[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, why WordPress events and community matter.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Cathy Mitchell. Cathy has been working with WordPress since 2007. What began as a fun personal project during her maternity leave soon evolved into a fully fledged business with the launch of WPBarista in 2008. Over the years, Cathy has garnered extensive experience in the WordPress space, and is now working towards the 2026 WordCamp Canada.

The conversation focuses on the powerful role of community within the WordPress ecosystem, something that Cathy is deeply passionate about. We discuss how open, welcoming, and international the WordPress community feels, compared to more traditional corporate or volunteer environments. A theme that emerged was how involvement in WordPress has provided Cathy, and many others, with a sense of belonging and fulfilment, especially after life changes like becoming an empty nester.

The discussion explores the motivations for volunteering and organising within the WordPress community, both from the perspective of newcomers looking for purpose and connection, and business owners assessing the return on investment from contributing or sponsoring events. This includes how easy it is to get involved, the unique lack of barriers and red tape, and the value of altruism and camaraderie.

Other topics we explored with a broader impact of technology and loneliness, the importance of service and community for wellbeing, challenges in sponsorship amid changes economic times, and the vital need to engage the next generation in open source.

If you’re interested in the human side of WordPress, how volunteering shapes both individual and the broader community, and what the future might hold for WordPress events and contributors, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Cathy Mitchell.

I am joined on the podcast by Cathy Mitchell. Hello, Cathy.

[00:03:25] Cathy Mitchell: Hello. Thanks for having me.

[00:03:27] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Cathy and I have been having, well, 15 minutes or so of chit chat just before we started the podcast. I’ve been learning a little bit about Cathy and we’re going to share all sorts of information.

I think probably broadly we could talk about it as being the WordPress community, which is a subject which is dear to my heart.

However, before we get into that, Cathy, I’ve had an introduction from you over the last few minutes, but would you mind sort of giving us your potted version of that, your shorter version, your bio if you like. Tell us who you are and how come you’re featuring on a WordPress podcast.

[00:03:58] Cathy Mitchell: Well that’s a whole lot of imposter syndrome. Why I am featuring, because you’re kind enough to have me. I’ve been working with WordPress since 2007 and it was just something fun that I did to begin, much like you with podcasting.

And then a couple years in, I told my friends that they’d have to start paying me, or I was going to go back to work, find a real job. This was during my mat leave, and so it kind of just took off from there in 2008, started WPBarista.

And now I’m very interested in the community because I was looking for something to do in the WordPress community last year. Dan in the Canada Slack got a hold of me and said, hey, do you want to help with the WordCamp? And I said, sure. You know, I had time.

And he got me in and brought me right up to like being on the organising team. And it was so fun but so shocking. Like, there is a lot of red tape in the corporate world before they let you do anything meaningful. Like you have to sweep the floors for a whole long time before they let you actually do something you’re good at. So this was remarkable. And this year I find to my surprise, I’m leading the 2026 WordCamp Canada.

So that’s what I’m doing now. And we’re going to focus on community too. So I’m very excited about this topic, both from a corporate, like what do we get out of this? Or are we supposed to get something out of this? And from a personal standpoint, it’s been amazing to meet these people, and to be given a chance. And I found out I’m not the only one. This is like normal, which is bizarre and wonderful.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: My experience of the WordPress community, so I started in WordPress actually quite a long time after you did. Maybe sort of six or seven years after you began using WordPress. I really didn’t know that there was a community at all. I just downloaded the software and used the software. And then I can’t even remember really how it happened. It might have been through things like Facebook Groups or something like that, where I was trying to learn a particular thing? Or perhaps there was something in the dashboard which indicated that there was an event nearby.

But I found myself, to my own surprise actually, I found myself at a WordPress event in London, WordCamp London, which at the time was going really strong. You know, hundreds and hundreds of people would show up every year.

And I remember purchasing a ticket and getting the train ticket and thinking, what am I doing? What am I possibly hoping to get out of this? And showing up and kind of being a bit like a timid rabbit sitting in the corner a little bit, and then it kind of worked out fairly quickly. Okay, this is all fairly benign. Nobody seems to be all that boastful. Nobody seems to be sort of shoving corporate speech down my throat, or trying to sell me anything unnecessarily.

And during the course of a day or maybe a couple of days, opened up a little bit and got chatting to people. And lo and behold, within a couple of years, a significant proportion of my free time, let’s call it that, outside of the commitments of daily life and family and all of that kind of thing, was taken up with doing WordPressy things in my spare time.

And so I, I don’t know if the story maps the same as you, I’ve shared mine, maybe you’ll share something similar in a moment. The community to me is much more than just, oh, there’s a community there. It genuinely is a seriously important part of my life. To the point where if that was to be sort of whipped away, or somebody like a Thanos type character suddenly clicked their fingers and that disappeared, I don’t know what I would do with myself. I would really have to go out there and find an awful lot of other things to do. Was it a bit like that for you?

[00:07:41] Cathy Mitchell: Not at all. I went to the forums first. And in 2008, 2009, there were some big names nowadays that were just answering us in the support forums. And so I learned from the best of the best, I think. And they would answer my ridiculous questions. I had no idea about PHP. I didn’t even know HTML. I didn’t even know what the internet was, like as broad concept. I asked my husband at the time like, okay, I don’t understand how my computer is talking to someone else’s computer, like you need to draw me a picture.

So anyway, I’ve only recently, I went to a couple of events, but I’ve always had the business mind. If I can’t see an ROI financially, I’ll say, from what I’m doing, then I don’t have time for it. But that was also during a time when I had a young family and then I became a single mum and then I had to work this business. And so it’s only really recently that I’m looking around and seeing people like you and going, this is unique.

I’ve been in volunteer communities, and now that my kids are all grown up, I’m kind of looking for those opportunities. What meaningful thing can I do with my time? And this just seems so unique. Like I volunteered at other places and there’s so much red tape and there’s so much, I don’t know, different feelings than this one. This one’s very open.

[00:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think the bit that is so curious to me is you can sort of dip in and dip out of it. Because, I don’t know, let’s say for example, you do something much more local, involved with your hometown or something like that. And you get involved in it and there’s a certain kind of, pressure is the wrong word, I suppose you can dip in and dip out of that as well, but do you know what I mean? You get involved in those philanthropic things locally and you get to know things and it becomes more of a habit, and you do the same thing over and over again. At least that’s my experience.

What I quite like about this is the international flavour of it. The fact that I’m being introduced people from really different parts of the world and cultures. And it’s very, very open, and it’s a real contrast to the bit that you just mentioned, where the corporate bit, and obviously there’s a side of our community which is very much devoted to turning a profit and what have you. But there’s a significant proportion of the people who don’t have that metric in their head when they’re introducing themselves to people.

They are just trying to be helpful and trying to deliver on the promise that the internet gave us back in the 1990s of, here’s the infrastructure to pass information around freely. Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody had the capacity to publish things, or to share things online without some sort of corporate overlord or paywall or algorithm? Which we’ve now probably regret deeply allowing that to happen to the internet.

All of those kind of things come into play. I have constantly, for the last decade, tried to sum up and capture what this is. And I always fail. It simply feels nice, is all that I’ve got, really. This community, the people in it that I hang out with, it just feels like a nice thing to do. That’s all I’ve got. No wisdom beyond that. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

[00:10:53] Cathy Mitchell: I’ve been trying to quantify it too, and especially planning this next conference. I feel much like a student because there’s a large group, probably most people are not like me. Like they’re like you, at least the ones, in Slack that I’m talking to on a daily basis. And they’re the original nerds who are so happy, like were inspired and spent their free time, like this wasn’t their job. Promoting this and like answering my questions in forum as an absolute noob. So in that way I feel like I would really like to give back now.

But the community, yeah, I can’t quite put my finger on. I just talked to a sponsor yesterday and she is of course wanting to get in front of her audience, which is agency owners. But there’s a real sense of promoting the community because the healthier the community, the healthier all of us are. Not just financially, but it creates the forward momentum, I think as far as open source as a whole too. Like there’s a bunch of us, me included, even though I kind of am taking a corporate angle that really believe that open source could change the world. I still do, maybe even more so because AI is, can actually talk to things that are open source. Less so if everything’s behind a paywall.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that you mentioned there, which suddenly sort of struck me is whilst there are a handful of people out there, and I say a handful, there’s obviously many millions of people. I think it’s fair to say that many people prefer to be in proximity to other people, to do things, to be in conversation with people, to have a shared experience. You know, we go to the cinema or the movie theatre to watch a movie. I mean I know the screen’s bigger and everything, but part of it is to be with other people and to go ooh and ah, at the same time and go to firework displays and concerts and things like that.

Now all of that stuff can be done in an isolated environment in your house. You know, you can watch Netflix and you can watch the TV and get a similar kind of experience. But I think there’s some sort of core part of me at least, and the people that I hang out with at these kind of events and online who just enjoy that shared experience, that willingness to be involved in a similar task. Just to be pointing in the same direction as a bunch of other people, pulling together on the same team. And it’s unquantifiable. I literally can’t encapsulate it, but I think you and I are talking about the same thing.

What’s interesting is I accidentally found it fairly early on in my WordPress journey. Serendipity played a really blinding hand for me there. But I think had I not had, bit like that film Sliding Doors, I could easily have missed the cues which sent me to that WordCamp or whatever it was that got me started. And I probably could have gone for a decade or more and not even noticed it was a community and maybe discovered it much more recently.

And it sounds like that’s kind of happening to you. You mentioned that you are, I think in the show notes you described it as, it’s a lovely phrase, empty nesting. Does that mean when your children grow up and go away? Is that what that means?

[00:13:53] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. That’s a pretty common phrase over here.

[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

[00:13:56] Cathy Mitchell: This side of the pond. You know, you kick the little birdies out, and they’re spreading their wings. All of a sudden we’re left with, it’s a different life stage. I think we were talking a little bit about it. You’re getting there.

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to there very, yeah, awh, it’s kind of filled with melancholy. On the hand, obviously I would love for my children to grow up, but on the other hand it’s, pulls all the heartstrings, doesn’t it?

So you are finding space in your life to do this kind of stuff. I’m going to ask a question, which is maybe a little bit personal, I don’t know. Hope you don’t read it in the wrong way. Do you find this stuff like meaningful and significant? Do you get a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction from the work that you are doing? For example, with WordCamp Canada.

Because there must be moments when it’s a real chore and, you know, you’ve got far too many tasks which are spilling over, and you think, gosh, I’m just a volunteer. There’s no quid pro quo here. I’m just doing it out of the goodness of my heart. But on balance, do you get that warm and fuzzy feeling from doing all of this?

[00:14:54] Cathy Mitchell: That’s a good question. I had time, so I started volunteering at a bunch of things. I started volunteering teaching kids, and then to go the complete other end of the spectrum, I did a seniors class at my local college last month. I just started volunteering because in my opinion, as a little amateur psychologist, I think service, serving our community is kind of the best way to, like you said, pull alongside someone. And then when you have like a focused goal, there’s a togetherness and I really need to grow my community.

Me, and I think quite a few other people, there’s this whole epidemic of loneliness to be frank. Having raised the kids and then having done the job, now all of a sudden it’s like, I have time to invest in a real community. And I really want it to be worthwhile. I don’t want to sweep the floors for, maybe it’s an age thing, I don’t know. I’m so, so grateful that they let me do something that I’m good at, as far as organising, because they didn’t have to. That’s a big responsibility to put on somebody. And I am praying it all works out in the fall.

But it comes because of the huge number of volunteers that all work together. So my job’s just basically pulling all these people together, and making sure that we’re talking to each other. Because one person can’t possibly do all of the work that comes with putting on a conference. At least not part-time. But yeah, I’m finding it immensely rewarding because I also feel like I’m good at it. Everybody loves to do something they’re good at.

[00:16:28] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned something earlier where you sort of implied that you were very surprised that in the WordPress world, you were given a bunch of responsibility for an event. I mean, basically, I think a lot of that, isn’t there? There’s a lot of, whoever can show up does get the job really, because there’s a paucity of volunteers. And for an event of the magnitude of WordCamp Canada, if you’ve ever been to events like that, you sort of walk in and on every level it feels like a corporate event. You know, it’s very polished, highly polished. There’s catering, the venue’s all been booked, you’ve got name badges and there’s probably some translation going on, and there slides and every, there’s timetables and everything. And it’s all done by volunteers.

And I remember the same sort of thing, being asked to do a variety of different things and thinking, wait, really? You don’t know the inside of my head. I will mess this up so badly. But that is such a nice characteristic of our community. And you’ll fail together, if you know what I mean? You know, it is not like anybody’s going to let you deeply fail. People will step in and help you, should you need to.

[00:17:31] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, we have to say yes, like it’s part of the culture is, if people volunteer, we have to find a way to say yes. Like our default is yes, not, well, have you done this first?

[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s interesting because you obviously have done a lot of this kind of corporate stuff, and so have the impression that you ought to be qualified, I don’t know, a decade or two decades of this particular thing in order to be trusted to do it. And this is just, yeah, this is so different. Anybody? Bueller. Okay, you’ll do it. Great. Fine. That’s great, yeah.

[00:18:03] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. You’re hired.

[00:18:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s it. That’s I’ve never done it before. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be brilliant.

[00:18:07] Cathy Mitchell: We’ll help you.

[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And that camaraderie of binding together on a particular thing, in your case WordCamp, but the broader project, you know, the WordPress project as a whole, I feel it’s full of these kind of people. And we will get into in a minute I’m sure, how that maybe has changed for some people in the more recent past, and about the fact that the community does feel like it’s in a bit of a challenging place at the moment.

But I just want to go back a little bit because you mentioned, and neither of us I suspect will have the answer to this, but I’m interested in your intuitions anyway. You mentioned that people nowadays, maybe this has always been the case, but it feels like there’s been a change. Loneliness seems to be a very common thing now. And my sort of back of the napkin calculus points me in the direction of wondering if it is actually oddly technology. The very thing that we’re celebrating. If technology might be responsible for it.

For example, I look around and I see a lot of people who give an awful lot of what would’ve otherwise been free time, time that they could have gone out and socialised and what have you. And, you know, you sort of end up sitting on the couch and scrolling through social media and things like that.

Television has become so absolutely fascinating. You know, there’s like a billion different channels, and essentially there’s a thousand ways to keep yourself entertained all by yourself, and never speak to another human being, or be in proximity to another human being. There’s no question there, I just wondered if you had an observation or a similar thought process.

[00:19:39] Cathy Mitchell: I looked up, because I knew we were going to talk about this, the stat on it. Because I know I’ve had the same feeling. And I’ve heard people talk about it, but I didn’t really know if that was like true or not, because whenever I am thinking or researching something, of course that’s what the algorithm shows me. So I’m always kind of hesitant, like is this actually real or am I just seeing this?

But it did say in a 2021 report, the US Surgeon General, and this is in the States, no 2023, that the health impact of a loneliness epidemic. Okay, General Vivek Murthy declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023. And he said that the health impact is the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s not good for us. And that the biggest effect, 79% reported feeling lonely of the 18 to 24-year-old group, which is more like 40 some percent. What was it? 41% of 66 plus.

[00:20:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so the younger you skew, the more lonely you are likely to be.

[00:20:40] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah. And we also see, now I don’t know if this is correlative or causative, but technology has also skyrocketed in that period of time.

[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, and also probably, again, I’m drawing conclusions which are not based in fact or research or anything like that. You and I were both born in an era where that technology wasn’t available. So I imagine patterns were set down in our infant brains, which are perhaps different to the patterns that are set down now.

It’d be curious to see if there is a there, there. If the broad adoption, certainly in the UK, I can’t speak to Canada, but the broad adoption of technology to ever and ever younger children, to a really alarmingly early age. You know, you see children who are not even at school age who seem to have access to every technology under the sun, and who don’t seem to get that interaction from another human being. I wonder. And I’m going to sound all curmudgeonly and there’s probably going to be people shouting at me.

[00:21:34] Cathy Mitchell: I have seen it change with the Gen Z that they’re talking about. And my kids fall in that category. Whereas I wanted to be, okay, it’s personal responsibility, so we’re going to raise them. It was new to me, so I raised my kids thinking, okay, tablets, I’m going to teach you how to use it, not restrict it. I was all open-minded about all.

Now they’ve told me that if they have kids, they will restrict it far greater than I ever did. They were like, they won’t have nearly the freedom that I gave them in my open-mindedness.

[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, but you are forgiven for your open-mindedness because I guess humanity perhaps needed more evidence to draw conclusions around that. And perhaps those conclusions are now landing.

[00:22:16] Cathy Mitchell: I think so.

[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, certainly as an example, I know that in Australia more recently, there’s now a widespread ban, I think under the age of 16, and I’m going to use the word illegal, maybe that’s the wrong word. Maybe there’s a technical definition, but social media is not permitted for children under the age of 16. And I think that there’s legislation being talked about in the UK of a similar nature, and some other European countries.

I don’t know how much traction that will have because I feel that there’s a persuasive argument, much like you described of, it’ll all work itself out. You know, we don’t need the government to tell us what to do, and all of that, and that all makes sense.

But my, I can well understand, I think in the UK also, there is a growing, a groundswell of this alternative way of looking at it. Like a rejection of the phones and the technology.

Anyway, there we go. That was an aside. Do you want to contribute into that a little bit more before I push us back in the WordPress space?

[00:23:11] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, I don’t want to be all, it’s bad, it’s bad, but I think that we’re seeing an effect. I really do believe that volunteerism, whether it’s with WordPress or anything else, in my faith background, being a person, a Christian person, I grew up seeing the service as an answer, as just part of our lifestyle. You just serve others. But now I’m seeing it come in a secular sort of way as well, where service is an antidote to loneliness.

And I think no matter where you’re serving, not the church or any, like just pick a service. Being that cameraderie with people, having a similar goal, going in the same direction, like I really do think there’s hope. There’s hope out there for all of us. And it’s a great way to do something meaningful. Like you get to do all those things. You get to practise a skill, you get to do something meaningful, you get direction, you get cameraderie all by serving.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to, say something now, and I’m going to caveat it heavily before I say it because A, it relies on my prodigiously bad memory, and B, it could just be fabricated anyway because the source could be utterly wrong. But it feels like there’s a kernel of truth in it.

I was doing some research recently about happiness, that broad subject. You know, we would all like to be happy I’m sure. There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about what this actually means, and trying to drill it down to some fairly basic maxims, if you like, for what leads to happiness.

Two of the biggest indicators of happiness are really interesting. One of the two is how often you spend with other people basically. How much time you interact with other human beings. Now I know that that’s not for everybody, but broadly speaking, that seems to be a huge indicator. If you actually get yourself out and you do things with other human beings, there is a definite benefit.

And the other one, which is very curious because I think it’s fair to say, you know, Canada and the UK, we’ve been brought up to worry about our own finances and amassing as much stuff as we can, and lining your nest for the future and everything. Well, this other one, controversially, the second one that I’m going to mention is the amount of stuff that you basically give away. And that could be time, or it could be finance, it could be any of those things. The more that you give away with no expectation of a return, that also apparently is a real indicator of happiness.

And I think we can all identify that. That moment where you give somebody a gift and you’ve really thought about it, and you hand it over and you watch the face change as they unwrap it. And you think, they’ve loved that, haven’t they? And you’re not thinking to yourself, well, I did that. I made them happy there. You’re just thinking, oh look, they’re really happy. Isn’t that wonderful? So anyway, there’s my 2 cents of utterly unproven thoughts.

[00:25:59] Cathy Mitchell: Okay. Learned something. Those are two, so the two things were being around people and altruism basically, with nothing expected in return.

[00:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: And funnily enough, they map very closely to what we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about events and socialising with other people, but also that, in this case, it’s not a financial thing that you are giving away, but you are definitely giving away an awful lot of your time for doing these kind of things. And maybe, given that little bit of information, it kind of becomes a little bit easier to justify because if you can say to yourself, this makes me happy, it might not seem it in those stressful moments.

[00:26:36] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, today.

[00:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s right. But ultimately that might be causing your happiness.

Okay, so there we go. That was our little segue. Let’s sort of bring it back to WordCamps. You were very kind to write me a bunch of show notes, and they really drew me in as I was reading them. And I want to sort of dwell on a few of them because you.

[00:26:53] Cathy Mitchell: Had to convince you to get me on the podcast.

[00:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, there not a lot of convincing needed. I loved it. You’ve got some sort of bullet points if you like, not really bullet points. You’ve touched on different areas where you feel that you’ve got something to say about, I dont know, why people might contribute and why they might volunteer and what have you.

So it’s things like, why might new people, newbies, as you’ve described them, volunteer and why might business folk volunteer?

So the first one was, let me go back. So I’ll read into the record what you wrote because it makes a lot of sense. You said, in 2025 I helped the organisers for WordCamp Canada and this year found myself the lead organiser. And this has been consistently one of the nicest, most open groups, that I’ve ever been part of. And then you strayed into why other people, for example, new people and business people might like to contribute.

So on the business side, you said, volunteers, boundaries when not getting paid, giving back, sponsoring folks, not necessarily a financial return on investment. And then for the newbies, you said, there’s other ways to contribute, for example, contributing in code or non-coding ways, and also just being a recipient of the open, friendly community that you encounter. So that was really it. Maybe I’ve said everything that you wanted to say.

[00:28:07] Cathy Mitchell: Well, those are kind of questions that I had coming from a corporate, and I keep talking to different people trying to figure out, I guess I’m looking for something other than altruism when comes to the corporate people at least. Like why are they sponsoring? And I can see, the pessimistic, or maybe the pragmatic, side of me to be positive wants to know why. Why are they putting the dollars in?

But then on the other side, I think, well, if WordPress doesn’t do well, then they don’t do well. Like, if their businesses are based on WordPress. But then I also saw something that, if you sponsor open source projects, it makes hiring people that much easier, and also vetting people that much easier. Because it gets you into the community and so it goes both ways. People will be more likely to apply for your jobs and you will be more likely to have a way to vet them. That’s one thing I saw.

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: I think there’s a lot of truth in that, or at least I’d like to believe there’s a lot of truth in that. That makes me feel happy about the whole situation. But what’s curious about what you’ve just said, and I don’t know how much of an intuition you’ve got on this, but if you were to go back to, let’s say the year, oh, I don’t know, 2018 or something like that, WordPress was experiencing this really stratospheric growth. You know, in terms of market share of the internet broadly, you know, the number of websites as a percentage, WordPress was going from sort of the low twenties to the mid twenties, high twenties, and then through the thirties, and then finally landing at this sort of 40%.

And during that time, saying this phrase sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, WordPress could kind of do no wrong, I think. There was just growth upon growth upon growth and a lot of companies, I don’t think needed to explain themselves to their directors quite so much. The return on the investment didn’t need to be made. It was just, look, we’re part of this thing, and there’s this rising tide, and we are one of the boats. And look, we’re going up as it all goes up. So it just happened.

However, during COVID, and then especially over the last few years, and then now especially the last couple of years, inject AI into the mix, I feel that that calculus has changed a little bit. And there’s this inkling when you speak to the same corporate people who a few years ago were willing to open their wallets to sponsor events, the wallets are much, much harder to open.

Again, in much the same way that I don’t really know why the community is so fabulous. I don’t really know why the wallets are harder to open. But I think the landscape for sponsorship, and the requirement of a return on investment, as opposed to, well let’s just join in because WordPress is growing. I think that calculation is going to be harder and harder to make. And maybe you’ve got experience of this over at WordCamp Canada trying to gather sponsors. Perhaps you found it straightforward. Perhaps it’s been difficult. I don’t really know.

[00:31:08] Cathy Mitchell: There’s almost like a perfect storm right now because wallets are tighter because over the last few years, at least in the States where my clients are, it’s become, economically there’s uncertainty. And so that trickles down and trickles up, right? And so more wallets are going to be a little bit more restrictive on what they’re going to buy, and they’re going to want to see more bang for their buck.

Corporately, also there’s been this huge rise in competition in the corporate world. There’s just way more competition over the last five or six years for just about anything when it comes to agencies or plugins or themes or whatever, there’s a lot more great competition, like good products out there. But then there’s also a lot more competition to get the clients, like clients have a lot more options.

And so I think it’s a perfect storm. Like, do you want to put your money into WordPress because is that the future? Is there money for sponsorship? Plus WordPress has become stricter on what they require to sponsor, as far as trademark use and different things that have been put higher on the priority list.

And I kind of see it like a levelling off. Like not as a bad thing because every industry can’t just, go, go, go, go. Like there’s going to be a levelling, right? Can’t be that easy. When I started, I didn’t even advertise. And I’ve had this business for 19 years. I’ve never advertised. That is going to go away. Like it was just, you know, I lucked out starting somewhere, but that’s not realistic.

[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: So what’s interesting in that is I think I am the same. The only period in which I’ve been in the WordPress community was during this stratospheric growth period really. Everything has been, you know, people have argued on the inside about this, that, and the other thing, and whether a feature should ship in Core, or whether or not we should do this thing at an event or what have you. So there’s been some minor disagreements.

But broadly speaking, the whole project has just swelled and swelled and swelled. There’s this overarching sense of optimism and growth, and now the brakes are on. And so for me, it feels like unfamiliar territory. And because it’s unfamiliar, it feels a little bit scary because I don’t know what that means. I don’t know whether that means that things are going to just level out as you just described, or whether it means things are going to decline, or whether it means some of my friends are going to go away because the community, it’s no longer going to be something that they wish to frequent because their profitability is under question and they need to seek revenue from other different options. Maybe AI, maybe, whatever it might be. And so I think my concern just, it’s probably self-interest really. I’m just concerned because I don’t know what’s coming and that fear is, well, it’s fear.

[00:33:57] Cathy Mitchell: I think this brings me perfectly into the WordCamp Canada thing that I wanted to mention. Just because I see this event, and even the community team, as a whole in WordPress. There are teams in WordPress, by the way, for people that don’t know, that help you get involved. It’s not just coders, like there’s all kinds of teams. And one of them is the community team, and all we have to know how to do is plan an event or host an event or serve coffee. It’s amazing. But anyway.

I am excited about WordCamp Canada, and the reason I’m putting so much time and effort into this conference is because I really see it as a light at the end of this tunnel. Not at the end. Maybe midway. I have no idea what’s going to happen to my own business, to WordPress, I don’t know. But I think there’s one thing that I’m fairly certain of, even now, even in the midst of AI, and that’s open source. I really still believe that open source is the way of the future. I still think it is, open source and AI are probably the way of the future. Yeah, I don’t know how else to say it.

And I think the exciting thing, and the thing that we need to do as people who got to take advantage of that uprise and that uptick, is you and I need to get young people involved. Like we need to get those young people involved in open source. I don’t even care if it’s WordPress or not, but they need to become part of a community that is exciting, that is beyond themselves. They need to see that we’re nice. We don’t bite. We’ll hire them. There’s just so much good that can come out of being together. And these are the nicest people. They’ll talk to people that are just standing around in the hallways with nobody to talk to, which is me. I’m an introvert, ironically.

[00:35:38] Nathan Wrigley: You definitely don’t come across like that, just so that you know.

[00:35:40] Cathy Mitchell: Well, we’re I’m pretending nobody else is listening.

[00:35:43] Nathan Wrigley: The other thing that I would add, as you were saying all of those things, it occurred to me that, I would imagine that people in more senior positions, I don’t really know how to describe it in the WordPress world, have got a similar intuition to the one that you just described. In that they can definitely see that the future needs to be thought about in terms of the youth coming in. Because there’s an awful lot of work being done at the moment and an awful lot of hours being put into educational initiatives.

And also, not just where you and I are living, but all over the world. And it was kind of interesting at WordCamp Asia recently, that was a big focus. A lot of people talking about exactly this thing and these kind of overlapping initiatives that are beginning to bear fruit. So people coming out of universities who’ve had experience of open source and WordPress in particular. And children at schools having experience of open source and WordPress.

And I think, as much as we would like open source and WordPress to win, just from a moral point of view, wouldn’t that be a great thing if everybody just noticed it and got on and used it? I think we need to do a bit of work to make sure that it’s being put under their noses so that they can make those judgements for themselves. And that is definitely a part of the future.

[00:36:57] Cathy Mitchell: Yeah, the Campus Connect and the Credits where they can university credits, like it is getting popular in other places we haven’t heard so much. But I really want to introduce it and bring it to the conference in Vancouver this fall. Because we can have universities in Canada and the US, on this side of the pond get involved in this and actually give kids credits that they can use to graduate.

[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting as well because it’s very hard to, how to describe this, that’s a difficult one to sell, let’s put it that way. The people that are really into those initiatives really love it, but it’s hard to get people to notice that that’s going on, and hard for people perhaps to notice how important that is. But without those little foundational bricks being put in place for the future, this rising tide carries all boats metaphor, that’s not going to happen. You know, I think maybe another good metaphor there is they’re kind of building the harbour wall to make sure that the boats have got something to rise against. And I think that’s really important.

And your part of the world is definitely open to that, I’m sure. Seems to be that some European institutions, colleges, universities and South American institutions and parts in India and Southeast Asia and places like that are also beginning to bite on those ideas as well. So it’d be really interesting to see how that all goes.

You’re painting a picture, Cathy, which makes me feel optimistic. Feels like there’s a lot of positivity coming out of where you are, yeah.

[00:38:24] Cathy Mitchell: I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but for all of the faults that Matt might be accused of, somehow he put something in place that became very, very popular. And the culture that I have been a part of, I haven’t worked for Automattic, but the culture at the WordCamp level and volunteering and the community team has been unbelievably positive, and foreign to me. Like I’ve had to learn this culture. What do you mean there’s no application process? How do I say yes? What are you talking about? So somehow this has grown. And he has had a lot to do with it. People don’t like that he’s had a lot to do with it, but there’s some truth there.

[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: It’s really interesting and it doesn’t matter how many times I have conversations like this, I’m always confused by it. I can never get my hands around it and work out what the secret sauce is so that I could copy and paste it into a different locale or a different jurisdiction or different era. But there’s a there, there. There’s something very satisfying about this community. And from everything that you’ve said, it sounds like you are very positive about it. And I share your positivity, even though sometimes it seems quite hard to grasp in the more recent times.

Oh, Cathy, that’s been absolutely wonderful. I’ve enjoyed chatting to you today. We’ve hit the sort of sweet spot of the amount of time that we’ve got, so if it’s okay with you, we’ll wrap it up there. Just before we go, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, or just sort of wants to pat you on the back for your wisdom there, where would we find you?

[00:39:55] Cathy Mitchell: Well they can find me at WPBarista. And right now they can also find me at canada.wordcamp.org.

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Well I will make sure that that goes into the show notes. So if you’re listening to this, head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Cathy Mitchell, that’s Cathy with a C, and you’ll be able to find the details in the show notes there. So Cathy Mitchell, thank you very much for chatting to me today. That was lovely. Thank you.

[00:40:19] Cathy Mitchell: Thank you. I enjoyed it.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the interconnected WordPress ecosystem and how to build partnerships and trust.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Zach Stepek. Zach is what you might call a unicorn in the tech world, having held roles in design development, and much more. His experience spans everything from Cold Fusion and Flash, to JavaScript, WordPress, and WooCommerce. He’s worked with brands like IBM and MTV, in varied industries from medical records to e-commerce, and has spoken at WordCamps, WooConf, and contributed to the WordPress community through both agencies and product companies.

You might know about WordPress, agencies, product companies and hosting, but might not have thought about how partnerships actually work in this ecosystem, or why they matter right now. Zach is here to explain just that.

He starts off by sharing his journey into WordPress, his early challenges, and how an unexpected viral moment led him deeper into the ecosystem.

He describes the three interconnected pillars of WordPress success, agencies or individuals, product companies, think plugins and themes, and hosting or infrastructure, and how each depends on the other to thrive.

We discuss the current state of partnerships, how companies collaborate, why trust and values driven approaches are essential, and why the rapid rise of ROI driven, transactional thinking, is at odds with WordPress’ open source routes. Zach explores the perils of short-term wins, and the value of nurturing long-term, mutually beneficial, relationships especially as economic uncertainty and the changes in the broader world are beginning to reshape how companies interact.

Then we talk about the challenges faced by hosting companies, the role of product companies in innovation, and how agencies often bridge these worlds. Zach makes the case for cultivating relationship equity, not just revenue, and how a rising tide can lift all boats, if the community keeps its collective focus.

Towards the end, we discuss how the landscape has changed. Why community contributions matter more than ever, and what the future might hold as WordPress partnerships reach an inflexion point.

If you’re curious about how these invisible partnership threads bind the WordPress ecosystem together, and how true partnership drives success, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Zach Stepek.

I am joined on the podcast by Zach Stepek. Hello Zach.

[00:04:00] Zach Stepek: Hey Nathan, how you?

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: Zach and I have been talking for a fairly lengthy period of time, probably close to an hour or something like that. And we’ve strayed into a variety of subjects, none of which have been related to this podcast, but it’s been very enjoyable. He’s a thoroughly sociable and humorous chap, let’s put it that way. So I’ve appreciated the last hour. It’s been an absolute bonus. You’ve cheered me up no end.

However, the listeners to this podcast, they may not know about you. They may not know what you do, or what you have done or whatever it may be related to WordPress. It’s a banal question, but I always like to introduce the podcast with it. Will you just tell us about yourself?

[00:04:36] Zach Stepek: Yeah, so I am what you would hear referred to in the industry as a unicorn. I’ve been in multiple roles, from design to development. I started my career as a Cold Fusion developer, moved into Flash back in the day. Taught the Flex Framework everywhere from IBM to MTV. Spent time doing the teaching thing for about five or six years as an Adobe Certified Instructor. And then the bottom fell out of that industry, because of a letter that was written about Flash that you may remember.

All of my contracts disappeared overnight. Within a week almost a million dollars worth of potential revenue had been cancelled. Back then I was very nice with my out clauses in my contracts, and I learned a very harsh lesson. Spent a year working support at a company that may have had something to do with the collapse of my industry, working for their care division and learned about the support industry there while learning new things. And one of those new things was WordPress.

I worked as an Experience Designer at a medical, an electronic medical records company, working on the design of their EMR software for a while. And then worked at a company called Comply365, where I dove deep into JavaScript and did a lot of demos of their forms platform, which is used by airlines all over the world to do the submission of service forms for aeroplanes.

The company actually started as a way to get rid of the giant binders that pilots used to carry that had the manuals. The company started as a digitiser of that material into a tablet application that pilots could carry in the pocket of a briefcase rather than it being a briefcase itself. So worked there.

Throughout the years I was working on WordPress. I had been involved in bringing a record label back to Rockford that had folded. Rockford, Illinois is where I live. And we built a WooCommerce site to sell digital music. And that was my first exposure to WooCommerce.

Went on from there to work at a company and organisation called Oscar Mike and the Oscar Mike Foundation, which helps injured veterans participate in adaptive sporting events. They are a great organisation that had a WooCommerce website that was failing under traffic. In fact, the way I got that job was I knew the founder, Noah. And Noah had called me on Thanksgiving during dinner with my family. And he said, hey, I need your help. My website is down. And I said, okay, where is it hosted? And he said, I’m not sure.

So four and a half, five hours later, we got the site back up. The problem is, he had been featured in an interview during an American football game. The interview was aired during the Thanksgiving Day game between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears. And so, you know, classic rivalry, the interview had happened in the Chicago Bears Locker room set, and was aired on TV all over Chicago. And so they were getting hit by a ton of traffic, and they got 14 orders before the hosting that was supporting their site died.

[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: It went viral. One of the first examples of going viral.

[00:08:32] Zach Stepek: Exactly. And so they got 14 orders and then the server just stopped. And so I had to do root cause analysis, and figure out what had happened. And we determined that it was because the email spool, because there was an email server on the same server as the web server, had filled with the new product order emails from WooCommerce. And because the server didn’t have a lot of power to begin with, it was a small VPS that had been donated to the organisation. Very grateful that that had happened because that was what got them started. But it was never designed for the level of traffic that they had received. And so after those 14 orders, delivering three emails a piece, the server ran out of memory because the email spool ran the server out of memory.

And when a server runs out of memory, it causes a cascading effect that basically took down the website and everything related to it and hard crashed the VPS so that it could not recover. We didn’t have a login to go in and reset the VPS until four and a half hours later. So the window of opportunity had already closed by the time I had the login information, could reset the server, and we figured out what was going on. That led to me working there.

Worked there for a little over a year and a half. And I fell in love with WooCommerce and WordPress through that process, and ended up talking about that site at WordCamp, Milwaukee, 2015. And at the time Patrick Rauland was the Product Manager for WooCommerce at WooThemes, and he flew from Denver to Milwaukee to see my talk. And that led to a relationship with the WooCommerce team that has not stopped since.

So it was really, really cool. I got to speak at WooConf as a keynote speaker in 2017. I had started an agency that started out small and became a force to be reckoned with in the three years that I was with it. Pivoted out of that for reasons that we don’t need to get into. And then moved into the hosting space, and I’ve been there since.

