WDD LIVE 073: The Outrageous Cost of Context Switching in WordPress

What’s up, everybody?

How are we doing today?

How are we doing today?

Happy Etch Timber, by the way.

We got Justin in the house.

We got Simon and Danielle and Pablo.

Digital Algorithms is here.

And Ruben, good to see everybody.

Let me get down here in the…

Oh, there we are.

There we are.

Okay, now the chat’s rolling.

Look frozen for a second.

As Jason says, hit the thumbs up when you arrive.

Anybody new here?

Anybody new to the streams?

What’s up, Mark?

What’s up, Charlie?

Erica’s in the house.

Alex.

If you’re new, let me know if you’re new.

Doing a little bit of a…

Well, we have a busy week, obviously.

We have a busy week.

I’m just trying…

I’m just taking it easy today, you know?

Thought I’d get on.

I mean, WDD Live, obviously, is one of my favorite parts.

It’s one of the highlights of the week, right?

So, can’t miss that unless I’m, like, you know, physically not able to be here.

But otherwise, I’m just kind of taking it easy.

Suzanne in the house.

Welcome.

First time ever, says Marcel.

Well, welcome, Marcel.

Patrick says, OG.

Hit the thumbs up before the streams start.

Absolutely.

We got design with Cracket in the house.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Innotrends.

Good to see you.

Do not forget to hit like, says Marcus.

Okay.

Good, good, good.

All right.

We’re just…

We’re letting the algorithm do its thing.

Bring some people in.

Agenda today.

Well, we have…

It is Etch Timber.

I think that’s a good…

That’s…

I think that’s…

Somebody else…

Somebody had that name.

I thought it was a good name.

I think we could do maybe something special every September for Etch Timber.

It’ll be the natural anniversary anyway.

So, that’ll be good.

It’s actually my actual wedding anniversary on the 4th, tomorrow, actually.

So, yeah.

That too.

That too.

Oh, man.

Okay.

You know what I want to do?

Probably next year for my…

Because I got…

We got married in Destin on a boat.

And I’ve wanted to go back for…

We used to go to Destin all the time.

But I want to go back and go back to…

Baytown Wharf was the area that the boat went out of.

It’s a really, really cool area down in Destin.

And then there’s some other places that are very nostalgic in Destin for us.

So, I want to get back down there.

Maybe next year.

That’ll be a good one.

Okay.

Here’s…

Oh, Carmen.

Second live stream.

Pretty new.

But I’ve been watching videos for months.

Well, fantastic.

Good.

Well, as usual on this stream, I mean, what we’re all here to do…

We are here to hang out.

We are here to have fun.

But we are also here to learn things.

And typically, what we’re talking about is web design best practices.

And we’re talking about everything that makes a website successful.

So, we can go into many, many different areas of that.

Today, what we’re going to be going into is a discussion on context switching.

Which is something that has been continually getting more and more and more frustrating.

And it’s actually…

You know, I was talking to Mateo, I think yesterday, about this.

And I was like, you know, I think people…

I think people kind of realize maybe like how much they context switch in web design.

And what I’m getting at, by the way, is that the nature of the tools that we’re using force you to context switch.

It’s not natural context switching.

It’s forced context switching.

And I think we all put up with it.

And we all realize it to some degree.

But we interpret it as like a given.

It’s like, oh, well, this is just how work happens.

Like this is…

Maybe it’s unavoidable.

Maybe there’s a reason for it.

Maybe there…

I don’t know.

But we like tend to dismiss it.

Instead of like, why are we doing this?

This doesn’t make any sense.

This is terrible.

It’s a terrible experience.

And it’s insanely expensive.

Every time you…

And if you don’t know what context switching is, it’s essentially that your brain has to switch gears from one thing to another thing.

Or your work has to switch from one environment to another environment.

Which, by the way, if you’re switching from one environment to another environment, your brain also is forced to switch gears.

Like you can’t…

That has to happen.

So…

And then you end up with multiple tabs open.

You’re trying to do multiple things at one time because this thing relies on that thing and this thing relies on that thing over here.

And they’re all done in different places.

And then you’re getting confused.

You’re getting lost.

You’re getting frustrated.

Somebody thumbs down already.

I don’t…

What even is there to thumbs down about yet?

I mean, I may give you plenty of things in the stream to thumbs down about.

But what could have possibly happened already?

Already, right?

People are…

It’s very funny.

There’s people coming out of the woodworks.

You can really see.

You can really see, especially given the nature of what’s going on right now.

You can really see who is who.

You can really see who is who these days.

Okay.

Anyway, let’s go ahead.

All my fellow…

Yes.

Okay.

Good.

This is a good comment right here.

Since EU will be etched at night, I won’t watch, but I’ll watch it on September 5th.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s the goal.

That’s the…

I mean, that’s why I’m doing multiple streams.

Because if you can’t do the first one, you can just do the second one and then do the third one, right?

Okay.

So context switching, very, very, very expensive.

It’s a mental load.

It drains you mentally.

It drains you emotionally.

It’s just very frustrating every time it has to happen.

And I don’t think people, because they kind of just dismiss it, they’re just kind of trying to get their work done.

They never actually stop to quantify how much it’s happening and how absurd it is.

And then calculating the enormous cost of that, because what I’m going to show you today is isolated to a very simple scenario on a very simple page.

And what we have to remember and keep in mind is that this actually expands out to the entirety of a project.

This happens constantly all throughout a project.

And the enormous cost of it really can’t even be calculated.

And then project after project after project, this thing.

And our stacks are often the way they are because we’ve already attempted to eliminate a lot of context switching and decision making as well.

There’s a lot of decision making that has to happen in web design already.

And so to add dozens and dozens of needless decision making on top of that is never a good idea.

And so if we’re talking about efficiency and maximizing our workflow and all of this, we have to look at these things and we have to stop dismissing them.

And we have to start to actually quantify them because they have a tremendous cost.

It is a real cost.

And I mean, you’re the one paying that cost.

You’re the developers.

Your client’s not paying that cost.

I mean, they kind of are maybe in the extra time that it takes you.

And you know, you’ve probably priced in such a way because you’re like, this is frustrating as shit.

I’m going to raise my prices.

Like, so it does have a cost to them, but you’re the one who has to live with it.

You’re the one who has to actually do the work in the environments, right?

Okay.

And if anybody has any, I noticed a couple of people talking about, yeah, it’s like, you know, Daniel has what on earth is context switching.

You’re going to see, you’re going to see in just a minute.

I’m going to demonstrate it.

That’s why we’re here.

You’re going to, you’re going to, we don’t have to like read a definition.

You’re going to watch exactly what it is.

But if you have any good book recommendations, maybe you did read a book on this topic on context switching.

And if you have a book recommendation and you think people should read it, uh, just go ahead and put that in the chat.

You can’t put links.

Don’t put a link because it’s going to, it’s your comment will not show up.

So don’t go to Amazon or anything like that, but just put the name of the book or whatever, uh, or an article.

It could even be an article, right?

Uh, but I’m going to show you, you’re going to, you’re going to watch it happen.

First thing I want to say, uh, this is pretty much your, look at that.

Look at that.

I’m not even trying to, wasn’t even trying to do that.

Okay.

Um, uh, what was I going to say?

Oh, this is pretty much your last call, your last call for the etch waiting list.

Obviously the live streams are going down tomorrow.

They start tomorrow.

Uh, they’re going to be Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Uh, but you need to be on the waiting list to get your link to join.

And we’ll just answer any quick questions about timings and all this other stuff going on.

Um, the links have not been sent out yet.

So a few hours before the live stream starts, you’ll get a link in your inbox.

You click the link, it is a zoom webinar.

Um, we’re using their webinar platform.

Okay.

So it’s capped at a thousand people and you can, if you have zoom, it’ll open zoom.

If you don’t have zoom, there’s a couple of people who are like, I don’t, I don’t have zoom or I don’t, I boycott zoom or whatever.

Okay.

Everybody’s boycotting everything these days.

All right.

So you, you, if you don’t have zoom, it’s fine because I believe it just opens in your browser.

It’s, they have a browser version of it.

So you don’t actually have to use the software or download the software or anything like that.

Um, so the link will be sent out.

You click the link, you join the room.

You’re good to go.

Uh, and the times I gave a link to a time calculator.

Okay.

So I put the times in my time zone and I gave a link to a time calculator, wherever you are, put your location in.

And I believe I even pre-selected Atlanta for you as the comparison time.

And so all you have to do is put your location in.

It’ll tell you what time to show up on your side of things.

For some of you, keep in mind, you know, if you’re way, way, way, way, way over there, uh, it could be the next day.

Like it’s the fourth for me could be the fifth for you.

Right.

It’s early in the morning on the fifth, late at night on the fourth for me.

Right.

Get it.

So you got to work that out.

I have faith in you.

I have faith in you.

Uh, for those of you who are coming to the inner circle live stream, okay.

Shh.

Stop.

Stop.

This is like, I’ve, I’ve been trying to say it like, and it actually says it in the post.

It’s like, Hey, just, if you’re coming to the IC stream, ignore the public times, just ignore the public, ignore everything about the public stuff.

All the stuff that you need to do the IC one is in the IC.

That’s it.

Okay.

Now stop talking about it.

And if you want, if you want that, well, just go read the instructions there.

All the instructions are going to be there.

And just, that’s the post.

That’s the number one.

That’s like your central hub for what is happening with that specific event.

Right.

So just go there, go there.

Um, all right.

Any questions?

Is that not, is anything not clear?

Right.

At the, at the end of the, at the end of the webinar, you’re going to get the link to how do I actually, um, you know, buy, buy into etch.

How do I do that?

That all that is going to be talked about at the end of the live stream.

Okay.

Um, so it’s all, it’s, it’s very easy.

It’s very, you’re going to get a link.

You’re going to go, you’re going to check out and it’s going to be done.

And it’s going to be very simple.

I know you might feel like this is an opportunity where panic needs to happen, but it doesn’t.

I promise.

It doesn’t need to happen.

Okay.

Um, I don’t see any, I don’t see any comments or questions about the times.

So I think we’re good to go.

Uh, we’ll go ahead and jump into, I like the viewership today.

I love, I love the viewership.

Do you guys remember the days where we had 40 people here or we had 50 people here, right?

Do you remember those that were the OGs back when we had 40, 50 viewers, right?

Okay.

Things are, things are getting fun.

They’re getting exciting.

Is September 4th at 9 PM Eastern in the email supposed to be 9 AM?

The calculator links to 10 AM Eastern time in Atlanta.

Now the calculator just links to the Atlanta.

That’s all it does is it has Atlanta preselected.

Uh, it’s probably, I don’t know.

It probably uses the time that when you open the link, I don’t know.

Uh, but put in the time, uh, for Atlanta and then put in the comparison city and it should work.

You can also go to this site right here.

Uh, yeah, I am, I am screen sharing.

You can go to this site right here, right?

Which I, I, this is the one I use because I can compare a lot at the exact same time.

So like that 9 PM Atlanta one right here.

And it gives me a column so I can see, ah, that’s 10 AM for Tokyo.

See, I had some Tokyo peeps that were like, everything you do is not at my time.

And I was like, you know what, Tokyo?

I got you.

I got you, Tokyo.

Okay.

So first one, first one out of the gate, out of the gate, Tokyo, you can, you can come.

Okay.

So there you go.

Uh, Sydney, my Sydney people, where are you at?

Where are my Australians at?

Y’all say, Hey, Hey, Hey, it’s never in my time.

Well, guess what?

First one is at your time just for you.

Right.

Um, so I, I like this site.

Just, it’s very easy.

Just go in and put in your stuff.

It should be, we should be able to figure this out in 2024.

I think ask Chad GPT.

I don’t know what to tell it.

Like there’s many ways, many ways that y’all can sort this out.

Right.

If you know it’s at 9 PM in Atlanta, I have faith in you.

Okay.

Um, all right.

Good, good, good.

Do the third live stream risk peeps missing out on the deal?

Um, a little bit, a little bit.

I mean, if we get there and there’s, and there’s no, none left, I’ll probably do a small batch for just a, not, not another thousand.

Okay.

Not enough, but it’s a small batch.

And it depends on the amount of people that are still coming.

Third was like overflow, overflow.

I expected everybody to be in the, in the first few.

So, uh, we’ll, we’ll see.

