Press This: Word Around The Campfire December 2023

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download episodes directly from WMR.fm.

Now on each episode of Press This, we tend to focus around one topic at a time, which means we miss some of the broader news in the WordPress universe. That’s why each month we do our special Word Around the Campfire episode, where we get to talk about WordPress news, and we often have special guests joining us to talk about this news and help us find the little bits that we might’ve missed. Joining us this month for Word Around the Campfire is Mike Davey, the Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. Mike, how are you doing today?

Mike Davey: Oh, not bad, Doc. And how about you?

DP: I’m doing really well. And, we are also joined by Jeff Chandler, Marketing Generalist at StellarWP. Howdy, Jeff.

Jeff Chandler: Hello, hello. Glad to be on the show.

DP: Let’s dive into it. I think the biggest news since the last Word Around the Campfire, episode is WordPress 6.4 and 6.4.1. This was an underrepresented-gender-led release, meaning it was made possible by women and nonbinary people from around the world. It features hundreds of new improvements. It seems to me like it’s mostly focusing on speed improvements and subtle under-the-hood improvements, kind of working around, you know, all the stuff that the Usability Team has been working on. Mike, can you kind of tell us a little bit about some of the main takeaways you had with 6.4?

MD: I mean, I haven’t actually had a chance to experiment with it yet myself, but I noticed that the Command Palette seems to be coming along quite nicely, And that was something that was introduced just in WordPress 6.3, but you can really use that now to, it’s getting a little better to be able to quickly find what you need, perform tasks efficiently, and just sort of speed up your workflow a bit.

DP: A lot of improvements to, like you said, the Command Palette and Block Editor improvements as well. I was mostly focusing, I guess on front-end speed, but there have been a lot of things that we saw with the Gutenberg releases that are out, I think we’re on 16.4 or something like that. And they had a lot of cool tweaks in there. Jeff, did you see any tweaks that you were interested in?

JC: I haven’t taken a look at WordPress 6.4 that deeply, but according to the release notes, there are more than a hundred performance-related updates, which should benefit everyone. I know that Block Hooks is pretty interesting out there for developers. I think it’s pretty neat now that you can share patterns across sites. So if you have a custom pattern on one site, you can basically export them as JSON files from the site’s editor’s patterns view, and then you can transfer that to another site. So that’s pretty nice. Um, you can rename group blocks. That’s not something I do, but I know there’s been a lot of fanfare around that.

And one of the things I’ve seen out there in the ecosystem is that the Twenty Twenty-Four default theme you know, over the years, there’s been this knack or kind of this ongoing complaint of the WordPress default themes not being designed to a point where they’re actually great to use as a default experience or a default way of showing, showcasing your blog or your website. And apparently, this new Twenty Twenty-Four theme is fantastic. It’s a home run. I’ve heard and read nothing but great things about this default theme, and I hope this is a sign of great things to come for future default themes.

DP: I am a huge fan of the Twenty Twenty-Three theme and have not upgraded to Twenty Twenty-Four. I just kind of like did a major overhaul of my site, mostly built around the Twenty Twenty-Three theme. So I’m not looking to totally undo that. So I haven’t explored the Twenty Twenty-Four theme as much. I’ve heard that it’s a very opinionated theme in terms of a lot of these default themes, we try to keep them very flexible, I guess, and kind of usable for everyone. But I’ve heard some comments that maybe this one is a little less flexible, a little like designed with like, here’s how we think this should look, which is fine. I mean, I think in the end, uh, it’s not the job of the default theme to kind of be usable for everyone. I think, if we look at the default themes instead of thinking of like, oh, it’s time to start switching to this theme, I think a lot of folks might be like, oh, this. Twenty Twenty theme is perfect for what you need. And Twenty Twenty-Three theme was perfect for what I need and Twenty Twenty-Four might not be, you know, for me, but it might be really useful for someone else. So just really good examples that aren’t meant for everyone. They’re just kind of meant maybe for certain purposes. You know, They decided to kind of think a little bit more like how do most people use WordPress, not just bloggers. So there’s a lot of interesting stuff there. And I think the design for Twenty Twenty-Four is definitely stellar—the last few default themes, you know, the year themes have just been really killer. Again, Twenty Twenty-Three, it’s just a personal favorite of mine.

