Agency Workflows for Building with Full Site Editing ft Amor Kumar

Cool. So welcome today. We got a more from a web dev studios and you’re a principal engineer at web dev studios. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you could give us like a little bit about like your background getting into WordPress and maybe what you do.
on a daily basis at Web Dev Studios? Yeah, sure. So my background getting into WordPress, well, before I started at Web Dev Studios, I wasn’t really in the WordPress space at all. I was working on JavaScript frameworks like Vue and Angular. And yeah, when I started at Web Dev Studios is when I really, like I worked on a couple of WordPress sites prior to my job here. But when I started at Web Dev Studios is when I started
in the WordPress space. And that was in 2020. about four years ago. Did they, did they, did you come in? Cause like most people start the opposite where I think a lot of WordPress developers are a little bit afraid of the JavaScript side of it or like hesitant to join it. like, you, did you join because you had that JavaScript knowledge and WordPress was moving in a JavaScript direction or was it just kind of a random coincidence
was kind of a coincidence. So I, at one of my, previous jobs in Montreal, I worked with, this guy, Oliver Harrison and, We worked at the same company. Then we both went our separate ways, working a couple of jobs and then he got a job at web dev studios and he referred me. and that’s, it just happened to be a WordPress company.
and, I, at the time I was like, yeah, I’m happy to start with WordPress. but I didn’t really know that much about it at the time, like in terms of Gutenberg and this shift to JavaScript, it just was a coincidence. And WordPress is like weird because I mean, I guess all frameworks are like this, but it’s like, it has its own language, you know, like, especially on the PHP side, it has its own weird way of doing things. Did you like.
What was it like coming into hooks and filters and actions and the templating system and all that sort of stuff? Did it feel intuitive coming from JavaScript or was it just super weird? No, it was very weird. I remember specifically, because when I started, we were doing classic themes. And I remember specifically having a problem with how the templates in classic themes worked, where the header
And the opening body tag was in one template and then the main body part was in another template and the the like closing body tags in the footer. Just this like coming from components and JavaScript development. it was very weird. Sorry. I’m not sure.
yeah, that’s kind of funny. Like when you think about how weirdly broken up the templates are that like, did have like the body tag and the footer and all that sort of stuff and like, sort of getting into it. And like you mentioned components, that’s like a piece where that’s very common in JavaScript frameworks. Like you build everything from components, like WordPress,
I mean, we have templating, like templating is not the same as components, particularly. Right. I mean, it’s like two different concepts almost. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And the whole fact that, like on, on the JavaScript side, you have a component and that component is the same everywhere where you use it and you can use it standalone. can use it inside another component. and that thing is always.
The same, no matter where you use it, it’s like that component. not having that in WordPress was very, very weird. Yeah. Yeah, there is, I was just thinking about this the other day, cause we’ve been migrating a bunch of old classic editor sites that another developer built. And we had like template parts where you could get this chunk of PHP and you could only recently you could kind of pass it some arguments.
And you could have it in your theme and then you could have like a child theme or a plugin theme like or a plugin like overwrite that little template part and like replace that little piece. And it’s like not quite components, but I don’t know template template parts. Like if they’re used really like purely are, I don’t know, maybe close to components, I guess, or the closest you would get in WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. When,
When was that change or when did that happen where you could pass template parts arguments? Ooh, I feel like it’s since Gutenberg. I could be wrong. I’d have to look it up. It’s not like the most, but they’re the get template function got like a third parameter where you could pass it in array. So you could like override specific, you know, and you would get these arguments. But again, it was like that kind of came, but then the block editor came and then the block editor has template parts, but they don’t like.