And in that space I’ve been focused on partnerships. So as of today, I am a freelancer who is doing fractional work in the partnership space and also doing some work on WordPress websites again, so WooCommerce sites and the like. Making recommendations for hosting infrastructure and stability for scaling those sites.

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: That is such an interesting story. I mean, you’ve run the gamut of all of it really. And dear listener, there are so many other stories that could be filled in in between those things because Zach’s got a lot going on outside of the day job and the things that he’s just described, there’s an awful lot of other things going on as well. So what a rich and interesting life you have had.

I hate to drag it back in a way to what we’re going to talk about, because given all of that exciting stuff, this may seem, you know, a little bit dry. But we’re going to get there because Zach wants to talk to us today about partnerships basically.

Just for the listeners Zach, this isn’t for your benefit, this is for the listener’s benefit, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the people listening to this podcast, we’ve got developers, we’ve got people who have been in the space for years and years and years, but I get quite a bit of email and a lot of it says, you know, I’m new to WordPress and that kind of thing.

And they really don’t know that events take place, that there’s this whole tapestry of people interconnecting, and hanging out in the real world. And that some of the companies that they may have heard of, they partner up with other companies. So plugin companies might partner up with hosting companies that then do other different things.

Do you just want to paint a bit of a picture of what a partnership is in the WordPress space in 2026? Now I know that’s a very open-ended question, because there’s no two that’ll be alike, but just give us an idea.

[00:12:37] Zach Stepek: So I like to divide partnerships into two types. One is the relationship between creators or builders or agency owners, and the hosting companies that they use to host the websites for their customers.

And the other, well there’s two forms of the other, and that is product companies that build products around WordPress who partner with either agencies or hosts.

I’ve been writing a lot on LinkedIn lately about how I feel about partnerships, and part of it was this pivot into thinking in terms of ecosystems. And I’m not the first one to say that. Jonathan Wold has been saying that for a few years now, how WordPress is an ecosystem.

But there are basically these three layers that are interconnected and work together, right? And so for most successful site builds, you have either an individual or an agency who’s building the site. You have the product companies that build the software that is layered into WordPress that powers the site, whether that’s a theme like Ollie or Kadence, or a plugin for anything like Gravity Forms for forms or for Formidable Forms, or any of the other forum companies who will be really upset I didn’t mention them by name. Or an SEO plugin or any of these other ancillary tools that make WordPress more capable.

And so those two things, the agency and then the products need to work in harmony because the agency needs to understand the products well enough to implement them, and the product companies need to understand the agency’s needs well enough to serve them through their products and through support for those products.

And then there’s a third layer, and it’s a layer that a lot of people think about in terms of more a vendor relationship than a partnership. And that is the hosting side, the infrastructure. When you start a company and you’re a retail company, one of the first things that you do is you go out and you look for where you’re going to put your retail store, right? And so you look for real estate.

You want a couple of things. You want high traffic areas that can handle bringing you people, and that can also handle the amount of people you’re going to just get naturally, right?

So you’re looking at things like traffic numbers that are going to go past your retail space. You’re looking at, population density, all of these other things. And where are you going to advertise in town? How are you going to be bringing people to you?

And the internet is very similar in its structure to what we do for a physical retail store. So your infrastructure, your hosting is like the address that you’re putting your retail store at. And so if you skimp on hosting and you go for somebody who offers $3 a month for unlimited websites, you’re putting yourself in the cheapest rent you can possibly pay for your storefront. And by doing so, you’re not going to have the ability to handle the same traffic as say, a location on Madison Avenue in New York might be able to. It’s different, right? It is a different setup. You could be on, in the Miracle Mile in Chicago. That’s great retail space. It’s incredibly expensive, but if your business can support it, that’s the place to be.

There are some other parallels we can talk about with some of the SaaS companies like Shopify that have created almost a mall. Because they’ve created this payments platform that allows them to expose stores to people, right? So shop pay will give you suggestions of other things that you can buy if you open the shop app on your mobile device. So it has a built in kind of discoverability, but that discoverability comes with a price. And that price is a percentage of your business forever. Even on their high end tiers, they still are getting a percentage of your business on Shopify Plus. That’s just how they make money.

So all of that to say, there are parallels between how we host a website and how we might position a retail space, right? So premium hosting is a big deal. It’s a huge deal, especially in e-commerce where scale matters because every visitor is a potential sale. Every sale is the only way your company makes money, right? The impetus of e-commerce is transactional. It is, somebody comes to your store, buys a product, you ship it to them, they receive it, and you have completed your contract with them to deliver the product that they asked for.

Because of that, if they come to your website and your site fails because you’re getting too much traffic, for example, it’s akin to if you were walking through a Best Buy and as you’re walking through the store, things around you just start to deteriorate. If you were walking through a store where the products you were looking at just stopped existing for fractions of time, like how long would you stay in that store?

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: Or you couldn’t quite pick the box up. You could get your hands on it, but then everything just stopped. You couldn’t lift it off the shelf. Yeah, that’s, you wouldn’t stay long is the answer.

[00:18:22] Zach Stepek: No. No. And that’s the same thing that happens with bad infrastructure for e-commerce sites. So that’s that third pillar of partnership and what makes a successful WordPress site.

[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask a quick question around that? So before we penetrate deeper into that. So you mentioned these three things and you’ve got the, and you did them in that order. So we had agency, or that could be an individual, I guess, but let’s go with the agency word because it’s easier. Which then has some kind of relationship with the product companies. So themes, plugins, whatever that may be. So that’s the second tier, if you like. And then there’s the third tier, which is hosting, stroke, infrastructure. But let’s, again, let’s just call it hosting.

So you listed those things in order, but I’m imagining, and I could be wrong, that instead of it being like a layer cake, it’s more of a kind of an overlapping Venn diagram. The three things are in concert with each other. So a triangle if you like. So the agency, whilst in your description, it’s kind of next to the product company, well it’s also next to the hosting and infrastructure side of things as well.

In other words, the partnerships that we’ll get into, it’s not bound from layer one to layer two, and layer two to layer three. Three goes to one, two goes to three, and so on. Have I encapsulated that right?

[00:19:35] Zach Stepek: Yeah, think of it almost as a Celtic knot, right?

[00:19:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Go Google that, dear listener.

[00:19:41] Zach Stepek: It’s this never ending connection of multiple pieces all forming a whole. And the interconnected nature of it doesn’t end, at least when things are working well.

There are product companies that have terrible support. There are infrastructure companies, hosting companies, that have terrible support. So those things, there are agencies that have terrible support, I mean this is not something that is only relegated to the product and hosting companies. Every layer has the potential for having pieces fall apart. The strength of the whole is only as strong as the weakest of the parts in the partnership.

[00:20:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. So we’re imagining that these things are not just overlapping, they’re holding each other together. And at this point I’m kind of imagining almost like a bubble that you blow with those bubble kits that you get as a child. The whole thing is, those three things are holding that bubble together, but it just takes one of them, the little pop with the needle and doop, the whole thing sort of comes apart because, they are the underpinnings of each other. That’s really interesting.

Can I just make an observation at this point? And again, you can rail against it or agree. I don’t know where you’re going to go. It feels like the revenue side of those things, the giant if you like, in the room there, the one that traditionally seems to make the money, all the money, most of the money, lots of money, is the hosting infrastructure side of things.

And then the two other layers, you know, the product companies, the theme companies, the plugin companies, whatever. There are a few examples that escape velocity and managed to pull away from the earth’s gravity, you know, Gravity Forms might be a good example in fact, who have that trajectory, but they’re big. But the rest of it is just lots and lots of much smaller entities. So thousands, many, many thousands of smaller entities with a single theme, or a collection of plugins, or what have you. And the same, I think would be true for the agencies. Just lots and lots of that spread out.

So in terms of demographics, the hosting companies, that seems to be a small number, but they make lots of revenue. Whereas the other two, the agency and the product companies, large numbers, all making less revenue individually, potentially. I know I’m drawing a lot of parallels that maybe are not necessarily going to hold up to scrutiny, but you get what I mean. That’s quite an interesting dynamic, because they’re relying upon each other and yet in some situations, you have a few players which might be able to punch above their weight because of their bank balance and the size of their business.

[00:22:11] Zach Stepek: No, absolutely. I mean we’re all familiar with the larger WordPress VIP level agencies, right? They’re the people who are out there in the community giving back the most frequently a lot of the times. So, you know, you see companies like Fueled who now has 10up as its WordPress practise within Fueled, right? And Fueled gives back a ton of open source technology just to the community.

It’s stuff that they built to serve their customers that they’ve given back to the community, because Jake has always been a good steward of the WordPress community in general. So he understands and recognises that the true benefit of an open source platform like WordPress is not only the things we can create on top of it because we have access to the code, but the community that can be created on top of the solutions we create.

So look at something like ElasticPress as an example. ElasticPress is an open source tool that also has been commercialised into a hosted product by Fueled. And it replaces search in WordPress with something that is much, much better, right? ElasticSearch is much better at searching indexed content than SQL is at searching a relational database for anything within it.

It replaces something that is a bit of a hole in what WordPress can do with something that is better. And they gave it to the community. They gave it to the community, because it’s based on open source server software. So it made sense for the plugin that enables the use of this open source server with this open source CMS to also be an open source plugin. And because of that, they have community members that contribute back to the ElasticPress product when there are bugs that they find, and solutions to things that they find. And they have a constant feedback loop of how to improve their product.

And that all happens because they decided to be good stewards within the WordPress community. They’re not the only ones. There are many. WebDevStudios just released Theme Switcher Pro. If you haven’t heard Brad talking about Theme Switcher Pro yet, you haven’t been on the internet around WordPress, because are absolutely right to be marketing what they built.

It was, again, something that was built around a need. They saw a need for an easier way for people to move from where they were with classic themes, to block-based themes more gradually. So in large enterprises, it’s sometimes hard to just wholesale replace the theme of a website. So they built a solution that allowed you to replace parts of it, a little bit at a time and move to a block-based architecture over time rather than all at once.

And so these companies are building tools around what WordPress can do to fit needs that they’ve found working with their customers. So in these cases, the agencies become the product companies, right?

And then there are product companies that, they were built around solving a need. Things like Gravity Forms, or other form plugins, that were built to solve the problem with form submissions in WordPress. And all of these things are all participating in the same ecosystem, right? But if you build a site that has 75 plugins installed and one of them doesn’t play well with others, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s a good analogy.

[00:26:02] Zach Stepek: You look at that, and the reason we’re, that I’m focused right now on ecosystem building and on building this, a network of people who want to work together is because a rising tide lifts all ships, right? We want WordPress to continue growing as an ecosystem. And like you mentioned, hosting companies tend to be the ones with the most money in the room. That’s not always the case, but they make a good amount of money on hosting.

And I think that hosting companies have a responsibility to be good stewards to the community in the same way that I just talked about WebDevStudios and Fueled being good stewards of the community.

And so hosting companies are in a unique position where they can drive these values based partnerships that allow for agencies to meet product owners and product owners to meet agencies who are all part of their partner programmes, right? They all can invest together in their mutual success.

Values driven partnership is a long game, right? It’s kind of the difference between planting a forest and picking apples off of a tree. If all you want is the apples, you just strip the branches of all the apples and you move on. But if you’re planting a forest together, you’re thinking about ecosystem, right?

So in the best partnerships, both sides are invested in that mutual success. You care about your partner’s customers, their teams, the reputation they carry in the community. Revenue matters, but the revenue is just the result of doing all the other things well.

[00:27:45] Nathan Wrigley: There’s so much to unpick here and I’m going to try and do some of that. So you’ve got this rising tide carries all boats thing, which I think is so important. We forget that at our peril.

But also I want to use the word synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You know, WordPress is so impressive because all these three layers, the agency, the product, the hosting company, because they’ve got overlapping concerns and it’s just over the last 20 odd years, it’s worked somehow.

Often on this podcast I say, I want to rewind, and that’s what I want to do. I just want to rewind back 22 odd years. There was no playbook for how this would turn out. We didn’t know that any of those three layers would exist. We didn’t know that there would be a thing like an agency, that there would be a freelance web developer, that that would be a thing. These industries didn’t exist.

We didn’t know that product companies would pop up because the plugin architecture and the theme architecture in WordPress would enable that, and it was okay to exchange money for those things. It turned out that was a thing with WordPress that you could do that other CMSs kind of pushed back upon. And then that hosting would become the bedrock of that whole thing as well. We didn’t know that.

And 22 years later, with a lot of agreement, but a fair level of disagreement, I imagine along the way, those three pillars, for want of a better word, they’ve evolved and they’ve become what they are now. We are recording this in the year 2026, and I feel like there’s a change that’s happened at some point. I don’t know when it was, but it feels like that synergy, that unwritten, and yet completely understood by the WordPress community, that unwritten, unspoken, contract, in many ways. It feels like that’s maybe disappearing a little bit.

I’m probably overemphasising that, but do you sense that a bit? That the maker taker thing is kind of skewing it. That money has become such an integral part of the WordPress project, so many lives bound up with the money, the revenue that’s generated by the company that they work for and what have you, that it’s so easy to lose sight of that bigger piece. The rising tide carries all boats.

And instead of the rising tide, what we’ve got is circling the wagons. You know, looking out for ourselves, and making sure we’ve got what we need to survive. And of course, just forgetting, wait, the very fabric, the foundations upon which our business is built, we must maintain that in the next year, in the next two years, in the next five and ten years, otherwise we’re just, well we’re standing on sand, we don’t have a firm foundation. There was a lot there and there certainly was no question, but discuss.

[00:30:26] Zach Stepek: No, so what we’re seeing is this move toward, it’s unfortunate because I see it happening in a lot of companies right now. Where they’ve taken on investment. They no longer are fully in charge of their own destinies, because they now have people to answer to that want to get a return out of the money they’ve injected into the WordPress community.

And the only thing that private equity generally sees is the dollar, or the pound, or the whatever your local currency is, right? That’s all they see. That’s all they see. And when you talk about an ecosystem of interrelated, interlocking pieces that all have to work in harmony, and then you have a force that’s in an industry that is interested only in transaction, that is at odds with how an open source community is built, right? So taking things to a transactional level only chases short term wins, because that relationship only lasts as long as you can continue to squeeze money out of it.

[00:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: It is such an interesting juxtaposition with broader society. So you live in the US I live in the UK. We’re both democracies, and we’re both capitalist democracies. And from a very early age, the subliminal message being delivered to all of us is, work hard, produce things and just see what you can get out of it all. Charge what the market will bear, and the rest of society will figure all of that out. The market is the thing, and somehow it’ll all beautifully work and balance.

This is so different to that. This is something else. It’s some, there’s a philanthropic outside to it which, it’s very hard to encapsulate, but the whole 22 year history of it is built upon the shoulders of many, many thousands, tens of thousands of people who didn’t necessarily have that as the basis upon which they were working.

You know, there was a lot of philanthropy, a lot of volunteer time, for want of a better word. And so projects like WordPress, it feels like, if the only metric for success by a WordPress company is going to be ROI for whatever reason, you mentioned having to repay the venture capitalists or what have you. But if ROI is the only metric upon which anything is based, you aren’t thinking about the rising tide carrying all boats. You are just thinking what’s the next month going to do, and what’s the next month going to do?

And again, I haven’t got a question in there, there’s just an observation. But there’s something intangible there. There’s something that our ecosystem requires in order to survive that it feels is harder to, conjure up in the real world in 2026 than it was say in, I don’t know, 2017 or something like that.

[00:33:24] Zach Stepek: Yeah, well, and here’s the thing, okay. When you focus on these short-term wins only, and you ignore the potential of long-term partnership and of ecosystem building, you lose out on potential revenue because of shortsightedness, right? If all you’re trying to do is close the next sale as quickly as possible to make people who don’t really know your business happy, then you’re losing sight of the potential that comes from investing in long-term sales.

And agencies understand this, especially the more enterprise focused agencies who have sales cycles that are 12, 18, 24, sometimes even 36 months long. So when these companies start to put profit ahead of people, ahead of partnership. When profit is the priority, then anything they call a partnership programme is really just a house of cards. It might stand for a while, but it’s fragile. And when people get treated like line items instead of collaborators, that trust erodes very quickly.

When every conversation becomes transactional, everyone, every layer that we talked about starts to just focus on protecting their own interests. And the irony is that the strongest growth comes from the opposite approach, right? When partners focus on people, they focus on shared wins. Those successes create real social proof.

And then the community sees it. And the customers see it. And that reputation, that long-term investment in the community as a whole, in the ecosystem, is more powerful than any potential short-term revenue spike. Trust and reputation compound over time. It’s not something you develop in a single conversation.

And then the other thing that’s really important about this is what the community perceives, right? Love it or hate it, the WordPress community is very harsh to companies that they see as just trying to eek out profit without giving back, without doing the things that are required to support the very ecosystem that allows them to make money. And so community perception is hugely important, and that perception drives long-term growth. Short-term thinking damages your brand equity, long-term thinking builds it.

Trust, in this case, is the durable asset, right? It’s not what your MRR is or your ARR is. Those things are important because they allow you to support the business and the livelihoods that you are supporting as a company. But trust is the most important asset a company has. And when that starts to erode because the company stops acting like it used to, before the injection of capital, and starts acting like a business that is focused on only its capitalistic pursuit, trust starts to degrade, and then eventually it’s just gone.

[00:36:43] Nathan Wrigley: I’m imagining like a, I often like to kind of encapsulate things in my head and I’m kind of imagining a really tall skyscraper. And the scenario that you are describing is more death by a thousand paper cuts. It’s this slow erosion of that building. You know, imagine that building where the way that you’ve just described things, you might be removing one brick one day and then you come back another day and take a couple more. Before you know it, the whole thing starts to look shaky.

So it’s not that giant, swinging wrecking ball that’s coming and in one hit has just demolished the whole thing. This is a slow, but potentially with a certain critical momentum and enough steam behind it, enough erosion of the fabric of the whole thing that it’s inevitable. Unless the brakes are put on, that slow erosion, the building will fall down.

I’m wondering if that’s more a consequence of where we are at. And I don’t mean you and I or even the WordPress community. The confidence in economies worldwide, and the nature of what’s going on in the broader world, I wonder if those kind of concerns play in.

So you know more about the corporate side of WordPress businesses than I do. I don’t know what is happening at the top tier of a lot of those bigger businesses. The sort of third tier that you mentioned. I do wonder if there’s a more, how to describe it, bean countery kind of approach to businesses.

I wonder if the calculus is much more now, what is the ROI? If we don’t see ROI, it’s not happening. Whereas in the year 2017, it would be, what’s the ROI? Well, yeah, we’ve got things which we can say we’ll make a profit from that, but we’ve also got the long bets. We’ve got the community side. We’re going to fly people to that event. We’re going to sponsor that person over there, two days a month because we know that they’re contributing to Core, and that’s part of this bigger rising tide carries all boats metaphor that we’ve been using. I don’t know if it’s true, but I wonder if the state of the world that we’re in, I wonder if that contributes a bit to it.

[00:38:42] Zach Stepek: I think it does. I think there’s a lot of fear right now because the economy has not been as strong as what it had been in the past. We all dealt with a period of extreme recession. And despite some governments not wanting to say the word, right? The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shrink in economic factors across the board. And it was inevitable that that was going to happen.

Some countries were hit harder by inflation as a result of that than others. But it’s a reality that we’ve all had to deal with, because demand for things went up and the supply went down because the workers simply weren’t there to make the things. And that’s just basic economics in a capitalistic society, right?

So, yes, there’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of fear that is causing businesses to make decisions that they wouldn’t have, you know, as you mentioned, just eight years ago in 2017. And all you have to do is look at the sponsorship page on any WordCamp or any tech event. Even events as large as CloudFest. Look at the sponsor pages. Look at who’s there and compare it to what you’ve seen in the past.

The numbers are dwindling, right? The people who are willing to continue making those investments are dwindling. Companies, whether they are product companies or agencies or hosting companies, but especially hosting companies this year, are deciding not to send people to events. They’re just not. I have heard from multiple people that work at hosting companies that are not leaving their home countries this year. It’s a belt tightening across the board.

But I understand that there’s a desire to tighten the belt and make sure that the company can survive through this current economic shift. And for hosting companies that own their own infrastructure, and even those who are renting infrastructure from a hyperscaler like Google or AWS, there’s a very scary thing on the horizon that we’re seeing, and that is the shortage of components for building servers.

And there’s this little thing that is an artificial term called Artificial Intelligence. They’re large language models people, they’re not Artificial Intelligence. There’s no intelligence there. They’re just regurgitating things they have read and digested, right? But these AI companies, these large language models take a tremendous amount of processing power.

And I’m reminded of the first time that I visited a data centre. And I was in the data centre and across the aisle from what I was there to see was an AI company. And they had their servers there and the data centre had to retrofit additional cooling for the area where those AI servers were running. Whereas you could probably just wear a T-shirt and be fine in a data centre, in most cases. If you were in that area without a coat, it was bitterly cold, because there was just so much air that was chilled air being shot at these machines that were filled with graphics processors that were generating massive amounts of heat.

And so you think about that, and you think about the level of hardware required to generate that amount of heat out of a simple server, and the difference in the number of components, the amount of RAM, the amount of processors, the number of graphics cards at $2,000 a piece that have to go into these massive beasts of servers. And the component shortage has a lot of hosts scared too. Not a lot of them thought in advance to buy a ton of RAM and a ton of processors, because we’ve never had a true supply shortage in that area except during the pandemic.

And at that time, everybody was slowed down. Now, nobody has slowed down. Demand is higher than ever before for hosting, and the infrastructure just isn’t there to support it. So as the prices of things like a stick of memory have gone up, the cost, the raw cost of hosting will go up too. And we’re just starting to see the beginning of that effect. But I think that companies that were built on $3 hosting are going to very quickly find that their model is no longer supported by component cost.

So yeah, there’s fear. There’s fear that is causing people to make decisions that are focused on revenue rather than relationship. And I think it’s incredibly shortsighted. I understand it. I get why fear is such a motivating factor, especially when you have lives that you’re responsible for. I’ve been there. But the important thing is remembering that, in everything you do, there are real humans behind these brands, behind these products, behind these agencies.

It’s really easy to talk about a whole bunch of companies like their logos on a slide. And in fact, that’s what some of these partner programmes are designed to do, collect logos. But that’s transactional, right? And all of these people are people. All of these teams are created from people, founders, developers, support staff. They’re all people, and they care deeply about the work they’re doing. At least in most cases, right?

[00:44:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just sort of interjecting there as well. The fear aspect that you mentioned for all of the reasons you’ve just described is so understandable where we are right now in 2026. And so ROI, it feels like it’s becoming the thing. The thing instead of anything else. And I wonder if that’s because there’s a vacuum on the other side where anything philanthropic, so let’s say for example, I don’t know, you contribute something by giving somebody a day a week to work on Core.

The calculus there is, well, we could do the ROI thing, or we could do this other philanthropic thing, but nobody will know about it. Only we’ll know about it. And if we write a blog post, then a few people will know, but almost nobody will see that that’s happening. And so there’s no kind of quid pro quo on the other side. There isn’t the recognition.

But it feels like the wheels are beginning to turn, the cogs are starting to move around that. There seems to be some initiatives that are coming, which are going to try and address contributor hours, or badges, or whatever it is that you do. Some way of recognising, okay, that company did this, we need to lord that, and praise that, and recognise that, and write it down and keep a record of it so that we know in the future.

And maybe that will be something which will be put into the spreadsheet. There will be an ROI on that thing because it’s more tangible. It will never be as tangible as the ROI of the dollar that you get back from the dollar that you spent. But at least it will be something. It’s not just sort of shouting into the void, we give that person a day, a month. Nobody knows. Nobody knows give that person a day, a month to contribute to Core. And maybe if we get to the point where those kind of things are recognised.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how we make that and inflate that into something important. But maybe those kind of things start to need to matter in a way that they never did matter before, because they just didn’t need to matter. But now the landscape has changed. They now do need to matter, otherwise the revenue from these companies is going to dry up.

[00:47:03] Zach Stepek: Yeah, I think that’s, it’s really interesting because when you look at all of this, first of all, partnerships, what we started this whole conversation around. You mentioned the spreadsheet. Partnership success doesn’t often show up overnight on that spreadsheet, right? It’s like tending a garden. It’s not flipping a switch.

So every partnership you grow, see what I did there, it takes time. You have to build the trust. You have to learn how each other’s businesses work. If it’s a vendor relationship and it’s only built on affiliate income, right? The agency recommends you because you give them more money than another host to do so, well, are you going to learn about that agency’s business ever? No. But if you invest the time, you build that trust, you find out how each other’s businesses work. Over time, those relationships bear fruit. And the first casualty of fear is patience.

[00:48:07] Nathan Wrigley: I like that. That sounds like the strap line from a movie.

[00:48:13] Zach Stepek: You know, revenue is just a signal. It’s one signal, right? It’s not the only signal.

[00:48:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so interesting this, and it’s so difficult. So here we are, we’re doing this dance. It’s even difficult to describe even though we’ve poured the last, you know, hour into thinking about this, it’s very hard to get hold of. It’s really difficult to describe. It’s very difficult to work out, to calculate. And that maybe is it. Maybe that’s the problem where we’re at. We can’t calculate it.

Like you said, it’s growing the garden, it’s turning up, doing things, things will blossom over time. It’s keeping the faith. It’s less circling of the wagons, more the rising tide carries all boats mentality.

Certainly this year feels like we’re going to go through something. And whatever comes out the other side, it will be interesting to see whether it was that wrecking ball, or whether it was people just taking a brick one at a time. Or whether it was adding stories to the building, you know, adding extra floors that didn’t exist before. It’ll be really interesting to see how this pans out because I think we’re at an inflexion point.

[00:49:23] Zach Stepek: We are. And I know, you said it’s hard to measure. And I do agree that it’s hard to measure the impact of something like partnerships. Revenue is the most common signal to use for that, right? It’s the thing that makes the most sense to a business mind. And the revenue is what fuels business growth, I get that.

But I would posit that there are a few other metrics, a few other things we can start to look at to measure success beyond revenue. Now, like I said, revenue’s a signal. There are other signals too. What’s the trust between teams? How often are partners collaborating proactively? If you’re a hosting company, you see this pretty actively. How often are your customers having better outcomes because of the partnerships you’ve forged?

Relationship equity precedes the revenue. These outcomes matter. Partnerships compound slowly. And when you’re in an environment where patience is thin because fear is high, taking the time to develop true partnerships is hard. But it is always the people that do the hard work that succeed in the end.

[00:50:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s the perfect place to put a pin in it. That was such an interesting conversation. I don’t claim to understand the nuance of it still. I don’t, certainly don’t claim to have the answer but it was fascinating chatting that through with you. I think there’s things to be addressed in the year 2026, and that certainly was an interesting foray into that.

As much as I don’t want to end the conversation, I think now is probably the moment to do that. I just want to give you an opportunity to tell people where you are. You obviously had your bio at the beginning, but I don’t think you dropped a website or anything like that. So if you want to drop a social handle or a particular URL that people can find you, if they want to get into this conversation more deeply, go for it.

[00:51:18] Zach Stepek: Yeah, so all of my eCommerce consultancy is done through mightyswarm.com. That’s my agency. The fractional partnership stuff that I’m working on, the fractional help, it will also run through that. It’s not quite updated to include that yet. You can find me at zachstepek.com, which is my personal site, talks a little bit about what I do. I’m in the process of rebuilding that, so it also encapsulates the other part of my life which is my concert and music photography, which we’ll talk about it another time. And I’m zstepek pretty much everywhere. So Z S T E P E K on all the social platforms that matter.

[00:52:00] Nathan Wrigley: I will make sure that I put whatever you’ve just said into the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Zach Stepek then you’ll be able to find it. If you scroll down to the bottom, it’ll be under the beginning blurb, and the transcription and things like that. Go to the bottom. There’s a useful link section so it will all be there. So Zach, what a fascinating conversation that was. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:52:25] Zach Stepek: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. It’s always good to talk to you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, trying to navigate the new normal for WordPress community and events.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Simon Pollard.

Simon has been building with WordPress for many years. Originally from Devon in England, he’s worked as a professional web developer across locations, eventually landing at Illustrate Digital, where he’s been for six years.

Simon’s not just a coder. He’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community, not only organising, but helping to grow the Bristol WordPress Meetup from a casual get together in a pub, to a thriving, officially backed event with dozens of regular attendees.

Like many in the WordPress ecosystem, Simon wears multiple hats. He’s a musician, a devoted dad, and an accidental community leader who found himself at the heart of local WordPress organising. But COVID-19 changed all that.

In today’s episode, Simon explains what happened to WordPress Meetups during and after the pandemic. How vibrant communities fizzled out. How hard it was to bring people back. And the new challenges of connecting when traditional social media platforms no longer bring everyone together.

Simon talks about his own journey, how he paused on events, shifted his social life to music, and struggled to hand the Meetup keys to new organisers. Eventually, a call from an old friend drew him back and he was faced with the new reality. Smaller groups, fractured channels, and the question of how to keep the in-person spirit of WordPress alive.

We get into the irreplaceable value of real life connection, the warmth in the room, and the need to rethink what gets people to in-person events now. Is it hybrid events? Perhaps it’s music? Something beyond pure WordPress talks? We discuss what’s been lost, what still matters, and what it might take to build the new era of WordPress community in a distracted, always connected, world.

If you’re curious about the future of WordPress Meetups, if you felt the ebb and flow of community during the past few years, or if you just want to know how to find your people again, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you. Simon Pollard.

I am joined on the podcast by Simon Pollard. Hello Simon.

[00:03:42] Simon Pollard: Hello Nathan.

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to chat. Simon and I have met for the first time, just sort of 10 minutes ago. We’ve had a little bit of a chat. And as is so often the case, Simon has a musical instrument in the background. I don’t know what that is, but there’s definitely a thing there. WordPressers often have musical instruments.

[00:03:57] Simon: There’s more behind me as well. And randomly, I’ll bring in another fact, so I’m in a very casual band of predominantly mid forties internet developing type people. And, yeah, we’re all the same, we all play instruments. And randomly we all, without being connected in any way, can work in the same one building in Bristol, which is co-working in individual offices and we all found out we’re all in the same building. And that wasn’t how we met.

[00:04:21] Nathan Wrigley: I think probably anybody listening to this has figured out by your accent that you’re from the UK. And you mentioned Bristol just there.

[00:04:27] Simon: Well, Brizzle if I’m going to be correct.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Right at the top of the podcast, we typically ask the guests to just give us a little potted bio, a moment or two just telling us who you are. And as it’s a WordPress podcast, just give us your background with WordPress, I guess, as well.

[00:04:40] Simon: Yeah, well, I’m from Devon originally, which the English people will pick up on the accent potentially. I try to hide that away, but every now and again a little bit of farmer will come out and it’ll be oh, argh. And then, yeah, so I was born in Devon, moved away into to Cheltenham, been to Cardiff and then ended up in Bristol and worked at various places amongst all of them.

Bristol was where I finally got my kind of proper web job, an actual proper official web job. And the first company I started used WordPress as one of the platforms, and that’s from where I started off my kind of professional career. Moved around a few places since then as developers do, but always kind of staying in the area. And then currently, I am now at Illustrate Digital. Been there for six years, joined at the start of 2020, so that was an interesting progression, we’ll cover that later.

During my time in Bristol, it was someone else who originally raised the idea of a Meetup for of WordPress devs to kind of meet up and have a chat. So myself and a few others met up with this one guy called Henry, and we just met at the pub, sat around a table and had a chat and said, what are you doing? What do you need help with? What would we like to talk about?

And it kind of progressed from being, so we had a few more kind of casual chats, managed to grow. I think there was about six of us met originally and we kind of grew a bit and then said, oh, should we try doing like talks and making it a bit more official? So we progressed onto that. Struggled to find speakers, which I think is the story of absolutely every Meetup is find someone to talk. So I ended up doing a lot of talks myself, which I didn’t mind, but there was only so many times I can involve cats and WordPress together in the same thing.

And then it grew a bit. The key point for me is we took on someone who was a project manager by trade, who was also a developer. And they created a Trello board, and then suddenly we got organised. And I don’t know how, we kind of reached out, I remember now as I’ve just literally spoken to Jenny Wong who works over at Human Made, and she was assisting and she said, you know, is there anything I can do?

And she came over, I was working in Bath at the time. So she came over in person, back in the day when you met in person. Came over to Bath and we sat down and had a coffee and a chat, and she gave me all the tips and advice she could to kind of help build the Meetup and get it bigger and try and get things working.

She also helped us get official backing. So we got the WordPress official backing for the Meetup, which is brilliant because that gave us funds. That allowed us to start hiring venues which is brilliant. So all the worry of paying for kind of costs or anything for the venues got covered by WordPress. We still reached out for sponsors, and the sponsors gave us money for food. Food is obviously a good tool to get people in as well.

It just kind of grew. And I’m not sure what made it grow or how it grew, but it just kind of fed through. But this was back in the day when social media was less run by maniacs and you were happy to post on Twitter and Facebook and it kind of grew from that. I already had quite a good Twitter following, so I just kind of shouted there all the time and tried to pull in everybody and anyone who isn’t at all connected to the internet.

We went to Facebook, I got a friend of mine, was a bit of a social media guy, he set us up several kind of media accounts and added his advice. And then, yeah, just kind of moved on, and we were getting in a good crowd. Towards the end of 2019 into 2020 we were getting say 30, 40 people coming along to the Meetup, which is really impressive.

So we’d fill out a room, we’d get catering in, that would all get done. We had an account, we were that kind of organised, so we had an actual bank account to put our sponsorship money in. We were in profit at one point. So it was crazy. It was just going, yeah, going really well. Lovely kind of gathering, it was just a nice thing. We ran monthly. The organising team grew to about six or seven of us, because there was so much to do. So there’s plenty of us involved.

And yeah, it was going great, all going along lovely. 2020 came about and then suddenly COVID, and that was it. It kind of stopped because it had to, and none of us had the appetite to do the video side of things. We didn’t really have the technology, or the means, and it was just too much with everything else that was going on in the world. So it kind of petered out, and as did my involvement in the community, as much as in person involvement kind of faded out.

And I looked back and, yeah, the last meetup that I attended was in 2020, before just the other week when I’ve gone back, but like the last one was 2020 was the last, looking at my logs, the last Meetup I attended in person, which is quite sad to look back. But this all changed around. I’ve gone very off topic of what I actually do. I think I just went into this hole.

[00:08:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no, it’s great because obviously what the listener doesn’t know is that you and I already know this is what we’re destined to talk about. So you’ve given us the full introduction. So I’ll just take over for a minute, if that’s all right? Because that’s really the case, I think you could map that across all of the WordPress Meetups within the UK.

So prior to COVID, things seemed to be going great guns. There were lots and lots happening. I don’t know the exact number, but there were many. I could pluck out of the air several, and probably, if you combined all of the numbers of those, it was hundreds of people, you know, getting out of their house, going to an event, sharing expertise but also, like you said, the social side of things.

And then this moment in time, this kind of sword of Damocles, if you like, suddenly that we didn’t know was there, dropped. Killed the whole thing overnight for good reason. You know, there was a really legitimate reason for everybody to stop moving around. But it seemed to have changed something for good.

Now what’s curious about that is I remember being in that COVID time, and I remember being utterly fed up and bored, and praying for the time when things would just return back to normal. And with great speed, actually, with the benefit of hindsight, looking back, that almost seems like I watched a COVID TV program. You know, it seems like, obviously I know it was real to me, but it all seems so in the rear view mirror now. It was almost like it was part of a fictional book or something like that.

But I fully expected that the minute all of the guards, and the protections, and the legislation came away, that I would just drop back into everything that I’d done before. And so for me, that’s what happened. I went immediately back to everything, you know, attending events, and all the other different things that I do in my own spare time that have got nothing to do with WordPress.

But the curious thing is, for me at least anyway, is that I appear to be different. You know, you’ve just gone back, within the last few weeks or so. What changed for you? Have you had the time to be introspective and think to yourself, why, Simon, did I not just resume what I was doing before?

[00:10:59] Simon: Yeah. So I mean it’s twofold for me. Yeah, I’ve been very reflective over the last kind of few weeks on this because I’m just reaching out again and seeing people. It’s like, I’ve not seen you in six years and it’s kind of crazy. Well I mean I spoke to them online and responded to comments here and there but, yeah, for me it was twofold.

So during the COVID times I was fortunate enough to have a baby, which changes everything again anyway. And that just became my focus. So whilst working full time and also having a child, that was my focus. The evenings, when I used to have the time to go to the Meetups and everything, in the evening, if I had any spare time, I would just prefer to sit. I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t have any energy. I was spent. I was enjoying a glorious moment of sitting, and if I was lucky watching a bit of TV. Yeah, it took it all out of me.

