WP Townhall 007: Can WordPress Be Great Again? (Kevin’s 3-3-3 Plan)

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So we are we are wanting to hear from the WordPress community.

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You have the ability to come in and be a caller, essentially, and participate in the in the discussion.

And today we are discussing can WordPress be great again?

I put out a thread on Twitter over the weekend.

Let me see what it’s up to. We’re about to cross the 10,000 views mark on this thread.

We’re at 24 retweets right now, 31 bookmarks.

There’s been a lot of great feedback, Mark, and I think that this is a pertinent time to be talking about this stuff.

But let’s just start with how are you doing? What are you up to?

I’m doing great, Kevin. I appreciate I appreciate your insight on this topic.

I, you know, I think that a lot of people have there’s been a lot of chat, a lot of different.

You know, we’ve, you know, internally tried to get some great guests and probably will to talk about these types of issues that are going on and kind of WordPress and everything.

And I I love this blueprint that you laid out and I’m excited to chat about it and get people’s thoughts on it.

So, yeah, rock and roll.

So I think what we’ll do is I’m just going to read this.

That’s going to put this thread in an audio format.

And it’s going to ensure that everybody listening who has not had a chance to read it yet is updated.

You know, they know exactly what we’re talking about and what’s on the table.

And then they obviously can hopefully participate.

Don’t be shy.

You know, this is not a this is not a format for shy.

This is, you know, come in here and sound off.

We want to hear from you.

It’s not just supposed to be us having this conversation.

So I’m going to read through the thread real quick.

Making WordPress awesome again is high level, a three point list that fixes the three big issues.

It’s not some crazy complex puzzle to put together.

Let’s thread this out.

I’ll cover the three main issues and a three point plan to get things back on track.

Issue one.

The CMS, that’s the content management system, has been grossly neglected.

The reliance on plugins for basic and modern CMS functionality is a terrible strategy that irritates long term users and makes it much harder for newcomers to adopt the platform.

Basic shit is basic shit.

Stop arguing for the status quo.

We could probably get into that at some point, too.

The arguing for the status quo is insanely rampant in the WordPress ecosystem.

Issue number two.

Too much time and money was invested in an experimental block editor that nobody asked for and that most people fought against.

It was haphazardly constructed, has no unified framework, is underpowered, and is built adjacent to an outdated and irrelevant theming system.

Issue three, too little emphasis was put on design and too little control given to whatever

designers are involved. UX, UI has been neglected as much as the CMS. There are talented people who

can fix this and prevent it from getting worse like Rich, but he seems to be poorly utilized.

There are many other things that I could point out and touch on, but let’s keep it concise. Let’s

focus on these three issues. There are a lot of wins that we can find within these three issues

alone. This would be my plan, what I’m now calling the 333 plan, okay? Step one, immediately get the CMS

up to speed. Custom tables, native post types, fields, and relationships, proper sorting, filtering,

ordering, tag-based media management, bulk post and page creation, enhanced permalink control,

basic SEO controls. We have to end the neglect of the CMS that has been going on for far too long.

Step two, unify WPUI and UX, the design, okay? Set and announce a date for sunsetting the customizer,

create an official design system to unify core and third-party development, deprecate widgets and

similar relics behind feature flags. A better CMS with a modern UI already makes WordPress great again,

okay? We could just stop there, but we’re going to keep going. We have one more step. Step three,

develop a single standard design agnostic official block theme on a unified framework.

End the fantasy of a block theme library. This needs to be heavily, heavily discussed and talked about.

This is a, I think a, if you have something like a block theme and you’re going to, you’re going to,

you’re not going to understand the real value of a block theme and you’re still going to go with this

concept of a block theme life. That’s absolute chaos, a block theme library, absolute chaos.

Encourage the development of pattern sets built with the unified framework and not new entire block

themes. Make the homepage, the default start page for the love of God, okay? Add breakpoint controls for

the love of God. Stop pretending that these, like, this is insanity that these things have not happened

yet. End the for everyone dev fantasy and give users real styling inputs. Embrace a class system,

since it is the only proven track record way of ensuring maintainability and scalability. Add block

level CSS with a dynamic root selector, which is required for a, for a seamless pattern sharing and

a viable pattern library. They’ve got this pattern library and it is not viable to share anything. It’s,

it is, it is, they’re not democratizing patterns. They’re not, because they still don’t understand

that in order to ship shareable patterns, the CSS has to live with the pattern. And first of all,

you have to have CSS in the first place because the styling inputs don’t give us the control that

we need to actually do our jobs. I can’t even ship shareable patterns in Bricks without writing CSS and

Bricks is a far more advanced builder than Gutenberg. So this is imperative that this exists.

We also must add native styles, stylesheet support with a viable CSS editor. Relegating all of this to a

relic theme system is ass backwards. Three problems, three points of action, a three-year roadmap. I believe

this all could be done in three years. Let’s, that’s why we’re calling it the 333 plan. And since we need

talented contributors and community alignment, let’s give WordPress back to the community by moving the

trademark to an independent board and ending any commercial enforcement via licensing. Then I went

on to say, unfortunately, none of this is really possible because of the gatekeeping within WP leadership.

But just imagine for a moment, if WP had leadership that was willing to do this,

if that was the case, how would you rate your optimism for WordPress on a scale of one to 10?

If the 333 plan was set in motion, how optimistic would you be about the future of WordPress?

And so that ends the thread right there. I’ll turn it over to you, Mark, and just get your initial

thoughts and to see where, you know, where should we start if we’re going to tackle this list? And of

course, we want to invite everybody listening to sound off as well. If you’re in the X spaces,

click the button to raise your hand, get invited to speak. We will elevate you into the speaker pool.

If you are watching on YouTube live, sound off in the chat. If you’re going to ask questions in the

chat, make sure you use hashtag Q to prefix your question so that Mark and I can find it. Go ahead,

Mark.

Yeah, I mean, it’s quite the plan. I think that we can kind of just go right down the line. I feel

like that’s probably the best because I think you laid it out in a very logical manner. I mean, I think,

you know, as I was, obviously I was reading through the past couple of days and then hearing you kind

of lay it out, like, I don’t know, my mind goes directly towards, you know, the common objections.

That’s just kind of the way that I, you know, the way that I think, and I’m sure we’ll get,

we might get some with, uh, you know, probably get some people that are in agreement with some

things, people that have more experience. I think, I think though, I think the biggest thing that I

can add to this kind of at the top is two things. One, uh, I think that it’s fair to say, and I speak

for us both when we, when we say that we enjoy working with WordPress, I mean, well, enjoy is,

you know, subjective, but I’m saying like, we want WordPress to succeed. We want to see it to

continue to get better. We don’t make these types of, I know you don’t make these types of

plans up because you hate the way that WordPress is, or like you hate, like, you don’t want to see it go

in a, in a bad direction. Like that’s, that’s a really important thing that I think a lot of times

I see in threads and everything like that. And it’s like, you know, why are people complaining

about something that’s free and all that sort of stuff? I mean, I think that two things can be

true at the same time. I think you can appreciate something that is open source and free for everybody

to use and also want it to get better. So I do think that’s, that’s a, a thing that I would,

it’s an opinion that I hold. And I, and I think you hold that as well. Yeah. So I think that was,

that’s the big top one. And then the other big top one for me, that is pretty much is his opinion,

but I think it’s, I think it can be proven is that in every single one of these types of conversations,

when we start to get into like, literally the things that you’re saying here are to me and you,

and to a lot of people are like kind of objective, like these could be better or better,

whatever, like, you know, it is this way. If we changed it to, you know, class-based or X, Y,

Z or whatever, it would be objectively better and more standardized and everything like that.

I think the thing that my hypothesis that I currently have is one of them is that I’m not going to fully

speak for you, Kevin, on this one, but I will speak for myself. And maybe you kind of resonate with

this a little bit. We’ve been in WordPress, we’ve been using WordPress for a long time,

but I know like myself, I haven’t been in the WordPress community since it’s like inception,

right? I mean, you know, I was born in 1996. So like it was, it came out in one, like 2003.

So like I, I just started using WordPress in 2017 and I started getting in the community in the last

couple of years. My point with this is that there are so many people in this community, fantastic people,

talented people that have made plugins and contributed and all this sort of stuff.

There is a level of emotion in this community tied to this platform, product, project, whatever you want

to call it, that is like noticeable. And I’m not saying it’s bad, but I am saying it, it’s not good

or bad. It’s just, it has an impact on the way that people think and feel and react to these types of like

ideas and where the project goes and everything. So that’s not one specific point to any of the three

points that we have here. I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a thing that we have to remember at all times.

And I’m not saying I know exactly how to navigate it, but I’ve noticed it heavily. And it’s like,

there’s just a lot of emotion built into this community for better or for worse. And that sometimes I feel

like has a direct effect on the amount of change that could actually be persistent amongst other

things. But I just think that that’s one that I see heavily. So.

Yeah. Well, I think the emotion stems from, we have a platform that powers 43% of the internet. So

right away, we have just masses of people affected by this stuff and affected to a large degree.