JC: The big difference with the Twenty Twenty-Four theme, which highlights where we’re basically at with WordPress now and Full Site Editing and the Block Editor and whatnot, is that it comes with over 35 templates and patterns. Now, if you go back in the day, you know, these templates or patterns would be, you know, template files or various CSS, or you would have to make separate child themes, uh, of a parent theme, or you’d have to have a theme framework.

No, you could, you could change your default theme and have a different look, and different experience, and rearrange things. And there’s like over 35 different ways you could do that all built into this default theme. And that’s, that’s kind of where we’re going here is now you can create one theme, but once you add in all these different patterns and templates, that one theme can translate, you know, it’s like having 20 or 50 or 100 different themes in one.

DP: Yeah, and I think that’s what they did similar to the Twenty Twenty-Three theme where they had, I think eight kinds of sub-themes split up within the Twenty Twenty-Three theme so that you were able to pick something that—you’re mainly going for the theme, and then once you have that, then you kind of flavor it with like preselected fonts and color palettes and things like that. So it sounds like that’s what they’re doing with the Twenty Twenty-Four as well?

JC: Yes.

DP: Cool. And Jeff, before the show, we were talking, Mike and I were talking about the 6.4.1 release, which came out, I think 24 hours after 6.4 was out, and we just were totally stumped on it. Can you help explain to us what that release was about?

JC: A developer put in a GitHub request or a pull request and it related to a very odd issue this person was experiencing with curl. And curl is computer software, it’s a computer software project, it’s a library. It’s a command-line tool for transferring data using various network protocols. It’s how WordPress can communicate with your website, and how you can download updates for your theme or your plugin or core.

And when they pushed out this update, this pull request, which got merged into WordPress core, it turns out that on a specific set of versions of curl, which were released about 10 years ago, it ended up breaking. So websites that were running on those particular server environments where those versions of curl were being used ended up being able to not download updates for themes, plugins, or WordPress core, which is a big problem.

And that would have led to, well, how are we going to get everybody back on the same page? So what ended up happening is Barry Abraham, who is a systems engineer over at Automattic, he made some changes on the infrastructure for WordPress.org to where they were able to enable updates, automatic updates, from the older of those sites that were affected. That way everybody could get back onto the same page. So there’s a lot of blame and a lot of things you could point at going around here. First, why wasn’t this possibly tested? Or was it? And second, really I think the lowest common denominator here is that it shows just how many websites out there are running on server environments that have 10-year-old software. I mean, I know that if it’s broken or if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. 

DP: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 

JC: Yeah, yeah. But 10-year-old software, right? There’s gotta be some kind of, you would think that the server environments in these web hosting companies would do a better job of keeping things like that up to date, but, I think what it really showed is just how many websites, how many, server environments out there that are just running on archaic versions of all these, various bits and pieces and libraries.

DP: Thanks for, explaining that to us. And just to kind of check just on your vibe, Jeff, do you think that this is a thing that the hosts should be taking care of? Or is this something that the website owners shouldn’t be using that old stuff, or was this maybe a testing, a lack of testing? 

JC: Well, the interesting thing is, Aaron Jorbin, who’s a WordPress core contributor, he noted that there’s a testing environment that WordPress hosts or hosting environments can participate in and they can use or run WordPress core across their environment, and then report the results back to the WordPress core team.

And, I guess if more web hosts would participate in that program, maybe this issue would have come up long before 6.4 was actually released. So I believe there are opportunities there for web hosting companies to participate in that program and be part, allow things to be proactive instead of reactive. You know, you live and learn, and WordPress is gonna have these types of things, and it’s not a big deal, it was quickly fixed, the team all worked together, and, we don’t even remember it now, we don’t even know it happened.

DP: Well, we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re going to pick up some more WordPress news, kind of focusing on what’s happening at Tumblr and WP Tavern, and I guess a little roundup of Automattic news. So stay tuned after the short break for more. We’ll be right back.

Welcome back to Press This, the WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I’m joined by Jeff Chandler and Mike Davey to talk about the Word Around The Campfire, and there’s been a lot of stuff happening in Automattic-land and Automattic does often get conflated with WordPress. A lot of people when they hear that I work on WordPress, they think that I work at WordPress.com. It’s a confusing thing, but, Automattic obviously has a lot of influence in our space. And so on that note, I thought in this section, we could talk about a couple of Automattic-related things.

