WordPress; 20th Anniversary, a Mini Series. Episode 2 With Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister.

Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the 20th anniversary of WordPress.

Today is a bit of a departure for the podcast. It’s the second of two episodes all about the last 20 years of WordPress.

You’re going to hear a round table discussion with four WordPressers talking about their thoughts on the last 20 years. It features Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft Tammie Lister and David Bisset as the discussion moderator.

They cover a lot of ground, and it’s fascinating to hear their WordPress stories from the past two decades.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you David Bisset, Meher Bala, Robert Windisch, Simon Kraft and Tammie Lister.

David Bisset: We have so much to talk about. We have 20 years of WordPress. We gotta condense in the next 60 or so minutes. Um, for those listening or, um, heaven and forbid if we can use AI to clean up my face. We will be putting this on YouTube maybe hopefully soon. Uh, for video perhaps. We’ll have to figure that out.

I only promise these people audio broadcast, so I have to see if I have to have them sign another contract. My name is David Bisset. Um, I have been talking to people on the 20th anniversary of WordPress, and I’ve been asking ’em a bunch of different questions, and today we have four more interesting people from the WordPress community and me to talk about some particular th and don’t worry, the, the, the, the humor gets self-deprecating, but it goes up from there.
The next 90 minutes, you know, it’s gonna be fantastic. I have four people here that are fantastic contr, uh, contributors and representatives of the WordPress community. Um, I’m gonna let them introduce themselves and then we’re gonna start getting into some particular areas of WordPress history that I think they’re gonna love to share some memories, and hopefully you can relate.
The first is Mihir. Hello Mihir. How you doing?

Meher Bala: Hey everyone. Hi. Uh, my name is me. I’m from Mumbai, India. Uh, I’m a front end developer and a codeable expert. I’ve been using WordPress since last 10 years.

David Bisset: Oh, good. I thought you were gonna say last week. No. All right. 10 years. Wow. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Meher Bala: I don’t know.
I think it’s more than 10 years because I quit my normal nine to five job, eight, eight years back, so it has to be more than that. Just giving 10 plus years.

David Bisset: That’s okay. It’s okay to round.

Meher Bala: I joined the community quite late because I didn’t know there was a community existing, especially my local and then the global.
So it’s been fun from the time I joined.

David Bisset: You’re not going anywhere, are you? You sound like this is Oh, I’m fine. I’m still up on Okay. It sounds like you’re about to send off here and I don’t want this to be that type of podcast. All right.

Meher Bala: No, no, definitely no. All right. I’m here for sure.

David Bisset: Okay, well good. It’s glad to have you. Thank you very much for, uh, coming. Have we ever met before?

Meher Bala: No, I have not met you. I’ve seen all your tweets. I love your

David Bisset: Okay. We can stop there. Alright, we, Robert, Robert, uh, you’re up next?

Robert Windisch: Yeah. I take over before, uh, David like sings in under the screen.

David Bisset: Quickly, quickly, Robert.

Robert Windisch: So yeah. My name is Robert. I am, um, uh, c o of Insight at WordPress agency. I’m in WordPress since 1.52. So for me it’s very e very easy. I’m so old. I can name the release I came in, which was in 2005. Um, and, and people go like, no, you were older. No, no, no, no, no. I’m a late bloomer. Like, I came in like two years already when everybody, when the, the server were already set up, the, the forums was there and I just came in, swooped up and was like, Hey, is can I help with developer stuff? And they got, and the community, German community was like, you can develop here a server admin access. So I just, uh, um, grab a hammer and then like cleaning pipes in the WordPress server community.

David Bisset: All right. Well, good, good to have you on board, Robert. All right, Tammie. Hello. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I am Tammie. Uh, I’ve. Uh, I had to check how long, which was quite a thing apparently. Um, according to my profile, 2006. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think I, I came because I was torturing a cms, like everybody back in the day, and someone showed me that there was a better way with WordPress.
Um, I think I might have been a bit before that because I was kind of doing it. Um, so that was on wordpress.org and themes brought me to WordPress. So, and since then I’ve been, uh, doing various core contributions. Um, and that’s me.

David Bisset: Yeah. Well, well, if anybody’s been word WordPress, any measure of time, I have seen you in some way, shape, or form.
Ah, Simon, bring it home. Hi. Bring it home.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Hi, I’m Simon. I started using WordPress in 2008, exactly 15 years ago. Um, I started with like, Easy front end development stuff. Worked my way a bit to the back end and at some point graduated from developing stuff myself. And now I am a product owner at Group One. Um, and I spent like the last 10 years organizing meetups and, and wood camps and stuff like that. So I really love that part of our community. Um, and I’m looking forward to at least the next 10 years of that.