I remember in the early block themes, would use like template parts the same way you would in a classic theme. Like the post-meta would be like a little template part with like the title and the categories. But then like a lot of that stuff just kind of disappeared. feels like we’re waiting for some modern version of components and templates to like really make a lot of sense. I don’t know if that makes like, like we’re waiting for some piece. There’s like some missing piece that we’re waiting for. I completely agree. And.
that a lot of people are saying that that missing piece is partially synced patterns. Is that what it’s still called? Ooh, I feel like it’s not. feel like it’s something else. Synced pattern overrides. Synced pattern overrides. I personally like partially synced patterns better. Like that nomenclature makes a lot of sense to me, but yeah. But yeah, so the, mean, my problem with that is that they are like synced patterns are
database patterns, like they’re not, they don’t exist in the file system. Right. So theoretically partially synced or sync pattern overrides would also be kind of living in the database. Yeah, they live in the database, but like, there’s also like, because they like, they are referenced by like, I think an ID or a slug or something. And then, which has to be in the database. And then there’s, inside you might call in sort of like.
specific fields that are overrides. So you kind of have to have some love, some idea of like arguments or props or something that you pass to them, but it feels, yeah, it feels like it has to get out things like that. Things like navigation menus, things like this, all this stuff, the templates in general, I think have to come out of the database at some point in time. at least that seems to be like what developers want.
You know, we want it out of the database. That seems like a common thing, but, I guess in your day to day job, are you at, at web data studios or like, least in just the projects you were on, are you still using classic tools? Are you fully full site editing and blocks? Are you somewhere in between? Like where are you guys on that journey? Or at least you, you particularly. Yeah. So on recent projects, especially new ones,
We’re fully trying to adopt full site editing. So, are the latest projects that I’ve worked on have been, from scratch redesigns kind of things. And, and we are using full site editing on those. How do you, like, I keep thinking, like, I think like one or two more years of improvements and I will be like completely happy with full set editing.
from a developer perspective, but I feel like I keep saying that like year after year, but like, do you have you guys found ways to build like internal systems to solve some of those gaps or is it kind of like, well, it feels like they’re going to get there in core. So we’re just going to wait or like, what is your approach to some of the places like the fact that everything lives in the database? Yeah, it’s definitely tough. we are so it.
I would say it depends on the complexity of the site on simple, you know, five page sites or even single pages or something like that. I think it’s ready and not an issue. But the more complex a site gets, the more issues that we’re seeing. We try to use patterns, file system based patterns, not synced patterns, so that at least we have the file.
and we can see the changes in Git on PRs and things like that.
We still have, we still have problems. huh. I would say, okay. So on, on new sites, like our biggest problem right now is mega menus. cause the, the core navigation block is not, good enough to build complex menus. It’s fine for like a simple, simple single level or maybe multi-level menu, but right when you try to do anything more, falls apart. that patterns.
the fact that when you add a pattern to a page, creates a detached instance of that pattern. So if you were to, even though we have file system based patterns, if you were to change anything in those, and you already added this pattern to a hundred pages, you’re stuck, right? Yeah. I had that exact issue talking to a client say where we on a full set editing site, there’s
A hero pattern and then maybe like a sub hero pattern and it’s on a bunch of pages. It’s actually on a bunch of sites that all run the same theme and SEO team came in and said, well, actually, if you make the hero, like a paragraph and then make the second hero, the H one, it’ll be better for SEO because this one has just like the, it’s just going to rank better, like whatever. so can you go to all those sites that have that exact same pattern? It looks exactly the same across 20 sites.
So can you just switch it so that this heading is a paragraph and this paragraph is now a heading. And it’s like, well, you know, the pattern is technically in the database for each of those sites. And. You know, that’s not quite as easy as it sounds like it should be. And in the amount of time I could sit around and try to think of a way to do it, you’re better off just having somebody go through probably and make like honestly, manually update it. Like, and it really is.
That’s never been a situation before that you’ve ever had to tell a client that. And it feels really, feels a little bad to say that because you go like, well, I mean, our last developer who built our site with ACF flexible content rose, didn’t have this problem. And it’s like, yep, they did not, they did not have this problem. Yeah. And it’s also not a problem in the, you know, a JavaScript framework, like viewer react world, because it’s the component, like you just, it’s such an easy.
change to do that. You just change the tags on the component, push that up and that’s literally it. Yeah. And I wonder if, we had used partially synced pattern overrides, even that actually, wouldn’t have solved that issue because I don’t think we could have changed the heading to a paragraph and a paragraph because it’s two different blocks. if we had to change a heading level on a partially synced pattern, I believe you could probably do that, but
It’s a lot of these issues where you kind of go like, well, I don’t really have time to figure this out, to know if this tool is going to work for me, to know if I can do it. But it’s, know, I think I feel you were saying before we started recording that it feels like the block editor. Like, wasn’t really meant for agencies, but agencies really, you see the value of it. You see where it can go. And it feels like maybe now they’re like paying a little more attention to these like agency.
