The WP Minute+

Matt Medeiros (00:01)
Brian Coords welcome back to the WP Minute.

Brian Coords (00:04)
Happy to be here.

Matt Medeiros (00:05)
It's the first time back since you've joined the mothership.

Brian Coords (00:09)
Is it really? Okay. Okay.

Matt Medeiros (00:10)
I think so. I think so.

Has it been a year?

Brian Coords (00:14)
Uhhh... No. It's been about eight months.

Matt Medeiros (00:18)
eight months at automatic. What is it like working at automatic these days?

Brian Coords (00:23)
it's a, it's a loaded question. No, it's, ⁓ it's great. mean, what, what, the reason I went there is because I felt like a lot of smart people go there and they're working on big things that have a huge scale of impact, especially like being on the WooCommerce side, which I was a little new to. I didn't really have a huge amount of WooCommerce work when I worked at an agency. So, just understanding that ecosystem, I feel like I'm just.

fully grasping that side of the community, is very different than the WordPress side. But it's great. I love being in a place where it's big impact and a lot of people.

Matt Medeiros (01:02)
The, I feel like we're probably on the tail end of what kicked off to be ⁓ quite a shit storm for all of us about a year ago. I feel like we're on the backside of that. mean, there's still, you know, there's things that are still happening. I'm not asking you to comment on that stuff. But where I am going with this is I think we're at a place coming out of this perfect storm where I've been a real public ⁓ proponent.

for automatic, right, for automatic to ⁓ continue to innovate, still with a critical eye on like what I, you know, again, in my two cents, my armchair quarterbacking is around automatic, but I still think that automatic is very important to the longevity of WordPress, and of course, the range of products that automatic has, of which is WooCommerce, which we'll talk about today.

I'm just curious ⁓ again on your thoughts on I guess the general vibe of what you can share where automaticians think about innovating and steering the ship of WordPress or in your case WooCommerce. What's the temperature internally you feel?

Brian Coords (02:10)
⁓ yeah, I mean, I feel like I came in at an interesting time. Obviously, I came in after last year's WordCamp US, when there was just a lot of stuff happening in the ecosystem. So, it's not like a surprise to me. and then specifically coming into WooCommerce, which was really ramping up like their marketing efforts. I'm technically Dev Advocacy, we're in the marketing team. So we're really, I get like a firsthand

seat at watching them go from a pretty

small team to just growing, investing, really prioritizing marketing, really seeing like what that means for marketing a product that's free, first of all, and open source. And second of all, not a decision you usually make lightly, like picking your e-commerce platform. It's not like, I'll just try that out. It's definitely, you know, that's something that takes months and stakeholders and people do agree to. So it's such a kind of a unique thing. But I think what I feel like the big theme that I keep seeing inside now, and I even just kind of wrote about it this morning.

is this idea that like WordPress needs to be more cohesive and it needs to be more like WooCommerce WordPress, all the other extensions. Like we really need to be building one really good platform for everybody. And this, what I call like balkanization of like different experiences, different page builders, different worlds. Like I think in the AI era that we're entering, it's, it's super critical for everything to really come back to core and for people to really invest back in WordPress core because

we need this stuff to be compatible, we need it to be interchangeable. So a lot of what I see at WooCommerce is actually we're building stuff for WordPress core so that we can use it in WooCommerce, but we want it to be something that's fundamentally available to everybody. And I think that that's been the big shift I've seen, which is like, let's get back to making WordPress core better so that Woo and all the extensions on top of it and all the page-wills and everybody can use this stuff, whether it's the AI stuff or Gutenberg or any of the other big initiatives.

Matt Medeiros (04:08)
I'll press you a little bit more on the general vibe internally, but minutes before we hit record, you published an email, probably a blog post as well. Open Source is a trade off. That was the title. I want to talk about that in a moment. I'm curious about, because I agree, like I agree that WordPress kind of needs to have, I guess, a standard, standard feeling, a standard way, a standard approach, a standard avatar that wants to use.

⁓ WordPress. But I'm wondering, as you pointed out in your piece, like it allowed other players like an Elementor or a Cadence to build on top of that. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that experience. For years now we've gone with like, okay, WordPress can be this healthy foundation, but if you want a thing tailored to you, go get Elementor or go get ⁓ Cadence in the case of your article. But I'm wondering if you think that

Can that truly continue to exist?