So I’ve put things on pause in that sense. I wasn’t really doing anything. Yeah, as you’ve mentioned the guitars and everything, used to go to gigs a lot as well, but that kind of went on hold. The music side ironically kicked off after. So that’s something that did come in first. So whilst I didn’t go to Meetups, some other people, when things got back reached out to me and said, oh, I’m running a band, do you fancy joining that? So that became my kind of social outlet instead. So my focus went on that, and playing in a band and just meeting up with them. So that was my social interaction.

Ironically, that was someone I knew through, not through Meetups but through events they used to run, I think it was Future of Web Design, or future of, one of those that was down in London. A lady called Michelle, who also has a child, used to live behind me, back in the day in Bristol. She’s moved away. And then she just dropped a message on one of the other social platforms, which I’ll go back to, and just said, oh, do you fancy joining a band, I do drums? I didn’t even know she played drums. Like, she’d been playing drums since kind of school and it just came out.

So that was my social outlet for a while. So I was doing that, and that was good because that was like once a month or so we’d just meet up and have a few hours. My wife could look after my little girl. And so that was my focus for a while and that kind of kept me content for a while moving forward. But I think, yeah, I lost the kind of the urge or the will. I didn’t really have the capacity to run the Meetup that I used to be involved with.

And there were a couple of failed attempts to hand it over. Several people came in and said, oh, I’d like to have a go at running that. So it’s brilliant. So I kind of was like, here’s the keys, off you go. Even still had the Trello board and everything that we had.

And one tried and failed. I think another one did and I just kind of left it. So I assumed nothing really was happening on that. Until recently, it was last year I believe when some of the original team, a lady called Janice who was there at the very first pub round table with me, I think we’ve been to every Meetup ever since. She moved into retirement because she was a web developer and was like, don’t want to stop doing things. And she liked the community and she thought, right, well, if no one’s going to get this up again, I’ll do it again. And she was in the team at the end as well, so she’s already had the experience. She pulled together some of the others of the team. So still another couple of people, Michael and Rob who used to kind of be managing as well, they’re back in it as well and they started bringing it back to life.

And so I kind of saw this last year, the Meetups kind of started filtering through. And because I’m still connected to a lot of these people I found out, trying to remember how it came, it might, would’ve been something like LinkedIn or somewhere, or even emailed and that kind of came through. And it was like, oh, I need to go along to that one time, I really need to go along. And even one of my friends was talking, I was like, brilliant, I’ll go and see him, I’ve not seen him in ages. And then I had an operation that put me out of action for a while.

So that came in, so even when I was just about ready to go. And then finally, turn around to this year and then, yeah, another good friend of mine Ross Wintle, who is a developer, who I think a lot of people hopefully will know, he works doing stuff for ACF in particular, which is why I harass him all the time. But I’ve known him for ages. He was talking, I was like, right, I’ve got to go along because he’s talking. I’ve not seen him in six years, and it’s a great chance to see everyone. And I was so glad I did.

A lot of it, whilst it was smaller, it was still just a lot of the same people. So I think I kind of took in that seeing the people didn’t really appreciate the size but still it was kind of nice. It still felt the same. It was still the nice, friendly atmosphere which you get with WordPress. I think you get that across the board. Not just in Meetups, but devs talk to other devs which you don’t necessarily get in other industries. I would happily tell another dev, for what I would call a rival, inverted commas, company, how to do something if they were stuck, which you wouldn’t necessarily get in other industries.

And that filters through, for me, for the Meetup side. The atmosphere, it’s just very friendly and welcoming. And talking at it is a joy, because you will never get heckled. No one’s going to do that. Unless it’s a friend of yours and they’re teasing you, because you know them.

It’s just such a nice kind of crowd, and that’s where I started doing talks. And I don’t think I would’ve ever done a talk if it wasn’t in front of such a nice crowd and you knew you could kind of do what you wanted. You can make a mistake and no one’s going to pick you up on it. And then a lot of the time they were just interested to hear what you had to say. It was just, yeah, nice.

So I think I’ve already talked myself into doing a talk again. So there’s a good reason to go back. So got to think about that. Yeah, and then I said, well, I used to have a network of people, so how do I reach out to that network of people that I used to do and pull them in? Like, how do I go, right, okay, we are doing all right here but as always, looking for people to talk? So how do I reach out to those people?

And that’s kind of the next point is, the next thing that changed was the social network seemed to almost turn evil in places like Twitter, which used to be a nice go to, and you’d message everyone. Everyone kind of jumped ship because, for good reason. No one seemed to jump ship into the same boat, and everyone was doing their own thing and there was no confined next to step of where you get in touch. And that’s where I’m currently at is, six years down the line, what’s the way to kind of network now on the internet with these people and get in touch with those I may have lost touch with?

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: That’s so interesting. I’m going to unpack a lot of what you said there. I’ve been making my little notes as you’ve been going along, but there’s a few things there.

So the first thing is that it’s curious you, for reasons that you’ve explained very well, you know, the family being the easy one to grasp. You know, you had a very, a different life out the other side of COVID. And so the constraints around that, and the possibilities of socialising were diminished regardless.

I didn’t have that, and so I did sort of just drop back into where I was before. But what’s curious is that clearly isn’t the pattern. You know, we hear about, not just in the WordPress space, but lots of sort of social enterprises, clubs and things that were going on all over this country, kind of lost their way. They couldn’t attract the people back.

So something happened, I think, to us during that period of time. I don’t know if we just became habituated to sitting in more and, you know, more accustomed to watching the telly. I don’t know if they’re ingrained into us somehow, was this fear of the outside world. That’s really overdramatising it, but hopefully you can grasp what I mean. You know, just this idea that outside, bad, inside, good.

[00:17:44] Simon: It was two years of being told to stay inside. And whether of not, that’s going to sink in isn’t? At some point, without even thinking.

[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But then it just means that, when eventually the guardrails are pulled off, and obviously they weren’t just pulled off in one fell swoop. It was this sort of slow experimental phase, where you could be with a few people and then more people, and then that all got pulled back again, and then it all began again. Eventually, where we are now is you can do basically everything again. There’s no restrictions whatsoever.

But the community, the WordPress community in particular, I do wonder if we probably went into our screens a bit more than the typical person might do. Because, you know, we’re on our screens doing the work. Six o’clock maybe would’ve rolled by in the year 2018 and we would’ve closed the laptop, shut the computer down, and then done the other things. But then for a period of three or four years, we just carried on, on the screens and met on Zoom, or just carried on watching Netflix or whatever it may be. And then untangling all of that on the other side, proved hard, hard to do.

But then the bit that you just said, I’ve never thought about that. The social media, the shattering of social media where people have decided that this platform over there is not for them anymore. And, okay, I’m going to either discontinue using social media, or go to somewhere else and there really isn’t that, what do they call X? They used to call it the town square or something like that. And that’s a long time since that happened. But there’s now, there’s no replacement for that. There’s no one place you can go to. Everything’s shattered over multiple accounts. There’s no question there, but I don’t know if you wanted to respond to any of that.

[00:19:15] Simon: That’s where I am at the minute was I moved on, I tried different things and that’s randomly how I got the band notification was off one of those. But I can’t even remember now what platform that was. And I think I’ve closed the tab on my browser, and I’ve long since forgotten and not really gone back into it because it was a handful of people. And I spent a lot of time building up my Twitter following, and I just lost the urge to kind of do that all over again. And followed enough people for a while but then kind of lost the interest in that.

And, yeah, I don’t know, it’s weird. It’s just because there isn’t really anywhere that’s taken over that was, I mean Twitter was the key one for me. That was because I managed the account for the Meetup as well. So I could post on their behalf, but I could also kind of tie in and connect myself. I could retweet myself and retweet other people, and you could get those connections in place which is harder to do now.

That was my go-to, and then I don’t really know now, yeah, where to reach out. And even, one of the things raised at the Meetup I went to was, someone asked a question. It was like, well I’m not sure I can answer that for you immediately. We need to kind of sit down in front of a computer or something. But how do we communicate in between this and the next Meetup? How do we talk? What is the way to communicate now, that’s standard? You give out an email address or something that, I don’t know. Is that the way you communicate? I seemed very lost and almost forgotten how to socialise outside of actually being there in person. The in-betweens, which I’ve been doing for years and years, what’s the in-between way of talking?

[00:20:40] Nathan Wrigley: It’s strange that that’s a thing really, isn’t it? But it definitely is a thing. I suppose the piece of the jigsaw puzzle where it fits into this podcast is that if you are new to WordPress and you’ve never been to any of these events, and you’ve recently started going, a bit like you have done again. You go and you look at the event and you’ll think, okay, this is nice. Here’s the collection of people. But if you were to go pre 2019, so 2017, 2018 in particular, you were probably looking at the same event with, I don’t know, five times the number of people, 3, 4, 5, maybe even 10 times the number of people.

And so whatever that period was, whether it was COVID or a variety of other things, the numbers have dropped. And I think, whilst it’s not, I’m using air quotes at the moment, whilst it’s not necessary to have community for an open source CMS software project, certainly helps.

It helps that these people gather. It helps that they gain empathy. They sort of start to understand each other. It helps so that they feel a connection. You know, they’re going to join different teams because, oh, that person’s in that team and I know that person. It helps because it enables you to share knowledge and hopefully, instead of 10 people falling over the same problem, one person does, and shares their experience to the other nine. And yada, yada, yada. On it goes.

And it does trouble me that that component is now missing. It makes me think this isn’t good. And I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I had a magic wand that I could wave and bring it all back. Does it bother you? Do you feel that the community should still be important? Or can we just say, this is now where it is, just accept it. This is what we’ve got.

[00:22:26] Simon: Having dipped my toe back in properly into the community as it were, recently, it’s kind of reminiscing now what it was, and there’s still elements there of what it is and knowing people. It is almost networking. It’s kind of knowing those people, and someone knows someone. There’s a very kind of small world. Those relationships and people I used to speak to a lot that I didn’t so much, and it’s weird why that kind of stopped.

And I think, yeah, it’s definitely the kind of the sharing. And it’s particularly relevant I would say if you are a freelancer or work on your own or you are even part of a smaller team. But the networking helps you kind of expand out, and expand your team without it having to be in the company you’re working for. Because as I previously mentioned, the rare thing in the WordPress community is that a developer can speak to another developer about an issue for say, it might even be for a client, and they will work together to resolve it. Offering back is how it was, and I think it still is in some areas, which you wouldn’t say get in others. And I think that’s the community side of it that’s very different.

And I noticed that with the Meetup because I’ve been to other Meetups. We even did a collaboration Meetup as well. And the other ones I went to, it just didn’t feel the same kind of warmth. It felt very fixed. There was no kind of welcoming.

So the one thing that has always been relevant that the Bristol one, is we’ve got a welcoming team. So as soon as you step through the door there’s someone there. Get a little name badge as well. And if you’re new, they’ll ask a few questions and find out what you do. And what we always do is, oh, what do you do? Oh, I’m in project management. Ah, go and speak to so and so, they’re a project manager. Or, I’m looking for a developer. Or kind of find out what was their reasoning, and then direct them because we knew who was there.

That’s opposed to other ones where you go in and you almost kind of sign in and then you’re left to your own devices, and no one approaches you, and it just felt very kind of awkward. Whereas we would try and engage everybody, and we were lucky with the people who kind of organised it, with people like Janice who’s just a naturally approachable person and she will go out and talk to people. And we had that kind of mixture of people that, it just made it nice, and it was nice to go along. And you would go along for the people as much as you would for the talk itself.

I would go to talks which had absolutely no interest to me on paper, but I go along anyway because I wanted to see everybody. And then I ended up finding out that these talks were actually sometimes even more interesting when I thought they wouldn’t be any relevance to me. And it helps you kind of expand your kind of knowledge, and appreciate other elements, and other factors that you might not know about. Which in person is just a lot better and I think it’s more engaging as well. So you can kind of stare at a screen watching something. It isn’t quite as engaging as it is being in person.

And also, once you finish, it’s the debrief after that I really like. So when the talk is finished and everything’s wrapping up, you can go and speak to the talker and query something with them and go and speak to other people. And you kind of have that little social bit afterwards, and it’s all just nice and relaxed. And you don’t really get that on a video call because you can’t really go and mingle on a video call, because how do you go and talk to someone else. And it isn’t the same in person, it’s just a lot easier to kind of do that.

Yeah, how do you sell that for something that wasn’t there for a few years? It’s twofold. How do you bring in the people who used to come? And how do you introduce people who may have been born into never having that? The younger generation who lived through COVID, and didn’t really have that Meetup experience before it to know that this exists on the other side. And what would make it appeal to different kind of levels, really?

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m not entirely sure, again, if we could rewind the clock. So this is going much, much further back. Let’s say the year 2003, something like that, when WordPress was really little. I don’t actually know the date of the first Meetup, but let’s imagine it was around there. And nobody had, in the WordPress community had ever thought to meet up.

If that just never had become a thing, I wonder how the project would’ve fared. I wonder if it would have been as successful. Because, you know, there were things like Skype and these platforms were coming along where you could do project management and things like that online. It feels like there was no, there would’ve been no inhibition to it being successful.

But I’m more or less willing to predict that it would not have been successful. I think the glue that binds the project together on some completely unquantifiable level is that community. And a certain proportion of that community in the past required the in-person meeting. You know, whether it be the WordCamp events, where they get on a plane or in a car and drive a long distance for a few days and lots of talks. Or whether it’s the more kind of informal monthly Meetup scenario, where it’s probably closer to home and a little bit quicker and one evening only, something like that.

I just have an intuition that the project wouldn’t have been successful. It was those people, and I think I’ve heard the word maven. Maven being this sort of description of somebody who is like a hyper connector. They’re really good at connecting the dots between people and saying, you should meet this person, and you should meet this person. A little bit how you described.

I think there’s some jigsaw puzzle of that going on. There’s some tapestry of these community members making it successful in a way we’ll never fully unpick. And now that that, in the year, so we’re recording this in March, 2026. Now that that seems to be somewhat in question, it then raises the question of, well, what does that mean for the future of the project as a whole?

My anticipation is that if we were to, let’s say nobody from this moment forward ever attended an event again, I think the project would not be as successful. There would be less development, there would be less interest in it. So I think it’s important that we do get these things back. But again, moving on to your point about how, that’s the tricky piece. You know, has life changed? Is the advent of everything online all the time, you know, so go back 10 years, there was no Netflix. Well, maybe there was, I don’t know. But the point is the entertainment that’s available through everybody’s TV now is so compelling, it’s kind of hard to fight against that.

But I don’t know how we get the young people in. I don’t know what it is about, you know, what the competition is. We’ve obviously got AI painted into the mix, and all of the interesting things going on there. So I don’t really, I’m not really pressing you for the answer.

[00:28:36] Simon: That’s fine. One of the reasons for joining is to kind of ask that question to the people listening and saying, has anyone else got that kind of magical wand and jigsaw missed piece? Has anyone got any ideas to kind of move forward with it? Because I say, I’m going to be looking, moving forward now, what I can do and how I can connect and get back in touch with people that I’ve not spoken to. I’ve already done it with a few people I hadn’t spoken to in a while. It’s like, oh, I’ve not spoken to you, oh, you’ve got a child as well. Oh, lovely. Those things you talk about which you just kind of left.

But yeah, I completely cut short on it and it’s just bizarre. But it is kind of coming back. It’s nice to know that whilst it’s quiet, it’s still there. It hasn’t died out, it’s just a little bit smaller than it was. But like you say, whether it can rebuild to where it was, or even partway to that is the query. I’d hope it can because I think it helps.

And the project itself, as you mentioned, WordPress wouldn’t exist without a community because it’s built by a community. It’s not built by a singular development company, and we wait for them to do it, you get involved. If you want to work with WordPress, you can do. There’s nothing stopping you getting involved. You can get in, you can be involved, you can be a tester, you can be a developer for it. There’s no like barrier to be involved in it, and it needs that community to keep it going. As you said, it wouldn’t probably have progressed to where it is without that community behind it.

And that community is still there in some context, but where are they in terms of, how can I to them and talk to them? Because there’s definitely people I want to reach out to again. And what’s the way to reach people these days? What’s the platform now? What’s the way to reach out to people? Where are people talking? Are they talking anymore? Or is it all just looking at TikTok? This is where I’m going to sound really old. Looking at like TikTok and just looking at short videos of things and that’s where. Or do people still communicate, and how? What’s the way to do that?

[00:30:20] Nathan Wrigley: I get what you’re saying by the way. I am of a certain age and things like, how do you even do TikTok? What even is that? I’m not entirely sure. But again, rewinding the clock, the website was the thing. That was the fulcrum of the internet really. It was, you know, suddenly you had this capacity to publish things online, and in order to do that, certainly prior to Facebook and MySpace and those platforms, you had your blog, you know, that was the way to do it.

You had to go through the process of setting it up. And the process of setting it up would pull back the curtain on, oh, so this is a bunch of files and a thing called a database. Right, okay. And that’s now on my computer, is it? Oh, right. And then that means I can mess up out with it. Oh, that’s interesting. And I can do this. And so this loop of curiosity gets created.

Whereas now, and again, this is where I’m going to sound old, the internet feels like a very different place. You know, you’ve got a billion platforms that you can just log into, no money down. There’s maybe some, you know, quid pro quo in terms of advertising or selling whatever it is that your attention can demand. And you can create your stuff over there, and it’s fine. And that platform has a reach of 3.6 billion people and yada yada, on you go.

So whether the incentives for younger people has changed because they just don’t see the need for having a website. Because that’s all been taken care of by these platforms that you log into. And, oh, just go over there, username, password, I’m all done. I think there’s something there.

[00:31:48] Simon: Yeah, I guess it’s the questions when you’re working on something. Because back in the day you would speak to someone, it would be someone’s response. If I had a question I would need someone to have answered that question on the internet. So developers will, of a certain age, will know Stack Overflow is kind of the go-to. That’s where we spent most of our time on the internet. You’d ask Stack overflow because you’d hope someone else had the same issue, and they responded or they’ve posted it, someone’s told them how to fix it or that kind of thing.

And I got to the point where even I started, I made it as a goal to hit a certain score on Stack Overflow. I was like, right, I’m going to hit a certain score, I’m going to respond, I’m going to answer questions, just because I want to feel like I’m giving back because it felt nice. I’d consumed so many answers from Stack Overflow, it felt rude not to give back. And the same thing for me I think with WordPress is I was consuming so much information I wanted to kind of give back, it was nice. And it made you feel, there was a nice thing in the community thing was, if I knew the answer to something and I could explain that to someone else and help them, it was a nice feeling, it was a nice thing to do.

It was like, I’ve learned this thing, and you are looking to do that thing, oh, I learned it, do it this way, this is how you do it. And that kind of helped me. So all of my Stack responses were WordPress. And it was nice to kind of respond to someone and them say, oh yeah, that’s great, and then several other people would like it. It was just a real nice, positive thing as well.

But now, again, there is a lot of reliance on AI coming forward, because it’s like, you ask AI and AI gives you the answer. And whilst AI consumes information from people, it doesn’t tell you who it consumed it from. So your answer is coming from the AI agent you are using, not from whoever’s actually come up with that answer. So you’ll get your responses, you don’t have to reach out to a person anymore so much as you did back in the day. And whether that’s a factor that the community isn’t needed because it’s being replaced. And you aren’t exposed to the community so you are not getting the answers through the community, you are getting it kind of channeled through an AI agent who’s consuming that.

So they’re doing all the stuff you used to do, and giving you the answers without you having gone into the community and found out that, oh, it was Joe Blogs who answered that question. And it might be that you reach out to them and say, actually, you knew this, do you know that? I’ve made connections through kind of these things as well, and if the answers are no longer attributed, and it’s like the AI agent is the one who’s responded, you don’t know who actually did that if that came through someone because it’s got this information.

[00:34:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s just the void provided the answer for you. Yeah, yeah.

[00:34:11] Simon: Exactly. And that’s the community’s kind of gone on that sense but, is that how people are kind of, that’s what they like or do people still enjoy asking others? I still like responding to others internally in my team. If one of my fellow devs has a question, I love to kind of speak, screen share, go and talk through together, because it’s a lot more kind of enjoyable than just asking the internet.

[00:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I wonder if that’s the bear bones of what we need to sort of aspire to. So it’s to realise that there’s a proclivity to, so, okay, rewind a bit. To realise that the community has taken a hit. There’s no question that’s happened. But also to realise that there isn’t a panacea for this. There’s no red pill that we can take which is going to fix it over time.

It’s to recognise that there’s value in these things. It may be that there has been a dwindling in the audience of these things, but also that little avatar that you just painted of the person who’s curious about the code, but also has a desire to hang out, for the multitude of reasons that that could be, you know, they want to just hang out because that’s a nice thing to do, or they want to do networking, or they want to just make connections that they can chat to when they’re not in the room. To recognise that those people are still out there, and maybe those numbers are smaller.

Whilst you were talking also, it sort of occurred to me that maybe we’re just in flux. You know, nobody’s writing on cuneiform tablets anymore. Nobody’s using a stylist to write on papyrus anymore. Things change, you know, over time. And it may be that this is just the new normal, this is what we now have. I’m not entirely sure. But I kind of long for halcyon days. I’m looking back to those sort of 2018s, 2019s and thinking that’s the bar I’d like to have set. Whether or not that’s possible, I’m not sure.

[00:35:59] Simon: Yeah. It leads to me onto the level up on the Meetup was the WordCamps where it was a big kind of weekend event. And I was lucky enough to be involved. So I was the speakers organiser for the WordCamp that was in Bristol in 2019. Ironically booked my boss before I joined a company just as one of the speakers, and someone we employed as well I booked in for that.

And that was just, yeah, it got so big that we could actually run an entire weekend of stuff. But because the Meetups are now going down in size, I see there is still the appetite. It seems in America and other kind of countries around, but would there still be the appetite in England specifically, where we’re both based, for there to be a WordCamp? Would there be enough to warrant one of those? Or would it have to be very scaled back? Because I remember back in the day, I’ve been to like the London ones and you’ve got multiple tracks. Even the Bristol one had two separate tracks running. But now would it be something a bit more stripped back? Would it just be one track and a small kind of event? What scale would it be? Would there still be the interest?

[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: And also, does it have to be kind of mixed up with other things? Like, does it have to be part entertainment, part information, part hallway? Because again, I just wonder if that’s the diet that we’ve created ourselves with. Our always on culture, where entertainment is so readily available, I do wonder if, you know, we’ve got to just acknowledge that those things are of importance.

If you want to attract an audience of people, you’ve got to have the social afterwards, you’ve got to have the band, the live entertainment, the bits in between, the, I don’t know what that is, but just some aspect of gimmicks to make these events fun. Not just, okay, let’s go to a talk, watch the talk and then all go home.

[00:37:36] Simon: Yeah. There was always, I mean the thing I liked with a lot of these was there was the kind of a developer day or, that often preceded so you could get involved a bit more for those who wanted to. So there were kind of certain things. There were the socials as well that was always key to some, and that was just a nice way to kind of unwind afterwards. Because a lot of the time people would be traveling, so you didn’t want to go to the event and then go back to the hotel room and sit on your own. You could stay out and chat.

And as mentioned before, the community is a lovely community. So it’s people you want to hang out with because they’re nice people to hang out with. They’re all really lovely. And I’ve met a lot of really nice people at Meetups, at WordCamps. Just afterwards in particular and just chatting, chat about anything because after a while you get bored talking about WordPress, you’ll chat about whatever you want.

I mean if I get talking about music then I’m away. But it’s just, you build those relationships. And there are connections that I’ve made back, six, seven years ago that I’m still in touch now and I’m reaching out again and going, we lost that touch in between. So I’m kind of reaching out again and just catching up with people. It’s just nice to know like, oh, you’re still in the industry. What are you doing? What’s happened to you? And that kind of just disappeared almost. There wasn’t a way to stay in touch in between.

[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: The sort of glib comment that I made at the beginning about the fact that if we were to switch on the cameras on this podcast, we’d be able to see that Simon has a guitar in his background.

[00:38:51] Simon: I’ve got more if you look further up.

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s many musical instruments there. But the point being though that there seems to be a, certainly from my perspective, doing these interviews on a, multiple a week. There’s a high correlation between musicians and WordPressers. And so I’m going to drop this bomb. Maybe that’s a channel for these events is to combine other things. Like combine cinema with a WordPress event. So, you know, there’s a track for watching films at the same time as there’s tracks for speakers, but there’s also live music over there. You know, I’m not suggesting we invite Coldplay or anything. But, you know, some local acts. Maybe some of the people that are involved in the event themselves, many of whom we know are musicians. It’s gimmicks again, but it’s fun.

[00:39:32] Simon: It’s a nice way, yeah, I mean it’s on our, so our band’s been going for a while and it’s still on our bucket list is to actually perform somewhere. We get together and rehearse and it’s one of my bucket list things is I would love to actually perform. Even if it’s just in a small pub in front of a handful of people and I know them all anyway, but just to kind of do that performance in front of things.

So that could be tied in. I wouldn’t be against kind of suggesting it to the rest of the guys and saying, there’s going to be this event and there’s all sorts of things taking place. There’ll be some technical talks or whatever and all these things. There’s also some music so we could perform. Definitely an idea. Yeah, like you said, there’s a lot of musicians around.

[00:40:07] Nathan Wrigley: Like a hybrid, arts meets technology kind of event.

[00:40:11] Simon: Yeah. There’s a lot of creativity. One of the best people I got speaking at the Bristol Meetup, bare in mind this is just a very small handful of people, a guy called Gavin Strange who works for Aardman. He is just amazing, and he’s done some brilliant speeches. I lucked out working with him on a community thing where we got together on a weekend and built websites in the space of a weekend. So thank God for WordPress, I basically built a site in, I don’t know, about five hours, we built a website from scratch.

He was working with us doing some animations and things and was such a positive, really great person. He works outside of work. He’s insane. He never stops. I reached out on a whim and said, do fancy doing a talk? And he goes, well, I don’t do WordPress. It doesn’t matter, it can be anything. And he came along and did a really good, positive, energetic talk. And that was my biggest coup was I got him to speak to us.

[00:40:57] Nathan Wrigley: And it was nothing to do with WordPress. Okay, that’s so interesting.

[00:41:00] Simon: Absolutely nothing. Nothing to do with WordPress. He just talked about, I can’t even remember, it’s a long time ago, but it was just interesting because it, just talking about what he does and a lot of kind of what he does outside of his working day and keeping busy and just.

[00:41:14] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot of overlap with soft skills and things, isn’t there? And to be honest with you, even just learning about the animation process and the tech, no doubt, involved in that. It’s kind of interesting. Okay. This is fascinating. This is going in an unexpected direction.

[00:41:27] Simon: That’s my thing now is maybe I can reach out to him again. And then through my other ways I’ve, I know someone who’s done a TED talk. That’s just probably a little level too much, but he’s a mountain biker. But I wonder, can I tie in that into somehow? And can I pull in that crowd that way? There’s all those kind of connections. It’s like, it doesn’t have to be. I think that’s the thing, we managed to get across that it doesn’t have to be WordPress. You can talk about anything if it relates to the internet, and then it might just aspire that that connects to a site that runs WordPress.

That’s how we kind of got a bigger crowd because we dabbled. We did do a technical focused one and it just, that was my thing. I really wanted to get techie and nerdy and it’s like, but you just cut down to too much of a niche and you’re cutting people out. It’s better to kind of have all sorts of things, and as I mentioned before, getting people to see a talk about something they might not think they’re interested in and realise actually it is very interesting and put across and try and get people in.

[00:42:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think that’s the perfect place to sort of draw a line under this one. So what we’re saying is that WordPress events, Meetups in particular, I think we’re talking about mainly, they’re definitely going through a state of flux. We don’t necessarily have the answer, but we’ve definitely floated what the problem is. And there’s a few towards the end there, interesting ideas of ways to possibly make it more engaging to people who’ve, I don’t know, just lost interest, or have never come across WordPress.

So, oh, that’s fascinating. I really enjoyed that. Simon, where do people find you? Where are, you mentioned earlier how the entire world of social networking has been shattered.

[00:42:53] Simon: That’s my issue. Yeah, well, I mean you can find me on illustrate.digital. I’ve got to give a slight plug out to the company I work for. We are a WordPress agency. We do loads of stuff for WordPress. At the minute I seem to be living on LinkedIn. I got addicted to a game on there, and then I kept kind of pulling back. That’s my kind of way to reach out at the minute so you can find me there. I think, yeah, otherwise I don’t really use the other socials. I am on Facebook, if you find me, good luck. But otherwise I think LinkedIn is the way to get me initially. But if you’ve got an example and say, ah, you should join this platform, do reach out and let me know, I’m happy to have a look.

[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I will make sure that anybody listening to this is able to find that. If you go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Simon Pollard in, you’ll be able to probably scroll to the bottom of the show notes and there’ll be links to his LinkedIn.

So Simon Pollard, that was a really curious and interesting chat. Thank you for chatting to me today. I appreciate it.

[00:43:41] Simon: Thank you very much Nathan.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case WordPress sustainability, community engagement and release strategies.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Jonathan Desrosiers. Jonathan has been involved with WordPress for almost two decades, both as a user and a contributor. He’s a principal software engineer at Bluehost, where his role sees him sponsored to work on WordPress through the Five for the Future program. Over the years, he’s become a Core committer, and has spent many hours thinking about how to enhance the contributor experience, and make it easier for people to get involved in the project.

In this episode we discuss how WordPress releases might become more impactful by synchronizing them with flagship community events like WordCamps and State of the Word. A recent experiment of combining a major release with a live event spark some excitement, and Jonathan shares insights on the logistics behind such synchronized moments, the challenges posed by international holidays, and regional scheduling, and the broader vision for connecting releases with community gatherings.

We also get into the challenging landscape of the WordPress community, how it’s recovering from the effects of COVID, the struggle to rebuild local Meetups, and efforts like mentorship and educational initiatives to bring in new contributors, particularly from younger generations.

Jonathan reflects on the importance of making release moments engaging and fun, akin to the anticipation of a new TV series or software launch, and the role of AI and open source in empowering a new wave of builders.

If you’re interested in how release cycles, community events, and contributor onboarding are involved in WordPress, or what the future might hold for the platform and its community, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Jonathan Desrosiers.

I am joined on the podcast by Jonathan Desrosiers. Hello.

[00:03:06] Jonathan Desrosiers: Hi, how are you?

[00:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Jonathan’s joining me again. Most recently, I think we were at WordCamp somewhere. I can’t exactly remember where, but I was chatting with him and Joe Dolson if memory serves. And a very different conversation to be had today because Jonathan has been mulling over how we can make releases impactful, and also how we can bind those to community events, particularly flagship WordPress events like WordCamps, things like that.

Before we begin that conversation, Jonathan, I wonder, it’s a bit of a banal question, but people like to have the context of who you are. So would you mind just, very quick potted bio. Just tell us who you are and what you do in the WordPress space.

[00:03:44] Jonathan Desrosiers: Sure. So my name is Jonathan Desrosiers. I am a principal software engineer at Bluehost and I am sponsored there, the majority of my time is sponsored to contribute back to the WordPress project through the Five for the Future program. And so I’ve been there, probably since 2018, I think. And I’ve been a Core committer for almost eight years now.

I’ve been involved as an accredited contributor for 13 years now. And so I’ve been involved with WordPress for over a decade in many ways, contributing, but also as a user for almost, geez, almost two decades now I think. And so, I just had that realisation, it’s been a really long time. It’s been almost 20 years that I’ve been at least using WordPress in some way.

But week to week I do a lot of thinking about contributor experience, how we can automate things, or how we can make our processes more clear so that more people can participate. And just generally making sure that everybody has what they need to be successful. And whether that’s mentorship, or they have blockers they need, certain people to come together and discuss, and get a consensus or understanding, you know, how the sausage is made in some way.

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s fair to say that you are very much connected to the WordPress project. I think it’s the fulcrum of your working life, and you are working at a very high level as well. So Core committer, things like that.

Now, in the recent past, it was probably, I want to say December in the year 2025, we had a kind of strange event happened. Not strange in the sense of weird, but strange in the sense of different, unusual. A release of WordPress came out and it coincided with an actual event. Now, in this case, it was State of the Word. So there was a bunch of people, and I believe they were gathered in New York. I could be wrong about that, but I think it was in.

[00:05:33] Jonathan Desrosiers: It was in San Francisco.

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: San Francisco. Okay, there we go. Thank you for the correction. It was in San Francisco and the idea was that the release of WordPress would go out and it would be bound to this event. And there was this almost, how can we describe it? It was almost like television, basically. It was being filmed and streamed live all over the place. And there was this feeling of a big red button. There was a lot of people gathered around and they all sort of leaned in and pushed a big red button, and the release of WordPress came out.

Now, I don’t know if the button actually did anything or if it was really sort of smoke and mirrors. I like the idea that the button actually did signal the release, but I don’t know if that’s the case. But the point was, there was a little bit of theater put into it. There was this idea that, okay, we’ve got this live event which lots of people will be watching. We’ve got a release which we need to do, which lots of people will be looking forward to. Why don’t we sort of combine the two things?

And so it was a bit of PR really. And it also felt a bit like sort of marketing, and I’m going to use gimmick in the real sense of the word. So not like gimmick as in something pointless, but gimmick as in something different, unique. Something to draw your attention and grab you in. And I think the idea has been proposed that in the year 2026, the flagship events, the flagship WordCamps, so I’ll list them in order in which they’re happening.

So we’ve got WordCamp Asia, and then we’ve WordCamp Europe, and then we’ve got WordCamp US. The three releases of WordPress during 2026 will happen in tandem with those events. Now, why? Why would we want to do this?

[00:07:12] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, so I don’t think it was intentional, but the schedule just happened to coincide. You know, we were working on 6.9 and we realised, oh, the release date is the same as State of the Word. And so, I can’t remember who originally had the idea, but it was mentioned that it would be really neat to just be able to publish it live at the event and celebrate that.

I guess the main reason behind it is just that, the more I’m involved in open source, the more I realise that the code and the license and all those things are important, but the most important thing underneath any open source project is the community that’s involved with it. And what better way to celebrate our achievements and our accomplishments when we get together in different ways.

And so, typically that’s in Slack or social media, right? We celebrate a release and we share the posts and say what we’re excited about. But we also get together at different events and we do the same thing, right? We talk about what we’re excited about, what we’re working on, what’s coming, or what we think should change in certain ways. Why not just do that at the same time and create even a more ultimate celebration, right? Another community moment where people have another opportunity to feel involved in something greater than them.

[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any notion that this is going to be carried forward? I mean, I know that there was obviously a bit of serendipity in how it happened. The coincidence of timing and things like that. But do you have every confidence that this will happen, that Asia will get a release, Europe will get a release, and the US will get a release. In the year 2026, do you think that’s going to actually occur?

[00:08:46] Jonathan Desrosiers: We will see. So as the proposed schedule is for this calendar year, right? There’s three releases. Unfortunately, it’s tough because the people planning WordCamps don’t plan around our software’s release cadence, right? They plan around budget, regional holidays, travel factors, weather, cost of venues and availability.

And so, you know, it’s not reasonable for the Core team and the people working on releases to say you have to have an event in a certain month, right? And so this year, some people may not have noticed, but WordCamp Asia is in April this year, which it’s been in February so far in the previous editions. And WordCamp Europe is in June, which it’s traditionally usually in.

And so that’s not a big enough gap to have another major release. And so the proposed schedule is saying, let’s release during WordCamp Asia, let’s release during WordCamp US, and then we’ll release again at the end of the year around State of the Word. We don’t have a date for State of the Word yet, but it’s around where we think it might be.

And likewise, creating a schedule for releases is incredibly hard because if we don’t release in the first week of April, for example, then I believe the whole month of April has major religious holidays scattered throughout it in different areas of the world. And if we released in March, that was way too soon because we started the alpha phase of 7.0, that starts when the previous release is branched, like it’s separated from the primary branch in the code base, and that happened in like November.

But there’s US Thanksgiving, there’s Hanukkah, there’s Christmas, there’s New Year’s, right? A lot of people in the community take the majority of December off, and so that’s like a washed month, right? And so we would’ve had essentially four weeks until the feature complete point of the release. So that was too soon. And so it’s just as hard to plan the release schedule in a way that doesn’t negatively impact everybody as best as possible as it is to plan these major events.

And so I can’t say that it will be a guarantee going forward. We’re trying it out this year to see how it goes and what we can learn from it. We felt that the State of the Word was successful and it was exciting. It was unique in its own ways. And so we want to try, continue trying this this year and see how it goes.

[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, the piece that you just said there about the religious holidays and what have you, that really opens up a really interesting discussion. Because it is quite likely, I imagine, that the listenership to this podcast probably never gave that any thought, that this kind of international calendar, be it a religious calendar or maybe just a vacation calendar in certain parts of the globe would really impact when the release can happen.