The first one I want to talk about is Tumblr.com. Now, Tumblr was acquired by Automattic after Tumblr had kind of changed hands. Tumblr was one of the largest purchases in startup history at one point. For like a small group, it was bought for huge numbers. And it has just been kind of fumbled and passed around since then, landing in the hands of Automattic. And I think they’ve had it for at least two years, and I thought things were going pretty smoothly there. However, last week there was an internal memo that got leaked that there was going to be a reorganization and there’s kind of a strong stress on, you know, not a layoff per se, but a lot of people who were working for Automattic, but working on Tumblr are being pulled from Tumblr and moved over to WooCommerce and Jetpack and probably all sorts of other projects. I’m not sure. I think maybe a hundred people might’ve been moved around. I’m not quite sure on that. Matt, when this came out, there was a lot of people on Tumblr, very scared that Tumblr was about to collapse, and, instead of doing any interviews with journalists, Matt decided to do a Q&A on Tumblr, which I use a bit, so I thought I’d take my shot.

And I asked Matt if Tumblr is not being shut down, will these changes keep it running? He did reply to my post, and he said that the good news is, since people leaving Tumblr aren’t being laid off, they’re just switching to other teams, then Automattic if something doesn’t work out or breaks, we can always pull them back to work on it, which I do have to say, talking to Tumblr employees, since Automattic has acquired them, I think many of them have said many times that that’s the one good thing that happened with the Automattic acquisition is that they weren’t treated poorly. I definitely heard a lot of the workers there saying that everybody was fairly compensated if people were laid off, but for the most part, people have been moved around and provided with plenty of opportunities. 

MD: It seems fairly obvious that it wasn’t making enough money to cover its costs. Just from some things I’ve read about, the things that they’ve introduced that have made some money, it’s probably not even coming close to covering its costs, even if you take away all those developers, right, and reassign them to other projects.

Uh, so the question really is, how do they grow Tumblr? Like, how do they grow its user base past the people who are already using it? And I really have no idea what the answer to that is.

DP: Yeah. And that’s where it sounds like they are no longer going to try to do that. It sounds like it’s basically just keep the site operating for the folks there. They made their push to try to grow it and you know, it didn’t happen. And it sounds like now it’s just like, let’s see if we can maintain it. And one other side note about Tumblr, it is worth noting, I love mentioning that Tumblr after Automatic acquired it, Tumblr started working on a new post editor that was of course powered by Gutenberg. So, uh, if you sign into Tumblr, you have access to this experimental editor. And I don’t remember if they brand it as Gutenberg, but it is definitely the same open-source technology being used between the two. So let’s switch over to more news kind of related to this. WP Tavern has long been an establishment for getting WordPress news, one of my favorite places to get WordPress news, and Sarah Gooding, the long-term employee there—I think she’s been there for 10 years and was the head editor there—Sarah Gooding recently announced in her Last Call post, just written a few days ago, that she’s leaving WP Tavern to go work on more projects in the tech space. Jeff, as a former Tavern aficionado, why don’t you give us a quick rundown of your history with Tavern first, and then just talk to us about the news.

JC: Well, it’s sort of interesting from my perspective, because back in about 2013, when I was hired on under Matt and Audrey Capital, which is kind of this fun money investment firm company, side hustle company. I actually talked Matt into hiring. I said, hey, this is Sarah Gooding, she’s a really good writer over at WPMU Dev, maybe we could, you know, hire her or talk to her. And it turns out she came on over and she really changed the website. She’s exactly what the website needed. And because of her work and her effort, the Tavern became the go-to place for reliable, truthful information, and I’m very happy. I couldn’t be happier for Sarah, for her to move on in her career and move on to bigger and better things. She is the head of content marketing now over at Socket, which I believe is an open-source, security suite of tools or something to that effect. So she’s working over there and doing things like that now. And after 10 long years, she was very emotional about it. And I can understand that after you do the same thing for 10 years and you walk away from it, I mean, it’d be crazy not to have emotional feelings about it, feel emotional. And, you know, during that 10 years, she wrote and published over 3, 000 posts. And we’re talking about documenting plugins, security, WordPress, community, people. I mean, it’s not just run-of-the-mill news posts, but she documented, I mean, that’s 10 years of history, of various facets of what has happened in the WordPress space over that amount of time.

And so, we’ll see what happens in the future. Matt has put out the call for hiring writers. I know that there’s been a call to hire writers that was published about three years ago. Don’t know what happened there, if any writers were filled or whatnot. But Matt has said he’s going to devote some time in the coming days to review applicants.

