Luke and Jonathan catch up with Jeff Paul, VP of Open Source Solutions at Fueled and an active contributor to the WordPress project for the past decade. They discuss Jeff’s contribution journey, their shared agency experiences, and thoughts on the upcoming 7.0 release. Luke introduces the concept of cool and dodgy versions of WordPress and Jeff shares guidance for newcomers to contribution.

Transcript#

Luke:
Jeffrey Paul, when I hear your name, you know, I think of all of the contributors to WordPress who don’t necessarily have a technical background. And I’ve been talking with my own kids just this past couple of weeks about how they could contribute to WordPress. And they say, we’re not programmers. We don’t know how to program. And I thought of you. I’d love to know, was it difficult to sort of take that first step into contributing to WordPress? Was that challenging given that you don’t have that technical background? Was there a barrier there that might not have otherwise been present?

Jeff:
I think my initial reaction was probably similar to theirs in a, I’m not an engineer, how could I help, right? This is back in 2016, 2017?

Jonathan:
2016.

Jeff:
2016, thank you, Jonathan.

Luke:
August 18, 2016. We did our research.

Jeff:
Yeah, 2016. right. Actually, yeah.. Both of you were part of that origin story of sorts, right?

When I was at XWP at the time with y’all and the 4.7 release was Helen Hou-Sandi who was the release lead was looking for deputies to help out and Luke you kind of talked me through I think you should really give us a shot Jeff and I was like what in the ever living are you talking about? I was like how am I gonna help? What am I gonna do? And you were just so positive and like helpful and like, no, I really do think that your sensibilities or capabilities would be helpful. ⁓ I definitely did show up and for a while was like, don’t even think there had been really much for product or program project managers around at that time..

Jonathan:
No, you were one of the first if not like the, yeah..

Jeff:
So I think even when I was asking folks.. Yeah, a lot of the questions I was asking people were like, I don’t know. How do you think you can help? And so it evolved to be a bit of… Seeing Helen and Aaron Jorbin, who was the other deputy on that release, doing things that I was like, “I can do that.”" And then asking them to be like, “do you mind if I shadow you on this thing you’re doing so I can learn?” And they were like, I actually would love it if you just did it. And I didn’t have to. And I think that’s like for me, when the light bulb went off, when I was like, these engineers are burdened by these things and don’t want to do that because they’re not able to do the things they want to do, right? The things that they are uniquely qualified for. And these other things, like to them, were just like a total drag, right? So yeah.

Jonathan:
So I think it’s worth establishing just a little bit of context. When I first met you, Jeff, we were all working at XWP. You were just coming on board. And we had a multi-million dollar WordPress project. And I remember the strong sense that I had when you first came on board. was like, OK, great. We have an adult in the room. Because it’s like, great engineering talent, some great capabilities to be able to think through and deliver, but there was something about, it’s like, how do you manage all this stuff? Like, how do you stay on top of it? How do you communicate this effectively to non-technical stakeholders? And when you came into that project, there was this sort of sanity and calm that you brought to it. And that was instrumental, I felt, in its success.

And when you started getting involved in the WordPress project, at least from the outside, sort of looking into it, I’m like, I had been completely won over at that point to just the value that non-technical expertise brought into the mix of like, let’s organize this. Let’s communicate this more effectively. Let’s make sure people are unblocked. You’d done that really well in the professional context in which we’d first worked together. like my, it’s been to me from the outside sort of looking into it, I’m like, I think.

I can see it being hard to measure at times, but to me it’s such an invaluable thing to bring to a project. How do we just organize ourselves more effectively?

Jeff:
I’m going to edit that out and put that on my CV, my resume. That was perfect. That is, that was lovely. Thank you. And I did not pay you. Let the record stay. I will now though.

Luke:
Well, for those who don’t know, I wonder, could you describe some of those project management-y things that prior to your arrival were typically done by developers?

Jeff:
Sure, I mean, think ⁓ some things like running bug scrubs and triaging things in track or GitHub ⁓ probably take a bit more context of the thing you’re working on, right? Having a bit more knowledge about core software components. ⁓ So those things probably aren’t the best first path in. It’s not the best front door for somebody that’s like a PM that wants to that contribute, those are things that with a little bit of time and ⁓ context that are absolutely things that engineers just rather be right in code building or fixing. Some of the better things that are a first front door for folks are. Just like helping write agendas, helping run a meeting. Probably that one is like maybe step two, ⁓ writing summaries from like dev chats or things like that. Those are all like fairly straightforward, not even really a, yeah..

