A New Generation of the WordPress Community
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Speaker 1:And give your brand the boost it deserves. Hey, Mark. Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2:Matt, thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:You came across my radar during this most recent yeah. Here's how I'll frame it. Bricks versus Gutenberg or Core WordPress. I'm sort of overstating it there for clicks. But really saw a video, make sure I'll link that up into our show notes below from your YouTube channel.
Speaker 1:Discussing are you sharing your perspective on Bricks and WordPress and the WordPress community? How does one fit in? We were just chatting before we hit record. You have started a WordPress or a digital agency back in 2019, started building WordPress 2018, maybe 2017. When I saw your video, I was like, man, this is a great perspective, because one of my predictions for 2024 is we're going to get new folks into the WordPress community.
Speaker 1:And look, this this is nothing against you, and I'll let you talk in a moment. This is nothing against you. Yeah. Absolutely. A lot of us here, a lot of us listening have maybe been here for a decade plus.
Speaker 1:Right? Since the inception of WordPress. And my take is, look, there's gonna be a lot of folks like Mark, as you'll hear in a moment, who are coming into this in the last five or six years. Right? COVID.
Speaker 1:Right? Starting a business. The same thing we saw back in 2008 with the financial crisis. A lot of people get into WordPress because they're I need to start a side gig. I need to start designing websites to make some cash, and that flourished into a a big agency.
Speaker 1:We're gonna start having folks coming into the space who have learned WordPress from these other tools that maybe we're not all familiar with. Elementor, Bricks, right? Coming into the space going, hey, here's how I learned WordPress, where a lot of us learned WordPress smashing our keyboard trying to get it to work, because back then, there were these tools didn't exist. And, you know, we had to walk to school in five feet of snow, you know, when when we were young in this space.
Speaker 2:Uphilled both ways.
Speaker 1:Uphilled both ways. That's a long way of getting to. I enjoyed your fresh perspective. Let's break it down. You've been running this agency now.
Speaker 1:First, let's frame who you are, what you do. You run this agency. What's your core offering? And is bricks at the heart of all this stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So my name is Mark Joe Simanski, and I own a agency I'm based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I own an agency called Find a Tech. Technically, it's an agency of one. I mean, we have some subcontractors and things like that.
Speaker 2:Hoping to build the team up a little bit more in 2024. Started in 2019 with again, I was working you know, I came out I'm only 28 years old now. So like I was in I was in college. I had an internship with a company. I learned a lot about like marketing and information and I was working alongside people in the web dev space, building the website for that company and like asp.net and all sorts of other stuff.
Speaker 2:Ton of great mentors there. As I was doing that, was getting more fluent in marketing and in the digital space and I decided that, okay, I wanna try to start building a little bit more. So I dabbled in, you know, again, like what I was, you know, next to asp.net and stuff. But ultimately ended up with WordPress once I figured it out. And again, it's very interesting that you frame it in that way because I actually feel like I've been in this space longer than just those five or six years because I feel like I dunno if it's the way I process things or the way that I think about it.
Speaker 2:I'm very business like oriented. I wanna build this into a bigger thing. Like that's my I'm not here to just like do a freelance side gig or anything like that. And I've just recently got much more into the WordPress community itself. I like to say that the first three or so years, three or four years throughout COVID and everything like that, I was a little bit like I built websites and I was using Elementor and I was using different things like that.
Speaker 2:But even before then, like when I first started, if we back up for a second, I was right on that cusp I feel like of when there was a switch from picking a theme and having to either just plop things in like text and images how the themes were created or code your own custom theme. I guess that was an option. That just wasn't where I was at at that time. But once I discovered Elementor, was like, wow, this is amazing. I can just do whatever I want wherever I want.
Speaker 2:And then I started to layer in things like Crocoblock and other dynamic content. And that's one of the big things that I try to preach on my channel now and the outlets that I talk talk to other developers and agency owners about is like if you're trying to be a better developer you gotta be more dynamic with your content. This isn't just like we're not creating things like a graphic designer necessarily where we're only putting certain things in certain places. We're designing for the web. That's very different than designing on paper or a billboard or something.
Speaker 2:And just efficiency and maintainability, scalability, all those things are things that I hold dear to me. So that's kind of like a brief summary of where I'm at now. But kind of looking into the very current thing with, you know, Bricks and Gutenberg to fast forward to there. I was using Elementor for all those years. And then I found literally Kevin Geary content, Dave Voigt content, things like that.
Speaker 2:And I was like this is an interesting situation. And the thing that actually sparked it was because I had experienced issues because I was trying to build really complex membership sites and things like that with Elementor. And I I just feel like the bloat got astronomically crazy. I actually if you look back on my channel, you can see some of the documentation that I kinda made from it. I I discovered Nitro Pack, another controversial plugin and platform, I guess, this industry.
Speaker 2:And I didn't know that at the time and I was like, oh, wow. That's interesting. I didn't realize that that was controversial. You know, whether I don't know. I don't wanna speak necessarily Nitro Pack.
Speaker 2:We could talk for days about it. But my point is that I was trying to find ways to solve my problem of Elementor bloat, speed optimization, things like that, and the client websites that I was building. And then I found Bricks and I was like, wow, this is I feel more like a developer in this platform. I feel like it's more streamlined. I feel like there's a lot more options here.
Speaker 2:So that's the route that I've traveled here in the last four months and it's been great because I've rebuilt my whole stack and I'm really enjoying the things that I'm doing there. I feel like more I feel like I actually have educated myself way deeper in actually developing websites, which has been great. And then to get back to the point now with the preamble there aside is that like bricks versus the future of Gutenberg, the future of WordPress core. And that is extremely interesting conversation that we can, you know, chat more about however you wanna however you wanna go.