All right.

Um, yeah.

Carl says you can even ask your Alexa device.

Yeah.

Ask the CIA.

Carl.

That’s a good, that’s a, just, just joking.

Just joking.

Okay.

Hmm.

Has Kevin actually said what etch is or will the mystery be lifted in the announcement?

The whole point is to come.

Yeah.

You come to the live stream.

If for those of you who are like, I want the details.

I, where are the details?

They’re in the live stream.

That’s where you go to get the details.

So you’re going to get all the details in the live stream.

Um, all right, let’s, let’s move on.

So what we’re going to do, go to hwp.com.

If you’re not on the waiting list yet, just get that done.

Um, I’m going to spin up a site and we are going to start talking about context switching in WordPress.

We are going to start talking about efficiencies and inefficiencies.

I also want to talk about this from the perspective of a new user to WordPress because we, we should not forget them.

And I’ve been talking about this topic a lot lately.

I believe it is very important for WordPress to continue to dominate being that we do most of us here.

Actually, let’s do this.

How about in the chat?

Let me know.

Do you do what percentage of work do you do in WordPress versus other platforms?

So obviously you’re doing web design work.

Are you, what percentage of that work is getting done in WordPress?

Throw that in the chat and let’s see what everybody’s, what is the general consensus?

Where are we at?

Are we at 20%?

Are we at a hundred percent?

Are we at 95?

Well, what, what percent is it?

Hundred, hundred, 90, 90, 100.

Keep them coming.

Let’s keep them coming.

Drop them in the checks.

We got to get a, you know, a general large consensus here.

Hundred, 90, 90, 100.

A hundred, 98, 100, 90, 100, 80.

Okay.

That’s, I mean, 90, 90, 90, 100, 100.

More just came in.

99, 99, 95, 90.

Okay.

So we see.

Now, being that this is so much of our work and our, like, we rely on this, obviously, this ecosystem.

It’s not just a platform.

It’s an ecosystem.

The stronger that ecosystem is, the better it is for us.

The more people coming into that ecosystem, the better.

I want you to imagine a future where you are telling clients, we are going to be building this site for you on WordPress.

And it’s like every client you come into contact with now, just imagine, we’re just, this is an imagination scenario.

Imagine those clients are, they have a negative view of WordPress because of whatever, right?

And so they’re fighting with you now.

They’re arguing, oh, I don’t know.

Oh, I don’t know.

Like 10 years ago, that was the fucking standard.

That was like, yeah, it’s going to happen.

That’s, that’s, of course, of course, it’s going to be on WordPress, right?

But imagine a scenario where now it’s not.

Now it’s like, ah, I don’t know.

We rather maybe look at something else.

And you’re like, well, I mean, what are you going to tell?

Because you’re like, I mean, I do my work on WordPress.

That’s what I do.

I’m exclusively WordPress.

Like with 90% of our projects are on WordPress.

You don’t want to start having to entertain these other platforms just like, because clients now have this negative view of WordPress.

But, you know, that’s kind of what’s happening.

Like, you know, there’s less people coming in.

We need more people to come in.

We need WordPress to be the obvious standard, to be the dominant player in the market.

That helps all of us.

It makes all of our lives easier.

It makes our work easier.

It’s good for everybody.

Okay.

So we need to keep that in mind.

So I talk about this a lot.

And in order to keep it a healthy ecosystem, you know what has to happen?

More people have to come in.

New people have to come in.

There have to be Webflow people who are willing to come over from Webflow into WordPress.

Right now, there’s a lot going the other direction.

Okay.

Not great.

We need people coming from Webflow.

We need people from Wix realizing the limitations of a Wix platform and being willing to come into WordPress and not just willing to come into WordPress, but it needs to be easy for them to come into WordPress.

It needs to be an inviting situation.

It needs to not be like chaos.

Okay.

And so I talk about this context switching thing and some of the other stuff ties into this from both of these perspectives.

You’re already here.

Look how costly it is for you.

You’re already here.

But imagine you’re not already here and you have to come into this situation.

Imagine now the barriers and the challenges to doing that as we go through this.

Okay.

So I know you’re like a lot of people are like, oh, I just care about me, Kevin.

I don’t really care about the community.

I just, I’m just here for me.

Right.

Okay.

Whatever.

But just as we go through this, it’s kind of open your mind to just, oh man, that would really suck for a beginner too.

Wouldn’t it?

Okay.

All right.

Let’s go to, let’s go to create new.

Let’s go blank website.

I am going to start this from a blueprint, but we are going to pause to talk about this for a second.

Okay.

So I’m going to spin this up.

Not everything needs to be a CMS and that complexity.

Yeah.

I don’t, I don’t know.

I don’t know that I agree with that.

Honestly.

There is, by the way, you know, some people will make this argument.

I think it’s a great thing to bring up at this point in time, by the way, people will make the argument like, oh, well, you know, it depends on my client’s needs.

I use WordPress here and then I might use Webflow over here.

I might do Wix over here.

Oh, wow.

That, I would never recommend doing that.

I would never recommend that.

The context switching cost of building on one platform versus another is ginormous, is ginormous.

Not to mention your ability.

I’ve talked about this relentlessly in terms of just business advice in the inner circle.

Your ability to scale an agency or scale your freelance business, you are putting ceilings on your ability to scale anytime you adopt a secondary platform.

Okay.

So like if you’re like, well, you know, we do 20% of our stuff on Webflow.

Oh, well, that’s, you know, that comes with a tremendous cost because that workflow is completely different.

Your brain has to completely switch gears and workflows and platforms to do that work anytime you’re over there doing that work differently from what you’re doing in WordPress.

There’s a tremendous cost to that.

And then when you’re hiring and onboarding team members, there’s the cost of, well, we need people who can learn WordPress, but who are also familiar with Webflow.

And then, you know, you got to keep up with the latest in Webflow and keep up with the latest in WordPress.

And like, man, that is just a tremendous cost.

And then I ask why, why, why, why?

I’ve never heard a good reason.

I’ve never heard a good reason.

People are like, well, you know, the WordPress thing, the maintenance and management.

Well, I sell my management plan.

Like what?

What are you turning down extra money?

Why are you turning down actually serving them as, as an agency?

I don’t, I don’t get it.

It doesn’t make any business sense.

And so I’ve just wanted to put that out there for people.

I see people trying to use all these different stacks and tools.

Like, it’s like, my gosh, my gosh, man.

Okay.

Have you seen Surecard 3 with the BRICS integration?

Some questions over data ownership and customer data relating to GDPR.

It’s not being stored on the WPN.

So all the database, I think they, they came out with a whole different, they’ve, they’ve done a lot of progress on the GDPR side of things.

I don’t have any specific links to point you to, but I, you know, we can get those.

And Adam, Adam will post those also, I’m sure.

Okay.

All right.

Let’s get into this.

So let me go to staging sites.

Let’s go.

I think this is the latest one that we made.

What is this?

Oh, seven, three.

I think this is oh, seven, three.

Let’s go ahead and fire this up and see what we’ve got going on.

First thing I need to do, I just need to activate some, some licenses here.

Let’s get these activated.

We’ll activate for frames also.

And I want to talk about this blueprint concept as well.

I want to talk about this blueprint concept.

Okay.

Let me go into plugins and, you know, appearance.

Let’s, let’s do themes first.

So this, this one is running on, this is running on bricks, right?

And right off the bat, just imagine this as a, as an agency, right?

You come into WordPress.

I’ve talked about this before.

You are going to have to choose like, what is your, because WordPress does not have a native editor that gets the job done, right?

That we know that native core Gutenberg does not get the job done unless you want to live and code editors and nobody wants to live.

Like 2024 should not be the code editor era, right?

It’s like, oh, back to, back to code.

All right.

Now that’s not really the way we want to live and work.

Especially when we have all of these advanced tools at our fingertips.

So you’re already making a decision right here.

This is already decision point.

Number one, one of the hardest decisions, by the way, is what theme am I going to use?

Or what block system am I going to use?

Or what page builder am I going to use?

Or what, what, what, what, what?

It’s just, oh, and it’s an endless, endless amount of options.

And it’s, and it’s just pros and cons, pros and cons.

And then, okay.

And so we’ll just, we’ll just move on because the mental load of that is just terrible.

Now we go to plugins and I’m already starting with this setup right here.

So automatic CSS and frames, but advanced custom fields, right?

We’re going to, this is a key area we’re going to get to right here.

Happy files pro.

This is a key area that we’re going to get to right here in our context switching and our decision-making and all of this, right?

And then WS forum pro is a staple.

Okay.

You got to have it.

You got to have it.

It’s a staple on every install.

All right.

So what we’re going to do is I told you, we’re going to build a little bit of an about page.

I am going to go slow because it’s a good opportunity for people to learn as well.

Uh, if you, especially if you’re a beginner or, you know, an intermediate, or you’re just new to our workflow.

Cause there’s a lot of people who they’re not going to understand what, whoa, what are you doing classes?

Whoa, what are you doing with that?

Okay.

Like, whoa, what are those tokens?

What context menus?

What’s going on?

Right there.

It’s just, it’s a little bit of chaos to them.

And, um, you know, we got to go slow, make sure we don’t leave them behind.

So first thing I’m going to do, obviously I said, we’re going to make an about page.

So why don’t we just go ahead and do that?

Love the fact that I’m in a different UI right here though, right off the bat.

So that’s, that’s a good, that’s a good, uh, feature.

Fantastic.

Always good for the brain to go from one UI right into a different one.

Um, all right.

So we’re going to have our about page and then I’m going to edit with bricks is obviously going to take me into, um, another UI, uh, and, uh, another whole environment here where, where we’re going to do some work.

Okay.

So what I want to do is I want to, um, essentially build, let’s see if this is, uh, let’s see if our frames license has actually activated in the back end there.

I think, Oh, see, see that we’ve got a context switch once again.

So this is a, this is actually a bricks feature.

Uh, it’s the template library, right?

Well, the template library will not pull in from an external library unless you’ve set it up, uh, to do that.

Now, where do we set it up is the question.

Well, not here, not here.

So we have to context switch already.

I’m like, I wanted to start, I mean, I guess I could just start from scratch building.

Um, but because I wanted to use a library to help me build and build faster and build using the patterns that I like.

And on all of that, I have to context switch immediately.

I just pause, just stop, stop what you were doing.

You thought you were about to do something productive, didn’t you, Kevin?

You thought you were about to do something productive.

Now, hold, hold on.

We got, you got to stop because I can’t, I can’t put the license in here.

There’s nowhere, there’s nowhere to put the license in.

You have to leave.

You have to leave what you’re doing.

You have to stop.

You have to go at, not just leave there.

I now have to leave here.

Also, let me go back to here.

Now I got to go here.

I got to go here.

Okay.

We got to go to templates.

I got to scroll down.

Look at that.

See, because the license key is not in that little area of that little menu.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait over here.

We have to just stop.

We can’t even get any work done.

Um, so what I’m going to do, let me go.

Here’s, here’s the problem with this.

Let’s go to, uh, uh, how do I get a new, let’s get a new tab because I can’t, I can’t pull up my password manager on the screen.

That’s not a good thing.

So I’m going to pull it up on this different screen over here.

Uh, I’m going to search for frames.

I don’t think you guys can see this.

Hopefully you can’t see this.

Uh, cause it does expose the license key.

All right.

I’m back.

So here we go.

Password.

We’re going to hit, oh, no, we don’t want to add.

Sorry.

Save.

Okay.

All right.

First context switch is in the books.

Uh, let’s go back to pages.

Let’s go edit with bricks.

Let’s see if we can actually add something now.

Okay.

So we’re going to go to templates and let’s go to frames and it’s going to reload our library here and let’s go to hero and let’s just bring in this hero right here.

Yeah.

Sure.

Import theme style, whatever.

Okay.

Good.

Now I’ve got a hero in, oh my gosh, look at this.

Uh, that’s not the font that I want.

That right there, not the font.

That’s not a great font.

That’s a, that’s a very, a very terrible looking font, right?

Okay.

Uh, need to add a font.

Where should we go?

Uh, not here.

Not, the answer is not here, right?

Let me stop.

Let me pause.

One second.

Sorry.

Uh, let’s go, let’s go somewhere.

Not here either.

Hmm.

Okay.

Let’s go back here.

