WDD LIVE 071 (STARTING EARLY!): Chris Hughes in Prison??? + Open Topics with Mark Szymanski

What is up my friends welcome back another wdd live let me get i need to get my chat window up here that would be the first good way to start comments and reactions start throwing them in the comment section give us a like on the stream i’ve got mark zemansky with me today he will be well i need to bring him on don’t i let’s see let’s see he is in the green room let’s add him to the left there we go should he be on the right on the left okay let’s make him on the right or on the left i don’t even know i’m dyslexic so it could be either way uh andrea is in the house welcome cool web design welcome welcome welcome we got manny grant d123 of course it’s going to be mostly ogs today because i did not send out an email to everybody i didn’t have time i didn’t have time i woke up a little late had to go on my my morning walk got back from the morning walk a little too late to send the email had to had to shower had to had to get ready for this thing so ogs in the house today say what’s up striped goat good to see you okay um what are we doing today we’ll go over the agenda so we’re going to talk a little bit about a little situation this happened in the web design create youtube community niche whatever you want to call it we’ll talk about that and then we’re just going to have open topic conversation you guys are going to be able to throw topic suggestions into the chat we’ll discuss them on today’s stream i think mark probably brought some topics and questions with him uh we have no idea what’s going to happen i don’t know what he wants to talk about i don’t know what you guys want to talk about we’re just going to find out as we go um okay if you do have questions very important very important if you ask your question without a hashtag so you don’t use hashtag q or hashtag question guaranteed it is going to get lost it is not going to get answered if you put a hashtag there’s a high chance that your question will be seen and answered so make sure you do that right if you want to throw your questions in questions can be on pretty much any topic you can go agency related you can go web design related you can go marketing related business related pricing sales whatever uh and we will give you what we’ve got all right um so mark how are we gonna how are we gonna kick this thing off we’ve got chris hughes we’re gonna start there that’s gonna be segment number one i’ll give everybody background because you know people may not know who chris hughes is chris hughes well apparently he leads a double life i don’t know uh but uh i’ve been following him for i’ve i’ll tell you the side of chris hughes i know all right i’ve been following chris hughes for a few years i guess at this point uh and i knew him through his brand a nerds world which is a youtube channel he had and a web design agency up in canada i believe and um you know seemed like he he had his stuff together and um you know he was a good source of knowledge and uh you know it appeared that he uh had a good client base and he was more on the you know i think the package website kind of deal right uh just sell some pre-done packages and just pick a theme i even think he admitted to like i you know we just my team just picks themes that kind of match the aesthetic the person wants and they essentially customize the theme and ship it out the door or whatever um but anyway he was a he was you know doing well on youtube i guess uh he had a good channel good following good engagement all of that and that was it and then i actually didn’t follow him for a while uh he’s kind of been in and out of the you i guess you would say like he you know he kind of disappears from time to time and then shows back up so uh you know i think as of late he wasn’t there and then i just happened to be on facebook scrolling and one of the facebook groups and um somebody somebody mentioned that uh this guy who looks like chris hughes i guess uh got arrested and maybe somebody asked like what what is you know where’s where’s chris hughes i don’t know what the whole thing was but uh turns out he was in prison uh in where trinidad and um yeah and so now you you chimed in when i posted this because i was like wow that’s wild um because he has a whole he had a whole different youtube channel that i didn’t even know about that was on like i don’t know travel travel focused or something and um i guess that got him into a little bit of an issue but you chimed in and you were like man i could talk about this for days i you know so you seem to know more why don’t you give us a little bit of a rundown on on uh the man chris hughes i would be absolutely happy to do that um chat though do i have an echo we have a little problem in the green room there’s an echo on mark okay uh let’s see what do we hmm hmm well we can bring up the settings and we can see what we want to do with this uh ecamm live we got a bunch of uh preferences here okay let’s go to some output mix mode you’re activating system output mix mode will not mix movie audio sound effects or guest audio into your broadcast okay well i we don’t know what this is about to do guys i’m just gonna tell you that right now okay i’m gonna hit okay on this we’re all gonna find out together okay here we go um all right mark why don’t you talk a little bit how about now how are we looking guys how’s chat mm-hmm let us know now now we have that awkward 15 second delay where we have to wait for them to give their input let us know let us know sounds good on my end i i heard it before we talked about that are we good now look at this i just click random buttons i mean we who needs an engineer who needs an engineer mm-hmm not us no need not us okay all right go for it we’re flying blind all right all right so uh appreciate you having me here kevin yeah honor and privilege man thank you so much um great to see you guys in the chat uh obviously long time you were here so excited to be here um yeah chris a hughes uh so i would say i would echo funny uh i would echo a lot of what you said there and the fact that i started you know web design you know a little later than you definitely but like in like 2017 2018 and chris and a nerds world was one of the first ones that i found i learned so much from the way that he was running his business uh the way that he was building websites and things like that some of the things i took some of the things that i you know you know changed and adapted after i found more research and other people as well but he was one of the big ones i mean i’m literally still subscribed to him even though he hasn’t made a video since you know over basically a year ago and um yeah it was a really interesting situation i kind of have more of the background story now because i took a deeper dive after i saw that you posted that and it’s funny because like three months ago i went back and like three months ago i was looking randomly again at his stuff because i was like i wonder if he’s posted anything recently i haven’t seen him in a while i was just going through my subscriptions or whatever and i remember that last year in september he was doing a big push he’d always been like an seo guy he’d always been like kind of like you know not like keyword stuffing or whatever but i remember one of the most ridiculous things that i ever saw which it worked though was like he would make the same page like a full page of content the same page and then like maybe like 20 times in there he would put a city name the service area like city type thing right and he would just change the words out like the city name out and he would like rank for like north pole for instance yeah like north pole web design and i was like that’s an incredible idea you know i don’t know if it still works and obviously the landscape’s kind of changed a little bit but that was an interesting way of doing that so i appreciate that type of thing he was always a hustler he kind of said a little bit of his background in his web design he’s like you know selling t-shirts and shit out of my car and stuff like that like before or whatever and he appreciated his work ethic really did fast forward though to more recently he had the web design business he had like kind of consulting and stuff like that involved and uh he was selling courses and if you go right now if you guys like open a new tab like go to a nerds world website you’ll see some of his videos still but his most recent video the comments on those are particularly not you know great you know it’s like he’s he’s doing things like um you know people are just still today like even recently especially with the news coming back up they’re like hey have you you know i’m still waiting on my refund for the course or support on the course or access to the course and things like that now there’s that side of the story and we can get into the other part of it but you know obviously his website has now been taken over i guess by you know i don’t know it says like there was a dns issue or something like that but um we could talk about both sides of it because i think the secondary part where his new channel chris must list is i have a little bit of a different opinion from that because there is there is some more to that actual story of why i got arrested the two aren’t necessarily related but for anybody watching i mean this is just a a really good conversation to have about business transitioning in business and also like just doing right by your clients and then obviously there’s the whole stuff that he’s doing like you know tourist wise so i don’t know it’s an interesting story for sure yeah so uh yeah it looks like there’s just a message up on his uh on his website i mean what what’s what’s i don’t know about the whole sedition thing and and all this other stuff that he’s doing and um i don’t know what’s your what’s your general take on this oh i mean my general take is again if we divide it into the two sides i’ll talk about the the stuff that’s like not pertinent to web design first the sedition and like the international travel thing he started i remember when he started that channel because he mentioned it on the web design channel and it was it was like in it was actually like four years ago that he started in like 2020 ish i think so he mentioned that and he was like you know hey i like to travel and i’m traveling a lot here’s this other channel go look at it at the time it only had like 10 000 subs because his main channel at the time the web design one only had maybe 50 ish like somewhere in there 30 to 50 and this new channel has like 300 000 obviously it’s a bigger audience more people you know right right right right um but to talk about the the quick legal situation there’s really two legal situations but talk about like the trinidad and tobago stuff i actually think it’s more of a different conversation but it’s it seems like he kind of at least did break the law of trinidad and tobago or it’s very close so like you know whether or not that should be the law of the way they have sedition set up and all that sort of stuff and i’m not an expert you could have a conversation about that but i mean again they have some issues there he’s documenting those issues as what i understand to be a non-credential journalist so i mean there’s a lot of weird stuff there that we don’t even get into from the other side or whatever but but the point is like there i think he’s doing something relatively admirable but maybe he’s not exactly following the law to a t and that’s just a whole different conversation right so as far as him actually being in jail and getting out and all that that’s kind of unrelated what i do think is way more interesting and way more pertinent though is his transition away from web design yeah i just yeah you know however good of a guy is now like on you know the what he’s trying to do that was a little shitty because there is documented people and legal issues with that side of it yeah way before the tourist stuff so yeah so that part of it goes back how far does that part of it go back do you think like the skipping out on on those responsibilities it’s it’s really funny i don’t have you know full facts on that but i mean i remember when he was making those videos like you kind of alluded to and some of this obviously is speculation but like he’s kind of going in and out on some of those videos you know like he started making the courses towards the end and again we’ve all been in this kind of agency you know life type of thing i mean is it can you do it forever for sure but does everybody want to do it forever so i mean i’m trying to be a little empathetic like i understand it but at the same time though you have to have a half decent exit strategy i mean i remember vaguely