Jonathan:
Wait, but Jeff, isn’t all this done by AI now? Like, we don’t need humans for any of this stuff.

Jeff:
to some extent probably yes more..

Jonathan:
Well, ⁓ yes and no, there’s something about like, because you’re also involved in the Core AI project. So it’s somewhat in jest, but also I would argue that like, I think humans become even more important in some of these contexts, just have that relational context that’s worth a lot more than just the long summary that you might be able to put out from the meeting.

Jeff:
Right, yeah, mean, they’re definitely, you know, even if you did take an AI summary from a Slack chat, ⁓ there is more context for somebody who is present that can edit that down or understand that something is totally out of context or just wrong, right? So it still does take somebody who is cognizant and aware, not just a non-sentient being.

Luke:
And I remember when I was the release lead for, geez, I don’t know, 4.9.1, I want to say, um, there was a lot of just getting in touch with people and running around going, Oh, we’d really love to include this ticket. really love to managing spreadsheets of going, Oh, this is going to be in that’s not, I’m reaching out to you on Slack. I’m reaching out to the other and trying to just wrangle is the word we use, isn’t it? Everybody into. Some sort of a release.

Jeff:
Yes, wrangling is ⁓ probably a good, describer. Herding of cats, that sort of thing.

Jonathan:
Thanks. So I’d love to talk more about sort of the current state, because you have the vantage point of 10 years now, just about, of contribution to the project. You’ve seen a lot of things. But one more little sort of vignette before we jump into that. One of the things I remember that are most distinctly about you, I mentioned the calm, the professionalism. There’s also this kindness that I feel like you’ve consistently brought into the work that you’ve done.

And one of the best gifts that I’ve experienced, I’m going to describe this for folks who are just listening only, is I’m holding this little Lego minifig that ⁓ has my, like, I had a shorter beard at the time, but you gave me and a bunch of us all these little Lego minifigs while we were back at XWP. And I’ve kept this with me all this time. And I’m like, it was such a thoughtful, personalized little thing that I’ve now associated this with this is the cool type of stuff that Jeff does. So thank you for being you.

Jeff:
Yeah, that’s great. I still got mine here. I’ve got a handful on my desk that I actually had. one of my kids built me a little stage for them to sit on, so I’ve got my collection here. This isn’t a visual podcast, I don’t think so. Those listening in won’t see it, but ⁓ yeah.

Luke:
That’s nice.

Jonathan:
You had the little WordPress logo on a minifig, which is super cool.

Jeff:
So that was the first one I made. I made one for Helen, Jorbin, and myself after 4.7 and gave those to them because somebody clued me in that for major releases, sometimes the core folks will give each other a little tchotchke or something from their hometown. And I was like, what the heck am I going to make for Helen and Jorbin?

Jonathan:
Yep. Yeah, the little gifts and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeff:
And I don’t know, somehow, I saw this, I think it’s minifigs.me, I found this site, and so I made that for them. And then, yeah, did the one for friends at XWP on projects, and then did it ⁓ also for folks at 10up and…

Jonathan:
I think you mean Fueled.

Jeff:
Now Fueled, yes, thank you for the segue there, Fueled and 10up, but I don’t actually, I guess I probably do need to create a Fueled one now too, but yeah. ⁓

Luke:
A little bit about that transition. What happened there with 10up and Fueled?

Jeff:
Yeah, so they were separate agencies at the time, Fueled operating more strongly in the mobile app product design space, 10up more in the website design engineering specifically within WordPress. And the merger closed, I think, September of 2023. Two businesses together, theoretically now, both had client business that was lost in the agency space because they weren’t able to do effectively the thing that the other part of that business did. And so.. like Hilton, they want a full digital experience that includes mobile, desktop, ⁓ native app sort of thing. And those two companies individually could not win that business. then together, those are the types of things you can win. ⁓

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Luke:
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Jeff:
And yeah, that’s two and a half years ago now, although we were operating together before the closure of the merger. So now, primarily go to market is Fueled, although everybody in the WordPress space for the most part understands 10Up historically and is still getting used to fuel. So typically put Fueled and 10Up or Fueled plus 10Up whenever I’m at conferences or events to try and introduce the name. So thank you for the plug there. I appreciate it.