Let’s go to bricks.

Let’s go to, uh, custom fonts.

There we go.

All right.

We’re in it.

Let’s go.

I want plus Jakarta Sands.

I’m liking this font a lot lately.

Uh, let’s add a font variant here.

Let’s go 700.

Um, okay.

Let’s, let’s come in here.

Fantastic.

We can go in.

I’m going to, I’m going to find this real quick.

Look, I’m, I’m in my fucking finder now.

I’m like, I’m everywhere.

You got to live everywhere.

Uh, this is nothing is nothing feels very easy.

The amount of resistance to all of this.

Um, it, it just, if you stop to add it up, it should start to get like very obvious how expensive this is.

Um, let me go to export exported fonts.

Let’s go to plus Jakarta Sands.

Let’s go to the Waf folder and let’s finally bring in some fonts.

Okay.

Uh, regular.

Yep.

Save and upload here.

I want the bold.

Yep.

We’ll take that.

We’ll go ahead and publish.

Okay.

Fantastic.

Can I, can I continue my, my work now, please?

So let’s go to edit with bricks.

Uh, man.

Okay.

Got some fonts.

Making some progress.

Okay.

Um, let’s come down.

You know what?

I want to build, I want to build, uh, the grid, the team member grid myself.

Maybe let’s go ahead.

And, uh, I could, I could just use a frame, but let’s just go ahead and build.

Um, I want to, I want to have, uh, well, let’s just put a heading in there.

Like a generic heading.

We’re not, we’re not really going to style this up or do much of anything with it.

I’m just, we’re making a point here.

That’s all we’re doing.

Uh, okay.

Our team.

Right.

And let’s go ahead.

And I want to add another container.

Maybe a, yeah, let’s just add another container here.

Um, I think what I want to do is I want to, I want to loop through team members, but I want to categorize them.

So I’m thinking like by their, by their actual team that they’re on, like maybe we have executives, maybe we have managers, maybe we have a board of directors, maybe we have, um, support like, okay.

So there’s going to be categories of people.

Um, and then I want to, so I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to loop through the categories and then I want to loop through the people that belong in each category.

You can see, it’s a very simple, relatively simple thing.

Now, uh, by the way, um, you can’t do this in most page builders.

You can, you can do this in bricks because bricks is more powerful than most page builders.

The idea of doing this in most page builders is it’s not going to happen.

Uh, what you’re about to see is really even in oxygen, you can’t even do this in oxygen, right?

Cause they don’t have a loop.

One, they don’t, I don’t think they support nested loops, but two, they don’t have a loop that can even query categories.

So they can only query posts.

If you’re, if you’re a query loop, you’ve got a very, uh, you know, underpowered query loop.

If all it does is query posts.

Um, but here’s the thing.

I’m just, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna start by, uh, well, let’s get a heading in here.

Uh, this would be, I’m just going to kind of scaffold this out.

So let’s go to age three.

This would be just pretend for a minute that this is executives.

Okay.

And then underneath that, uh, we’re going to add a block and this block is going to be our grid.

So we’re going to say, this is a team grid.

Um, this container is going to be a team group, a team group.

Okay.

And then we have the heading and then we have the team grid.

And then what I’m going to put in the team grid is a block for the team card.

So we’re going to go team card.

Fantastic.

What do I want in my card?

I probably want two blocks.

I’m just going to, again, scaffolding this out.

If you’re new here, this is just the, I like to do HTML first and then content and come back and do design.

Okay.

So team card, we’ll go with a, um, thumb, uh, let’s call it a headshot.

How about a headshot wrapper?

And then a content wrapper.

In our headshot wrapper, we’re going to put in a headshot, obviously.

Okay.

So let’s throw in an image.

We’re going to call that image a headshot.

And then for this, we’re going to have a heading and then we’re going to have text.

And this is going to be our name.

So this is the person’s name.

And then this is their title right here.

Let’s make the title a P.

Fantastic.

Let’s make this a figure element.

Okay.

Awesome.

I’m going to go to unsplash and I’m just going to say like, um, professional headshot and okay.

Fantastic.

Let’s use, um, uh, the one I always look at.

Why is this the default?

Like the one I always try to get first, it’s like unsplash plus, like, come on now.

All right.

So let’s go with, um, um, okay.

It’s another one.

The ones that looks like the most natural are always the plus.

Uh, I don’t know who this guy is, but he’s, he’s everywhere.

Let’s just use that.

Whatever.

Uh, okay.

So I’m, I’m over here.

Let’s go ahead and drop this in.

And then we’re going to go ahead and loop through these things.

So if you’re not familiar with like query looping and all that, where’s my finder?

Okay.

Uh, let’s go to downloads and bring that in.

Fantastic.

Um, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

That’s right.

Uh, WordPress doesn’t, WordPress doesn’t have any native, uh, image optimization support.

So I can’t even upload the fucking thing.

Can’t even upload it.

That’s just not a thing.

So we’re going to go to squoosh and we’re going to have to squoosh it first.

So sorry, I have to switch context again.

I have to go into a completely different mode.

I just wanted an image to be in there.

And now I’m in, now I’m, I wasn’t even ready to do this yet.

I didn’t want to do this yet, but now I’m in image optimization mode.

I thought I was in build a team grid mode, but apparently I was in image optimization mode.

Okay.

So let’s go back in.

We finally have our, which one is it?

This?

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

It’s this one.

Okay.

Let’s pull that in.

Insert.

Okay.

And there we are.

Fantastic.

All right.

Let’s make this a three.

Actually, that needs to be a four.

Cause this is a three and this is a two.

Got to have good hierarchy.

Okay.

Good hierarchy.

Um, all right.

So what we want to do now is we want to take this team card and we want to add classes to everything that we did.

Cause we style with classes around here.

We don’t just, we don’t just raw dog it on the H on the ID tag.

Okay.

That’s not what we want to be doing.

Uh, you need to use your classes.

So we’re going to hit BIM here and we’re going to BIM these and we’re going to say apply classes.

And now I have custom classes on everything using BIM methodology.

That’s auto BIM.

That’s a automatic CSS feature.

And then I can come in here and I can say that this is going to be my team grid.

And then I can come in here and say, this is going to be my team group.

And I can come in here and say, this is going to be my team group heading.

Okay.

Team group double underscore heading.

All right.

Fantastic.

We’re not going to go through all the BIM thing and all of that, but, uh, you get it.

All right.

Let’s pause here.

Is anybody lost on what we’re doing right now?

Um, and, but have we identified where, because we’re about to have to context switch again.

I apologize.

Like this, the context switching is just relentless.

Um, okay.

So I haven’t, that’s the, that’s the joke, Rob.

That’s the joke, Rob.

Don’t say it out loud, buddy.

Don’t say it out loud.

Okay.

I got to take it off the screen.

You’re going to get me canceled.

All right.

I haven’t pursued the idea as the new admin is kind of some plugs.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Um, all right.

Uh, I don’t see any questions.

I just see comments.

This is fun.

Um, that guy buys and leaves a testimonial on every SAS product.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If this guy, okay.

Here is.

Yeah.

Good point.

Good point.

If you see this guy leaving a testimonial, it’s because it’s a fake testimonial.

Like this is, it’s classic.

It’s classic.

Okay.

Um, mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Intern.

Okay.

Okay.

I’m just reading some comments.

We’re just taking a break here.

We got, we got to let everybody else catch up.

Who’s new here.

Figure out what we’re doing around here.

Uh, Jaccardin’s here.

Nice.

Nice.

Okay.

All right.

Fantastic.

So let’s, let’s keep going.

I don’t see any questions.

I don’t, nobody’s confused.

Um, oh, well, Vidiot has a question.

He says, why do you need a headshot wrapper?

Uh, can I directly add?

Yeah, you can, you can directly add an image.

I, I, one of my principles that I’ve espoused for a while now is that you should always wrap your images, right?

Um, good idea in life to wrap things.

So, uh, yeah, images should be wrapped.

And here’s why, uh, the image tag now, and it, it, it depends on page builder.

It depends on what you’re doing, but the image tag does not support pseudo elements and pseudo elements are more and more and more and more and more common.

And I’ve done a bunch of trainings on pseudo elements and what you don’t want to have happen.

Okay.

It’s just the nature of efficiency.

You’re making a trade-off.

You’re essentially saying, I’m going to add an extra wrapper on every image.

I may not need that wrapper, but if I do need that wrapper, it’s there.

And the reason why it’s, it’s, it’s a classic situation of it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Cause if you get into a situation where you have hundreds of images that you’ve put into this website, and then it’s decided that you need to do some weird padding stuff or some other, you know, visual effect or, and then maybe you need pseudo elements to accomplish it, you can’t, you can’t snap your fingers and make them have the wrappers that they need.

So you just get in the habit of wrapping images, knowing that the image tag does not support pseudo elements.

So you get in a habit of wrapping your images.

And then what I find constantly is I run into situations where I go, Oh, we need to do that thing to that image.

And I’ll just use the wrapper.

Right.

And it’s like, thank God the wrapper is there.

Like, and I’ve run into situations in the past.

This is just like where I’ve like corrected, you know, problems that I’ve constantly run into.

Cause every time you run into an image where you need a wrapper and the wrapper is not there, it’s just a womp womp.

Like it’s, it’s a terrible situation.

What is the cost of a wrapper on an image?

Nothing.

Like nothing.

It’s incalculable.

It’s nothing.

So why not do it?

Just, there’s no downside to it.

So why not do it?

Right.

That’s kind of the argument that I’ve, that I’ve always made, but that’s a good question.

It was a good question.

Okay.

Um, all right, let’s go with, uh, well, let’s make it look like a grid.

That would be a good start.

Right.

So let’s just go grid.

Let’s go three.

Let’s go, uh, grid gap.

Hmm.

Okay.

Uh, Oh, actually we don’t want to do that.

I’m sorry.

We don’t want to do that on that element.

We want to do that on the team grid element.

That’s why we call it a team grid.

So we’re going to go grid.

We’re going to go right.

Click.

We’re going to go right.

Click and grid gap.

Okay.

Fantastic.

So guys, there’s our grid.

Have you ever seen a grid made faster than that?

Not really.

Um, all right.

So we’re going to go with, uh, team card, team card, team card.

This is kind of what we’re wanting right here.

So if I, if I duplicate team group, look what we’re going to get.

We’re going to get another group, which theoretically could be like managers.

Right.

And so your managers would be here.

Your executives would be here.

The idea that we would do this manually is my gosh, don’t, don’t come, don’t come with that.

Right.

You, yes, that’s, that’s, that’s weak sauce.

As we say, that’s weak.

So you gotta, this has got to be a dynamic situation.

You gotta be looping this.

You have to be looping this.

This is not, this is not 2012 anymore.

Okay.

We’re, we’re looping things now.

So we need to figure out this loop situation.

Don’t we?

Okay.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to delete it.

Here’s the rule of looping.

You only need one of the thing you’re going to loop.

So I need one category.

I need one group, right?

This executives group.

I just need one.

I don’t need all of them.

I just need one.

That’s the thing.

Cause the loop is going to produce the rest of them.

And then with the cards, I only need one card.

Okay.

I don’t need more than one card.

The loop is going to do the work of producing all the other cards.

Okay.

So what we’re going to do is take out the other two team cards.

And now we’re just left with our looping situation.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the, the team group right here, and we’re going to activate the query loop.

And we’re going to say, what are we going to loop through posts?

Yes.

What post type?

Fuck.

Exactly.

You got to stop.

I’m sorry.

You got to stop.

You can’t, you can’t, you can’t keep doing.

Did you think you could just keep doing your work?

Oh, kid, just keep doing our work.

You got to leave.

You got to stop.

What you got to leave.

Cool.

What about here?

Can we do, can we do it here?

Oh no, you can’t do it here either.

Okay.

All right.

Well, let’s, let’s go back here.

Now, again, this is sucks for us.

This sucks for us as the, we’re, we’re doing this all day, every day.

Right.

Imagine coming into this as a beginner where you’re trying to explain these things.

You know, I have to teach these things.

I know how, how frustrated people get.

And they’re like, what, what?

This doesn’t make any sense.

I’m like, you’re right.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

So where do I go now?

I mean, is there some sort of native area in WordPress where I can do this work?

No, no.

So we have to go back to plugins and we have to talk about this existence of ACF.