David Bisset: Oh good. You, you’re okay. Well exercise and eat, eat a good diet and we’ll see. Uh, well thank you all and again, I’m David, if you’ve probably already know. Um, I work, uh, I’m employed at Awesome Automotive. I run a project called WP r WP Charitable or Charitables, the products for non-for-profit organizations. It’s been a recently acquired and I’m a project manager there. I’ve been, uh, I’ve experienced with, uh, work camps. I’ve been. With Word Camp Miami started in 2008, and I think I was around and since, um, WordPress 1.5, whenever that was. Um, that came out with, with I think, uh, themes and pages and that sort of thing. So I’ve been with, with WordPress for a while. This is not gonna be about me today. This is because I’ve talked enough in the past episodes, um, of that. So I want, I want to feel, um, we’re gonna go around. We’re gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get your picks in terms of the categories we’ve selected, but this is an open conversation. So as soon as the, the initial person gets their, gets their words out of their mouth, you’re feel free to have a discussion and I’ll, uh, I’ll poke up accordingly. So, Mihir, um, Let’s start with you. Uh, let’s talk about, one of the things that we wanted to, wanted to talk, and this is gonna be a little bit different than if you’re, if you’re listening right now, you’ve listened to the others. These are slightly different topics and categories I wanted to touch on here, cuz these, cuz I wanted to get some, there’s so much to cover for WordPress’s. 20th, 20th anniversary in 20 years. There’s so much to cover. So I wanted to make sure we, we, on some of the shows and some of the people I talked to, we, we kind of varied our discussion points.

So first thing we wanted to cover was a memorable design or refresh in WordPress history. Now, some people ask me, well, does this mean this? And does this mean that, um, does this mean project or does this mean that I, when I ask these questions, they’re open for interpretation. So I am not looking, I am looking for something within a scope. But wherever you read that question, you can go from there. So what Mihir, what was your. Memorable design or refresh and WordPress history?

Meher Bala: Uh, my memorable was 1.3. Uh, one was having a multisite built in the co. Mm-hmm. And one was a 20, uh, 10th heme, which was most stylish, more simple and very readable to normal users who, you know, what, just wanna run the WordPress as a blog because blogging had just begun and everyone was using WordPress. So for me it was, 3.0.

David Bisset: Yeah. Uh, I was a big multi-site fan back in the day, and I remember he had to download two versions of WordPress. Yes. Uh, and that was, and that’s, but that was, um, and see that was the, what was the theme again? What was the year 2010?

Meher Bala: 2010 was it? Uh, 2010 was a theme. The year was, uh, 2010.

David Bisset: Right. That makes sense. I was trying to, I was trying to pull up what it looked like, cuz I’m drawing a blank. Remember we were talking about, um,

Meher Bala: it’s the white banner on top.

David Bisset: Oh, there it is. Yeah. I remem Oh yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. That was with the trees in the road. Yes. Is the default picture. Yeah. And it’s kind of hard to describe audibly, but if you just do WordPress 10,000 theme in Google images, you get all the clones appearing and there is some, there was a little bit of styling there, but it was mostly what blogs, what the typical stylish, simple blogs were back then. It was like a large hero image or a large full width image. And then you had your two columns, right?

Meher Bala: Yes. It was something new for a lot of people.

David Bisset: Well before that, not too much before that. I don’t know if there was another word. I, I forget when WordPress year theme started, was this the first one?

Tammie Lister: That was the first default theme? That was the first, that was second one. No, that was the first official default theme. Mr.

Simon Kraft: Well, there was Kubrick before that.

David Bisset: No, I see. Dang. I lost a bet. Years. Yeah, because yeah, I was, I, I should have said that’s the first default theme that was named after years because we had Kubrick for like four or five years before that. Oh yeah. So this is kind of memorable because this

Tammie Lister: is the first default, the one that started the default years
David Bisset: because we got so sick and tired of looking at that, uh, Corick theme. No, I mean, it was nice and pretty, but I mean, it’s like my kids, I can only look at ’em so much before I need something new, new, new to glance at.
So, but yeah, it was perfect. But, alright, so I think that’s pretty memorable. Nice. Round number 3.0, multi-site, no more Kubrick, first year theme. I agree. That’s a pretty good design moment in WordPress history. Um, let’s, uh, so Robert, what’s your, yeah, what’s your, what’s your big, uh, design moment that you wanna share?

Robert Windisch: So, so first, Mihir taking multisite from me, like, uh, we have a conversation next, next word camp like, and from me by the way.

David Bisset: So is that your, was that gonna be your pick?

Robert Windisch: No. Yeah. Uh, I’m the multi side person. Yes.

David Bisset: Oh. Oh, see, we already have our first

Meher Bala: right after three, so.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that’s totally, it’s, it’s, you, you are the first one. Um, and I am, I shying away from other things because I want, I know Tammie wants to, wants to mention that that one thing that end ends with a number, probably this, the design refreshed, but like, I, I give Tammie the, um, the, oh, no. Okay. I can take it. I can take it. Okay.