Speaker 1:Your YouTube channel is youtube.com/@markjzemanski. The video I'm referring to now has 703 views, posted it a month ago, four weeks ago. Who is the WordPress block editor Gutenberg actually for? Again, I'll link that up. It's twenty almost twenty minutes of fascinating perspective.
Speaker 1:Is it fair to say that you you don't know a WordPress world with the classic editor or the original editor in there? Have you always used Google since you started?
Speaker 2:I think yeah. I think when I came in, the classic editor was maybe on its way out. I can't really specifically remember. All I remember at that point it may might have some video content or something around it back then. I'm sure I could look up like archive videos from that from that time.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean my experience at first. And again, totally I'm not I wanna paint this picture real quick though because there's maybe some listeners out there that think like I'm just like a page builder, you know, like oh, you ruha, you know, like, let's only page builder. Like, that's not really who I am.
Speaker 1:And by the way, this I don't think there's wrong with that. I don't think there's anything wrong with folks who are building a business off of or building a website, but building their brand, building their business using a page builder. I am not a developer. I love these tools. Right?
Speaker 1:And they are much much needed. It's why we have what we have with blocks. Okay. Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, yeah. So I appreciate that. Yeah. The the thing that I would say a couple core tenets.
Speaker 2:One, I'm a I'm a big believer in competition though. I think that's just gonna push everybody to do better because if we had just like a monopoly on everything and if it was closed source I mean, again, it's a slight it's definitely a tangent. We don't have to go into it. But like a Webflow, that's a big concept. Right?
Speaker 2:Like just WordPress as a whole versus Webflow. We have a lot of like debate in the inside. Right? Of Bricks versus Elementor versus Quickly or whatever versus Gutenberg. But then as soon as somebody says Webflow, we're all like, no no no no no.
Speaker 2:We're not not gonna because it's closed source. It's a little sandbox y plan. And again, it's a different it's very nuanced conversation. There's no right or wrong answers to a lot of this stuff. It's another interesting one to have.
Speaker 2:So back to the page builder thing though is like I'm not the distinction that I wanna make before people cast judgment on like this I don't I don't care who wins. Like I'm just, again, first of all, kinda thinking for my business and what I like and my honestly, my personality set too. The things the way that I like to develop right now and especially as I build a team out, like what I think would be best. But if bricks I love bricks. I love Delementor.
Speaker 2:I don't even have too many bad things to say about Elementor. I haven't used Gutenberg enough to necessarily make that judgment as another comparison. But I would say that if Gutenberg was if it was verifiably like I could jump in and use it as quickly as I could use bricks and do the same things, then I would be all down for that. I honestly just haven't maybe this is just ignorance. I haven't jumped in and done that yet.
Speaker 2:But if you could snap your fingers actually I don't know if I tweeted this or something. If you could snap your fingers and tomorrow the core of WordPress could do everything that every other page builder could do like combined or something somehow if we made that happen, I would absolutely switch in a heartbeat. Like, I genuinely kinda wanna use the best tool for the job, best tool for me, which is a hard thing to answer. But I'm not like it's not like I don't wanna do it or only wanna use page builders, but that's just what has worked for me so far at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think there are like some the way that I see a lot of this stuff is generally how I try to evaluate most things in WordPress is WordPress the software, and WordPress the community. And and by community in this sense, I mean, just freaking everybody who who's touching WordPress. Users, power users, agency people, you know, developers, you know, all those types of folks. I think that as much as the case that people make, like you said, snap your fingers and all of a sudden, core WordPress has, you know I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't I don't know the development terms. Z index and a million different sort of CSS options per block, you would alienate so many users in the space, and I think that what we have is this amalgamation of software being developed, every piece of software starts with a one point o, and it always sucks. Right? The iPhone, everything all is is slowly, always getting iterated. You don't I don't know a thing that is just amazing out of the box.
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess you could have some unicorns there. But we always know, as developers, this thing launches, it's got this feature set, and it's gonna it's gonna change, man. It's gonna get better, hopefully. And we're gonna keep iterating on on it over time, and it's this democratic development process that makes things really slow, but also there's a massive benefit to the open source side of things. So I think that Gutenberg needs to stay in its lane.
Speaker 1:I say Gutenberg, WordPress core needs to stay in its lane, so that millions and millions and millions of people can use it without blowing their brains out. You know, trying to use the software. And then, for the hundreds of thousands of advanced users across the world, or millions, you have these tools like an Elementor, like Bricks, Beaver Builder, Divi, and all this other stuff. It's not to say that people can't use them, millions and millions of people can't use them, but most of the people who are developing those sites are gonna be the power user, the webmaster of the days who had built it, and then set it up in a way that, okay, here you go client, or here you go organization, you go ahead and play with it. It's not an I don't think there's an easy path to any of of this stuff.
Speaker 1:We're all sort of vying for that market share, and WordPress core is the elephant, you know, in the room. Right? It it can kinda push people out, these other products out of the way, because of blocks and full site editor, and then the user goes, man, templates? Should I use these templates? Should I use these templates in bricks?
Speaker 1:This guy built me this site in bricks and left me with this. I don't know. I'm in this template screen here, there's a template screen there, what do I do? It's a challenging world, but I think they both serve a certain set of users, and everyone does get passionate about it. That's the community side.
Speaker 1:Everyone gets passionate about the tools and the ways that they build WordPress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think obviously a lot of great points there. The the one thing that I would say and we could dive into maybe like the specifics there or however we wanna go. But the but the one thing that I would say is I don't again, I don't know if I made a piece of content on this or not, can't remember. But I'll say it here because I I still believe it to be true is the one thing that I have noticed, I've consumed a ton of content.