Brian Coords (05:03)
I mean...

The difference I said is that when we build for the entire WordPress platform, it moves extremely slow. that, let's just a fact. I Gutenberg is, I think most people would say moved slower than people expected. A lot of features, even the AI stuff, which I think is moving tremendously fast. A lot of people, the reason I wrote that post, were complaining that it's moving too slow. I disagree with that, but I can get that general sense. And so sometimes you got to go out you got to build something really specific and you got to something really tailored. I think, I know a lot of people

WordPress platforms for a different vertical and they use a very specific set of plugins and the customers have no idea they're on WordPress, but they, you know, tailor it to this very specific audience. I think that's great. Like I think you need that because I those specific fast things help inform the product, but it's like the second half of it is like, can you bring those findings back to the project? Can you, you know, share like, know Elementor is working with the AI team. They, they went really fast, built a really cool AI integration, and now they're going to coming back with stuff.

that they've learned, they're gonna bring it back to core. I think your interview with the GoDaddy recently talked about some of that same stuff. And so I think as long as people keep doing that and not just arm share quarterback the project, but actually build a thing, see how it works, bring the findings back to core, contribute, I think then we're in a good place.

Matt Medeiros (06:25)
Now that you're on the inside, how do you evaluate the reception of, again, we'll just use that same phrase, armchair quarterbacking. Have you seen it differently now that you're on the inside of, okay, there's all this noise, let's say on Twitter and Slack groups, probably at WordCamps. Are they internalizing that information? I mean, I know you're just working with the WooCommerce team, so maybe you can speak directly just to the WooCommerce stuff.

But are they hearing us, they being automatic, and what can you share about how that's internalized with the teams?

Brian Coords (06:56)
Yeah.

I mean, that's technically my job. Like a developer advocate, your job is to listen to the community, figure out where their pain points are, bring it back to the engineers and hopefully prioritize those specific things. At the end of the day, like there's a lot of priorities in WordPress and WooCommerce and any platform. You know, you have everything from partners that you're trying to work with. You have everything from the hosting companies that you're trying to appease. You have the users, you have the developers, we have a whole extension marketplace. You know what the end user wants from, you know,

the checkout form in WooCommerce is one thing and what the extension developer who wants to make money selling an ad on wants from it is another thing. Those are two different competing priorities. So I think there's definitely a sense of listening. There's definitely a sense of, there's a lot of conversations. I would say most things that get posted online get discussed internally. mean, you know, the, the tweets are shared, they're discussed, people are aware of it. We write, you know, little roundup posts. We do office hours and we present it to everybody. ⁓

But at the end of day, there's like 500,000 things you gotta work on and...

only so many people and you do have to prioritize a little bit. And at a certain point when some people are maybe not the most like positive in their communication online, there's, know, and this was before I even worked at automatic. just, you know, some people I just have to mute. I just have to say, you know what, this isn't helpful to me. And so I think if you're trying to get a point across and you're doing it through, you know, maybe some aggressive,

personal attacks and things like that. Like, yeah, sorry, no one's gonna take you seriously on that. But no, these things all get talked about. It's just a matter of what's the most urgent thing right now in any given week, you know?

Matt Medeiros (08:39)
Yeah, yeah, once again, like we've been saying this now for decades. A lot of the issues with WordPress is a human issue, right? It's just humans communicating, you know, whether there's a lack of communication or people feel like they can have some kind of control in the entire project. That stuff that you and I have debated on this channel before, like what is open source? And again, still going to get to some of your things in email. I was watching a local city council meeting the other day and it's just like, I get it, like taxes are keep going up. People are like, yeah, keep taxes. You know, and they had this whole

you know, the citizens input time and you just have people come in who want to like advocate for, you know, keeping taxes stable for the next year or the water prices going up, everything's going up. But they'll come in and they'll just insult everybody like on the city council. And I'm just watching this going, how do you ever think this is going to work when you literally come in and insult everyone? And then it's just like, but keep my taxes down. We're not moving in a sensible direction.