David Bisset: See, you try to, you try to be a nice human being. Well, well,

Robert Windisch: yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because like, I, I’m the second one, so, um, but I have, like, you are welcome to that one. Yeah. But that’s my, would be my second pick. So, um, so I would, with the, with the biggest like, design, uh, um, like seismic shift from like, uh, from, from the, from the feeling was when the, when the menu went from the top to the left. Like that. That was like that. I have no idea when this was. Like, I’m very bad. Right? Like it was eight ago.

David Bisset: Menu went from the top. You mean the admin making

Robert Windisch: the WordPress menu was in the top third

David Bisset: one? Yes, it was. Cuz I remember in one five it was, but I, I can’t, I can’t remember now. You’re gonna have to make me look things up.

Robert Windisch: I, I would guess, but I’ve, I’ve, I’m bad with like, because it’s, so we’re currently talking about like between like which dinosaur were alive when this happens. So that’s why it’s, it’s so, it’s so far off. And I will simply say like, uh, the biggest, like design wise for the future, for the user interface was really when the, when the top menu, which was not like, it could not scale because you had, uh, determined like link in the menu. We experienced that in the WordPress org menu also that we have a problem with, with link there. So, so that was for me, like a, a, a big, um, like design visible decision that, um, was, was made and then, Like, it’s now the current, the current way of the WordPress backend.

David Bisset: Okay. For now, I’ll, we’ll, I’ll, I’ll guess that it was around 2.0 cuz I remember it being in one five and it was pretty, and I started using one five, but very quickly after I started using it. Like, I don’t remember the top stuff match for very long, so I mean, I’ll be, I’ll be Googling to fill that in, but, okay. Well, we’re gonna, we’re, we’re gonna put 2.0 as a placeholder, but That’s right. It’s, and just fortunately, I mean, we think the sidebar is a bit of a mess today. Although the stuff that we had, just imagine if it was a top-down navigation menu in the admin.

Robert Windisch: Yeah. All the, all the, uh, like upsell things now in the top menu bar, that would be like, lovely. What would it be?

David Bisset: Why, how would that work? You, we all the plugin authors have to add like a second navigation, second dropdown. It’s like a mega menu.

Simon Kraft: We just, we’ll just like break and add another line, and you have a huge block on top of every Diamond page.

David Bisset: Tammie’s miming all of the facial expressions as we’re talking here. That’s fine. All right, okay, well, Tammie, now it’s your turn. Robert, I’m gonna get back to you on a version number on that exactly, because

Meher Bala: I think version number’s, uh, 2014.

David Bisset: Okay. That’s a year. That’s close. That we’re, we’re, we’re getting closer now. So 2014 is the next clue. 2014, the menu came inside. So that’s four years after the 2010 theme. I know I can do math, but I mean, that would mean it would be greater than WordPress.

Robert Windisch: No, no, no, no. The the menu, the, the, the, the, it was was already decide when the, when the other thing that I want to mention later, uh, um, come, come.

David Bisset: No, don’t ruin it. Don’t worry, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. All I know is that I was. Yeah, all I know is that, um, there’s probably dirt younger than the version number that we’re gonna find, but anyway. All right, Tammie, time, time to go from miming to audio and sharing your, uh, the biggest or most memorable design moment. And this should be right up your alley

Tammie Lister: 2005 and it’s Kubrick. And the reason is, if you speak to most people that got their visuals or, or some front end work in WebPress, uh, have been around for a while, they got their start because of Kubrick. That was one of the themes that got them into it. Or they started tinkering around with themes. Um, it was one of those themes that you like cut your teeth on, you learnt with, so that, I know we were kinda saying it was around for a while, but honestly it’s what. Most of us learn how to theme from. So for me, I think it’s the most memorable design. Um, mainly for cuz of the gradient. If you think of Kubrick, you see the gradient. So that’s the one for me. It’s gotta be Kubrick.

David Bisset: Well, for me personally, I may have mentioned this on another episode, um, but Kubrick wasn’t just another design or even a design that stayed for a long time. It was when WordPress was really starting to get popular for blogs. Yeah. And I think visually speaking, at least for me, that whenever you ha if you wanna get a couple of screenshots or photos or memories Yeah. Of just how, when blogging got popular, Um, yeah.

Tammie Lister: Would, and I set the tone. Yeah. So many people just were never color gradient or had that big header and that header format stayed for a very long time. The big headers. We’ve only just very recently stopped having big headers in our designs and kind of started moving away from the big header design and realizing you don’t have to have that in every design, so,

David Bisset: well, you know, what they say about big headers.
What’s that?