when he said like oh they had you know he was talking about they had like in toronto canada they had multiple locations i mean i remember literally he would give he would it would just be like kind of like we are now like he would give out his whole make a video uh about his whole uh proposal it beautiful proposal has like like three locations is you know his his uh flagship office and i don’t know what what area of toronto was or whatever but like he he she would show all that sort of stuff and i feel like over time like over just that small like three year period because he’d been doing it for a while it was just like i’m just less interested i feel like it’s kind of the vibe that i got less videos less stuff like that less content and then at the end he seemed like he was trying to do consulting and courses and those ended up being kind of like you know it’s kind of that middle ground obviously between agency work and like consulting and stuff but then again if you go to the youtube comments right now like he obviously didn’t service those people i saw other comments in there from people that were subcontractors allegedly right of a nerd’s world and that didn’t apparently pan out um i think i even saw some like uh like legal documentation somewhere you know about yeah you know the person versus him on so i don’t know again i would look into it yeah it’s well when i first heard about it i was like um because i didn’t know about any of that stuff and people when i heard that people were criticizing him he’s not delivering on this he’s not delivering on that i’m like the dude’s in prison like he’s in prison but i didn’t know this went back to way before that right so you know i was ready to cut him a break and then you were like oh no no no this has been going on for for a while now right um so yeah because you know i also don’t i don’t really believe like the whole sedition thing it’s like um you know uncredentialed journalist you know that sounds like some red tape nonsense it’s like that sounds like you know if there’s if there’s situations and people want to document the situations go document the situations it’s like you know that’s it’s reality it’s what we’re we’re doing real stuff here and then so it’s just a a way of censoring like you know getting out reality to the rest of the world so um not super big fan of that uh and so if if that was the reason why he was you know not able to deliver on things that he’s been doing that would be like uh okay well hold on we need to let’s have a conversation about that but if he’s been skipping out on responsibilities uh way ahead of time then that’s definitely a huge a huge problem but like i saw it was i think twice he made like a concerted effort to be like guys i’m back like i’m i’m kick-starting the channel i’m re-energized i’m like i was like twice right and that’s where when that starts to happen you that’s where the you know those are those are the red flags of like all right something else is going on behind the scenes um so yeah yeah yeah as uh i don’t know again i don’t think the two are completely related other than just like him but you know i’m reading some stuff in the chat about like the whole legality and everything like that and i would again reiterate that i agree with you like i think that what he’s doing is admiral should be legal i just think that there’s a whole yeah yeah yeah weirdness of like it said it’s illegal maybe it’s just a bad you know what i mean bad law badly interpreted stuff like right on the front end now but again though in the in the in his past life right like yes i i literally went to that last video saw those comments and i left a comment you can go there now and see it’s like i feel bad for all those people because i never ended up consulting with him or buying any of the courses but i knew about all them and it’s like if those people got scammed or ripped off in any sort of way like just didn’t get the value they were provided i feel like that’s a shitty situation and i don’t yeah i feel bad for those people and so hopefully that gets rectified yeah well that’s the that’s the content side of things but what i mean he’s got to have just hundreds or or thousands you would imagine of clients on the web is like the agency side of things right what is i maybe his team is still serving them i don’t know i would i would i don’t know i would i would say i would doubt that’s total speculation though but like i would say the one thing that i remember and i and i wasn’t in did he hand off everything content i think he did i think that it was like the packaged websites and then it was like they would build them on the dev server and they would hand off most of them so again still though he did have at one time maintenance plans i remember all right right right so i don’t know if he how that transpired but i don’t think it was a situation where like you know like kind of how we advise people or at least think tell agencies to think of where it’s like you want to have the control that you want to host it for a small business or a medium-sized business or whatever yeah and then actually maintaining it and everything i don’t think that was exactly his model i think it was much more of like you said earlier kind of like build a more of a templated theme type thing and then deploy it to their their server wherever they have it yeah so sheldon sheldon here i’ll just i’ll just put that up on the uh on the screen yeah i i think it’s very important to i wish you know the whole world could get on the same page with this kind of stuff but it’s like um i’ve i’ve there’s a really good quote it’s it’s the law is not a measuring stick for ethics like you know people pass laws based on their opinions and it’s not necessarily linked in any way to what’s ethical or moral or anything else it’s just some politician’s opinion of how things should be done um now sometimes law and ethics go hand in hand but a lot of times they don’t and so it can’t just be that said that oh well because because it’s the law that’s just or it’s moral or it’s right like there’s been a lot of bad laws there’s been a lot of really really awful awful laws uh and they still exist today so um you know i don’t jump straight to what’s the legal or not legal thing i jump straight to the what’s the ethical thing uh so yeah and i you know i’m a big proponent of let people let people you know publish let people tell uh the story in these different areas because you know if they’re locking it down like that’s the only way we’re going to find out so um okay let’s uh let’s go to the chat here uh daniel says no idea what’s being discussed well um yeah he said he says my fault for missing the intro um okay yeah sorry jamie we did start a little bit early i i meant to send out an email to let everybody know it just it because of the early start it was uh and everything going on yesterday didn’t get around to it by the way i’ll just tell everybody softball season is is starting so last night i had get this this is wild dude this is wild i had to i had to draft my peewee team okay this is what they do in peewee dog i’m drafting eight-year-olds like we did evaluations they all got like scored up you know and so i’m looking at like what’s their vertical what’s their you know no we didn’t do we didn’t we didn’t do like verticals and all that we did do uh how fast they run the first how fast they run all the bases can they catch can they throw it turns out most of them can’t catch can’t throw uh but you know that’s how that’s how peewee is that’s our job to to coach them up but i just think it’s hilarious that we get together and draft like our peewee team um so yeah that was fun that was last night uh and then you know right into tomorrow this morning didn’t get sent any emails so jamie i apologize uh for not notifying about the late or the early start okay we got 176 people if you want to ask questions hashtag q or hashtag question uh let’s go ahead and move on mark do you want to you want to bring up a topic or do you want to go straight to the questions it’s up to you i’ll let you drive today i know we’re oh wow look at this um i i know we had uh i saw a topic in there wcus i mean that’s a pretty big one that we all it’s gonna be my first we can talk about that um talk about some i don’t know random acss stuff let me do a search real quick here yeah uh okay oh here’s here oh well this one’s for you mark uh we’ll put this put this one i saw that one yeah yeah i don’t i don’t know how to deal with that it’s you know it’s we’re polygamous in the live streaming world will this qualify as sedition i would really call it i wouldn’t call i wouldn’t call it cheating i wouldn’t call it cheating we’re just you know talking sounds sounds like uh yeah yeah got a little it’s trouble in paradise classic relational issues there all right um who is chris hughes we well yeah just yeah look up a nerds world i mean i i would encourage you you know go watch some of the videos on the channel if they’re still up i mean it’s still like it was it’s it’s good content right so you can still get value out of them regardless of what’s happening now definitely um okay well let’s see to mark uh to what extent do you share kevin’s concerns about wp oh good one um hmm i would say that i would say that i’m kind of i mean i’m kind of in there but i uh i’m my true position is i’m i’m little younger to the space i’m definitely really way more uh green to the community side of it i mean literally over a year ago if you asked me like what other page builders were i wouldn’t i wouldn’t have known i was just an elementor for the last you know from like 2018 to 2022 ish 23. um so i’ve just learned a ton in the last 12 months from guys like kevin guys like matt maduras at wp minute um so many people and i’ve made so many good connections specifically with the concerns about wp i definitely see them because i you know i have eyes and i use the platform so there’s definitely concerns that i have and i always try to like stay moderately in the middle as far as like understanding kind of like both sides and like seeing what people are saying like people that have been just core for a very long time people have been just page builder for a very long time because i feel like if i can understand both sides then i can kind of be a little bit of a conduit because i feel like that is kind of something that’s you know as valuable in some aspects um so i’m really just a curious person i just like to see it so i would say there’s definitely concerns though um you know i know kevin’s done a lot for the page building community bricks i’m a bricks user i’m an acss and frames user and i really appreciate all that because it’s it’s it’s bettered my workflow and i do hope that wp continues and you know i mean we’re literally hopping on a call here and you know an hour and a half yeah well that’s why yeah why don’t we tell people yeah why don’t we tell people why we’re starting early what’s what’s going on at new yeah yeah i mean um so if you guys aren’t familiar with everything automatic which is there’s a lot to there’s a lot there so i wouldn’t blame you ann mccarthy is a i gotta get her title right i believe she’s a product wrangler but she’s really like a rover in in like all of automatic land and um she had she deals with a lot of different projects a lot of different disciplines and one of her initiatives recently is to unite wordpress youtubers so there’s a lot of us you know that you guys probably follow um that we’re we’re popping on calls this will be the second one and kevin’s first actually and um it’s going to be exciting because we’re it’s a group of people with ann and potentially other members of automatic and just talking i mean like i feel like the you know i’m not 100 sure as to what the actual goal is but i feel like if you get all of these really talented and intelligent people in one space and then you also publish it for the world to see like for the community to see i feel like only good things can ultimately come from that whether or not you know what form that takes we don’t necessarily know but it could only be beneficial i’m a big proponent of that more talking you guys know i love to talk more talking i just feel like is generally good yeah so the reason we’re starting early is because that’s happening at 12 um which would have coincided if we started 11 and uh i’m really excited for that and it just goes back to the other question about the concerns with wp if we’re not talking about these things and we’re not hearing you know different perspectives on things because the world has changed in 20 years you know and and i know that um everybody understands that and everybody has different opinions on it and this space is just getting really big i mean not not just web design in