workflow issues that we’re all kind of like a raising. Like you feel optimistic a little bit about that? Yeah, I do feel optimistic about that, especially recently. I think it’s going to take a lot of time and who knows how much time it will take. Like, I hope it’s faster. But I am optimistic about that. And it’s interesting that you said like,
we can see the value that Gutenberg provides to clients. That’s part of the reason that I’m still on board and I like Gutenberg despite all of the issues. The whole like visual editing experience and the improvement in user experience or editor experience from the way we used to build custom things like ACF is huge. Like just being able to click on something and edit it in place and it looks like the design.
even the experience of, having a piece of text, like a heading or whatever, and having options to change the heading color, the background color, like all of those things, the difference from ACF is, is just huge. Yeah. I mean, I remember building flexible content things, and then the client would be like, and we want to be able to change the color and we want to be able to change the heading from an H one through H six.
So then you were just adding field after field after field for every little thing. Or then we would do like a separate, like accordion, like tab of just style settings for them and all these things. And you’d come up with some way to like read all the settings and turn it into a bunch of classes or like styles or whatever. Like it was also manual. And I feel like the idea that like, I don’t have to think about like 90 % of that stuff, like anything simple, I don’t have to worry about. Like it’s only when it gets complicated that I have to start thinking.
and stuff, but it’s like anything simple, basic styles, basic fonts, basically all that stuff. The fact that that is all built in. do feel like, that’s kind of like an under recognized strength that’s going to pay off probably in the long run as people get more comfortable using it and everyone’s using the same thing. And it looks the same on every WordPress site. That’s, that’s one of the things that made it click for me as a developer. just like.
how repetitive it was to add all of those custom options on ACF blocks. and how none of that is a, is a thing anymore. pretty much. Yeah. So you guys use, I know that you web devs use has their own like underscores sort of, would, I doubt it’s even a fork, but like their own sort of starter theme. I had somebody just email me last week where they were saying like they were coming from the classic.
editor world and they kind of wanted to do like a hybrid theme or something. And they’re just looking for what our starter theme options, because like for my personal website, I use all the pro, which is like a paid very overly, not overly, sorry, very like heavily designed theme. And it like, looks really good. It looks a certain way. I would never take it and try to match like a design from my client, cause that would be kind of hard.
But I, for my personal blog where I don’t want to think about design and I don’t care, I just want it to look good. It’s like this perfect thing. And I see some more of those coming out, but I haven’t yet seen really good developer starter themes that are. Hybrid or fully block based as much like it feels like they’re just not quite there yet. And I didn’t know, I didn’t have too many good recommendations, but I’m guessing you guys must have starter themes. must be thinking about this and like,
trying to get everyone on the same page with like the same framework internally. Yeah. And we’re still trying to figure that out too. Specifically the thing you said about starting a website with a theme that’s built out already or starting from like something more bare bones or scratch from scratch. Our starter theme is more built out. we, the concept was we have like a design system
And we matched our starter team theme to our internal design system. And the idea is that we make the tweaks on the design system, and then we translate those to the starter themes. Like we change the spacing values and things like that. And theoretically, we should be able to match the design as long as it was started from our design system, our Figma files for the design system. The problem with that, though, is that sometimes clients come to us
with designs, they talk to a third party agency. So we have to use design files from them. Or in which case, like if that happened, we would be ripping out all of the opinions in the starter theme and starting from scratch and building it back up again. And that happened a couple of times. It doesn’t necessarily, it’s not the nicest thing or it’s not the nicest way to start a project in my opinion.