This is the thing that enables the thing that I need in order to do the work that I was just trying to do.

Okay.

So where is this work going to get done?

Oh, by the way, ACF is not your only option.

I mean, hey, hey, Metabox users, any Metabox users in the house, put Metabox in the chat.

Go ahead and put Metabox.

Hey, any, any JetEngine users in the house?

Any, any Crocoblock users in the house?

Go ahead and just put that in the chat.

Just let me know if you’re one of those.

Right.

Cause this is not your only option.

I mean, now, now we got to talk about pros and cons again.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Why do you use ACF?

Why do you use Metabox?

Why do you like that one more?

It’s such a simple fucking thing.

It’s create a custom post type and a custom feel.

It’s not rocket science.

Why?

There’s 80 different options and they won’t give it to you native.

Okay.

Pods.

Pods is even ones.

A-C-P-T.

Ones I didn’t even mention.

Ones I didn’t even mention.

Look at all these decisions.

Look at all these decisions we have to make.

All right.

I’m going to go to ACF.

All right.

We’re going to go to post types and we have to create a new post type.

This is going to be called team members and team member.

And then I’m just going to say team as our key.

All right.

We’re going to make this hierarchical.

We got to go advanced configuration.

We want to remove the front URL prefix.

We want to do a bunch of nonsense.

Let’s regenerate these.

Make sure.

Actually, I want to go to labels, add team members, all team members, edit team member.

Okay.

Those are fine for right now.

Let’s go to permissions.

Good, good, good, good, good.

Okay.

Just save.

All right.

So fantastic.

So I did the first thing I knew I needed to do, which is team members.

Now, can I, oh, I need a field for their title.

Where do I go for that?

Well, you got to go to this area right here called field groups.

Okay.

A little different area there.

Go ahead and hit add new.

All right.

We’re going to say team member and we’re going to come down here.

Text.

Yeah.

We’ll say title.

Actually, because there’s no organization in the backend for any of this.

You have to constantly repeat the thing you’re working on.

So like, if you just said title and then you went to go to dynamic data, you’d be like, well, title for what?

What am I, what am I pulling in the title for?

It doesn’t tell you that, oh, that’s the team member title, by the way.

It’s just like, oh, here’s a title field randomly floating around in your WordPress ecosystem.

Like, oh, okay.

What’s the title for?

I don’t know.

So you have to say team member title.

You just got to keep repeating the same shit over and over and over again.

Team member title.

All right.

And then you got to tell it where these fields are supposed to live.

So we’re going to say team member and we’re going to go ahead and hit save.

All right, man.

Fantastic.

Okay.

Can I add my team members here?

No, no, you can’t do that.

You can’t do that right here.

You can, you can make the team member, you know, thing here, but you can’t add them here.

Yeah.

You got to go somewhere else to do that.

So let’s go up here to all team members.

And let’s add a new team member.

Okay.

Fantastic.

We’re going to say, um, who do, oh, Jake.

We’re going to call that guy, Jake, Jake, uh, Jake from State Farm.

Okay.

He’s an executive.

All right.

So Jake is an executive and we’re going to go ahead and hit publish, publish.

Oh, you know what?

We need to put in Jake’s headshot.

Why is the sidebar not there?

I don’t know.

Good question.

Um, set featured image, save, go back.

Okay.

Great.

Great.

All right.

We’ve got Jake in.

Um, how do we get Jake on the page?

That’s a good next question, isn’t it?

Uh, well, we got to go back to where we were earlier.

Right?

Uh, so let’s go pages.

Let’s go to about, let’s edit with braces.

Wait again.

Let’s just wait, wait for the builder to load.

Wait, get back in here.

Well, there he is.

There’s Jake.

Um, that’s not really Jake.

That’s just the, that’s the, uh, static Jake.

We don’t want the static Jake.

We want the dynamic Jake, don’t we?

Um, so what we’re going to do now is we are going to loop through our team card and I need to, oh, wait, oh, wait, hold on.

Stop.

Pause.

Because if you don’t magically think through every single thing that you need ahead of time, you may run into the situation where you realize, ah, I said that Jake’s an executive, but that’s not a queryable field.

That little executive tag that I gave him down there, it’s not a queryable field.

It’s not going to work for us.

Uh, what I really need is a custom taxonomy.

Fantastic.

How do I, how do I make that?

Uh, how do I, where do I, where do I, where do I, do I do that here?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Stop.

You can’t get the work done yet.

You’re not ready to get the work done yet.

We need to go, we need to take a trip back.

We got to go back.

All right.

Let’s, let’s go there.

Not there.

Not here either.

Not here.

Maybe, maybe I go to team members somewhere in here somewhere.

No, not there either.

We got to go to this place right here.

Okay.

And then we got to add new.

All right, let’s go.

Uh, how do we want to categorize these people?

Uh, let’s say teams.

And let’s say team.

And let’s say teams.

We got to make sure our, our keys don’t conflict.

We don’t want, we don’t want a conflict situation happening.

Okay.

So finally, uh, let’s, let’s, oh, we got to make sure we assign it.

Let’s assign it there.

Oh, let’s make it hierarchical.

Do we, do we want it to be hierarchical?

Like really?

Do we want to like nest teams under other teams?

No, not necessarily.

But if you don’t, if you don’t make it hierarchical, you don’t get check boxes in, in, in the block editor, right?

You know, we, you know, we want the, we want the check boxes.

It’s easy.

This is a good experience.

Right.

So I gotta, I gotta enable something I don’t actually want or need, uh, just because there’s a quirk of the interface.

All right.

Let’s go back to team members.

Um, there’s, there’s Jake.

Now I have foresight.

So I, I, I already know because I’ve done this a gazillion times that it would probably be best if I just went and categorize Jake like right now, because if I go into the builder and start, and then it’s not, he’s not going to be categorized.

I’m going to have to go back out of the builder and I’m going to go back to Jake and categorize him.

So let’s just categorize him right now.

Let’s just go to Jake.

Let’s go over here to teams and let’s add new team.

All right.

Jake is an executive.

Well, this is a queryable, uh, situation right here.

I can actually query this.

So let’s go ahead and say, see this thing down here, his title, I could not query.

Right.

And now it even begs the question, like, do you even need that title down there?

Maybe you should just query the category he’s in as the title.

Right.

Cause I don’t know.

But then, but then, but then you get in a situation.

Oh, I mean, maybe he’s on, maybe they call them different things than the categories or maybe he’s in multiple categories and we really only want to list one title.

Like, okay.

So this is, seems more flexible to do it this way.

All right.

Let’s go back.

Finally.

I think maybe, maybe we can get some work done now.

Uh, let’s go back to about.

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s go.

Back.

All right.

Thank you.

Let’s go team group.

Uh, we should have something we can, we can query now.

Uh, we don’t want users.

We want terms.

What terms do we want?

We want teams.

Okay.

Fantastic.

And what we want to do is say, uh, instead of executives, that’s a static title.

We want the term name.

We want the name of the term that we are querying.

Awesome.

And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to the front end and we’re just going to take a look at what we’ve got so far.

Uh, that is not the front end.

Let’s go to the front end.

There’s the front end.

Okay.

There we go.

But that’s, that’s still static.

Jake.

That’s still static.

Jake.

We need dynamic.

Jake.

Don’t we?

Okay.

So let’s do this.

Let’s go in.

Let’s, uh, we need to go to the team card and we’re doing what’s called a nested loop.

Okay.

So we have a loop right here.

Let me cat.

Let me collapse this for you.

There’s our first loop.

This is our parent loop, right?

Called team grid.

Inside of that, I have a team card and I’m going to loop again inside of my other loop.

And what I’m going to do with my team card is I’m going to loop through the actual people now.

Okay.

So we’re going to say query loop and we’re going to say, uh, what post type?

Well, the team members, and then I’m going to come down and we’re going to do a tax query, right?

And we’re going to say, uh, let’s go through teams and we’re going to check the term ID.

What is the term ID?

Well, it’s the term ID of the loop we’re in.

Okay.

So you have to, like, we’re already in a loop so we can actually check, Hey, what, what are you looping up there?

Oh, that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Does that match this ID?

All right.

Pull the people in for that.

Uh, it’s going to compare.

Are they, are they in that term ID?

Right.

Okay.

Now, uh, if this says Jake on the front end, then we’ve done our job.

Right.

So we’re, cause we’re going to pull in the post title, which should be a Jake’s name.

Right.

Hey, look at that.

Jake.

Good to see you.

Now we get the dynamic Jake.

Dynamic Jake’s much more fun than the static Jake.

Uh, we can pull in the featured image now.

Fantastic.

We don’t need it in that resolution.

Let’s just go 768.

Um, okay.

And once again, the builder is like, I don’t know.

I don’t, I don’t see any data there for you, but if we go to the front end, we do still have Jake’s picture.

Maybe if I refresh the builder, it’ll give it to us in the builder.

It doesn’t, it, I don’t know what bricks is doing, but, uh, clearly it’s working on the front end.

And so now we can test things by, by watch the, watch the power of this now.

So we can go, Oh, Oh, that’s the other thing.

Let’s just talk about that for a second.

I mean, once again, I’m here, right?

I’m here.

I just, I, I mean, I’m building the page.

I just, I, I want the people to show up.

Can I, can I just add them?

Can I add Jill?

Can I, can I add, uh, Jane?

Can I, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Stop.

Stop what you’re doing.

Stop what you’re doing.

You should probably leave.

You should probably leave what you’re doing.

You should probably go somewhere else.

So we’ll just go back here and we’ll go to team members and we’ll go add new team member and let’s add, uh, let’s add a Jill.

Okay.

So let’s go in.

Here’s Jill.

Let’s Jill’s very happy about her position in this company.

Um, so let’s go in and I, sorry, I’ve got a context switch back to my, I, yeah, I’m in, I’m in, uh, image optimization mode again.

Didn’t really want to be, but I am.

Um, let’s go to 1920.

Okay.

All right.

Finally, we can download things.

Find the tab we were working in.

Here it is.

Okay.

Here’s Jill.

Uh, Jill is going to be a manager, right?

Oh, you know what we should say?

Uh, you should never miss an opportunity for these sorts of things.

Right.

Karen.

Karen is going to be the manager.

Um, let’s go add new team managers.

All right.

We’ll just say managers.

We’ll make it plural.

Right.

All right.

There we go.

And, um, we got to add her featured image.

Let’s go ahead and drop in.

I thought I did drop in her featured image, but I guess I did not.

Let’s go ahead and drop in her featured image.

Let’s go ahead and set featured image.

I mean, do I really want to be doing anything else in this block?

Am I using the block editor for anything else at the moment?

No, I’m not.

I just, this is just where I’m kind of forced to do this work.

Um, so I’m going to go ahead and hit publish there.

All right.

Where do I go?

I don’t even know where I go.

Do I go back to the front end?

All right.

Let’s go back to the front end.

Yay.

Now we’ve got Jake under executive.

And actually that should be executives.

Uh, where do I go to fix that?

Oh, I got to go back to, uh, teams, right?

I got to go here.

I got to, yes, here we go.

Executives.

Look, I mean, it’s, it’s like find the, find the fucking thing you need.

It’s a, it’s a good hunt.

We’re always on the hunt for things.

Okay.

There we go.

Executives.

Uh, let’s, let’s fix this image situation.

I know a lot of people would be like, that’s a terrible situation there.

Well, let me go back into the builder to fix that.

I think a pretty easy fix here on the image that I can’t even see.

Uh, we’ll just go to aspect ratio of 16 by nine object fit, cover it, save.

That should, that should seal the deal.

Um, can I go back to the front end and see what we’re working?

Okay.

All right.

Let’s go back to the front.

Oh God.

Okay.

All right.

Let’s go back.

Sorry.

Not the front end.

We need to go to a page about page view.

Yeah.

Okay.

There we are.

Oh, look at that.

Oh, damn.

We cut her, we cut her, we cut her face off.

Uh, we’re going to go 0% and 80%, something like that.

I’m dyslexic.

So that’s probably backwards.

Uh, it was a hundred percent backwards.

Uh, let’s go to 20%.

Uh, anything that’s binary, it’s guaranteed to be wrong.

Okay, great.

I told you we’re not going to design anything.

We’re just talking functionality and we’re just we’re just making the point of like, look at the fucking hassle to just, this is not that difficult.