Luke:
Yeah, there’s that historical, I think of it as a trifecta of frenemies of you’ve got the 10up, Human Made, and XWP, but that really is more historical now, isn’t it? Am I missing anybody in that sort of high level enterprise agency space?

Jeff:
There are others. You could probably go to the WordPress VIP agency page and go from top down. I’m sure Ally, I’m sure ⁓ Big Bite before they got purchased are probably ones that are up there. ⁓ I know folks at ⁓ Web Dev Studios. One of the topics we want to touch on is contribution paths. I know that they’ve got one that’s unique to them. ⁓ Yeah, there are some that are more pitched towards enterprise work, some towards, you know, SMB in between. ⁓ but yeah, I think you were saying about ⁓ frenemies of sorts.

Jonathan:
Especially through the lens of contribution because these those were the ones that initially were having some of the biggest impact like Human Made back in the day ~ the REST API was a big contribution on their side. 10Up had already been doing quite a bit. At XWP we’d been looking for any opportunities to weave that into the projects that we were taking on there was there was quite a bit there and I think you were a great example of that initially through at the XWP lens. You did that on your own time. ⁓ You worked hard at that. then eventually, I forget how long after, you ended up moving to 10Up and got to then focus at that point on dedicating even more time and energy to contribution.

Jeff:
Yeah, that’s right. I think the time at XWP was pretty heavily focused on client work, ⁓ the one that you mentioned earlier and some others. ⁓ And over the time there, I had wanted to do more product development and less client directed site development. ⁓ And one of the things that XWP early on was partially funded and then for during the 4.7 release cycle. After that, after I kind of got in that first taste, I stuck around for 4.8, 4.9 and then Team Rep for Core. And yeah, all of those intervening months, year plus, I think was self-funded. And so wanting to get more into product development, wanting to get more into contributing to the open web as part of a role was fortunate in reaching out to some folks that Helen introduced me to. Jake Goldman and I had a conversation at WordCamp US, 2018, 2019, 2018 probably. ⁓ And then, you know, made the jump to 10Up and the shift into more product development and, you know, working to build the open source practice, I say here, ⁓ now Fueled in 10Up. ⁓ Yeah, so that was kind of the arc from XWP to 10Up and the reason for leaving XWP and unfortunately, fine folks like y’all that were there at the time.

Luke:
It’s a difficult thing for agencies. Actually, this is a recurring theme in the conversations I’ve been having in the last couple of weeks to find a return on investment when it comes to sponsoring WordCamps. And like you just said, like the conversations that happen on WordCamps, how can you quantify that, you know, and, then also contributing to core. And this is a problem that the project has had since the beginning, probably still has.

How do you think agencies, especially smaller agencies too, can justify spending time on just contributing, paying staff to contribute?

Jeff:
Yeah, I mean, is that is the hardest conversation to have with leadership at whether it’s an agency, a host, a product shop, right, of why should we not spend time on a thing that’s a direct line to revenue generation and spend it on something that at best has maybe a theoretical dotted line to potential revenue generation, right. And I think the answer to that probably differs based upon ⁓ what that company’s key focuses are..

Jonathan:
Their values too.

Jeff:
Sure, right. Some may have more care for the open web than others. coming to 10Up and now Fueled, I’m fortunate that Jake Goldman, the president and founder of 10Up, I think to his core, ⁓ feels that he was successful in building 10Up because it rode on the back of the WordPress project and that ⁓ it was paramount to giving back to that so that that project had longevity such so that then 10Up also had longevity, right? And that it’s, you know, to him, I think it felt like morally, ethically, not just the right thing to do, but like it would be a poor business decision not to.

Luke:
Yeah. So that begs the question then, do big agencies contribute or do contributors become big agencies?

Jeff:
Putting the chicken and the egg in front of me? I guess.. you know..

Luke:
Yeah. Maybe there’s not an easy answer. I’d like to switch tracks a little bit. I want to just go down one little rabbit hole that’s just like a personal pet thing of mine. It sort of came up a bit earlier. And let’s just see where this one goes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the WordPress project runs meetings and the way that it’s done has a very specific style, a very specific process. It’s all text-based. There’s recurring meetings and there’s a particular way of introducing the meeting. There’s a particular way of going through an agenda. There’s a certain maybe unspoken expectations around when the meeting will continue to the next agenda item before people have had their say. There’s like a particular use of threads, particular use of emojis. There’s a whole thing around meetings and it seems really, really specific to the WordPress project. I’ve never seen it or heard of it anywhere else. And you probably have more experience running these meetings than anybody else on the planet. And I’m wondering, do you think that these meetings, this format, whatever it is we’re doing here, there, is there a method to the madness and can that method maybe be applied in other contexts?