But again, this is just sort of, at least in my opinion, a lot of the stuff that happens in WordPress is mirroring just human issues. And I try to be as understanding as possible and understanding when people have strong opinions on things, they're just trying to express really what they're struggling with within the project, as long as they're not just like,

again, doing those personal attacks.

Brian Coords (09:59)
Yeah, sometimes I have to do the, you know, they call it like the disagree and commit, you know, mindset where it's not like I agree with every decision ever being made around me, but at a certain point you just commit to the work because there's plenty of things to work on, you know?

Matt Medeiros (10:14)
Yeah, I promise we'll get to WooCommerce. I also saw ⁓ before, literally before we hopped on a new page that just, I think it was just published about WooCommerce versus Shopify and it looked really nice. But I want to talk about this, like the AI stuff. And this definitely lends into WooCommerce. And this is more of like a high level thinking because, you know, we saw some criticism of like, hey, AI is moving so fast. What's WooCommerce doing? What's WordPress doing?

You put out this piece about open source is a trade off. I read it quickly. My first thought when I read your words is like, are we in the lens of AI, this is hard for me to formulate because literally just read it before. In the world of AI, I feel like we're almost saying like AI is awesome. We got to incorporate this into WordPress. And then what are we left with?

with WordPress as just like the open source thing. Like I get we get to save our data and our code, but it's almost like we're just renting out the real intelligent part to AI. And it's just like, what do we have left if we're defending for open source, but then we're also like, the critical thinking piece, that's over there on that hosted platform with AI, right? And then at the end of the day, what do we own? we own the framework of WordPress that holds some data. It's almost like,

What are we vying for when we want more AI in WordPress? And I'm guilty of this as anyone, because I love AI, but I start to think, I don't have control of this. I'm outsourcing all this to OpenAI, Claude, whatever. And we're left with what, open source WordPress? And it's hard for me to frame it, but I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that.

Brian Coords (11:49)
Yeah.

I mean, there's a few things. Number one is if you want to build anything like in the block editor, you got to go through a build process, right? You got to use react and you got to use a thing and it's going to compile a bunch of scripts and you got to move that to a server. Like the days of like, opened my WordPress and I tinker with some PHP. Like you can still do that, but at the end of the day, there's a bit more like things happening to your stuff before it shows up on your WordPress site. And I think that that concept of like, there's a build process. It handles all of this other stuff. It compiles all these

things. I think AI is just kind of another thing like that, where it's like, this is the table stakes for working with technology nowadays. You just, need this kind of additional processing to make the kind of experiences people are expecting online. And that's just the way it is. But it doesn't mean, you know, WordPress isn't out there saying we're putting open AI's, know, paid tier inside your WordPress site. Like you want to, it's a, it's an open framework. So if you want to connect to like a local model, think, you know, Chrome will probably have some, I think it already does has

some

local models in it. you know, I think there's a lot of opportunities for you to use your own open source models and use that as the foundation layer of your AI on your WordPress site, if that's important to you. But, ⁓ ultimately at the end of the day, it's like, just need a place for my content and for myself on the internet. And whether I use AI to get content in there or to design it or to make changes to it, whether I use WP CLI, whether I use any of these tools at the end of the day, it's like, I just want a place where my content lives and I

take it wherever I want and I can tweak whatever I want and I can modify it. I I think that's kind of all I care at the end of the day whether you use open AI or some private open source model.

Matt Medeiros (13:31)
Let's talk about this WooCommerce MCP stuff. I'll be honest, I haven't dived too deep into it. I'm not completely sold on MCP as a thing, okay? you know, there's something about it. It's something about it like, look how cool this thing is over here, but it's a black box, you know, where I'm, I like API routes, I like endpoints. I can go, this is what I have access to.

Brian Coords (13:39)
I've heard.