general but specifically wordpress is way bigger than it was when a lot of people started using it oh yeah and there’s a lot of different people there’s a we talk about a lot of this last few months you know months and weeks months is like the new generation that’s where again i feel like i’m a little younger than i feel like the the average age median age in this community so i’m also kind of like looking behind me and i’m like oh these young kids like they’re popping on frame or they’re hopping on webflow kevin’s talking about it all the time you know um there’s just there’s real concerns there and you know you have to you have to at least uh you know see them yeah and take them at face value yeah and then from what we do there is you know we got to see so yeah i think the 20 year mark actually should that’s a good time to re-evaluate you know where things are at because 20 years lets you know okay well you you don’t what do you want to avoid obviously becoming and it’s very easy to do in software actually because the pace at which software moves so to have a 20 year track record is fantastic it’s amazing uh and wordpress has accomplished so much in that 20 years but you do start to run into the danger of starting to be like the dinosaur you know like the the old thing not the up-and-coming thing not the cool thing not the hip thing not the whatever thing if you don’t keep evolving if you don’t keep evolving um and so i’ve said time and time again like it it is important to have the next generation’s support you know um things and things are rapidly changing with technology to the point where um some of the advantages that we used to have with wordpress are not advantages anymore right uh and we are really and people are going to hear this more tomorrow in the dear wordpress video but um you know it we’re hinging on just like a couple things you know when we look at how we’re being competitive in the marketplace uh i mean it’s very common for companies to do basic analysis of like what are our strengths what are our weaknesses what are our competitors doing really well what are they not doing well this is all basic stuff that should be happening and when i do that analysis uh it comes back that man we had a we used to have a lot of strengths like strength after strength we were checking so many boxes we’re checking two boxes now that’s it we’re not checking any more than two boxes now and all the other competitors are checking all the other boxes that does not that does not bode well right and so we’re at a spot where and i i think there’s a lot of people on wordpress who are they want to avoid having these conversations they want to avoid and not acknowledging these things and i think that’s very dangerous if you love wordpress and you really really support wordpress and you want to see it successful you want to see it continue to dominate then you have to look at these things objectively you have to be concerned uh with these things because we don’t want to be in the situation where there was probably a lot of people sitting around at yahoo going guys let me look how look how long we’ve been dominating this is the attitude that these people tend to look how long we’ve been dominating so it’s obviously just going to continue we’re just going to continue dominating because look how big we are i mean we’re we’re too big to fail we’re too and then google comes along and they’re like no no see you we’ll take over um we have to be very careful of of that and we are poised if you look around wordpress at what’s happening and you look at the trends of where things are going that’s that we could be on the cusp of that if we if we don’t wake up and and do some things right make some moves and part of that is this like creators talk that we’re going to be on which is that’s one area we cannot lose in uh that i think we’re either starting to lose in or already losing in but the level of talent in the creator space in places like framer and webflow and even look at figma and i know figma is not a direct competitor wordpress but it’s a good community to look at when it comes to the quality of creators that are there and i’ll tell you right now that is not an area you want to lose in if you lose in the creator talent area you’re not going to be around much longer so that’s i mean that’s why i’m excited about these creator calls that we’re getting on because i think wordpress’s creator community really needs to recommit to like a higher level of um well creating 100 yeah i think there’s a you know you talk about it and the words that kind of come to mind just in general and i’m not saying that i’m not trying to generalize like the wordpress community and like like that but the two words that come to mind are like complacency is is scary like if you start to get complacent at the top then that’s generally when when bad things start to happen um so there might be a you know um you know minute amount of that you know depending on what your you know what your opinion is on that but the other thing is and this one is uh often i feel like i don’t know if i don’t know if you’ve said it recently or other people said it this this concept of like kind of like paranoia like you need to be like somewhat paranoid like not to not to the words debilitating right you need to be like like the concept of like only the paranoid survive like i kind of like agree with that concept to a certain amount like you have to be it’s just the opposite of complacency in in some ways it’s like you have to constantly be thinking that like at any time if you want to continue to grow and continue to be the best regardless outside of web design like you have to be like i want to continue to be my best and potentially be the best you have to be like paranoid that like at any point somebody’s gonna come along they’re gonna be better i mean it’s literally going to happen yeah like you know what i mean so it’s like to not to not think that way is a little bit you know dismissive of the reality of it and customers should like customers of products should want a founder a product founder to think like that because it actually helps the all of the people who bought the product because that’s what keeps driving if that founder wakes up and is like what what are these other people innovating on right and how am i going to keep innovating my product how am i going to continue improving the experience for my customers you don’t want the founder that’s just like sitting around like ah look we made it we we did it we we reached the finish line this is fantastic we’re not gonna you know we’ll just go security from here that’s what we’ll do we’ll just go security updates from here so what what like we’re we’re living in the fastest like one of the fastest moving industries in existence you can’t just be like oh we’re good we don’t have to keep innovating now uh you have to constantly be be thinking about i was gonna say worried it’s not necessarily worried it’s just thinking about what is the next thing what is the next opportunity where are the holes uh and and how can we continue serving the the people in our community yeah and the last thing i would say there is because it’s not just with software i feel like it’s with agency life too and this is where we could probably talk for hours about this is this is why being like a solo preneur is so difficult because you literally have to wear the hat of like the visionary yeah and the actual doer at the same time and that is not an easy task you know like you have to like that’s why people build teams that’s why people are successful when they start to like delegate out like that because if you’re if you’re constantly thinking about like you know it’s a full-time job to literally think and be a visionary yeah you know right like i mean like there’s so much of that that you have to you have to like be scouting the course ahead and seeing what’s you know the trends and what’s coming and whatever like that you really don’t have a hell of a lot of time left over to actually execute on it as well maybe you have some time to manage the vision slightly but that’s why that you know big companies there’s a lot of people doing things that don’t seem like they’re you know digging the ditch so to speak but they’re actually like there’s a lot more there’s a lot more to it to be successful in that in that realm so yeah absolutely um okay let’s go back to uh let’s go back to questions see if we can dig up another another good one here um any of you well that’s an easy one any of you visited the netherlands i have not uh i don’t i don’t think mark has but neither no okay well here’s let’s just piggyback off of this we got at with a good question here so you both get a magic wand where would you like to see wp in five years oh man it’s a tough one you or me um i’ll go i guess where would i like to see wp in five years um well i i would like to see um i would like to see us back to so if you if you haven’t caught on yet right i’ve been continually saying i don’t think i think we were dominating for a long time there and i think that’s slipping and that’s a little bit scary okay uh and for all of us now i know some of the people that watch not many not many but there are some people that live in other worlds you know they’re not a hundred percent in wordpress so they live a little bit over here you know they got a web flow site over here they got a little shopify thing over here they’re like they’re not a hundred percent in wordpress and then they’re also you know entertained by the idea of maybe oh yeah let’s let’s go to a new up-and-coming cms let’s dabble over there let’s let’s build some sites on that platform let’s distribute a little bit and maybe you you know so i don’t really care like if wordpress ends up going down one day or it’s not the dominant player or whatever it doesn’t really impact me all that much there are some people like that that’s not me that’s not me i’m a i’m a hundred percent wp and have been a hundred percent wp since 2005 okay so i need wp to keep dominating and i chose wp as my team i don’t i don’t like to play on losing teams i like to play on winning teams uh and so i i do everything that i can to help that happen and so right now what i’m seeing at if we’re just talking five years we’re talking very general now obviously more details will come out tomorrow on this uh and will continue to come out as we head into september so if you want details details well uh just buckle up they’re coming okay but high level what i’m saying right now is i feel like our team is starting that downward trend and so in five years what i would hope because i here’s what here’s the duality of this i think that the next five to ten years could be amazing or the next five to ten years could be really tough okay in wordpress and so you know how that shakes out we’re we’re maybe about to find out i don’t know uh but if i looked up in five years i would love to see us trending back towards market dominance because we’ve made some really really great decisions and we’ve done some really really good things and um you know but i i don’t have control of the ship so but that’s what i would like to see in the next five years and that’s most important right now we could talk little features we could talk you know some what people might think are significant things or others may be insignificant i don’t know we don’t really need we just need to go 30 000 feet and go all right here’s the trend we got a course correct and if we don’t course correct nothing else matters so let’s focus on course correct right now yeah a couple things come to mind there uh the first one is i i don’t know if i’ve heard you say this or i’ve heard anybody else say this i know i’ve heard your analogies before and i most of them i’m pretty agree in agreement with is but i just thought of it in this sense of if you look at a chart right and you know you look at all the stats about how wordpress is like you know is still the dominant thing every here is like the 43 and all that sort of stuff the amount of sites that’s being built you know built on it or you know is lowering and all that sort of stuff i think a possible another way to think about it is not that like webflow or shopify or framer are going to you know dethrone wordpress i think a much more likely option of it is like a death by a thousand cuts yes type thing and i’m not saying it’s going to happen i’m just saying like that seems like more of an outcome where it’s like those platforms are objectively like good in certain things they’re not all good at everything though and one thing that they are better at and because of the nature of them actually being products they are like the marketing dollars are there all of that like that like they’re trying to they’re trying to