Speaker 2:Like a ton of different WordPress creator content and just everything online. Like I mean I've been subscribed to these guys you know for many years and I've started to pay a lot more attention recently now because I'm creating content as well and I wanna kinda like see like, you know, what is this guy doing in this case or what is so and so doing here and all that? And how do they think? How do they what decisions are they making? What's the process that they're going through when they're thinking about these things?
Speaker 2:The one thing that I truly don't think it's talked about enough stemming directly from that, the piece you just gave there, is there are so the beauty of having 50% of the internet on WordPress is that there's so many websites and so many installs of WordPress and so many different people using it. I think that's fantastic. I think WordPress should continue to be be kind of like whatever it wants to be in that sense. I think the one thing that we have to say though, because I don't think any one way is right, I think the the the pre qualifier in this conversation that I probably didn't even say in that video very well. I probably didn't say it as as well as I could have because I was just trying to answer that question or ask the question who is who is it billed for.
Speaker 2:I would love for every time creators in our space have this discussion to say I am my business or my goal is to do business for x or build websites for x or Y or Z. Because in my mind my offer, a lot of the decisions that I make and a lot of things that I say are based off of the way that I'm building my business. But I'm not saying like do this. I'm saying I am doing this because I am trying to reach these people or I'm trying to go after these or x y z. I had a conversation with a very recently with a two hour conversation with an agency in the area that does like 5,000,000 a year.
Speaker 2:And I was talking to the CEO and he was like a lot of the things we I'm like I'm wondering like all these weird like little nuance questions. Do you hand the sites off to clients? Do you have somebody manage the WooCommerce? What about custom fields? Do you let them change anything?
Speaker 2:Do you let them in the builder? Do you let them in WordPress core? What is that? And he's like he's giving me all these nuance things and it's like everything that he's saying is related to a $50,100, dollars 150,000 project. And it's like a team of people that he's handing it off to and they're like big ecom brands or whatever.
Speaker 2:And it's like the point is that we are the beauty of having so many people is there's so many different perspectives. The trouble is it's very difficult to talk to everyone at one time because everybody has different goals and everybody's on a different path. And that is the thing that I feel like it's a blessing and a curse and it's very difficult. I try to toe that line and be like this is why I'm doing it. But listen, maybe you're trying to sell smaller websites.
Speaker 2:Maybe you're trying to sell marketing brochure websites. Totally okay. Do whatever you want. And I'm not saying like, oh, use Bricks for this or use Core for that. I'm not even talking about the tools.
Speaker 2:I'm just talking about where your goals are. And I feel like that is a pre qualifier that doesn't get really talked about enough. Then it gets, it's hard to say that every single time, obviously. But if we try to keep that in our mind, I feel like that will just that'll put the conversation in a totally new light and it'll be like, oh, we're just not speaking the same language. We're literally not trying to reach the same people.
Speaker 2:So there's no way our decision making process is gonna be the same. So I I hope that was, you know, kinda made sense there. But that's where I come from on a lot of the stuff that I the way that I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I would say that we are an underrepresented customer avatar in the WordPress market to a degree. What we have because I've been saying this, you know, now for twenty years, that the power users, the agency owners, we're not the ones that WordPress, the community, and WordPress, the software, is trying to solve for. Although we are the biggest, again, in my opinion, the biggest cheerleaders. Right?
Speaker 1:I'm responsible for thousands of WordPress sites that customers and friends and people have launched because I either sold them the service when I ran my agency for ten years, or I encouraged them through my YouTube channels, or they were friends, or in my start the start incubator I used to mentor at. Same thing with you. You're probably responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of websites now with your clients across the board. But the the challenge is, when you zoom out, that the WordPress community, the ones that collectively make the decisions for WordPress, yeah, there's there's maybe a few agencies in there. Right?
Speaker 1:A few boutique agencies, larger agencies, web dev, 10up, you know, all of these bigger agencies that are out there. There's a lot of people who are building the software who have never sold a website in their lives. Right? They've never had a customer interaction before. And this is the particular challenge when it comes to the the strife and the passion in this space.
Speaker 1:You know, there are people who just work at Bluehost, and they're core committers. And they are the ones making big decisions on WordPress, not to pick Bluehost out, they are a lovely sponsor of the of the WP Minute, but they have a team of people that they pay to contribute to CORE. And they're not in the agency mindset, they're in the mindset of WordPress is this massive piece of software for the world, and I'm trying to solve complex problems inside WordPress to launch this for WordPress. Not for Matt and Mark who are selling websites for people. Right?
Speaker 1:Maybe not even the end user who's she has a little blog that she's trying they're they're trying to solve engineering issues, scale issues. Right? So you have those types of of people, developers, building this software. They're not thinking about you and I all the time. Right?
Speaker 1:And then you have the the ideology leadership of of WordPress. Matt Mullenweg, Josefa, these are massive visionary blanket statements that happen in direction, and that's bringing WordPress into, you know, the future, and trying to shape it from a massive global perspective. We're not included in that either. It's about freedom of speech, and the democratic way of developing software. There are so many channels and so many directions that WordPress is being led in, that you can only get your 1%.
Speaker 1:You can only get your little time to shine to influence this stuff. And that is, again, a great thing about WordPress, because there is all of this momentum, but everybody can't have their their piece of it. And you're always vying for oiling the squeaky wheel to a to a degree, you know, to get our piece. And this is why these products are born. Elementor, Bricks, Divi, Beaver Builder.
Speaker 1:This is why this stuff is born, because someone in the market said WordPress isn't doing this. We need to do this for agencies, and then agencies started buying. Right? And then as the world turned, Wix and Squarespace were also getting better and attracting agencies, and we realized, oh, the way people need to interact to build websites is more visual. It's blocks.
Speaker 1:It's templates. It's moving this stuff around, like Legos on a page. And we're just, you know, the ball's still rolling, the earth is still turning, and I think we'll get there to a soon ish. But that's the that's the the conundrum we're all in. Love it or hate it, this this is this is what we got.