Matt Medeiros (13:54)
And how do you limit me? Well, it's whatever the response is times how many responses you can give me in a certain window. Like that makes sense to me. The MCP stuff almost is just like, yeah, you can go ask this thing over here. It's going to give you a kind of a response back. You can do other things with it, but it's just not, you know, we'll see what happens in the middle here. And I ran a perfect example of this with like Claude MCP with my Stripe account and ⁓ Google Sheets, I think with the two like integrations. And it was just like,

25 minutes of trying to export customer information from, know, prompting customer information from Stripe into this Google Sheet cells of like custom reports all the way to find out like, no, the MCP doesn't give you that information. It's just like, I see. I see. Maybe there'll be a future like a different tier of MCPs and it's just a way to tax of getting information. All of this is not open web stuff. With that.

pretext to tell me what WooCommerce MCP is all about and what it's looking to achieve.

Brian Coords (14:55)
Yeah, I mean, I'll just say like in terms of MCP, I'm sort of with you where I would not be shocked if like MCP is, you know, not around in five years. but I think luckily the way WordPress is doing it, they've been pretty smart where they're separating the functionality from the protocol. So, you know, with rest API, it's like, if you have rest API, you have rest API. If you want GraphQL, you gotta go get the GraphQL plugin. These are very separate things.

to build it. So they've done this abstraction layer of the abilities API where you just make these like abilities and they're basically like tools and it's like get my products, update a product, get my orders, get my posts, all these sort of like tools. They really do map pretty closely to the rest API endpoints. I think that's just going to naturally happen. But at the end of the day, the abilities are kind of the more important thing. The MCP is there, but I think WordPress is going to provide that and that's one way to interact with it. Like, hey,

Claude get my, you know, 20 last orders and what was the most popular product, that kind of stuff. Like I think that's going to be useful, but I actually think the abilities API side of it is much more interesting because then instead of exposing it to like an MCP, we could expose it to the command palette and WordPress. And I could just talk to my WordPress site through the command palette or through some sort of a chat interface or something like that. And MCP is not really part of the picture. So I feel like MCP is useful as a marketing term because it's gotten a lot of buzz.

and all that sort of stuff, but I think the superpower is really going to be these abilities, and I think we're going to see other ways that they get exposed in the future. But yeah, they're going to look like REST API endpoints. I think that's kind of just what's happening.

Matt Medeiros (16:37)
If there's a, well there certainly is, a WooCommerce developer agency, freelancer listening to this, why should they get excited for this technology? Especially if they have been steeped in AI for a few months now. What's the exciting thing that MCP is going to unlock for them?

Brian Coords (16:56)
I think, I mean, if you're, if you're managing a bunch of woos stores, you're probably using WP CLI and you have a lot of commands there. think the MCP just adds kind of a natural layer, natural language layer on top of it, which is kind of like, I don't want to remember a bunch of commands. I don't want to do all this stuff. It's already cataloged all the tools that you've made available. So don't have to remember WP WC product, find the ID, whatever. can just say, Hey, go find this product and update the price to this. And I think.

that natural language communication is kind of the key selling point. I think if you don't need natural language communication, you'll probably find yourself being like, man, this was easier with code. This was easier with the terminal, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, if you want to start interacting with stores through natural language and then getting those results and then doing something with it, like get these results and then go do this other thing, I think that sort of approach would be pretty interesting. But it's also early days.

Matt Medeiros (17:58)
Is there a way for folks to start playing with this technology right now?

Brian Coords (18:04)
Yeah, so the...

WordPress side of it, it's not in core yet, but it should be in 6.9, which will be like early December, I think. But if you're on WooCommerce, they've like ingested the composer packages so you can start playing with it just through your WooCommerce site now without having to worry about the WordPress side of it. You just need 10.3 or higher and then you gotta go to like the settings screen and like turn on the experimental feature and you gotta get your keys and stuff. Like it's still pretty developer centric in terms of adding an MCP server. I think we'll see people in the product space

like make that easier for people. think we'll start seeing those one-click integrations come. But for now, yeah, if you get 10.3, the beta just dropped the day we're recording this. So you can throw a beta on a, you know, I wouldn't do this on your live site, but throw it on a staging site, turn on the feature. It honestly takes you about, if you've done MCP before, it takes you like a minute or two to turn it on.

Matt Medeiros (18:56)
Can somebody connect up with ChatGPT or Claude or is this strictly for a particular thing?