be the dominant player like that’s their goals so if you have like five like players kind of goes back to your elephant analogy but if you have five like players trying to you know dethrone not really even dethrone they’re just trying to become the best you know you might have that it’s more of like again like the death of a thousand by a thousand cuts type thing where it’s like it’s just five things overtake one thing rather than one of them over correct so it’s not really about like one on one it’s just it’s it’s kind of like a little gang up situation in a sense i don’t know if i if i see too many of them going against each other i mean probably there is some of that i just haven’t seen that marketing i haven’t seen them going at wordpress either i just see you know as a general thing but anyway to try to hit on the specific question again i would agree with a lot of what kevin said there uh but mainly like if i think about it i really like the concept i know i know other people have said it i know paul over wp touch just said it kind of like a freeze on some of the on some of the certain uh features on like gutenberg and blockader i would i don’t know the details there but i’d be interested to see like a plan that had that in it mm-hmm because like the cms the core of it we talk about all the time it is the thing that you can’t like you can change it there’s i’m sure there’s plugins to like you know make the cms better but at the core of wordpress and the core of any like cms is the actual cms part right there’s no uh you know default custom fields and things like that there’s no uh you know the ui is getting apparently nicer here shortly you know according to some of the uh this the renderings and and uh gutenberg experience we’ve seen which that’s a good thing um but you know just just those types of quality of life and like actual core what’s called like core cms features i think would be really the way to go because if there’s anything lacking there right now i feel like those would be kind of like easier quicker wins that are going to affect everyone and then not to mention if you can make the core cms better specifically with an example of like custom post types and custom fields and those types of things yeah that you could always still extend that is like to me when i found out about dynamic data everybody knows i love dynamic data like that is so transformative to the way that people understand and utilize and build websites it’s unbelievable i mean it’s unbelievable it opens a whole new world you’re actually building things you know again like kevin’s great series that he just had recently where he’s showing like an actual build like that that thing that concept is so transformative that i feel like if that was in the core and people didn’t have to figure out about acf and didn’t have to find out about jet engine or whatever like it would just it would i think it would increase use you like user base i think it would i think what people would be like way more understanding of like how it works they would like immediately immediately be like oh i want to do this i want to add team members i want to add services like there’s there’s ways to do that already built in yeah um but i don’t know if that goes against the idea of like they try to make like a very base layer of software that could always be extended i don’t know that like there’s literally and we should probably talk about on the creator call today like there is pieces i feel like that the mentality is different between like somebody like us like a creator looking from the outside and then the core team of like what they do and don’t want to do with the core software of wordpress yeah which whether you agree with it or not like it’s you know it’s a conversation we had so yeah i don’t know um i was blurry there for a second i’ve always got to do the uh hand and then yeah i got the the auto focus i got that too yeah yeah so um no i i agree i the thing you know we talk about communication and we talk about transparency you know i invited matt to come on and he actually he he agreed to come on and but that was right before his uh sabbatical he’s or somatical if we want to i don’t know stupid uh okay so i don’t know what happened it got lost in the shuffle i i gotta i’ll try to reconnect right but i think that i’ve i’ve i’ve seen interviews with him and i just i don’t know the questions aren’t really where they need to go like somebody really needs to ask matt like what he thinks about some of these core things you mentioned custom fields dynamic data we all know how powerful that is why has why didn’t it get put in core right um like can we get an actual reason because if you were the visionary for like a cms if you were the leader of the cms right you’re thinking in your mind and this is me if i was thinking in this way and this is how we’ve thought with acss and all of this you’re really wanting to build a product that gives people a process that they can implement and it’s like a process that makes sense a process that’s powerful a process that they believe in a process that they enjoy then they’re like thank you like look at this look at this process so we give like acss has a framework and the framework provides a process and the process adds a lot of scalability and maintainability and we built frames and that gives them a process of wireframing and a process of building the actual website and then we talk about things like custom fields and dynamic data and how all of these things make a website better and make a website easier to manage and make a website more dynamic and we’re putting all these pieces together and it’s like okay well if you were wordpress and you were matt you’d be like well we can’t really teach that process because you know we we don’t really have native functionality for some of this stuff and so people are reliant on the third party plugins and maybe that’s just the thing is it’s like well just let them rely just let them rely on the plugins that’s fine just like but what i’ve constantly said is it’s very difficult to play that game and win with new users because a new user coming into an ecosystem where everything is an add-on everything is a plugin everything is a choice a decision what you have to do with beginners especially is limit their decision making that they have to do and so if they come in i use my mom all the time like all right mom come on we’re we’re gonna do the wordpress thing mom and uh she comes in and she’s like great like where do i start and i’m like great question uh well you need to pick a theme well which theme do i need to pick well i have a lot of pros and cons there probably we that’s how many days can we have that discussion of like what theme do i choose and then that’s not even uh if she wants to do you want to do the page building thing mom do you want to not do the page building thing do you want to do the block thing do you want to look how many conversations we already have to have to have and then it’s like well i need um this and i need that it’s like okay now we go to the plugin repo mom there’s thing called plugin repo let me show you and just one piece of functionality might have 40 different plugins to choose from and so now my mom is like well which one do i choose well guess what you need knowledge and experience to even make half these decisions and so where do you get that from so now what we’ve said by having this giant ecosystem is either just choose randomly i mean just choose i mean hopefully it works out for you or you do a lot of digging and research and reading reviews and what do these people say and what do those people say and then we also know the crockford’s law right which is you you know if you’re choosing a plugin there is a chance that you get 90 of the way it like to the finish line and then the last 10 that you couldn’t foresee at the very beginning because you can’t vet the whole thing magically there’s no magic wand for vetting a plugin you get 90 of the way and you realize oh my god there’s it’s they’ve made a decision architecturally or whatever this last feature that i need it i’m not going to be able to do it and now you’re backtracking and now you’re doing workarounds and that this is so common and um this kind of environment is to a beginner to trying to build the next generation of wordpress users absolute chaos and by the way it was not like this so when wordpress was gaining dominance 2005 2010 2000 whatever uh it was much we lived in much simpler times remember this is a blogging platform that’s the other part of this right we are building complex websites on a glorified blogging platform that has not changed all that much since since it was used for blogging specifically right and um that’s a problem in itself okay but it used to be i want to do a blog thing like okay well choose a blog theme and then just get to blogging that’s like there’s not a ton of decisions it’s like there’s a little bit here and there but today i mean you want to you want to build an actual web um there are so many decisions and uh it’s not very friendly to beginners it’s not even friendly to intermediates if you know web design and you just come into wordpress because you’re like hey i’ve never done the wordpress thing let me try to come into wordpress you’re not going to feel at home you’re not going to feel like you know what’s going on there’s still a giant learning curve okay so how are we going to win in in in that regard i think there’s uh there’s two things that i that come to mind here the first one is and again it’s a question for the creator call which again if you guys weren’t here earlier that the lot the first one was published so when it is published it’s not live but it was published so when it’s published we’ll let you know um because i think those chats are important to see um but the first thing about that is i think from what i’ve heard like directly but i don’t want to misquote i don’t believe that automatics i say automatic and generally the wordpress project i don’t believe that the people with influence want there to be onboarding like they don’t agree with that sentiment of some some level of onboarding and i understand why they are i sort of understand the point that i’ve heard again we should again bring this up more because i want more clarification on this but that’s what i’ve heard and i understand it from that perspective but it also definitely doesn’t make sense from like the conversation that we’re having and the way that we think about these things and the things that we see boots on the ground so to speak and like all that sort of stuff yeah so that’s like one situation there but i’m sure there’s a ton of other pieces not just onboarding that are the exact same way where it’s like we think of things one way they think of things another way or they see in another way or like the level of difficulty to implement is xyz whatever and it’s so there’s a lot there and you probably have to go issue by issue and hopefully we get the opportunity to do some of that stuff at least the more impactful stuff hopefully um the second thing though is a question yeah and how much do you agree or disagree with the sentiment that all roads lead to wordpress if you are a web designer that’s coming into the space and you want to continue to get better and you have an emphasis more so on like non-coding like you’re not just going to spin up some you know you’re not going to spin up vs code and you’re not going to like build some stuff like do you think that most people and i mean we know people in the webflow community we know people in in the other communities but like do you think that most people end up getting to wordpress when they get limited to these other platforms do you think that’s a normal trajectory do you think a lot of people see wordpress or try wordpress and then go back the other way because i feel like for me but i don’t know if i would have started in webflow i would eventually made my way to wordpress when i had like limitations and things like that but only if i knew that i could do it in word you know what i mean like that’s like the one again the one big thing it has going for it is obviously open source and data well that’s that but like yeah it is the most versatile that is a it’s a really good question i mean it’s a really good question we have to know and i don’t know that we know i don’t know that there’s any stats on this i don’t know this is a question for matt this is we have to have matt maybe matt has the answers to these things how does the typical user and then we have to define user even remember we’re not talking about bloggers anymore i for me i’m i’m talking about everything from an agency perspective a freelancer perspective a we build websites for businesses perspective