Speaker 1:Feel like I'm you're gonna be right now. An answer I would give to somebody that was that was like interview interviewing me. But the point is, there's just a lot of perspectives in the WordPress space, and I think it would do well if we zoomed out. And here's a perfect segue into that question that I didn't wanna forget. What I don't wanna see, and I don't know Geary at all, would love to have him on the podcast if he if he ever wanted to come on, but what I don't like to see is people who either root for the foundation to to crumble, or to just not give back to this open source software, and what I mean by that is to just come out on Twitter and just really go hard at WordPress, and say this is atrocious.
Speaker 1:This is terrible. Can't believe they're making these decisions. You have to zoom out and say this is our we're all on this land. Without WordPress, there is no bricks. Right?
Speaker 1:Without WordPress, there is no Elementor. There is no market for for Geary and team to sell automatic CSS or whatever it's called. Right? That doesn't exist. So, you wouldn't just walk out in front of your house, you know, into the city street, and just be like I'm gonna dump my trash right here.
Speaker 1:And then it is. That's it. I walk right back into my house. I don't care who left that trash there. No.
Speaker 1:This is this is all ours. Right? We all have to take care of it. You might have your opinions, might have a better product, or a different product, but you also have to respect the people and the process that got us here, or else none of us continue to thrive in this WordPress space.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm not sure if you had a specific question around that, but
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, just got me on a soapbox rant, and I had to finish No.
Speaker 2:I I like I said, I welcome all opinions. I love that. To address the two things. One, rooting for I like I tend to look at things I try to look at things more objectively and logically rather than emotionally. So that's the first thing that I do.
Speaker 2:The the so if if you think about this, regardless of if you are an agency with a 150 sites under management or you're a DIYer that built one site for your for your shop or whatever, but both of those are WordPress based. Right? The agency and the DIYer. If you root for the the the crumbling of WordPress core, that seems illogical to me. Just straight up illogical.
Speaker 2:And regardless of if you like it or don't like it, it just doesn't make any sense. So I start to like be like, okay, I look at something like that and I'm like that that just doesn't make any sense. I'm almost maybe I'll try to reason with somebody, but like if you have that belief that just to me literally makes no sense. So at some point it's just like, okay, you do whatever you want because that's you're literally by proxy, you're hoping for your own demise in either of those circumstances. Right?
Speaker 2:So that's the first thing. The second thing is the idea of giving back and everything like that, 100% do agree. I think that there would be we would probably have to have like an hour long, two hour long conversation to kind of really dive into that. But specifically, my question or my thought would be like kind of in what way? But to hit on the specific point that you had, not like kind of just being like hey, this sucks, this is whatever, da da da da.
Speaker 2:I do think that what I see as more of like an agnostic kind of like observer at this point is that people are There's this weird thing in the WordPress community where that creates the idea of some people are business minded and agency minded and some people are just I don't want to say DIY'ed but they're just more like platform oriented. Again, are bad but it does create some harsh lines of like I'm literally thinking of this as a business decision. Like I'm not necessarily there, but I see some people as like I am using WordPress because it's the best thing to fuel my business. If Webflow was better than WordPress, I would switch to Webflow and I would be out of the WordPress space. I don't hold that belief.
Speaker 2:But I'm saying that like some people definitely process it like that. You know? I mean, it's not just it goes beyond Core versus Quickly versus Bricks. It goes WordPress is one platform that has a bunch of different options, open source, so many pieces of value. I can't really see Webflow overtaking WordPress.
Speaker 2:But I do think that, you know, again you bring up Kevin Geary. Like a lot of times I've listened to a lot of his stuff, tried to analyze the way that he thinks. I don't agree with everything he says nor do I agree with everything everybody says because I'm an individual. But I'm saying that one of the things that I've heard him and other people talk about is like Webflow it's almost like we care so much about WordPress. We don't wanna see it be taken over by another leader.
Speaker 2:We have such an incredible lead on everybody else as far as like market share of WordPress which is good for everybody in the community. And then if we kind of pivot to a weird direction or take our foot off the gas, and again it's super subjective so I'm not giving much objectivity here with this. But I'm saying that's I think where it's coming from, if I'm taking like a psychological look at this. If we as a community of WordPress leaders, whatever, if platform goes in a direction that like Webflow can easily come in and steal market share or become the next big thing, then maybe over time WordPress falls and it isn't as big as that. Can't Again it's hard to envision a world like that.
Speaker 2:You've been in this space way longer than I have so you've seen it come up. But I just don't think everything is always you know, that's too big to fail type thing. I don't necessarily know if that's always the case. I'm just giving you examples here. I'm not even saying that I believe any of this stuff.
Speaker 2:I'm just trying to take what you said and kind of reverse engineer why people might hold those opinions and why they say the things that they do and why they hold the opinions they do. And that's just again, I don't even cast in I'm just kind of observing. Not even
Speaker 1:A 100%. And when I came into you know, and I'll fully admit, when I came into the space so I started my agency at the 2007, and when I first got started with this, it was the same thing. It was and I'm not saying you're doing this, but I I know a lot of people look at it through this lens, is business software. Is this tool working for me? Is it is it back then, it was WordPress versus Drupal, and WordPress back then was leaps ahead usability wise of Drupal, so that's why we went forward with it.
Speaker 1:And then when I started to discover the community, and I'll be honest, the the prospects that were out there, I mean, back then people were switching to WordPress because it was just way better than any system on the web in 02/2007, so I mean, clients it was just a very easy sell. Right? It was just like, yeah, give me this WordPress thing, you can build that for me for that cost. That's amazing. I'll take it.
Speaker 1:So the fish were kinda jumping into the boat back then. And I too had that same perspective of, well, this is crazy. Why are they doing it this way? They should be and it was very just business product. Business product.