I would love more bare bones starters, starter themes. Yeah. It’s a tough one because like, we, like where I work, most of our clients are marketing agencies, so they do the design. So we don’t have the ability to say like everybody use the same starting figma file. So we’re in that same situation where the less, the less we’re given, in the theme.
the better because we don’t want to spend time tearing things out. Obviously if you could control the whole process and you had design and development all under one, that obviously makes sense. And I see that’s why, a lot of themes, like I think all of you, for example, they’re, they’re giving you Figma with they’re giving like Figma files with the theme. that way you can, like you said, I just tweak all the like design tokens. And then I move that into theme Jason and it like,
does the whole process, but it like feels like in the real world, that’s never the case. Like you’re always dealing with these other sort of situations or like weird custom things, you know, cause that’s kind of the job is always getting stuff that’s weird and custom. like I have a starter theme that’s very bare bones.
But now I’m realizing like, well, it would be nice to have a couple of custom blocks in there for like the header. You know, we all like, I don’t know. I mean, how are you guys even doing headers and full site editing? you like, are you even using the core navigation block? Are you just like do a custom block or an ACF block or like, it feels like you have, it feels like you just can’t give a client the site editor and let them change the menu that way. Like it just doesn’t feel like a realistic option.
So like in that case, like we’re ahead for a header. What are you guys even doing there? It depends on the project. Like there’s been a couple where we have used the core navigation block and it works fine. There’s a couple where we tried to use the core navigation block and thoroughly regretted it. And then there’s a couple where we just did custom, you know, ACF blocks or use the WordPress menu, the older WordPress menu system. Yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking, like putting in my starter theme, like a custom block that
just pulls classic menus in or something. don’t know. just, it’s like, I really liked the visual editing experience, but it often doesn’t make any sense for a client to be in the site editor really ever. I don’t really want them to, I don’t want them to have to feel like they’re scared to touch anything or feel overhead. I want to keep them out of it as much as possible. unless they’re extremely
tech savvy where we do have some clients where it’s like they have somebody on their team who can handle that and can be trained and understand how to use it. But it’s not always the case. So do you guys do anything around like, like keeping user roles separated or like, you know, kind of like curating that experience, that editor experience a little bit. not at the moment right now. It’s kind of, kind of like, there’s no restrictions or anything.
on that, no curation. I think I would love to see us do more, more curation and more, just putting up more guardrails. Yeah, because I don’t love just like letting everyone, letting editors run wild and having access to all that, all that stuff and being able to break things. I think it’s our job as developers to
protect the editors from messing up their site. Yeah. Like we went from a place of advanced custom field based classic sites where they had almost no freedom to now too much freedom. it feels like part of that is sort of, I don’t know, the core audience of Gutenberg and wanting to give everybody that full freedom of editing their site. and I think it’s still now kind of stands to like reason, like
Do people want that much freedom or did people kind of like when their website was a little bit more locked down? Like even the like the novice users like brand new, they’re just trying to build their own website for their business or something. Do even they want that much freedom and control or would they actually have been happier with less freedom or something like that or being able to opt into these extra layers of freedom?
Whereas I think what they kind of had to do is start with complete freedom to like break anything. And now they’re kind of coming back and saying, okay, now we need partially synced patterns. Now we need, these other sort of like curation tools and things like that. it feels like, you know, just like they’re building it while they’re building the plane, while they’re flying it, you know, here’s the thing about that. I think if you were to ask users or editors, like what amount of freedom that they want, they would say,
I want to be able to customize everything. But I think this is the, the, goes back to the thing, Ford said with, if I asked the customers what they want, they would have set a faster horse. I don’t think they actually want that. I think, especially if there is a design system and like mock-ups and, for the brand, like a brand design guideline, people want freedom, but.
You want to stay within the guidelines kind of thing. So that’s where curation, in my opinion, should be used. so that they can’t deviate from those, from those guidelines, for example, taking out the custom color selector, things like that. Yeah. Custom. The one I’ve been thinking of that works that like is a new feature that’s kind of leading us towards that is section styles in. Have you messed with that one where you can.