we build marketing engines for websites we want data ownership we want we want all these things that i constantly talk about that’s i’m not talking about my mom and her bunko club website okay that i’m talking about websites of consequence real consequence in the world um that’s what i’m talking about how do those people come to wordpress we know how freelancers and agency owners especially more technical ones often come to wordpress they know the advantages of this or they are told by other people in the industry the advantages of being on wordpress and hey you should do this on wordpress and yada yada yada then there’s the just the brand thing the dominance thing if you’re 43 of the market it’s like being number one in seo and and attracting backlinks the person who ranks number one is going to naturally acquire more and more and more backlinks the rich get richer in seo so when you get to the top three you are automatically you know inclined to stay there because you enjoy the benefits of being there and that’s a little bit of what wordpress is right now but how does the average like you know what is that what are we doing we’re tuning out hold on we are hold on hold on hold on you got the tunes oh oh there we go nick d what was that that was pertinence baby come on pertinence in the background you don’t know no pertinence do you you don’t know no pertinence you got to get on that pertinence train i’m i’m with all the independent artists baby come on um okay pertinence is yeah pertinence not safe not safe you got to put the earmuffs on okay if you can do a little pertinence okay uh which is good that we got that pause before for anything uh yeah for anything crazy started i like the comments the comments is hilarious okay um so you know i if i think about the business owners i’ve done websites for right um i brought them to wordpress right they they rely on all these business owners rely on the agencies and freelancers they hire i’ve been in plenty of boardrooms where they’re talking about okay yeah we know about wordpress but they don’t really know the technicalities and stuff they’re they’re wanting the agency and freelancer to sell them on the platform and they’re asking readily are there other are there other options for us and a lot of times it’s the agency freelancer uh selling them on wordpress bringing them and that’s why i wrote this email yesterday where i was like it kind it’s really awkward that wordpress has ignored our side of things seemingly for so long right they focused heavily on bloggers they still focus on bloggers i went to word camp us last year matt’s up talking and you know what he’s telling us to do he’s telling us to go encourage more people to blog that’s what he’s telling that’s he that was his message to us at word camp last year right and again i don’t think that that is going to secure the future of wordpress so he’s focused on bloggers they’re heavily focused on enterprise so if you look at all the talks that they gave the examples what they had nasa up there they’ve got and in order to do enterprise they want to do the custom theme custom block side of wordpress those are the three camps so they want bloggers they want enterprise and they want all the agencies and freelancers who are going to custom code themes and do custom blocks that’s who they’re really paying attention to i don’t know that that is the group the the three groups that are really responsible for the rise of wordpress the dominance of wordpress to me it’s all the agencies and freelancers who and we know elementor and divvy as much as i rail on them they have gazillions of users and they have onboarded gazillions of businesses into wordpress they are responsible for selling wordpress to all of the businesses that are out there using wordpress right now freelancers and agency owners who don’t necessarily want to code themes and code blocks and who aren’t bloggers right and who aren’t doing enterprise that that’s the middle america of wordpress okay the middle america of wordpress is agency owners and freelancers who have been recruiting millions of businesses into wordpress and wordpress leadership do they do they seem to want to listen to what we have to say and our needs and wants and desires doesn’t seem like it and that’s the most awkward part of uh of this whole situation that is a real interesting one and i think the other the other part of it though and i wish we had data on this i don’t know if it lives somewhere you know if there’s any way to know about this but the idea of this concept that there’s so many millions of websites 43 of the world and there’s those two questions is like how many of them are literally like installs but like not completely unconventional not just not just like a bunco club website like just like dead websites so that’s the first thing that we that i don’t think we have any clarity on but the second thing is how many of them are just not necessarily dead but completely like diy because it’s like diy or agency enterprise would kind of be like those those three and i’ve heard a lot of people say that especially i don’t know about now because it’s so easy i i i genuinely wonder i’d love to know the data on this and the lay of the land here if you were a diy or you’re not trying to start an agency you just have a random website that you want to build because you think it’d be cool to have a website totally understandable are you gonna like what is the likelihood that you’re gonna go to wordpress in 2024 if you’re a complete diy i think that’s kind of part of the crux of our conversation yeah i don’t think it’s extremely likely like i mean like why would you like i mean i i say this before i asked uh you know a buddy of mine on the golf course uh you know i tell him like oh i’m big in the wordpress community like i’m like you know i’m talking to different people and doing something and he’s like i thought word wordpress thought that was dead like you know what i mean like it’s like the the general person i’m not saying it is dead again just just for the for the footnote there i’m just saying like if that is what a average person is thinking because then you you you the follow-up question is oh you know about wicks though right oh yeah i see it all the time it’s like that that’s i’m not sure if that is i don’t know exactly how to fix that problem given the distinction between a project and a product that is always brought up there and is is valid but that is the whole thing like that is a complete illustration of everything you boil everything that you say down everything that everybody else says down that is it right there it’s like do you want these people on the thing or not like because if they don’t really know about it you know what i mean they know about the other ones so it’s just well it’s also okay so they have obviously way more marketing dollars so wicks you know every time i’m on the web i see a wicks commercial um i don’t see as many square wicks wicks seems to be the main player in the advertising space um i’ve seen some ads for framer i think you know occasionally you’ll see um an ad for square space kind of shopify for sure shopify but that’s yeah see my brain even isolates because i don’t do a lot of e-commerce stuff so my brain doesn’t even pay all that much attention to shopify but like wicks absolutely for sure and and actually i would say shopify i mean i i have always felt that um e-commerce like in wordpress is is like trying to put a a triangle into a square hole it’s like it’s not really i mean if you want to talk about pushing a blogging platform to the max like that’s what we’re doing with with heavy e-commerce in wordpress that’s what it feels like okay um and so it’s it’s i just and i’m not in that world all that much so i kind of already compartmentalize that away um but if i was counter programming to wordpress for example let’s say i was a competitor i was wicks right it’s so fucking easy like what i just said about the chaos of the wordpress ecosystem i would just hammer that home at all times where it’s like guys come to wicks and look look how clean simple unified all of this stuff is and then look at wordpress you got the wild wild west chaos good luck over there good luck picking themes good luck because themes in wicks i mean let’s be very clear about this this is why i said wordpress maybe needs to get away from the whole theme thing okay themes in wicks the consequence of choosing a theme in wicks is design and layout you are essentially like what do i want my new website to look like oh that like that with wordpress you are not just choosing like that is not all that a theme is in wordpress you are choosing architectural decisions you are choosing underlying code base you are choosing what that developer decided to give you or not give you as part of that theme in terms of actual functionality in terms of hooks in terms of lots of things and then they’re pairing builders with their themes and it’s like well what builder and then this is the chaos that i’m referring to and if i was wicks there’s no way wicks versus wordpress in an advertising sense to beginners and new users there’s no way wordpress can win that like they are absolutely going to make people believe that wordpress is chaos and it’s going to be very difficult for you there’s going to be a very steep learning curve and that is the death to any any product that needs to onboard new users and beginners you don’t want that to be the reputation right um so that’s the thing that we really have to start one of the things i mean there’s a lot of things in wordpress but that’s that’s one of the things that we really have to start figuring out now is that helped by the fact that there’s three different uis no uh is that helped by the fact that there’s the the block editor situation going on right now no is that helped by the fact that the cms part is you know 15 years old and hasn’t really been innovated on and it is literally a dinosaur it’s a ui dinosaur it’s a functionality that no so we’re not we’re not doing ourselves any favors either uh we we have a lot of this is what i’m talking about we have a lot of work to do or we are going to look up in the next five to ten years and we are not going to be the winners we are not going to be the winners um and the people that think everything is fine right now or it’s on track right now i hate to break it to you it ain’t it ain’t and so if we want to be the winners in five to ten years some things are going to need to to change um i think i think that’s the main point that i wanted to make about the beginner side i think there was one more i wanted to hit on but it’ll come to me i’ll let you keep talking and then i’m sure it’ll pop up yeah for sure no i think um the one the big thing that came to me there was when you’re talking about themes the fact that like bricks is technically a theme uh generating press is technically a thing to do completely different things like you know if if you’re a complete beginner to that and you’re like looking at just oh what what theme do i want you type in like wordpress themes i mean i’m not sure if you’re going to get both of those on a list but like you know like you would get you would get things that are like classic themes you would get block games you would get uh literally what is a page builder as a installed as a theme right in the bricks you know and other ones right so there’s like there’s different there’s this weird thing that has happened where i feel like the the semantics and the verbiage and we talk i know you talk about all the time in the block editor side of things right like what is a group and all that sort of stuff but that those become like real problems at scale i feel like and i’m sure that wordpress is not the only culprit of doing stuff like that but i just that is so it’s so i feel like it’s really detrimental to just just have things that categorization and language is so important and like when we just like start naming things different things just kind of to be different that’s obviously very very uh that that actually okay so hold on you you you just triggered it okay you just triggered it thank you thank you uh no that’s that’s what i wanted to hit on um so the going back to the the fight between like a wix and a wordpress or a square space and a wordpress their messaging has been very very consistent uh we are a like a beginner platform like we are you are so open to beginners like we just come on off the street the ads all say you can build a website five minutes on wix like it’s a lie it’s a lie but that is the narrative that they’re putting out there and they’re trying to that’s the target they are trying to attract now i’ve said it’s a lie i’ve said it’s uh impossible you take people off the street we can talk more in