Speaker 1:And then once you start to spend time in, you know, the community, if you care, like, number one, you have to care about open source, I think, from at least just the data portability perspective. Right? I am not locked in to Microsoft, Adobe, Webflow. I can do I can move this around. Yes, it might be a challenge to do something that I that my customer wants to do, or that I wanna do, but I can do it and not be locked into it.
Speaker 1:Right? So there's that. But once I started to explore the community, there are there are people who contribute to WordPress. I don't know what the number was for the last word WordPress 6.4 that was released. Maybe 400 ish people.
Speaker 1:That's not even all developers and designers. Developers, designers, document writers, people who are just bug checking. This is of a quilt of of people, of patterns stitched together from so many backgrounds, and I know it doesn't mean anything to anyone's business, but it is amazing to see people come together to launch a piece of software from many many backgrounds. And I too get frustrated when my needs aren't being solved, that's why I started a podcast, when my needs aren't getting solved with WordPress, but it is fantastic to see this thing come together with by so many people, so many backgrounds across the globe, that no other critical piece of software on the planet allows me to do. Unless maybe the Linux kernel, if I went back to my real roots of open source days when I was a server admin.
Speaker 1:And it's just fantastic. And, you know, those are the things that are are the benefits aside from just the product. Totally agree with you, all these product things, Webflow could take over WordPress, but there is such a deep foundation of humans that back WordPress, at least for now, that it it is hard it's a hard sell to to move to something else, you know, because of the advantages WordPress has on that in that category. I think, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, one of the things that people should do is, with WordPress 6.5 coming up, do you have a Slack account on the official wordpress.org channel?
Speaker 2:I do not yet. No. It's on my list.
Speaker 1:100%. And this is a challenge, and and we'll talk about this in a second. Get a get a free wordpress.org Slack account. Join the Slack. On launch day, it is a work of art
Speaker 2:to watch. I think he said this in a recent episode.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. It's amazing. You know? To see all these things, and this is the process, and then you really just that moment, just spend that half an hour of the day, or it's actually all day, but you'll see it all accruing pretty quickly. You spend some time in there just watching people talk, and all the spot checks and the check it's freaking amazing.
Speaker 1:And then the software launches, and you're like, wow. There's a lot of people, there's a lot of things I don't see. And it's that perspective that we miss on Twitter, and in our business lives, because we're not behind the scenes. And that is the particular challenge with the WordPress community. We have people talking in wordpress.org Slack, we have people talking on social media, we have people talking in WordPress GitHub, we have people talking on in comments on make.wordpress.org, and then we have meetings that happen at big WordCamp events.
Speaker 1:And all of this stuff is everywhere. And there's not this one central place, which is a particular human challenge, not just a software challenge. So getting involved in the community can be tough, because you just don't know where to begin. My perspective, start start with the Slack, and just watch people talk. Watch these meetings unfold, and then go to a word camp.
Speaker 1:That's probably the best way to to prime yourself to get a feeling. Not that you're not primed, I'm just saying, like, anyone's listening.
Speaker 2:Definitely. No. Those are those are fantastic recommendations. I remember, yeah, like I said, you I think I think it was a recent episode. I don't know if it was with you.
Speaker 2:The most recent one with was it Corey? Corey Miller? If I remember okay. I don't I don't know which one you said it on, but, yeah, definitely. That was that was crazy because I was thinking, wow.
Speaker 2:You can kinda see how the sausage is made sort of in a sense. Right? You could see like the actual whole thing there. I mean, I had some thoughts there. I don't know how deep you wanted to get into that specifically, but it's just interesting to me because I don't I'd love to see that, and I'm going to hop in there.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, like you said, Slack and WordCamp definitely need to make it out to some WordCamps. Missed the last one. Just wasn't deeply ingrained enough at that point. But, like, Portland, I know, coming up, so it might make it out there. There's a lot of great people in the community.
Speaker 2:Like literally I would say every single person in the community is great because they're doing work no matter what capacity, if they're product, if they're, you know, involved in WordPress core. The only like the question that I would have though is like we could go in there and we can look at everything that's happening on launch day. Are you saying though that you feel that that is unique to WordPress? I mean it's unique in the way that it works, and it's unique and there's a certain appreciation you have to have for all these different people communicating, all these different things, and there's all these people talking. But the question would be just like, is a like you said, it's a human problem.
Speaker 2:It's almost like just a baseline efficiency problem, which is just the state of it. But I don't really know if I have like a question per se, but I just don't know. I mean, do you have like a do you think it needs it's a problem that needs to be solved? Is it something that would be better if it's solved? Is it something that just the way that it is is the way that it is, and that's what makes it beautiful and makes it really good?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the challenge of it's you zoom out, there's just, like you said earlier in the interview, so many people with so many objectives who use WordPress. Everyone has a particular thing that they're going after. WordPress can't the WordPress software and WordPress community can't solve it all for us. Right?
Speaker 1:We'd love more business tracks at word word camps. But it's kinda shied upon, I think there was something in the works where we're introducing more business talks, again, folks like you and I who are really into that kind of thing. But people obviously, on the flip side, you'll have like this big commercial presence that tries to like push in and muscle their way into a word camp, and then it just becomes a big sales pitch for people. No one wants that. So I totally get it.