Jeff:
They are very particular. I would say that maybe Francesca has run more than I have at this point. And I’m sure there may be some people, Jen Milo and others before me that may have also run more. But I mean, I do like them for their rather particular structure, to some degree, confined, tight confines. That helps us not get too far off track, although there are plenty of meetings that have gone off track that I’ve either tried to wind back or myself maybe have taken off track. ⁓ I have used the format ⁓ at Fueled and 10Up, running team meetings occasionally when ⁓ it didn’t make sense to be on camera, although for things where it makes sense to be synchronous and on a camera, I enjoy that. In fact, the core AI team does have a weekly that is actually a video chat, is somewhat unique within the WordPress project. Most are, like you said, ⁓ Slack conversations.

You know, I think one of the things that’s nice about them is you can probably multitask and still be very participatory, where if you’re on a video chat and multitasking, you’re probably losing context pretty quickly. ⁓ Part of that is probably being able to scroll back a couple of minutes and catch up without really needing to be able to do that ⁓ on a video chat, although.

Luke:
I think also like enabling participation for non-English speakers. It’s much easier to English and maybe use translation tools if needed than it is live.

Jeff:
Right, and you can easily lurk. You can not even call out that you’re there and present. When I first started contributing during the 4-7 cycle, there was a lot of just, I think I probably emoji reacted that I was there, but for sure did not ever type, quote unquote, say a thing, right? Which definitely allows folks to just watch. Whereas, you know, a video call, somebody might socratically pull you into the conversation and then you freak out and close your browser, right? ⁓ Or stay in the conversation, I don’t know. ⁓ So yeah, think it does allow for probably more, maybe not participation is the right word, but observation when other formats might not.

Jonathan:
It makes it more accessible.

Luke:
Yeah, especially for time zone challenged people like me.

Jeff:
Or maybe we’re time zone challenged and you’re the only right one, right? Let’s flip it on its head.

Jonathan:
All right. So one of things that I’m curious about, Jeff, you’ve you’ve now had just about a decade of contribution and admittedly could ramped up over time, right? Like, so you were doing a mix of things and you caught the bug early on. As you think back over this over that period of time, I’m curious if there are any particular experiences that stood out to you or things that surprised you like you were seasoned kind of going into this. You’d had a lot of experience in project management, working on team project that’s a lot of the value I think that you brought is not only were you like motivated and interested in it you also had a lot of real-world skills that you were bringing but there’s it’s also a pretty unique project and a unique ecosystem and there’s a lot of things that you learned along the way anything that stands out to you over the past decade things that surprised you?

Jeff:
The first one that jumped to mind was really sometimes even when it feels like you have the right… you know, a feature or product definition, you can see there’s a market for the thing. You know that there’s firsthand pain that you’ve experienced and thus the thing makes sense and feel like others have the same problem that even when you feel like all those things exist, sometimes the timing isn’t right or. ⁓ somehow you’re just not able to maybe ⁓ mark it or explain the thing.

Thinking specifically, and this might be twisting the dagger for y’all as well on the topic, is Tide. And going back to the work that started internally at XWP in building that tool for ourselves and then feeling that there was value to the project and getting some agreement within the project to bring it in and then running into a brick wall trying to ⁓ help show the value to other teams. Now there are things like the plugin team has their own tooling, the plugin check plugin and other tooling that they have to help identify issues in plugins that they’re reviewing, whether that’s on their own or feedback to plugin developers. That was definitely a thing that we were trying to describe as functionality that Tide could perform and was able to do. But just for reasons that we were never really able, I guess, to knock on the right door and have the right person answer to help unleash some of that value. ⁓ So that was a fairly hard learning of a thing that also many of us spent a lot of time on, sometimes funded by XWP..

Luke:
Funded also by Google.

Jeff:
Thank you, yeah.. and sometimes personally contributed to and feeling like there was a strong value for it and getting some agreement and then it just kind of dying on the vine and it’s poor thing is still out there. ⁓

Jonathan:
Well, this is actually a great example because it does bring back a lot of memories. We have a lot of shared context amongst the three of us for this. For those who don’t know much about it, ⁓ this was a project that came about in XWP. ⁓ Luke, think you were like ground zero with some of the early ideation and concepting. Google provided some initial funding to XWP to build out a proof of concept.