It’s kind of like you can do like little mini sets of styles of like color and font combos. So when a, when the user has like maybe a hero section, they could say like, actually I want the dark hero section or the light hero section. And instead of having to go in and change all the colors on everything inside of it, they can just kind of click and pick which like theme styles they want. And it’ll be like, and like we’ve used that where
Say the client has like four colors in their brand, but only like certain combos of them work together. Like you can’t put, you know, the first and second color together because it’s not accessible. The contrast is too low or something. So you can give them these little curated styles and stuff like that where they can say like, I can change it to be dark or light, but I’m not going to like pick a bad color combo or something like that. I feel like these, all there’s like all these little tools that are all like happening in full setting and.
Each one, every release gets pushed a little further, pushed a little further. Version control, getting things out of the database, section styles and more style creation, more design controls and finishing so that all the blocks have the same design controls, responsive design, all these little things that all need to be pushed. And every release, it’s like, we’re getting a little bit closer and a little bit closer to where…
I think agencies one day will be like, yeah, I don’t know how I ever lived without full site editing. Yeah, yeah. I definitely agree. the thing that you said, section styles reminds me of how like, you shouldn’t just, you should create button variations instead of just like saying, you know, here’s a button. Now every single button you add, have to configure the padding, the size, the font size, the colors, just instead just create like,
block styles or something like that. And then they just click the different button styles. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I’ve been trying to break down is like, when I think a of people get nervous, say they have a design and they enter the block that are in there nervous. And it’s like, I get a lot of like, I need to make a custom block for this. Like that’s always the default thing is like, I just need to make a custom block. But like the way I’ve been mentally thinking of it, and you could tell me if this makes sense is if you have something.
That you can do with core blocks and all you need to change is like CSS and styles. Then you stick with core blocks. Like you said, style variations, things like that. And that should solve all of your needs there. It’s only when you need a piece of HTML. That is not something you can build with like in the block editor with core blocks. Like I need a carousel. I need a bunch of things in a list or like some, some sort of like semantic HTML situation.
I need, you know, two images next to each other or something like these, like weird HTML changes. That’s when you get into the world of custom blocks and sort of filtering blocks and all that sort of stuff. And so I’m guessing that at some point you are building custom blocks or using a tool like ACF blocks or something like that in your build process. Yeah. Yeah. For exactly. Well, pretty much so far just, carousels, a couple other things, but carousels is the big one. I think.
What you said makes sense though, where if you need the custom HTML or something to be output in the way that the block editor doesn’t, that would be the situation. Have you ever ran into a situation though, where you build something with core blocks, but then after a small change, it kind of falls apart and it needs to be a custom block or something like that. Yeah, I, I’ve tried.
I feel like I’ve built every wrong approach to everything so far. Like I have one where it’s say you have a query loop with all the posts, right? But then they wanted some filters on top of it so that they could show and hide some of them. So then you build a custom block up here that shows nice filters, but then you got to connect it with the core block of the query loop. So then you’re kind of like doing some magic to figure out.
what’s on the page and then maybe they move the block and now like my magic broke or something like that, or all these sorts of things. I’ve had all the situations of like everything doing it like the wrong way. I think the blocks themselves have gotten pretty stable where the markup doesn’t change. So I can reliably use, use that. I think where I still struggle is what we were talking about earlier, which is really components, which is
A collection of things together in one little package that I can control. And it’s like, that’s where I start to fall apart because I’m like, I put it together and then it’s like, well, how do I add extra styles to it? Do I put a bunch of classes on everything? Or what if I want a little bit of JavaScript interactivity sprinkled on top of this? Do I do that? and it’s like each approach kind of has its own pros and cons. And I still feel like I just want something, something like patterns.
and react components sort of mixed together. Something that’s visually editable, like the way blocks and stuff are, but something I can really control. That’s like, I feel like that’s the dream. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. What are you doing right now for something like a card, a card component where you want to be reusing, you want it to look the same everywhere, but maybe here it doesn’t have an image or, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, that one’s tough. So
I feel like the last time around, just used regular patterns and what I ended up doing at the last, actually the last build I did was like two months ago, maybe like full from scratch build. So I think I did, I think I just did patterns. And I think at that point I actually had my own code that would sync them into PHP on the theme so that at least I could version control them and keep track of them.
but, and then what I tried and I was not super happy with was doing some of the content locking stuff where it hides a lot of the things that you can edit. So like they can change the text. so say they add a pattern of a card, they can change the text and they can change the image, but they can’t mess with any of the design or add blocks or do anything like that. And it worked pretty well. And I would, like, I got into the habit of always putting a class on the top of my pattern.