Speaker 1:But understanding that we all can't get, you know, our little sliver of WordPress, but solving how to get people into this community, like folks like you, you've been invested in it now for five or six years, you care, otherwise, you wouldn't be chatting about this stuff right now. You wouldn't be making videos about it. And how to get you in in the mix, so you could say, you know what? The next thing that I'll contribute to WordPress, so I'm not just the guy who is, this is harsh, because I've been accused of this too, is just profiting off of WordPress, you know? Just the guy who's profiting off of WordPress, is to contribute back.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'll, you know, read one of the support docs, and and make some changes, or whatever little thing I can do to commit to WordPress core, the smallest thing, and I'll get my name up there. That might be a fantastic thing that encourages a lot of people to care more about WordPress the community, and WordPress the software. But what I think is, I don't think it's a particular problem, it's just a challenge to get all of this stuff across 40,000 people who are in that Slack into one communication channel. So for instance, right now, where do you go? Like, I I want to WordPress admin change is coming, and the media gallery is coming.
Speaker 1:I wanna go and make my comments, because you could do that right now. You could go into the Figma file, or the make blog post, and say, you know, this button shouldn't be blue. It should be black. Right? Here's my thoughts.
Speaker 1:This is why it should be that way, and you can post that. And you could actually get that committed into it into into WordPress core if your thoughts were poignant, and it made sense, and everyone said, yes, Mark, that is fantastic. Let's do it. I think that is unlike any other piece of software that would help power my business. I'm not doing that at Zapier, I'm not doing that at, you know, HubSpot, I'm not doing that anywhere else of any other piece of software that would help my my business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's important to me.
Speaker 2:Can I can I comment on that real Yeah? Like so I would say one thing though, is that generally, I feel like if you're paying for a product, they will kind of, like They will take your feedback into consideration. They should at least because you're paying for their product. You mentioned like a Zapier or like a Webflow or something like that. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've brought up, you know, things to like Google before, and obviously Google doesn't really care. But, you know, but like, you know, like But things like that. So that's one, you know, nuance I would say there. But you're but, you know, by and large, they're completely correct. My only other thing is, like, that is amazing.
Speaker 2:You're educating me on the fact that I didn't realize that I could literally see all of like, you're basically saying, like, you know, like the Figma file or whatever, like, this is how the, you know, new media gallery is gonna look. Our media library is gonna look. And I can, like, go in there and change that. Is that is is that on the
Speaker 1:When I'm developing 2024, the new core theme, and this and but the challenge with this is, where do you get that information? Like, now, I would have to know I would have to go into GitHub, I would have to search for it, I would have to have it bookmarked. So for a busy person like me who's not living in it every day, even I am like, oh shit, gotta go to the GitHub, I gotta find it, oh, there it is, there's the link. There's no one central, like, tool where I'm gonna go to and just immediately find that. And that's what I think really needs to get solved.
Speaker 1:But yeah, when they were developing 2024, man, Rich Taber, everybody on Twitter was posting, here's the Figma files. You could see them designing it live, and I was just like and you can leave a comment. Like, I don't like this. And if you what I don't want is people to get these things in their hands, like when they launch 6.5, a new default theme. Like, you had your chance to say something.
Speaker 1:You didn't. And here we are. I gotcha. Right?
Speaker 2:Okay. No. Perfect. Love that. I think that that you're I'm a 100% with you on the fact that that needs to be more accessible and more like noticed.
Speaker 2:Because I have been in the like I said, I've been building WordPress websites since 2018 or whatever, and I've just now dove into the community a little bit more. Like I've been making videos, but like it's way more now in the last like we'll say six to twelve months just building connections with people like yourself and things like that. So that is definitely a good piece of advice and I agree with that as well. Don't, you know, complain about it after it's already been released. Like, talk about it, you know, like, try to be involved in the process.
Speaker 2:Totally get that. My only thing, and this is total speculation, this is just a question that I would have. And I'll do this because I'm actually gonna do that myself, and I'm gonna encourage everybody else to do that. The only thing that I would question without even experiencing that yet is based on all of the other discussion that we had prior to this and everything else that you hear. If you have people talking online and on the internet and everything like that, obviously there's a lot of noise in a lot of different places.
Speaker 2:But if I go into that Figma file with the mindset that I have that is probably different than the mindset that everybody else has, I am skeptical at how much that's actually gonna help. It doesn't mean I'm not gonna do it. Doesn't mean I wouldn't encourage people to do it. I'm just saying that I feel like that is still that solves the communication issue to a degree and the collaboration, but I don't know if it actually is going to change anything as far as, like, how the perspective is. Could be completely wrong there.
Speaker 2:I'm just like I said, this is just me thinking about, you know, what that would be like.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You have to want to make a difference with the expectations that look. It's like voting. I'm not gonna get I don't wanna get, like, political, but, you know, rock the vote, man. You don't like what's happening?
Speaker 1:And, like, listen, when I say that, I'm talking like local politics. Right? Because usually that's the one that you can impact the most, and I see this all the time. Why is this person on the city council again? Did you vote?
Speaker 1:No. Who if I don't you know, What's my what's my vote gonna do? It could change it. Right? Like, if you showed up, it could change it.
Speaker 1:Right? And that's the thing, for me anyway, like and I know everybody doesn't share this, and they don't need to share this. Open source and voice is or voice, my voice, sharing others voices, letting people know that they can impact this, that is core to my being. Whether that's, again, in local politics, or in WordPress, or in podcasting, where these same things happen at a much smaller scale. Right?
Speaker 1:There's an open source movement in podcasting that helps to make the RSS feed a lot better, and a lot more advanced as much as they can with that technology, versus the big players like YouTube, and Spotify, and Apple, who really just wanna keep you on their platforms. And a lot of people will go, well, what am I gonna do if I if I make a commitment to this RSS thing? What what's the big deal? These other places are gonna win. Will they?
Speaker 1:You know? Will they? Joe Rogan just came back to open RSS, whether you like his platform or not, Spotify said, oh, yeah. Keeping him just on Spotify, this ain't working. We I guess we need to go back to that old thing called the RSS feed.
Speaker 1:Yes. Because people realize it's open and everyone can have access to it. So I always say is you don't give up on trying. At least that's that's me. And, you know, a lot of people are are just in this to get to the means to the end, totally fine.