So many of the people that I know in WordPress are solely WordPress. They’re a hundred percent

WordPress. They’re not, they’re not dabbling in the web flows and the, and the other platforms,

this Wix’s and the square spaces. Of course, some of them are, but there’s like a vast majority of

people that I know and that I interact with are a hundred percent WordPress. You’re a hundred percent

WordPress. One, you need the thing to win because if it, if it’s not winning, you’re not winning. Okay.

Number two, you need the thing to certainly not die, to not fall behind the times, to not get replaced

by something else. So, and that’s, that’s where a lot of the emotion, like on my side comes from

is it’s, it’s, it’s like, if you were playing for a sports team and it’s like, God, do you guys realize

how great we could be if we just quit the bullshit and we just like, we did the practice, right? We

listened to the coaches. We did the stuff we’re supposed to do. Like that’s what a player on the

team is supposed to sound like. They’re not supposed to sound like, well, yeah, I mean, we could just

stick around and do whatever we want and, or, or we could just do this other stuff over here.

That’s not going to make us any better or like, right. A team can either get worse or it can get

better. And you need people who want to move the thing forward and want to make progress and want to

win driving it. And I think that’s, that’s, I, you know, I can’t speak to the motivations, uh, of the

current leadership of WordPress. They would have to speak to that themselves. But when I look around at

the choices that they make, I ask myself, do they really want to win? Are they really trying to win?

Are they trying to win personally versus having WordPress win? And then, you know, we, we talk

about 43% of the internet and all these people that are tied to WordPress and their livelihoods are tied

to WordPress. It is very like, you got to question how somebody is going to come out and be so destructive

destructive in, in, in, in, in what they’re saying and, in their actions. Okay. As we’ve seen over the

past few months to the destructive, to the brand, uh, and not have that in the back of their mind and,

and suggest that what they’re doing is actually in everybody’s best interest. Like, no, I’m sorry.

Tearing down the brand is, and, and tarnishing the brand in this, in this capacity. This is not in

anybody’s best interest. And then of course, ignoring all of the feedback that says exactly

that, you know, I start to wonder, are we seeing somebody that is just interested in personally

winning? And, and in this case, it seems like some just weird vendetta, ego vendetta. Okay. Uh,

versus the platform actually winning and everybody that uses the platform continuing to win.

That’s what I’m questioning. Um, and you know, people do charge me with like, Hey, okay. All you

want to do is complain. Where’s this? Okay. Well, I’m giving you the solutions right now. Here’s the

roadmap. Here’s the three, three, three is, is a very simple, fairly basic in context. Okay. Relative to

what, what, what WordPress is. Um, and it, and it’s a timeline that’s doable. Okay. This is,

this is the roadmap. So if I was in charge, this is what I would be doing. If I, if I,

if leadership wanted WordPress to win, I feel like this is what they would be doing.

They’re not doing this. This is why we need to question them. Why aren’t you doing the things

that are going to cause us to win? Uh, but we’re putting this out here for, for discussion. I don’t

know. We, we probably, we should dive into the specifics. I don’t know which part you’re most

interested in, in like digging into. Yeah. I mean, again, like I said, we could just, uh,

kind of take it from the top. I feel like issue number one is something that, uh,

you know, the CMS being grossly neglected. I think that again, I have a hard time dissecting

these things. The reason I do is cause like, you know, something like this, that’s laid out

seems pretty objective. And I think the most constructive thing though, for us to do would

be like, you know, tell, say why, like, obviously that, like you feel like this and everything like

that. And it’s, and it’s going to make sense for most people, but I do think like, you know,

and again, I would, I would 100% encourage anybody in the, in the audience here, if you

want, if you’re in support of these things, obviously dive in, but also if you have, if

you have objections to them, definitely let us. That’s what I want to hear from a one-sided.

Yeah. I want to hear, I want to hear from the, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve actually heard from people

with objections, um, uh, you know, in replies, but I would love for them to, you know, come into

the speaker pool and voice those because I, you know, you’re, you’re saying, well, I think

this stuff is fairly objective. There’s actually been, I would say 25 to 35% of people pushing

back on certain things. Um, one of those would be like the native custom post types, for example,

let me go down to, um, you know, step one, immediate, immediately get the CMS up to speed.

Um, so native custom post types and native custom fields. I have long said that these

are requirements for proper content management. WordPress is billed as a content management

system. You cannot properly manage to me. This is my object. This is my argument. Okay. You

cannot properly manage content with just posts and pages. Posts become relegated to blog posts.

Pages end up being a junk drawer where everything lives. Uh, you only have parent child hierarchy.

You don’t have taxonomization. You don’t have, uh, the, the looping control that you need. You

don’t have a lot of things when all you’re relegated to as parent child relationships in a junk drawer

called pages. Custom post types is where different types of content need to live. This is how you

organize content in a content management system. If you’re going to create services pages, those

are not pages. That is a services custom post type. You’re going to create FAQs. Those are not pages.

Those are a custom post type called FAQs. You can then bi-directionally relate things. You can then

properly taxonomize things. You can do all the things you need to do. You have all of the looping controls

available to you provided you’re using a, uh, environment that actually allows you to loop properly.

This is proper content management. A lot of people are 25%, 30% of people come along and say,

I’ve never needed to loop anything. I’ve never needed to, I’ve never felt the need to create a

custom post type. Okay. I’m sorry. Um, you are not managing content properly. That’s the, it’s just,

it’s not to me, it’s not debatable how a content management system is supposed to, just because you

don’t use it right. Doesn’t mean that that’s not how it should be. Um, and so I, you know, I, and this

is where I go into how many, how many hundreds of hours of video have I recorded tutorials demonstrating

these things and Joe Schmo, nobody’s ever heard of comes along and just say, Oh, I’ve never needed to

do that. I don’t, I don’t think WordPress needs to do that. Okay. Well, like where’s your actual

argument though, Joe, right? Where’s your video showing? Well, actually everything that Kevin did

on video, I can do with pages. Let me demonstrate how to, they can’t do it. They won’t do it. They’ve

never done it. So to me, that’s where I say like some people’s opinions matter and other people’s

opinions are just opinions, just noise. Right. Um, that’s, that’s really what I want to sort out.

And that’s why I’m hoping like, if there is somebody who can come in and say, no, Kevin, this is why

legitimate reason one, two, and three, why WordPress doesn’t need native post types and native custom

fields. I, that’s, I would love to hear from that person. Um, so far I just hear, well, my opinion is

it doesn’t really need to happen. You know, I think back to when I started using custom post types and it

was a whole new world as probably most of us when they, when we figured that out. And I genuinely

can’t, can’t think of how I could possibly build another WordPress website without them, like 99%

of the WordPress website. So obviously fully with you there. Um, and I’m again, in agreement there,

I think that it would be really interesting to, you know, somebody like that, whoever that is,

like John Doe or whatever, it’d be like really, really interesting to just like, see how they do it.

Cause I mean, I, I know people that don’t use custom post types and it’s just like, again,

it’s the, it’s a nightmare drunk drawer type thing, duplicating and all that sort of stuff.

Um, see, that’s the thing, Mark is I know how they do it because I have taken over the websites

they’ve built and I’ve seen the absolute nightmare that they’ve created in this content management system

by not managing content. And so that’s the funny thing is the same people who build these disasters

that I have to take over and be like, ah, this is a disaster. And then by the way,

I have to have the very uncomfortable conversation with their client saying, I’m sorry. Uh, the person

who did this had no idea what they were doing. And a lot of this has, has to be completely rebuilt

and restructured and that’s going to cost you a lot of money. And that really sucks. It’s not a good

conversation to have with the client. It would be nice if everybody could get on the same page with

like best practices and fundamentals. And if the, if the tool that we’re using actually had the proper

native support of these things that it should have as a content management system, the entire world

would be a better place. And it’s not just about my opinion. It’s about clients actually being better

off. The people that we are working for would be better off. But those people that are creating these

disaster scenarios are the same people in my DMS and tweets going, Oh, WordPress doesn’t really need

that. I just do everything with pages. Yeah. You create an absolute disaster with pages. Congratulations.

Okay. But we are talking about how to make all of this better and unified and native. And you should

probably stop trying to get in the way of that conversation. That’s kind of like the vibe that I

have to get because they don’t listen. They don’t, they ignore the, I mean, the hundreds of hours of

video that are there that they could watch, they just ignore it. Well, okay. So am I supposed to

entertain this person with a, with a conversation? I just, I’m starting to get to the point where it’s like,

you just have to dismiss them because they’re not actually saying anything of substance. They’re not

demonstrating any alternative methods. They’re just essentially saying, no, let’s just stick with the

status quo, which is by the way, losing.