a minute about how beginners actually build websites okay i think we should get into that how do beginners actually build websites the mistake that wordpress made because you’re not backed by an environment that is friendly to beginners that’s already the default you have to know that okay self-awareness in wordpress is very important dot org has to be self-hosted it’s already hurdle number one okay then there’s the plugin ecosystem then there’s the theme ecosystem and you said block themes versus non-block themes and is does the theme come with a builder is the theme a builder what the that is chaos absolute chaos so you can’t then also parrot the wix narrative hey we’re for everyone guys we’re so beginner friendly look at this block editor that’s so beginner friendly come in anybody off the street can come in and use wordpress it’s fantastic sorry you are not going to win that fight against wix because wix doesn’t have the chaos and beginners hate chaos okay so beginners hate chaos wix doesn’t have the chaos wordpress can’t be like we’re for beginners too but come into our chaos situation wordpress.org and this is where i get back into we have a.com i mean you could do that you could do the wix thing with.com if that’s what you wanted to do but with.org you can’t play that game that is a losing game that is a losing strategy.org needs to be the place where people who know what they’re doing come that’s where the place that where the freelancers and the agency owners come and they bring their clients to it right this is not .org is not for my mom okay because here’s the reality about how beginners build websites beginners come into a wix or a squarespace situation and they are handed layouts and design on a silver platter they are handed tools to manipulate content to change colors to swap images and so on and so forth and that guys is the extent of what they are able to do and even at that they’re not good at it and even at that they get highly frustrated and even at that they give up after three days and end up hiring a freelancer half the time if the website is of any consequence right and so that’s what we have to understand about how beginners the idea that a beginner comes in okay because we’re talking about how software is designed how do you design a block editor how do you design a wix how do you from a soft i’m talking from a software developer standpoint now you have to know the user if you don’t know the user the software is not going to work my mom is not it doesn’t matter how much you dumb it down it doesn’t matter how much you go in your little head oh they we can’t call it a container or a div they won’t know what a div is let’s call it a group that’ll that’ll clear up everything so they call it a group they think that this is going to make sense to a beginner when the reality is none of it makes sense none of it they don’t even understand how websites come together they don’t know what’s going on under the hood they don’t know anything and if you give them a blank slate it doesn’t matter how dumbed down the controls are it doesn’t matter how easy you think it is they are not going to build a website from scratch they are not going to build a layout from scratch they are reliant 100 unless they’re going to go through all the learning curve they are 100 reliant on a developer giving them a starting point they have they have to be given patterns they have to be given layouts they have to be given starter designs and then they can make tweaks that is the extent of what they are able to do so now when we look at something like the block editor you have to ask the question who is going to create those things that the beginners need well we are can we create them with the block editor no they dumb down the environment so much that the people who need to build the things in that environment don’t have the tools they need to build the things in that environment that’s how is anybody going to win how is anybody going to win and then their solution is i say where do we build these things well they go well i mean that’s easy pop open vs code pop open some json files pop open some react pop open i’m like i don’t want to do that that’s not that’s not the that’s not where i want to live that’s not where i want to do my work so they’ve effectively like they’ve dumbed it down so much that um it’s it’s a glorified content editor but then it’s like but we need patterns for the beginners who’s going to build the patterns we can’t build the patterns with the tools that we’re given and that’s why we have more block themes we have more block systems we have and this just adds to the chaos more more decisions to make more things to choose from uh nothing native i mean my gosh you i want a carousel well just go you got to get a plug-in for that i mean how many plugins am i going to end up with at the end of the day right because i needed a plug-in for a carousel i need a plug-in for an for an accordion i need a plug-in for a slider i need a plug-in for and it’s just like and we think a beginner is going to put this stack together we could like what what is what this doesn’t make any sense right uh and so this is what i’ve been trying to point out and the reason it’s all happening is because we fucking bought the lie we like literally it’s like wordpress watch the wix commercial and they were like oh my god you’re right people can build websites in five minutes we got to make our environment do that too and they just tried to copy wix uh that narrative like hey let’s just be for everybody we can we can make it as easy as possible and they weren’t self-aware enough to say that’s not our platform that’s not our identity that’s not that’s not the ecosystem that we provide and that’s not the people those kinds of people my mom and her bunco club website are not why wordpress gained dominance in the market i’ll tell you that right now okay uh going back to the the middle america of of wordpress it was the agency owners and the freelancers bringing in millions of legitimate businesses to this platform through their recommendations recognizing things like a powerful cms data ownership and extensibility and on and on and on and on and the freelancers and the agency owners guiding their clients through this maze giving them the stack giving them the website right that’s what got wordpress to be dominant we we cannot continue to buy into the lie that anybody can build a website it doesn’t matter how easy you think you’ve made it or how dumbed down you think you’ve done it they cannot build a website period so we need to focus on the freelancers we need to focus on the agency owners we need to give people the right tools the real tools to do the work and then if you want people to be able to edit let’s make it so people can edit but we are not dumbing everything down to the ultimate lay user and then the freelancers and agency owners who are actually professionals are like they’re all they’re doing is living life doing workarounds like i can’t really use these tools they’re too dumbed down i mean i gotta work around work around work around or i gotta go work in vs code or i got i’m this is this is a nightmare rant over two big thoughts rant over that was a good one uh two two big things two big thoughts one i would encourage anyone that if you if you obviously probably agree with what kevin says there but if you if you don’t if you’re at all skeptical of that specifically on the diy or one one thing that i’ve done recently i’ve talked to brendan o’connell about this he’s he’s the one that kind of got me into some of this wordpress i know at one point probably pre-covid but still is like it’s a huge segment of like the the website meetup like there’s the idea of having meetups and going on those meetups there’s a lot of virtual ones now i’ve attended several a lot of really good and uh seasoned like wordpress admins developers and stuff like that go to them there are also i mean i guess somehow like people that find them that are diyers and they go into those groups and i will tell you what like that is one of the best case studies that you could possibly sit on sit in on and see when they bring in you know like a help desk situation where they come in and they say hey uh i have this problem my logo in my header uh is not showing up i’m in like spectra or some you know something like xyz like whatever builder it doesn’t matter bricks you know it doesn’t matter i and i don’t know how to do this and it is really interesting and just educational to see what somebody who doesn’t build websites all the time and they’re not asking like you know like deeper questions about like dynamic data and like we’re just talking basic just showing a logo on a on a theme not even something that you need to pull in or anything like that it’s we’re just talking customizer as an example here right like nothing crazy and um it’s it’s really interesting uh to to see i just got an echo i don’t know i don’t know if you guys can hear it or not but um let me know but it’s interesting to see all that and how that kind of goes i want to ask you a specific question off of that as well yeah we talked about this i think offline a little bit but from a abstraction like how do you feel about that whole conversation as far as like how like okay so you already have like wordpress which is kind of abstracted away from like coding so to speak and then you have a layer up which is either like bricks or another page builder or something like that and then you start layering on more things and like obviously acs kind of like abstracts a lot of things away that i wouldn’t know how to do or wouldn’t want to do in a framework and we’re just talking about all of this with kind of like how how themes work and just like the the lay user and like i mean where do you draw the line what are your thoughts around that kind of like what’s what’s the vibe there well it’s um actually like your example of the logo um i mean i think i think we should we should talk about that a little bit more detailed because uh what what would you say well first of all reiterate what was the problem with the logo that this person was trying to get help with positioning it it was believe it was just a spectra like theme yeah i don’t know never used spectra but it was like you know how like back in the day when you first started you would install theme even now i mean you install theme and then it has like a header builder however the ui is for that yeah and then you go to like show logo in a transparent header or whatever and there was something that was already that was already misconfigured coming into it that what the solution was like resetting the settings of the customizer yeah so like yeah it just like it there was some transparency issue weird like phil keller issue but it was just showing a picture up there and it was like really a basic thing but there was already pre you know pre-misconfigured things and it was just a yeah interesting situation i i think that it’s it’s actually really helpful to break it down to like minute details like this when people are trying to understand and i mean any beginner that’s watching is gonna like they’re gonna align with this right away immediately people that have been in the game for a while they forget about these kinds of details okay now keep in mind that i get on streams all that’s not streams i get on private calls zoom calls all the time um and i and i because i do consulting so i help people i help people with their website i i watch them build i coach them through building like some people want to learn uh they want to learn in private right so we get on a zoom call and i’m like i’m walking them through like literally teaching them how to how to do stuff okay so i see plus my daughter’s like super interested in it right so i help her a little bit we did a little series in the inner circle where she was part of it um which you can get to see like what does it look like when an actual beginner um uses these things but you break it down to one specific concept like a logo the amount of decisions and just the learning curve of getting a logo on the page properly because if you gave Bev like all right Bev i’m gonna give you access don’t worry Bev i dumbed down this tool so much for you like you’re just gonna be able to go in you’re gonna know exactly how to put this logo in place the fact remains that she’s still most likely nine out of ten times gonna go put a jpeg logo in that spot right okay we all know that when we ask for when we ask clients hey please send me your logo can you raise your hand raise your hand who gets who’s been given the jpeg file who’s been given the the png and even though it’s a png it still has a block white background right it’s not transparent right uh how often do you get an svg