And, and then, ⁓ Luke, you can catch us up on some of like the, any of relevant history that I’m missing. But to me, the key thing that stood out, Jeff, is that like. There, I think I agreed with you. I agree with you. There was this clear sense of “This is useful. This can solve some real value. Folks could use this.” There was a lot of just the pieces there. We really struggled with getting that adoption.

But the thing that stands out to me is the work that you did in sort of project program management for it is what kept it alive over the years. Like there were so many Tide meetings where I would see it happen. There’s just nothing to really say or really do, but there’s something about that sense of presence that over the years, there’s been numerous times where I’ve made a reference to that project ⁓ to others who, and it’s hard to know about the influence or the impact of a thing, right? It didn’t do what exactly we thought it was going to do.

But I’ve seen multiple ways in which others have drawn inspiration or made reference to it. And the continuity that you brought by looking at through the lens of like, hey, this makes sense. We’re going to just, we’re going to manage it. We’re going to keep it going. It’s an interesting project, like for a lot of reasons.

Jeff:
Yeah, no, lot of Tide chats that were Derek Herman and myself just catch up, say, hey, not much? Yeah, not much. All right

Jonathan:
So that’s one thing that stands out to you, this idea that ⁓ something that seems like it could just be a good fit, sometimes for reasons that just don’t really make sense, just don’t find ⁓ that ⁓ market fit, I guess, or just something’s off in the adoption. Anything else that stands out to you?

Jeff:
⁓ Another one that I, ⁓ the second thing that came to mind, whether it’s a great response or not, it’s what came to mind, so that’s what you’re gonna get, ⁓ is living through a version of WordPress history that ⁓ kind of repeated itself, thinking specifically about the 5.0 release cycle and the introduction of Gutenberg, and that the time leading up to that release was extremely prolonged.

Jonathan:
I love it.

Jeff:
⁓ for reasons at the time, but it had been an earlier lesson in WordPress history of, you know, deadlines aren’t arbitrary and, you know, we set a release cadence and we release, you know, on that cadence and we, it was kind of broken during that, lead up to the 5.0 release. ⁓ You know, certainly feels like in hindsight, perhaps things could have been shipped sooner, but you know, it’s that eternal trade-off of when is good enough, good enough.

⁓ But it was just interesting, you because you might read about in, you know, WordPress history that there were releases that went on forever because of trying to just get that one last thing in, trying to continue to polish, right? And then it just, then you spiraled so far past the timeline. What’s it matter if you do one more thing, right? ⁓ And then having that as a don’t do this and then have lived through doing it anyway ⁓ was just an interesting scenario to be in as somebody who is a product project program person who innately is attuned to deadlines and deliverables and velocity and yet still seen or allowing a release to go for that long.

Jonathan:
It’s interesting, you made reference to constraints earlier within the context of the meetings, right? Like there’s some pretty like fixed constraints to how the meetings are done. And there’s also a freedom that can come in that because someone can observe and sort of whatever the case may be. And that’s an interesting thing within an open source project because you’re dealing with this very, at least from my perspective, this very, I guess, hard to pin down resource, right? Of like, you can have the energy of a volunteer, super motivated, get a bunch done, but then something could happen and like something that felt like it was a lock for release ends up not getting finished because like their attention had to weigh in. There’s all sorts of things that can come up that I think could really throw off sort of what you’re expecting from like a project management perspective compared to your typical commercial types of projects. How have you dealt with that over that period of time?

Luke:
It’s hard particularly with contributors who are volunteering at that time.

Jeff:
Yeah, no, that’s literally the response I was going to dive into there is that that is quite literally the hardest thing of, especially as a release leader, somebody on a release squad where you have going into that release a set of features or things you are expecting to deliver on. And there are people theoretically lined up working on it. And life, be that work or personal, may take those folks away. And nobody really has control over that, especially when they’re volunteers. And even when they are sponsored, like sometimes things happen, right? And sponsored volunteer time just retracts.