This should not be that difficult.

Right?

Look at the hassle.

We just had to go through.

Imagine leading.

I, I, I, I was teaching my daughter to do this at one point and I was fucking embarrassed.

I was embarrassed for all of us.

I was just shaking my head.

Like, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

This is not easier.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

This is so chaotic.

This is, I get you.

I get, I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now.

You know?

Um, so yeah.

Uh, I, I mean, dude, if there’s any web flow people, I mean, have at it dog.

Have at it.

I mean, we, we, we’re going to take, we got to take the L on this.

You, you just have a field day with us.

Web flow.

Have a field day with us right now.

Right?

It’s an absolute joke.

It’s an absolute joke.

And this is what the most modern tool.

This is what the most modern tool in WordPress at the moment.

Okay.

It’s a joke.

It’s a joke.

Um, all right.

Let’s, let’s go into, uh, yeah.

James, James has a headache.

Um, okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Uh, Jill works for everyone.

She’s, she’s in everyone’s live chat providing support.

A hundred.

Yes.

A hundred percent.

A hundred percent.

Okay.

Yeah.

If you, if you just, um, if you’re frustrated by this, here’s the actual thing.

I think a lot of people blame this on themselves somehow.

They’re like, it’s gotta be me.

Like I’m just not good enough.

I’m just not like, I didn’t figure this thing out yet.

Or like, no, that’s one thing I wanted to tell you desperately is it’s not.

It’s not you.

It’s not you.

The tools that you’re using were not built for you.

The tools that you’re using were built for the people that they thought that they, that they think are going to use.

They’re not doing nested loops.

They’re not building dynamic websites.

They’re doing, they’re raw dogging ID tags and they’re in there and they’re manually putting content on a page.

They’re stuck in era one and era two and era three.

And they’re not, they’re not, they’re not doing the work that we do.

They’re not doing real work.

They’re not doing real.

They’re, they’re playing pretend and it’s pretend tools for pretend users.

That’s what it is.

Okay.

And so, you know, we should feel frustrated because we don’t have what we need and the workflow is not what we need.

And there’s a lot of gaps.

There’s a lot of holes.

There’s a lot of roadblocks, as you can see, to doing what you actually need to do.

And who’s paying for this, by the way, like I, I have to bill my clients more because I know these nightmares exist.

I know this is all a headache.

Okay.

So they have to pay more for me to deal with this terrible situation.

It’s, it’s not good for anybody.

And again, learning this now, if I’m teaching somebody, I’m like, Hey, let me teach you.

Let me teach you how to do it a better way.

Let me teach you a more modern way to, to build these websites.

Then I got to lead them through this chaos.

And then what actually the worst part of this, I mean, you could imagine watching, watching me do a tutorial.

You would just come to the conclusion.

Like, I don’t know, dog, that doesn’t look easier.

That doesn’t look fat.

That looks very frustrating.

Why are you doing it that way?

Why don’t we just raw dog the ID tags?

Why don’t we just put manual content all over the site and not even do this loop thing?

Why don’t we, why don’t we do that?

What though the classes thing that you’re doing, that, that looks tedious.

Remember when I had to type every BIM class, imagine teaching, Hey, Hey guys, you, you should really do this BIM thing.

Cause it’s going to make your sites more scalable, more maintainable.

It’s going to organize your styles better.

But the downside is you got to type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type.

So what do we do?

Well, we said, well, why don’t we fucking fix that?

Why don’t we solve that problem?

So we came, we did auto BIM and auto BIM just does all the BIM classes for you.

That’s the power actually of a visual environment. where, cause even in HTML, if I write my own code, I’m like, no, I’m going to write my own code.

Guess what I got to do?

Type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type.

Well, guess what I do now?

I don’t type shit.

I right click, choose, right click, choose, right click, choose, right click, choose, auto BIM, right click, choose, right click, choose, right click, choose.

All tokenized, all right.

That’s the kind of innovation that you can actually bring to a workflow where people start to feel like, damn, I’m in a groove.

I’m in a groove here.

Okay.

I’m in the flow state.

I’m getting my work done.

Look, I’ve never worked faster in my life, but then you can, you still run into all this, all the stuff that we just looked at.

Right.

It’s a big problem.

It’s a big problem.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You gotta, you gotta type, type, type, type, type.

Yeah.

A lot of typing.

A lot of typing.

Um, yes.

Uh, somebody had the idea for like, there’s, there could be a whole store of these things.

Um, mm-mm-mm.

Okay.

Oh, we got good viewership still.

This is, this is fantastic.

Okay.

Uh, why don’t we, we’re gonna move into the Q&A portion.

I, did I make the point?

Do I have to go any further?

Do I, do I have to, do we have to do, oh, oh, by the way, um, I forgot one thing.

I forgot one thing.

So the media, I mean, I don’t know about you.

I don’t like, I don’t like a junk drawer for my media.

I like, I like an organized media gallery, right?

Um, so if I’m in here, remember I was adding those team member photos from, from, well, I didn’t actually add them in here.

I had to go, sorry, I had to go to this other magic area over here.

This, this place, this place called the block editor.

I had to go to team members, um, all team members.

Okay.

I want to organize Jake, Jake from State Farm.

Okay, let’s open his media.

See this sidebar right here where you have some semblance of organization.

I don’t know what it is about, uh, WordPress leadership, but they’re like, ah, you don’t fucking, who wants to organize media?

I mean, I mean, like, why would you even want to do that?

Like, that’s just, you should just have a giant, a giant, uh, screen where there’s just random media all over the place.

That sounds like the best way to do this.

But thanks to happy files, I actually have a way to, you know, I can’t do much more than organization, but I can organize things.

So I can come in here and I can say, uh, this is going to be my team.

And then I can go team and I can bring him into team.

And now finally I have some, but see, it’s a little buggy.

It’s a little, it’s not, you know, it’s not a native experience.

It’s not, it’s not fantastic that I got dragged her in.

Oh God.

See, see now, now what am I going to do?

What were I going to go to the happy files fucking forum and ask them like, oh, it’s not getting my team, my team’s not, not, not showing up properly in here.

All files, drag, drag.

See, what, what should I just, I’m just going to get on the phone with Bev real quick and let her know.

Bev, uh, we’re just going to be a little delay on the timeline.

I can’t organize the media.

Let me just shoot off a text real quick to Bev and let her know.

It’s a little technical issue on the backend, Bev.

Uh, okay, good.

We got, we got that out to her.

I’m sure she’ll be perfectly understanding of that.

Uh, all right.

Well, I thought I could organize.

I can’t, but I can’t do it natively for sure.

Um, so it’s just another, another decision to make another thing you have to add another thing you have to account for.

I don’t know.

I don’t think I have to keep going any further.

Right.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Get used to this.

Sorry.

Sorry, Bev.

Another, another delay.

Uh, all right.

I think I made the point we’ve, we’re an hour in.

We’re good.

I think we will just turn this over to Q and a.

Hmm.

Okay.

Um, open questions have to have hashtag Q or hashtag, uh, question.

By the way, if you just want to rant a little bit about, about some of these challenges in the chat, I’m more than happy to elevate them onto the screen.

Um, I w I will put, I will put your, uh, rant on the screen for all to see, like, did this resonate with you?

Are you like, ah, yes, I, this is my life.

I hate living this life.

Uh, go ahead and sound off in the, in the chat.

You have to be in the media library to do organization of media.

Yeah.

That’s unfortunate.

Um, it’s, it’s, it’s unfortunate because why, why?

It’s almost like we’re not using modern tools.

You know, it’s like, um, shouldn’t I be able to organize my, my media from pretty much anywhere?

You would think so.

A hundred percent relatable.

Um, okay.

Let’s see.

Uh, uh, mm-hmm.

Yep.

Question.

What’s the answer?

What’s the answer?

Uh, all the answers coming.

The answer’s coming.

It’s way more than what I did.

I, I, here’s the thing.

I asked Mateo, I was like, I mean, they’re going to think that this is the, this, they’re going to think this is the thing, you know?

Um, this is a, this is a small part of the thing.

Uh, this is, uh, yeah.

I mean, we’re just, this is, uh, I don’t know.

I’ve tried to tell people, you know, it’s not, you know, people want to say hype.

I got so many comments.

I got so many comments.

I told them, I said, they just don’t know.

They’re not ready.

Um, and it’s things, things are about to change.

Things, things are about to change.

Um, okay.

Let’s see.

Here we go.

Good, good.

I’m just going to elevate some comments here.

Vidiot says, yes, you’re correct.

And I always blame myself.

See, that’s one thing I, I want, I hate that.

I hate that for people, especially beginners, because they do default to blaming themselves.

They’re like, certainly this isn’t how they designed it.

Like that’s the conclusion you come to.

Any rational person is be like, ah, they had to have thought this through, right?

No, they didn’t.

They didn’t think it through.

Let me go back to my rant about, they’re not, none of these tools are designed for you.

They’re not.

They’re designed for a mythical user called a layperson.

And a layperson, they believe that a layperson is actually building websites.

They’re not.

That’s, that’s the, the layperson lie.

Uh, as, as you’ll hear, you’re going to hear more about a lot of this tomorrow.

Um, but the layperson lie is that laypeople build websites and they absolutely do not.

And Wix took that to the extreme of like laypeople build websites in five minutes with Wix AI.

Fuck you, Wix.

Uh, it’s, it’s all a lie.

It’s a hundred percent a lie.

It’s just a lie.

They’re just lying.

That’s it.

Um, laypeople cannot build websites.

Laypeople cannot, you cannot give a layperson a blank page and they build a website.

Sorry, that’s an end of story.

It’s just not going to happen.

Uh, what the layperson can do maximum is they can swap some content.

They can swap some colors.

They can shuffle something around and then they can ruin things.

That’s all they’re capable of doing.

Uh, let’s not pretend otherwise.

So to design the tools for the people who can’t do much of anything at all.

And, and the theory has just been, well, we just dumb it down, dumb it down, dumb it down, make it easier, make it easier, make it.

No, it doesn’t matter how much you dumb it down.

It doesn’t matter how easy you try to make it.

It doesn’t matter how cute the names are for all the elements, right?

They can’t do it.

They can’t do it.

Period.

End of story.

Nor do they want to do it.

They want a starting point, which is more or less a finished website where they can swap some colors, swap some colors.

That’s the extent of what they’re doing.

So stop designing the tools for them.

We’re in the situation that we find ourselves in because all the tools are designed for people, not us, right?

Uh, and the block editor is the most egregious one of all.

And then you’re in a situation where it’s like, well, all right, how do I, I want to use the block editor, but it doesn’t have the thing that I need.

What do I do?

Oh, okay.

I got, I got that for you.

I got that for you.

Let’s, let’s just go here.

Let’s go custom block WordPress.

Uh, cause this is the answer they give me all the time.

This is what they tell me.

I’m just going to go to the tutorial.

Just a little tutorial.

Oh, oh, what do we have here?

Let me zoom in.

What are we, what are we trying to build today?

Mr.

WordPress, build your first block.

What are we trying to build today?

Hmm.

Oh, a copyright date block.

Well, that looks easy.

Let’s just got a little toggle for showing that.

Look how cute that little thing is right there.

Oh, how do we build that?

Uh, let’s go ahead.

Oh, some prerequisites.

Oh, what does that say?

Right.

Oh, code editor.

Hmm.

Node.js development tools.

Okay.

Local WordPress.

All right.

Uh, we just want to do that thing right there.

That’s when we need all this.

That sounds like a lot.

Okay.

Oh, scaffolding the block.

Okay.

Let’s just keep going down the tutorial.

That’s a lot of files right there.

All right.

Initial setup.

That’s cute.

All right.

Block tutorial.

More.

It just keeps going.

Oh, oh, God.

I got a block.json file.

Got a little index.js.

Yeah.

Gosh.

It’s still going.

Look at that.

Some PHP involved there.

All right.

No problem.

No problem.

I’ll just dust off my PHP skills.

Hmm.

Oh, man.

It’s not fucking stopping.

Wow.

Uh, okay.

Ah.

Hmm.

Oh, well, we’re almost there.

Oh.

Woo.

Okay.

Hmm.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

I’m sorry.

Webflow user.

You’re not supposed to look at this.

You’re not supposed to look at that.