Yeah. I mean, so, so if we, if we talk about issue one, right. And bettering the CMS again,

custom post types, tables, all that sort of stuff. Um, this is, this is an interesting one because this

is obviously because of WordPress’s nature. And again, this kind of goes back to what we’re talking

about earlier with like kind of the emotion and just being here since the beginning. Like there’s

this, I feel like there’s this, and this is going to come up, I think more in the other issues too,

but there’s this idea. I feel this constant thing of, we have to make sure that WordPress works

like it’s completely backwards compatible and all that sort of stuff. And again, I don’t want to get

too far off topic of the actual issues, but again, it’s a big thing of the idea of like, I don’t know

this for certain, but like the, like it almost feels like we want to make sure that websites built in

like 2005 are still working. I know that there’s other technical things like PHP and all that sort of

stuff that’s, that’s not aligning up, but I just feel like there’s, there’s a little bit of that where

we know, and this comes a little bit from a chat that I just got on over on YouTube from Max. He said,

CPTs and custom fields are already an abomination from the perspective of database relationship models. Like,

like, I don’t know the, I don’t claim to know the actual like deep technical piece of all that. I know it from

the, from the, from the front end and like relating data and all that sort of stuff. But what I’m saying is I know that

there was like default WordPress custom fields. I know they’re coming out with like, I think the

interactivity API or something like other type of other things. And I think that it’s just like,

my question is like, what did we have before? What did like ACF jet engine metabox do to create those?

And then what, what is there, is there a future where we bring that without stealing it necessarily,

like into, into the core type of situation that still like is, is good for the basic user,

but then maybe can be extended by plugins. I think that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

This is what’s crazy is that a WordPress has custom post types and custom fields are native

in WordPress already and have been for a very long time. There’s just no, they never built a UI for it.

So what advanced custom fields and metabox do, they, they, all they’ve done is created a UI for easily

activating and registering custom fields and custom post types and making it easy for the user to just

click, click, click, click, click. Okay. Done. Which WordPress could have done a long time ago.

And everybody would be happy. We wouldn’t need these, these plugins. The, the argument that I’m making is

you’re going to call it a content management system. And then when somebody installs the content

management system and attempts to use the content management system, you go, ah, but the gotcha is

everything that you really need to do to manage content properly, by the way, even, even see your

content properly. You need, uh, admin columns. You need a plugin to just see your data properly,

see your content properly. Then if you actually want to manage the content, you need another plugin for that.

And one, just put yourselves in the shoes of a beginner right now. Okay. You’re a beginner.

You’re trying to navigate this. You’re like, okay, I’m going to install WordPress. I’m gonna start

managing my content. It’s fucking content management system. Let’s go. I’m gonna manage my content.

And then you get in. And the very first step is choose from this, uh, library of custom post type

slash custom field plugins. So now I got to go, I got to go down this rabbit hole of, okay, well,

which one is appropriate for me? Which one’s better than the other one? Which one is the industry

standard. Oh, there it is. One really isn’t an industry. There’s two main players. Then there’s

this other one from Australia and the, you’re down this crazy rabbit hole. And then it’s like, okay,

I figured that out. Now I’d actually like to see my data properly. I’d like to see my content,

be able to sort it properly, be able to do, uh, some of this custom field management in the actual

table that I’m looking at here because clicking on each individual post is a nightmare. Okay. Oh,

and they go, Oh, well you need a plugin for that too. So I can’t even manage the content in the content

management system without an add on. And I can’t even see the content properly and filter it properly

in the content management system without an add on this, this, uh, commitment to, Oh, somebody else

will take care of that. It is what is like made WordPress, a wild, wild West nightmare for beginners

and for a lot of users and you take over sites and it’s a different stack. There’s nothing really

that’s important. That’s native. So any site you take over, it’s like, Oh my God. Okay. Let’s find

out what our stack nightmare is today. Right. And these are not tools that I normally use. It’s very

difficult to take a site over, uh, in WordPress. And so what does the client end up having to do?

Well, pay to rebuild the entire thing. It wasn’t built right. The content’s not managed properly.

It’s fucking chaos in the backend. So the result is, Hey client drop another 15 grand. It’s all

got to be redone. Is that, is that what we should be doing to clients? Is that, is that the reputation

WordPress wants to have? I don’t know. I’m saying that, that, you know, all of this to me is, is

loser. This is a team that’s losing. All of this points to a team that’s losing, not a team that is

winning. I feel that. So if we go, if we go to, if we skip to like step one, so that was issue one,

if we skip to step one, how we’re at, how we would actually do it. Obviously we’re, we’re kind of

talking about what needs to be done. Like, you know, pseudo, like what needs to be improved.

And then, you know, you have your, like, get the CMS up to speed, custom tables, everything we just

talked about. So like, I guess then the most productive thing will maybe be like, well, what are the,

what are going to be the common objections there? I could think of a few already, like one,

obviously, anytime you suggest something, you should just contribute to yourself. So that’s

number one. The second, the second one, the second one is, uh, is like that I could think of

potentially would be people saying, well, okay, what happens to like, if you took basically what

happened, you know, a couple months ago or whatever, at this point, like if, if you took ACF,

you took all the feature set and you put it into kind of like core or made it like a plugin that you

could just more something that you just like turn on rather or turn off rather than like

have to go find, right. If you brought that into the core experience, um, what is your,

what is your thoughts on how does that affect like the actual plugin ecosystem? Is that just

kind of the cost of doing business that at any point you could just kind of, you know, like ACF,

jet engine, like those types of things. I mean, obviously they would still have other value that

they could provide, but what do you see like happening there with, if something was in core,

like how much, maybe another way to ask it, how much of it actually needs to be in the core of

WordPress? Um, well, I, you know, I made a list of stuff that should be in core. The way that we get

this into core is very simple. Okay. We, we created, uh, automatic CSS and it didn’t take long for,

uh, somebody named Chris to create an add-on for automatic CSS. The add-on was contextual menus,

right-click contextual menus that were shortcuts to all of the utilities and actually helped you live

preview, whatever utility is going to do on the canvas. And that was essentially, if you want to

see it as like a plugin for automatic CSS and add-on for automatic CSS that unlocks this functionality.

So what did we do? Well, we said, well, damn, that’s, uh, I mean, users love this. Uh, it’s fantastic.

It dramatically speeds up workflow. It makes things way more efficient. And so I got on a call with Chris

and I worked out a deal to buy it and to, and to bring him onto the team. Okay. Cause he’s a super

talented person. Um, what automatic has gazillions of dollars that they could do this for with, with

ACF, if they wanted to with meta, that would be the right way to approach it. In my opinion,

I think Matt’s argument would be like, well, I can just take the code if I want it. You know,

it’s GPL. I’ll just take it and put it in. Just take it from them. You know, don’t, don’t reward

them for anything that they’ve done. Like you, you said, it’s not going to be native. Somebody else

go solve the problem. So ACF goes, okay, we’ll solve the problem and we’ll sell it. And they’ve made

boatloads of money doing that. And then Metabox has done it and everybody else has done it that has

that same exact offering. Right. Okay. And so Matt could just what take any one of those and

integrate. I mean, I guess legally he could, but the right thing to do would be to choose the one

you want to have native, reach out to that team and buy it from them. Um, and it’s a done deal.

It’s a done deal. Uh, and then recognize that you should have done that, you know, yourself to begin

with probably, uh, with all of the, again, money sitting in your bank. So I, I don’t see it as a,

as an issue. Like that’s, that’s why like the three-year timeline could actually be shorter.

If we went that route, we don’t need, we don’t even need contributors for that side of things.

The solutions already exist. It’s a matter of how we’re, how we’re fairly going to put them into the

product. Okay. So you would, you would say like kind of in an example scenario, maybe like acquire

ACF rather than steal it, but acquire that acquire maybe like, um, you know, admin columns, pro

acquire admin columns, pro is an example of one that could, it’s almost a no brainer acquisition.

Um, yeah, yeah, that, that solves that problem immediately. Uh, now you, you’re going to build

off of that. You’re not going to just like rest after that’s integrated. You’re going to build off

of that. Um, but again, this is, this is, um, this is only going to happen when you are willing to make

it happen and you don’t, you don’t use, well, it’s open source. Uh, well, do it yourself. Uh,

open a track ticket. These are all excuses. These are all excuses. See, if, if it’s my project,

like you were going to say like, oh, this is my child. It’s like my child. I just, I love this

thing. In fact, he wrote a blog post the other day where he actually said this, I I’m married to the

game. He said, you know, he’s got a WordPress ring cause he’s married to the game. You go,

go read his blog. Well, you’re not treating this thing. Like you’re married to it. You’re,

you’re completely neglecting it. That’s what you’re doing. Um, and so you open your tool that

you’re married to and you look at it and go, yeah, this shit’s 10 years out of date. Can’t sort things

properly. Can’t manage content properly. I’m going to pay to fix this stuff. It’s my thing that I love

that I, that I claim I’m married to. Seems like you would fix that stuff, not say, oh no, no, no, no,

no, no. You go fix it. No, you go fix it. Oh, you want it? You want it to be better? You do it.