So that worst case scenario, I could find the patterns and I could add CSS if I had to and do all that sort of stuff. But it kind of kept falling apart because there’d always be like, well, we want this, but we want a button on this one or we want a list on this. it was like, there, just felt like, you know, it almost went back to the same problem with, with the ACF fields, which is like, they want one thing, but they really want like 10 variations of one thing. And so it got really hard to
to really make those choices. Do I make a new version of it? Like here’s card, here’s card with button, here’s card with list, like, and have five different things. It still feels like a lot of those things aren’t really locked in yet. And yet anytime I try to work on a custom solution, it felt like Core was maybe gonna release something that was actually gonna get me. So then it was like, well, don’t work on the custom thing. Cause I think Core is maybe gonna solve it or at least is working on it. So.
That’s the last time was just, it was just patterns and you just kind of let them go. And you know, you can add CSS to them later, but that’s about it. You can’t really do any global changes. you have a hopefully better approach than me? No, it’s pretty much the same. mean, I think that’s, that’s one of my biggest problems with, you know, WordPress development right now. It’s just, there’s so many different ways to do anything and there’s trade-offs to each.
There’s pros and cons to each one that aren’t immediately or aren’t obvious. at the time that you need to make the decision. That’s exactly it. It’s like, don’t learn the trade off until you’ve done it and it’s in production and you, and then you’re like, and you don’t have like budget to refactor things. Like it doesn’t make any sense at that point. yeah, I, I’m like, I go back and forth on whether I think it would be useful. Like there are.
You know, there are sort of like groups in WordPress that are agency builders and we’re all kind of like highlighting a lot of these same problems. And it does feel like some things are going to get us closer to those problems, to solving those problems. I think, I don’t know if you guys use the create block theme plugin, in your bill, in your workflow, but that’s like a core plugin that like is working on the problem of like taking everything out of the database and flattening it back to your file system. and it’s.
It’s like the changes are getting there happening, but I would love to see WordPress come out with like a really solid agency workflow from beginning to end. Because like, if you know, you came from the JavaScript world, it’s like react next JS, for example, like, like Larry and Laravel, like all these platforms where they go like.
you want to build a this site? Here’s the exact best like approach to do it. There’s probably a one command you run and it’ll give you all the packages we think are the best for that. And you’re never going to worry about version control and, all these sorts of things. You’re to have all of that built in and WordPress still is just kind of like, Hey, you know, do it, do whatever you want. And, hopefully some, you know, somebody will solve it. And I think everyone’s just waiting for places like web dev studios to like.
solve it for us because because because no one has really cracked it and I don’t I don’t think that core is is going to crack it I don’t think I don’t think core has ever taken the role of being that opinionated on workflow really ever on anything it would be nice it would be nice I love it I love it when there are opinions on things because then all the projects look similar to each other and
And yeah, I think it’s just easier when there’s those sort of guidelines and, and standard ways to do everything. That’s what I prefer. Yeah. I think that it’s going to have to happen sooner or later, because I think it’s going to, we’re going to hit a point where maybe developers are not going to want to engage with WordPress when, know, I mean, as far as like a client editing experience, it really is the best. But I think if you are somebody who.
Say you don’t, your clients don’t edit their website. Like if I had clients who’d never wanted to log into their website ever, I probably wouldn’t need to use WordPress because that’s the value of WordPress is that the, a non-technical person can edit content. But like, if I don’t need that skill or like that thing, I wouldn’t use it. Whereas if my workflow was so deeply tied to WordPress that it was always better for me to just use it. And like, it was always, I would keep using it in those cases.
But if the developer workflow isn’t that great for that and I’m like, well, they’re not going to log into it. I don’t need to log into it. I can set up a simple, you know, API and just build it or make a static site or whatever. think we are going to start seeing that happen a lot more unless. Unless there is like a real like push for, you know, solving developer needs and getting like agencies like back to being excited and like want to be around for the future of WordPress. Yeah.