how often do you get an svg that’s formatted properly like we get we can talk about this all day this is just one little thing we haven’t even you you’re gonna build a website we haven’t even gotten past not even the header we haven’t even gotten past the first element in the header without a learning curve there’s already the learning curve what’s a jpeg what’s a web p what’s a svg what’s a what’s a what’s a why there’s just questions endless questions right and then we have to say well we need it we need that in svg format well i don’t know what the fuck that is not now i gotta go have a conversation with my graphic designer and say can you get me this this file i don’t even know what they’re wanting can you send that over we haven’t even gotten past the first element of the first part of the first page and we’re already into a technical discussion okay we have to understand that when somebody says they’re a beginner or we’re trying to onboard or bring in new people to wordpress this is where a lot of them are at and it doesn’t matter how dumbed down you make the editor there is just just the fact of life there is a tremendous learning curve to building websites period just fucking accept it now and we will all be happier okay which leaves us at the conclusion that none of these people can will or should build a website from scratch absolutely they need either a developer to do it for them to get them to a starting point give them patterns give them a whole layout give them a ui give them whatever and then they can move stuff around but that is going to be the extent of their experience period end of story everything else is a fucking fairy tale my question my question there playing a little devil’s devil’s advocate is do you believe that are you basically saying nobody should ever diy anything in any circumstance because the only thing that i would like slightly maybe tweak in that from my perspective is i absolutely agree with the idea of nobody not everybody can pretty much a non-professional cannot create a um website that is not professional so to speak right like like if not everybody can create a professional website is a better way to say that but like just a website i mean what are your what are your thoughts there like do you do you not want anybody building websites do you think it’s or is it’s a specific type of website like anything that’s like like going to be used for a business no that’s that’s a really really good question no no no yeah that’s a that’s a really good that’s a really good question because it’s you because you framed it as do you not want anybody building a website right it’s not i’ll make it very clear it’s this is none of this is about what i want none of this is about what i want this i’m just talking about the facts of the situation right now let’s just imagine for our second we’ve got a success story right mr jim whatever jim bob okay jim bob we’re gonna fast forward jim bob created his own website uh he had an idea for a business he was able to diy it on wordpress and wordpress is gonna we’re gonna bring jim bob to the next conference and we’re gonna celebrate jim bob on stage look at jim bob grinded his way through making his own way he didn’t have a a scent to his name this is jim bob’s story jim bob didn’t have a scent to his name and he was able to get on wordpress and he was able to grind his way through making his own website and it actually started to take off and he had a great idea for a product and now jim bob just closed his first million dollars in sales give it up for jim bob look i love that fucking story i love that story and is that story possible absolutely it’s possible why because it is possible for jim bob to grind his way through getting his first website up on something like wordpress okay very very i mean even if you pick the theme but we’re talking about somebody building from scratch right that’s the context that we’re talking from could jim bob could a jim bob grind his way from scratch to his own starter website blah blah blah and go off and right off into the sunset absolutely absolutely right now he grinded his way through it which means what did he do lots of googling lots of video watching lots of learning right lots of going through that learning curve and he got to the finish line so you have to accept it wasn’t easy for jim bob right there was no oh oh yeah he did it and it was easy he was willing to grind his way through it i love people that are willing to grind i love people there but that’s not the advertisement that’s not what fucking wicks said it was what was going to happen right so that’s just not a situation that that’s comparable to the narrative right that’s that’s actually fits my narrative because that’s what i’ve been saying the fact of the matter is how many jim bobs are out there how many people want to sign up to be jim bob how many people see the advertisement and expect that it’s going to be the jim bob story right where i have to grind through and watch endless hours of youtube and make so many mistakes and get help from people in the community and yada yada yada yada that’s what we need to realize it is possible it is great when it happens but that can’t be the the narrative that we expect everybody to go through if that’s our expectation that everybody’s going to follow that path we are going to fail a large portion of society because they’re not going to do that yeah yeah i would agree i don’t know i think it’s it’s a it’s a fine line you don’t want to like discourage people from potentially getting into the space if they want to but again i mean i think you’ve used it before like the idea of like a there’s a professional there’s di wire there’s an aspiring professional um and i think that that’s a really important distinction to make because i don’t it’s not it’s the idea of it being for everyone and democratizing publishing is like a cool concept but at the same time like i really think that and hopefully again the creator call we have is an opportunity for us to like get aligned on some of the actual perspectives and the way that like we perceive these things to be like the meaning behind the actual words so to speak the phrases um it’s tough let’s go back to q’s questions let’s see we’ve been neglecting the questions a little bit here uh okay here you go why don’t you fork wp and make it your own well what do you think about a fork mark what’s what’s your what’s your appetite for a wordpress fork so i my problem with that is i don’t know what that entails at all from a technical perspective and i also don’t know you tell me the answer to this question if we forked wordpress at what are we at 6.7 can you can you like start creating your kevin press or whatever so to speak right yep could you create that and then as wordpress adds new things could you just grab those and pull them in and but you obviously already have like your base of whatever like as um i’m not the technical lead to to ask really um theoretically theoretically you can uh now if you’ve changed parts of that code base that you’re then trying to pull like if you know that thing you’re pulling relies on something you’re gonna have conflicts right um you know i know this enough from automatic css development and branches and um absolutely like you can in three days you can go off create a new branch and then you come back to merge it and there’s merge conflicts that you got to figure out so it would get very very messy like it probably would not be a practical approach like if you forked it you would just okay from this point forward we’re we’re going in our direction and we’re not sitting there trying to piecemeal like all right what did they do and we’ll pull that part in but not this other part like that seems like that would be maybe not a great strategy again i’m not the technical lead to ask uh about that but from my perspective a fork of wordpress uh it’s not a situation that i would even entertain right now i know there’s been a lot of speculation about that might be that might be the thing right that might be what we’re about to hear that’s not what you’re about to hear that’s not what you’re i’ll just tell you that point blank um because i still still fully believe in wordpress i still so again when you’re when you’re uh if we’re using the team analogy we’re all playing on the wordpress team right uh are you ready to throw in the towel on your team are you ready to diverge and start a brand new team um and then try to compete with that no i mean that’s not the point that we’re at right now now we look up in five to ten years and things have still slid straight downhill um you you have to reassess like okay now we got to make a new decision because we have new information and new things are happening but at the current standpoint right now no that would be um not a good move that would not be a good move um aside from the massive uh technical aspect of all of that um you’re also now having to convert a lot of people who are for the most part they’re happy with wordpress they have a lot of workarounds that they have to do they don’t have the necessary they don’t enjoy necessarily the environments that they’re working in but when everything shakes out when all the pros and cons shake out and they realize hey i’ve been on wordpress for 10 years i know it like the back of my hand yeah okay like it’s just the the appetite for like leaving and going to a fork is not i don’t see it even being there so that would be the first thing you would have to even look at if you were going to try to do something like that is what is the appetite for the general wordpress community it’s not there it’s not there so that would be a bad time that would be something called bad timing um and then it’s just i don’t see i don’t see any paths to any sort of victory just willy-nilly trying to do that much better is to do what i’m doing which is essentially saying we’ve done so many tremendously awesome things we wordpress is a fantastic product and project okay and um you know there’s some there’s some issues with it and those issues can absolutely be fixed and overcome and uh we can still win we can go back to being the dominant player we can win in the categories that we used to be winning in that we’re not winning in now we can very easily reclaim those victories uh we just need to understand what’s happening and we need to make some decisions about it and we need to do it together and i think we can absolutely win so there’s no reason to fork yeah i mean i think we’ve already seen classic press and such right so like i mean i don’t know if that’s really see when that came out i i didn’t even entertain it i didn’t even entertain it so um and i you know i don’t think people people would entertain the next one either yeah um okay let’s see what do you think about forking chickley when it’s false uh i think that would translate into quickly um but i don’t know when the last i don’t know what the last part of that sale maybe means maybe i don’t know i don’t know um i think a lot of people believe that uh if if quickly was for sale or something they in their mind all that means is like i can buy it and i can start working on it and that’s not the case like if you bought quickly it would be months and months and months and months of just an analysis of the code base and of trying to same thing with like automatic css i’ll go into automatic css and there’s something i did a year ago where i have to reanalyze like the logic of it and then what does that impact if i make a change here what kind of impact might that have in other areas and so on and so forth there and if imagine i can do that as the developer of acss but imagine if you didn’t even build a thing to begin with there’s so many things you just don’t even know what the implications of making a change might possibly be which means you have to go very slow you have to do a lot of analysis and you have to do an insane amount of testing and so the idea that you would just buy quickly and then start developing on top of quickly and make it just fantastic and take out the things we don’t need and add the things that oh my god that’s not going to happen anytime soon like that would be um a tremendous tremendous project in itself so there’s a lot of technical stuff and even technical debt in a lot of these plugins uh which technical debt it harasses the developer of the plugin itself much less the people that inherit it or buy it uh it’s just not as easy as people think it is um and the timelines would be much longer than people would assume that they would be yeah we saw i saw that in the comments there’s somebody uh clarified it’s free open source software was that okay yeah which makes i mean again yeah so if you were gonna like fork quickly when it was open source that’s