You do it. And open a track ticket. You contribute all the code. You do this. And then, and then by

the way, also say, and after you do that, let me just remind you, you don’t own any of this,

right? It’s mine, right? That’s the, that’s the situation we’re in right now. Very conflicting

messages and, um, and, and putting expectations and responsibilities on people who have no,

no real payoff at the end of the day. Cause again, he could legally, I think just take all ACFs code and

just do it and just leave them out to dry. Could, could do that. Uh, so putting all of the risk on

everybody else, putting all the deflection on everybody else, but then also saying, uh, yeah,

let’s keep in mind, I’m married to the game. This is, this is my baby. Uh, it’s just that none of that

aligns. And, and that’s kind of, uh, it’s irritating. Interesting. Um, I did, I don’t know if you guys got an

echo. I got one in my ears, but that might be, that might be a me issue. We do have Rob in here, uh, for the

speakers, uh, if we want to get Rob.

Okay. Yeah. So what I wanted to say was, you know, the precedent has already been set for, uh, automatic

acquiring a plugin. Just look at what they did with Woo and WooCommerce.

a hundred percent. That is true. Keep going, Robin. And I didn’t mean to cut you off. Go, go ahead.

If you, if you’ve got any, no, that’s, that’s basically all I wanted to say. Okay. Yeah. The

whole GPL. I’ve actually asked this question a couple of times to other people, um, of what the

legality is of, of doing what Matt did as far as just ripping the code off and taking it. I mean,

isn’t that what GPL standards are? It’s, it’s free for anybody to use.

Yeah, essentially. Um, you know, we, we would need to get, uh, somebody in the legal field on here to

really give us the intricacies of, of, you know, how that kind of stuff would be treated. But, um,

yeah, I think essentially that’s what that means.

And so why, I mean, when you think about this, why would, would anybody actually want to develop

a premium plugin? If anybody can just down, you know, buy it one time, download it, and then put

it on a mirror site for anybody to use. Correct. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a big problem. That’s why,

that’s why a lot of things. Okay. So like automatic CSS and frames are not in the repo because we don’t want

to agree to the terms of Matt’s repo, uh, which, which now we find to see, we, we, I think it was

billed as like, that’s like a foundation thing. That’s like a group thing. That’s like a, no, no,

no. It’s actually just a him thing. Uh, it’s like his personal website. Right. Um, so yeah, you know,

ACF is shocked that they just stole it and turned it into SCF. Uh, but that’s, that was actually the

terms they agreed to when they put it in the repo. That’s why our stuff’s not in the repo. And then

that’s why you see, you know, most plugins have licensing and, um, technically GPL, you can

redistribute all of that code. You can alter the code, but what you can’t do is you can’t get support.

You can’t get updates from the official source that’s protected by the license, yada, yada, yada.

But I think even that is something Matt would probably maybe argue against. I don’t know. I don’t

know what his actual official position is on, on that.

Anything else, Rob?

Nope. That’s all for me. Thanks.

Okay, cool. Uh, we had a couple of people bounce into the speaker pool and then, uh, also dropped off.

Uh, but yeah, feel free to, to come in and sound off.

Yeah. Um, we could move to potentially question or issue two. I had one thing though, that again,

it’s kind of more of a, a larger question. I don’t want to derail, but you know, I think,

I think it’s an important one to consider and it’s not the first time it’s been brought up, but

this idea of like, you know, we, you know, a few months ago, you and I, Kevin and the rest of the

community that like kind of listens to some of our stuff, we, we had this idea of like, we had this

revelation that WordPress is kind of still considered like a blogging platform. Right. And like, I didn’t

know that before, I guess I, I didn’t use it strictly as a blogging platform, but the concept is like,

when you have a creator or a team of a product or, well, I guess in this case, not even a product,

it’s a project technically, but like at what point, and you wouldn’t, and I’m looking at this

from your perspective, but also yours as a product, product owner perspective. At what point does,

if you set out on day one to make a blogging platform, X, Y, Z, whatever, at what point in

that journey does the platform, does it ever have to become something that you didn’t want it to become

because of the, because of how it’s being used, the audience, your customers, or do you all, do you

feel like you always have the final say as a product owner? I feel like that dynamic is something we’re

maybe struggling a little bit with here. Um, because I don’t, I don’t know what, like, you know,

just as an example, like Matt Mullenweg, like really wants WordPress to be, I mean, I kind of do,

but, but also nobody really knows. Right. So it’s like, what is, what is the actual,

from your perspective as a product owner? Do you feel like ACSS, for example, whatever becomes

something that it’s not, if the, if the entire user base wanted it to do something else?

Now, obviously it’s a weird example, but it’s a fairly easy question to answer. You can,

a lot of products start out with a theory of, of what the product is going to do and how people are

going to use it. And then you get it into people’s hands. I mean, many products have gone through this

evolution where it started out as one thing. I think even Uber, look at Uber. I I’m pretty sure

Uber didn’t start with the concept that they’re currently using today. That’s actually wildly

successful. Um, they, they put it in the hands of real people and then real people decide, Oh,

this is actually how this thing is super valuable for me. And they start using it in that regard.

Um, or what often happens is the theory just fails. Like you put it out there and people don’t use it

the way you thought that they would use it. And you’re just forced to adjust. You’re forced to pivot.

Pivoting is very, very common in entrepreneurship. Pivoting is very, very common in software.

Okay. And so, yes, what happened is, uh, the initial idea was, Hey, this is a, you know, for a,

it’s a blogging platform essentially. And Doug, uh, put a comment in my chat that says, but Kevin,

it’s a blogging platform. Don’t forget that it’s just for blogging. You should know this blogging is

so hot right now. Um, which I, I love the comment because blogging was hot at, at one point,

you know, blogging has dramatically fallen off. And I would argue that WordPress powers 43% of the

internet because of non blog websites. Like these websites may have a blog, but they are not a blog

in totality. And they are sites by the way of consequence, very important sites that serve as

the online marketing and sales engine for millions and millions of small businesses. And by the way,

most of these people were onboarded into WordPress by agencies and freelancers. They didn’t come to an

agency and say, I really want to be on WordPress. Can you build me a WordPress site? Most of them said,

I need a website for my business. And the agency said, cool, we’re going to put you on WordPress.

And that is where the growth came from. And you have these websites of consequence, as I call them,

because we’re not concerned with the little hobby, the little hobby blog situation did not grow WordPress.

And anybody that suggests that that’s the case is out of their mind. If you want to look at what a

platform, what happens to a platform that dedicates itself to hobby blogs, it’s called Tumblr and it

failed. Okay. And so that experiment is done. Websites of consequence were built on WordPress,

turning it effectively into from a, from a blog platform into a real content management system,

not with the help of the people who built WordPress, but with the help of third-party developers who gave

us the features that we needed to do that. That is how WordPress came to power 43% of the internet.

And so, yeah, I don’t even know what your question was anymore. You got, you got me,

you got me all into this.

Yeah. I mean, I, I’m sure you kind of answered it with, with all that. I mean, it’s just like,

the pivot, it’s just, again, the pivot. That’s what it was the pivot. So yes, I mean,

you, you recognize, Oh my gosh, look at what our software has empowered and look at what has

contributed to this significant growth and our websites of consequence. These websites powering

millions of small businesses. Is that far more valuable than our dedication to hobby bloggers?

I think so. Maybe we should pivot. Maybe we should start natively providing the things that this cohort,

this insanely profitable cohort. Cause I’ll tell you right now, uh, no hobby blogger is signing up for

WordPress VIP. Okay. Tell you that right now. So if you want to serve the profitable growth oriented

cohort, you pivot and you acknowledge, yeah, I guess the blogging era is over. Here’s what WordPress can

be for the future. Nobody’s done that. They are clinging desperately to the old blogging platform

situation. And we saw this on, we we’ve seen this on calls with the, you know, the creator meetups and

all this stuff still talking about, but this is a blog there’s, they are so committed to a dead

platform to a, to a dead format. Blogs are still relevant. Don’t get me wrong, but they are being

trounced by audio trounced by video trounced by social media trounced by all of these other publishing

platforms. Okay. Um, it’s that’s ship has sailed. If you want WordPress to continue to be relevant

going forward, you must embrace content management. You must embrace websites of consequence. You must

embrace all of this stuff that is not blogging. Yes. You have to pivot.

Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think that, I think that also kind of goes back to what we’re talking

about earlier with like the, I don’t know, I haven’t owned a product for, you know, over 20 years and

a software product at that. But I, I, I agree with what you’re saying. I think that there’s probably just

some of that piece that’s still to where, you know, like, again, there’s been people that have been here for,

for that entire length. And it’s like, it started as such. And like, it obviously has grown tremendously, but I feel

like there’s, there’s still just like kind of a clinging to that, especially when you get into the more things that

people probably feel like are, some people probably feel like, you know, a custom post type situation is like a fringe thing. It’s like, why would we, like you said earlier, like, why would we need that? I would love to know if there’s some, I’m sure we don’t really have any data on this, but I would love to know.

Well, I mean, I guess maybe we could just round up all the custom post type plugins and see how many installs there are or something, but I’m sure those numbers are, are so small compared to the numbers we hear about, like the amount of WordPress websites. You know what I mean? And like that right there is like, okay.