Because there are people who are committing to the project, and they tend to be in certain jurisdictions. And so if there are people who are on, I don’t know, a week long holiday, nationally, in a specific jurisdiction, and they typically are a large part of the team that are committing in various different respects, that’s important, but probably something that many people would not have thought about.

Now, in terms of these releases then, is the idea, well, I’ll backpedal a little bit. It occurred to me that quite a lot of the people who may be involved in releases are the very kind of people who would find themselves also at some of these flagship events. Now, obviously it’s not going to be 100%, maybe it’s 25% of the people who are release leads and part of the teams that are committing here, there, and everywhere.

I was worried that there’d be people on airplanes, people trying to land and orientate themselves in the country that they’ve landed in in the same period of time when they would’ve been heads down, in their office, in their study, figuring out the bits that might be broken with the upcoming release. Is that a thing? Is that part of the jigsaw puzzle of this?

[00:12:32] Jonathan Desrosiers: It definitely is, yeah. With any release, there’s no time of the day where everyone on the planet is available to work on something, right? And so another part of this is that, in a way it forces us to have a major release in different geographic areas so that everywhere on the globe there’s a WordPress release that they may be able to participate in, right?

And so, likewise with travel, right? So when we assemble a release squad, we have to think, okay, it’s based in, for example, this one was planned to be released at WordCamp Asia in India. So we want to make sure we have a mix of people that are in different areas of the world. And not just so that there’s always people around to respond to things throughout the entire cycle, but we also want to have people that are present and not present at the event that are participating. And maybe the wifi is completely unusable or maybe something happens, right? So it’s good to have people that are there and not.

And that was part of the announcement too, is that we tried to underscore the point that it would be great if everybody could go to WordCamp Asia, but traveling is not a requirement to participate in the release at all. And that’s a good thing, because it’s good to have people in multiple areas, multiple time zones.

With WordCamp Asia, once contributor day ends, it’s the beginning of the US daytime, right? And so those contributors can sign off and there’s people around to help carry that torch and continue on if there’s any follow-up issues or anything that needs to be investigated.

And so, yeah, that’s also a consideration is how, I guess we can call it global coverage, right? Like, how can we ensure we have global coverage so that there are people with the right skill sets, and right availability, and right knowledge, to be able to take on certain tasks or responsibilities or perform investigations, whatever may need to be done as part of that release process.

[00:14:26] Nathan Wrigley: I, like you, am really in the weeds of the WordPress project. I obsess about it in a way that’s probably not all that healthy. I’m very well aware of when the next release is coming up. I’m usually fairly aware of what is going to be in that release. But I imagine most people using WordPress, it’s probably a bit of a surprise. You know, they open up WordPress one day and either it has updated. If it’s a point release, probably it’s a more manual thing, if it’s a major release, I should say, but if it’s a more minor release, maybe things have updated in the background during the course of the night and what have you.

But I’m thinking of TV series now. So when a successful TV series has a new season, there’s all this fanfare and buildup and you know it’s coming. You see the commercials, you see the adverts. And the moment that TV series comes around, you are excited, you’re ready to go. And I remember back in the day, this is going back a long time, when Firefox would make a release, they sort of did this thing like, I don’t know, every 18 months or something like that. Not like now where it’s every couple of hours it seems, that browsers update themselves.

But when it went to, I don’t know, 3.6 or something like that, there was this big fanfare, this big moment. Everybody took stock and what have you. And are you trying to encourage a bit of that? Are you trying to create a bit of razzmatazz and drama and intrigue and awareness and all of that around the release, and make it feel like an important thing, which with the best will in the world, it kind of has not been more recently? Most people, it just updates. There’s no fanfare whatsoever. But we can leverage it to make it important, significant, fun, interesting.

[00:16:04] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yes and no, right? Like, we want to celebrate the community and the work we’re doing now. I actually would love it if we could get to a point where we’re releasing every, I don’t know, every week or every month even, right? Not have to wait every three or four months. There’s some value in having that penultimate moment, right? Of, we’ve worked for three months on this. But there’s also aspects of the world where we expect things faster and more instant and waiting for the patch that you submit in January to be released in April is not really, like maybe you lose interest in contributing in that time, right? So there’s many different things like that.

Some things that you mentioned really resonated with me as far as awareness of what’s coming or like what’s been done. In a way, the fact that users are not so aware of what’s being added or what their site has updated to, it’s a sign of the success of auto updates and how seamless those are.

Because for a little while I’ve been considering, when you update WordPress manually, you’re redirected into the about page in the dashboard, right? And every release, there’s a new about page that’s designed, it works hand in hand with, we call them the micro sites, which is like a wordpress.org’s landing page that showcases the release. And it just explains all the features that have been added.

But you only see that if you either go to the about page manually or you manually click update when you’re in the dashboard. And a site might have many administrators that only the person that actually updates will see it. And so I’ve been thinking about ways that we can make users more aware that their site is updated. Or maybe that’s not the important part, but maybe it’s just the important part to make them aware of the new features that are available to them, right?

Maybe we put some type of a widget on the dashboard where we link off to a Learn WordPress page that teaches you about how to use the Notes feature that got added. The other thing too is you mentioned about the TV shows advertise when they’re coming up, right? Maybe we need to do a better job of advertising what’s coming up and encouraging people to opt in early and test.

And in a way a more rapid release cycle leads to that because many of the browsers have different feature flags and they build features out in different branches, and you can actually opt into testing a specific feature and that would get turned on, but maybe not all the other things that they’re working on until it’s ready.

And so maybe we need different ways for people to get involved testing, or trying things out earlier to understand what’s coming, but also to give us valuable feedback, how it works on their site, what breaks, what it doesn’t interact with. All of that is very valuable feedback, and we should always be striving to get more testers and more awareness around what’s coming because it creates new feedback loops that are valuable for different reasons.

[00:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, and what I’m about to say, I am sure that a significant proportion of the listeners to this podcast will say, no, Nathan, we don’t want this. But here’s a proposal then. Here’s an idea. And again, I’m going to hark back to the TV series.

The TV series, typically when they’ve started advertising between other television programs, that TV series has been made, the footage has been shot, the graphics have been done. It’s basically ready to roll. And then they parcel all that up and then they release little snippets of what’s coming so that you can prepare yourself and get excited.

I kind of wondered if something like that in the dashboard, akin to the about us page, but in the run up to the release. So all the graphics have been made. We know basically what’s going to drop in this release. Now it may get tweaked here and there at the edges, but we know what’s coming. I’ve always thought that would be a really nice idea.

I would love to see that. And I realise a proportion of people would think, no, we really don’t want that. But I think that’s a perfect opportunity to get people drawn into, oh, this is coming. Collaborative editing, that’s about to happen is it? Gosh, that’s really interesting.

And then this call to action could be dropped in, but we need some testing around the edges of it. We’ve got the bare bones of it, but we need some more eyeballs on it and what have you. So that proactive demonstration of what’s going to happen rather than the reactive, your site has been updated, here’s what there is, which is already there. This is more of a here’s what’s coming, get excited, get involved, yada yada.

[00:20:29] Jonathan Desrosiers: In some ways the feature branch model that I described lends to that, right? Because then it’s not, here comes this feature and then, oh, actually we left it out of this release, right? It’s its own thing that’s being worked on. And then when it’s released, it’s released, and it’s here. But it doesn’t make it any less, any worse off than other things that are shipping in the release, right? Because it’s its own thing, and it’s its own, it has its own criteria to be ready, in a state that we’re comfortable with shipping it and supporting it forever because of backwards compatibility.

And so yeah, I think that what you’re describing is essentially what I was describing, a little bit more detail. And there’s of course a lot of nuance there around how often do we do that? We have a lot of parts of the release process that need to be automated before we can even consider that. The different parts of the block editor are, many of it is managed as packages, NPM packages. And so a lot of those are so interconnected, it’s a little difficult to release just one feature because they’re all being updated at the same time.

And so like there’s some architectural things to think about around that. Like, how do we compartmentalize things better to be able to do that? Make sure we don’t accidentally include something that’s not ready but when we intended to include a certain feature. There’s a lot to unpack there and I don’t know that we’ll ever get there just because of the sheer size of the project and how, backwards compatibility, how long we’ve been around.

But I think that training users that auto updates are important to have enabled that are quality, you know, not shipping things that break people’s sites as much as possible, even though it’s unavoidable because of how flexible WordPress is.

After 6.9 came out, I was looking into some of the data because I had this gut feeling that 6.9 was being updated to, slower than other releases. And so for a little while I was looking at that. And after about a month, I was like, okay, this is just a hunch. Let me go and actually look at the data around this.

And so what I noticed was actually the opposite. When I looked at, I created 5% thresholds for the percentage of total WordPress sites. And when I looked at the data, I realised that for the last 10 releases, let’s see here. So every major version of the last six to eight releases has passed 35% of all WordPress sites in two days or less. And also every one of these columns as far as percentages is increasing.

And so WordPress 6.9 reached the 50% threshold of all WordPress sites in 10 days, and that’s four days faster than 6.8, which was the next fastest. And currently we’re approaching 65% threshold of all WordPress sites. And only six other releases have done that so far. All of them are the most recent ones, except for 4.9, which we all know had a waiting period for Gutenberg. And the only release the past 70% was 6.8.

And so I’m interested to see how this trend continues because it’s showing an acceleration of adoption for each new major version of WordPress. They’re getting installed faster, by more people. It’s a sign that we’re shipping stable software. People are more confident. People are opting into auto updates for major versions. And in general, it’s just a quality sign that we’re doing something right here. And so how can we lean into that more?

[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s pivot a little bit. Let’s sort of bind community, we did touch on this a minute ago, but let’s spend a little bit of time binding the community to these kind of things because right at the start you mentioned that really the community is the underpinnings of your interest in the WordPress space. The code is obviously tremendously important, but without the community there is no code basically.

And so we’ve got these events. We’re trying to create interest around the WordCamps and the releases at the same time. But just looking back over the last period of time, let’s go for year, two years, something like that. I don’t know what your spidey sense is telling you, but my spidey sense is telling me that that community portion, it’s sort of slowly but surely, it feels like it’s withering away slightly.

I’m not really picking up on like this angry mob of people who are stamping their feet and shouting, I don’t want anything to do with the WordPress community and then disappearing. I mean maybe there’s a few of those, probably, somewhere. But I don’t get a sense of that. I just get this sense of sort of, somebody’s pulled the plug out of a bathtub and it’s slowly sort of draining away.

Attendance down at WordCamps. Meetups struggling to sort of get the numbers that they had several years ago. And so it would feel like at the moment, you would have to be watching the news fairly closely, especially right now. So at the beginning of February, 2026 is when we’re recording this. There does seem to be a push from the senior leadership to make WordPress Meetups and things like that, a much more central part.

And then there’s this whole broad spectrum of educational initiatives as well going on. So we’ve got WP Campus Connect, we’ve got the Credits Program and a whole smorgasbord of other things which is happening.

So there’s no question there, really, what I’m just trying to do is give you the opportunity to bind the two things, the WordPress community and the software, and really just talk about whether you’ve noticed the same thing as me, where there’s this slow, withering of the community. And maybe this is a part of just sort of getting it all back together, making events like this a bit more fun and interesting.

[00:26:02] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah. I think there’s a few things there to call out. The first observation I’ve had over the last year is there’s a palpable excitement to build with WordPress again. I’m noticing there’s a renewed enthusiasm. People, they want to move on from certain things, and they want to get back to building experiences and tools and things on the WordPress platform.

But there’s also, I think we’re dealing with some, in some ways, a long tail COVID effect, right? There was obviously, you know, a lack of in-person events for a while, and during that time a lot of the people who were keeping Meetups alive and WordCamps alive, they moved on, or burnt out, and chose not to return after. And so there was a break in that pipeline of, usually there’s a lead doing that and there’s other people learning under them, and then they move up and take over. And that was totally disrupted and I think that we’re still trying to rebuild that.

I think that it manifests differently in different areas too. So for example, the APAC WordCamp community is very strong and they have lots of WordCamps. But in the United States, there was one WordCamp that wasn’t WordCamp US last year, I think, Montclair. And I lead the Boston WordPress Meetup and so finding speakers is difficult. Getting people to come out is difficult as well. And I think those are partially just larger societal shifts where it’s harder to get people to come out to certain things. And we just have different preferences as far as how we consume information or learn.

But I’m still not sure why the difference in the geographical areas, and I think it may have to do more with, APAC is a more emerging market when it comes to WordPress, right? Like their community, especially in certain areas has been growing and is much newer than it is in the US. And so I think that they’re growing their communities for the first time in many ways, right? But in the US it’s the second or third or fourth time that we’re growing those communities or revitalising those communities. And the form that that needs to take, I think is a little different. And I’m not clear on what the holdup is there.

But I do know that a big factor of that is to get new people involved with WordPress and interested in WordPress, and that’s why some of the priorities that Mary Hubbard published, and one of them in particular is education and awareness and all of those different things that work together in the form of the WP Credits program, mentorship programs. There’s been the contributor mentorship programs that happen every few quarters in WordPress over the last few years.

And we’ve seen some really great contributors who were mentored in that program, and then the next time the program happened, they mentored, and then they became a team lead, and then they served on release squads. And so we’ve seen some really great contributed journeys through those paths.

[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll just sort of run through with you the kind of things that I’ve noticed in my part of the world. So I think COVID is an enormous part of it. It upended so many ordinary things in life. So, as an example, you know, people obviously, they ceased going out, and then that pattern of not going out became habituated. People didn’t go out because that’s not what you do.

And in the UK we have this institution called the pub, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. And it used to be that prior to COVID, the pub was the real centerpiece of many communities. You know, towns, suburbs, what have you. Everybody would coalesce around the pub and that was very important. Since the pandemic, a lot of those institutions, they don’t really function in that way anymore. You know, there isn’t the throughput, there isn’t the footfall and so they go out of business.

And the same, I presume is true in the WordPress space. You know, we’re trying to encourage people to get up, leave their home, spend money on transportation. Obviously there’s the time cost, the sunk cost of time and what have you as well. It’s difficult, but it makes me more sanguine that it’s not just like, it’s not just a WordPress thing, you know, it’s the whole of society.

But like you said, I get the feeling that the WordPress community has begun to address it. And the way it’s being addressed is through these educational initiatives. Trying to get a throughput of younger talent. So get them at the school age, get them at the university age, and then hopefully they will have an interest. They’ll get a flavor of what it means to be involved in these Meetups and things like that and hopefully take those on.

It’s a laudable goal. I hope that it has the capacity to transfer. You know, so in a decade’s time we can look back and say, look what happened. This young blood emerged. I think it’s yet to be seen. I think certainly in the area, the locale where I am, the United Kingdom, we don’t see evidence of that yet. Maybe in the US that would also mirror.

But from everything that I’ve learned and the people that I’ve talked to for this podcast and events in Asia and places like that, that seems to be a really different picture. There seems to be a real thirst for solutions like WordPress. Because there’s a direct kind of career path there. You know, you can pick up a free piece of open source software, crack open a laptop and get going and start to sell your services far and wide. And so again, there’s no question there, just observations that I hope these initiatives bear fruit. But it’ll be interesting to see. Only time will tell.

[00:31:16] Jonathan Desrosiers: I think at the root of what we’re dealing with is that people are motivated by what they see as valuable, right? If they’re not going out to events, so they’re not engaging with the community, they don’t recognise or feel that it’s valuable to them in some way. And so we’re having to reprove why communities are valuable, why open source is valuable, why you should care.

And then the other aspect of it is, you know, overall project sustainability. We can’t just keep getting older. We need to have a balance of new, younger people that get involved as well.

And so one way to lean into getting younger is obviously, like you said, to approach people at schooling age, right? Or university, and teach them about open source. Show them how to contribute, how to be a part of a community, and why it’s valuable. But we have to be really careful because we need to be prepared to, I’ve written in the past that we need to be prepared to activate these contributors, right?

So it’s one thing to make them aware of this, but it’s another thing to make sure they’re properly supported and we give them pathways to grow. We give them clear criteria to be successful, clear projects to work on, so they understand what they’re doing and what they’re trying to accomplish.

And I think that this is one thing that is also a benefit of having the releases coincide with these major events because new people are getting together already, so why not use that opportunity?

One of the goals that every table lead and every organiser of a Contributor Day has is to ensure as many contributors see, realise their work over the finish line. And so on the Core team that’s a patch that someone tests gets committed, or a patch someone writes gets committed to WordPress, right? How can we make that more valuable, where it’s not just ending when they leave Contributor Day?

And so I’ve been thinking about all the different logistics and helping to coordinate with the WordCamp Asia team and the 7.0 release team to make sure we’re prepared for that final day. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the release process itself. One of the best, lowest friction ways to get involved with WordPress in the actual release process. And you don’t need any experience contributing to really take part in it. And that’s when we get to a point where we say, okay, here’s the zip file of what we think we’re going to ship, go test it.

And so people will take it, and they install it on their server and they say which version of PHP they’re using, and how they installed it and what they did and, you know, it worked. And the majority of that though is just looking for problems. And when problems don’t come up, we just don’t do anything with all the information that people are dropping, right? And there might be 50 people at a major release. We call them parties, but at the release parties that are dropping information. And again, if there’s no red flags, that information just largely goes away.

But, how can we rethink that and make that effort more meaningful, and also create a pathway for them to continue contributing in some way past that moment? And having everybody in person is a great way to have pilot programs for different approaches, because there can be someone that briefs a set of contributors on what we’re going to try this time, here’s what we want to do, give us feedback on how you felt it went. Everybody that’s involved in the squad and doing the release can say, oh yeah, that actually was really helpful and better than what we do before.

And these newer individuals that are learning also have fresh perspective. And so having them participate in these, I guess I’ll call them experiments of such, but just these processes and things that we are considering, it helps get that fresh opinion and perspective on why things are working and why things aren’t and helps us just improve.

[00:35:04] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got three children and they’re all of a certain age now, they’re certainly no longer small. You know, they’re basically adults. And it’s really fascinating looking at the kind of things that engage them. I think they’ve just grown up in a different era. The diet of the kind of things that excite them is very different to the kind of things that excited somebody of my generation, just because, you know, they’ve had the whole world in their pocket ever since they were born.

And having that dialogue with the next generation, and trying to figure out what it is that they want and that they desire. And even things like open source. So when, I was already an adult before the internet began to be put into everybody’s homes, and people started to own personal computers and things like that. And so I was ready to receive that message of open source right at the start. And it became really obvious to me, oh, that’s a really clever way of making software.

But now of course we’ve got this landscape of closed platforms. Everything’s free at the point of use, but everything’s not free in any way, shape, or form. You can think of the siloed platforms that I’m talking about. My children have been raised with those and so just even making the argument about open source is hard enough.

So I think what I’m really advocating for is, obviously we’ve got to shepherd these people in, but at the same time, I think we have to be willing to let go of a lot of the things that we think the project is. We think the Meetup should contain. We think the WordCamp should maintain. Because at the end of the day, we’re competing for eyeballs and if we don’t make it, I’m going to use the word exciting, if we don’t make it exciting, they’re just not going to show up.

And I feel that’s a piece of the next five, six years, trying to figure out what excites these people. Because unless we do excite them, I fear the Meetups are going to be empty and there’ll be a certain throughput from the WordPress initiatives, Campus Connect and what have you. But we need to make these things exciting, interesting, innovative, fun. But I don’t have an answer to that.

[00:36:59] Jonathan Desrosiers: Yeah, you touched on something interesting that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I gave a talk last year about how to implement AI into open source communities while maintaining what makes them great in the first place, which is the human element, right? The community aspects of it.

And so I’ve been thinking a lot about just AI and how it’s affecting us. And there’s a few things that I’m really excited about with AI and those are empowerment and learning. And so you can have an AI model that digests massive amounts of information and summarises it in the specific way that you learn best, right?

And likewise, I’m noticing that people feel more empowered to try things themselves because they have more of an ability to distill a lot of information down into something that’s digestible, right?

And so I feel that the tension between those two areas of closed and open is growing. Because when I was growing up, computers were just starting to be less than the size of a car, right? People were starting to have them in their house. But they were still at a point where, the computer went bad, you took it apart and fixed it. You didn’t trade it in for a new one, right?

And so I feel like my generation, there was a level of, we had the tools, but we had to go out and build the things we needed ourselves in some ways, and experiment. And then there’s been the generations between that and now where they pretty much had everything that they needed.

But AI is changing what we need, or what we want, and what ways we want it. And so now there’s a new found need to build again in some ways. And in some ways it’s kind of a circle, right? Because it’s, the AI is making it easier to build, but it’s also making you more aware you have to build. It’s kind of like building against itself in certain ways.

But I’m finding that there’s more of a willingness to do things on your own, try to tackle something you would typically need to hire a professional to do in the past. You know in many ways we need to lean into that because then that gets people excited. Oh, WordPress, I could use WordPress to build this, or I could use just the WordPress for just the database part of it and the REST API and have some type of application on it because it scales well and it caches or whatever it may be.

But I feel like people are starting to scoff at the walled gardens a little bit more, and I’m seeing that there’s a resurgence in things like RSS. I’m seeing new RSS readers are popping up. People are leaning towards the Fediverse. People are blogging more, having their own website instead of just their business on Facebook, right? Because that can get taken away.

We saw with Twitter how they just chose to close their platform. And embeds no longer work in WordPress because they shut down oEmbeds. And I feel like it changes every month, but there’s times where you have to log in to see a post, or you can’t see a post, or you can see one post and then you can’t see any more that’s shared externally. Yeah, so it gives you more control.

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. And I also noticed that swing. Obviously, I don’t have any broader data. I can only point to the things in my life, the little intuitions that I’m gaining. But I see the same thing. I see an interest in AI, so we’ll just put that to one side for a moment. But in terms of the closed platforms, I do see that the people that I know who are significantly younger than me, they have intuitions around that, and they’ve kind of figured out for themselves that this is not great. It seems to be a vehicle to serve me ads, and I wonder what the incentive is for the stuff that I’m seeing, and maybe it’s kind of pushing me off in one direction politically and all of that.

And yeah, this resurgence of RSS, of the blog. I know it’s hard to talk about, but it’s almost like we’re doing some sort of archaeology in the internet space. We’ve gone back to something older. We kind of dug up the relics from the past and we found that they’re still usable. They’re still there.

It’ll be so interesting. But I think if it was just the RSS and it was just the open nature of things, I think that’s going to be a hard sell. But throw AI into the mix, this capacity for somebody with very little relationship with writing code who can get something credible out. Now, it may not be robust, it may have security problems here and there. The accessibility may be something that needs to be addressed and what have you. But who can argue with the excitement of it.

You know, you tell a computer to make a colourful website that’s got rainbows and pictures of cats, and sure enough, two minutes later you have a website with rainbows and pictures of cats. And that wasn’t possible until just a couple of years ago. And so I think we’ve got the tools. I think there’s things that we can deploy. AI seems to be the primary one at the moment. Let’s hope that that continues to be sustainable.

But that’s interesting. That gives me some hope. And the way that you’ve encapsulated it, open source combined with things like AI. Trying to get Meetups back. Trying to combine it with educational initiatives. Trying to combine it with WordCamps and releases.

[00:41:52] Jonathan Desrosiers: You mentioned something that’s important there in that it’s very easy for someone to get something built that they need specifically, right? And I think that’s where we’re at right now where AI is, like I said, is empowering, but more on a personal level. Once you need to scale those things, that’s when it gets difficult.

And it’s a rollercoaster of, oh my God, there’s going to be no software. And then, oh, look at all this crappy software that AI built. We are always going to have a job. And then it’s like up and down all throughout time as new tools get released. And it definitely matches what I’m seeing is like the personal empowerment level, they could take that and run with it and build this really massive thing, or they could just build something that they just want, that does specifically what they want, that they haven’t found out there that it accomplishes.

And I think that another aspect of that is I’m noticing that a lot of people that you may not have thought would try things in the physical world on their own are more likely to do so as well. So maybe changing their faucet, or doing a landscaping project or something. I feel like we’ve had YouTube tutorials, right, has been a big thing for maybe a decade, right? But I feel like AI has unlocked a new level of empowerment where people feel more confident to try things because of the knowledge that’s available to them in different ways.

[00:43:09] Nathan Wrigley: The year 2026 is going to be punctuated by WordCamps. It’s going to be punctuated by WordPress releases. Hopefully we will start to see the needle move on educational initiatives, and maybe some younger people joining in with the community.

That has been a fascinating chat, Jonathan. I really appreciate that, getting your insight into what I think we both hope is going to happen in the WordPress project. That it will still be relevant in 10 years time, and that there’ll be children who are now, not old enough to be using computers, in a decade, they’ll be coming on podcasts like this, and hosting podcasts like this, and being involved in the community that we love so very much.

Where can we find you, Jonathan? If people want to talk to you and have a bit of a natter, where’s the best place to locate you?

[00:43:48] Jonathan Desrosiers: My website is just jonathandesrosiers.com. I’m desrosej pretty much everywhere on the internet. I try to keep it consistent and easy. And you can also, of course, find me in the wordpress.org Slack.

[00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to all of those in the show notes. So if you go to the wptavern.com website, search for the episode with Jonathan Desrosiers, you’ll be able to find all of the links probably at the bottom underneath the transcript and the preamble. Go and have a look down there and hopefully we’ll be speaking soon. I’ll probably see you in Mumbai in a few weeks time. Take care, Jonathan.

[00:44:21] Jonathan Desrosiers: Thank you. Look forward to it, and hopefully I see your listeners there as well.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, build it and they might come, bridging the gap between WordPress plugin development and marketing success.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Muntasir Sakib. Muntasir, has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor, LMS, Droip and more. He’s played a key role scaling products from their early days helping them achieve wider adoption.

He’s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and Word Camp Sylhet.

The focus of today’s episode is a crucial, yet often overlooked topic, especially if you’re a plugin developer. It’s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and the real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that’s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply build it and they will come, does not mean that users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.

We start by learning about Muntasir’s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don’t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.

The discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn’t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.

We talk about the dos and don’ts gained from Muntasir’s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.

We also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.

if you’re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into real success, or you’re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Muntasir Sakib.

I am joined on the podcast by Muntasir Sakib. Hello.

[00:03:47] Muntasir Sakib: Hello, Nathan. How are you doing?

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Very nice to connect with you. We’ve had a long chat prior to hitting the record button. And we really touched on all sorts of things in life. But that’s not the purpose of the podcast today. We’re going to keep it firmly on the WordPress side of things, and particularly about marketing, I guess maybe a good way to sum it up, which is a topic that we don’t often get into.

Before we get into that, Muntasir, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. How come you’re connected to the WordPress community? Whatever you think fits the bill.

[00:04:18] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan, for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself a bit, and it’s nice being with you here.

Well, I’m Muntasir, I’m Muntasir Sakib and I have been with WordPress since 2018. So you can say over half a decade. And throughout my career, I worked for some really, really amazing plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip, EasyCommerce, Core Designer, ThumbPress.

So when I joined JoomShaper, like premium, back in the days, I was talking about 2019, we had Tutor LMS and Tutor LMS had probably 15,000 or less active installations back in the time. And then within three and a half years, with the help of the amazing team we had back then, we all worked together day and night, and with our beautiful clients and customers all around the globe we achieved 100,000 plus active installations within three and a half years. And that was a phenomenal number to mention in the WordPress industry, in the WordPress ecosystem.

And then there’s Droip, the first ever true no-code website builder for WordPress, and that was born. It got a traction that we ever expected it to be that much. So we were overwhelmed about it as well.

And then during my tenure so far, I, along with my team, represented Tutor LMS and Droip at WordCamp Asia 2023, WordCamp Sylhet 2023 and some other WordPress meetups as well.

And why did we join WordCamps? That could be a question. It’s because we sponsored those events to show our gratitude to the WordPress community and the ecosystem. Because there’s a thing in WordPress, which we say Five for the Future, as per Matt. So every product companies and every business that do business in the WordPress industry should contribute in the WordPress ecosystem, contributes in the open source market so that it get better every day.

Because we are working in the ecosystem, we bring some real value for our clients. So what if our foundation is not strong enough to get those clients, to get those correct tractions? Because in the SaaS market nowadays, there are lots of, plethora of SaaS products, but we have to bring something together, stronger and better than SaaS, so that people believe in us and they come together to work with us and use our products.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. So you’ve been working with a variety of different clients in the WordPress space. And when I put out a message saying, I’d like to chat with a variety of people on this podcast, you reached out and you mentioned that you wanted to talk about essentially the gap where development finishes and success begins. Because I think it’s fair to say that if you were to rewind the clock, I don’t know, maybe 15 years or something like that, maybe 10 years, it was much more straightforward to build a product as a developer, put it out into the marketplace, and because you were potentially the prime mover, the first person to have such a thing, you might succeed just off the basis of build it and they will come. That old chestnut.

Whereas now the marketplace is much more mature, much more saturated. And so the idea of build it and they will come. Oh, really, I mean unless you are incredibly fortunate, or maybe you’ve already had some success and so have, I don’t know, your company has notoriety or what have you, that really isn’t the case anymore. When development finishes there needs to be this whole marketing piece that swings into action to alert the community.

So how would you differentiate between the plugin marketplace, in terms of marketing, and the SaaS marketplace? What makes those two things different?

[00:07:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, that’s a pretty important question that we mostly overlook. Nathan, thank you for bringing that out. We need to be very specific. When it’s about WordPress product marketing, it’s more like ecosystem driven than SaaS. When we’re talking about SaaS, you control the entire environment, your onboarding journey, your analytics, your pricing model, your customer journey. Everything is under the one umbrella.

But when it’s about WordPress, then you are selling inside an open ecosystem where users make dozens of plugins together. So you cannot give your customer some boundaries that if you use my product or my plugin, you cannot use others. It doesn’t make any sense.

So they’re going to use as many plugins as they want to, and you have to be compatible with every one of those. So you don’t control hosting, themes, PHP versions or the user’s technical setup, all of which impact your product experience, right?

And in wp.org, wp.org acts as a distribution channel. So you need to think about it. It’s more of like app store, which influence reviews, support expectations, and growth. In most cases, all the products start from wp.org, which provides a free version of every plugin.

So the founders and the marketers mostly overlook the thing that free plugin often becomes your biggest acquisition engine. So your marketing depends heavily on the documentation, the on point documentation, and the onboarding journey inside your WordPress dashboard. Your operation, the smoother it is, the better it’ll be to get the traction of the pro customers and the continuous updates, and your community presence. If you have no community presence in the ecosystem in your WordPress community, then you are just gone.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious, when you sort of say it like that, the idea of logging into the WordPress backend, if you’re a plugin developer or a regular user of WordPress, you’ll be really familiar with this. If you go into a website, there’s often dozens of different things. And maybe a lot of them are kind of overlapping, so there might be things which integrate with other things. And as a plugin developer, that kind of overhead is something that you just don’t really need to worry about with SaaS, because you just build the thing, and you make sure that it works and everybody logs in, and it works because it’s yours and you control the infrastructure and the hardware that it’s on and the servers and all of that kind of stuff.

Whereas the WordPress thing, it’s just so much more complicated and you’ve really got to be thinking all the time about sticking to coding standards to make sure that at least you know your thing is doing it right. And if there’s a conflict and something breaks, well, you can be fairly sure that it wasn’t your fault, it might be somebody else’s fault. So it is much, much more complicated.

And then throw into it all of the other bits and pieces that you’ve just mentioned, community and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it really is a very complicated picture, and I think getting more and more complicated year by year.

So have you, in your previous work, have you kind of identified this moment where the development cycle ends and the marketing cycle begins, if you like, but the plugin developer has basically made no preparation for the marketing piece? They’ve just built things and then have an expectation that, oh, it’ll just sell itself. Do you see that? Is that a real thing?

[00:11:22] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah, that’s definitely a real thing. And the thing is, I don’t give the blame to the developers actually, because they were supposed to build the product, they were supposed to follow the compliance issues, and they’re supposed to build fresh code so that the thing cannot break when people are using it massively.

But it’s mostly from our and from the marketers end that we need to tell them beforehand, like what to do and how can we get the KPIs? What are the things that we need to sell to our customers that going to help them to solve their problems?

Because the fun fact is, in most cases, when our founders or a developers is planning to build a product, a plugin, they were thinking from their end like, okay, fine, I want to build a product so that the product going to be that much good that everyone going to use it. But it’s not the case, because we have almost like 59,000 plugins right now in WordPress directory. So in every category, in every niche, there’s a plethora of products, plethora of competitors. So there were some big competitors and there are some upcoming competitors who are small.

So how they compete with someone who has already hundred thousand or a million of active installations, millions of happy users. We cannot compete them with just everything they have. Whether if we come with some specific niche, like some specific problems that they’re facing from our competitors, and we can add value to them, to our clients, they would be happy enough to try our product.

So you need to give something to the customers first so that they can rely on you. And if you have a good reputation beforehand, like if you are not new in this industry, you have some other plugins beforehand, and if have a good reputation and you are coming with another solution, they’re surely going to try it. And there’s the catch.

When people start using your product, they give you the feedback, and those feedbacks are gold mines. So you need to talk with your customers. You need to talk with the developers. You need to connect with them on regular basis. And that’s the job of us. That’s the real job of us, like the support system, the marketers, content creators. The documentations all need to come along and they need to figure out the problems, what they’re facing, and what the customers are asking for. What are the bugs they’re having? It can be a bug based on their environment, like everyone has their different environment, right?

But the thing is, when we speak to the customers, when we talk to them and when we try to figure out their issues and try to solve their problems, they’re going to do the best marketing you can ever imagine, the word of mouth. And WordPress is doing the exact same thing. WordPress is depending on word of mouth. Your 10 happy customers is way more important and valuable to you than a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: And I think that kind of speaks to what I would imagine, or at least what I would hope to be the case. When I look back at my time in WordPress and I go right back to the beginning of it, it felt like a really good, solid playground for hobbyists. There were an awful lot of people who were doing things for a hobby, and then now it’s become much more professional. In fact, when I joined the WordPress community, that whole thing was just beginning to open up. There were a few companies who were making a great deal of success for themselves, selling things into the marketplace, you know, they had a free version and a pro version. But it was still, it still felt like the beginning of that, the wild west of that.

And I think that still there’s a little bit of that hobbyist mentality still out there where, you know, you attend events, you hang out with like-minded people. You can see that this individual over here, they had success, I could do the same. But there’s that whole thing that you’ve got to have prior to building anything, and it sounds to me like you’re making a real difference between the marketing people and the development people.

And, okay, maybe you are this unique person that can do both. Maybe you are brilliant at developing and you are going to be an amazing marketer. I think it’s fair to say that most people are not that. They don’t have the time, they’ve got other things to do, their skillset is developing, their skillset is marketing, they’re kind of different entities.

But it feels like for many people, that realisation hasn’t been made yet, that you need to, before launching, so maybe even at the moment you think, I am going to build this thing, maybe that’s the moment where you think, okay, two thirds of my budget is going to go into development and one third into marketing, or 50 50 or 70 30, or whatever it may be. I think that’s what you’re saying is that you need to be thinking about this right from the beginning, not leaving it until the last minute if you want it to be a success.

[00:15:57] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly, exactly. You have to have a plan from day one when you started developing a product. How and where should I go? Who are my primary audiences? Whom to reach out. Which influencers should we work with? And when should I give them the beta version to test? I can give a beta version to like hundreds of peoples, who are willingly giving it a try. Tell us some beautiful insights, some valuable insights so that we can develop the product even more before going to the market. So that’s the thing.

In most cases, what developers are thinking, what mostly the founders who are mostly developers, they’re thinking like, well, I can develop the product like 80% and then for the rest 20%, we can start working with the marketing team. I can think of how to go to the market and how to have some early traction. Early traction is easy, but it’s not the kicker. Early traction is easy because if you have a freemium plan, you can definitely go for wp.org. There’s a free version so everyone can use it.

There’s a term, founder led marketing. So when you are a founder, yeah, you can just announce on your socials, like, yeah, I have a plugin. I developed it and I launched it on wp.org so you can try it. Everyone going to try it. No problem on that. But the thing is, there might be a hundred plus active installations on day one, but on day three it could go way below 10, 10 to 15.

So where are the rest of the people went? They just came here to try the product, you didn’t ask for anything. You didn’t know how to contact with them. You didn’t know how to collect the data, how to collect the information that you don’t have in your mind, in your head. What’s the fuss about? What’s the problem they’re having? So they didn’t even bother to share?

You need to ask first. Be the first person to ask the questions like, what are the problems you are having using my product? I eagerly want to know. I want to solve your problem. So when I am talking with each and every person, each and every client, as he’s valuable, we bring value to their life, they’re going to bring something for me too.