And I will say this, you got to have a thick skin. It’s not an ordinary job. You got to have a thick skin. You got to really know what you’re doing. You got to have some knowledge, in-depth knowledge of the WordPress space. And it’s a great and unique opportunity for the right person, or for the right persons. And, uh, kind of excited and curious to see where it goes from here. 

DP: And you reminded me that WP Tavern is not technically Automattic. It is Audrey Capital-funded. So not an Automattic position as I alluded to earlier.

JC: Correct. It operates, uh, confusingly, as Mike can allude to, it operates in a way of not generating any profit. So there’s no affiliate links. There’s none of that. It’s just pure news that doesn’t have a financial obligation or a financial purpose.

DP: Mike, why did you tell us about that?

MD: Actually I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot for the last week or so, primarily because I quite recently just found out a lot of things that I didn’t know about how WP Tavern was structured, who owned it, how it was owned, how it was acquired, and things of that nature. And, before moving into WordPress, I had about, my background for about 20 years or so was in niche news publications. And it seems the way that WP Tavern is run seems a little odd, and I don’t mean odd in a bad way necessarily. It’s just not the usual way you’d run something like that. Like, for example, as you guys have already covered, it’s owned by Audrey, which is an investment firm, like it’s an investment company, and it’s a nonprofit, so it does not run ads, does not take affiliate links or anything, and it seems a strange thing for an investment company to own. How are they going to recoup their investment? And I mean, Matt Mullenweg’s always indicated he’d keep the Tavern at arm’s length, and as far as I can tell, he’s really done that. If you want, you can go onto WP Tavern and find plenty of coverage of public disagreements he’s had with people. So I think he genuinely wants a WordPress news site that isn’t beholden to any, no ads, no affiliate links, and if it has any bias at all, it should be that WordPress, broadly speaking, is a good thing. The thing is, like, reading his post looking for writers was actually kind of surprising. Just to quote from a bit of it. “I’m sorry I haven’t had the time to find a new writer for the Tavern in the time between when Sarah gave her notice a few weeks ago and now.” I was kind of surprised to find out that he was personally picking, what he refers to as a writer. Most nonprofit news orgs do carry advertising of some kind. Even if it’s just, this program was made possible thanks to donations from the Argyl Bargyl Corporation and viewers like you. Um, and I think it’s great that they don’t, but a more usual way to do something like this, if you want a nonprofit news organization that really is beholden to no one at all, is to create a nonprofit or not-for-profit foundation of some kind, fund it a bit, and then go ask for donations from WordPress companies and individuals. And at that point, you’d also usually have a board of directors or something similar to make hiring decisions. More broadly, I was actually somewhat surprised to find that they’re hiring writers rather than, say, an editor and a writer.

And again, that’s not really the usual way you’d run a news organization. There are a myriad of reasons for having someone who serves as a gatekeeper, not least of which is that no publication can be expected to survive the mistakes of more than one person. Right, like it sort of just has to, it functions best when at the very least you’ve got like, if it’s a big enough place you need sub-editors, but you very often have to have one person sort of serving as that gatekeeper. And it’s worked at the Tavern because Sarah and Justin, when he worked there, are both very good gatekeepers. They’re very much in touch with and knowledgeable about WordPress. So they simply didn’t make very many mistakes. Now, and if Matt continues to go with that route, he needs to make sure every single writer that they even try really meets those same high standards.

And he says they’re going to try out a number of folks on an hourly contract as a trial, and if that goes well, we’ll aim to hire two full-time writers by the end of the year. And again, a more usual way to approach something like that would be to just find one really highly qualified editor and a junior writer, or maybe some freelancers. And the writer and the freelancers don’t need anything like the same qualifications, because they’re gonna learn fast, and they’ve got an editor working over them, serving in that gatekeeper function.

DP: Well, on, on that note, I think we are going to wrap up this segment of our Word Around the Campfire. We’re going to take a short break and when we come back, we’re going to talk about WordPress foodies. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. This is our Word Around the Campfire edition with Mike Davey and Jeff Chandler. And so far we’ve talked about the re-org at Tumblr. We’ve talked about WordPress 6.4 and we talked about WP Tavern and nonprofit, which kind of reminded me, it’s a little bit of a tangent, but it kind of reminded me of all of us kind of being reminded that OpenAI is also a nonprofit as we’re recording this and there have been several shakeups at OpenAI, which as you hear, this will probably be old news. Or, still going, but it kind of reminds me of what happens when we have nonprofits that are also kind of just confusingly structured, but that’s all unrelated because now we are going to talk about food. Jeff Chandler, can you tell us about WPFoodies.com?