That’s that’s that’s yes, but that’s where we need to, we can’t take the total number of WordPress websites because WordPress is free and anybody can spin it up and anybody can drop it onto a cheap ass three 95 a month host and do nothing with it.

And this is kind of like where I talk about, you know, everybody’s allowed to have an opinion, but you don’t have to listen to all of them because some of them are just irrelevant.

When, when somebody can’t demonstrate why you can do all the things I do with just pages, they can’t demonstrate that.

Then their, their argument that you can do everything with pages is irrelevant.

Right.

And so we have to look at relevant websites.

This is why I label this cohort of websites, websites of consequence.

So if you have a million WordPress websites and you say, well, you know, Kevin, only 300,000 of them have a CPT plugin

and custom fields going on.

But then I ask, okay, but how many are websites of consequence?

And you go, well, it’s that 300,000.

Like the others were just freebie bullshit, spun up, forgot about a month later.

And we can’t put those in the calculation.

We got to look at real websites that are actually being run and managed and growing and doing something of value in the world.

Those are the ones we look at and say, what kind of infrastructure are they running?

Okay.

Cause that’s what you actually need from the platform.

That’s the way I would look at it.

We can’t look at the total numbers.

Gotcha.

I got some good comments in my chat on YouTube.

I want to go to Sathy.

Let’s see.

Yeah.

Hey guys.

Can you guys hear me?

Yes.

Yes, sir.

All right.

Okay.

Okay.

So if you guys listen back, like when I was here, like a few months back, right?

I was a big supporter of Matt, but then that thing kind of changed because a client has been complaining, complaining to me about whatever that’s been happening with WordPress.

So I have had a lot of conversations with people who build sites and all that.

Right.

So we figured like, you know, a few dozens of us, like after talking about these and like, you know, friends and whatnot.

The problem with WordPress is being, the biggest problem here is that all of this is being built by a committee.

Okay.

And inherently, that’s not a mistake.

But then even if you do that, you need somebody that’s leading it who is super strong and understand what to do and what not to do.

And Matt is not that.

That’s the biggest problem.

If you look at like what’s happening in Linux, right?

Like, you know, the operating system itself.

Yes.

You will see like Linus Proverbs, the guy, he has like huge leadership and he gives good guidance, right?

Yeah.

So if you have somebody like that, that’s totally possible.

But when it comes to WordPress, we don’t have that.

We have somebody who’s kind of stuck in like, you know, making money at the same time.

They want to be like the champion of open source, but they realize they kind of overstapped.

That’s the problem here.

And I don’t think it’s a big issue to kind of like, what do you call it?

like fork it?

Because this happened before, right?

Like when MySQL got acquired by Oracle, then people created MariaDB, right?

Which is essentially MySQL.

The only thing that we need to figure out is what’s the translation and migration layer.

That means that if somebody is running something like WordPress, how do they go into WordPress X?

What’s that thing they have to run in the server or in WordPress that’s going to migrate everything,

including their plugins and whatnot into the version of WordPress you’re going to build.

If you guys use like something like TypeScript, right?

So JavaScript is like owned by Oracle and they were moving super slow.

So Microsoft is like, okay, we’re going to create TypeScript, right?

So they have a translation layer on top of it, which compiles and does a lot of stuff and translates everything back into like JavaScript.

So we need something like that for WordPress.

And we have friends here like we’re discussing to create something like that before they fork so that we can probably fork in a way that’s like, okay, you have a client site.

Just run this transpire compiler and all that.

And that will bring you to WordPress to WordPress X or something like that.

I feel like Matt knows this, which is why if you see like whatever is happening, he has been blocking people who are trying to fork and all that because I think he knows this.

It’s not like, you know, the first time somebody is going to do this.

These have happened in like so many different subways before.

The question is, and this, you know, Lewis in my chat here is asking a question along these lines.

At what point do developers fork WP to accelerate these updates and features or to make an open source alternative of WP to accelerate these new features?

From a momentum standpoint, one, I don’t think most people understand how insanely complex WordPress is.

But from a momentum standpoint, it’s not even if you have the technical team required to fork WordPress.

Let’s just say none of the technical issues are actual issues.

You have money and you have a team that is capable of a fork.

That still does not solve the adoption issue.

That still does not solve the fact that even though WordPress, and this is what Matt knows and understands deeply, which is why I think he’s able,

to just, you know, be Rambo and not care really all that much about what he’s doing or what he’s saying or what anybody thinks about it.

It is an insane job at the proper velocity to leave WordPress and go to the fork to make the fork really, truly viable.

And it’s not just the people using the software.

It’s their clients as well.

I mean, if you imagine a client asks, well, what platform are you putting me on?

You say, you don’t say WordPress.

You say, well, it’s a fork of WordPress.

Right away.

I mean, they’re going to be like, ah, hmm.

They’re just, they have a lot of questions and a lot of objections potentially, right?

They want to be on the main thing that they know powers 43% of the internet that, yeah, it’s not perfect.

But, I mean, it’s gotten us to this point, right?

That’s like, that’s their risk.

Everybody is, it’s a risk aversion level that prevents them from just jumping ship to the new fork to make the new fork viable.

And you can’t, like, you see this with classic press.

I mean, nobody talks about classic press.

This is like, this fork’s been around for a while.

I don’t know much about it.

It sounds like it’s a pretty stable thing.

But nobody’s super hype about classic press.

It doesn’t have the momentum and the velocity to ever challenge the real WordPress.

And that would happen to almost every fork unless there is some crazy plan in place to generate the necessary momentum and velocity over to, that’s why I haven’t even entertained it.

I can’t tell you how many emails I have in my inbox begging me to fork WordPress.

No, I haven’t even entertained the idea because I don’t have a plan.

I can’t see the path to achieving that escape velocity that you need for a fork to make it challenge the main platform.

But, I mean, I want to hear what you have to think about that side of things.

Not the technical side of things.

Let’s call it the marketing side of things.

Yes.

So, I had a chat about this with a hosting provider locally, right?

So, they provide like hosting for all these big companies that kind of use WordPress for e-commerce and all this, right?

So, they say that they will be interested in supporting WordPress fork kind of thing.

And they feel like the hosting companies are the ones that accelerated the growth of WordPress because it’s a one-click install, right?

They will be into like supporting a fork if the fork is more secure, cheaper to host, faster, and all that.

And by talking to people who work in that company who deal with WordPress, they’re like, yeah.

WordPress inherently carry a lot of like security flaws and stuff like that that they actually have to take care of because of the backward compatibility thing, right?

So, I feel like the way to do this is to become a fork that’s like more secure, cheaper to host, and like faster kind of thing, which is kind of like what the hosting providers and who not will opt in to provide those as one-click install.

So, once they hack that, it will become super easy because then it becomes a question of do you want to use exactly like do you want to use MySQL or MariaDB because both of them support it.

You know what I mean?

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

So, I feel like that’s the way to crack it and like even the guys who are like hosting this and all that, they were like, if somebody can do that and kind of prove it, not in a beta version, but like, you know, fully like done like version 1.0, these one-click installers will just like, you know, do their own audit and it will go live.

It’s not, apparently, it’s not too hard to get into that space, number one.

And number two is that the moment you have that, then you can like, you know, get more and more buy-in from the community.

I feel like that’s the route to go with this and I feel like it’s not going to be too hard, but it’s just going to be like a long process.

It’s not going to happen in a month or two.

It’s going to take like a year or two, you know?

Right.

A year or two and, you know, how many people, like put a number, you know, if you’re just going to say, here’s how much money we need in the bank to do something like that.

I mean, what kind of number would you come up with?

Yeah, yeah. So it’s a very weird calculation that was done, right? So we need like anything from like 20 to 25 developers who really understand all these different stuff to even start like, and to replicate all that.

We calculated, right?

So even if like somebody that’s going to sponsor, like, you know, if you think about TypeScript, how Microsoft sponsored it, we need to like, at least have like 25 million to like 30 million USD in the bank to even start this process.

Because we have to do a lot of like, you know, migration. At the same time, we also have to do a lot of convincing and that evangelizing that part of like teaching people how to use this.

That part of like understanding what the community wants and all that is the one that’s going to cost us a lot of money because we have to now go out and do like word camps, but do it like word camps better. That kind of thing, you know?

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. And Matt knows that Matt knows those numbers. Matt knows all of those details. And that’s why he is so cavalier in how he’s talking, because that’s not a small thing.

That’s not a small thing by any means. And by the way, when you take that risk, you know, what you’re also doing is you’re also departing the WordPress ecosystem.

And so you’re essentially, you’re betting it all. I mean, you’re, you’re all in at that point. You’re all in. Right. And so that takes a certain level of, of risk tolerance because, you know, can you, I mean, let’s say you do that.

Let’s say it doesn’t work out. It doesn’t catch on. I mean, what can you come, can you like come crawling back to WordPress? Can you, what do you do at that point?

Yep. That’s the risk with any project, you know?