Speaker 1:But I'm just saying for those who are out there, yeah, you can commit. If you show up to those launch meetings and expect to make a change then, that's the wrong time. Certainly. Certainly, like, in the beginning, you know, commenting on on the the track tickets that open up, or I track to GitHub. I don't even know if they use track anymore.
Speaker 1:GitHub, the Figma files, yeah, the MakeBlogs, those are the times, you know, to to really chime in. And, yeah, maybe people don't maybe your your thing doesn't get adopted, but you get recognition. At least people start to know your name, and, you know, if you're the branded marketing type, like, that's how you kinda make yourself known a little bit. And then when you go to a word camp, one of the lead devs, oh, you're you're Mark. You're the guy who said this, and, yeah, I kind of agree with you, but here's why.
Speaker 1:Then you start working it out in person because, yeah, chatting online sucks. Right? And trying to find that common ground. Oh, yeah. Guess you weren't really mad when you said it should be black and not blue.
Speaker 1:You know, and fantastic things happen. But again, that's more if you care about, you know, the community of WordPress and open source, But some folks show up and they're just like, yeah, man, I'm just trying to pump out these websites. And that's what I wanna get into as we sort of close out. Let's talk about some more drama.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Love it.
Speaker 1:This is what I don't understand. And this, again, when I go into these page builder groups, man, I don't know if you spend any time there, I I can't. And if you do, I don't know how you do. Because people ask a question, and it's just you're what a stupid question that was. And then I just don't see anything thriving there when I go into these page builder communities.
Speaker 1:I'll say communities, but groups that I go into on Facebook just to get my knowledge. I'm trying to dip into all these areas so I can understand the perspective of people coming into WordPress, and it's just, wow. I don't even wanna go back in there, because I'm afraid whatever pixel they're tracking is gonna associate me with, you know, whatever's happening here. And I as much as WordPress has those challenges in the community, I don't ever find it as bad as yeah. I don't know how to do this thing in bricks.
Speaker 1:Read the freaking manual. It's like, man. Just one person asking a nice question. Your thoughts on, like, the temperament of of these other communities outside of WordPress?
Speaker 2:For sure. Definitely a definitely a topic. I as I was as I was, like, saying earlier, was, you know, in the Elementor space for a while. And truthfully, I was never in really too many, like, Elementor groups per se on Facebook. I I couple them, but it was more for, like, just, like, kinda design help and things.
Speaker 2:The big groups that I'm that I'm currently a part of off the top my head on Facebook are Crocoblock, which is a fantastic community because, like, it's also a specific plug in, and it's, like, dynamic content. So people are normally asking questions that are like, don't even know how to do that. Know, I gotta think about it. Right? So that's that's one thing to think about, one nuance of it.
Speaker 2:Bricks is a is a fun one. I actually posted in there, and it got like a 100 reactions. Like, I was like, wow. I'm so glad I switched to Bricks from Elementor. This group is so much fun.
Speaker 2:And it was it was purely because of things that you've probably seen and you've and you've probably heard about and talked about. Because, like, there was just people, like, all the time, like, huge comment threads of, like, people talking things back and forth and everything like that. And and let me stop. I am not condoning hostility or disrespect or anything like that whatsoever. Like, don't get it twisted.
Speaker 2:Occasionally I will laugh at the concept that, like you're saying, people are doing that in these groups. I don't think it's ever warranted, and I hope that people could see by the content, if they check out any of my stuff, that I'm always trying to help. I'm always more than happy to help people if they have questions. I don't look at somebody coming into the space and being like, Hey, how do I add a heading or something? Or What's a section?
Speaker 2:Or What's a container? Whatever. There's people that are on all different playing fields as far as where they're at. Like beginners versus intermediate, professional, whatever. I think the only thing that I think the thing that actually drives a lot is that people have opinions This is what I've seen.
Speaker 2:Maybe you disagree. People have opinions, and those opinions are firm, normally relatively fair to a degree, but they're firm opinions based off of lived experience that x y z person has a different lived experience of, or a different experience just in general. And then person A states opinion firmly, person B doesn't agree with that. And that's where we get to this almost emotional debate whether Brix is better than core or XYZ, or if you should do this in Brix, this way or this way. And it's like there are some people that are wired to do things what they feel is like the best practice in the best way possible.
Speaker 2:And it is very difficult, myself kind of included there. And it's very difficult to kind of get out of that frame of mind when somebody is asking you, Can I do it this way or should I do it this way? If somebody asks me should I use custom post types or should I not for, I don't know, like a bunch of services on a website or something, whatever, you know, XYZ resources, I'm gonna tell them the way to do it is custom post types. Like it's the best practice, best thing we got, whatever. And if they say, okay, I don't wanna do it that way, then at that point it's like, well, I don't feel like you're doing this the right way, so I don't really know how to help you.
Speaker 2:I can give you the second best option, but it's not gonna make your life any better. It's actually gonna make your life way worse in three months. You know what I mean? So I feel like that's especially when you have those conversations a lot. If you're in those groups, they can get toxic like that if they're not moderated well and da da da, whatever.
Speaker 2:But if you have those conversations lot, like it is just frustrating because it's like, hey, I'm trying to tell you how to do this the best way. I, as a professional in this space, regardless of how many websites I make, I'm trying to do things the best way that I know how to do them based off my experience. I don't know how to do everything right right now, but in the future I hope to be better than I am. And if other people don't have that same mindset, I think that is really what causes a lot of those we'll just call them like conflicts or different disagreements because that's, I feel like, where a lot of it stems from. There could be other things as well, but at the core of it, I don't think you're ever gonna it's harder to get rid of that stuff.