And yeah, that’s definitely the hardest thing, especially when… there may be perhaps that happens across multiple features in a release. And as a ⁓ lead or somebody on the release squad, you start to panic a little bit and think of, ⁓ gosh, well, what’s going to be the tent pole thing? What’s going to be the top of the about page? What are we going to put on the news blog post about this release? ⁓

But fortunately, the project is large enough and there are enough people showing up day in, day out, ⁓ contributing and committers that are reviewing and getting stuff in that there’s always something. There’s ⁓ things that you’re able to figure out. Sometimes we need to lean a bit more on the marketers and the copy editors to help us ⁓ polish what’s there to tell the story. But ⁓ yeah. The lack of control in a myriad matrixed relationship of people from different companies or individual contributors with no real ⁓ connection to each other that says I have to show up and I have to deliver on this thing by this date. ⁓ And yet the project still manages to move forward and ship things is quite lovely.

Luke:
Hmm. So speaking of shipping things, what do you think the likelihood is that we will ship collaborative editing?

Jeff:
I feel like I was set up for this question.

Luke:
Hahaha.

Jeff:
So collaborative, I assume you mean real time collaboration and not further iterations on asynchronous of notes. ⁓

Luke:
Real-time collaboration, yeah. Which the notes feature, by the way, I think is amazing and one of the best features added to WordPress in a long time.

Jeff:
There are a couple of things that I would have loved to have gotten into 6.9 and things that I think make it even more powerful, especially to folks who have multiple people that are working on a WordPress site, which that’s for the most part the heavy users of notes.

But yes, back to real-time collab. Yeah, look, VIP has had this working in their environment since last fall, right? They’ve had customers using it since then. They obviously have the benefit of additional infrastructure as needed to make that real-time collab feel really graceful, right? And that doesn’t need a necessary have ⁓ a progressive fallback to maybe not as graceful real-time collaboration, ⁓ where somebody on a VPS install or something relatively underpowered or just doesn’t understand or want to or know how to spin up a node server kind of thing to have that more powerful ⁓ real-time interaction.

So VIP has had this working for a while. I’ve seen it in practice. It’s quite fantastic. But it’s also something that we have to make sure we, when I say we, meaning the WordPress project and shipping it, that the base experience for somebody who is non-technical, ⁓ whose host is not, you know, either not able to or they don’t want to pay for or can’t have additional ⁓ server components to help power that experience, that they still have something that’s valuable and useful and that it doesn’t just slow their editing experience or degrade it in a way where a 7.0 release that theoretically includes real-time collab is an absolute bomb for them, right? So it’s making sure that the feature can still deliver for folks that are in that orbit.

Luke:
Hmm. So you’re talking a little bit about like a bifurcation of WordPress, especially in the hosting sphere of people who they either have the cool features that require extra server configuration or they don’t. I wonder if that will end up being like on host management pages and choose your plan with the, you can choose good WordPress or choose the dodgy WordPress that doesn’t have all of the cool new features.

Jonathan:
I’m sure that’s what they’re going to call it, dodgy WordPress.

Luke:
Yeah, cool and dodgy. But I mean, the thing is that it opens a door, Collaboration is real-time collaboration is great. And I’m looking forward to messing around with it outside of the sandboxes that it’s already available in. But like then what’s next also, if we have that bifurcation precedent.

Jeff:
Got it. I wouldn’t worry about it, right? Here’s why. One, I look at my site, jeffpaul.com, massive traffic, fantastic. ⁓

Luke:
yeah, I bet.

Jeff:
I don’t need real-time collab for me and myself, right? ⁓ You know, my friends that own a board game shop here in town and a couple others, like, they don’t need it for their site. So there’s definitely somewhere, it’s almost like a who cares? You’re reading the about page, whatever, the real time cloud, I don’t need it. ⁓ And there are plugins in the space that help with caching. Maybe that’s bundled with some plans on host. Maybe you get better caching on higher end ones. So there’s already things that..

Luke:
Right. Yeah. Object caching.

Jeff:
Right, there’s already things that are creating that bifurcation, if you want to use that word. But I don’t think it lessens the dodgy, the base WordPress experience. I think that base WordPress experience is still ⁓ extremely useful and valuable. And as your needs for creating and publishing content, you know, expand towards like an enterprise uses, then some of those other things become more palatable and you know, then you get onto, I forget what you called the non-dodgy plan, but that’s when you move up to that one. The cool plan.

Luke:
The cool plan. Yeah.

No, you make a really excellent point there, especially comparing to object caching because yeah, and WordPress does include object caching separation depending on what you’ve got available on your server. It does the same for making external calls. It does the same for database stuff. And so in that sense, it’s not really a precedent. In fact, the precedent has already been set.