Yeah. Well, I mean, not necessarily like, you know, it can, things can start and fail, but like, again, this is, um, you know, you’re leaving an ecosystem that powers 43% of the internet.

You’re leaving, uh, massive amounts of opportunity, um, to, to try to do this thing on your own and to try to evangelize it and try to get enough people on board.

And you’re, you’re just, you’re putting up a massive amount of money, a massive amount of time in the process. And it’s not to say that it’s not doable. It’s just a very large hill to climb.

And that’s why Matt feels very, very, very safe in his current position.

Yeah. I feel like once a few people start like, you know, going into that particular route and we see how it plays out, a lot of people will either like, you know, move to like that particular version because the same conversations happen.

Like if you trace back, right. When like, uh, Microsoft and type three came about and all that, right. Same conversation, like Neo, Vim and Vim.

Like if you guys go see like what happened, the same conversation, people like, how are we going to do this? What’s going to happen and all that. Right. But once a few people start to do this, the others who are fired up will contribute.

Maybe like you will contribute like, Hey, I want to contribute this much code and it will happen in the same way. And that’s when like, you know, that is like another thing where like, if something is new, something is done right. A lot of people would want to contribute.

So you will see a migration of people are contributing to WordPress now to come to this side. It’s just like the bump. You need to just like, I don’t know, just be brave, I guess, you know?

Yes. But you also need a way to get that $30 million back that you put into it.

Yeah. So the best way to do this is like to go talk to like these hosting companies and get them to sponsor, which is why like, like locally here, we’ve been talking to the big guys to see like, okay, what, what do we actually need to do?

Which is where I realized like, if you’re going to do this right, you got to have the one-stop installer and even the hosting site, right?

They have like their own, um, mattresses and all that. And they are telling us like, Hey, less and less people are using actually WordPress.

We can see that in our, like, you know, dashboard and whatnot. And I’m like, I asked them like, how many of them like just had the default site for WordPress, but didn’t do anything with it.

A huge chunk of this quote unquote 43% is practically people who just install WordPress. They’re not actually using it as you say, like, you know, as a big site kind of thing.

So that means that the moment we do it right, a lot of people will transfer over to this site because it’s more secure, cheaper, faster to run. And like, you know, all this kind of thing, which WordPress going to have hard time competing because they are just dealing with somebody who do not know what they’re doing.

You know?

Yeah. I get you, Sati. I get it. It’s, it’s definitely an option on the table, right? It’s a, it’s a, a big option, but it is an option on the table for sure. Appreciate your, your thoughts.

Um, Mark.

Yes, sir.

You have any, you have any, I’m about to go through my chat and look for these questions. I want to know if you were doing the same thing. If you have any, uh, pressing or entertaining or interesting questions.

Yeah, we definitely have a few good ones. Um, Max just brought up a good one pertaining to that conversation there that, uh, a fork is not protected. So WordPress can just take the stuff back. Um, and like, you need to rewrite everything for it to not be GPL. Is that, that’s the case, right? I’ve been hearing that, that if something is GPL and you fork a GPL thing, you have to make a GPL. Is that how that works?

I don’t, I don’t even know if I’m comfortable like answering on the details of, of, of GPL. I’ve never been a huge GPL fan to begin with. So.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that that’s, uh, that’s part of it there. Um, Matt is in, I think he’s bouncing back and forth between my Matt Medeiros in my YouTube stream and then on here as well. And I think that he had some good points about.

We’re talking about earlier with, you know, kind of when you were saying that, you know, blogging is definitely not what it once was, which I think that that in itself is true. Um, but I do think that there’s this other interesting conversation that.

You know, is again, slightly tangential, but obviously all this is related where blogging and you know, I’m, I’m, I’m big video guy. You’re a big video guy, right? Like, like blogging and writing stuff was like really big before because it was like the easiest medium.

Now it’s still kind of the easiest in a way, but everything else has become way more accessible. So.

You know, like proponents of blogging proponents of WordPress in that manner, I think are heavily like the point that Matt makes in some of these, in some of these things is like blogging, audio, email, they’re still like open platforms.

And I think that that, I think, I think just maybe if you could kind of like reconfirm, like kind of your stance on those things, like, I don’t think you’re saying that they’re, they’re, they’re bad or they’re completely going away.

I think you’re just saying there’s other methods that are more accessible now, but the point that kind of comes back there is if we say that, okay, blogging and everything like that is different than it was then video and everything is more accessible.

Now there is one interesting piece of this where Matt brings up that video is owned by like YouTube and social platforms and everything like that.

Like that is, that is kind of a concern that I can understand.

You know what I mean?

Like we make a lot of videos, right?

And like, I don’t know if you save your videos, but we, we still own our videos, so to speak, but we are putting them on YouTube where it’s definitely, you know, we’re kind of screwed.

If something ever happens there, I’m wondering, well, I think if we, that’s not a, that’s not a, that’s not mandatory, right?

YouTube is a distribution platform and you know, not to get too much into all the marketing stuff, but like you, you just need to see YouTube as a distribution platform.

Too many people, you’re right.

See YouTube as a video hosting platform that also happens to distribute their videos.

If that’s the case, that’s not the safest approach to doing things.

You can get any number of private video hosts to host your video files for your archive, for your ownership purposes.

Like if you have all of your videos on YouTube and you have them nowhere else, they live nowhere else.

Then yeah, like YouTube is your host and your distribution.

And if they decide to shut you down, not only does your distribution end, but all of your data is gone as well.

That’s not a good situation.

So it’s a question of where are videos to be hosted.

And then once I have found a place to host them, that’s not YouTube, they can just as easily be on my website.

And so I can, I can use WordPress as my video.

I could use it to distribute video.

Even I could use it the same way I use it for blogging.

Right.

I don’t see much of a distinction there.

The key difference is I’m saying I’m not using YouTube as my one and only host of my data.

I feel that we got Matt in here, Matt, would you like to explain your points better than I did?

Hey guys, great conversation.

As always.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So I’ll just pontificate on the Matt and .com blogging stuff.

You know, I think the mission that he’s largely on to differentiate himself from the rest of the tech oligarchs is to democratize publishing.

Right. Which we’ve heard a gazillion times.

Right.

And blogging certainly is one of those aspects.

So I think we see the marketing speak around blogging because of that.

Right.

But one, because he believes it and the team believes in it.

I do.

And two, it differentiates them from, hey, we’re just competing against Wix, Squarespace, and the like.

So I think it’s like half of it is, hey, we want to believe in this because it’s a good thing to have free and open publishing.

And two, it’s their like tech differentiator.

Because I think if they said that we’re all in it, like building websites, now they’re squarely up against all these other competitors who are doing it better in the user interface.

You can actually see this stuff in almost real time.

They just published a .com, just published a blog post about their, they’re changing their .com interface to be more in line with .org.

And people are freaking out in the comments.

But, I mean, that happens when anyone changes anything in a piece of software.

But it is interesting to see, you know, that people aren’t happy with, you know, this direction.

But I do believe in the blogging side of it.

But, Matt, the publishing side of things.

YouTube has democratized my publishing of video, far more than WordPress ever even thought of doing.

sites.

Well, you’d have to really break that down because you can’t move your videos off of YouTube.

And they are doing a lot more to make a profit off of your work than, like, if you started a blog on WordPress.com.

Well, they’re not making anything off of my videos because I have all of the ads disabled.

And I can also download, I can download my video.

My point is that WordPress is not set up to publish.

Like, you’ve mentioned publishing is the mission, right?

Democratize publishing.

But, really, it’s democratize text publishing.

It’s not publishing anything.

It’s not publishing video.

It’s not publishing audio.

It’s publishing text.

And that’s a very myopic view of what publishing actually is.

And my argument was the market has moved on largely from text-based publishing to video publishing to audio publishing.

And, yes, text is still a thing.

It’s just not the primary thing anymore.

So, where our views differ is I don’t disagree with you that the market is trying to push in that direction.

I don’t agree with it.

And I don’t think we should want it, right?

As somebody who has been podcasting for a while, YouTube is trying to take it over, right?

Spotify tried doing it.

They failed.

YouTube is now trying to do it.

And the podcast industry is leaning into it because they’re going, oh, fuck.

We can’t make any money off of all of these fragmented RSS feeds.

Why?

Because it’s not controlled.

It’s not centralized.

And YouTube has an ad network.

It has the freaking largest platform in the world for eyeballs.

And now they’re trying to get the listeners on it.

But that is not open publishing.

And it centralizes it to just YouTube.

And that is a dangerous thing.

So, we shouldn’t want the market to get consumed by big tech.

That’s my play.

That’s just my stance.

So, if you don’t want it.

We should want the essence of text.

If you don’t want that.

Well, if you don’t want that to happen, why not embrace the format and build the format distribution

into WordPress, the tool that you believe is democratizing publishing?

Isn’t that how you compete with that?

Isn’t that, hey, don’t use YouTube.

You can use WordPress to distribute your videos.

Hey, don’t use this host over here.

Well, they do.

They do.

Dotcom does.

They have Videopress.

Okay.