Uh, because I don’t, that doesn’t look fun.

Does it?

Uh, it’s not what you thought you were going to get involved in, is it?

Uh, yeah.

We’re so out of touch.

We are so, it’s fucking still going.

We are very out of touch.

We are very, very out of touch with how modern websites should be built.

Uh, this is, it’s a joke.

I’m sorry.

It’s a joke.

Okay.

Um, hmm.

Q and a, we got to get to Q and a, got to get to Q and a, my blood pressure needs us to get to Q and a right now.

Okay.

It’s my anniversary this month.

Two, 20 years.

Know what I’m getting.

Etch.

Yes.

Hey, best thing.

Somebody said like, hey, what, I mean, there’s, you know, um, oh, what, what did they say?

What did they say?

Uh, yeah.

Somebody said the live stream was on their anniversary or not their anniversary.

It was their girlfriend.

I don’t know.

I don’t remember.

Anyway, I said, I mean, if she doesn’t understand the value of etch, like she probably not really the one, you know what I’m saying?

I’m knocking stuff over now.

Uh, yeah.

Okay.

It’s a joke.

This it’s don’t write me.

I don’t need emails.

I got too many emails right now.

It’s 3am in my location for the first stream.

Can I get a recording or link to purchase etch without watching the first live stream?

Don’t want to miss you.

You won’t miss.

It’s all right.

Come to the second stream.

You’ll be good to go.

The second stream.

Easy.

It’s easy.

Easy.

Okay.

Let’s come to the second stream.

You don’t have to get up at 3am.

You don’t have to, I did the time zone thing for you.

This is to make it comfortable, to make it comfortable.

You don’t have to just, just come to the second one.

You’re good.

You’re good.

Okay.

Um, do the third live stream.

Okay.

We, we answered this.

If you missed the idea.

Okay.

I’m going to have you switched from Insta.

Have you switched from Insta WP to Zip WP?

Um, I mean, not switch.

Like I’m, I’m playing with, uh, Zip WP.

I actually like the interface a lot in Zip WP.

And I will say the performance side of Zip WP.

I mean, you can measure this with automatic CSS.

Uh, it’s kind of the, how, like, I just, I don’t know.

It’s kind of like the lazy man’s way of measuring.

Um, but if you go open automatic CSS and save, and we’ll just see real quick.

So 3.5 seconds.

So on, on local, it takes like a second and a half, two seconds max on a lot of dev environments.

It’s most of my dev environments.

It’s like two and a half seconds.

That was three seconds on Insta WP.

It’s six to seven seconds.

I mean, I, I, I’m just saying, I’m just saying, so they can look into that.

Um, but I, I just like, I do like the interface better.

Um, but I still have stuff on Insta WP.

I have stuff on Zip.

I mean, my job is to like assess these, all these tools.

Right.

Um, and, uh, you know, I, I always love what Adam’s doing.

I, I got a lot of, uh, I got sure card.

I got sure triggers.

I got sure members.

I got, I mean, Zip WP is like, it’s, it does, it’s, it’s, it’s a good experience.

I mean, I, that’s the thing.

I just keep having good experiences.

So I should just keep, I should keep going down that path.

I feel.

Okay.

Um, question.

Why no child theme?

Uh, good question, Jan.

Uh, well, I, I do, I, I use the bricks child theme on most of my sites, but I don’t do a lot with the child theme.

I put some code snippets in it and things like that.

But, um, I mean, I’ve recommended, like I did my blueprint video and I recommend that people install the child theme and activate that and do whatever they need to do with that.

But, uh, I don’t know in terms of what I just showed, why you’re asking that question necessarily, or maybe you’re just like, I don’t, I’m not, I’m noticing it’s not there.

Is there a reason it’s not there?

Um, no, it’s just, I didn’t put it in this little zip WP blueprint thing.

Hmm.

Is it possible to set a featured image within bricks instead of having to go back in the WP admin area?

No, uh, no, no.

You can’t do anything related to content in bricks.

Um, it’s a, it’s a forced context switch.

Um, okay.

Let’s go to, yes, you did.

You will hear that on WDD live.

You will hear this on, which I, that, you know, I’m thinking about renaming it.

Maybe, maybe WordPress uncensored or something like that.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t like, I’m tired.

I’m done with the WDD thing.

Um, but I don’t have any other good names.

So I don’t know.

Well, that’s why it keeps being WDD, even though I’ve been talking about changing the name for like weeks now.

Okay.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

What monitors are you using?

They’re LG 32 inch monitors.

It’s the kind on the, uh, they come with the, the, what is it?

The mount, like the desk mount.

So they’re mounted to the back of the desk on a pole and they pivot and swivel and all of that.

I think they’re like 800 bucks each, something like that.

I went like middle of the road.

I don’t want a cheap monitor.

I didn’t want, but I, I, I have to have them desk mounted.

Absolutely.

I can’t stand monitor stands that are sitting on a desk.

Uh, is it worth a 32 inch monitor?

Like your setup or just a 27 inch?

If you’re going dual monitors, it’s really like maybe preference.

I like dual 32 inch, a dual 27 inch.

You could absolutely get away with.

I don’t think I would do bigger than 32 inch.

I think anywhere in there, you’re going to be okay.

Uh, 20, once you’ve done dual 32, dual 27.

It does feel a little small.

Um, but whatever, I don’t know.

It also depends on your space.

How big is your desk?

How big is your space?

I mean, there’s some limitations there.

Hmm.

Shouldn’t it be called death star three or something along those lines?

Um, I mean, yeah, I don’t know.

It’s not, it’s not, it’s not destroying anything.

It’s, um, there are natural consequences to innovation.

And, um, you know, it’s like we had to apologize when the cars came out, we had to apologize to all the horses.

Now, in that case, I think the horses were happy with the development.

Right.

But, um, you know, it’s like, you know, things, things change.

We can’t stop it.

Uh, I saw an ad from Wix in which they are now allowing users to bring in tools like Vue.js.

Seems they are stepping up.

Well, they have, they have Wix, uh, studio.

I believe it’s called.

That’s their like pro version of Wix.

Um, probably it’s probably in Wix studio that you can do that.

Uh, when will be, that should be announced after the live streams?

At the, at the end of the live stream at the, well, I mean, we’re going to talk about it’s, you’re going to get all the details during the live stream and, uh, and then you’re, yeah, you can get it.

It’s, it’s, it’s, I’m just going to give you a link.

It’s very, it’s going to be very simple.

It’s not going to be difficult.

Um, does Ms.

Geary understand the value of ads?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you still use WP code box now that ACSS has a SAS editor?

I actually do not.

Um, I just use, I just use ACSS.

Cause it was another, it was another magic area.

It was another, uh, gotta leave, gotta go over here.

Uh, now I told him, I told him, I was like, you got to get this thing inside the editor.

Uh, but you know, nonetheless, nothing happened.

And you know, some people don’t like to listen to me.

I don’t know.

I try to tell people, try to tell people.

Okay.

In what area is price?

No object for you.

Uh, can I get a little more, a little more context AT on this question?

I’m not sure I’m able to answer in its current form.

Sometimes I have to weigh up the complexity of building a WP or just creating a static site, especially if the customer doesn’t need to be admin.

Yeah.

I don’t think you should have to weigh that.

Like it should be so seamless and so efficient that it’s like WordPress is the default no brainer situation.

Like it’s not.

Because again, if I have to build some static websites versus WordPress, that’s a massive context switch.

That’s a massive context for, I can’t use automatic CSS.

I can’t, I mean, I can, but it’s just a, it’s not like a, Oh, it’s already installed in my blueprint kind of thing.

I’ve got to like manually use it.

Uh, I can’t use frames at that point.

I can’t, I can’t do a lot of what I want to do.

I’ve got to do my work in a completely different, it’s just, that’s a massive context switch.

The biggest context switch of all is not using WordPress on some sites because, because of the issues I just highlighted where it’s like, God, WordPress feels like it’s so clunky and it’s, and it’s so inefficient and it’s so, so like this chaotic, chaotic is the, I think the best word for it.

Right.

It shouldn’t be the case.

If it’s just, if that wasn’t the case and it felt freeing, if it felt smooth, if it felt efficient, if it felt right, if it felt like it was designed for the professional work that we’re all doing, it would be a no brainer.

We wouldn’t have to make that decision.

It would just, the default would be, we just use WordPress, but I get it.

I understand.

I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m sympathizing with you.

I’m just saying it’s a shame.

It’s a shame that this is what we’re weighing the, the options as, um, oh, cars, clothes, dev tools.

I don’t buy, I don’t buy cars and I don’t buy clothes.

I don’t buy jewelry.

I don’t buy cars.

I don’t buy clothes.

I don’t, I don’t really care about cars.

I mean, I like, I love cars.

I love cars.

Don’t get me wrong.

Like I, I, I could go out tomorrow and just buy like some, I just, just put, just cat, just give them cash and just get like some awesome, like my brother-in-law has got a fucking badass Porsche.

Right.

I could just go get one of those tomorrow.

I don’t give a fuck.

Like I don’t, I, I, cause I, my brain goes, you have to understand also, like, uh, I left my house when I was like, I, I left, I didn’t have to leave home.

I had a nice middle-class upbringing.

Right.

Um, but I, I’ve been an entrepreneur since like day one.

Um, and so, and by the way, my parents were kind of like, um, I mean, we’re not going to give you anything.

Like you’re not like, we have things, but we’re not going to give them to you.

Uh, so, I mean, if you want things, just, you should go get them.

You should go to acquire them.

Right.

So, you know, age 12, I’m, I’m on the side of the, uh, block up here.

Right.

Selling video games and shit.

Like, um, just finding ways.

Like what, what, what, what, what could we do?

We got to learn this entrepreneurship thing.

Right.

Um, 15, I’m, I’m got my first like real job.

Like you can go, Hey, you can clock in.

Here’s your little paycheck.

Right.

And then, you know, work your way up from there.

And then you start thinking about the businesses, uh, that you might want to create.

And, but you find yourself.

So I find myself at age, what was it?

20, 19.

I met my wife.

I met my wife around that age and we, uh, we moved into an apartment together.

Right.

So here I am in the apartment.

I’ve got two jobs to pay for the apartment.

My, I mean, my mom’s like, this is a fucking gigantic house over here.

Right.

Uh, but it’s, you know, it’s, I, I, I thank them.

Like, I’m like, yeah, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t want you to hand me shit.

Um, so I’m in an apartment.

I won.

It’s a studio apartment.

Right.

Uh, not a, not a fantastic apartment by any means.

And I’m working two jobs.

And, um, it’s, it’s literally like you just build from fucking nothing, uh, up.

Right.

And then you might even be like, oh, well, certainly they got him like, uh, you know, they paid for him to go to college.

I mean, he went to like maybe a blue ribbon high school, got one of those, you know, you, you, you get a scholarship, go to a nice little college.

No, no, no, no.

I went to college for two years.

No, a year and a half.

Didn’t even, yeah, didn’t even, didn’t even go.

I was a year and a half in and I was like, I think I’ve had enough of this place.

Uh, I don’t know what we’re doing here.

None of this shit seems relevant to what I want to do in life.

And, uh, so I was like, peace.

And, uh, yeah.

And from there, it’s just, you have nothing.

So when you have nothing, when you have, and there’s been multiple times where I’ve had nothing.

There’s been times where I had lots and then had nothing.

Okay.

Um, because that’s, that’s the Nate entrepreneurship.

If you don’t know is, uh, it’s a bit of a roller coaster, especially in the early days.

Okay.

So you might find success and then you fuck it up and then you’d, you know, you’d go through that a few times.

And so once you’ve done that and you’ve, and you, and you also are in a, in a place where you, you have a real mission, you have a real vision, you want to make real change and impact.

And like, you know, your, your kids are older now and you’re wanting to teach them and show them like the idea that my brain would ever let me really like, unless I just had gobs of money, like it would just have to be an absolute non-decision, but even still at that point.

But the idea that my brain would allow me to go in to a Porsche dealership and say, I’ll take, I’ll take one of those.

And it’s like, what is the value in that?

Exactly.

What am I going to do with the, Oh, so it’s going to sit in my, I don’t even, I work from home where I got, I mean, Oh great.

I can go to the grocery store and fucking style.

Can I, uh, or like what?

Right around the block for fun.