JC: Yeah. So, uh, myself and a number of other folks on Twitter, we sort of have a group where we just love food and we love WordPress. And we routinely share pictures of our meals or yummy food that we’re having and, Nyasha, who is one of my friends, she was at a couple of different WordCamps and she kept being asked, “Hey, when are you guys going to put together a website or something for all you WP foodies?”

And eventually, we didn’t do it for a while. One night, I decided to look up if WPFoodies.com was available and lo and behold, the domain was available. And so we put it on Nexus Hosting, which is really cool, and ended up using the Cadence WordPress theme and Cadence Pro Blocks. And I gotta tell you, I’m biased because I work for StellarWP, so there is some, some bias involved, but man. Putting together this website as quickly as I did using the templates and some other things, I was really impressed. And I had a good time building the WP Foodies website, but right now. It’s, it’s supposed to be our one-stop location where we do have a Slack instance as well, but the website is supposed to be posts about food that we’ve seen or tools we’ve come across or reviews of things or restaurants, you know, whatever, as long as it deals with food, gardening, whatever.

So far I’ve had a bit of difficulty trying to get my cohorts to publish posts on the blog. They’re perfectly capable of sharing things on Twitter and images, which I get it. It’s so much more convenient. You’re just throwing stuff out there. Versus this, but, I like the design of WPFoodies, and if anyone out there has, you know, if you enjoy food, if you have a passion for food and you don’t have to be involved in WordPress, but if you do, that’s just a bonus, uh, definitely check it out and register an account and be part of the community. Cause I’d love to see others come here and write different posts and share their backgrounds and their passion for food or recipes or what have you.

DP: Yeah. I love looking through the site. The logo looks amazing. Again, it’s wpfoodies.com. It’s just a fun break from any other WordPress news or anything like that. It’s just a way to kind of, uh, bond with people over food that also are in the WordPress space. And I think that’s super fun. 

JC: So you got to register an account and you have to write a post about that, uh, salmon stuff, whatever it is you make. What was it you make? You make too much of it?

DP:  Yeah, I am not great at like making a dinner, and what I like to do is, make like food prep for a week. So I can go through the process of like cooking a big batch of rice and, you know, cooking some salmon and making a special sauce and chopping up like mint and cilantro or, you know, whatever things and kind of add all the little garnishes because you’re doing it at scale. So you’re doing it for like. eight meals or something. And I store them in these little Weck’s jars. That’s W E C K, which are kind of like little Mason jars, but you can put them in the microwave and stuff. Well, they’re, smaller. They’re just great for my needs. I would love to write about quesapizzas, cause I saw your quick and easy naan bread pizzas, so I could kind of counter with a quesapizza.

JC: Yeah. Ooh, definitely write about that. I want to learn about that. See, and that’s the essence of what I really want to see WP Foodies become is you know something, or you know something that’s really good, and this would be a great way for you to share it and document it and allow others to try it. And we can link to it and talk about it. I just want to say, listening to you talking about food, you mentioned making dinner, making meals at scale. Congratulations on mixing tech terms with meal prep. That’s, that’s amazing.

DP: [Laughter] Well, my salmon bowls are still in beta, but I’m rolling out invite-only to some of my friends and then passing them around. Hopefully, there’s no bugs in them. So, on that note, we will wrap up this episode of Press This, the Word Around the Campfire edition. Jeff, if people want to follow you online, what’s a good spot to do that?

JC: I am at @jeffr0, J E F F R 0 on X, formerly Twitter. And who knows what it’s going to become. I am also on WPtoots.social, as I believe the same thing, Jeffr0. Just look for Jeff Chandler. that’s where I usually hang out. And, also the WP Foodie Slack instance. 

DP: Mike. If people want to follow you, what’s a good spot to do that?

MD: They can follow me at @MediumMikeDavey on twitter.com and I still say Twitter because it still says twitter.com

DP: Well, thanks to both of y’all for joining. I really appreciate it. It was really fun chatting with you. Press This is a weekly podcast, coming up on next week’s episode we’re going to be talking to Anil Gupta about his multi-collab plugin, which brings kind of Google doc functionality to your WordPress dashboard, like in the moment now, not the future version that we’re talking about. You can actually get this multi-collaborative user now. So we’re going to be talking to him about that. 

You can follow my adventures on Twitter as well at the Torque Mag, that’s @TheTorqueMag. You can also subscribe on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or download directly from WMR.fm. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This.

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