It’s powered by Jetpack.

I mean, you still got to pay for it.

Right?

That’s, and that, and that’s, so look, when you look at what Google, what’s the biggest

piece of this?

But am I democratized on dotcom?

I don’t know that I’m democratized on dotcom.

I’m democratized if I can own the install.

Well, you’re far more democratized on dotcom than you would be on, on YouTube.

Less let’s for, okay.

So for example, you could just say, ah, you know what?

I’m done with.

Dotcom is going to peel this content out and put it on my own wordpress.org, host it at

wherever.

Right?

So you could, you could do that quite easily, much more easily than you could 150 videos

on, on YouTube.

It’s, it ain’t going anywhere.

Right?

They, they had a connection to rumble, I think at one point, and then they shut that off.

Yeah.

Um, so you can’t, you can’t move things around, right?

Video is expensive as, as, as cheap and as available as it is from a content archive perspective.

It’s expensive, right?

It’s hard to move and nobody else wants to do it.

That’s why the essence of publishing should still be words and, uh, text on a page and then

built, built out from there.

That’s just, that’s just my opinion.

See, I think there’s go ahead, Mark.

Go ahead.

My only pushback on that, Matt, and I know we’ve talked about this before, but like

you, when you, cause I don’t think you’ve articulated that specifically, like, I mean,

to, to me specifically like that before of, you don’t, you don’t think the market should

want to go that way.

But like my, my pushback there is like, my pushback there is like, I hear what you’re

saying, but, and maybe I’m wrong in this, but doesn’t everything get cheaper over time?

Like, doesn’t like, wouldn’t, wouldn’t the concept be that like in 2003, it was impossible

to like move a video, make a video, whatever.

Now it’s way cheaper, way easier, way better.

And in 10 more years, it’s going to be even way cheaper.

Yeah.

Like than that.

So like, so like, I totally get what you’re saying.

It’s still like expensive and the apparatus and infrastructure is not fully set up for like

open source video or open source audio.

Well, you know, in a way, you know, I, in, in conjunction with what you’re saying, but I’m

saying like moving forward.

And again, we can’t control what, what an app wants to do and what, what, what automatic

wants to do or whatever.

But I’m saying in the grand scheme of things, wouldn’t, wouldn’t turning WordPress into a

full audio video, like do like doing kind of what we’re talking about here.

Wouldn’t that be like Renaissance 2003 with blogging?

I mean, technically it can’t, you still need hosting.

So where I was going to go before was the most important piece of technology that every

company has decimated is the RSS feed, right?

Google hates the RSS feed.

They’ve crushed every product that they’ve made that is powered by the RSS feed.

Including their podcast app that shipped with every Android phone, right?

And now they’re just like, Oh, you know what?

And we know more of this RSS thing.

We just want it in YouTube now, right?

Which is, is the closed platform.

WordPress has, has been forever slash feed, right?

I mean, I know it’s a technical headache, but slash feed on any category page or the root

domain of your WordPress website will pull up an RSS feed.

And that’s a piece of technology that’s old, lethargic, cumbersome, but extremely powerful.

If the internet wasn’t aggregated into silos of social media sites that are all algorithmically

driven.

If Mark had just one RSS feed and Kevin had his RSS feed for all the shit that he publishes

on the internet, I could just subscribe to that.

I don’t need a social media platform with an algorithm with ads injected in it.

I just need an RSS reader.

But that’s the thing is the algorithm is what helps introduce people to the content.

Yeah.

And I don’t disagree with that.

Don’t know exists.

I don’t disagree with that.

Yeah.

I don’t disagree that algorithms help because like if I’m on Macedon, it’s boring as hell.

Right.

You know, if I’m on X, I want to run for my life.

You know, here’s the thing with every platform.

Without YouTube, without you, without you too, without TikTok, let’s just use those two as

an example.

Okay.

Let’s say, um, you know, what I’ve been into lately is, uh, fucking watching these.

I don’t, I don’t know why I’m never going to do it.

I don’t know why.

Uh, these van life videos.

Okay.

There’s people that live in these fucking converted vans.

I’m never going to do this, but I love watching the videos.

Okay.

If Susie van life wants to create, you know, videos about van life, um, in, in your world,

in your model, she has to find a way to distribute those videos or nobody’s ever going to see them.

Nobody knows who Susie is.

Nobody’s ever going to find them.

Nobody’s ever going to watch them, but Susie can just upload to YouTube and YouTube goes,

ah, we know people who like van life videos.

I’m going to show them all to them.

And then boom, Susie’s on the mat.

Okay.

Um, that’s really, really value.

That’s again, that is, that’s more of democratization.

You just put so much potential in the hands of Susie who all she knew.

I know how to shoot a video and upload it.

That’s all I know how to do.

Yep.

Until Susie accidentally puts like a music back, uh, music in her background that gets,

but Hey, I mean, it’s like, yeah, there’s a copyright.

And it gets, there’s rules.

I don’t disagree with you.

I think what we all have to do, this is why I, I, I’m looking at it from one, just my perspective

two, trying to put the power back in the hands of us.

Like the people who, who publish the content.

And, uh, while these algorithms certainly help, what you want to do is try to leverage them

for that boost that you were just talking about.

Absolutely.

Right.

When podcasters ask me, should I go on YouTube?

Absolutely.

Because it’s the biggest search engine and you want to keyword it and do all this other

stuff to get found because your solo RSS feed ain’t doing anything for you.

But like we saw with TikTok banned for a day, like we’ve seen with Facebook over and over

again, when algorithms change, you mistakenly do something like upload a track that gets copyright

or your, your account gets shut down.

You’ve got nobody to call.

So I urge folks to not say, ah, let’s just give it up to all these platforms that can do

it faster and cheaper.

Yeah.

You got to roll up your sleeves.

You got to do a little bit of work.

You got to understand it’s a slow game and you got to understand it’s your content.

Um, so I use the platforms to what they’re good for amplification discoverability, but don’t

certainly don’t rely on them.

Yes.

Uh, that’s why a huge proponent on the blog and the podcast feed.

Yeah.

I agree with not relying on them a hundred percent.

Uh, let’s get, let’s let Patrick interject.

Cause he’s got some insights.

Okay, good.

Thank you, Max.

Appreciate it.

Um, I know Patrick’s probably got some, you know, hosting technicality type stuff that he

can interject here.

Maybe.

Are there, Patrick?

Let’s see.

Uh, yeah.

Can you guys hear me?

Yep.

Yeah.

I don’t currently know how to use X.

Uh, so.

Uh, so yeah, I, I came in late and I have so many thoughts about so many of the things

that have been shared.

Um, I do think, uh, to Matt’s sort of last point, I would certainly say that using, using

YouTube for distribution, using X for distribution, using all of the channels that are available

to you, but ultimately being able to own your customers and your audience in the form of their

email address in the form of them, you know, coming to your property.

That’s your own is absolutely essential.

Um, and you look at, uh, I mean, you can look at people like Sam Harris, for example, where

he, he cannot be canceled no matter what he says, uh, because he owns, he owns all of his

customers.

He owns all of his, you know, listeners, even though he uses other channels for distribution.

But, um, uh, one of the points that I thought, um, that I, that I fervently disagreed with,

um, I think that the estimate of, you know, call it 25 or $30 million to be able to fork,

uh, WordPress.

I think that’s actually not far off.

Like, I mean, if you just look at, if you look at the 4,000 hours that automatic was

contributing to core, you know, that’s sort of at this, you know, this point of contention

where all of these things started, I mean, you just do the, you know, do some back of the

napkin math and that’s a hundred full-time developers and let’s call it a hundred thousand

dollars fully loaded.

Um, that’s going to be low here in the States, but that’s going to be high in Pakistan or the

Philippines.

Um, and you’re at $10 million a year.

Right.

And so if you wanted to do, if you wanted to actually make a real crack at it, you’re going

to need at least two to three years of runway.

Um, so you’re at 20 or $30 million.

It’s, it’s actually a good estimate, but that doesn’t actually solve for the fact that you

would then need automatic to just fall asleep at the wheel.

And they’re not going to do that.

You know, like, like the idea that you’re not going to have, like the idea that you,

you know, you have a very capable adversary who’s literally holding all the, all the keys

and, and Matt’s just going to fall asleep for two or three years and not just cherry pick

every best thing that you could possibly do and drop it right back into core.

Right.

You know, like that’s simply not going to happen.

And so, um, you know, I’ve talked with a lot of people about, you know, a lot of very serious

people about these, these challenges and these problems.

And the thing is, is that it’s like the $30 million is easy.

That’s the easy part.

Like even the, even the talent, which is actually the primary constraint on every business is

finding talented people.

Well, there’s more than 200 that have just left automatic, you know?

So it’s like even getting the people is formulaic.

The, the real challenge is all the things that you can’t see coming.

You know, like did anybody actually see ACF getting rugged?

Did anybody see that coming?

You know, like even though we knew that it’s possible, no one saw that coming.

And so it’s like the 500 things that you can’t see that are the real challenge.