Tammie Lister: Um, for, for me, I feel that you, you can’t really include this list without saying that because it feels quite seminal to Yeah. What you learn and at the front end, the code level, because we really learn how to create themes from it as well. Oh yeah.

David Bisset: Iconic. Iconic, very good choice. So, yeah, we’ve had, um, WordPress 3.0, our mystery WordPress 2.0 theme that we’re gonna go to do, and, uh, Kubrick 2005. So, uh, Simon, what I, can you share with us what your memorable, uh, design. Moment is in our WordPress history. So far we’ve, we’ve, and I’m, so far, I’m glad we have stayed in the past, but are you gonna, are you gonna be there with us, Simon, or are you edging a little closer to the future? Like pick something from the future? Um, no, I mean, I meant far past.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. Okay. I, I think mine is not that, that long ago. Well, it should be like 10 years. Um, Robert already, um, alluded to it. Um, I pick MP six, the, the redesign of the word presentment interface. Um,

David Bisset: see, you hear that Si Simon. That means I can Google it and get a year versus Roberts description

Simon Kraft: it should be what? Press 3.8.

David Bisset: Well, I’m not gonna fact check-

Robert Windisch: just keep in mind the new redesign of the interface.
Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. It, it’s just 10 years old. That’s, that’s still good. Um, and that was was a point where I really started. Loving the way the WordPress back end looks, because before that it was, it was cool, it was nice, it was usable.
Uh, but with that, it felt like really fresh and still to a certain degree does, uh, today. And I think there were a couple of smaller, um, redesigns, I think WordPress 5.7 at the standardization of, of colors or something it was called, where we had a bit more contrast, a bit more unified set of colors, which is also very nice. I came to really love that. But that’s the interface on the web that I interact with, like every single day of every year, ever since. Uh, so that’s, that’s quite cool.

David Bisset: I, it looks like, to me, the, I mean, I think this plugin was around a while before it actually officially came out in the WordPress police, because I’m finding posts from 2013. Um, and do you remember why it was called MP six? I mean, must stand for something

Robert Windisch: Tammie doesn’t know. Nobody knows here.

David Bisset: Yeah. I’m looking at,

Tammie Lister: I think it was a project name.

David Bisset: It had to be Matt, think it was, it had to be probably Matt or who, or I forget the original designer or the original project creator cuz I’m, cuz this was nine years ago.

Tammie Lister: It was a group, group of people who created it and got together.
It was one of the first projects where a group of people got together and created it and kind of worked on it. Um, it was kind of the first attempt at that, um, to get kind of designed, done collectively, I guess.

David Bisset: Yeah. Was that the first, what do you call them? Um, project plug-ins. No, that’s not the right word. Um, feature. I’m not even sure. Feature plug-ins turns back then. Yeah. Cuz this, would this been considered plugins or anything? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the term didn’t exist, but it was, I think it was probably one of the first quote unquote feature plugins. Right. Yeah, I mean without that we’d still be looking at the uh, um, now if I can find a screenshot between Robert’s Pick and Simon’s Pick for the WordPress admin where the, it was side navigation, but it’s still an before MP six. Man, I can’t remember it.

Robert Windisch: People, people will not, people will not like if you show them MP six, it looks very like the current, um, interface. So that’s why, um, oh yeah, we don’t change anything. Just need to like the pre, the pre MP six phase, because that was the new redesign, as I always, I cannot, I cannot emphasize nothing. That was how new this was for, this was for the WordPress people, and we are like, finally someone is investing in the WordPress Pega interface. So that was really like a, a, a jump in in, in, um, in user, in, in, um, user interface, um, and, and usability of WordPress.

David Bisset: It had a bunch of new dash icons, remember, da remember Dash icons. Um mm-hmm. For those of us who know what those are a redesigned widgets page by Sean Andrews from his Widgets project. If, uh, P six included that. Wow. I didn’t, I totally forgot about the widgets project. Improvements to the customizer color schemes. Is this, is this when we got our color schemes like Ectoplasm or some, I wonder if that’s Yep.

Tammie’s shaking her head vigorously guess. And a new midnight color scheme. So that’s, thank you, Debbie. Thank you Sarah from 2013 for helping us remind that. Well, that sounds fantastic. So we have stayed. We have stayed pretty, pretty well pre 2015 pre Gutenberg. That’s a i I applaud you all for the biggest, most memorable design moments, not being part of, uh, anywhere beyond the 5.0 release of WordPress.

Thank you. So just to, just to rehash here, Mihir, uh, WordPress, uh, 3.0 multi-site and the first year themed theme. Um, yes, Robert, uh, we’re still gonna hunt for a version specific for that, I assure you. But when the, but we’re talking about when the big jump made from moving navigation from the top to the left hand side.