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the curious thing about a lot of the developers that I know who’ve brought a plugin to the market is that they’ve been focused a lot on the features. They’ve got this laundry list of features and they get really wrapped up in the features and they execute that, they build the features. And then maybe somewhere along the line they realise, oh, there’s this other feature that would be quite nice to have. Yeah, let’s do that. And then before you know it, the idea of launching the product just gets pushed back and back and back because, oh, there’s another feature and, oh, I’ve thought of another feature. And on it goes.

And the whole time you haven’t been doing exactly what you said, kind of trying to figure out how to build up an audience, trying to figure out how to get influencers involved, how to put it out on, in this case, wordpress.org or whatever it may be. And that whole puzzle, that whole jigsaw piece, inside that puzzle needs to be thought out, I think for many people, at a much earlier date.

I get quite a lot of email from people who would like to have some product or service distributed through something like a podcast. On some level, it’s amazing that the people would like me to help them, but also when you go to the property that they’ve got, you can see that the thing that they’ve built is amazing, but also the marketing side of things hasn’t really been taken care of. So the website is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is. Everything about it, you know, the documentation is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is and so on. So there’s this sort of real disconnect.

So do you have any like do’s and don’ts? Have you got any, like a list of things that you highly recommend people do if they want to market a plugin? But also some things which you think, actually no, stay away from that, that’s snake oil, people have tried that and it doesn’t seem to work. Any order of any of those things.

[00:19:35] Muntasir Sakib: Absolutely. If you’re talking about like developing features and releasing it every alternate week, these are the most common picture when we are thinking about WordPress ecosystem, or any other products. 80% people are doing that. But the problem occurs when, feature first development means you keep building what you want, not what your customers actually struggle with, right?

So when you release a product, you have the roadmap. You make it public. You show the customers like, well, these features are coming next, but people don’t bother about what features are coming next, they’re mostly bothered about what you have right now, and are those working properly or not? You might have, like when you were thinking of any e-commerce, you might have 20 or 30 payment gateway integrations with it. But I don’t need all the payment gateway integrations, right? I need specifically like one or two, like maybe I need PayPal integrations or Stripe integrations or Wise or some other integrations like Klarna.

The rest of the integrations you have are useless to me, so I don’t even bother whether they’re coming or not. I do bother about my product and I do bother about whether, as I am using your product, so even giving me the value of my requirements, like the PayPal is working fine, in the next update the PayPal is working still fine and it’s secured. When I click the update button, or if I enabled auto update, with an update the PayPal is not working. My business will go through the loss.

So it’s your responsibility to take care of my business because I’m using your product. So you have to make sure that every specific niche I am giving the solution for, are working properly after every updates and everything.

I often see companies who are trying to develop the update version, who are trying to give updates regular basis. They often consider giving it the quality assurance, the QA. The QA team mostly were doing nothing. They were just going through on the surface level. They bring the update, and then the people updated it, and the site crashed. And then they figured out, well, it might be your environment issues. It might be from your end because we are doing nothing. It’s working fine from our end. So let me see. Give me your backend credentials so that I can see what’s going on here. It’s a big no. It’s a big no for me. If you are talking about me, like it’s a big no. Why would I give my credentials to you? It’s your responsibility to take care of your product so that it’s working fine from my end.

These are the common things, and apart from that, when we are talking about feature first development, this leads to slower performance. The more the features, the slower the performance is, and it’s non-negotiable. The higher support workload and our roadmap, as I said, a roadmap that is reactive, not strategic. So strategic roadmap is important. Reactive roadmap means you are actually way far behind from your competitors. So many founders think that features is equal to value, but features are not equal to value. In reality, clarity, reliability, and use case fit, drive adoption and revenue.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: So the really interesting thing about this is that there’s really two completely different worlds in collision here. So if you are the developer, you are basically sat in a chair looking at a screen, wrangling code. And it’s this, you’ve got this small window on the universe. You’re just sort of staring into this thing. You’ve got complete control over it. And it’s clean and it’s, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s all just right in front of you.

Whereas the other side, the marketing side is the exact opposite. It’s like, turn away from the computer and look at the entire planet. Every single human being in it, all of the messiness of that, trying to find them, trying to figure out how you’re going to talk with them, trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that you exist. Trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that your product is exactly what they need. Trying to figure out how to do the SEO piece, and we could go on and on.

There really are two very different universes colliding there. And I feel that in many cases, a really different personality type fits those things. Like, you know, the developer sitting in the chair concentrating on that code is a really different kind of personality type, if you know what I mean, than the person who can turn around, look at the world, cope with that messiness and figure all of that out. I’m not saying that they’re not possible by two people, I’m just saying they are very, very different things. One, much messier and harder to figure out than the other.

But from what you are saying as a developer, you have to do both. You have to turn around and look at the world in all of its messiness because your users are going to kind of, you know, they’re the people that are going to tell you whether or not what you’re building is a good thing or what they need.

[00:24:26] Muntasir Sakib: No, no, I think we got it wrong because I didn’t say that developers need to do both of the work, they need to code fresh and they need to look around all the users, what they’re saying and how their product is performing. It’s not their job.

We need to be very specific. If I’m a developer, my only responsibility should be to do fresh code and to make sure that my product is working fine on every environment. And it’s the marketer’s duty to talk to the customers, to talk to the world, and if as a founder, I don’t need to jeopardise my business, my company, then I need to align with everything, with every team possible. Like there’s sales team, there’s marketing team, there’s support team, content team, developer team.

The thing is, market research should be done by the marketers. Market research should be done, the customers should be talked with the marketers, with the salespeople. They need to come along with the ideas that, well, fine, these are the opportunities we have right now. So if we want to build a product, if we want to develop a product, we need to bring these three or four features before releasing the product in the market because these are the things people are having problem with. So I am giving you this list of features, or this list of things that you need to have in your product, and then it can go to the design team. The design team come up with a very beautiful design and then the developers start developing it.

And then we need to figure out the fact that, well, the product is almost 80% done, so we need to reach to the influencers, we need to reach to some YouTube influencers who have great audience so that they can use it. So we can give them the beta version. They can use it, they can bring some beautiful solutions, some beautiful suggestions to make the product even more mature before going to the market. And we can share the thought with the developers so that they can update accordingly.

[00:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I got it. Yeah, so I get the piece there. So really when I was talking about, you know, the developer facing one way and then facing the other way, the computer and the world, you are introducing then, in the middle, the developer turns around and instead of talking to the world, talks to the marketer.

And then the marketer absorbs those messages, whatever it is that the developer thinks, okay, it’s ready, it’s nearly ready, here’s the features. They communicate with the marketing people, the marketing people turn that into real world action. And then they themselves turn around and look at that bigger world and figure out how to do that.

I think the curious thing is, in our community, there’s so many of the solo developers who, when that thing that you’ve just suggested, gets suggested. That some of the budget goes to a marketer, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can do it all. I’ll be fine, because we know it can work in some rare cases. But it’s not going to be as effective as getting somebody else on board.

But I think in our community, there is a, I don’t really know how to encapsulate this, but there’s a little bit of a divide between the marketing side of things, the sort of sponsorship side of things, the affiliate side of things, all of those bits, and the developers. And it’s not always an easy conversation to have.

I suppose, in the end it comes down to things like money and things like that, which our community is maybe not as comfortable talking about as other different communities.

So is there anything that you think is a bad idea? I remember in the show notes that you sent to me, there were a few things where you thought, for example, you mentioned things like the one-time revenue trap of lifetime deals and things like that. Do you want to mention some of the gotchas, some of the things in the past that you’ve thought, nope, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea?

[00:28:00] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah. You were talking about the solo developer. There are a lot of solo developers, I might say. I must say because they are a one person team, and every project they build, every line of code they write, it’s like their children. So it’s always normal to be biased to your product. Like, yes, my product is the best because I have developed it with all my passion, with all my hard work. Why aren’t people using it?

And you might have a tight budget because when you are solo developer, the budget’s going to be tight. So you might not have that much money to spend on marketing before going to the market. And that’s fine. Welcome the community because the WordPress community is so helpful that even if you go to the community people and you tell them like, well, I am working on a product all by myself, and I want someone to come up with me and test the product and give me some valuable insights about what I can do better, before going to the market. And they’re always helpful. There are like hundreds and thousands of people who can help you, making your product even better by testing your beta versions, by testing your RC versions.

The thing is you have to be vocal. You have to talk to the poeple. You have to ask for help because you are helpless, you are working day and night on your product, and you cannot let people know, you cannot talk to people. You are very shy to ask for help, to ask for a hand. So how do I know that you are building a very beautiful product? I am here to help you, you just need to ask me. You want to give it a try? Sure thing. I will definitely give it a try and have some suggestions for you if you may allow me. That’s it.

And about the question is one time revenue, you think? Yeah. And whether it’s a trap or not. It’s a trap. It’s a trap. Nathan, I can say to you, like many WordPress founders rely on lifetime deals, one time license and large seasonal discounts. I mean Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the year end sales. Might going to create some cash upfront, but that doesn’t bring sustainability.

Sustainability is something way more different than cashflow. Because sustainability comes with recurring revenue. Your support is recurring, but if you have only lifetime deals, then your revenue is not. So how can you go along with your support team year after year, when you are running just once from a customer?

Because once a customer has got something lifetime from your end, you have to give him support. You have to provide him top-notch support for the rest of your lives, for the rest of products life. And then every year, fixed cost goes up. Teams, servers, your support team will go along. Your team will be bigger than the last year, along with your product. So your fixed cost will always go up. And lifetime buyers often create the highest support load while paying the least.

So you have to have that in your mind that when I am working for a easy traction and I am giving them the lifetime deals, and I want to onboard thousands of customers, lifetime customers, you need to think that you need to give them support, you need to develop the product for these thousand customers who will not ever going to pay a single penny to you anymore. So this is a big burden for you.

So real WordPress companies that scale, focus on renewals, annual plans, and clear upgrade perks. So here are the things, you might have like three to four pricing plans for one site, for ten sites and for unlimited sites. And I bought the one site license. And then I fell in love with your product, and I want to upgrade to ten site plans. So there should be a very, like one click upgradation plan, upgradation system where I can just go from one site to ten sites. And if you can’t give me that opportunity, and if you going to tell me like, okay, fine, buy the ten site license, give me the one site license key, and I’m going to dispatch that. I’m going to deactivate that and activate your license manually, that doesn’t make sense because that’s a hassle to me. I’m your customer, so you need to give me the smoother way. This is the thing.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you’ve been working for some of the, I don’t know, agencies or companies where there’s obviously a marketing team which has been a part of the success. Do you know roughly, I mean, maybe it’s just a ballpark figure, do you know roughly how much of the wider team so, you know, think of Company X, which is a development company, but they’ve got in-house marketing as well. Do you know how much of the company, in terms of personnel or revenue, is given over to marketing as opposed to everything else? So, you know, is it typically like in the sort of 20%, 30%, 50%? What’s your rough estimate for those?

[00:32:43] Muntasir Sakib: My rough estimate is your marketing budget should always be at least 30% of your total estimation cost. Because marketers need to talk to people, they need to reach out to the people, and they need to collaborate with most of the influencers who going to work for you, and you have to give them the honorarium to do the work for you.

So if the budget is not standard enough, then they have the boundaries to not do their works. So you need to give them the free hand, explore the sides to work with the other WordPress companies, to collaborate with better partners, to collaborate with other companies and to onboard their clients as well, so that your client base will increase day by day.

[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: And in the old way, when I was talking about sort of 15 years ago, it felt like most things were driven by interaction with the WordPress community. Do you think that’s still like a viable way of doing things or, you know, in the case of, I don’t know, let’s say that you’ve got an LMS plugin or something like that. Your market really isn’t other WordPressers, your market is the entire world, you know, educators and what have you.

So do you put much stock in sort of turning up to events, and sponsoring WordPress stuff, or do you sort of advise, focusing on your customers? I’m just trying to figure out where the community bit might fit into all that.

[00:33:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, the thing is, let’s talk about the sponsorship first because in WordCamps you need to be sponsored under your product. If we are talking about any LMS plugin that we have. We want to let the WordPress community know that, yeah, we exist and we sponsor to this event. And the most important thing is only in the WordCamps or the WordPress meetups you’re going to get along with other companies in person, so that you can connect with them, you can talk to them. You can figure out an opportunity to work with other companies. If I am an LMS company, I have an LMS plugin, my customer’s going to need some hosting plan. They might need some security plugins. They might need some SEO plugins.

[00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s more of a sort of partnership opportunity.

[00:34:42] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly.

[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Figuring out who, in some curious case that you may not yet have imagined, how you could collaborate in the future. So like you said, you know, hosting or whatever it may be, or maybe there’s a form plugin out there, which you kind of get the intuition that, oh, we could use bits of your form to onboard people to our platform, or whatever it may be. So it’s very much not about marketing to the end user. It’s more about figuring out partnerships and things like that. But also being a good custodian of an open source project, I guess, as well.

[00:35:11] Muntasir Sakib: Of course, yeah. That’s true. Because in every other companies who are doing great in WordPress ecosystem, they have a very strong relationship with the other companies. They have the mutual connections with all the people, with all the companies their customers might going to need. And the partnerships, affiliates are the best way to do the marketing to grow, to scale your product in WordPress market. Because as I said at first, word of mouth is something that brings the most valuable customers in your back.

[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, you only have to look on Facebook and LinkedIn and things like that to realise that there’s a lot of people in the WordPress community who attend these events and hang out with other people at these events and make great friendships and partnerships and those kind of things. I presume they’re doing it because, A, it’s fun, but also there’s a real value to it, you know? I know all these people and so I know where to go when I’ve got a particular problem, or I just have an intuition that I want to spin my company off in a slightly different direction. I’ve now got some people that I know, some contacts that I’ve already made who might be able to help me with that.

Okay. What about the, sort of last one, and it’s actually alluding to your, one of the questions that you wrote here. Is there anything about the sort of psychology of this, the sort of mindset? Because I think with the best will in the world, a lot of people in our space, they kind of see marketing as a bit of a, an icky thing. Something that they really don’t feel comfortable doing.

Is there any kind of psychology here that you could recommend or some kind of mind shift that somebody like me, for example, who is terrible at marketing, that I might be able to undergo, some magic wand that you can wave to help me out?

[00:36:41] Muntasir Sakib: We all are learners. We learn every day. I’m still a learner, and most of the world famous marketers are learners, even the passionate developers. You still learn how to develop well, how to write fresh code in even a better way.

But the most important thing is there are some mindset differences. There are someone who is a builder, and there are someone who is a business owner. So the thin line between builders and business owners are builders think about features. They think about features, what to come along with next, what to give to our customers, whether they like it or not. But founders think, I build outcomes and value. I bring value to the customers.

Another mindset, if we talk about like the short term revenue and the long-term sustainability. So when we are selling lifetime deals, one time license, that’s the short term revenue that give me an early traction, a good traction within a few months. But it’ll never going to be sustainable. If you want to be sustainable, you need to have a recurring plan, you need to have recurring customers, you need to onboard more customers, but your recurring customers should be like around 70 to 80% or even more than that, so that you can sustain all along.

Then if I’m talking about another mindset that it can be the focus on the product versus focus on the user. Failing founders, like those who cannot scale, they think that what feature should we add next? But the scaling founders, if you talk to them, they’re going to think where my users are getting stuck, so I need to solve the problem first. I need to bring value to their life so that they come along with me. They’re going to be my best audience and they’re going to do the marketing for me.

[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: This stuff is so intuitive to you because obviously it’s something that you’ve spent a long time thinking about. I’ve got to say, for me, a lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive, but not at the same time. I’m definitely more on the kind of builder side than on the marketing side. I don’t know what it is about marketing, I just struggle to do those kind of things.

And you’ve written a lot of your thoughts up in three articles, which you’ve published on LinkedIn. I don’t know if they’ve been published elsewhere, but they’re definitely on LinkedIn. And they describe all of the different scenarios of, you know, what founders need to do, how plugins can have success, where the community lies, how you can get yourself involved in different things. But also quite a lot of work you’ve put into what not to do. So example, lifetime deals, which you don’t think are a particularly great idea.

I’m going to link to all of those different bits and pieces in the show notes so that people can go and read those, and then hopefully having been armed with all of that knowledge, they’ll understand better what it is that we’ve been talking about.

Where do we find you, Muntasir? Where do we go online? Apart from LinkedIn, obviously, where could we find you?

[00:39:28] Muntasir Sakib: I’m always available on Facebook, on Twitter. And I am always available on LinkedIn as well. These are the platforms you are going to find me.

[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I will link to the LinkedIn posts and I will endeavor to dig out your Twitter handle as well. So hopefully people can find you and if they’ve got questions, you are open to suggestions.

So thank you so much for chatting to me today. A subject of great interest to me because, well, as I said, there’s just great interest for me. I won’t say more than that. But thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:56] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for talking to me. And it’s great talking to you and sharing my knowledge and expertise with you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how public contributions can shape careers in WordPress.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Topher DeRosia. Topher is a web developer with over 30 years of experience, and he’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community for the past 15 years. He’s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, contributed to projects like HeroPress, and has made it his mission to highlight the power and value of open source and remote work, especially in the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, Topher joins me to talk about the value of working in public, and how sharing your work openly can create unexpected and lasting opportunities. Whether that’s boosting your career, finding a sense of purpose, or building connections across the globe.

We start with Topher’s personal journey, discovering the WordPress community and the profound impact it has had on his life and family. The conversation explores what makes open source communities, like WordPress, so unique, and while working transparently can lead to moments of serendipity and even job offers from people who have seen your contributions many years before.

Topher shares stories about giving back, the motivation that comes from helping others, and the long-term satisfaction that comes from being generous with your time and expertise.

We also discussed the tension between the philanthropic and commercial aspects of WordPress, and how individuals and companies navigate that balance.

Towards the end, Topher reflects on building a body of work over time, trusting in the slow and organic process instead of seeking instant influencer success. He explains why he still chooses to create and share resources for free, motivated by the hope of helping the next person just starting out.

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of sharing your work, finding meaning in open communities, or how to make a difference over the long term, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Topher DeRosia.

I am joined on the podcast by Topher DeRosia. Hello.

[00:03:19] Topher DeRosia: Hello there.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to chat to Topher. We’ve done this before. We’ve had many chats online, but I just want to pay a special thanks to Topher for reasons I won’t bore the audience with, Topher has sort of joined me at extremely late notice, like minutes of notice.

We had a bit of back and forth yesterday about topics that we may cover, and the one that’s going to be covered today is the one that we decided. But he wasn’t expecting this, and so he’s arrived and I’m extremely grateful. So firstly, my deepest thanks for carving out a bit of your day unexpectedly.

[00:03:50] Topher DeRosia: You’re very welcome. This is always fun, and fit my day perfectly.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Thank you. So what we decided to talk about was, and I’ll encapsulate it in a sentence that Topher wrote to me, and then we’ll just sort of get into it and see where we go. Topher said, he’d like to talk about the value of doing things in public, and how this can come back to you later as a way of potentially, I don’t know, boosting your career or just offering some guiding light to the community and what have you.

So first of all, in order to give us some idea, I’m sure that there are people who know you, having listened to the things that you’ve done or consumed the HeroPress website or what have you. Will you just give us a little potted bio of yourself related to, I guess the WordPress community, makes most sense in this context?

[00:04:30] Topher DeRosia: Sure. I have been a web developer for 30 years, which is old, but I got into WordPress about 15 years ago and I did not know there was a community for several years. And Brian Richards said to me, hey, we should do a WordCamp. And I said, what’s a WordCamp? And then of course, my life changed forever after.

Oh, you know what? We started with a meetup, but like 2 weeks later he said we should do a WordCamp. And he said, we should do it this summer. And we were talking, like we were talking in June. So we went from never hearing of it before, to having a WordCamp suddenly. And I’ve been in, all in on the community ever since. I’ve been to nearly 80 WordCamps, all over the world. I’ve been making stuff, building stuff, meeting people ever since.

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:05:13] Topher DeRosia: It’s pretty great.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 80. Gosh, that’s profound. I mean, I don’t consider myself to have a high attendee account, but 80, that really is remarkable.

So I think it’s fair to say that the profundity of the effect of discovering that community is pretty important in your life. You know, it’s had a material impact in every way.

[00:05:31] Topher DeRosia: Hugely. My wife got into the community. My children, both my kids have spoken at WordCamp US. My wife has spoken. My kids have friends in other countries that I don’t know because of the WordPress community. Every parent has that fear of, what if something happened to us? What would happen to the kids? And we have family that would take care of them, you know? It’s nice to know we also have that backup where there are people all over the world who would say, hey, we got room, come on.

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. I joined the WordPress community, so I’d been involved in lots of open source projects, things like Magento and Drupal and things like that. And I know that Drupal has, there’s definitely stuff in the Drupal space that you can attend. But I never did.

And to be honest with you, I didn’t know that that stuff existed until after the fact. And then in about 2014, something like that, I discovered WordPress. And just like you, I had no conception that it was more than some downloadable bit of software. Honestly didn’t even know that it was done by volunteers. I just had probably some assumption that there was an organization or a company behind it that in some way monetised it and made it free and what have you.

And then just got this intuition, I guess, with social networks, the way that they were at that time, you could find groups and discover that there were all these ancillary groups of people doing things with WordPress, you know, groups focusing around page builders and groups focusing around plugins.

And then for me to discover that there were actual events that you could attend was, just like you, really remarkable. And I attended the first one and I kind of thought, oh, we’ll just see how this goes. I’m a bit of an awkward character in person, so I sort of stood around at the back. But it didn’t take me long to sort of be welcomed in. And just like you, completely changed my life. And ever since then, a sizable proportion of my free time has been devoted to curious WordPress things. It’s amazing.

I can’t quite work out what it is about a project like WordPress that inculcates that, fosters that, makes that possible. Because I imagine if you attended, I don’t know, a Cisco networking conference or something like that, it’s not going to have the same feel. So I don’t know if you want to speak to that for a little bit, why you think the community works.

[00:07:36] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have two thoughts about it. One is that I think it’s absolutely because of the people. And it may be chance that the right people found WordPress and got together at the same time. But to that point, that it’s the people, I recently went to two non WordPress conferences in one week.

I went to one for higher education in technology. The people who attended were from universities and colleges, and they were looking for ways to manage web stuff on their entire campus. So do you offer a blog to all 24,000 students, you know? That kind of thing. It was my first time there, but I saw a number of people who were greeting each other and not having seen each other since last year, and the year before, and the year before. And it was very much like a WordCamp. And people talked about how this group is so wonderful and they wait all year long to come back here. And I thought, oh, okay, so this is WordCamp.

And then while I was there, I met somebody who worked at Umbraco, which is an open source .net based CMS. And they’ve been around for 20, more than 20 years, but it’s a very small community, like 0.01% of the market share. And I told her, you know, who I am, what I do, and she’s like, oh, we would love to have you come to our conference this weekend in Chicago. Can I pay you to come? I was like, oh wow, sure.

So I went and it was about a hundred people and it was WordCamp. Everybody there loved the software, loved the community, everybody was friends. It was the same. And expanding just a little more, HeroPress says it’s about people leveraging WordPress to make their lives better. But in actuality, what it is, is open source and remote work combined. It allows people in Malaysia to pick up software and compete on a relatively equal basis with somebody in New York. And in our world, that’s WordPress. But it’s exactly the same with every open source remote work option, Drupal, Umbraco, anything.

[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe open source then is, forgive me, the secret sauce. Maybe that’s the component, the bit that binds those communities together in a way that perhaps, I don’t know, something where a proprietary thing or something was locked down, or profit was the whole point, maybe that is the bit. The fact that there’s a bunch of people gathering together in a kind of philanthropic way. You know, there’s no expectation that my attendance will definitely lead to finance, let’s put it that way.

Like I said, I don’t really have much experience outside the WordPress world, and so my assumption was that there was something a little bit unique. But from what you’ve said, this same exact thing is happening probably a thousand times over throughout the globe, but your expectation there is that the open source component is the bit, the bit that unlocks it.

[00:10:32] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I agree. WordPress has the advantage of a very large user base, which is good and bad. There are certainly more wonderful people in it than if there were fewer. But at that scale, you are just as likely to have really terrible people. I know people that have left the WordPress community because they’ve been treated horrendously, abused, and it breaks my heart. And I want to say, oh, WordPress is different, you won’t find that here, but you will. It’s too big a community to not have that.

[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder what it is then about that sort of spirit of giving back that creates some kind of, I don’t know, hive mind, for want of a better word. You know, there’s just this ethic that you’re all combined on this slightly higher purpose. So in the case of WordPress, and you mentioned Drupal and you mentioned the other CMS with the small market share, the principle there is that you’re working on something, and I guess publishing is the point. You are enabling people who may or may not have a voice to get on the internet and do something, publish something, write something, put images, videos or what have you.

There is some kind of higher calling there. It’s very hard to sort of grasp that, and to really understand it. But do you know what I mean? You’re doing something which, at the end of your days, you can look back and say, there was something there. There was something meaningful, there was something significant and important. And that feeling, that thing, whatever that thing is, is important, and enough to propel people to give up hours and weeks of their lives to do this.

[00:12:04] Topher DeRosia: I think most people enjoy making other people, I don’t know, so many things, more successful, happier, more stable. And there are open source projects that will shrivel up and die because no one ever says thank you. People work on a project for years and years and they think, you know what? Nobody cares. I’m going to go play Frisbee.

But I think the WordPress community is large enough, and we have these events that everybody goes to, that you run into people who have been impacted by the work you do.

There’s a, boy, can’t remember his first name. Heisel. He’s Dutch but lived in England and now he lives in Malta or something. Anyway, I met him for the first time at WordCamp London and he walked up to me and said, hey, I need to shake your hand. I said, okay. He said, a few years ago I lost my job and I didn’t know what I was going to do and I needed to support my family, and I got on OS Training and learned WordPress from your videos, and now I support my family with WordPress. I about broke down in tears right there.

And that kind of thing happens to lots and lots of people. People who say, you know what? This plugin you wrote, it changed my life. I make a living with this now. I support my family.

[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what’s kind of interesting there is that, I guess you did none of it with the expectation of that person wandering up. You know, it’s not like, Topher, you sat down and thought, the more thanks I get, the more I’m going to do. There isn’t that kind of expectation. But it certainly helps, doesn’t it? When somebody does come up and express those thoughts to you. I bet you that carried you through the next days, weeks, or months. You know, the capacity to drag that out of your brain.

[00:13:42] Topher DeRosia: It still is. That was years ago.

[00:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that interesting?

[00:13:45] Topher DeRosia: I do think though that you don’t do it for the thanks, but it’s a lot easier to do if you think it matters. When people say thank you, it feels good, but it lets you know that what I’m doing matters. It’s making a difference. It’s making somebody’s life better. It’s making the world better. That’s a huge motivator.

[00:14:04] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the big thing. So this is a curious question, right? And it’s not really related to WordPress. Did you have those same intuitions at an early age? Was there some part of you can remember even as, I don’t know, let’s say a 15-year-old or 17-year-old or something like that. Where you had already made the leap that life is better when you are being helpful? Or did you learn that later?

Because I kind of have the intuition that quite a few people in our community probably figured that out at some point fairly early on. And it enables them, I’m obviously not suggesting that people who didn’t make that intuition early on can’t join the community or what have you. But I’m surrounded by people who seem to have this almost bottomless capacity to give. And I’m always struck by how did that begin for them? Where did that start for them? So because I’ve got you on the line, I’m asking you directly.

[00:14:58] Topher DeRosia: When I was in college, I just randomly became interested in motivations. What makes people do things? What makes somebody mean all the time? What makes somebody happy all the time? What makes somebody be kind?

And I thought through the process of how gratitude is an influencer. If you say to somebody, thank you for what you’re doing, it makes them feel good. It makes them want to do it more. If they’re, you know, working at a food pantry and you say, hey, thank you for what you’re doing, it’s changing lives, just feeding children. It makes them want to do that more. If that person at a food pantry were faced every day with angry people who abused them verbally and stuff like that, they’d be a lot less inclined to do that.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I listened to a podcast not that long ago, and I actually can’t remember which one it was because I listened to several in this line. But essentially it was trying to peel back the latest studies in what causes some people to be happy. And I am not going to explain this and have the expectation that everything I say is true, nor that this is the limit of that. But a fairly reliable indicator of happiness, whatever that means, but on a fairly profound level, happiness can be boiled down to these two things, apparently.

One of them is that you are giving of your time. So it may be that you are, as you say, working in a soup kitchen. Or that you are doing something in the community. Or you are just putting into your children or what have you. There is a real connection apparently between the capacity to give something from which you expect nothing in return. Humans apparently find great, deep satisfaction from that.

And the other one is friendship. If you have people that you regard as friends, on a deep level. So obviously acquaintances, we can all have many, many thousands of those, especially online nowadays. But it’s that core little group of really impactful, meaningful people who in the time of crisis, you know are going to have your back.

Those two things apparently are a real predictor of one’s happiness. And both of them seem to stray into our community, you know? Although it’s an online thing, you’re still giving your time, and you know that in a fairly ephemeral way that you maybe can never grasp, people will be benefiting from that. And also you make friends. So there you go, it’s the root to happiness.

[00:17:19] Topher DeRosia: It is.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: So all of that, having said all of that, you have this wealth of experience in the community. You’ve done so many projects in the community. And as I said at the top of the show, the thing that you wanted to talk about was, not just the mere fact of doing things in the community, but about the fact that you are doing things in the community in a sort of public way, and how that can sort of impact in the future. So just tell us a little bit about why you wanted to get into that, or maybe some anecdotal evidence of how that’s helped you.

[00:17:50] Topher DeRosia: Very little of it in my life has been deliberate. I’ve done some things and then later thought, oh, wow, I didn’t realise that this would be the consequence. I made videos for OS Training for a lot of years, they’re behind a paywall, they paid me by the video. I wasn’t thinking, oh, I’m going to go teach the world. It was a client, I made videos.

And years later, Brin Wilson from WinningWP got a hold of me on Post Status and said, hey, I want to start a YouTube channel. Would you make videos for me? I said, sure, but why me? He said, well, I’ve seen your work. You’ve done this, you have given evidence to the world that you know what you’re doing. And that was a good contract. And I got it because I had previously done something else.

With HeroPress, I didn’t set out to become a relatively known person. I was just doing it. But I remember the first time I talked to a stranger from India and introduced myself and they said, oh, of course we know you. I said, what do you mean of course? You live 5,000 miles away from me. How on earth would you know me? And, boy, it is just stuff like that.

I have some plugins on wordpress.org. I think cumulatively they have 12 installs. They’re not big plugins, but they’re there. And people look and say, oh, Topher knows how to make plugins.

I contribute to the photos project. And people who aren’t necessarily contributors don’t necessarily understand the different kinds of contribution. They just see my name on the contributor list like, oh, Topher builds WordPress because I take a lot of photos or something. But just the fact that I’m out there doing that makes a difference.

I’ve been blogging for years. I did blogs in the GoDaddy Garage back in the day, I wrote on OS Training, I wrote all over the place. And recently I thought, boy, I wish I had had all that on my own site.

And then it occurred to me that WordPress does a lot of RSS, and so does YouTube. And so I built a site called topher.how. Found everything I’ve ever done and just used WP All Import and pulled it all into one place. So now at topher.how you can see stuff I’ve done decades ago, and it’s nice. It’s a place to say, look, here’s stuff I did. But I have gotten, no, you know, I’m not going to say I’ve gotten jobs, I’ve gotten consideration, interviews, interest because people who know who I am, because I did something once long ago.

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the interview phase, to get yourself over the line, you’ve still got to sort of show your metal, haven’t you? But that whole thing of just being represented by your past, it’s really curious. We live in a world which is so dominated by, I don’t know, the financial motivation for this, that, and the other.

It is curious when nowadays you can have a legacy which is not the CV, it’s not the line items on the CV. It can be much more ephemeral stuff. Things that you did, videos that you made, blogs that you contributed to.

The people out there making the decisions about who’s going to get those jobs, well, you have proved that that kind of history of being online definitely works, and in unexpected ways. It’s not like there’s always a through line between, okay, I’m going to make these YouTube videos so that in a few years time I’ll have this credible body of evidence that will make it so that anybody can employ me. It’s much more ephemeral than that. It’s more, I’m doing this video because I think itll be helpful, and then serendipitously that then leads to something in the future.

[00:21:14] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, very much so. Before we started recording, you mentioned my background here. It’s a piece of fabric on a photo stand. And I bought it just the other day because, you know, I’ve been making videos for years, I’ve never appeared on camera. Always been a screencast. And I recently got a client that said, well, we want you on camera. And so I got this thing.

But the interesting part is that the client is a company in Bangladesh. And I know them quite well, they know me quite well because of stuff we’ve done together in the past in the WordPress community. And when they needed videos, they came to me, because they know me and they know that’s what I do. That wouldn’t happen if I hadn’t been out doing stuff years ago. What are the chances I would know somebody, me in Michigan, I would know somebody in Bangladesh?

[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Right, I mean, the world of 50 years ago, it’s tending to zero basically, you know, unless you’d been on plane or somebody had been on a plane in the opposite direction and you’d met where you are. The opportunities afforded are amazing, and it’s that kind of long tail that you’ve got as well. That I suppose is going to be hard for somebody that’s younger to listen to because, you know, they kind of see this mountain that they’ve got to climb and this great body of work that they’ve got to build up over decades. I guess that’s, it’s not all about that either, it’s about sort of just chipping away at it and doing things piecemeal.

[00:22:31] Topher DeRosia: I have a funny story about that. Early in my WordPress career, I got to know Pippen Williamson. You may remember him.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I do.

[00:22:39] Topher DeRosia: And he was very well known in the WordPress community. I got to know a few people who were very well known. I was like, man, that’s cool, everybody knows these people. Wonder if people will ever know me? We were talking about it, he and I, and he quickly urged me, do not seek to be known because that will only lead to tears. If you’re doing it for the wrong reason, then it will just turn out badly.

And so I thought, well, you know, maybe in 10 years. Well, here we are. And I didn’t set out to be known. I’ve never bought a banner ad saying, look at Topher. I just went to WordCamp and spoke. I wrote blog posts, I made videos. I shook a lot of hands. I listened to a lot of stories.

[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: It’s about sort of spreading the network organically really, isn’t it? Which I suppose in a sense leads to, okay, rather than the word fame, I’m going to use the word notoriety because I think they’ve got two very different endpoints. But the idea of seeking fame is tied up with, you know, you just want random people to know you because they know you, and that’s the kind of end game, you know? Oh, you are famous because you’re famous, that sort of flavor to it.

Whereas notoriety for me has much more, there’s a body, a corpus of work behind you that leads to that understanding that, okay, that’s Topher. I know Topher because he did this, this, this, and this. It’s not famous because they’re famous. It’s more, there’s the guy who made those videos that I watched. Or there’s the guy that wrote that blog that I read all the time. That kind of thing. And so it’s not fame for fame sake, it’s accidental fame more, if you know what I mean?

[00:24:10] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I heard the term not too long ago that I like called community known.

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s nice.

[00:24:15] Topher DeRosia: Within a community, you you could say famous, very well known. Outside that community, people do not care and have no idea who you are.

[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. Yeah, it’s curious, inside of our community, there’s this one person whose name kind of precedes all others, and it would be Matt Mullenweg. But I’m willing to bet that if Matt was walking down the street, more or less anywhere, that his life is just the same as yours and mine. Nobody’s going to know who he is unless randomly they happen to be a WordPresser. But he’s fairly thin on the ground. You know, it’s not like he’s Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney or something like that, where that fame is probably quite an oppressive thing in their life. You know, the capacity to just walk down the street.

So yeah, anyway, the point being that you’ve done stuff over time without the intention of it being this fame for being famous. It’s more about being community known, as you said. But that has had amazing consequences.

And that kind of leads me to this next thing. I wonder, this question comes up all the time, but I do wonder if it’s more material now than it ever has been. I wonder if the community can always cope with the commercial pressure that is being born by the community?

So for example, you know, you up to events and there’s a lot of people trying to sell you things. And maybe WordCamps from 15 years ago would’ve felt very much more a room full of like-minded individuals. Whereas now if you go to WordCamps, maybe there’s more of a feeling of, okay, that bit over there is more commercial, that bit over there is less commercial. But there’s always that kind of commercial angle.

I don’t really know where I’m going with that, but the commercial side of things, I don’t know if you’ve got a feeling on, or a intuition on that?

[00:25:54] Topher DeRosia: Sort of. Something I’ve noticed over the years is that it’s entirely possible to write a plugin, start selling it, have it be successful, build a business, hire people, maybe get a relatively large business, maybe hundreds of employees. And it feels good, it looks good, it’s great, it’s wonderful until it starts going, or getting hard. And then people who never thought this would happen start having to make difficult decisions that hurt people.

If things aren’t going well, we need to let some people go. Maybe we need to let a lot of people go. Maybe we need to reorganise, whatever. And people look at this golden company, the pinnacle of WordPress, open source, love, family, peace, blah, blah, blah, and they’re letting people go. And you think, what? They’re just another business. They were just in it for the money. And they’re not, but it can feel that way when you’ve been let go.