And, and that’s setting aside again, the monumental task of the, the gravity of 43% adoption.

You know, it’s like, you know, oh, let’s just go take over a non-trivial portion of the known

universe.

You know, like that’s basically what we’re talking about here, you know?

Um, and so I just do not see, even with unlimited funds, you’re still up against a very, very

capable, uh, opponent who is not just going to sit there and watch his thing get dismantled,

you know?

Correct.

So I, I do not believe, you know, like I’ve tried to think through every possible version,

you know, every future version of the matrix in which there is a fork and I just do not see

it working.

Like I, I’ve come up with one, one possible scenario in which I think it could be, it

could work, but it requires basically artificial super intelligence, you know, and we’re not

there yet.

So I just don’t, um, I don’t know.

I think that there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of wishful thinking in the whole, you know, oh,

we’re just going to fork it.

You know, it’s like, you’re just going to, you’re just going to carry forward a project

of this magnitude.

It’s like, that’s preposterous.

Yeah.

There’s no, there’s no, just, you’re just going to organize a land invasion of the United

States.

Like that’s, yeah, that’s good luck.

Right.

Exactly.

When we have more guns than people, you know, you’re, you’re just going, you know, we have

more guns than hands.

Like you’re just going to invade the United States.

Like, no, that’s, that’s, I don’t see it happening.

Um, but I do think that there is definitely some white space to this idea of can WordPress

be great again?

Like to Mark’s point, yes, it’s expensive to, to host video, but these things are becoming

more and more and more, um, cost effective with every iteration.

You know, I mean, you look at, you look at the, the deep seek R1 that just dropped out of

this Chinese lab.

They are accomplishing the exact same things that open AI is doing and they’re doing it at

one 50th the cost.

And so that’s what the internet does.

That’s what software does.

And so I can definitely see a future in which you’re hosting your videos on WordPress, um,

to, to, to own, you know, the connection, but you would still be using YouTube as the

distribution channel, you know, to, to get the eyeballs and the algorithmic reach.

Yeah.

It also becomes cheaper when it becomes the main focus of somebody, you know, like when it,

when that becomes the mission that’s, that’s you, because that’s where the people are like,

Hey, I mean, that is the vision.

We can’t do it right now.

So what do we have to do?

We have to innovate.

We have, we have to figure it out.

We got to make it happen.

And that’s, that’s when it’ll happen.

If, if the platform just puts it off as like, ah, yeah, we’re just going to stick to text.

Well, yeah.

I mean, it’s going to be a much slower road to getting video to be cheaper.

Yeah.

Well, and the thing about it is, and, and it’s like, it’s a bit, it’s a bit disingenuous

that some, I mean, it’s, it’s not disingenuous or unethical that they charge for video or video

press, whatever they call it.

But the, the, the, the fact, the fact of the matter is, is that if you are a automatic scale

company, you have enormous servers that you’ve just purchased and you have enormous bandwidth

that that’s just, that’s a cost.

It’s not, it’s not an operating expense, it’s capex, you know, that you’ve just bought that

stuff, you know?

And so you might as well fill those pipes.

You might as well start serving video, you know?

Because it’s, it’s not that complicated 10 years ago, whole different story.

You know, today I, we could host all of your videos, like no problem.

And, and we could do it in a cost-effective enough manner where you go, oh, it’s like 78

bucks.

All right.

That’s fine.

You know?

And so, yeah, I mean, I think that there’s a lot of, a lot of room there, um, for WordPress

to potentially host other kinds of content, um, that would make it more, uh, future proof,

I guess.

Yeah, for sure.

Um, all right.

We’re coming up on the 90 minute mark.

Uh, I think, you know, Daniel’s got a question here.

Do you have any optimism, uh, for if there’s even a tiny chance of the three, three, three plan

working, how could it play out if it worked?

Uh, I think we can, we can probably just close on this Mark.

Um, one is I, I, I, I don’t have a lot of hope for, uh, any of the three, three, three

plan being implemented.

Uh, I mean, I would love to get a certain person’s thoughts on it, uh, obviously, but I think my,

my plan is, I don’t think it matters.

I don’t think it has to, uh, I don’t, I don’t actually think anything about WordPress native

has to change.

Um, if you look at what has been proposed with etch, for example, a unified development

environment, uh, that unifies things, not just, not just the page building side of things,

but the custom fields, the custom post types, the media management, the seeing your entire

site bird’s eye view, the wire framing, the, the being able to just do all of the work you

need to do, have access to the code all in one place and essentially bypass the outdated

core aspects of WordPress, um, without abandoning WordPress without.

And by the way, feeding everything automatically into the block editor.

So your data is liberated from this environment.

If, if that’s something that you care about.

So when somebody says, well, I mean, you know, aren’t you, doesn’t it suck that the media

management’s never going to get fixed?

And no, cause we’re going to fix it.

It’s going to be fixed by etch.

And I’m never going to have to interact with the core media manager.

I’m never going to have to interact with ACF or Metabox or SCF or whatever they do.

It doesn’t matter to me at that point.

I have the interface.

I want the interface I need and the features I want and need.

And by the way, I all have, I am an all in one place.

They’re not distributed into 17 different magic areas inside of an, uh, an admin somewhere.

Um, that is the solution.

I go building the solution.

Um, and that, cause that’s the environment that I want to work in that I prefer to.

And I think other developers are going to want to work in.

And I think, uh, even beginners are going to want to work in.

So, uh, after they learn the fundamentals, but to me, it doesn’t matter because that’s,

that is we’re, we’re leveraging what WordPress does give us, which is the opportunity to

fix it ourself.

I’m just not going to donate it when I fix it myself.

Right.

Uh, this ain’t, this ain’t a charity for, for, for Matt.

Right.

Um, so that, that is what we’re building.

We’re building the, the, the solution, um, because we don’t have faith that it’s ever going

to get done and ever going to get fixed.

So that the only option is to do it ourself.

We’re just not going to do it in, in their repo.

Yeah.

I mean, honestly, this is kind of a hypothesis, just putting the pieces together, but from

everything that I’ve kind of like heard and seen, and you know, we’ve, we’ve, you know,

you see Matt, uh, Mullen, we talk about these types of things, you know, it’s like, it kind

of sounds like he, he would be very, we don’t know.

I don’t know if you’ve ever asked him specifically his thoughts on that or whatever, but like,

it seems like that is though, you know, adding, uh, you know, an add on plugin, this case theme,

like that type of unified development environment.

It sounds like that’s something that would actually align with the grander scope of WordPress.

Meaning that I think if the status quo would continue, like you’re saying here, then WordPress

is what it is.

It’s a publishing tool, everything like that.

It’s like the extreme base layer, even though like we’re in these conversations all the time

and we’re talking about custom post types, like all these things we discussed earlier.

Like we think that every 100% of our WordPress experience has custom post types.

Therefore WordPress core should have it.

I mean, we kind of believe that, but that’s not necessarily a one-to-one.

So I kind of, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt there, but I do think that there’s like the,

the, the, you know, the creation of etch, so to speak, and the introduction of that into WordPress

could be like exactly fit that exact mold.

It’s like, you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, but now you have this capability,

this like, you know, three, three, three plans, so to speak within one, within WordPress,

but it’s kind of that, you know, another layer of abstraction up with, with etch as your,

as your command center for all that.

Yeah.

I mean, I’m excited to see what happens.

And then I don’t know.

I don’t know what, I don’t know what happens from there.

Once etch is like out there and, and is, is, you know, serving the masses.

I don’t know if at that point we’re in a different, you know, the timeline, you know,

two years, whatever, two years, three years.

I don’t know if at that point the timeline changes and it’s like, okay, now we have to focus

on those things.

I’d be interested to see what automatic and, and, you know, Matt Mullenweg’s, uh, stances

at that point, you know, if he’s seeing more things come to light like that, maybe at that

point it’s a, it’s a change in mind and, uh, you know, maybe a pivot into the future.

Um, but I mean, I don’t know.

We’ll see.

I guess time will tell.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, there’s a lot, uh, there’s a lot that’s unknown.

And, uh, like Patrick was saying, you, you have to be ready for the unknowns and be able to

pivot and be able to adjust and, um, you know, keep chugging along.

So I think we got to put this one in the books.

We’re at the 90 minute mark.

Uh, it’s, it’s been a very lively conversation.

I mean, this is what WP town hall is for.

This is the benefit of the format hearing from great leaders inside of WordPress and, uh, hearing

from general community members.

It’s, I think it’s fantastic.

So thanks to everybody who participated today.

Uh, thanks again, Mark, for being a great co-host and we’ll see you guys again, probably

in a, we’re on like an every two weeks kind of schedule.

Um, so look for us again, WP town hall.

Show.

And by the way, you can get this in any podcast app that you, where you listen to podcasts,

you can subscribe to WP town hall and listen there.

Obviously you’re not listening live, but you can catch up on anything that you’ve missed

and, uh, that’s it for today guys.

Uh, well, this one’s in the books.

We’ll see you again very soon.

Cheers.

See you.

Thank you.