Uh, we’re gonna guess that’s 2.0 WordPress for now. Kubrick, who could forget Kubrick? We didn’t. Tammie thought that was, and that probably one of the most fundamental images and thumbnails representing the blog when blog blogs went. We’re in its heyday when movable type was, was starting to fade and WordPress jumped on the scene, how iconic.

And then MP six, Simon picked that. And that of course is just, you know, we still have that with us today. And that’s been, it’s been, been probably, it’ll probably around 10 years. So, Fantastic. Well, uh, from design-wise, I really don’t have much to, to say in this department. Um, I, I think we’re, I think the early version of WordPress that introduced pages was great, but that’s not really much of a design feature.

That’s just, I think it did open it up for a little bit more design. Um, I, if I had to pick something, I, I don’t know if this would be my most memorable, but I use it every day. It is the redesign of the WordPress site, um, wordpress.org. Um, a lot of people don’t remember how that looked way, way, way, way back then.

Um, with, and then it was all split out into various groups, uh, various categories as we have them today, you know, core and design and plugins and, and all of that. Um, I don’t know, maybe I’m, maybe this is an old person talking, but it was really, really clunky and really plain back in the early days. And now with the learn.wordpress.org and the redesign stuff’s, it’s happening.

It’s looking so much more professional and grown up maybe is the, is the best word I can describe it in. But anyway, that’s, that’s just me. And maybe for, I will share some, if I can find some old screenshots of that, which I couldn’t initially, um, I would love to, love to share them with you. So let’s move on to our next category.

Mihir, you are up again. So we are talking about the most notable enhancement to WordPress core that isn’t Gutenberg related. So I definitely, so I definitely put that. That, that qualifier in there, because I think that would be way too easy. Um, we in way too broad. Um, and when I say most notable enhancement to WordPress core, that means this is, um, it, it had to appear in WordPress core at some point.

Maybe it’s something that’s not there anymore or maybe something that it was acquired or merged into WordPress core. Didn’t have to start there, but it was something, a most notable enhancement to WordPress core. And I had some people say, well, what do you mean by enhancement? Do you mean coding wise or design wise?

Again, this is up to your interpretation. As long as you don’t say the G word, we will be Okay. Mihir. So go ahead. What is your most notable enhancement to WordPress Core? We had no guten, guten free.

Meher Bala: Mine is the events, uh, widget on a dashboard.

David Bisset: I’m sorry, say that again. My, my ears exploded. What was that?

Meher Bala: The event widget.

David Bisset: Oh, the event widget, yes. Ooh. This is why I like talking to people that are above the age of 18, cuz that’s all I have in my house for, for like a week, every week. The events widget. Oh, tell us, tell us a little bit about that in case people have have forgotten about that.

Meher Bala: So, uh, whenever there’s any, uh, meetup happening or WordPress happening, uh, in your locality, the events are displayed there.

And in our local, what I noticed is once the widget came out, a lot of new people who didn’t know the community started, you know, attending meetups, started interacting with the community. So we had a few different people at every meetup. So that’s something which is memor, which is.

David Bisset: That for me is an amazing pick. I never would’ve thought of that. And apparently you did.

Meher Bala: I see the community grow even with that. So for me, that’s still in the mind more than Gooden book.

David Bisset: That’s amazing because not only does it serve, did it serve a purp? I I, I can’t remember if this is when people realize meetup.com was crap. I can’t remember exactly when. Uh, sorry. Meet, sorry, or sorry to our sponsor meetup.com by the way. Um, I love you. Uh, so mom, uh, who works there? So, meetup.com was probably the only way WordPress people were fighting each other at the time. I do you have a, do you know when that, I guess we’re gonna have to find out when that came about cuz I have no idea.

Simon Kraft: That was WordPress 4.8.

David Bisset: And do you have a year for that? No. Oh, well, now that we know a version number, hello. Welcome to a podcast, but we’re doing our research live on the air. Thank you. 2017. 2017 or something like that.
Robert Windisch: Welcome. Welcome to a normal community conversation, by the way, we don’t, we don’t run around and no version numbers and years.
We just go like, do you remember this feature? Oh my God. That’s it.
David Bisset: You get what you pay for the hallway track. People are getting what they

Tammie Lister: for when someone get, gets their phone out and starts tapping and then finds it, and then you go, oh yes,

David Bisset: someone’s rolling their eyes right now and starting a letter.
Dear David, oh, well

Tammie Lister: I can’t believe they didn’t know that.

David Bisset: David Professional in quotes, uh, we have that before that 2017. The reason why I was wanting a year is because that is before I think Slack and where Press Slack, I believe.

Robert Windisch: No, no, no. Slack was, slack was uh, in civil already. Slack was there.