And at some point it has to be about the money. If you’re building a plugin because you love it and you’re selling it because people need it, that’s cool. If you’re running a business and people are depending on you for their livelihoods, you have to make the decisions. You have to do some hard things sometimes. And it’s never going to be comfortable. And at some point it’s going to look like you’re just another company. I’ve never been in this position, but I think it can be incredibly difficult to maintain a culture that we associate with the stereotype of WordPress community, in a full on company.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do know exactly what you mean. I think we, let’s say for example, let’s go back to Cisco. I used that example a minute ago. Let’s say that I work for Cisco. It’s pretty obvious what the goal there is. The goal is to ship loads of units of networking hardware all over the world, and then next year ship more than we ship this year and innovate more and.

[00:27:45] Topher DeRosia: And you have investors that are going to hold your feet to the fire.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, so make money, make the investors happy, make the shareholders happy, and so on. That is so straightforward a bargain. But we in our community have this extra layer underpinning it of this philanthropic bit, which forms the basis of it. It’s literally the bedrock of it.

And so that whole thing is propping everything else up on top of it, which I genuinely don’t know how the shifting sands of that all work. We’ve managed to get through 22 years plus, of that building up slowly over time, there being arguments here, there and everywhere. Minor arguments, some bigger arguments. We’ve somehow worked it through.

But I don’t suppose that will ever get perfectly resolved. It’s going to be just part of the understanding that if you’re in open source, there’s a commercial bit. And if you can’t cope with that, well, that’s something you’re going to have to think about and look at. But also there’s going to be this whole philanthropic side, and that has to carry on and has to be funded, and figured out, and made important and advertised and all of that. I don’t have the brain to figure all that out, but it’s part of the jigsaw puzzle.

[00:28:52] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. It’s truly something I’ve never had to deal with, and I hope I don’t, the scales of money. I had a job once when I was very young. We’re at home, we were newly married and money was tight, and we were talking about where to get $20 for groceries and things like that.

And at work I was allocating hardware for new employees and, oh, let’s pick up two or three extra computers at $4,000 each because we might need them. That scale of money is, it’s something I’ve tried to be aware of.

I look at a WordPress plugin company that has employees and I think, oh man, you have so much more money than I do, so much more. And maybe they do, but they also have so many more bills than I do. Just because they have several employees, and they’re doing well and things look great on Black Friday, doesn’t mean that they’re super wealthy or anything.

[00:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I genuinely struggle with this component. I don’t think I’ll ever resolve it. I’m just aware that it exists. I’m aware that there’s people who are very polemic about it. There are people on the far this side, and there’s people on the opposite side who maybe are kind of struggling to shout across the gap. But then there’s people sitting in the middle who are somehow managing to figure it all out, or at least be sanguine about it, and not worrying too much about it. Time will tell. In the year 2026, I’m sure that it won’t get figured out, but it will probably carry on.

I’ve got every hope that WordPress is exciting enough to carry on and that people will continue to use it. So I don’t worry too much about that. It’s just more whether or not the two sides of the argument, in an increasingly polemic world, whether the commercial side of WordPress and the non-commercial side of WordPress can figure out some way to walk upon the same path.

[00:30:28] Topher DeRosia: There’s an element to WordPress that I think will carry on, even if it looks like WordPress is starting to fail. And that’s going to be the earliest people, the smallest contributors. Things have been really shaken up in WordPress in the last year or two, and I have friends who’ve left the community. And business is getting bigger and WordPress itself is changing. Gutenberg is a big thing now and AI is moving in and all that. So much is changing.

And I have people say, why do you stay? Why do you keep doing WordPress? Specifically, why do I keep doing HeroPress? And I think my experience tells me that there will always be a 17-year-old picking up a computer at the library for the first time and discovering WordPress and starting a new life. And I want to be there for that person.

[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it’s going back to the 17-year-old you as well. You know, that bit that we had earlier where you figured out you had this intuition that there were some things in life which mattered more.

One of the things that I think is really, like it’s so difficult to square this argument though, the whole thing where you see incredible wealth being generated by WordPress and you see incredible endeavors being put into WordPress by people who are really struggling to make ends meet. And I simply don’t have the capacity to figure out the solution to that. I cannot square that circle. But that is such a bit of cognitive dissonance that so much wealth is generated, on the one hand, and yet so much of the foundational work is created by people who may be struggling to put food on the table and what have you. And that is really challenging.

[00:32:12] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, it is challenging. I don’t think it’ll ever be solved. I think it’s a universal problem of humanity. But similar to other areas, I think WordPress does better than other communities. There have been a bunch of discussions in the past about inclusivity, diversity in the WordPress community. And even people who point out the problems and say, look, we messed up here, this is bad, we need to change it, will say WordPress is probably the best of the IT world. There are problems. It’s bad. There are things we need to change, but we’re way ahead.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s a really, sorry to interrupt. I got really caught up in what you just said then. I wasn’t expecting that to hit me quite as hard as it did. That was really interesting. That sort of sanguine approach to it. It’s never going to be perfect. We’re probably going to have division and factional fighting, I’m going to do air quotes around the word fighting, but you know what I mean, like infighting and what have you. But we do all right. Given how it could be, it’s okay. These things are just a part of the evolution of it. It’s a journey, not a destination. Yeah, that was interesting.

[00:33:18] Topher DeRosia: We do have to take care though to not rest on our laurels, as it were. To say, oh, you know what? It’s okay, we’re better than everybody else, and so we don’t need to work on it. As soon as we do that, then we will not be better than everybody else.

[00:33:30] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s curious because I think the people that I end up talking to when I attend things like WordCamps have that intuition. I think some, on some innate level, they get the bit that you just said. They know that it’s not perfect. And they know that work needs to be done. And they’re there for that thing. They want to fight the good fight, and make it so that this platform is available to the 17-year-old that you just described, so that they can pick this stuff up and publish their own stuff online, and have their own voice, and create their own identity and all of that. And it’s, yeah, really interesting.

I think I have one more question. So we were talking about the impact of you doing stuff in the open. You obviously did all of that stuff in the open. You did everything, you put everything online, you got HeroPress and all of that kind of stuff. Would you still advocate that in the year 2025, 2026? Do you still think that’s probably the best way forward?

The reason I’m asking that is because we see so much out there in the world, beguiling stuff. TikTok, YouTube, all these people getting YouTube famous, making giant amounts of money and all of that kind stuff. They’re doing it kind of purposefully in order to gain wealth. So it’s less that philanthropic side.

If you could replay your life, would you do that? Is there any part of you which thinks you’d go down that route of being the kind of influencer, or are you happy that your life would replay in, if you were the youngster that you were many, many years ago and you were now that youngster, would you still do it the same way, do you think?

[00:35:00] Topher DeRosia: I think I would. A couple years ago I did a video tip of the week on HeroPress. It was a video on YouTube. And people would say to me, you know what? It’s good that you offer this free stuff. You should put something behind a paywall and make money off it. And I think, oh, you know, that’d be cool. I could make money and pay the bills. But then I think, anything I put behind a paywall is not going to be able to help a 17-year-old who’s making a dollar a week. And that’s where my heart is. And I struggle.

I’m doing a project right now that I would love to tell you about. Over the years, I’ve done support a lot. And I, early on, made a rule, if I get asked a question more than three times, I’m making documentation. And so I can just say, oh, here, go check this out. And over the years I’ve had many clients come back to me three months after I built a site and say, you know, you taught me how to use the WordPress admin and I don’t remember, can you show me again?

So, I don’t know, a year ago I thought, I’m going to make a course for beginners, and it’s going to have videos that are one minute long about how to make a link, how to put in a picture, how to edit your form. Stuff that we all take for granted every day. But somebody who just got a website three months ago and used it once, they don’t remember.

So I started down that road. I got MemberPress, I set up a site, and I made a list of videos to make. I was going to sell it to my clients as part of, you know, you bought a website, for an extra X dollars, here’s all this documentation you can have. A WordPresser at that educational conference said to me, I want to sponsor you to make those videos. You pick the topic, but do it on our hosting platform, just so that our name is there.

And she gave me some money to do it. And she said, I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel. I didn’t have one. All these years, I didn’t have my own YouTube channel for my own videos. I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel, and once you get 2000 subscribers, I will pay you for every video you make. Just to put them on my own YouTube channel. I get to pick the topics. It’s just to get their name out. And I thought, wow, okay.

So I pivoted, rather than make a course behind a paywall, I am doing this thing, but they’re all going on YouTube. And I started three weeks ago, and I’m putting up a video Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I have 57 subscribers.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a little road to go. That’s so nice.

[00:37:23] Topher DeRosia: But this goes back to doing stuff in public so that it’s more significant later. Maybe in a year or two or five, I’ll have thousands of subscribers. And life experience has shown me that I need to not assume that I’m going to have thousands of subscribers within a month. That’s not how this works. You do stuff now, you build your foundation and you grow it. And eventually it gets big.

HeroPress happened that way. You know, I did a few essays, and I did a few more and I did a few more. And then one day I thought, oh, I have 200 essays, and now I have 300. I never set a goal of how many or anything like that. I just did one at a time, and then suddenly there’s this big site full of stuff.

And so that’s my current project is to make these videos, helping people figure out how to use WordPress. It’s not going to be just the beginners, it’s going to be, well, have a heart for beginners in any area, so I’m going to do some beginning programming stuff. I’ve built some cool stuff like WP Podcasts, aggregates podcasts. It wasn’t hard. It’s WP All Import, pulling them into the posts type. It’s not that big a deal. But I can make a 10 minute video on how I did that, and some developer’s going to go, wow, I never realised you can do this kind of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about it.

[00:38:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your life seems to represent that kind of long term approach, and I can completely empathise with that. Obviously my thing is podcasting, and I have the same sort of story that I just began it and kept doing it and kept doing it, and people obviously, you know, found that there was something there for them, or they didn’t.

But there was something that kept that propelled. And now I look back and there’s a few episodes that I can look back to and, it’s pretty amazing what that brought in its train. Most of it completely unexpected, most of it never intended, and now podcasting in the WordPress space is kind of what I do.

And it just goes to show, if you do things with the right intention, and you do things for the long game, there is a way to make it work. You know, obviously you’ve got to keep the wolf from the door, and if you live in a part of the world where it’s incredibly important that you earn lots of money in order to just meet the bare essentials, then you’ve obviously got to take care of that at the beginning. But then after that, there’s these opportunities on top of that to sort of grow who you are, grow the community that we’re in. And maybe in the long term, over 2, 3, 5, 10, in your case, probably approaching 20 years in the WordPress space, it has an impact. It’s slowly but surely. Slow and steady wins the game, as they say.

[00:39:57] Topher DeRosia: It does, yep.

[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, I will say thank you for that conversation. It was very unexpected and really, really powerful in some regard there. You really made me think on a couple of occasions as we were chatting there, and I really appreciate that.

So, Topher, where can we find you if somebody wants to see some of the stuff? You’ve already mentioned one. It’s probably topher.how. I don’t know if that’s the one you want to drop again.

[00:40:17] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, let’s say topher.how. But if you search Google for Topher1Kenobi, you’ll find me pretty much everywhere.

[00:40:24] Nathan Wrigley: Love that.

[00:40:25] Topher DeRosia: I’ve never found anyone else use that name.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s the number one, like the numeral one.

[00:40:29] Topher DeRosia: Yeah.

[00:40:30] Nathan Wrigley: Not the wan.

[00:40:31] Topher DeRosia: My personal blog is at topher1kenobi.com. There’s HeroPress. I did an episode the other day with Christos Paloukas, and he said, hey, send me your links.

[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: An essay.

[00:40:40] Topher DeRosia: I sent him 15 links.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do that to me as well. Whatever you do send me, then I will put them into the show notes. wptavern.com, search for the episode with Topher. It’s T-O-P-H-E-R. If you just look for that, you’ll probably find it. And thank you so much for chatting to me today. It was very pleasurable. Thank you.

[00:40:59] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I had a really good time too. Thanks.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case the power of local WordPress Meetups in community building in Spain.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Héctor de Prada.

Héctor is one of the founders of Modular DS, a tool for managing multiple WordPress websites. But his contributions to the WordPress community go far beyond his day job. Based in Spain, he’s been involved in creating and developing websites for years, and has immersed himself in the WordPress community, attending numerous WordCamps and Meetups in various cities.

More recently, he’s been co-organizing the WordPress Meetup in Leon, a city in northern Spain, which has seen impressive growth and engagement since its revival after the pandemic.

Héctor shares why he volunteers his free time to organize these community events, and the impact Meetups can have, not only for individual learning, but for revitalizing local tech ecosystems.

We discuss what makes a successful Meetup, how his team approaches event planning, rotating roles so nobody feels the pressure to attend every time, and how sponsors and local venues help make it all happen.

Héctor explains how their Meetup group draws diverse attendees, from students and marketeers, to business owners and agencies. And how they’ve experimented with differing formats and topics to keep things fresh and inclusive. Whether it’s inviting guest speakers from digital businesses, running panel forums, or focusing on networking opportunities for job seekers and entrepreneurs, he highlights the power of community in building connections that exist beyond WordPress.

We cover everything from the practicalities of finding venues and sponsors, to managing team workflows and keeping the events welcoming and approachable.

If you ever thought about starting a WordPress Meetup in your city, or want to bring new energy to an existing group, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Héctor de Prada.

I am joined on the podcast by Héctor de Prada. Hello, Héctor.

[00:03:20] Héctor de Prada: Hello, Nathan. A pleasure to be here.

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: We’re at WordCamp EU. It is in Basel. We are on the contributor day. And you are going to be giving a presentation about an experience that you have, I guess, on a monthly basis running an event. Let’s get into that in a moment. First of all, just introduce yourself, who you work for, what you do in the WordPress community outside of Meetups.

[00:03:41] Héctor de Prada: Okay, so I am Héctor de Prada. I am one of the founders of Modular DS, which is a tool to manage multiple WordPress websites. So that’s like my main occupation. But thanks to that, and also since way before, I have been involved with WordPress, creating websites, developing websites.

And for the past couple of years, or three years I could say, I have been also involved in the community. I’ve been in many WordCamps in Spain because as you know, in Spain, we have a lot of WordCamps. I’ve also been in many Meetups in different cities. I try to stay as much connected as I can to the community.

I also write a newsletter about the WordPress ecosystem in Spanish. And since a year and a half ago, I am also one of the co-organisers of the Meetup, and that’s what I’m going to talk about, well, Saturday in the WordCamp Europe in the talk I have.

[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: This is going to seem like a strange question because you know, on a very visceral level, you really understand why you do it, but I’m kind of keen to explain that to the audience. Why do you use up your free time organising WordPress events on a sort of voluntary basis? You know, you’ve given up lots of your free time, there’s no financial gain, you’re just doing it. Why do you do that?

[00:05:02] Héctor de Prada: Okay, well, I was thinking a lot about this question before and I came up with two different answers.

The first one is that since, like I said, I have been kind of part of the community for a few years, and I have been in many events outside of my city. I saw how the WordPress communities, how it feels, all the good things that come out of it. And then one of the main things I was always thinking when I was going to these events was like, why can’t we have this in our city for the people in our city to experience this, to have this type of connections, inspiration, learning, and so on? So that’s one of the first things.

And then it was also mixed with, I come from a small city in the north of Spain, and one of the things, many people say inside the city and outside of the city is that we don’t have many things anymore, okay. So it’s hard to explain, but like there is not much to do, a lot of young people leaves the city. So it’s kind of like depressing mood a little bit.

So it was also like, why don’t we try to do something in our city to try to start creating an ecosystem? And WordPress gave us the perfect excuse to also do that. Try to get people together, people in the tech world, which is what we do, talking about me and my partner, my friends, we are always talking about websites, technology, design. So it kind of all got together and we said, okay, let’s start doing the WordPress Meetups. And it’s been great so far.

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: How long have you been actually involved in the one that you’re doing now?

[00:06:34] Héctor de Prada: The meet up in our city, we have been doing it for around year and a half now. So after the summer, we’ll do two years.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: I should probably say to the listeners that a Meetup, if you’ve never attended one, WordPress has a whole community outside of the software, who help create the software, but they also show up for social events and things like that. And the ones that you may have heard of are WordCamps, and they’re the big ones. That’s where we’re at right now. So they tend to be an annual thing, perhaps in a city or, we are at WordCamp Europe, which is an annual thing, which moves around Europe.

But the Meetups, which is what we’re talking about, that’s usually bound to a city or a town or something like that, and it’s much more regular and it’s probably happening in an evening. It’s not a whole day. It’s maybe, I don’t know, six o’clock till nine o’clock, something along those lines. And presumably using local talent, using the people in the community that you’ve got, drawing them in and trying to get them to do the presentations and all of the bits and pieces.

So if you don’t know anything about that dear listener, now you do. If there’s something close to you, if you actually log into your WordPress dashboard, there will be an area in the dashboard, if you put all of the panels on, if you turn them on, you’ll be able to see, hopefully it will geographically locate you and give you some intel as to that.

So tell us a little bit about the one that you’ve been doing. You said it’s been going for 18 months, or at least you have been involved for 18 months.

[00:07:53] Héctor de Prada: Actually it was already working before Covid, so for a couple of years before Covid. Then it was shut down. I wasn’t involved before Covid. I didn’t even know the WordPress community before Covid. And then it was like three years stopped. Yeah, like 18 months ago, we kind of restarted the Meetup.

[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: So how many people typically would attend your Meetup? Because yours is quite a big one. The one that we are at at the moment is ridiculously big. You know, it’s going to have several thousand. Nobody can expect those kind of attendance numbers. That would be extraordinary. What are the kind of numbers that you are seeing on a monthly basis?

[00:08:28] Héctor de Prada: Yes, so I was checking this for the presentation I’m giving on Saturday, and we have, in this 18 months, we don’t do it every month, okay, it is more like every couple of months, because we don’t do it in the summer or during Christmas, for example, in December. So it’s kind of like six, eight, a year. And we have an average attendance of 60 people.

I know it’s pretty big because like I said, I’ve been in many other places where having like 25 people, 30 people, is already like a huge success. And that’s what we were trying to accomplish at the beginning. Like, okay, let’s try to get 20 people here, 25 people, get together. And since the beginning it’s been like, yeah, like sometimes it’s 50 people, sometimes it’s like 75 people. And for us it’s like, sometimes we don’t even know, how is it possible? But sure, it’s very fulfilling and we’re very happy about it of course.

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: And how do you sort of account for that? Do you email people? Do you have like a system? So for example, a lot of the Meetups will use a platform, which is called Meetup. You can go to meetup.com, and figure all of that out. But do you use a system like that to keep in touch with people and notify them that there’s a new one coming in June or July or whatever it may be?

[00:09:35] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, we use meetup.com to create the events and send the email communications to all the people that is subscribed to the group, or has been in one of the previous Meetups. And also, we always try to get people to follow us on social media because it is where, we have like a Twitter and Instagram account. It’s where we try to advance the new Meetups and give all the information and stuff.

And then we try different things also to get more people to come in. For example, we go kind of old school and we print some big flyers, okay, to put it on the walls. And we put it, for example, in the university, in the buildings the city hall has for technology companies. So we put them over there just for people, when they go to work or students, when they go to the university, they will just check it out. And maybe they will feel like going. So that’s also something we do.

[00:10:25] Nathan Wrigley: And where do you actually do it? Do you have the same venue every single time, or do you tend to move around?

[00:10:30] Héctor de Prada: No, we move around. This is very important because it, I think it’s one of the most important things when you are organising any kind of event, the venue where you’re actually doing it. And we are very lucky because, even when I was telling you that in our city it seems like not many things are being done. When you actually try to do something, everybody tries to help you.

So we have been offered many different venues from City Hall, from the university, from private companies, from the government, public buildings they have. So what we have tried to do is to do the Meetup in different places. So in case, at some point, we can do it in one of them, we will always be able to go to any of the other ones. And that has worked very well for us.

[00:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice, yeah. I think that’s not typical. I think usually it’s done in kind of the same venue and what have you.

My understanding also, and I could be wrong about this, but my understanding is that the Spanish WordPress community is actually one of the healthier ones, for want of a better word. It seems to be kind of thriving. I don’t know if I’ve just heard a story and that’s not true, but is that true?

[00:11:33] Héctor de Prada: No, I think it is. I think it is definitely, well, I was talking with somebody that is organising here at WordCamp Europe, and we were accounting for WordCamps made in Spain last year. And I think it was like 12 WordCamps in one year, only in Spain, which I could say is what the rest of Europe has in one year.

So it’s like pretty crazy. I think, we Spanish people, we just like to gather a lot and just meet each other. But also I think there are many Meetup groups in Spain that are doing a great job and have great numbers and do a lot of Meetups with really great speakers. So yeah, I would say in Spain there is a lot of community movement.

[00:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: I’m quite jealous. The part of the world where I live in the UK, Covid really had a profound impact. The Meetups kind of disappeared, and in some cases came back, but in most cases they didn’t. I think maybe the year 2025 was a bit of a watershed. There’s a few I think that maybe are on the cusp of returning.

So it can’t just be you. I’m presuming that there’s a whole bunch of people, a team, if you like. And how does that work? How many people regularly are helping you out, and do you have, I don’t know, different roles that you perform? Like, you’re in charge of the emails, you’re in charge of the venue, you’re in charge of the snacks and whatever it may be. How many people on the team and how do you manage all that?

[00:12:49] Héctor de Prada: We are six people currently, and what we tried since the beginning was to find other people that could be complimentary to us. And like you said, we try to split responsibilities. So one of us, who is very good with social media, is the one taking charge of posting everything in social media so everybody sees what we are doing.

Other person is always in charge of the networking we do afterwards to get the catering, even the venue we have to change somewhere, because it’s somebody who has a lot of contacts in that space.

Also somebody’s in charge of sponsors. Somebody’s in charge of creating the Meetups. Somebody’s in charge of the design.

Okay, so we try to split the responsibilities, but at the same time, and this is not so obvious, I think what we have also found very important is that, even when each one has a responsibility, we also try to rotate every once in a while. So, for example, when we started, everybody thought or supposed I was always going to be the one presenting, because I’m kind of more used to speaking in public. One of the first things we decide is that every day one of us was going to present the Meetup. So in case I’m missing or anybody else is missing, the Meetup will work exactly the same.

Because we don’t want this to feel like an obligation, like every member of the team has to be every single Meetup no matter what, because it’s not a job. You said it. This is like a volunteer thing. We do it for the community. So if at some point something happens with life, you have to take your kids to school or anything, well, the rest of the team will be able to take charge.

[00:14:27] Nathan Wrigley: So everybody kind of rotates things around so that if somebody’s, I don’t know, unwell during that day, somebody can slot in. Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting approach.

[00:14:35] Héctor de Prada: Exactly. Yeah, the same with like organising the networking and the catering afterwards, taking charge of cleaning everything up afterwards. We try to rotate everything.

[00:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: There’s so much that goes into these events. So let’s just go through the little laundry list of things that you have to achieve. Now, you may do some of these, you may not. But I guess it’s things like booking the venue has to be done. Maybe there’s a payment that needs to be involved with that. You have to presumably have an email list. You’ve got social media accounts. You’ve got ordering the food, tidying up at the end.

[00:15:03] Héctor de Prada: You need to talk with the sponsors as well to get any merchandise they might send to you to give to the attendees. Also, you have to select the speakers and then prepare it with the speakers.

[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: So do you work with the speakers as well? Because my experience is that often speakers can be, if they’re new to it, they can be a little bit nervous. And so having some sort of, coaching is maybe the wrong word, but some intuition as to, yeah, you’re on the right lines. That, I think, is what our audience will like.

[00:15:27] Héctor de Prada: It depends a lot on the speaker, because it’s true that there are some speakers that are very, I’m not going to say professional, but they’re like very used to, they are experts in something and they’re very used to give talks about it. So you basically can’t tell them anything because they already know more than you do, okay, about how to do it right.

But it’s true that one thing that we like to do a lot is that we don’t only try to do like the normal talks you might see in a WordCamp, where somebody is an expert on a field, and they just give you a talk trying to allow you to learn something. But we also like to do more experience stuff like trying to look for inspiration instead of learning.

So for example, like you do with the podcast, nowadays I think podcasts are a trend because we like to listen and understand the stories behind people, how they are doing something, or how did they come to this? So for those kind of talks, it’s true that we kind of give them a guide. So, we would like you to talk about this.

Or sometimes if we do, the last meeting we did, it was like a forum with three different businesses, and we wanted to just talk about their experience. And what we did is try to get like the main questions we wanted them to answer. And we gave them to them previously so they could kind of prepare a little bit of what we wanted to talk about. Because they didn’t have any presentation or anything, it was just like a normal conversation, like an interview more. So in those cases, it takes much more work than if it’s just somebody with a presentation and they do their thing.

[00:16:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, i’ve been to Meetups where they’ve done a whole variety of different things, not all at the same evening. So for example, they might do two presentations of, I don’t know, 45 minutes each, and then have a bit of networking in the middle.

Some places do social things where it’s just, maybe there’ll be an hour where you just do the networking and hang out. I’ve been to Meetups where they do prize giveaways and quizzes and things like that.

So there isn’t just one model. You can sort of mix it around a little bit and offer things which the audience, I don’t know, it’s a bit more entertainment, if you like.

[00:17:29] Héctor de Prada: Of course. I think it’s very nice to try different formats, different things. Because also people, when we have a lot of, I guess like many Meetups, we have many regular people, they go to almost every Meetup, so I think it’s also good for them to try different things so it’s more like, a little bit unexpected. You get a surprise of what you are getting out of it, and it’s not always the same thing.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: Have you had things which you’ve tried maybe recently in the last six months or something that you just thought, oh, let’s give that a go. And if so, maybe you could share that.

[00:17:59] Héctor de Prada: Well, the last one we did, at the beginning it was a little, it wasn’t so much about the format because we had already tried that because it was like, yeah, like four people from three different businesses talking about how they achieved what they have done. But the crazy thing is it was the topic about it. Because it was three different gastronomic business, which at the first time you could say, okay, so what does this have to do with WordPress?

But it was very interesting because those three businesses, it was a social media influencer only talking about restaurants, a food influencer. Then it was a restaurant that has digitalised all the experience inside the restaurant. So you get to the restaurant and you order the food with your phone, everything, so no people around you or anything.

And then the other one was an e-commerce site made with WooCommerce of one of the biggest meat sellers in Spain. It’s a big restaurant just to eat meat. The type of meat, like you pay a lot for that. And they are really crushing it, like with their e-commerce made with WooCommerce.

So it was all very digital, but at the same time, the topic was like gastronomic and at the beginning people was like, doesn’t feel like a WordPress Meetup. It was amazing. People loved it.

[00:19:08] Nathan Wrigley: It worked.

[00:19:08] Héctor de Prada: Yes, yes. Because their stories were so interesting and how they kind of mixed with the technology and how it started, the pains they had at the beginning, trying to introduce that technology and how it has now changed their business. It was super interesting.

[00:19:23] Nathan Wrigley: How did you come up with the idea of that particular one? Because that’s so curious. Because usually it is, there’s a strong WordPress focus to the ones that I’ve been, you know, there’s a presentation, it’s WordPress, there’s a Lightning Talk, it’s WordPress, there’s another presentation, it’s WordPress.

But that one, there’s a thread running through it, which is technology. Sounds like the audience really liked it. And there was obviously that WooCommerce bit at the end that you mentioned. How did you even conceive of that topic?

[00:19:47] Héctor de Prada: Yeah. Well, it wasn’t only that WooCommerce, like the three of them had started somehow the business with some WordPress, a WordPress website, a WordPress blog, a WooCommerce, okay. It wasn’t the main focus of the talk, but they all had something to do. And that wasn’t intentional, like it just came out because I guess WordPress, you want it or not, it is behind most of the worldwide web. So it was very nice.

But one thing talk about in the presentation here at WordCamp Europe is that I think that WordPress is what unites us, but I don’t think it should be what separates us. So I think, thanks to WordPress powering like 40 something percent of the worldwide web, it allows us to talk about almost everything related to the digital world. It will always be somehow related to WordPress.

So it’s true that we don’t go too deep into the technical WordPress part. It’s always somehow related, but we feel like our audience is not like WordPress experts, to say it like that. We have a lot of students, marketing students, marketing agencies, entrepreneurs. And then we talk more about like the digital business part, the online marketing. It’s always somehow related to WordPress, but it has worked for us very well to kind of get a broader view and not go so specific, to get also like more attendees coming, and they all feel like they understand, that they can apply that to themselves.

Of course we always talk a lot about WordPress. It’s a WordPress Meetup. But I think that’s also important because even us that we are so deep in the community, I feel like WordPress is like my main thought like 24/7 almost. But for most people outside the community, it is not like that. And I think one important thing in WordPress is that we try to get as many people to the community as possible, and they don’t have to be such experts.

[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because if you show up and you did two presentations back to back and it was all about, I don’t know, WP-CLI, followed by some other very technical thing, it may be that half of the audience, maybe more, maybe 70% of the audience would think, I don’t really understand that. And managing that is quite difficult.

So mixing it up a little bit and making sure it’s not too technical for one of the evenings. Maybe you have a technical one now and again, but you’ve got to think a lot about the audience and what they are prepared to consume.

So, pivoting slightly, I guess this cannot be entirely free. So I know that you give your labour for nothing. But presumably there is a cost somewhere along the line, whether that’s for snacks or whether it’s for hiring of the venue. How do you finance your Meetup? How does that work?

[00:22:22] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, we have sponsors that help us with the cost. We basically, our costs are only the flyers, which is like almost nothing because we don’t do that many, and then the food and drinks for the networking. So we always try to have two sponsors. One, it’s always a local company, and then one is a workers community company.

I think in Spain at least, because I don’t know outside of Spain, but there are many companies, mostly hosting companies that really want to sponsor these kind of events. And since the beginning, we have had a lot of offers of companies trying to sponsor. I guess it’s also important that we have good attendee numbers and stuff. But I think they sponsor most of the Meetups in Spain. That’s what we use to cover the cost.

[00:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: How does the sponsorship actually work? Because obviously they couldn’t realistically be paying you directly and then you then move the money to buying the snacks and the pizzas or whatever it may be. How does that sponsorship actually work? Who is the person that’s receiving the money and distributing it and so on?

[00:23:23] Héctor de Prada: Well, normally what we do is that, since our costs are very located in, I would say 90% or maybe 95% of the budget goes to the food and drinks for the catering, which we have also tried different companies and different stuff. So they give us a bill and then we’ll send it to the sponsors so they pay the bill. I know it’s not the easiest way. Sometimes because of the company requirements of the food, we have to give the money first and then ask the sponsor to give us the money.

Well, I guess as long as you are, for example, us of course, in the team, as long as you are completely transparent and you show where all the money goes and what is being spent. At least for us, I’m sure for you guys in London, for example, it has to be way different because it’s another city, other kind of prices and everything. But for us, the money sums are really, really small. Even when we have a 60 person Meetup, the money is really small. It just gives you for that, for like the food and that. We are still waiting to try to do some T-shirts for the team, but we haven’t still gotten the money for that.

[00:24:27] Nathan Wrigley: So you tend to get a sponsor on board to sponsor a thing, a component of the Meetup. So it might be that this week hosting company X is sponsoring the food. Or such and such a company is sponsoring the venue. It’s like in one door out the other. Somebody on your team will pay for the food, but then send the receipt, the bill if you like, to the sponsor, who will then reimburse them for all of that.

[00:24:50] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, could be. For example, we have never paid for the venue. We have always had agreements, it’s always free for us so far. Yeah, it’s basically always the food. And the sponsor, even the local company has changed a few times.

But for example, I would say the WordPress community company, that for us is a hosting company, that also sponsors many WordCamps in Spain, we have always had the same one because since the beginning they told us, we want to sponsor, and as long as you keep doing it, we will send you the money or give us the bills.

And also the sponsors we’ve had, they always give us gifts or merchandise for the attendees or maybe to give something like a raffle and then somebody can win a prize or something better. Or they even give us gifts for the speakers as well. So they always treat us very good.

[00:25:37] Nathan Wrigley: So is there like a magic number that makes the event work? So you said that sometimes 70, sometimes 55, something like that. I mean, they seem like pretty good numbers. If you stand in front of that many people, that can be quite intimidating, you know, that’s a lot. Obviously other places will have smaller numbers. Maybe some places will have bigger numbers.

Is there some feeling in your head about, if the numbers dipped down to 20, it’s not worth doing it anymore or anything like that? Do you have any of those thoughts? Because I know that a lot of people who’ve put these events on before, they get quite demoralized because they begin it, three people show up and they do it again, and then two people show up and maybe five people show up. And it kind of seems like a lot of effort. There’s not much interest. I’m trying my hardest, I’m doing all the things which I think are the right things to do. Any thoughts on that?

[00:26:22] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, well, I think it’s definitely challenging because I’ve seen, like you said, many cities where this is the case. It’s really hard for them to get people to attend. I think the main focus for us, when we got all the team together, we always try to think about new things to bring new people in. Maybe talking with the teachers at the university, or maybe going to a business group to present them the Meetup, or maybe get a collaboration with a social media influencer in the city, so he can talk about the Meetups, even be a speaker and then post it on socials. So it is definitely, I think it’s the most important thing.

In my experience, i’ve been in many Meetups and when you are more than 20 people, I could say, it already feels pretty good. Because more than 20 people, it’s already a good number of people to network, to talk, to give a presentation in front of. So more than 20 people, I think it’s already a good number. When you go below 20, below 10, I guess it’s pretty hard.

[00:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: You sort of feel that it’s a lot of work and, you know, it’s difficult to justify that work if the interest is not there.

So speaking of that then, is there a support, like a wider WordPress Meetup support network? So where you can go and dip in for ideas, advice. Obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, that’s one avenue you might get it. But is there a place that you can go, like a Slack channel or a wordpress.org forum or something like that where you could go and gain advice, or some leadership from people like you who’ve been doing this before?

[00:27:48] Héctor de Prada: Yeah, well, there are different places. In the day to day, we have the Slack channel, for example, in the Spanish community inside the WordPress Slack, we have a channel for the Spanish Meetups. So every time we have a problem, we had one a few weeks ago with the Meetup platform, for example, or things like that. We always go there and there is always somebody from the community team replying, and telling you, and helping you, whatever you need.

Also I think it’s very important. It was huge for us at the beginning, before we started doing the Meetup of our city, again, when we started now 18 months ago, it was very helpful to go to WordCamps and in the Contributor Day, like today, go to the community tables and talk with the people that has experience organising Meetups. And they were the ones, for example, when we started it was like super easy because people like Rocío Valdivia, Juan Hernando, who are very deep into the community team for many years, they have been there. They just help us do all the process, all we needed to know. They gave us all the basic advice to know, screwed up at the beginning.

So I would say, if somebody’s looking to organise a Meetup, the first thing they should do is to go to a WordCamp event, or maybe a Meetup in a different city, and talk with people that is organising a Meetup to just get some of the real experience, because I think that’s invaluable.

[00:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: How do your team actually meet up then? Do you have like a regular weekly gathering, like a session where you all gather on zoom or something like that?

[00:29:16] Héctor de Prada: It’s more like on a monthly basis. So since we do Meetups every two months, let’s say on average. So one month we do the Meetup, and then the next month we got all together. It may be all together on the same place, because since it’s a small city, we are all kind of close to each other, or it might be on Zoom. And then we do like the feedback of the previous Meetup to talk about what went well, what could be improved, and at the same time to prepare the next Meetup.

So it’s kind of one month, Meetup, one month, all get together to talk about it. Next month, Meetup, next month, get together to talk about it.

In one hour we can talk about the previous Meetup and organise the next one. And I’m not talking about organise everything, I’m talking about kind of like divide the responsibilities and say, okay, so I’m going to do this, you’re going to do this. And then on a WhatsApp group, we are just letting each other know like, okay, I already booked the venue. Okay, I already talked with the speaker, and he said, okay. Okay, I already designed the flyer or the image and we are good to go, and things like that.

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: From what you’re saying, it sounds like it’s kind of got a homely, family sort of vibe to it.

[00:30:20] Héctor de Prada: Yes. We try to have that casual vibe, like friendship vibe. Like, even in the Meetups, when people come at the beginning when other people on the team was speaking at the beginning, like presenting the Meetup, and talking a little bit about what is the WordPress community, or what do we do here, what type of events are in the WordPress community and everything. They were a little bit nervous about it because they haven’t done it before or seen it as many times as I have seen it.

And I would always tell them, this is like a friend group. If you say something wrong, you just say naturally, okay, this is my mistake. I should have said that this way and not that way, okay. And just do it in a casual vibe. Like, most of the people, like I said, since they’re regular people, we kind of know everybody. We all know each other because we do, if we do like one hour talk, then we always have like one hour, or hour and a half, of networking. So almost everybody knows each other.