When you were talking a little bit about how like for a lot of people, it’s not really going to be a big deal if they miss out. It makes me think maybe it should be in plugin territory, but we can leave that alone.

Jonathan:
Well, hold up before we leave that alone, because that’s part of my thinking is like, are we setting a precedent? Is this really about taking WordPress to a future where, in my head, I’ve always had this like it has to be for the 80 percent, right? Like if it’s going to be part of Core, right. And and that 80 percent is shifting over time. Like there’s something to be said about how the use of WordPress has evolved. Like the majority of people using WordPress today are not blogging. So there’s a fair thing to be said about that shift over time, but it’s a question.

Luke:
Yeah. And I think there’s something to be said for like skating to where the puck’s going to be. um, and maybe by implementing collaborative editing in core, maybe that is a way of getting people to work on a website together where just because it wasn’t possible before we never had those systems in place. But then if it’s going to be gated to the most expensive plans, maybe it’s not so I’m just excited to see what happens there basically.

Jonathan:
If I were to guess, it’s a little bit more akin to some of what we saw with WooCommerce in terms of like how hosting responded to it, because it required for a lot of them to say, okay, we need to provide a little bit beefier of an experience around this. We need to do some things differently for this. But yet they’re for that though, there tended to not be as much pushback on like businesses willing to pay for that because of the value associated. So the idea is like to me, if people are getting value out of collaborative editing, there’s a higher likelihood that they’re going to be okay.

Or they’d be willing to pay for a higher plan that would justify that. yes, we’ll see. Interesting.

Jeff, last thing I’m curious about for now. ⁓ For folks, one of the things that I feel like you’ve you’ve done really well is to demonstrate what someone with less of a technical background can do and the impact they can have bringing their skills into the project. And that’s something I’ve seen happen with others.

From your experience now, having been in the space and seeing all these different types of volunteers come in, the first question I’ve got is, what types of folks are you looking for more of? What do you think the project could use more of at this point? And then the other question is for folks who might be listening that are interested in contribution, just any general guidance that you would give them, especially speaking to the folks that have less of a technical background.

Jeff:
⁓ I mean, look, the project is probably most flush with engineers, ⁓ though there’s always going to be more that’s out there in track or GitHub that somebody could pick up and work on that’s a good first bug, good first issue. So certainly don’t shy away if that’s your bag, again, whether that’s PHP or JavaScript or what have you. ⁓ I think there’s… I have those blog posts that I published back at XWP that I then kind of forked to put out on my own blog that like, you know, look, really every, every role that you might envision at an agency or host or product shop, there is a need for that in the project. There is, I don’t know how many teams at this point, 20, two dozen, maybe more that on their own are very likely clamoring for contributors, right? ⁓

Luke:
AI team not being one of them.

Jeff:
The AI team would love to have folks. know Tammie Lister’s new program team ⁓ would love to have some folks there that operate in that space. know documentation team is always looking for help, folks to help, whether that’s during a release cycle or outside of one. Designers, testers, whatever you can think of, there is a place for your competency, your skill set, your interests in the project, ⁓ whether that is somebody who is junior in that profession or experienced, right? There are onboarding experiences for somebody that’s junior and there’s, you know, some really big nuts to crack for folks that are experienced.

You know, I think the onboarding experience is probably different for everybody across all those teams and the different types of competencies. So, you know, it’s not a one size fits all. I know there is a like onboarding ⁓ wizard, a contributing wizard. just had it up. Yeah, make.wordpress.org/contribute that was put together that kind of helps walk you through like what can you do, what do you like to do, and answer a couple questions. And it’s like, ⁓ here are some teams that might be a good fit for you, right? Or here are some things that the project needs help with.

So ⁓ Jonathan, I don’t think there’s a singular answer of we need more widget makers, and we only want widget makers, right? It’s really everything and anything. And ⁓ the project, think, would be foolish to turn away any contributor, right? ⁓

You look at WP Credits, they’re trying to get even further into integrations with Higher Ed, colleges and universities and bringing folks in at that level. ⁓ And so even people that have perhaps no context of WordPress, trying to get them exposed to it and contributing is fantastic.

Jonathan:
Yeah, I’ve loved seeing that.