Yeah, I definitely agree. I think with AI, especially like, if you just need a quick marketing site, single page, something like that, you could pretty easily generate something with AI right now that, that looks good. and if you don’t need to edit it or anything, then like that’s, that’s it. That could be up for a couple of years or however long you need it. Yeah. I that I’ve been trying to force myself into the AI mindset. because also.
The thing about AI is like, it’s really starting to appeal to the no code, low code audience. And there’s so many tools now where you can get up and running and things that you would normally build a WordPress site for, where you would plug in a couple plugins and it would connect to this and it would connect to that. And maybe people would subscribe to a newsletter and blah, blah, and all this stuff. And now there’s these like automation, no code platforms with AI integrations that are just really solving that.
And it’s like, I can just pay 20 bucks a month and I’ll have all of that set up. And I don’t need to like host my own WordPress site and like learn this whole other thing and pick 15 different plugins that I hope they all work together. I can just sign up for a newsletter subscription and a API thing. Like it’s just, I think we’re, we’re going to see a lot of people kind of go like, well, then what do need WordPress for? If there’s other tools that are solving this problem and they’re getting me up and running faster.
faster than WordPress is. Hey, maybe that’s why, you know, core is listening a bit more to agencies. Now, if all those, those sort of people, smaller companies that would have gone with WordPress are now going somewhere else. I don’t know, just random thought. Yeah. I mean, I don’t, I, if you ever have like the family member who asks like, Hey, I need a small website for my business or something like, you know, I mean, I, I’ve learned the hard way. Don’t send them to WordPress.
if they’re not technical, you know, if they want to like do some crazy, like they want to set up a store or something like that, then I’ll, I’ll say, yeah, WordPress. But like, if they just need that marketing site, you know, even a five page marketing site, probably not. So yeah, if WordPress wants, you know, to stay relevant with agencies who are launching multiple sites a month, you know, that’s, those are the tools they kind of have to build out. Yeah. And probably
Bigger sites, I guess I don’t have any data on this, but are like enterprises going with Squarespace and Wix and things like that. I think once you’re at that budget, you want WordPress. feel like those, I feel like if you still have a lot of content, like if you’re gonna have a ton of content or a ton of people logging in and editing that content, you’re not gonna find anything better than WordPress. And if you have the budget for custom design, maybe you would go to like a Webflow, but mostly
You know, WordPress is still there, but, but, know, I know a lot of it comes from, like, we’ve even had this situation where you get a large company and it’s one person in the company who’s responsible for the website. They’re not like a developer. They’re just like the content person. And they say, well, I WordPress because at my last job, had WordPress and like, that’s why they want WordPress. like, I’ve used WordPress. That’s what everybody uses. But like, if that, you just have to keep that it’s what everybody uses or else, you know, if we start losing that.
And people will say, I don’t know WordPress, web flow, Squarespace doesn’t really matter. I was speaking to someone recently that, we were talking about CMSs and I said, I work with WordPress and they said, Isn’t that older software? Like, like I thought most people were doing like Wix or, or Squarespace or, they used, think, web flow. and that’s honestly the first time I’ve ever heard that.
so that was interesting. Have you heard that from other people like WordPress is old? I mean, I definitely hear WordPress is old WordPress is for blogging a lot. I think, you know, I don’t think it’s wrong. Like if you look at all the, like even the WordPress.org showcase, it’s like, it’s a lot of news publications. Like in a sense, it is a lot of blogs, it’s publications, it’s time and Rolling Stone and these sorts of things. It’s a lot less of the marketing sites.
It’s a lot more of big publishers, lots of content. And so I definitely hear that people say that WordPress is old. think when you say like WordPress is half the internet, that’s like shocking to a lot of people, but also like similarly, you know, if you look at WooCommerce versus Shopify, I bet you that most people have never heard of WooCommerce, like an average person, but they have heard of Shopify because they see the commercials and stuff.