So it’s kind of more like, yeah, like friendship, not family, but friendship. We try to do that also so everybody who comes feels comfortable and not afraid to speak with anybody or even to ask something during the Meetup or anything. Because it feels really like it’s just a group of friends and you are part of those friends and everybody’s welcome.

[00:31:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that feels really nice. The Meetup that I attend, we also have this idea of kind of networking and that seems to be quite a powerful thing as well. So people don’t just show up to make friends, which is nice. They don’t just show up to watch the presentations. Again, it’s nice, but they also show up, and there’s an opportunity to share stories about, I’m looking for work, I’ve got a job that I need to be filled.

And just the other month we had a story about somebody who, you know, started a new job because of a conversation that had happened at that event. Just wondered if that kind of thing was something that you have noticed happens with yours as well?

[00:32:09] Héctor de Prada: Definitely, definitely. One of the first things I was telling, for example, in the first Meetup we have, I think a few students came from the university. And I was like, this is where you have to be because you’re studying for marketing, and here there are like, I don’t know, like seven or eight agency owners that are going to be looking for the next people to work on their marketing team. So this is the perfect place. You are not going to meet them any other place. You’re not going to go on the street and just cross them all. So you have a marketing agency. I want to work on a marketing agency. No, it’s not going to happen.

But here you just come here for free, you learn something, and also you can talk to these people directly. You can tell them about your life. They can tell you about theirs. Maybe there is a match. So yeah, I hope, I know a couple of stories that have worked, but I hope, I really hope it will be like the best thing for the Meetup that a lot of good things, it’ll either be collaborations, hirings, partnerships, anything come out of the Meetup. Because that would be great for the ecosystem, for the people in our city, for the people attending the Meetups. So that would make us so, so happy.

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: It’s one of those things that I think many people might find it a little bit nervous to go for the first time. You know, just the idea of sitting in a room full of strangers. You can do just that. You can sit at the back and you don’t have to contribute. You don’t have to put your hand up and say anything. So the idea of just showing up, lurking maybe a few times, just seeing what the whole situation is like. And you never know, something completely revolutionary might happen.

[00:33:33] Héctor de Prada: Yeah. There is always, sometimes when you go to the networking part, and you don’t know anybody, the normal thing is that you probably go to a corner just by yourself, okay. Or just close to a wall and just stay there. But the normal thing in this type of events, or I would say almost any event, is that you’re going to find other people next to the wall, next to you, because they also don’t know anybody.

And those are the first people you’re going to meet. And you’re going to create that relationship. And from that you’re going to start moving to other groups. Somebody’s going to come that knows one of you. And that’s how it starts. So it might feel intimidating at the beginning, but then once you get into it, also, this is especially in the WordPress community, it’s very easy to start to know people.

[00:34:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s just occurred to me, Héctor, that we’re sort of 40 minutes in and I haven’t said, where is it? Where is your Meetup?

[00:34:24] Héctor de Prada: Okay, yeah, true. Well, it’s in the city of León, which is in the north of Spain. It’s a small city in the north of Spain.

[00:34:31] Nathan Wrigley: And I will make sure, when I put the show notes together for this episode, if you go to wptavern.com and search for the episode with Héctor in it, I’ll make sure to link any resources that you put in my way. I’ll make sure to link so that if you are in that neck of the woods, you can check it out, but also I’ll make sure to link to other more wider resources.

[00:34:50] Héctor de Prada: If somebody that listens to this at any point thinks that me or anybody on our Meetup group can help them, if they are trying to create a Meetup, or doing a Meetup and trying to change something, please reach out to us and of course we’ll be happy to talk with anybody, if our experience can help in any way.

[00:35:10] Nathan Wrigley: That’s perfect. I will make sure to put some links to your bio as well. That’s absolutely wonderful. Héctor de Prada, thank you so much for chatting me today.

[00:35:17] Héctor de Prada: Thank you, Nathan.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, what WordPress and Drupal have in common.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Chris Reynolds. Chris is a developer advocate at Pantheon, where he brings nearly 20 years of experience in the WordPress community, as well as deep involvement with Drupal and open source technology at large. Prior to his advocacy role, he worked at some of the top WordPress agencies like Human Made and Web Dev Studios. He’s been active at events like DrupalCon, PressConf, and Word Camps.

In this episode we set aside the usual WordPress only focus, and turn our attention to two CMSs, WordPress and Drupal. What makes them tick, where they excel and where they might have something to learn from each other.

Chris draws on his unique perspective working closely with both platforms as Pantheon is one of the few hosts with a 50 50 split between WordPress and Drupal sites, and has a significant footprint in both ecosystems.

We discuss the similarities and differences between the two open source CMS communities, from the mechanics of flagship events like WordCamps and DrupalCon, to the ways these projects organize their contributors and support community initiatives.

Chris explains how Drupal’s model with its association run funding, and project governance, compares to WordPress’s approach, including how each community approaches plugin and module development, and what role agencies and companies play in contributing to Core and the broader ecosystem.

If you’re curious about how open source projects organize themselves, how their communities navigate growth and challenge, and what WordPress can learn from Drupal, and vice versa, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Chris Reynolds.

I am joined on the podcast today by Chris Reynolds. Hello Chris.

[00:03:20] Chris Reynolds: Hi. How’s it going?

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: You cannot see, dear listener, what I can see. Chris has the most amazing setup where he’s doing the recording. I guess it’s an attic or something like that, but it looks like the Starship Enterprise from where I’m sitting.

[00:03:34] Chris Reynolds: I’m working on that.

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s really nice. Chris is joining us today and we’re going to have a conversation about the WordPress community. The things that we do well, and perhaps the things that we could improve. And we’re going to probably use Drupal as a comparison.

Before we get into that, Chris, I know it’s a dreadfully banal question, but it’s always good to scope out where you are and where you stand with WordPress and Drupal and the companies that you work for. So just a moment really to give us your little potted bio of who you are and what have you.

[00:04:04] Chris Reynolds: Sure. My name is Chris Reynolds, I am a developer advocate at Pantheon. I was formerly a senior software engineer for Pantheon for about three years, before joining the developer relations team around August, right before WordCamp US in September last year.

I’ve been in the WordPress community for close to 20 years. I think I’ve gone back to my first blog posts and my first, like talking about technology that I was using. And I think that I’ve found references to using WordPress in some capacity back in 2005, so almost exactly 20 years.

But even before that I was really interested, like as a side hobby in just open source software, playing with Linux and playing with other open source community projects that I found I was really a big fan of one called Ampache for a long time, which was a music sort of library app thing written in PHP. That was really cool. I think it still exists even.

But yeah, so I’m a developer advocate at Pantheon. That means I do a lot of these sorts of things, talk about best practices, write a lot of blog posts, get in a lot of trouble, not really, and go to events and stuff like that. So I was at DrupalCon in March. I was at PressConf last month. Probably doing stuff this summer and in the fall.

[00:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: Just to lean in a little bit on the Pantheon side of things. Pantheon, a hosting company, but very much aligned in two worlds, maybe more than two. But from my perspective, I used to use Drupal exclusively until about 2015. That was my CMS of choice for many, many years. I think Drupal 4, and then finally I jumped ship at Drupal 8 over to WordPress and have been that consistently.

But Pantheon was around as what felt like at that time, so we are going back more than a decade, the only sort of managed Drupal host, but it definitely had a WordPress side to it as well. Can you just speak to that for us for a moment? That is Pantheon’s sort of MVP, isn’t it? It handles managed hosting for both of those platforms. And maybe there’s more, I don’t know.

[00:05:57] Chris Reynolds: Yeah. I mean, I think that from a platform perspective, we obviously do host Drupal and WordPress. We also can host like Next.js and sort of front end sites. But the sort of hidden Pantheon magic is in the kind of DevOps, WebOps we like to call it, layer that happens like somewhere between pushing code and the code being a thing that like site managers and editors and things like work with, right? So automation tools, and we were one of the first providers that used Git by default. Now that’s not such a big deal anymore, but like that was a big thing within Pantheon for a really long time.

When I was a developer, the first time that I used Pantheon as a developer when I was back at WebDevStudios was, the thing that was the killer feature for me was we have a thing called Multi Dev, which is, each site has a development, a test, and a live environment. So everybody gets those three things and we have a very specific sort of workflow. Code goes to dev, to test, to live in that order. But we have these Multi Devs, which are entirely separate containers where you can build, you can do all your feature development on a branch in a Multi Dev and see what that looks like before merging it into dev.

It sounds like maybe not that much now, but I know when I was back in agency life and even when I was working at Human Made and we had built our own sort of stack that had this very similar kind of system, we didn’t have Multi Dev because spinning up new containers for sites that you’re just going to destroy at some point in the next couple weeks or days anyway is expensive and hard.

And so what that meant was the master branch, or the development branch, of all of your code is always really messy and dirty, and you want to keep that away from the code that is going to production, right? Because that’s where your experimental code is. Maybe you didn’t back it out entirely. That’s where like a whole bunch of weird database stuff is going. That’s like the junk, right? So you want to keep that separate from like your staging branch and your production branch.

And with Pantheon, the idea is your development branch is just where your finalised code goes, because you can do all that testing in a separate environment and then when you go from dev to test, it’s not a headache, it’s just this is production ready code, basically.

[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember my recollection of Pantheon was that it was one of those platforms that, well, platform really, it felt more like a platform than a host, if you know what I mean? It just offered more as a layer on top of the typical host that you might find.

However, you also do a whole bunch of stuff around the Drupal space, but also the WordPress space. I’m just curious, maybe you don’t have this information, but maybe as a developer advocate, you do. What would you say, as a percentage, does Drupal represent as opposed to WordPress? You know, is it like an 80, 20 split, a 90, 10, a 50, 50?

[00:08:40] Chris Reynolds: We’re almost exactly 50, 50.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[00:08:43] Chris Reynolds: And we’ve actually honestly been 50, 50 for about five-ish years, five or six years.

[00:08:48] Nathan Wrigley: So does that mean that in the Drupal side of things, okay, dear listener, WordPress as a CMS is a giant, it’s a leviathan of a thing, you know. Occupies a massive amount of the market share. Drupal I think is somewhere in the region of, I think it’s like 1.2% or something like that.

[00:09:05] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, we might be creeping up to two-ish, but yeah, it’s pretty low, yeah.

[00:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: That then implies that you as a company have, you’ve got your foot on the pedal more on the Drupal side of things. Maybe the people who are building clever things on top of Drupal are using you much more. You’re a bigger player in that space than you are inside the WordPress space, even though it’s, you know, the same in terms of revenue. As a community endeavor, Drupal probably means a lot more to you than WordPress maybe.

[00:09:32] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, I mean definitely going to DrupalCon for my first time this last March, it’s definitely, so there’s Acquia, which is essentially Drupal’s version of Automattic. Acquia is a company that was founded by Dries, who is the founder of Drupal, and very much like managed Drupal hosting the same kind of thing that Automattic is into, and a lot of the sort of same ideas, at least from a, where it sits in the ecosystem.

But, you know, you go to a WordCamp and you see the big Automattic booth and you’ll see a couple other sort of bigger hosting booths. At a DrupalCon it’s like, there’s the Pantheon booth and there’s the Acquia booth, and then there’s a bunch of little things. We’re definitely the kind of headliners because between the two of us, I think probably we do own most of those Drupal sites that exist in the ecosystem. But we’re definitely a bigger fish in that pond, than perhaps the WordPress pond. There’s also a lot more fish in the WordPress pond.

It’s an interesting thing, like for me coming to DrupalCon for the first time, to see just what Pantheon’s footprint is in contrast to when I go to WordCamps. And, you know, we were big in WordCamps for a long time, and then we kind of pulled back a little bit, and then the intervening time it’s I think felt by the community like, well, who are you? Where did you go? We’ve gotten sort of feedback from folks being like, I used to think about Pantheon, but like it’s been a long time, you laid a lot of people off. Why should I care anymore?

And that’s, you know, part of my personal goal is to say, no, this is why you should care. That’s one of the things that excited me of joining the DevRel team was to go back to our roots and go back into the community, and we still have a really good product that I believed in when I was a developer and I still think is really good as, you know, obviously I think of it as a developer advocate. But like I’m here because I like the thing. I think we have a good thing.

[00:11:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you basically have the exact same platform for both of the CMSs? So I know there’s all the other stuff that you do, but let’s just concentrate on Drupal and concentrate on WordPress, those two things. Do you basically have the exact same platform? Or is there some nuance that you can do this on WordPress because of, I don’t know, WP-CLI or the REST API or whatever it is that you can’t do in the Drupal side? In other words, if I sign up for a Drupal account, do things look different, behave differently, or is it broadly the same?

[00:11:45] Chris Reynolds: It is broadly the same. There is sort of individual differences but they’re very minor. And honestly like, in many ways, I think that when Pantheon, and this is before my time, obviously, but I think when Pantheon jumped into the WordPress boat, it was really more of a, well, we have this stack and we’re really good at this thing, and WordPress is also a PHP application that has a lot of the same requirements, surely we can just run the exact same stack for WordPress.

And what’s sort of evolved over time is like, well, that’s like 80% true, but it’s the 20% that’s really important. And if you just go into building WordPress sites or hosting WordPress sites with the same mentality as you’re doing Drupal, well, you are going to run into a lot of the growing pains that we ran into, right? Drupal from like a database perspective is far more efficient. The queries are much shorter because the way that it’s structured is more efficient than WordPress. WordPress, you kind of have to do more sort of optimisation on top. So those are things that we needed to figure out.

The Drupal space sort of moved toward Solr as their sort of search tool of choice, which is a project from the Apache project. WordPress went into Elasticsearch. So trying to convince a WordPress team to use Solr, in fact, a pretty old version of Solr, is kind of pulling teeth. Like, well, why would I do that when I’m doing Elasticsearch for everything else? I don’t know why you would do that, honestly. Like, you should probably use Elasticsearch.

And so we’re like actually going in, that’s a project that’s on the roadmap as well finally, it’s something I’ve been talking about for like three years internally. There’s little nuances. Drupal obviously since version eight has been using Composer as a fundamental part of how the CMS just works. Whereas WordPress, you’ve got some people that are using Composer, in fact, last time I was here, two years ago, I was talking about Composer. And I don’t know that the adoption of Composer has really changed much in the WordPress ecosystem since that time.

I would like to say that it has. I still think that you should be using Composer. Throwback to the last WP Tavern Jukebox podcast that I was on about Composer. But yeah, so there’s little differences and I think that that’s, there’s not anything from a platform level where your experience is going to be that much different.

[00:14:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you were to take a look at the Pantheon platform, I think quickly poking around on the site, maybe the pricing page or something would give you an intuition that really you are kind of more for the sort of enterprise level, I think would be fair to say. You know, you are trying to get the bleeding edge out of the websites that you’ve got, and so it’s, high traffic, that kind of thing.

But the endeavor today really is to put all of that code stuff to one side and get into the community side of things. So just to reiterate, we threw around a couple of words there, and maybe the listener doesn’t really know that even there’s a WordPress community or a Drupal community.

There really is. There’s just hundreds, maybe thousands of people who attend events, they might go to a local thing, which we might call them Meetup on the WordPress side of things. I don’t know if there’s similar things in Drupal. But then there’s these bigger events, which we’d call WordCamps, and then there are bigger ones of those which are kind of flagship WordCamps.

There’s one in the US, there’s one in Asia, and there’s one in Europe. They happen each year. And thousands of people show up and inhabit the same space, listen to presentations, hang out in the hallway.

And then you’ve got the same thing happening on the Drupal side. It’s called Drupal Con, but forgive my ignorance, I think the DrupalCon thing is a once a year thing and it moves around the globe. It’s not necessarily in the same space. Have I got that about right?

[00:15:15] Chris Reynolds: It’s more than once a year. It’s actually the equivalent. So DrupalCon is the equivalent of flagship WordCamps. So there’s a DrupalCon, there was a DrupalCon US in Atlanta this last year. There is going to be a DrupalCon Europe in, where is it? Maybe Vienna, in the fall. There’s a DrupalCon Asia that’s just starting to get fired up. That’s happening I think in, the next one is like 2026, I believe. I think they just had their first one. So very similar, like the Cons in the Drupal space are equivalent to the flagship WordCamps. There’s also DrupalCamps in much the same way as there are local WordCamps.

I feel like in the WordPress space, a lot of the local WordCamps kind of, they either blew up and got super big, or they kind of fizzled after Covid, right? I don’t have a lot of local camps. I don’t see a lot of local camps anymore. I do see those things happening a little bit in the Drupal space, or at least starting up again.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah so, what we’re basically painting a picture of here is that we’ve got two bits of software which basically are trying to achieve the same thing. They’re a CMS. They’re trying to make it so that non-technical, as well as technical people, can run a project and put it online. Whether that’s a website or an e-commerce solution, whatever it may be, you’re trying to get your stuff out onto the internet. And both of those things will work.

But also, behind the code is a bunch of people who are willing to go and hang out in the same place, the community, if you like, attend these events. And so there’s massive similarity. In fact, you know, if you’re an alien landing, I suspect that you wouldn’t really know that the two things were different. Okay, there’s different advertisers in the hall and there’s different logos and things, but broadly they would probably look really similar.

However, in the more recent past, and if you don’t know the story, I’m not going to go into it too much here, but you can figure it out by looking at various news articles in the WordPress space and what have you. The WordPress community has really been pulled in different directions, let’s say that. And it’s curious because no sooner had this happened than some of the more prominent people, Dries Buytaert, who is the founder of Drupal, put out a piece, really as a way of kind of offering, look, this is what Drupal do. We know you’ve got on the WordPress side things that are not working out for you. Here’s our model.

And far be it from me to say whether that is the perfect system. I don’t really know it, but I was just curious to get your thoughts on what that is. And that’s going to really occupy the majority of the rest of this podcast. What the Drupal community looks like. What you believe it does well. How it does things differently. So let’s start there. Let’s start with Dries’, what he was telling us about. How does Drupal, the community, how does it do things differently in terms of, I don’t know, events, the access to the code? So yeah, a conversation around that really. So I’m just going to throw it over to you, Chris. How is Drupal different than WordPress on that level?

[00:18:05] Chris Reynolds: Well, I was saying before we got on that I kind of had a crash course in Drupal when I went leading up to, and then immediately following going to DrupalCon. Part of that crash course was at DrupalCon, they actually have a community summit. It’s similar to like, in WordPress we’ve had sort of community summits before. At DrupalCon it was really more of like a track, with like presenters and like also conversations. It’s like space for chatting and hanging out with people.

But mostly, mostly it was like community related talks in a space, talking about what’s working, what’s not working, as well as a sort of a get to know you sort of thing. And that was really helpful. I also did homework before the event in watching a couple of Dries’ last Dries Notes. So Matt has State of the Word, Dries has Dries Notes, which is just like keynote. It’s basically the same thing, like the same state of the CMS, right?

I caught up on what was going on in Drupal before the Con. And one of the things that I learned about, and then I followed up and dug into the history a little bit, was we have the same problems, right? WordPress and Drupal have the same fundamental sort of issues from both a contribution standpoint as well as a just organisational, managerial management kind of standpoint.

And Drupal, or Dries, just kind of got to a point sooner where he’s like, well, I can’t do all of these things. So the Drupal Association, and I’m sure there’s some Drupalistas that are going to correct me on my history, but as I understand it, the Drupal Association was initially formed to sort of manage events, because Dries knew that they needed to have events. They were having events, they started off just similar to WordPress, small camp things. And they started getting bigger and Dries is like, well, I can’t do all of the management stuff of this, so I need to like do something, create an organisation that can do that stuff.

And that was where the Drupal Association first was founded, to sort of manage that thing. And then over time, that evolved into being able to fund, or kind of oversee, directions for where, more of like a community representative in the general sort of CMS development ecosystem, right?

There is a board. They are elected by the community. They are paid. They manage events, but they also, all of the money that is made after expenses and stuff from DrupalCons and donations and whatever, they have the authority to direct into whatever projects they think would be most valuable for the evolution, or the fulfillment, of the ideals of the Drupal software, right?

So Dries says, I want to do a thing, and he can go do that thing. The Drupal Association is like, well, I think that what we really need is this kind of thing, and we’re going to devote some of our resources that we have into hiring some folks to work on that thing.

So, most recently, where you can kind of see this in action is there’s been a lot of hype about Drupal CMS. That is a thing that exists because of the Drupal Association, because the Drupal Association saw, okay, I mean, I assume, I’m reading between the lines. But I assume that you can’t ignore the sort of declining line of Drupal in the broader ecosystem of CMS usage. But also, there’s been a really big problem since Drupal seven of a lot of the sites on Drupal seven remain on Drupal seven.

Drupal seven should be end of life by all accounts. Everything else up to the current version is end of life. Drupal seven isn’t, because there’s still, it’s now just under, but it’s still close to 50% of Drupal sites are running Drupal seven. It’s a version of Drupal that’s about 10 years old.

And the reason why, there’s so many people. Drupal historically has always been a thing where, when a new version came along, you kind of killed your old site and rebuilt it in the new version, because it wasn’t sort of backwards compatible. WordPress has gotten around that by just remaining backwards compatible all throughout its history.

Drupal seven to Drupal eight was the first version to introduce Composer. We talked about Composer and how a Composer’s been part of Drupal for a really long time. that was the cutoff. So that was a pretty big shift. And there’s a lot of people, teams, organizations that have not made, or have been reluctant to make that shift because it’s a, it’s a rebuild. It’s a full site rebuild.

It’s not just, we can just migrate the thing over. You have to rebuild your site. You do need to migrate your stuff over, but also you need to rebuild your site. So in the intervening time, WordPress has gained adoption and acceptance and grown into 43%. And so now we’ve got these Drupal seven sites where it’s like, well, we need to rebuild anyway. Do we rebuild the site in Drupal 10, 11? Or do we rebuild the site in WordPress where I’m never going to have this problem ever again.

And that’s where a lot of that like, bar graph, a lot of those sites have moved to WordPress. Some of them have stayed on Drupal, but it’s a declining number, right?

So obviously, folks inside Drupal see this and know that it’s happening, and know that they need to do something about it. So Drupal CMS is basically like a layer on top of the latest version of Drupal, which is 11. It’s got a far nicer installation screen. I wrote a blog post about this on the Pantheon blog, I think. It’s got a far nicer installation screen, that actually walks you through, stepping through like what type of site, what type of content you want to have on your site. To actually get you thinking about the site that you’re building before you just hit install. Which I find to be amazingly refreshing.

And then beyond that the admin interface is far less cluttered. I know one of my personal gripes about working with Drupal, even up until, up until now, like up until before Drupal CMS is that there’s too many buttons, there’s too many menus, there’s too much stuff. Like, I don’t know where stuff is.

This feels a lot more familiar, partially because I think it kind of resembles the WordPress admin a little bit. You know, sidebar on the left, menus. And it feels just more, more familiar to me. And then also they have built in some new architectural things like, recipes are a thing where, a recipe, Drupal has modules, WordPress has plugins. Modules generally need a lot of configuration, to get them actually working.

When you install a module, it’s not like it just works outta the box. A lot of WordPress plugins, you install a plugin, it just works outta the box. So a recipe is like, here is, maybe a collection of modules, maybe a specific module, but it’s probably a combination of a bunch of different modules, but also the configuration that goes along with them.

So when you install a recipe, it’s like, here’s the stuff that you probably will need. You’re most likely to need this stuff in this order, configured with these settings, and then you can do whatever you need after that. But like, here’s the go bag and now you can move on. So, one of the really interesting recipes for Drupal CMS is the SEO recipe.

And that is interesting because they’re using a Yoast module. The Yoast module is literally taking the JavaScript of Yoast SEO from the WordPress plugin and throwing it into Drupal. And what’s fascinating about that is it doesn’t have all of the other stuff that comes with the Yoast plugin, it’s just the traffic light system, and the scanning the text system and it’s, so it’s the best possible implementation of Yoast that I’ve seen because it’s all of the good stuff.

They’ve also built an AI recipe. And that’s interesting because when that is configured, you can actually talk to an AI chat bot inside your Drupal instance and ask it questions about Drupal or about your site. You could say, hey, I need to create an event content type. I’m gonna be hosting events. They’re this type of thing. I need to have a, like a, date picker and whatever, and we are taking attendees and you can tell that the chat bot that that’s the thing that you need. And it will, to the best of its ability, build that content type inside Drupal for you.

So the WordPress equivalent is, I have a podcast and I need an episode post type. I just talk to a chat bot, and it magically creates that episode post type for me with like the Gutenberg blocks I need. That makes it an audio format or whatever. And, it’s just there for you. It’s like, great, thank you chat bot. As a WordPress developer, I think that’s really cool. Because that’s kind of the thing that I want, is like I know how to do some things, but I really don’t know any of the buttons and gears and gizmos in the Drupal admin.

But if I have a chat bot to sort of help guide me through, I know I can figure out the rest of the way, or I can see how it did the thing, and I can figure out, oh okay, so that’s what I need to do. And so all of these things are geared toward the idea of just getting more people using Drupal and lowering the barrier to entry.

Because one of the big things with Drupal is it’s always been really developer centric, really highly technical, and you need sort of skilled individuals to even just manage the site. So if we lower that barrier to entry, you can target the people that are already using WordPress, the sort of content level people or the site administrators that don’t have a lot of technical experience.

That’s all like basically because the Drupal Association put money, funding that they had into backing these very specific projects.

[00:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of a curious idea, isn’t it? It’s like a subset of the CMSs capabilities put into this one project, Drupal CMS. Which has like a target audience in mind. So it’s like a blogger, or a podcaster or something like that. You know, it’s for content creators. That was the message I got from when I read all of the, the marketing bits and pieces that came out.

But also addressing the need for it to look nice. That was always an area I thought WordPress excelled at. When you logged into the WordPress admin, it was night and day looking at a Drupal admin. Everything was consistent. Everything looked modern and clean and easy to understand. On the Drupal side, it was, it was much more difficult to understand. But also things like updating plugins. Backwards compatibility on the WordPress side, always much more straightforward. On the Drupal side, much more difficult.

And so this is such a curious experiment. Putting it into the hands of people who might want a blog, or whatever it may be, and hopefully making it more straightforward. And the website for it, I will link to it in the show notes, it’s just so kind of modern and appealing and friendly and, Drupal never, for me at least when I got to Drupal eight, for the exact reasons that you described, that’s all of my sites would have stayed on Drupal seven.

It definitely wasn’t that kind of warm and fuzzy welcome to everybody kind of thing. But now it really look like it’s leaning into that. But getting back to your main point, that was funded from the inside by some, facets, some internal mechanisms, some body inside the Drupal Association that decided that’s what we need to do. This is where the money’s going. But are you saying that decision making was divorced from Dries?

[00:29:02] Chris Reynolds: Dries leads the technical architecture. And Dries will like say we need to do a thing. And he may be personally involved in the leadership of doing that thing, but mostly he’s like at a director level. Like, go my people and go forth and do stuff. And the Drupal Association says, okay, well one of the things that Dries said we need to do is X. So how can we make X happen? And in the case of recipes, it meant getting agencies and people from agencies involved. Create like a coalition. Like there’s a bunch, it wasn’t just one agency. It was like a bunch of people from different agencies are working on this thing together. Which is another thing that I find really interesting about the Drupal ecosystem.

I have thoughts about that too. But in this context, yeah, I get a bunch of different people to work on this thing. Um. Whether it’s the SEO recipe. Whether it’s the AI recipe, and they, I think the way that it sort of broke down is, and it might have been even Dries that conceptualized the idea of recipes and it’s like, okay, go out and implement this thing.

But when they did, it was like, okay, if we’re gonna do this thing, we need these types of recipes from the get go, from day one. We need SEO, we need whatever. We need AI, we need content things, so that people have an idea of what a recipe is and can start building their own recipes.

[00:30:15] Nathan Wrigley: So they’re bound into it? You can’t install Drupal CMS without those things. They’re just there.

[00:30:20] Chris Reynolds: It supports the recipes, and in the installation process, when you’re doing the Drupal CMS installation, that screen that I was talking about, where it’s like asking you the type of site you want to build, those types of sites in quotations, correspond to sets of recipes that align with each of those things.

It doesn’t ask you about AI in the installation screen, but it does sort of say like, oh, do you want this type of content or that type of content? And then we, based on your selection, it automatically installs those recipes for you.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s installing things based upon a wizard at the beginning, but the principle being though that you the end user, not really interacting with anything apart from oh, I would like that. Yes, please. I would like that. And then you finally get to the end of the wizard, wait for a few moments. The modules get installed, activated, and they’re pre-configured to behave in a way which is likely to be the best that you can get.

[00:31:08] Chris Reynolds: To get you as close to what you want as possible. And the goal, the roadmap, is Dries wants to actually take that one step further, and do sort of site templates where if a recipe is a collection of modules and configuration, a template would be like, I want to build a real estate site. So I download this template, or I install this template and then click a button or two and it gives me a real estate site with the configuration that I might need to have a real estate site.

And obviously I can go in and customize things, but I have a starting point. One of the things that I heard a lot when I was talking to people within Drupal, among other things, there’s not really a marketplace as much for stuff, for software, for add-ons in the way that there is in WordPress. And there’s not really in particular, there’s not really the same sort of like theme or a repository, or a place to go for commonly used or shared themes in the way that we have the Themes Repository. Mostly you have like the default things and then you’re building your own.

So, as a user, having a template that maybe comes with a theme that is specifically tuned for that type of site is a really big win, because there really isn’t an alternative in the current ecosystem within Drupal.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s, really worth leaning into because again, please interrupt me if what I’m about to say doesn’t actually match reality anymore. But when I was using Drupal, there was basically no commercial plugin system. Everybody had kind of leaned into the same thing for the same problem.

So if you wanted to put a form on your website, there were a few, but there was this one called Webform, and it was just the one everybody leaned into it. And so rather than in the WordPress space where you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a few repository ones that are free and easy to use, and then you’ve got the commercial ones that you can pay for and they add different features and support levels and all that kind of thing.

In the Drupal space, it felt like there was just this one kind of community endeavor to do the thing. Yeah, so if you wanted something to display data, Views was the thing you used. The Views module, and I think that did actually get rolled into Core. So it’s there. My point being, there isn’t this sort of, shattering is the wrong word, but in the WordPress space, there’s often a dozen, more than a dozen, there’s multiple alternatives. So you have to go and find the right thing.

In the Drupal space, it feels more like, okay, for that problem, we have this module, and everybody leans into it. So I’m presuming that all the people who contribute in the community to the code and what have you, they’ll all finesse that version. But that means therefore, that when you come to build the CMS, there’s basically this one way of doing it? Okay, if you want forms, we’re going to use that module. And if we’re going to add this feature for real estate or what have you, here’s the modules that we’re going to add in. And the jigsaw of those modules will make it work. And that’s different from WordPress. WordPress has much more leaned into commercial plugins and kind of figure out which ones you want for yourself.

[00:34:04] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, that was one of the things that I didn’t know going into DrupalCon that I learned while I was there. It’s a really different approach, and I actually kind of appreciate the Drupal model because the community is built around more of an idea of, if I build a form plugin and you build a form plugin, and mine is the defacto form plugin or.

In the Drupal space, it’s really more of a, well, let me talk to you and see what ideas you have that we can bring into the canonical one and just collectively like integrate those things. And that’s, that is a thing that happens more often than not in Drupal. That’s why you don’t see the competition, the competing modules for different things.

Because if you had a competing thing, or you had a different idea, you would contribute it to the one module that does that thing. Or if you had a different thing, then you might be invited to do the same, right?

In the WordPress space, it’s like I want to protect my form module or my form plugin because right now it’s free, but tomorrow I might want to sell it, and I want to keep my intellectual property to myself and not contribute because, you know, I might wanna make a buck on this later.

And, I kind of like the other thing better because it’s more, it is more of a community. Like I get like wanting to make money and everybody wants to make money and have a form plug in. Like, that’s great. Like I’m not going to say Gravity Forms shouldn’t exist or anything like that. Gravity Forms is amazing. But I do think that building an ecosystem around contributing to a collective, or a community based solution for the thing, where everybody has a, a say or a seat at the table, is a really, I don’t know, possibly overly idealistic, but very optimistic sort of view of how we can contribute to software.

I find it really nice. Like it feels good. Like it feels less like we’re all trying to grab our little piece of territory, you know?

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: It feels to me like that moment when you first install Linux. And you realize, wow, there’s a free OS that I can put on my computer. And there’s just something quite remarkable about that. That a bunch of people got together and, really pointed everything at this one solution. I suppose that is the choice that you’re going to make. Really, that there is something right in there.

You know, the commercial side of WordPress has probably been its single biggest accelerator. The fact that people could build businesses on it. And they could have a living. They could obviously refine and finess and dedicate real time entire lifetimes, in many cases. Get staff on, support staff and what have you. Pay all of those people because they’ve cracked this nut and everybody wants a piece of it.

Whereas on the Drupal side, it’s much more, let’s go for egalitarian, let’s say that. But it, also, I suppose, means that at the moment where something doesn’t work you probably have to either understand how to maintain that yourself or hire a developer.

So there’s a bit of a trade off there. And I presume, like I said, I imagine that’s why there was this acceleration of WordPress’s popularity because the people who maybe were buying these plugins had that intention, I just want a website. I don’t want to learn how to code. I’m not interested in that.

I can see over here, look, I can buy that. It’s $97 a year. That’s perfect. That’ll satisfy me perfectly. Whereas maybe more on the Drupal side, it’s okay, that kind of works, but not entirely. I now need to make it work and obviously the community can do that.

So that leads me then to the next question, which is, who the heck builds Drupal? So in the WordPress space, if you’re listening to this, you probably have an understanding of that. There’s a lot of volunteers, but there’s also a lot of companies that will dedicate a proportion of their time. We have this idea of Five for the Future. And so 5% of whatever it is that you want to give, be that time or money, or what have you. And so there’s this idea of community massively, but also corporations, businesses, putting time in. Is it the same basically on the Drupal side? Is that how it works?

[00:37:51] Chris Reynolds: Yeah, largely. One of the things that I think you’ll notice that is a little bit of a distinction between WordPress and Drupal, from the events again. Is going through like the showroom, the sponsors floor. And at a WordCamp you see the hosts obviously, but then you see a lot of like plugin development shops, and that’s pretty much what I would expect, right? Big plugin or theme development shops and WordPress hosts. And a lot of the WordPress hosts are doing plugin development, and like, that’s sort of the thing.

In Drupal, and at DrupalCon, obviously we have the hosts. And we had a, I mean, CKE Editor was there. That was kind of weird to me. I don’t know, like it’s in Drupal. It was weird to have like a library have a booth space. That seemed weird to me. But like it’s a lot of agencies, because agencies are the ones that are doing the work, and I’ve never seen an agency or maybe not since very small, like local WordCamps, have I seen an agency with a sponsorship, a booth space at a WordCamp.

But that is, that’s where it is. And it’s agencies that do a lot of that Core contribution, because they’re also in the weeds working with clients and building these things for their Drupal customers. And so like, the SEO recipe that I was talking about, like at DrupalCon we, Pantheon has booth demos. Acquia also has booth demos, which means we can talk about, like do demos of our platform, whatever. What we actually did was bring in guest speakers from like agencies and universities and whatever that are actually using Drupal and Pantheon and to talk about their implementation of the cool stuff that they’re doing, because that works better.

And one of the people that I talked to was about the SEO recipe, and he is at an agency and he worked with other people at other agencies, competing agencies even, to make this SEO recipe. So it’s, that’s where the contribution comes from. But again, like it’s the same sort of thing.

Dries said 10 years ago, wrote a blog post about the maker taker problem, as he defines it. And then again in September, in relation to the current state of things in the WordPress ecosystem, because that’s a thing that he’s been thinking about for a long time. It’s obviously a thing that Matt’s been thinking about for a long time.

Like it’s not, again, we’re not that different. We have the same fundamental problems. At the Community Summit at DrupalCon, one of the topics of conversation was getting more people involved, a younger generation involved into Drupal development, which is the exact same conversation we’re having in WordPress as well.

Like, how do we appeal to a younger audience? It’s all the same stuff, right? And there was at some point like a contribution like pie chart. Again, similar to the pie chart that could be displayed at a WordCamp. You know, Automattic does a big chunk of that pie chart.

And then you’ve got, you know, maybe Google does a smaller part of that pie chart and maybe like Bluehost or whatever. Similar pie chart. Acquia does a lot of the big part of the, of that pie chart. And then like other agencies are noted around, and then there’s like an other category, right, of just like individual contributors. It’s a very similar breakdown.

[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting because obviously you alluded to the fact that WordPress has been in a state of flux since September. But Dries, I presume prompted by the situation that arose out of WordCamp US. He wrote a piece very much timed after that. So I presume it was in, there was some sort of correlation in his head. And he was laying out how Drupal have, not solved, but how they just have a different approach to that. And I can’t remember every single detail, but there was some curious examples in the Drupal community, like this kind of, I’m going to say pay to play thing.