Brian Coords (19:02)
No, MCP is used by, so I've done it in Claude, I've done it in Claude code, I've done it in VS code, so like the copilot kind of thing. All three of those have like a way to do MCP. I've never messed with, I don't use ChachiPT a lot personally, I just like, it's just not in my toolkit really, so I don't know about that one.

Matt Medeiros (19:22)
And I think like, you know, some of the advantages here again, if MCP is what it says it's going to be and is actually doing what it's what it's told, like some advantages here could be just like you said, ⁓ plain language talking to your commerce store saying all the red, you know, baseball caps should be 1999 now, right? Or we're running a sale for

you know, whatever all scarfs take 15 % off the price of all scarfs and or maybe show the the sale indicator option again, if if all the natural language stuff works, all the way up to like, hey, create me 100 or you know, whatever, take 100 inventory from one database and put it into my WooCommerce store if MCP is doing its thing, it's talking to one data source and importing that into WooCommerce and then maybe even prompting you to say

Okay, I need product descriptions. Oh, that's all in my Google Docs store. Look for all the Google Docs stores for that. I it's never gonna work that way. Let's just say it. But there is a desire for it to be that easy, I think.

Brian Coords (20:22)
Yeah, well.

other.

My next blog post was like gonna be about, what did I call it? Like a productivity, it's like a productivity hype. I forgot what I was gonna call it. But like where people have these like, got 10 agents doing this and it's connecting to this and all this sort of stuff. I mean, good for them. I just don't see that we're at that phase yet. It does, know, a lot of stuff is trial and error and hit and miss. think that's okay. Because I think when you do something and you do see something work, you kind of get a glimpse of that potential when you're like, oh, okay, this thing just.

created this for me and so I think we'll see a lot of that stuff. But yeah, think those sort of big products sort of like changes and that sort of stuff is gonna be, it's gonna be pretty useful once it works.

Matt Medeiros (21:11)
Yeah, one of the biggest criticisms that I've had largely about maybe Matt's ⁓ approach of branding with automatic is like rarely talking about commerce when I when I see him go on to, you know, a bigger podcast or something like that. And it's always obviously I get it. It's talking about WordPress first and foremost, but then about the acquisitions of, you know, let's say, beeper, you know, the different clay.

Tumblr, like all this stuff, all the other messaging platforms. Like you hear about these acquisitions, and then it's like, by the way, we also have WooCommerce. And I was like, why is it always just like, by the way, we have WooCommerce. I think I've seen a lot more marketing stuff coming down, at least in my email. There's a new marketing vice president, president, director? I don't know what the title is, right? CMO that's, you know, steering this ship.

What's the direction internally now? Like, how are they thinking about approaching marketing and WooCommerce? Is it first and foremost developers and agencies and that's the bread and butter? Or are they going to start knocking on the door of, you know, the person who just tends to go to Shopify to do something because it's just a household name in their head?

Brian Coords (22:19)
Yeah, I I think we did an event a while back where our CMO and some of our marketing people kind of laid out the strategy. so we did a write-up of it too, you can read. And I think a big part of it is like, we still really are focused on the key differentiators. I mean, I don't like that we're always compared to Shopify, but I can understand why it happens. But I think the things that we're narrowed down on are like extensibility. I think that that's always gonna be, you know,

that you can customize and be extensible, but that means that's a certain person who wants that. You know what I mean? Like the average mom and pop doesn't care about the extensibility or customization. They just want to get up and running. But right now we're really focused on selling extensibility. Another one is total cost of ownership. Like, yeah, it's cheaper to get started with another platform, but once you get over a certain dollar amount or you want to do different payment providers or you want to be more global, all these other things, that total cost gets a lot higher on other platforms. But again, that's speaking to a very

specific segment of the market that cares about total cost of ownership. So I think you can see that there's kind of a trend in like where the marketing is going. And I think it's, you know, for really just like a very specific subset of e-commerce. But I think the value of that is that it hopefully brings, you know, a lot of these tools and stuff back down to the stack. But like we are kind of focused on like a very specific part of the audience because I think that's just where WooCommerce tends to win.