I don’t know what my brain just doesn’t compute how that’s a good use of money.

Right.

I would rather take that money and put it into the bit.

I would rather hire another team member.

I would, which is why I have a team.

I could be alone.

I could, I could, well, I can’t technically speaking.

I need a PHP guy and I need a JavaScript guy.

Right.

And then I could just be like, no, I don’t, we don’t need anybody else.

Maybe a support person.

Right.

I don’t need anybody else.

I’m just, I’m going to go get this Porsche thing over here.

I’m going to go get this big house over here.

I’m going to go get this thing over here and I’m just going to take it easy.

I’m just going to do the, the one man band kind of thing.

That’s not what I, that’s not what I’m here to do.

So I would much rather take that money and go, I need another team member.

Come in.

We got to make this thing bigger.

We got to make this thing better.

We got to make this thing more powerful.

Right.

That’s what I would rather do with my, with my time, with my money.

I just, I don’t, my brain doesn’t allow me to make those kinds of purchases.

I order my shoes.

Like I was like, I just need shoes that are comfortable that I can walk.

Cause I destroy my shoes.

I got, I walk like twice a day.

Like in the morning I do a walk.

It’s like three and a half miles at, in the evening I try to do another one.

That’s like three and a half miles that destroys shoes.

I coached my daughter’s softball team.

If you had never coached softball, that field absolutely wreaks havoc on footwear.

Okay.

And so the idea that I have a couple of pairs of nice shoes, but like, I am just, I don’t give me, give me what works.

Is it comfortable?

Okay.

Good.

Is it, does it not look like a, is it not a dad shoe?

Right.

You’re not going to catch me in the new balance.

I’ll tell you that right now.

Okay.

You’re not going to catch me in the new balance.

Right.

So it’s got to have some semblance of style, but I’m not, you know, it’s, I just don’t spend money on that kind of stuff.

Period.

It’s not, it’s not really entertaining to me.

I always just come away with it feeling like I made a terrible decision.

Like, okay.

I just want to go through chat here.

Let me, let me see if there, were there any questions I missed?

Let me go down.

I mean, there’s a lot of questions about etch and etch and, you know, okay.

But you’ll learn all of that tomorrow.

Just, let’s just chill and we’ll learn all of that tomorrow.

When can we expect CPTs, templates, loops, and logic, the makings of a modern dynamic website?

Part four.

I understand you are way too busy with etch.

Looking forward to part four.

Yeah.

It’s, it’s, it’s coming.

It’s coming.

Um, but again, it’s, it’s a situation where I actually, I, there’s a mental roadblock.

Uh, like I, I’m very frustrated with the architecture side of WordPress, right?

In that regard, it’s annoying to me that I actually have to, cause I wanted to start doing the second part of that series, which was the centralized taxonomy architecture concept.

But in order to do the centralized taxonomy, like in order to teach that, as a concept, I have to ensure that there are no major roadblocks.

Now I built one website with the centralized taxonomy architecture and I did not run into any roadblocks, but I also didn’t need to use relationships and relate a taxonomy to another taxonomy.

That’s something that I haven’t tested out yet.

And so I can’t record the video until I do the work first, find the time second, actually do the work of like, okay, can I break it?

Like I got to try this thing and this thing and this thing, does it break?

Does it, does it work?

Because in order to teach it, I can’t teach something and be like, this is how you should do it.

And then you get 90% of the way.

And then I’m like, oh, by the way, by the way, sorry, that doesn’t actually work all that well.

See, so I have to find the time to do the testing, which nobody sees.

Nobody sees.

They only see the final video, right?

Where everything’s already figured out for them.

That’s the part they see.

They don’t see all the unrecorded stuff, frustrations, headaches, and, and, uh, you know, context switching and nightmares.

Okay.

Hopefully that’s the answer you wanted.

Somebody said, could you switch to full camera view mode?

I can.

It’s very dangerous.

Here’s why everybody, anybody that’s an OG knows.

Cause the next question that comes in is like, can you show me X, Y, Z?

And I’ll be like, yeah.

And then I just go and we’re not screen sharing.

And that is the most awkward situation, uh, that could possibly happen.

And it’s happened many times.

So just for safety reasons, I tend to leave the screen up.

Okay.

New balance is trendy, bro.

Well, when did this change?

When did this change?

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I bought memory foam sketchers.

I feel yeah.

Yeah.

Oh boy.

Oh, that’s danger territory.

I don’t know.

I mean, maybe they got it.

Maybe they got a model.

I don’t know about, but I would see.

I would, I would be careful with that.

I would be careful.

New hat.

I say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I got a little, got a little hat action.

You know, what also destroys hats, uh, summer in Atlanta and then coaching softball.

I went to the last softball practice.

I forgot I was wearing one of my like decent hats and it was, it was soaked.

And then, and then of course it ends up with like sweat bands.

Like it’s just not a good situation.

Right.

Uh, absolutely destroys.

Yeah.

It’s so, yeah, here we go.

Here we go.

Oh, we need, you need to get out more cap.

No, I mean, I’m, I’m out all the time.

Actually, I’m out all the time.

Hmm.

Everything better than under armor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I’m not a big under armor fan.

Okay.

If you were to leave WordPress right now, what platform would you move to?

I really can’t say because that’s one thing I’ve not investigated.

I haven’t allowed my brain to go to that place yet.

I’m not ready.

I don’t have the appetite for, for leaving WordPress.

So haven’t looked.

Therefore I can’t, I can’t make any recommendations or comments.

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s keep going up and we’ll get out of here in about five minutes.

We’ll just spend the last five minutes hanging out, having some fun.

Uh, open topic.

By the way, if you just want to throw a topic out there, I can, I can, uh, we can riff, we can riff on top.

I’m just going through the chat.

Last five minutes here.

Bricks.

Bricks.

One-on-one would be awesome, but probably going to be pointless after edge.

I mean, there’s already a bricks.

One-on-one.

You can go get Dave Foy’s, uh, course.

My page building.

One-on-one course is all focused on bricks.

Uh, so it depends, you know, Dave, Dave, uh, Dave’s superpower.

Is that like, I, I, I can slow things down and I can talk to, what am I doing with this card?

Let’s not show that.

That’s like a, ignore that.

Uh, it’s a debit card.

We don’t, yeah.

Hopefully the numbers didn’t show.

Okay.

Let me cancel, let me cancel that.

All right.

Um, I don’t know.

It’s playing with, I’m fidgeting with shit on my desk and that’s not a good thing to fidget with.

Um, Dave’s superpower is that he can, he just like the production level of his videos and the pace that he’s able to go at and the things that he chooses to focus on are just right in line with like, if you, if you want the, um, just most streamlined, streamlined, like make it feel easy, make it seem easy kind of guide to bricks.

That’s, that’s the way to go.

Dave is the way to go.

Um, okay, good.

Thank, thank you Farhan.

Farhan says we did not see the numbers.

If you’re looking for something to riff on, what about business mindset?

Uh, maybe give me a, give me, give me a, yeah, close, close call.

Uh, maybe give me a subsection of that.

When we buy a certain theme, then we have to invest a specific theme, plugins, themes, et cetera.

This is so frustrating.

Yeah.

Everybody’s got a different stack.

I mean, that’s the, that’s the wild, wild west of, uh, WordPress.

Any thoughts on David Goggins?

No.

Why are you trying to get me in trouble, dog?

Why are you trying to, why are you, what, you know, there’s going to be a video.

He’s going to be running, looking at the camera, talking shit about Kevin just because of Tyree.

Why are you trying to get me in trouble?

I don’t want that man breathing down my neck.

Come on now.

Isn’t he also like a black belt in jujitsu?

I don’t know.

Maybe that’s the other guy.

Maybe that’s the other guy.

I don’t know.

Um, okay.

Good, good, good, good, good, good.

Every time someone solves a problem on WordPress with a plugin, WordPress says problem solved, no need to ever think about this problem ever again.

Well, I’ll just tell you right now, like a lot of the challenges that we talked about, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve talked to them behind the scenes.

I’ve, I’ve been on the calls.

They’re not going to natively put custom post types and custom fields and things like that in WordPress.

They’re going to very, very slowly and minimally update the media library, but you’re not going to get hardly any of the experience that you actually want and need.

These things are just afterthoughts.

They’re afterthoughts.

They’re focused on other things and they’re don’t, they don’t really care what you think all that much because they’re not building it for you.

I just keep going back to this.

They’re not building it for you.

Like you can ask Elementor for this great new, they’re not building it for you.

So why should they listen to you?

Right?

They shouldn’t.

They’re not building it for you.

They’re building it for some fairytale user that doesn’t actually exist.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

I love that WordPress is modular, but that doesn’t mean strip out all core features.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, there’s, there’s some, there’s things that, you know, should be, should be native.

Kevin, the API and universal remote analogy is a great way to grasp your point.

It clearly shows how APIs allow software control without needing to dive into the complex details.

Yep.

Yep.

Okay.

All right.

Last call.

Last call.

If anybody wants to put in a, what do you, oh, here we go.

What do you think about, oh, that’s a good one.

Let’s end on this.

Let’s end on this.

What do you think about the future of Divi 5?

It is good for small business.

No, it’s not good.

It’s not.

It’s objectively speaking.

It’s objectively speaking.

They rebuilt Divi.

They rebuilt Divi.

You would think that if you’re going to do that massive of a rebuild, you would think a little bit ahead about like in, in some sort of innovative way.

And I, and I, people don’t like when certain people are like, you have to be critical to talk about the facts.

Like it’s just, they did a massive amount of work.

I think that they’re, they were at one point kind of winning the game in a way with a big audience.

They still have a big audience, but it’s people that are, feel locked into Divi.

The problem with, okay.

Okay.

I got it.

I got it.

I, I’m going, this is the road I’m going to choose to go down.

Cause I, it’s a point I’ve made before.

And I think it’s a very important point.

You know why it locks people in Divi users.

Let’s just say it.

Let’s just say it.

Divi users are locked into Divi, technically speaking, because they don’t know the language of web design.

That’s it.

I, this was the intro to page building 101.

It’s a huge problem.

This is why many Elementor users have a tough time and a long road switching away from Elementor.

These tools, by the nature of the fact that they are not designed for professional work, they do not respect the language of web design.

They do not facilitate the language of web design.

When you come into the web design game and you learn on these tools, you are not aware of the fact that they don’t respect the language of, you think you’re doing web design.

That’s what you think that that’s the case.

You’re not.

You are learning the proprietary nature of that tool.

You are learning how to assemble pages in a proprietary tool with proprietary workflows and proprietary behaviors.

Period.

End of story.

If you take a random Elementor user who learned on Elementor and drop them in Webflow, they would have no idea what they’re doing.

But for the most part, they would have no idea what they’re doing.

Some things are a little similar, but they just, they don’t know.

That would just feel terrible to them, right?

If you take somebody who knows the language of web design and drop them in Webflow, they will know what all of the things do.

They will look at the panel and go, I know what that does.

I know that.

I know what all these things do.

Now, will they know magically where the things are?

No.

There’s a little learning curve of like, oh, let me find where they put this thing.

Okay.

That’s natural in any new software that you use.

Like they do an update to Photoshop and I’m like, oh, where did they move the thing?

I got to go find it.

Right.

That’s a natural part of learning curve and software.

But for the language to be different, for the names of everything to be different.

Like imagine this.

There are millions of elementor users who believe that the columns element like creates columns.

Like in CSS, there’s something called CSS columns, right?

They’re very different from flex columns or grid columns, but they just call them columns because they’re like, that’s what a dummy would think to look for, right?

Like this is grab.

They’re not calling the things by their actual name.

There’s no div.

Divi.

Divi.

Divi.

Doesn’t have a div.

There’s no divs in Divi.

Okay.

Because they were like, I mean, let’s give everything a cute name.

Let’s just come up with this proprietary structural workflow for things.

And what this actually does is people can go three years into web design using Divi or Elementor and still not know what they’re doing.

They know how to assemble pages in a proprietary tool, but they really don’t know web design.

They don’t know the language of web design.

Right.

And if you take them out of that, it’s like a fish out of water.

And so it actually makes it very easy.

So we are very hard.

We talk about data liberation.

We should also talk about developer liberation, right?

How can we liberate developers from these proprietary tools that they don’t feel comfortable outside of?