Well, what I think has been essential as well has been the work that’s gone into and you’ve been an important part of this as well of recognizing those ⁓ like less technical. There are some things that are lot easier to recognize. If you have a commit, we can run that programmatically and we can like make sure that there’s a reference that’s made to it, right? I remember some of the work that you do early on, like, hey, like checking to make sure that folks contributions were all recognized, even if it was small. And there’s a lot that’s really motivating about that. And I think that some of the some of those some of those less technical areas can be harder. Like how do you measure that? And it requires people that are thinking more about the program, more about the project and, you know, not just looking at the commits that showed up at the end. So I think that work, and I know there’s been a lot more of that lately, I think is part of what makes it, because how do you, when you’re volunteering, ⁓ there’s different, there is something to be said about just the internal satisfaction. We as humans also care about being appreciated for what we do, even if it’s not like, formal public, but it’s, you know, that the what’s expressed from one to the other. I think that’s a big part of what draws folks into it.

Jeff:
Yeah, and I think that recognition, the thankfulness towards contributors for their contributions, there’s still, I think, a long way for the project to go, especially for folks that are maybe not contributing directly to a major or minor release, ⁓ or folks that maybe are contributing to things that… aren’t code-based and having the project properly capture and recognize and thank those folks. I think there’s still a long way to go, but I think we do a better job with every release cycle just because that’s the way kind of the my brain measures progress within the project. ⁓ But yeah, I think we do a decent job. Could definitely be, could be doing a great job, but we’re not there yet.

Jonathan:
Last thing for me is if you had one suggestion for a new contributor of like, if they’re looking at the arc of their first year, ⁓ maybe there’s just a few hours here and there, they’re gonna spend a couple of hours on one of the teams that’s interesting to them and do what they can. What’s a, yes, a non-developer, it’s like, what would you encourage them to keep in mind? Any just one piece of guidance.

Luke:
Especially a non-developer.

Jeff:
So I think what I would recommend ⁓ would be there’s a post that ⁓ Matias has up, Matias Ventura from December 11th called Planning for 7.0 ⁓ on make.wordpress.org/core. So if you find that post, I would recommend reading through it. It might be overly dense. It might be particularly technical in points that don’t make sense, but reading through it with a lens of, know, hopefully at this point this person has a WordPress site or they’ve used WordPress or they’ve published content in a CMS, right? And read through that post and see which of those things are like, oh, that’s interesting. That sounds really cool. Or, oh yeah, that bothers me about this, you know, my site or the publishing tool that I use. And then subscribe to the GitHub issue or track ticket for that thing. And when it becomes available for testing during the beta and RC cycles, give that a test on WordPress Playground, or not download, sorry, in the browser. Test that feature and just give feedback of like this perfectly solves, I have this problem, or here are some oddities I see. Just doing that.

We’re always wanting more feedback during the beta and RC cycles. And I think there’s hopefully something in what’s planned for 7.0. And certainly some of those things will probably leak out to 7.1 and later. There’s got to be something there, hopefully, that’s somebody that resonates with you. And then you can just help give it a whirl when it’s ready during the beta and R3 cycles, meaning when the WordPress 7.0 release has a beta 1 release or later, give that a try.

Jonathan:
I love that. That’s very practical. And it’s a way of because I think people might assume by default, they don’t really want my feedback. Or like, it’s it just really wouldn’t be that helpful. But just to take the time to test something out, to get some impressions of it, to give that context, I can see how valuable that would be.

Jeff:
Yeah, absolutely.

Luke, I know earlier you were upping the notes feature from 6.9 ⁓ and working on that fairly closely with folks like Adam Silverstein and others. There was a point in the release cycle where we got a flood of feedback because of folks that were actually testing it out for the first time who had not helped build it. And there were so many things that we were able to make that specific feature that much better, that much more polished because of that feedback. we had the typical blinders on where we had been building it and testing it and just had accepted some of those blemishes, I guess. so yeah, ⁓ you think the feedback may not be actioned but like guaranteed, either somebody’s like, ⁓ I’m glad somebody liked this, that makes me feel good, or, yeah, I don’t know how I didn’t see that this doesn’t work, now it’s gonna be better, right? Feedback is always gonna be super helpful for those building the software.

Jonathan:
Jeff, thank you for all that you’ve ⁓ been doing with the project. Looking forward to seeing what the next years bring. If someone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to get in contact?

Jeff:
⁓ Probably ⁓ at this point either WordPress Slack @jeffpaul. ⁓ I’m @jeffpaul on most social platforms that I’m on at least. Blue Sky probably the most active and then jeffpaul.com. ⁓ Come and find me on my WordPress site.

Jonathan:
Thanks for joining us.