David Bisset: So, yeah. Okay, so. I don’t wanna pinpoint it, I guess. Yeah. Cuz 20, I remember a community summit when they made the announcement, but 20, that could have been as early as 2015. So if that widget came out in 2017, there was still ways. I guess the two top ways you would know about WordPress community would be meetup.com was still probably the biggest way there.
And then maybe if you were on WordPress Slack at the time. Right.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, but meetup media.com was the, we, we, so we decided on media.com because I remember the conversation we had internally be, Hey, let’s build this. And like, people who know project management was, was like, um, you know, that we want to do democratizing publishing, not democratizing events here.

So, so that’s why luckily we decided to simply give meetup.com money and let they run all of this. And we simply like hooked the meet, hooked the Meetup API into their system and was simply like, um, doing, let them do all the work.
David Bisset: Oh, I was talking, when I talk about meetup.com, I talk about the interface on meetup.com because my experience with it was, I was running meetups through meetup.com and creating the meetups, um, even searching for meetups, and I’m, I’m sure it got better over time.

I think Amaz, coincidentally enough, is when Weber, when there was that single. Page for the WordPress meetups. Like you said, they, I think there was some, some deal with the, uh, with, um, with, I don’t know. I would, I’m gonna guess WordPress Foundation on this was, was involved or something, but before a while you would just have random spots of communities on meetup.org.

Which org, which was hard to find. That’s the experience I remember cuz I was running one of those meetups, or two of them actually for a while. And then there came a time where everything was under one umbrella. Organizational wise, I think it had a dedicated page and probably, I’m guessing at that time is where the widget would probably start pulling that kind of information.

Right. Cuz it’s all centralized Meetup. It’s probably, it’s probably, um, like a meetup organization or something like that. So apologies for me getting it a little confused. I think it did get better, but I, I remember once we had that widget, I pointed people toward the widget and we would have meetups where I said, how many people found us through the widget and we always had one or

two people at our meetups raise their hand. So I think that’s an amazing pick. Does any, did, doesn’t, does any, I I’m seeing a few people nod. So is that your experience as well, Simon?

Simon Kraft: Yeah. I think our meetup in, in Germany, multiple meetups in Germany, like grew tenfold or something in the year following the, the, this update with 4.8. So that’s really huge for the meetup community.

David Bisset: Yeah. So not only do we get a nice new widget on the dashboard, which doesn’t come by that often, but it had an impact on the community. So I think that’s a really cool pick. Really appreciate you take us down me memory lane and my apologies to meetup.com. Um, Robert. I believe you’re up next. Um, so again, just in case, uh, people have nodded off here listening to us

Robert Windisch: totally like, yeah, totally fine. I can bring up something that is nothing with five. Oh, that is a feature that influenced many people and that, uh, everybody goes like, yeah,

David Bisset: just I said Guttenberg related. Now if there’s anything else in five that wasn’t,

Robert Windisch: no. Not even close. No, no. I’m, I’m still, I’m still in a very old feature. I’m still in three, 3.0. I’m talking about, menus.

David Bisset: Menus. Oh, you mean like creating menus?

Robert Windisch: Before that you needed to have pages and pages needed to have redirect because you needed to get some structure. And then the only thing to have a high, high cultural, uh, a structure where you have like a parents and chil uh, children was with pages. And that was like when people like fumbled their menu structure together with external links. And then you had a drag and drop in the WordPress back and with menus.

David Bisset: You. Wow. That act. Wow. I can’t remember that o That was wor that was 3.0. Yeah.

Robert Windisch: Wow. That was merged from Wu. Seems the WCI feature of menus were merged in the WordPress core

David Bisset: wow. That’s so hard to believe. Looking back on that now, 3.0, not so, not only P 3.0 had multi-site and, and, and the new theme it had, it had the menu stuff too. That’s amazing that, that would’ve been so barbaric. It’s probably the reason why my webs

Robert Windisch: no difference with me. No promise with me with features and breakfast.

David Bisset: Uh, that’s so barbaric. It’s like, for a long time it’s like, why do all these WordPress sites don’t have barely have any menus on ’em until this date? Co. I remember Cooper, I don’t, I might explain why my early Cooper Gays, I don’t see many, I don’t see many menus. They were on the, they were on the sidebar. A lot of the links for websites. Yeah, I re I don’t know,

Tammie Lister: it was all a widget or, or kind of lists

Robert Windisch: and No, that the link, the link, the link feature where you could have like defined what’s,

Tammie Lister: that’s what it was. Cause that’s all we had. You didn’t have anything else. And then when you had early menus, you had to do those walker things. The, you only knew a few knew special magic words and more wizard. That was because it was really, really difficult.

David Bisset: Oh wow. Okay. Well, yeah, definitely notable enhancement menus. Where could we be without menus? It’s like a, it’s like a car without, I dunno, a steering wheel or something. All right, Tammie. Uh, notable enhancement to WordPress core and no good. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: I think I’m back at 3.0, but I want that checked custom post types is where I’m going. Uh, I feel like we’re just settling on that release, but it’s one of those releases where we just kind of, it feels like it grew up or we got the features, which then meant the, not just people could write logs or, or use, you could then pivot and grow and extend.