Speaker 2:The disrespect and anything like that that's out there or whatever, that shouldn't be tolerated. But those things are like the little meta things that I've picked up on that I feel like are much more understandable but at the same time do cause issues. So that's just that's my take
Speaker 1:on it. Yeah. Mean, think the fundamental issue is a lot of these groups first of all, you have you have software like Elementor and Bricks who are trying to create a GUI wrapper on code. Right? How do you do this the right way?
Speaker 1:You open up Notepad plus plus and you start coding. That's how you do it. Oh, you can't do that? Oh, okay. So then you start with WordPress.
Speaker 1:Oh, you you don't know how to edit WordPress files and and commit HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS to the server? Oh, okay. You get Elementor and Bricks, and you layer on top of that. Oh, you don't know how to use that? Okay.
Speaker 1:Now you have to, like, read the read the manual and learn how to use these tools. And I think what we found is, at Cultivate It Online, is the get rich quick scheme. Right? Where a lot of people see this as I can make $500 if I sold this website to somebody, let me just go copy paste all these things together, wrap it up, here you go, customer $500, give it to me. I I I bought that for 50, and I just made $450 in a and everybody feels great.
Speaker 1:And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that profitability and that mindset, in my opinion, so long as you actually care about the customer, the value you're providing, and and the business. Not even WordPress. Just, you care. Like, I built something good for the customer, they pay me what I'm worth, and I'll support the customer, and I'll, you know, I'll continue to think about this.
Speaker 1:But if you're just doing it like, I just made $500 and I'm out, Like, feel like a lot of these people do, then that's the issue that I have. I think people, when they go into business with that mindset, especially in web, because I've seen this with folks in my space, when I was running my agency, doing the same thing. We had a full agency, the guys that worked for me are now at Bluehost committing to WordPress core, are at Jetpack, developing Jetpack and and wordpress.com functionality. We had a solid team building really big projects. And I had guys coming to me, who my age back then, which was your age now, going, hey man, I sold this website to this guy, it's an ecommerce store, he's selling stuff out of his warehouse, he's got like 10,000 products, and I put it on a a $5 a month server, and it keeps blowing up.
Speaker 1:What can you do for me? What can I do for you? How much did you charge him? Like $1,500. $1,500?
Speaker 1:Like, if you bring that in here, it's 50,000, right, to start, and the like, the concept just couldn't. Why? Because there's so much to think about. There's so much to think about. Not even the website.
Speaker 1:Like, there's so much other things to think about, and and to develop and scale, and, you know, that get I don't wanna call it get rich quick, but that quick money mindset is not is unhealthy when you're doing it for the wrong reasons. I think a fantastic idea is to launch a website in a day for $500 for somebody, so long as the guidelines are there, and they come in, and it's answering me these three questions, I'll build a website for you, thank you very much, $500, here's how you access it, here's a little tutorial doc on your way out, I made $500. Cool. Love that idea. Should happen more often.
Speaker 1:It's when they try to just take advantage of people, is what we get. And I feel like that is just so rampant amongst these page builder tools, because they see it as a quick way to do it, unfortunately. And I encourage people to just care more about the customer and the product first. We'll talk about WordPress later, but just care about what you're doing now, and then maybe you'll care about WordPress in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know if there's a way to really police for that in any I mean, it's just the tools make it so easy. Like you said, you know, you used to have to open up Notepad plus plus code the thing, you know. I mean, I started there honestly, like in college. So it's I understand the core of it.
Speaker 2:I respect the core of it because I don't think the web is ever gonna change from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I think if you're if you're kind of professionally minded in that way, you have to at least respect that. I'm not saying you have to know every, you know, command and everything like that and and all that. But that's you know, I don't know. That's a whole discussion for a different time.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe It's just That's a whole separate thing. It's like the level of I don't wanna say the level of professionalism, because I feel like everybody that's doing this for money should Does have that. But at the same time, it's like how much How deep do you wanna go? How deep are you comfortable going? And I think that goes back to the other question I asked, is who are you trying to build for?
Speaker 2:And that's ultimately, you know, in way what I was asking with that video is like, who is this for? Who is this targeted at? Who are you as a business? And a lot of my content is not just gonna be technical stuff, it's like also talking about those types of things. You gotta care about your customer.
Speaker 2:Your processes have to be good. You have to manage expectations easily. Yeah. The biggest thing that I've learned in this industry. Regardless of who you're building for, what it is, like, if you if you build if you say you're gonna build this for this amount of money, do not deviate from that because that's how everything gets screwed up from an agency level, business level.
Speaker 2:I don't care if you're doing it for a friend. It's a nightmare. Like, so all the things that you said, you know, I agree with there. And, you know, it just depends on how like, what you wanna do, who you're building for, and and kind of all that. Like I said, bigger topic.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, definitely definitely agree there.
Speaker 1:Mark, it's been a fantastic conversation. We went really long today. Really appreciate it. We'll we'll we'll mark the calendars, we'll have you back, we'll continue this web I
Speaker 2:appreciate it, Matt.
Speaker 1:Agency discussion. You can find Mark's YouTube channel, youtube.com. You can find Mark's YouTube channel at youtube.com at mark j zomanski. Search for him. I'll link it up in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Same thing with your website, markjosephzomanski.com. Check him out. He's in Pittsburgh. You know Joe Casabono? He's in Pittsburgh as well.
Speaker 1:Feel like such a small state.
Speaker 2:I'll have to I'll have
Speaker 1:to check him out. Know, Name sounds familiar. He's a former he's a former WordPress celebrity. He gave up Oh, okay. I'll I'll say it.
Speaker 1:Joe, if you're listening, gave up on WordPress a few years ago, good on you for getting out of the the rat race. I'll link up Mark's stuff in the show notes below. Thanks everybody for listening. That's it for today's episode. Get the weekly newsletter at the wpminute.com/subscribe.
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