Shopify is only half of WooCommerce market share now, like, will that always be the case? You know, I mean, it’s already made it to half in a fraction of the time. know, like people picking something because they just know what it is or they’ve heard of it. Like that’s definitely something to keep in mind. And if people think WordPress feels old, yeah, that’s not good for us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll see where that goes. Cause didn’t they just publish the WordPress market share?
updated numbers recently and it actually went up slightly. Yeah. feel like it’s, I feel like it’s like a plateau, but it’s like tiny percentage points like up and down and it’s, it’s really like solid, which, know, hopefully that’s new sites and not just old sites. Cause that’s the other nice thing about WordPress is like we have sites we built 10 years ago and they’re good. They’re they’ll, they’ll sit there for another 10 years and they’ll keep getting updates and they’re going to, they’re going to, they’re steady, know, they’re.
are resilient. So I think it’s, it’s a big fraction of it, but I would love to see some of these. I would love to see developers and stuff get a little bit more excited about WordPress and see people who are building content editing experiences, find ways to, you know, feel really excited and comfortable in WordPress. Yeah, what are you, so what are you working on next? Do you have like,
kind of a concept, it projects that you’re building? you ever work, are you gonna work on any like plugins or like, I know, do you ever do like, kind of like other than like a, like design to dev kind of builds or anything exciting like that? No, that’s pretty much my plan to continue sort of figuring out the best editing experience with the tools that we have in WordPress right now. I care,
I’m a developer, but I care a lot about the user experience of what I’m building. So for example, it really bothers me that we’re not doing as much as we could in terms of curating the editor experience and putting those guardrails up. I would love to more of that. So yeah, that’s my focus. I’m building my own starter theme also. I haven’t updated in a while, but it is
more of the bare bones starter theme. Like for example, there’s only two colors like black and white, so that you just add on instead of, you know, taking away and then, and then adding on, yeah, I dunno more custom blocks. I w I would love to focus on, you know, like just standardizing different ways of doing things, going back to what we talked about before on how there’s like so many different ways of.
doing things and how it’s not necessarily obvious what the pros and cons to each ones are. I think it would be really nice at WDS if we could document, like, you know, if this is what your goal is, this is a good path to take, but here’s a couple gotchas if you do take this path, you know, sort of operating procedures like that. Yeah, I think people would love that because it feels like
When I started was like the PHP era and there was so much content coming out so much, so many people sharing, doing tutorials, doing blog posts about stuff. And it feels like everyone’s been in like a bit of a holding pattern or just kind of waiting. And you know, that really isn’t the word, like the WordPress community always is very proactive and you know, finds gaps and build solutions for those gaps and.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to kind of wait around for, you know, core to solve all these issues. And the best way for us to see these changes is to keep testing, keep documenting, keep sharing this information. And, you know, I’ve definitely seen that the more that agencies talk to each other and put things online, that it really does start to influence the direction of where core is going and that anything that we need.
you know, in Gutenberg, which like that’s kind of part of the problem is like a lot of stuff. It’s like, no, we just need the change in Gutenberg. We can’t extend it. We need it. We need the change actually in core. I think, you know, the more vocal that everybody is and the more that they share and stuff, I think it like, I think it actually makes a difference. So anything that, know, you guys are learning that you like publish out there, I genuinely think it helps the community and helps, helps other developers. Yeah, that’s good to know. And I should also like,
We should be blogging more at WDS. I should be blogging more personally too. I started a blog last year, actually around this time, like around November. And when I started it, I posted a ton of articles in the first couple of months and then just sort of, sort of died down after that. Yeah, that’s we’ve all been, I have like, I have like 10 domains where I have like four posts and then I just, it dies.
It’s, I also find for some reason developers also really like, seeing videos of how things are done and stuff like that. was much more of a writer, but I feel like people love seeing it. yeah, anything you guys share, I think everybody would appreciate it. I’m really excited to see where your starter themes go, because, I do think we need more good examples of starter themes. so I’ll be looking forward to that. And I should say thank you for chatting with me about.
all things WordPress and Gutenberg today. Nice. Thanks, Brian. Yeah. Is there anywhere any people should go to learn more about you or follow you or anywhere you’re active online? well, yeah. you can check out my company’s site, web dev studios.com. my personal site is it’s a more a.dev I T S R E H.dev. and yeah, that’s pretty much it. Thanks. Awesome. Thank you.