Matt Medeiros (23:47)
I'm looking at this landing page, is WooCommerce.com slash WooCommerce, hyphen versus hyphen Shopify or VS. I'll link it up. I'll link it up in the show notes. So WooCommerce versus Shopify, top e-commerce platform as the number one global e-commerce platform. We're proud to power millions of online stores, including more of the top one million stores by revenue than Shopify. Four million stores built with WooCommerce, the top one million e-commerce sites. And then.

Of course, anchoring to 43 % of the Internet runs on WordPress. A bunch of accolades there. It's certainly a nice looking site. This is the first time I've seen a more direct comparison to Shopify, specifically with WooCommerce, or specifically from automatic, specifically from WooCommerce. People like to say, though, that Shopify is just the thing you turn on and everything's there. It's just easier.

How do you think we get there to at least start making WooCommerce easier when I think the biggest challenge is, is WooCommerce even easy yet? I mean, excuse me, is WordPress even easy yet before they even get to WooCommerce? How do you think we make that transition?

Brian Coords (24:56)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely ⁓ a big question internally. And like I said, like I think there's, there's powerful and there's easy. And I think we do focus 10. We tend to focus more on powerful. I spent a lot of time on Reddit recently, just because I feel like a lot of builders, developers hang out there and you'll open up any Shopify subreddit, Wix subreddit, whatever. It's all the same problems. Like it's, it, there's definitely a perception from the WordPress side that these other platforms are doing it easier because they're bigger. They have a lot more money.

and that sort of thing. like, if you go into the actual users, you'll see all the same problems that everybody is having. It's really hard to do this. I'm using all these app, they call them apps, we call them plugins, and they're not compatible, and no one's responding me on support. there's, you know, all these other platforms have a lot of those problems. And so it's kind of just a matter of finding out what our strength is and I think leaning into that. But I do kind of agree that what's supposed to make WooCommerce a lot easier in terms of at least customized

your store is the block editor. It's very heavily invested in the block editor. can, know, Elementor has a great integration so you can go that route also, but like in terms of where the focus is, it's on the block editor and I kind of...

Agree that a lot of that stuff has to be fixed in Gutenberg because there's actually been times in the past where WooCommerce has done a whole new like screen for editing your products. It's like the product editor. call it. So it's like where you go and manage your product and you know, set the prices and stuff. And I think they've done like maybe two versions of it in like the new WordPress UI and both versions. They just hit these walls kind of stalled out. So this time around it's a lot more like, all right, let's fix what

needs to happen in Gutenberg and the site editor and that sort of React side of WordPress upstream so that when we use these tools we're using the same thing everybody has access to we don't have to make it all extensible because it already is but like that means fixing the WordPress stuff and you know WordPress also had a big pause of contributions over the last year so like that kind of affected that time frame but yeah I mean I think a lot of that is just you know we got to get Gutenberg kind of over that finish line a little bit

Matt Medeiros (27:07)
How much communication happens from the internal team at WooCommerce? Well, before I ask that question, how similar, this is a weird question for me to ask, because I honestly don't know the answer. I've never even thought about it until literally right now. How similar is the contribution process or I guess, lack of a better phrase, like the community aspect of WooCommerce in comparison to

to WordPress. In WordPress, if we're just talking WordPress, you and I have done many shows on this. Hey, you wanna contribute something? Come up with an idea, post it on GitHub, get some people around it, have somebody develop it, know, advocate for your cause or your feature, and then hopefully it makes its way into WordPress. Does that same thing happen on the WooCommerce side?

Brian Coords (27:54)
yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say it's definitely more like WooCommerce is WooCommerce. know what I mean? It's not like obviously WordPress.com isn't leading where WordPress open source is going, but like WooCommerce.com, you know, is managing the product and leading it. like we get every single release has some amount of community contributions for sure. Like the, there's constant, some of it's bug fixes, but some of it's bigger features for the new Stripe agentic protocol. We, one of the

fields that we don't have, but we need is MPN. It's like manufacturer part numbers. They expect that in this new agent to commerce stuff, right? But a community contributor named Brian, actually opened a PR for it maybe a weeks ago or a month, month or so ago, built the entire feature. and so now we just get to go to his PR, maybe make sure the testing is good and all that sort of stuff. But like, that'll be a critical piece and a community member who manages a bunch of sites and just needed the feature built it for us. And that happens. That's

definitely a bigger scale like a whole feature but like yeah every release is community contributions especially from people building extensions agencies building sites yeah it's it's there

Matt Medeiros (29:02)
And what's that crossover like where the WooCommerce team talking, if at all, intimately with the Gutenberg team, right? I mean, so many of the folks at Automatic are core contributors. Is it just that native crossover because they're also working at WooCommerce and they're part of Automatic? Or what's that team setup look like? How do they talk to each other, say, hey, we need this better in WooCommerce?