We should be able to go, like if when Oxygen failed, there was Bricks.

Now Bricks wasn’t like the Bricks of today.

Okay.

But it was the closest thing to Oxygen, right?

Oxygen respects the language of web design.

People were like, Kevin, how did you switch over to Bricks so fast?

Because they speak the same language.

It’s the language of web design.

There’s classes.

There’s semantic HTML.

There’s everything I need right there.

There’s loops.

There’s logic.

There’s condition.

I mean, right?

There’s divs.

Oh my God, there’s a div.

There’s a div there.

There’s a div here.

There’s divs everywhere.

Fantastic.

We can build with divs.

I know how to do that.

I know how to add classes to things.

I know how to style those classes.

I know how to write CSS.

I know the language of web design.

So I can just go tool, tool, just leave there, go here, right?

Very easy.

A divi user cannot do that.

An elementary user cannot do that because they don’t, they haven’t learned the language of web design.

It’s not a knock on them.

It’s actually a knock on the tool.

The tool is locking people in, right?

There’s many ways to lock people in.

You can lock their data in or you can lock their brain in.

And these tools lock their brain in because it teaches them a proprietary workflow that does not exist anywhere outside of that tool.

And the block editor is the most egregious form of this.

The people trying to build in the block editor groups and stacks and this and that and no CSS and no, really no controls.

It’s just sliders and no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And, and, oh, and what’s, what’s the other half of this?

If you know the language of web design, let’s say, let’s take somebody that literally like legit, legit is really good at web design.

Like, and, and they’ve used web flow or they’ve used code editors.

They’ve just written their own code, whatever.

Drop that person in Elementor, drop that person in Divi, and then just set a timer.

Just set a timer for like 90 minutes, 90 minutes.

They’re on suicide watch.

They’re like, I don’t, I don’t want to touch this tool at all.

None of it makes sense.

None, none of it.

It’s not, it’s gibberish.

It’s out.

It’s a toy.

It’s a toy.

It’s gibberish.

I don’t want anything to do with it.

Right.

They recognize right off the bat.

Like, this is not, this is not what should be.

And then they, God forbid, they inspect the code.

Oh my God.

Go to the front end and inspect the code.

Can we not all agree if you wrote code, let’s say an agency hired you like, Hey, we need you to, we need you to create the static landing page for us.

Okay.

And you went off and they were like, you know, we don’t use WordPress.

They just, you know, here’s VS code.

Just write up some HTML, write up some, you know, a little bit of JS, put some CSS in there and you go do that.

But you write the code the way Elementor writes the code or you write the code the way Divi writes the code.

Your ass is fired.

Like that’s, that’s an unacceptable.

Like nobody’s going to look at that code and be like, ah, this guy knows what he’s doing.

Right.

They’re going to be, what on earth have you done?

What have you done here?

Right.

This is a disaster.

They would fire you immediately.

So why are we using a tool that writes code that would get us fired in a legit job?

Like, well, that shouldn’t be the case.

And, and bricks and oxygen prove that that’s not even necessary.

Why, why do they, because they had no foresight once again, because they didn’t build it for you.

They didn’t care about those standards because they’re not building to a professional standard.

They just care about the lowest common denominator user, which that person’s not even building websites.

That person a hundred percent of the time is installing a theme or a layout pack or whatever.

And they’re customizing colors and content or whatever.

And maybe it’s a beginner and they’re at the early stage of learning.

They’re doing that, but they’re trying to learn.

And guess what?

The bad thing is that they never know until three years later, they look up and somebody has to break it to them.

That last three years isn’t going to do you much good in the real world, my friend, right?

Because you’ve been learning this proprietary thing and it doesn’t exist anywhere else.

So the minute you need to leave, you got to relearn.

You got to relearn everything that you’ve been learning.

It’s a bad situation.

It helps, it helps nobody and it shouldn’t exist.

Okay.

That was a good, that was, that was good to end on.

That was a good to end on.

I learned software development before I started building websites.

I was shocked that there were no real professional builders out there.

I started with Elementor before I heard of Bricks.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

They will scream and run.

Yes.

Do not inspect the code.

Over abstraction is stupid.

Yep.

It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s so abstraction is a, is an interesting thing.

Yeah.

You can absolutely over abstract things.

A hundred percent.

You can over abstract things.

You need, it’s like cooking.

It’s like cooking.

Like you got to have the right mix.

If you have the right mix, delicious.

It’s great.

It’s fantastic.

If you overdo it, it sucks.

You know, it sucks.

So why should we stick with WordPress if the management doesn’t listen to us users or develop for our needs?

Well, because some people do listen.

Some people do listen.

Some people do know what, what the needs are and some people do build to those needs.

I’m alluding.

I’m alluding.

It’s, it’s alluding.

Okay.

Brian says, Brian, this is WDD is where you come to find web design truth.

Okay.

This is what we do.

If you’re new here, this is what we do every single week, every single week.

This is it.

This is the recipe.

No divs and divvy.

So crazy.

Oh, there’s so much limitation in, in divvy.

And then, and then like, okay, here’s one last example.

Then we absolutely have to get out of it.

I’m sorry.

I’m taking it easy today.

Yesterday was a U S holiday.

I’m just in, I’m just like, it’s, let’s hang out.

Let’s hang out.

If we do this at word camp, this is, but it gets even better with a drink or two.

It’s fantastic.

So, um, presets.

Should we, should we just talk about presets for a second?

This is what happens.

You start building a tool for the lowest common denominator user, and you get to a part of the whole situation where you go, you know what?

Uh, raw dogging the IDs probably wasn’t a great idea.

You know, we have no control, no global control over styling.

We have no instance level control over like these cards that I was building.

And I am going to remember to share my screen.

These cards right here.

Okay.

Like, let me, let me just demonstrate for a second, just for the people who still aren’t on the same page.

Right.

Because I added classes to these things.

Um, I’m going to go to background and I’m just going to choose like, uh, BG ultra light.

And we’ll just go to padding.

And we’ll just pop in some padding.

Okay.

We don’t have to make it crazy.

We’ll just go save.

And then we’ll go back to the front end, front end.

Can we get to the front end?

Okay.

See how both cards just got the same change that I was making.

Um, that’s the power of classes.

Right.

And, you know, if you have a gazillion now looping does help looping helps, but still I would have this loop probably maybe on many different pages and then I’m SOL.

Right.

Cause I have to go page by page by page and change the parent of the loop.

And you don’t want to be in a situation.

That’s just a, that’s a losing situation.

You don’t want to play a losing game.

Right.

So we have these things called classes.

Well, classes are native to web design.

Like if you speak the language of web design since like 1990, whatever, you understand what a class is and how it works and how to use them.

But you know, Divi is like, well, we don’t speak the language of web design.

So there’s no classes.

Breakdance has classes, but they also see, they muddy the waters.

Generate didn’t have classes until five minutes ago.

Uh, they use this thing called presets.

Uh, Elementor doesn’t have classes.

And so what these tools do is they recognize a problem.

And the problem is look at all these websites that are not maintainable and not scalable because they were built with our tool.

And then they come in.

It’s essentially like, well, let’s just say it.

They’re the U S government.

They, they create a problem and then they show up and go, Oh, we’ll fix that problem for you.

And then the solution that they give you is a half-ass solution called presets that don’t actually fix the problem.

And then aren’t nearly as powerful as classes.

And then they go, huh, aren’t you happy now?

And it’s like, couldn’t I just have the thing that I had before?

Oh, no, no, no, no.

You can’t.

Cause it’s not built for you.

And so, and then you’re like, but the presets caused this problem.

And they’re like, ah, just ignore that.

Ignore that problem.

Right.

We had classes.

Why couldn’t they give you classes?

Well, cause they thought I was just, we’re just being honest.

They thought, well, the average lay person can’t understand the concept of classes.

So we have to create a simpler concept called presets and use a simpler name called preset and we’ll give them that.

And so you, my friend, the professional, you, the aspiring professional, you, the serious hobbyist have to, you’re now in a situation where you have to go, and you have to put up with that shit.

You have to put up with the fact that they’re not building it for you.

And you’ve got to slog through this preset bullshit going, man, I really wish I had classes.

Well, why don’t you?

Cause the tool is not built for you.

It’s built for this lay person user that doesn’t actually exist by the way, as we’ve talked about many, many times, which that’s even more frustrating.

If there was literally a gym, lay person gym next to me, just having a fucking field day over here with the tool.

Cause it’s so easy.

That would be one thing, but that’s not actually happening.

Gym.

All gym is doing is buying an element or layout on theme forest and shuffling the content around and changing the colors.

Meanwhile, as somebody trying to do real work in element or, I can’t, I can’t.

Right.

Um, because it’s designed for gym, lay person, gym, who’s not even using the tool the way it’s supposed to be used.

And I just have to be constantly frustrated.

This is the life all of you live right now.

This is the life everybody lives.

Um, even, even in you, we live this life actually to a large degree in bricks.

We still live this life to a large degree.

And I, and I’ll point out the many different ways that this is happening.

Um, but it’s a, it’s just a fact of life.

And the block editor is 10 X all that.

It’s like, take that insanity and 10 X it.

And you have the block editor, um, which then the pro wants to do some pro work in the block editor.

And I already showed you the documentation.

Have at it.

Have at it.

Go read all that documentation, figure it out for yourself.

Uh, that’s the workflow that they want you to use.

That doesn’t feel very era four to me.

That doesn’t feel very 2024, 2025 to 2030.

For me, that doesn’t feel like, like as a, as a proponent of WordPress, imagine I’m tasked with Kevin, go recruit as many web flow people as you can.

Like go tell them all the virtues of WordPress.

Go tell them how awesome it’s going to be over here.

Go just like subvert, you know, web flow.

Go get us, go recruit from web flow as many people as you can get them over to WordPress.

And I’ll go, I mean, that’s going to be a tough sell.

That’s going to be, that’s going to be a tough sell.

Right?

I mean, look at what I got to show them.

I mean, what, what conclusion are they going to possibly come to when I show them the workflow I showed you guys earlier?

Don’t send me on a losing mission.

Like that’s a losing mission.

It shouldn’t be a losing mission though.

It should be a winning mission.

We should be able to get the web flow people over here.

We should be able to make the case that it’s so obvious.

Why are you using web flow when you have this kind of experience in WordPress?

We can’t say that right now.

We will hopefully be able to say that soon.

That’s, that’s the deal.

I do think, oh, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Oh, no, no.

I thought I saw something.

Okay.

Oh, I do want to, yep.

That’s good.

Lewis.

Good point.

Good point.

We didn’t even get into that.

We didn’t even get into that.

That’s a whole nother discussion, a whole nother textbook of technical things that we could get into it.

We’re not going to do it.

We’re not going to do it.

Hello from New York city.

Builders also care about the owners and website decision makers who actually, uh, who are looking for fake simplicity at, yep, that too, that too, that too.

Um, okay.

Let’s go ahead and get out of here.

Uh, I, I love you guys.

Uh, the support is fantastic.

The, uh, fact that you guys come here every single week to listen to me ramble is, is, you know, I don’t take it for granted.

I love it.

Um, hopefully you find it entertaining.

I find you guys entertaining.

I find this whole situation, uh, entertaining as frustrated as I sometimes am.

I am always looking for solutions.

I am always creating as many solutions as I possibly can.

I am creating as much content as I possibly can to try to lead things in the right direction.

And really none of that would be happening without you guys, without your support, without your, um, hitting subscribe, hitting share and, and you guys being proponents of the same things, you know, that’s, uh, it, it takes all of us.

And I have said that etch is a, um, there’s a mission that is much bigger than etch.

And I’ve, you know, I’ve been talking about it.

I’ve been alluding to it, but it is going to take all of us.

Like we can shift WordPress into a really, really, really awesome and powerful place.

Uh, but I can’t do it myself and we can’t just do it with the inner circle and we get, it has to be, it has to be something that catches on in, in terms of professional standards, in terms of how we’re producing content as a community, in terms of how people are interpreting WordPress from the outside.

And, and that starts on the inside.

It starts on the inside, but we’re here.

The mission is starting.

Era four WordPress begins tomorrow.

And you guys get to be a part of it.

And that’s awesome.

So I’ll see you guys tomorrow.

We’re going to have a lot of fun.

Peace.

Thank you.