In other words, if you as a company, let’s say Pantheon may fit into this perfectly, if Pantheon steps through certain hoops and can prove that they did this thing and this thing and this thing for the community, for the Drupal project. If you step through those hoops, you then get, kind of, merit on the other side.

You can, for example, turn up to DrupalCon as a sponsor. My understanding is that maybe it’s only certain tiers, I’m not really sure. But you can’t sponsor DrupalCon unless you have jumped through those hoops. And we don’t really have anything on the WordPress side like that. We have Five for the Future, but it’s hard to pin down. It’s hard to figure out who did what and what have you, because there aren’t the same sort of goalposts, but it feels like the goalposts are a bit more nailed down on the Drupal side.

[00:42:03] Chris Reynolds: There is a process of nailing things down. I don’t know that it goes to the level of, like you can’t actually sponsor, because obviously Pantheon does sponsor and we’ve been, on the other end of being told that we don’t contribute enough to both WordPress and Drupal. But that also depends on how you define contribution really. And I have thoughts about that. The merit thing, it’s just where you’re drawing the lines in the sand. And Drupal has, Dries has his particular lines and the things that make you a contributor to the ecosystem, and what that means in Drupal.

And then, to a degree, I mean, yeah, like you said, Five for the Future is kind of, sort of that thing, but it’s also kind of amalgamous and like it’s honor based. There’s not really a real sense of tracking or, you could kind of, sort of track things, I guess. But it’s very wibbly wobbly.

But my perspective on contribution always has always been, one of the things, I know we’re not supposed to talk about what was talked about at PressConf, but Brad Williams, who I, was my former boss said, he was talking about Five for the Future and was talking about how Web Dev was very early on an adopter of Five for the Future, and I was there at the time, so I remember this. So it’s not just Brad’s words that I’m repeating. And the way that he approached Five for the Future was very much in the umbrella of if you’re doing anything WordPress related that is open source, we are counting that as a Five for the Future project, right. And that was how I understood Five for the Future.

That was kind of how it was presented back in 2014 or whatever when Matt first threw the idea out to the, out to the ecosystem. And since then it’s sort of become this thing where contribution to WordPress really means Core contributions, or contributions in very specific ways. And it doesn’t mean all of this other stuff over here, including an up to theme development, plugin development.

Even if that stuff is on .org, even if that stuff is open source, that’s not included in contribution. But I’m very much in the side of the bucket where like, well, everything is kind of contribution. We wouldn’t know how good WordPress scales to like enterprise level sites that are running it today, that are driving the adoption of WordPress, and driving the bar in like the visibility of WordPress, if it wasn’t for just hosts that are running the thing and making sure that it operates properly. And the teams like 10up and Human Made, and whoever who are like then, oh, to get this working at its best, fastest, most optimized state we need to do some enhancements. Either through the plugin ecosystem or contributing back to Core, so that we can push this code to these hosts, or platforms, or softwares as a service or whatever so that they operate for these clients that we’re building.

So like I kind of feel like everything should be, even if you are a taker, in the language of Dries, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not pushing the ecosystem forward. And I have that critique for both of our BDFLs, right? Because they both have very similar ideas.

Like I think that the contribution title could be applied and should be applied more broadly, because everything that we’re doing is driving the project forward. A lot of the stuff that I write is like GitHub actions, or like plugins or things that are still broadly available to, and publicly available, and they’re open source and they’re for the community, but they’re not technically contribution, because contribution is narrowed down into this very specific definition.

[00:45:30] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious, you know, if you were to cast your mind back 20 years, the beginning of both Drupal and WordPress, just even the idea that they would still be around for one thing, you know, that that software wouldn’t have just come and eaten them up and there would be like a two year lifespan.

[00:45:44] Chris Reynolds: And that there’s an open source solution for these things.

[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s going and it’s kept rising and it’s kept being used. That’s just so curious. But also the teething pains of that. The idea that, you know, it started with Matt, and it started with Dries, and then people got on board and it grew. And then in the case of Drupal, and in the case of WordPress, it just grew to the point where these individuals can no longer handle everything.

You know, you described how Dries needed to sort of say, can somebody handle the events please? Because that’s just not where I want to be. The same, presumably on the WordPress side. And now we’re into giant communities. Really, really complicated communities. A lot of differing opinions, a lot of different maybe even politics, but a lot of different backgrounds, geography, the whole thing.

It’s this international thing. And it’s difficult. It’s really, really hard to get it right. But what I’m taking from this conversation. Is that maybe Drupal do things differently, but they have way more in common than we have as differences.

But also maybe there are some things that WordPress does better. Maybe there are some things that Drupal does better. And it would be very, very interesting if the two communities could kind of collide more, and share those ideas and we pick the best of each of them. It’s never gonna be perfect, but maybe that’s something that in the future, given that really at a very core level we’re not in competition with each other, it would be very nice if those conversations could take place.

And I think you’ve laid the groundwork for a lot of that and explained how one project is not that dissimilar to the other one. So, that’s it.

Chris, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it. That was very enlightening.

[00:47:22] Chris Reynolds: Thank you for having me. I always love chatting with you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a personal journey through the history of the internet from start to now.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wp tavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Wes Tatters. Wes has been immersed in the tech space for close to four decades, starting his journey with early computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS 80. He’s been an author, with multiple books on internet technologies to his name, has worked across AV and media, and today he’s the driving force behind Rapyd Cloud, a globally distributed hosting company. Wes’ perspective is shaped as much by his hands-on experience building communities on CompuServe, AOL and MSN, as by his deep involvement with modern open source platforms like WordPress.

Wes starts off by sharing some of the fascinating stories from the early web, when getting online meant stringing together modems and bulletin boards, and long distance communication felt nothing short of miraculous. He talks about the evolution of the internet as a space for community, and how chance encounters in early online forums led to opportunities like writing for Netscape and shaping the very first JavaScript Developer Guides.

We then discuss the changing meaning of community across different eras of the internet, touching on the shift from closed walled gardens, like AOL, to the open source ethos that powers projects like WordPress, and much else that we take for granted online. Wes describes how WordPress’ flexibility and openness allowed anyone, anywhere, to claim their own piece of the web without technical barriers, and how this has contributed to its rise as a cornerstone of global digital freedom and self-expression.

Our conversation also examines the challenges, and potential missteps, of the modern internet from social loneliness, to the commercial world of social media. And reflects on WordPress’s role in helping steer a path back to more positive, open, and empowering online experiences.

If you’re interested in how the history of the internet directly shaped WordPress, the Open Web, and the communities we build today, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wp tavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Wes Tatters.

I am joined on the podcast today by Wes Tatters. Hello, Wes.

[00:03:50] Wes Tatters: Nathan, good to be talking together again.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve got to be very, very, accommodating of Wes’ time, because for me it’s about four in the afternoon, something like that. Wes, on the other side of the planet, is giving up his time at about one in the morning. I have no idea why you are here, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:04:07] Wes Tatters: Oh look, my day tends to be largely focused on talking to people in Europe, and in the United States. Half my employees are in those parts of the world as well. So I tend to work midnight to midnight. And we’re in the middle of a big product launch, for Rapyd, which has meant we’re just talking, and being visible, and I’m awake and happy to chat.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: So you literally pivot your day, your Australian day, you pivot it so that you are available for North American and European customers. So we should probably say you work for a hosting company called Rapyd Cloud, And that’s where the thrust of your marketing endeavors go. So you pivot your day?

[00:04:41] Wes Tatters: Yeah, like about, I think about 60% of our customers are in the United States, and about 30, 45, 35 are in Europe, and 5% or something in Asia, Which is pretty generic for the WordPress space. Our focus is around obviously those markets, but also because we’re a global company, we don’t have a head office.

Everyone who works in our team is doing it remotely. It might be Dubai, or Chicago or the Philippines or Pakistan, India. So we choose times of the day, we have this great calendar and for every meeting we post up a list of all the times, and then there’s happy faces, red faces and smiley faces. And someone will go, all right, I’ll take the red face. That’s the nature of WordPress though.

[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, madness though, when you think about it. If you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here, I am talking you through a web browser, as if it’s nothing, and it is utterly remarkable. And actually that’s going to be the thrust of this conversation, I think. We’re going to trace the WordPress community in particular, not just the community, the software and what have you, over the period of time it’s been in existence, 21 years odd.

So, do you want just give us your backstory, specifically I guess around WordPress, but just generally in tech? Because I know you’ve done quite a lot of other AV related things as well.

[00:05:54] Wes Tatters: I’ve, been in the tech space for close to 40 years. I was trying to work it out a little while ago, and it’s like, I remember my first computer. It was a Commodore 64 or something, or a TRS 80, or something like that. And I would’ve been 16 or 17, and even then it was like, I was programming them, not playing games on them. I enjoyed programming and coding.

So I started very early in the tech space, but as a result of which, even modems didn’t really exist when I first started in the IT space. Laptops and PCs and computers and certainly iPhones and all that wonderful technology we have today didn’t exist.

But there was already people in the space at places like DARPA, that were going, how do we connect the world? It was a government military strategy. How do we connect the world in the event of a nuclear war? That was the driving mentality behind what they were planning. It was originally going to be a network of radio towers sending, a bit like we had with the old modems, the buzzing noises.

But it was this whole concept of, how do we build a disconnected system that can survive massive breakdowns in the structure of communication? And a part of what they build, ironically, is what makes the internet so powerful these days. It’s that ability to interconnect disparate technologies, disparate systems, all different types of capabilities and devices and all those sorts of things, in ways that are transparent.

As you just said, we’re in two parts of the world and we are talking together in real time. I grew up in the, as a part of my life, in the media world, and film and television and primarily television. In a point in time where if we wanted to conduct a live interview with someone on the other side of the world, firstly, we had to book satellite space in the thousands of dollars per minute almost. And then we would go, Nathan, are you there?

And Nathan would come back four seconds later, and we would conduct these really bizarre interviews, with delays on this crazy technology. So much so that when live television was first starting, obviously there was a big fear that someone would say naughty words, or swear on television for the want of a better word. And one of the early ways that they originally managed, we have what’s called, a lot of television stations had this big red button called a dump button.

The whole idea was someone said f, someone had to slam the big dump button. But the way they we’re actually handling it was they were actually sending the entire signal up to a satellite and back down to the ground station before they transmitted it. Because that gave them roughly two or three seconds of delay, which gave them the ability for that big red button to stop the transmission point. But the signal had gone up and down through a satellite just to even achieve that craziness.

I came into that world, and started in that world. I was incredibly lucky that I lucked into an IT firm, here in Australia, that was at that stage of company that doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s a company called Wang Microsystems. Dr. Wang was the guy that invented the first memory ship, so he, he’s reasonably well healed, but that entire platform doesn’t exist. But Wang was one of the first it companies to release a processor with a box. There was this three racks that was a modem.

300 characters per second. It was bleedingly fast. But for, its time, and I was one of the first people that got to play with one of those things in Australia. And I’ll tell you what, I was hooked. I just went, even then I could go, oh my goodness. There were dreams of we can make it faster.

And we got 1200 baud, and then we got 1600 baud, and then we got 3,200 baud and 56 k. And every bit was exciting. Because what it was allowing me as a person to do, especially a person in Australia, was to reach out and communicate with people that weren’t in my part of the world. And we had things like America Online, well CompuServe first, I guess prior to America Online.

We had bulletin boards and local BBS software and things like that. And all of them were creating communities. All of them were starting to build communities around this same space. It was something that I really engaged with.

When I got into CompuServe though, it for me changed a lot of things. Because until that stage it was hard to communicate with anyone outside Australia. But with CompuServe, all of a sudden, I was connected to people around the world.

[00:10:37] Nathan Wrigley: What did that connection actually feel like though? Was it literally, you’d type something, and was it you’d leave the computer, like the email sort of exchange?

[00:10:46] Wes Tatters: They were really very, very similar to an early sort of discussion board. People would leave comments, and people would make comments back and respond, and people built relationships and discussions were built. And in my early life I was an author. I’ve written a number of books on internet technologies.

This is the guy in Brisbane, Australia, who happened to luck into a forum on CompuServe with a guy named Mark Tabor, who was the head of publishing acquisitions for Schuster and Schuster, which is McMillan, and sams.net, the biggest publisher on the planet.

And Mark was going, we are looking for authors to write in this space. They were releasing a new imprint at the time called sams.net, which was going to be like. Theirs was Teach Yourself series.

They were building it at McMillan, and their biggest problem was respectfully that IT people don’t make good writers. Love us, or like us, we don’t even like writing comments in code, let alone knocking out 4 or 500 pages of a book, to tell someone how to do something.

But that ability to be in a community outside of my own space, this is me in Brisbane, Australia, talking to the head of acquisitions for Macmillan, going, yeah, I can write a book. I’d already been doing some writing. I had, as I said from, because I have a media background, I’d been writing for magazine articles in Australia, and I’d been involved in communications and had some journalism experience, so I was kind of already in the space.

And yeah, the book got written. We actually wrote a book that told people how to connect CompuServe to the internet, because previously CompuServe couldn’t be connected to the internet.

[00:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember those times like halcyon day’s, rose tinted spectacles. Because that was real pioneering stuff. The idea that, okay, so dear listener, if you are under the age of 30, your world was entirely connected from the moment you could conceive a thought. In some respect you could turn the tele on and be live tele from around the globe. You may not have had internet access.

[00:12:44] Wes Tatters: I remember trying to explain to my parents what I was doing, and they were looking at me going, you’re doing what? And it wasn’t until the first book, 500 pages, 50 copies arrived in a box from McMillan, that the lights went on in parents’ head who went, okay.

[00:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: There’s something in this.

[00:13:05] Wes Tatters: This is odd. And we sold hundreds of thousands of copies of edition of these books. I wrote the same book for America Online.

The joke was America Online actually wasn’t even in Australia at that stage, which was interesting. But it gave me lots of opportunities, and this was about communities. This was about getting into communities. While I was in that community, talking, working with the a AOL team on how they were going to connect to this thing called the internet. There was a little crowd called Netscape banging around, going hey, love what you did, Tim. Love that original browser. We’re going to build a better one.

[00:13:37] Nathan Wrigley: An open one.

[00:13:38] Wes Tatters: An open one. And the Netscape guys had seen my books, came to my publisher and said, hey, could we do a book with Wes on how to write, how to build websites for Netscape? So we wrote six books for Netscape over the next five years, going teach yourself HTML development for Netscape. So community was the whole basis of it.

[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious that for people that are born in the last, like I said, 20 years or so, the internet has just been a feature of their life, almost like a utility. Almost in certain parts of the world, like a human right. You might even describe it on that level.

This conduit of information that can come in. This capacity to talk to people, any point on the globe almost immediately with almost zero cost. And in the time that you are describing just the merest foundations of that were beginning. Little glimmers of that would beginning to emerge.

[00:14:34] Wes Tatters: Really edge.

[00:14:35] Nathan Wrigley: Really interesting though. I can imagine your passion and interest and all of that must have been. The curiosity that was spiked by that.

[00:14:42] Wes Tatters: It was. I loved it. But even then, we still didn’t truly understand where it was going.

I remember a call from the team at Netscape going, it was around, I think it was around version three of the Netscape. Going we’ve got this idea we’re going to, we’re going to put a scripting thing in Netscape. What do you think? And I’m going, yeah. What do you mean? What do you think? We need you to include it in the next book. It’s this little thing called JavaScript.

[00:15:04] Nathan Wrigley: Just little thing.

[00:15:06] Wes Tatters: And I remember sitting there going, interesting idea. Can you tell me more about what it can do? And they went, we don’t really know yet. We’re still working on those bits. So we ended up writing the first JavaScript development guide, me and my technical writer, who was my technical editor for my Netscape books. And I wrote the first JavaScript Developers Guide for Netscape.

So we were there in the middle of it, but all the way through, we still didn’t truly get it. It was still such this small thing. I was talking with Bud.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Bud Kraus.

[00:15:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, I was talking with Bud at PressConf, and we were chatting about just the way the internet’s evolved. I had the opportunity to meet Tim Burnes Lee.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, the Godfather.

[00:15:48] Wes Tatters: The Godfather of the internet. And listening to Tim talking about his dream of the internet and the worldwide web, this was a worldwide web conference seven, which was back before WordCamps. It was, that was what a WordCamp looked like before it was WordPress. And I look back and I was thinking, and I’m going, there were some serious names at that event. Tim Burnes Lee was there. James Gosling, the founder of Java, was there.

And these were guys doing for the want of a better WordCamp style sessions, chatting about these ideas they’ve had. Seeing even then that what the worldwide web, and what we’ve grown into with WordPress had the potential to be, was entirely different to the way the world thought before that.

I remember there was like, I think it was the Friday night. I actually ran the media for that particular conference, that was held in Australia. It was the first time being held out of the northern hemisphere. But no fully explained reason, it was being held in Australia, in my hometown, and I ran all the media for it.

And I remember some guys, they had this sort, they were going to create this shoe library, it was like, this is the early web. Who knows what we’re going to do with it? We want a shoe library.

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: A shoe library, yeah.

[00:17:01] Wes Tatters: They taking photographs of people’s shoes, and I remember it was like 7:30 on a Friday night, and Tim’s in a pair of slacks and a t-shirt. Taking his shoes off so that they could photograph his shoes, so that his photograph of his shoes could go into the shoe library.

[00:17:19] Nathan Wrigley: Of course.

[00:17:20] Wes Tatters: And this is the guy that invented the thing that we all live on. This is the father of everything we do today. But even then, he was this amazingly humble person, that was happy to have a chat with a bunch of kids and take photos of his shoes. It’s a different world.

[00:17:38] Nathan Wrigley: When you are where you’re at. So in the year 2025, we’re concerned about the internet now. And so the way it ended up is how it now is. And honestly, it’s not one of those things that you pick apart, as like what is the history? What were the dominoes that fell to make the internet, what it now is?

Like, history, politics and warfare, and all of those kind of things get dealt with by historians. The migration of people over great land masses, all of the kings, queens, all of that.

But this, this kind of doesn’t, and it’s fascinating to listen to you there, because it feels like it could have gone in so many different directions. Maybe would’ve been a more AOL type thing, where everything was closed and you had to buy into AOL, and everything was handled by AOL. It didn’t turn out that way. Open won. I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t swing back to closed with things social media?

[00:18:29] Wes Tatters: One of the things that caused that was the people who started using the technology that DARPA invented first, and it was universities.

[00:18:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. That was the client base, wasn’t it? It was the academics.

[00:18:44] Wes Tatters: It was the academics. So Tim’s original agenda was to obviously create a way to communicate with all the scientists in Cern what was happening in the accelerator that was sitting under three countries. Even then it was about community and communication. But as it’s walked forward, I look at the whole journey of the internet and at every point community has been a part of that.

The ability to share things. The whole basis of what we have today in open source, moving towards WordPress, is about communication. So you can’t have open source without a group of people coming together to collaborate on a project as large as WordPress, or as large as, Linux or as large as Drupal, or as large as all of these other projects. And they’re not being paid for the most part.

They’re doing it because of community, and the underlying technology behind that obviously is the internet. And more insignificantly since then this thing called the World Wide Web that Tim originally envisaged as a tool for sharing.

[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But just tool for sharing with a handful of academics, and then it just grew exponentially. Do you remember the first time that the internet became more social. No, let me rephrase that. Do you remember when the internet shifted from something which a few people did? To something where, not the majority, but it was like hard to ignore at that point. Because definitely as a child have a of no internet.

[00:20:20] Wes Tatters: Done badly, but Microsoft MSN. Windows 95 was the watershed. So Windows 95 launched, and for the first time, anyone, in inverted commas, with a modem didn’t need to know someone at a university. Didn’t need to know how to hard wire AOL to connect to something else. They could literally go get me on the internet, and it happened. So that was the watershed moment.

Now, MSN as a platform also was heavily driven by community. And again, like it or love them, the original version of Messenger, an embarrassing mess, but it started the concept of community. The original version of MSN was a place where you could go and chat. Their design philosophies around. I remember, in Australia, 9 MSN was, the branding of it. 9 here is our major television network, and they partnered with MSN, in Microsoft and Australia and our major telco to bring MSN to Australia. But it was heavily geared around building communities. And I was quite active in that MSN community in Australia.

We used to do things like popular TV shows would go to air, and then we would host forums where the actor, or the presenter, or someone from the show would hop literally straight off, the show would end at 9:30, and they would be in a forum going, and hey, tonight we’ve got insert name of whoever it is.

And people could ask them questions. And we curated it. I was a part of the curations team at 9 MSN at that stage. And, again, it was using this crazy technology to build community, and to expand communities.

Now for that network they were using as just obviously a marketing tool, but what it was doing underneath it was again, building this ethos of communities and spaces.

We then have obviously Facebook that took that and ran with it in crazy directions, and commercialized it. But underneath it we’re still this open source thing. There’s still whole open source community.

[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember the moment as well when the internet went more from a consumption kind of thing? So you know, you would log onto somebody else’s property, MSNs Messenger or whatever it may be. I do remember that, by the way. To I can own a bit of the web, a bit of that whole thing can be something that I am in control of. And now we move towards CMSs I guess.

[00:22:51] Wes Tatters: So this is probably 98 initially. So we were still writing books and Netscape was still trying to work out what they were doing in the world. And, Tim was, Tim was out telling people how big the internet could be. And I remember lots and lots of people, as I said, James Gosling’s come down, Tim Berners Lee’s come. The BBC had flown two camera teams, journalists, The Times had flown out people. NBC and CBS had flown out camera crews and to be at this event. Because Sir Tim was becoming Professor Tim at that stage. He was being reordered, a honorary doctorate from an Australian university. It was a big event.

Could not get a single Australian broadcaster to even show up. Now, put this in perspective. I knew them all. I was actually in that industry. I knew the people. I literally was on the phone to news directors going, dude, just send me one cameraman. Oh, what’s this thing? What’s this thing? It was the internet.

So 95 to 98, it was still a bit hokey. I think where it really started to change though is when things like WordPress started to arrive. Because before that my books on how to build a website, I love meeting people and go, I think I’ve got your book on a shelf somewhere. It was, and it was always either mine or Laura Lemay’s.

Laura and I were both writing in parallel for the same publisher. And some of her chapters are in my books, my chapters in her books. But then it was, we were still hacking HTML. If you wanted to use JavaScript, it wasn’t jQuery or anything like that. You were writing lines of code and hoping it worked.

And there were some predecessors and other things. Microsoft had to go at the same thing. Microsoft released a product called ASP, a little thing that.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, that’s right. Active Server Pages.

[00:24:35] Wes Tatters: Yeah, and then they released a thing called asp.net, and this wonderful new programming language called C#. And that was their push into this community space. They released open source product with it. They released a product which was called I Buy Spy Portal, which was eventually then forked into a product by a guy named Sean Walker to become a product called DotNetNuke, which was literally their version of WordPress.

I was there, I know Sean. I was in that space, and we were building communities again, coming outta the Microsoft space on DotNetNuke. At the same time, this little thing called WordPress was happening in parallel. At that stage, ironically, at that stage, I think DotNetNuke was actually more a CMS than WordPress was. Because WordPress was still really a blogging tool. It was still really MySpace for people who actually had a desire to code a bit.

But I think it was then, that WordPress journey, the arrival of a mechanism that did two things. It allowed you to create a website without knowing how to code, and it allowed you to become a part of something, a community online, where you could all of a sudden reach out of your local neighborhood, your local city, your country, into the rest of the world. And take things to the rest of the world. Sell products to the rest of the world. Communicate to the rest of the world. Share your opinions and thoughts. In the past, you could do that on CompuServe. You could do that on America Online. But in all those places, you didn’t own your content.

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right, exactly that.

[00:26:18] Wes Tatters: Even MySpace, sort of like the predecessor to almost Facebook. Facebook groups and forums. None of these spaces you owned your content. And so I think WordPress in its initial incarnation, a blog, was a way for people to start expressing their feelings. And the concept of blogging. And then we started to grow that how do we get our blog to the world? Well, RSS feeds, and then aggregators, and then this wonderful thing called Google came along.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Discoverability.

[00:26:47] Wes Tatters: Discoverability, and visibility. And all along that journey, there’s this guy in the states beavering away, we’re talking about Matt, with a vision of what WordPress could be in that space. And he was creating that in parallel to these communities starting to emerge, to these other companies like Google, and Facebook building closed enclaves.

Where Matt, obviously very passionate about open source, had a philosophy to build this space that people could use, that people could communicate and share. It was incredibly open. Anyone could write a plugin. Anyone could write a theme. Anyone could decide that they wanted to commercialize that space by selling their theme or selling their plugin.

Hosting companies could host that platform. So the fact that was such an open product, tweaked something in the consciousness of the time. It tweaked something in that desire to communicate, but also I guess a concept of freedom to communicate.

Freedom of speech is a passionate position of a lot of countries. The right to freedom of speech, and to a certain extent the right to express an opinion, safely. Or in some cases the rights to communicate in communities.

I discovered during Covid that the platform that Rapyd grew out of Buddy Boss, which is a social media platform creation tool for WordPress. Install Buddy Boss and you’ve got your own private Facebook.

We discovered that there were communities using Buddy Boss to communicate things to their people that they were terrified to communicate on private spaces, like social media or Facebooks. I know people specifically in some of those communities, doctors, other frontline groups and organizations that were facing the real challenges of what was happening in Covid and impacts of those things. They were able to use that gift of community, freely given, freely shared, where you own your raw data in ways that I hadn’t even considered.

And for reasons that I hadn’t even considered. And each time I look at it, people find ways to use community creatively and in incredible ways. And we find that at the core of WordPress.

[00:29:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we really do. I remember the first time I ever produced anything online, and it wasn’t with a CMS, it was just HTML. There was no CSS at the time, it was just tables and things. But I remember publishing that, a friend of mine knew more than I did, and he said, okay, here’s the environment. Here’s the text file. Just write it in there and, I’ll click a button and it’ll go to some server.

And then I saw it, saw it on his computer. And then I said to him, but it’s on your computer. And he said, no, no, no, if you go home, it’ll be on that computer well.

[00:29:44] Wes Tatters: And if, you go down the library, or you go up the road, and all you needed to know was where it was.

[00:29:50] Nathan Wrigley: And I remembered this profound feeling of, what the heck. That’s so amazing. What, I just put something on your computer, and now anybody in the world should they, discoverability is the big problem, but they could find it. He’s yeah, that’s it. That’s what the internet basically is. And I remember thinking, gosh, what a force for good.

[00:30:10] Wes Tatters: Huge force for good. Unfortunately, it’s also been a force for other things. I had a conversation with Tim, as a part of a set of interviews that the BBC were doing, this was in 1998. And at that stage, Tim was just exploring the idea of what he called the semantic web, which was zaml, and underlying metadata. And what Tim always envisaged the worldwide web should be, he always envisaged that every page, because he’s a data scientist, he envisaged that every page would have a beautiful set of metadata and structures, so that it could be searched and indexed.

Of course that’s everything the worldwide web didn’t become, respectfully. We have enough trouble in the WordPress space remembering to put a, an alt text on a photo that we upload. But his envision was of this beautiful semantic web. So it hasn’t gone exactly the same way as he envisaged.

But even without that semantic web, the additions and add-ons of things like Google, and Google search, and the ability to create an index, a massive index of the web. And now in 2025 going, hey, ChatGPT, can you just tell me the answer to this question please? And then can you write me a presentation?

I was having a meeting with an associate of mine. I haven’t caught up with each other for about six years, and he’s deeply involved in the concept of human centered design, which is, a business practice where you, look at the customer to identify the problem. Not look at the business and try to solve a problem.

He wanted to know about what I was doing in AI and that sort of stuff. And I said, did you know that I could write you a business plan? And they used to spend a lot of money creating business plans for people, and creating sessions and seminars. And I went, I can write you a seminar structure and plan in two minutes, on any topic.

I said, no, we’ll do better. Hey, ChatGPT, tell me what you know about human-centered design and why it’s good. And of course it printed out 20 paragraphs. And then I went, can you summarize that for a presentation seminar? And of course it did that. And then I said, now can you give me the structure of the seminar?

And it did that. And this guy sitting there going, are you kidding? And I said, that’s where we’ve come. But underlying all that is data and information. And none of that’s of any relevance unless you’ve got a community to share it with.

[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have a sense that the internet has gone in a, I’m going to use the word bad or poor direction over the last decade? Do you have a sense that mistakes have been made? If you could rewind the clock, were there any moments in time where you think, I wish it hadn’t have gone in that direction?

Because I often think things like proprietary platforms that kind of want to put a wall around the conversations that we have. They seem like, maybe in 50 years time when we look back, maybe they’ll seem like missteps. I don’t know. Maybe they’ll carry on and it’ll all be, as it is now.

But it does feel like there’s a resurgence more to owning your own conversation. So obviously we do that in WordPress, but it does feel like there’s a bit of a groundswell towards more federated protocols. Things like the AT protocol that Bluesky are doing, but Mastodon and an ActivityPub and those kind of things.

[00:33:12] Wes Tatters: I think again, if you harken back to Tim’s semantic web and, he wrote a document, 2022 I think, which was 30 years on. And he talked about where things had gone. I can tell you right now that the way I read Tim’s take on the worldwide web is that e-commerce was not a part of it. That was not a part of his idea of.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, how would you even have conceived that?

[00:33:38] Wes Tatters: Yeah, e-commerce wasn’t a thing. I don’t truly think, Snapchatting or no fully explained reason, 15 second videos in TikTok were anywhere on the radar, because there was this whole deal of philosophy. But each of these things actually has the same underlying traits.

It’s all about communities, it’s all about relationships and building relationships with people. Where I think personally we have made a misstep is in how our younger generations consume that community.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot.

[00:34:12] Wes Tatters: Well, it’s more than a lot. There was a survey done and I haven’t got the figures in front of me, because I wasn’t planning on discussing where we were here. That’s looked at the level of loneliness of people in 2025, compared to the level of loneliness of 20 and 30 years ago. And it directly related this online community thing. The, unfortunately, what do we call false community sometimes. The people we have never met that we talk to in a Snapchat or something like that, that are not community, and they’re not really our friends.

And there is an increase in loneliness. And I think if there’s any misstep that we as a society have maybe taken out of this thing, is a lack of understanding of the impacts of loneliness. And I think the internet’s to blame for that.

[00:35:13] Nathan Wrigley: The internet is so beguiling, isn’t it? Because there’s so much interesting stuff there. I think throw the mobile phone into that equation as well. This always on device, which is available 24 7. But it’s that capacity, incapacity, to put it down. You start doing something with it and then five minutes later you realize, often, in many cases, five minutes is not even the benchmark. More like an hour or something.

[00:35:36] Wes Tatters: And, there are clinical reasons for that. We’re actually getting out of these devices the same dopamine hits that lead to depression. The same dopamine hits that lead to mood swings and to a certain extent mental health issues.

We now have this whole, go on the internet and you’ll get, especially when you’re hitting my age, are you dopamine deprived? Join this, get on this dopamine detox. And it’s real. It’s a real problem. And the five minutes bursts, the swiping, the scrolling, the doom, scrolling, they’re not things that you could have even comprehended. We have all this data, massive amounts of data available to it, but we prefer to consume a, TikTok video, or look at photos of funny dogs or kittens, or dogs and kittens or whatever it is. The internet and the things that have grown out of that, have all contributed to that.

[00:36:32] Nathan Wrigley: It really is interesting. Bit of a double-edged sword, really. Like on the one hand, the internet is probably the greatest innovation, maybe of all time. Or the electric light or, you know, what did the Romans us kind of thing.

But also, curiously, it also has aspects of it which are really deleterious to humanity, and can really bring out the worst. It allows us to consume the worst to, I don’t know, to spend hours where we probably got other things that we should be doing, but for some reason we can’t let go of the phone, and things like that. So it is really curious.

[00:37:06] Wes Tatters: It’s the speed that it’s happened.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: And continues to happen. I don’t see any slowing down.

[00:37:12] Wes Tatters: At PressConf the other day, one of the sessions was an AI session. Of course there’s going to be an AI session. Seriously, if you go to the opening of a restaurant in the town center, there’s some guy doing a presentation, and we’ve got Barry to talk about AI for 15 minutes. It feels like that anyway.

One of the demonstrations was about two paragraph script, and it said effectively, hey, insert name of AI tool. I want you to create me a five second video, and I want the five second video to be of a dinosaur running out of a valley with a volcano erupting in the background. And as the dinosaur runs towards the camera, the ground shakes and the dinosaur’s then going to pass to the right hand side. And I’d like it to look a bit like Jurassic Park. That was literally the wording, and you hit enter not that long later, here’s a 15 second video that looks lifelike, realistic.

[00:38:05] Nathan Wrigley: Jurassic Park.

[00:38:06] Wes Tatters: It literally was, you may as well have been in the feature film. 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that would’ve cost couple of million dollars for that five seconds of animation. Now it’s literally something you can get on your mobile phone.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Anybody can get on their mobile phone.

[00:38:22] Wes Tatters: I was looking at a video thing today. I was like, some AI tool where you can go, hey, can you, put me in a video of me flying? Yeah, sure. I just need 10 photos of you please. And, now what would you like to fly over? Yeah, technology’s changed.

[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: Madness though, when you think about it, if you were to rewind the clock 30 years none of this was possible. I mean here I am talking you through a web browser as if it’s nothing. And it is utterly remarkable.

[00:38:48] Wes Tatters: So we live in a society where we’ve moved from the first time anyone heard of a deep fake, but now it’s just what you do when you’re at lunch break.

Things are changing. Forget about the ethics, the morals, and all those things, but our technology has changed. So yeah, to answer the question, are there missteps? Probably. But the interesting thing about the internet, and it’s something that was built into it at the beginning at DARPA, it’s actually got this amazing ability in technology to recorrect itself.

And that was how DARPA was built. The whole idea was, if you can’t get it this way, it’ll go this way. And if you can’t get it this way, you’ll find a carrier pigeon, and you’ll keep the communications going. What we’ve discovered with communities, and with groups, is that they seem to have an inordinate way of self-correcting as well, through moderation, through conversations.

When you get critical mass, and you pull enough people together, there is this inordinate ability to self-correct. I don’t fully understand the psychological basis behind it, but it’s fascinating how the internet has this ability to self-correct itself. So maybe over time it will, who knows?

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly in the world at large at the moment, we do seem to be in need of some sort of self-correction in all sorts of walks of life. And the WordPress community that we are both a part of definitely has had its schism over the last six months or so.

[00:40:17] Wes Tatters: Look, and it’s been, and that’s happened before. And even those things self-correct, because there are communities that are passionate in this space. Yes, there’s been some drama. and there’s no point in having conversation about that. But one of the outputs of that has been interesting new conversations in communities. Not looking at things like how we destroy WordPress, or how we, what we do next, but actually going, how do we build our community? How do we assist our community?

So even in those sort of challenges that every big ecosystem has, the community itself can self-correct. The community itself, can develop new relationships. And people grow out of those things.

PressConf was an amazing example of that. Obviously it had happened before in a slightly different form a number of years ago, but this was, let’s put 150 odd in a space for a weekend, and let ’em all chat and have conversations. And actually have intelligent dialogues and a whole heap of things grew out of it.

When we have WordPress events, we have WordCamps. We have Word Camp Europe coming up. Groups creating new vision. We talk about things like contribution and what contribution looks like. There’s been some negatives about contribution in the recent space, but there’s also been some huge positives about contribution. Out of the drama we’ve had, actually created a new conversation. Many people who didn’t even understand the concept. Oh yeah, I just assumed WordPress was this thing. I never thought that there was actually people giving up their weekends to go to a day in Hyderabad to fix bugs in wordPress. But that’s what people do.

And it actually helped us have a new conversation with a lot of people in the WordPress space that actually hadn’t even comprehended. Because they just assumed that they were, oh yeah, I just downloaded this WordPress thing.

[00:42:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do wonder if some things will come out of the year 2025 that would’ve been in the year 2024 unimaginable.

[00:42:21] Wes Tatters: I would say I’m quietly positive. There are lots of conversations, at many layers. I do think, and this is my own personal opinion, that there is a time for speaking and a time for listening. And I think that right now there is a need for a lot of listening from disparate part of the community, and by listening I think a lot of people need to listen to what other people have to say. And then as a community, look at what all those things are. What’s being said, and look at what we do to self correct. I think it’s important to listen.

[00:43:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, a conversation which drifted through what the internet even was and is. Then finally landing on CMSs and WordPress and the community built up around that. So Wes, what a pool of knowledge you are. You’ve really done the entire internet circuit and I’m really glad that we got a chance to speak today. Thank you.

[00:43:19] Wes Tatters: Nathan, it’s been a pleasure. Always happy to chat. It’s about conversation and communities. That’s what matters at the end of the day.