Brian Coords (29:25)
Yeah, I mean a lot of features. I think we've got versus the best like The most extended version of WordPress, right? It's like the the version of WordPress that has the most need to extend things and change things so there's a lot of teams that Go back and forth and contribute upstream like right now. We're working on There's a feature called the interactivity API, which is you know kind of handles like front-end interactions on your website So if a block wants an accordion or tabs or something like that and the team that manages that have spent the last few months

just

building Woo blocks because that's the best way to figure out what people need. We have a little group of extension developers that are also extending the blocks and they're community members. They interact with the team that's building it and we basically say like, all right, what are we trying to do with blocks? How can the interactivity API solve this and lay out all that stuff? And then that foundational work is gonna end up in core because this is the team that got acquired by Automatic a while back.

specifically for the interactivity API. So yeah, I mean, it's pretty fluid in the same way that any other company would be because, you know, we're not the only, WooCommerce is the only company contributing things back upstream. A lot of companies are, and they do the same way, which is we need something, we'll build it in core, and it'll match our use case. Yeah, you see that a lot.

Matt Medeiros (30:42)
Again, now that you're on the inside, what is the marketplace? There's my friend Brian and there's Brian who works at WooCommerce. That's how I lead these interviews. Talk to me about like just now that you've seen it. I guess that's the better phrase. Like now that you've been in there for ⁓ eight or so months, I'm just curious, what is the marketplace?

Brian Coords (30:46)
I like how you say that, like I have some sort of insights or something to provide to you and I really don't.

Matt Medeiros (31:06)
temperature-like or vibe in comparison to a WordPress.org plugin repo for WordPress businesses, right? Is it easier and friendlier to be a WordPress business with WooCommerce add-ons or extensions and go to WooCommerce.com and say, hey, I got a business, I'm trying to make sales, what do you got for me on the marketplace side? How can you help me get more visibility, co-branding or co-marketing, I should say?

versus the .org, which is kind of like, keep your paid shit out of here. And good luck on the premium side. Now that you're on the inside, what do you see?

Brian Coords (31:42)
Yeah, mean, there's almost no comparison between the plugin directory and the WooCommerce marketplace because the WooCommerce marketplace, it's easier now, but it's always had a really high barrier to entry.

There's integrations that you have to do as part of your plugin. There's an entire testing suite that you have to pass that tests for any sort of errors because like nine times out of 10, when there's a problem with WooCommerce, it's because an extension did a thing that nobody expected them to do, right? That's very often what's the issue. So there's a whole testing suite that's like figuring out, sure you're using every function the exact way you're hooking into filters and actions the right way. They're rolling out right now, like performance testing.

like it can't slow down the admin, can't slow down the front end, and it has to pass all this every time you release an update. So it's definitely, WordPress plugin directory, you can just bytecode something, and as long as there's no glaring errors in it, you're good to go. So no, it's a huge different thing, and I don't know if WordPress needs that kind of a thing, but this is definitely, the marketplace here is much more like an app store, much more vetted, much more quality controlled.

Matt Medeiros (32:50)
I will go back, take one step back to the AI stuff in the context of this marketplace. A lot of folks that I talk to are like, my God, you're gonna replace whole plugins with AI. And yeah, I mean, probably maybe in the future, but again, just getting your sense of AI in the WooCommerce marketplace, like,

Do you see trending in that direction where we're like, I need to be able to, I don't know, have a pop-up for the store, one of those alerts that say, hey, John Smith just bought this product, show it to create urgency. I can see AI kind of creeping into that space, which is like a lot of these little small extensions that we see. What's your take on AI sort of absorbing the WooCommerce extensions pie, if you will?