That’s really what that release felt about. And custom post types, if you think about everyone that’s made a product or everyone that’s used in an agency or anyone’s done anything with WordPress, they wouldn’t have probably done that if it hadn’t been for a custom post type. So it kind of was there, or, or at least that concept.

So, and even Emberg has the, the G word, I’m sorry, but that has the roots in that kind of thinking. So yeah, custom post types is the thing for me. That’s, it’s,
David Bisset: that’s, it’s, it’s. It’s really what started to make WordPress more than a blog. Like everybody’s, yeah. But then

Tammie Lister: you could, like ex you could make it yours and you could take it your your direction and you could build on top of it. You know, we now think about like headless and doing everything you want and all that. That would not been impossible if we hadn’t started thinking about custom post types, which now sounds really like simple. Right? Um, but it’s not that back then that was radical thinking. Yes.

David Bisset: So yeah, you could start making. And history would rather us not learn this lesson too deeply. But I mean, you, you could make a like WordPress into any sort of application you wanted to. Yeah. Yeah. Not that you should, but I mean, you could. Right. And there was, and there was already custom post types.

Tammie Lister: It wasn’t just these pages with, with Kubrick, but it was just this flat file. You, you, I mean, as we’ve just heard, you had navigation and, and then you had these different things. You had so much in 3.0. 3.0 was basically like Christmas.

David Bisset: Yeah. I mean, how much brain matter had this. How much brain matter was scraped off the floor at the Word camp announcement for 3.0. You know, it’s like our minds were blown so much. Just stop it. Yeah, stop it. It’s all, it’s already dead. Uh,

Tammie Lister: yeah, but if you think back then about the upgrade paths of 3.0 as well, cuz back then it was very different as well. Let’s say we don’t have releases that are that significant now because so many things happen then it’s kind of mind blowing.

David Bisset: Yes. It’s like you, you went out, you went to, you went to, you went to the customer saying, let’s upgrade you where this is the customer. No. Really? No. Yeah. Let’s, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s, let’s go nuts. Just cup take. All right, Batman. So, all right Simon. So we’ve got an events widget, we’ve got menus, we’ve got custom post types.

Uh, I don’t wanna put any pressure on you here, but, um, do you have something he’s gonna say entering text into a box? For the win, Alex,
Simon Kraft: and that, that was exactly what I was going for. Now, actually, in the first round, all my picks and the backups and their backups were picked by everyone else.

David Bisset: But this time I, I said to come, I said To come with a sat.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. And, but this time, every single one of my, of my picks is still in the race. And that makes it a bit hard. And I’m going for the, I think most insignificant one of them, because it’s no longer in core. And that’s something we don’t do that often. Oh, no.

David Bisset: Um, oh, no, I think I know what it is. It’s post formats. Yes.

Simon Kraft: Um, I, I really loved that feature back in the day. Uh, as I said, I was

David Bisset: te Tell us a little bit about post formats, Simon.

Simon Kraft: Yeah. I, I, I was, I was building a lot of themes back then and post formats basically had the idea that you cannot only post a post. So not just a blob of text, but also. Oh, I have lists somewhere here so I don’t have to bumble around like an idiot.

Um, something that was called a site, like a, a small kind of update kind of post. You had a galleries, links, uh, images, quotes, a status while reading that. I’m not so sure how that compares to a site. Um, video, audio and chat. And they’re gone now. They were introduced in 3.1. Um, but they were like, that was a really fun way of, of styling different kinds of content in blocks.

David Bisset: I remember Matt talking about it on stage, by the way, and I mean, I’m that old.

Robert Windisch: I’m so happy that they are gone. I’m so happy that they, I’m not, I’m not at all.

David Bisset: Robert. Robert, Robert. They’re some confusing for people. Robert, we, we’ll get to, we’ll get to your negative emotions, but let’s, I’ll, I’m sorry Simon, I interrupted. Go ahead. You were telling us about this wonderful feature.

Simon Kraft: It was so wonderful and at some point, I’m not sure when. It was removed from Core. I think there’s still a way around that. You can still technically use it in some capacity, but it’s not an ongoing core.

Tammie Lister: I mean, still you can also use a block now you could use a block and, and have it as a, that’s not the same. Yeah. I mean, no, you could sign it.

David Bisset: Well, it was introduced in 3.1, it says here. So it almost made like we were writing an, we were writing high back then as a WordPress. People we’re like, oh man, 3.0 is so awesome. What’s next? What’s next? Oh, this post format stuff. Oh man, we gotta do this. And then, and then crickets. Why, why do you all think that post formats didn’t make it?