a really another obviously probably not not not advisable per se but like now you like you said technical debt and stuff but it goes back to like the wordpress thing i mean i feel like isn’t part of our issue that we’re facing right now kind of just in in wordpress is that there is a lot of legacy situation kind of going on there and it’s almost just i mean you can build on top of it for sure because you can kind of like isolate a lot of those things and you just deal with wordpress being wordpress but if you were going to fork it then you’d have to probably deal with all those things which again takes it back to we’re not saying any of these things are easy so to speak like any there’s no easy solutions to a lot of this stuff but you know i’ve heard things like you know certain legacy stuff i don’t know was it you the other day it says somebody somebody feel like said it like if if we talk about all those dead sites like we want everything to be legacy compatible but at the same time yeah yeah like if they all just evaporated because of something that made everything moving forward better i’m not i’m not i don’t i’m not making an basing an ethical judgment on that just yet because i haven’t fully thought about that but it is a thing it’s like should we we we made mistakes like you make mistakes in software 20 years ago like no doubt about it there’s better ways to do things now yeah how do you rectify for that how do you yeah it’s no it’s um it’s well i mean some people would make the argument that wordpress would fork itself almost where it’s like there’s a legacy version right and then there’s this new version where we are going to make changes to the architecture that fix things that were done in the past i mean like we go into things like how do you fix the permalink situation that currently exists in wordpress where i can’t even choose a custom front-end slug for my blog posts like without assigning that front-end slug to every url on the website by default okay so that’s an architectural decision that’s technical debt in terms of like that’s just the decision that was made and why was that made because that was made when wordpress was a blogging platform and there was no vision of well that might not be great for like the websites of the future right that are coming down the pike um because remember this all this talk that we’re doing about custom fields and dynamic data and loops and logic and nobody was talking about that stuff in the blogging days that just not there like simple loops that was all that people needed um so we are evolving how websites are built and managed and we’re on a platform that was a is a glorified blogging platform and that hasn’t really kept up with the times and hasn’t innovated in terms of content management and the way that certain urls and content relate to other content um we’ve got the taxonomy situation we’ve got the tag situation we’ve got the bi-directional relationship situation we’ve got and then if you use relationships the uh the the querying power right the the resources that are need to query those things are dramatically different than if you use a taxonomy structure and then we have everything stored in one uh essentially post table uh where we’re not doing custom tables for custom data that brings in problems with performance and that’s matt’s been asked about that and he’s kind of pushed back on it but i think that’s an area where somebody would say it’s just technical debt it’s like you can’t you can’t just make these broad sweeping architectural changes like this willy-nilly um and that’s why when people talk about a fork it’s almost gets to a point i mean we’re 20 years in somebody would probably ask do you just start fresh with the cms concept or do you unravel all of this spaghetti that’s been going on for the past 20 years what’s easier what what would get to you what would get to the solution faster i don’t know the answer to that question i’m not entertaining that side of things so it doesn’t really matter to me um but it is somebody is going to have to tackle that somebody is going to have to have a discussion about that i know that we can’t go into the 2030s with a glorified blogging platform like we do have to start innovating the cms we do have to start putting some of these pieces together or fixing them uh because you know it’s it’s it’s already unraveling a little bit it’s already breaking a little bit it’s already not working for the future of websites and it’s only going to get worse yeah great all right let’s do a couple more questions and we’ll get out of here because we got the creator call to jump on uh d123 says what is the creator call so we alluded that a little bit earlier where it’s um essentially just a powwow uh with wordpress creators discussing um you know wordpress and creating around wordpress uh because the creator the creator pool is very important to what we want to do obviously and what wordpress wants to do what automatic wants to do uh and if we’re all on the same page we’re all communicating and we’re all uh sharing ideas and things like that it’s i think it’s going to be better for everybody so mark’s participating in that i’m participating in that i don’t even know who else are we expecting to be on the call mark you’ve been on have you been on one before yeah i was on the first one if you guys want to see the first one it’s published on ann mccarthy’s channel she’s a automatic uh like employee so um i i did i did quite the it was on quite the recruiting trail between the the first call and the second call so kevin’s joining us now and um i know wp toots wants to try to make it i think imron web squadron um brennan o’connell i mean there’s i mean if you name the people in the wordpress space like i don’t know the full list but like there’s a lot uh matt maduros uh so yeah i mean i mean it’s just it’s just us that are out here talking about stuff seeing stuff every day getting great feedback from you guys in the chat and everything like that and we’re just trying to open more lines of communication because i mean again i haven’t been here for too too long but i don’t remember seeing something like this before so kudos to ann for putting it together so bill lewis says wordpress is used by 43.4 of all the websites that is a content management system market share of 62.6 percent um okay so yeah this this point is a this is the line right so if you’re going to give people the wordpress brochure and the sales brochure um and and you know i i i made this joke to my wife the other day because she she comes home from the uh alternative the alternative orthodontist right there’s a i don’t know if anybody knows there’s a big thing about like braces are braces great or there’s this uh new thing called applied light force therapy which is kind of like it’s a little bit different um but anyway you go and they’ll obviously give you the brochure anywhere you go they give you the brochure and so my wife comes home and my my gosh she has sold on applied light force therapy and and i was like man you brought the whole brochure didn’t you like i want to look into it i want to look into it first but you uh love that brochure that they gave you uh that was very clear right so if you were going to give people the wordpress brochure i mean that’s the one of the first things guys like we’re 43 of them 62 of but here’s all the stats coming in the stat they don’t want on the brochure though and that we all need to be very clear of because you know there is a leading indicator for if you’re looking ahead that’s why i like to look ahead i like to look ahead right it’s great to look at what you’ve done and it’s great to pat yourself on the back and that 43 number and that 62 whatever that works out to that’s a pat on the back look at the history that’s that kind of stat but the stat that tells the tale of what’s about to happen is this and i don’t have the exact number on it but what i do know is relative to where we used to be the percentage of new websites being started with wordpress is dramatically lower dramatically lower than where it used to be and where it needs to be okay and if that number doesn’t come up that that’s a problem because it doesn’t matter how many sites use it now we’re talking about new sites new site new site being created new site being created new site being created those aren’t wordpress sites okay that’s a big problem so if you’re looking to the next five to ten years that’s a category you cannot lose in if you’re losing in the category of new sites being started with wordpress that spells disaster for the next five to ten years and it doesn’t matter how many pats you give yourself on the back for what’s happened in the past that is not going to save you going into the future so that is the stat we have to change that is the category we are currently losing in let’s not forget that yep 100 all right where where can the creators call be viewed live tyree said i don’t think it’s live right it’s just recorded yeah it’s not live it should be on ann mccarthy’s channel uh and i don’t know less than a week i would assume cool um all right let me tell everybody about tomorrow what’s going to happen so the uh dear wordpress video comes out tomorrow some people have asked is there is it a live stream tomorrow is it an hour early it goes live at 10 a.m it is not a live stream it is what youtube calls a premiere right which is youtube takes a video and premieres it and the premiere time is 10 a.m it makes it like a live stream in the sense that you can chat on it so we can all show up together i’ll be there um and we can all chat about it’s only it’s it’s 12 minutes okay so if you’re concerned about the time or or the length or anything else it’s literally a 12 minute video so it’s very quick to digest um come show up again i’ll be there we’ll be in the chat talking i would like you if you if it resonates with you then i want you to share it with somebody that’s in work that you know is involved in wordpress okay help help it get around there is a larger mission at play here uh for those of you who are wondering more about etch etch is a piece of a larger broader mission within wordpress uh we think it is going to be a critical piece um but you have to understand what’s going on with the state of wordpress right now you have to understand the history of how we got to this point and what the workflow and the tools currently look like for the people who operate within the wordpress ecosystem if you don’t understand these things if you don’t have this context then the etch project um won’t make as much sense to you and won’t seem as important as it actually is and so this is these are the things we have to talk about this is the lead up to it so uh show up tomorrow i’ll be here we’ll watch the video together we’ll chat about it we’ll share it around i’m sure there’ll be plenty of people you know with their opinions uh there will be a lot of poppies uh coming out to to say their thing um to dance and sing and um yeah it’ll be it’ll be a fun time for everybody but then in september is when things start to really heat up okay so beginning of september is the live streams the live streams are where you are going to get all of the details that you want okay um but those are going to those are you got to sign up to those you got to show up live they’re not going to be recorded and released um the people that show up live are the people that get in um so that’s going to be super important there so tomorrow i just want to clear up a little confusion is not a live stream it is a video premiere it is only 12 minutes long i will be there in the chat though we can all watch it together uh and then we’ll we’ll need to have some discussions about it and then you’ll just follow uh the the developments from that point forward uh paul says real quick when is the next ic office hours uh so that’s going to be coming up probably um probably next week probably next week i usually do them toward the end of the month so i think next week would be a good time i’ll get that on the schedule there will also be a co-working with kevin probably later this week or early next week so that’ll be a good time to come hang out and get some work done together um any any last final thoughts mark before we get out of here buddy uh this has been a pleasure thank you so much kevin for having me thank you guys for uh in the chat here it’s been awesome uh hopefully we entertain you and try to educate you and everything like that but um yeah appreciate appreciate it kevin thank you so much for having me absolutely it was good having you and uh thanks everybody for being here we will be back very soon we’ll fill you in on what’s happening on these creator calls so that you guys are on the same page and uh that’s it peace Thank you.