Brian Coords (33:35)
⁓ yeah, I mean...

Matt Medeiros (33:37)
I mean, anything is possible,

right?

Brian Coords (33:39)
Anything is possible. know, was like, the extensions is not like the critical line item on the business. So I'm not concerned about it from like a WooCommerce point of view, but I think we want there to be a marketplace. want community developers. We want an ecosystem. I think just from like a meta perspective, think ecosystems are important. So like if AI is going to ruin any ecosystem around any piece of software, I think that's a problem because I think people will lose interest in it if they're not invested in it in the way that

you are when you're part of an ecosystem and the health of the whole thing matters to you. so I'm concerned about it from that point of view. I don't think we're anywhere near AI building a plugin on your live site and you know, like just anybody's going to be able to do that. And I also think like at the end of the day, like w like the most baseline thing that AI is trying to solve right now is like support. And you know, we're still not there yet with just basic support, just basic answer my question about this thing. Like it's getting better. AI support is improving, but

like we haven't even solved that. So let alone, I'm not even worried about build an entire functionality that I need to spec from a person who has never built software before. I think we're still so far from that and software vibe coding is really only successful with like that Centaur model they call it where it's like a human does the thinking and they have the experience and stuff. So I mean, maybe ask again in a couple of years but I don't think that's a near term concern.

Matt Medeiros (35:02)
Yeah, I that would get me down a whole other path of like, do I really think AI is going to be as impactful as all the trillions of dollars say that that you will and all the deals with NVIDIA and Intel and AMD and I don't know, OpenAI just had their thing today. I haven't even looked at what's come out, but I'm still like, is this really replacing all the jobs that people are saying or not?

Anyway, we won't go down that path, that's for different episode. Brian, what's one thing that ⁓ you want folks to know about WooCommerce these days? Is it a feature? Is there a new version coming? What is it that you think is the most important takeaway for WooCommerce? And say the WordPress professionals listening to this.

Brian Coords (35:46)
What? am I coming out? Because that will give me the time frame of...

Matt Medeiros (35:49)
This will be

in like two weeks.

Brian Coords (35:52)
Okay, then I will be at WordCamp Canada, most likely.

Yeah, then you will

Matt Medeiros (35:57)
Find him there.

Brian Coords (35:59)
be right around the corner from WooCommerce 10.3. I think if you look at the actual releases of WooCommerce, James Kemp had led this kind of, he called it more in core charge of getting really baseline functionality. And so by 10.3, it's like cost of goods sold, that kind of stuff is gonna be there. The first beta version of shipment tracking, so send your customers their shipment tracking code, they get emails, you get to manage it all in WooCommerce.

will be there, MCP, all this sort of stuff. I feel like by the end of this year, WooCommerce has hit a lot of those baseline points that people were sort of expecting from it. And I feel like the thing to do, I would say, is just engage with the community. the hardest part is when people stop telling us what they need or where the pain points are. And so that's kind of the main thing that I'm always looking for is what are the pain points? I mean, I have a good list of them, but I'll always take more.

Matt Medeiros (36:53)
Yeah. Brian Cords, you told me the other day or you mentioned in Slack to follow, is it blog.woocommerce.com? Developer.woocommerce.com? What's the call to action here?

Brian Coords (37:06)
Yeah, if you go to developer.wooCommerce.com, that's the developer blog. It's really like if you're building stores, building extensions, selling WooCommerce to other people, you should definitely be on that. There's a good newsletter. We send stuff around. also do, I think by the time this comes out, we'll probably be doing a live event with Automatic for Agencies presenting like, I mean, there's actually pretty really good deals if you do the Automatic for Agencies program. It's like there's a lot of revenue share, like that kind of stuff in there. So we're gonna be talking about that. But like the developer blog is

like you'll get the release updates, you'll get the newsletter, you'll get links to good stuff, ⁓ you'll know when something new is coming and how to test it out and how to play with it. So developer.woo.com.

Matt Medeiros (37:47)
The tagline on that page says, open source e-commerce with limitless possibilities. Fully customizable e-commerce platform. Thanks for hanging out today, Brian.

Brian Coords (37:55)
Thank you, Matt.