Simon Kraft: I think, uh, blogging is not that relevant anymore. Yeah.
Tammie Lister: Unfortunately. So I think that’s, that’s one of the things is like, It’s very in the blogging sphere, I think it works just for blogging or not for a particular type of blogging even. Mm-hmm. Um, and there was a, you know, if you think about, what was it?

Timelines, it was a big thing back then. I went kind of wanna bring them back, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, and like listening to, and I’m doing and status updates. It was kind of in a time before we used social media as well, so people were using their blog to post and syndicate everything on there. And people just started doing that in other places rather than their blog.

Not saying they’re not gonna come back with, uh, the world as it is and owning your own content. But I think that because it was very particular, and then WordPress was starting to become about more broad in its terms. I think that’s the thing when we moved to plugins being about particular things rather than the interface.

Robert Windisch: Yeah, I just want to pick on my like, negative thing that I said I, I just wanted, like in terms of the user, for the user, it was very complicated to like decide while writing. And, uh, if we are emphasizing on like for the majority of users and have it very lean, mean, uh, interface, then it’s like going like, okay, what of these seven things, is that what you currently want to do?

And or nine or whatever it was. And it was not extendable, so it was Oh my God. So that’s why it was very, for the user, not that, that’s why I’m saying like, uh, um, it was not easy to understand and they just want to publish and then we are going like, please do this checkbox and otherwise you cannot like, start the car.
So that’s why I was like, um, really against, uh, the, the post format because they were against the, the, the, the directory of WordPress having like becoming easier to use for people. Yeah. And, and as much as I love the feature, I think that’s a valid reason to, to remove it.

Meher Bala: Because even a lot of my clients. They want, they choose a, uh, post type, and they expected some result, something else came up. So a lot of people were confused. Users.

David Bisset: I could see that. S all right, so I have here events, widget menus, custom post types, and r i p to post post formats, although I think it’s in the code somewhere, it’s, and, um, you, you can up to this point, right?

They wouldn’t just outright kill it. They hit it and it’s still in there somewhere. And it’s just one of those few things in WordPress that had a lot of, uh, fanfare. And again, it just, for one reason or another, it just kind of fizzled a little bit. And the, and so anyway, um, so I’m, I’m gonna throw in mine.

So, believe it or not, there is something that was once popular. And I don’t know if post formats, you could say it was popular, but I, I like to think it was at least it had a little bit of, uh, runway. There was something early on in WordPress that was popular, that was used quite a bit. And then inversion 3.5, I think at 3.5.
Feel free to correct me, uh, future Self that, um, it, it disappeared. Um, I’m talking about something in the admin. I’m talking about Something was, started very on in WordPress and in fact, it was part of blogging culture for a long time that if you had a blog on your website in the sidebar, I’m looking to see if peopleare starting to think about this.

You had a list of other people’s blogs that you could l that you would link to, and that was called drum roll. Please think I broke my table. Um, blog roll. That was called a blog roll, but in the WordPress backend, does anybody remember what menu that was? No. Okay. Links. I’m All right. Thanks for reading it.

Links. Sorry, there was a links menu. No, no, that’s right. I made, so it was the links. So I don’t know if this was in WordPress from day one. I like to think like pretty soon in WordPress it was, I couldn’t find when it was actually officially added, but I’m pretty sure I could have, I put my mind to it. But link management phase out of WordPress, from what I can see around WordPress, 3.5, um, supposedly wordpress.com added them back or something along those lines.
I’m not sure if they’re still there. Um, so when WordPress 3.5 links was gone, and, you know, by the time it was gone, nobody was using it. Very few people were using it. Um, it, because I remember when it was gone, it was like one of those things that like, it was, it was getting old and crusty anyway. And it had, it would needed to be taken out to the refuge, trash bin, dumpster, whatever you kids are calling it these days.

But I remember using that as one of the first things when I started with WordPress 1.5. Cuz blog rolls were a thing, you would like link the top. Like you people were reading your blog, they wanted something similar to, and you needed something on the sidebar. And believe it or not, um, when people stopped using that, they kind of went over to menus.

Um, like a menu widget or something, I think was, some people wanted to continue that. But yeah, the links management system blog rolls in the early days of blogging. Those were things, you know. Um, so anyway, um, r i p to R one links management. So that was for me. All right. Lastly,

Robert Windisch: can I jump, can I jump in?

David Bisset: Can you link to something? Sure.

Robert Windisch: Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I cannot like, because it was also hard for me to pick something and, um, uh, Simon, do you do the other thing? Um, yeah. Okay. So, um, uh, one of the, one of the things that, um, was very, was very, very important, but it’s not like really visible to see this to people, um, is for me the, uh, the rest api.

Um, because, um, if we talk about like what we are currently like doing with all the, the word we cannot mention here because it’s a, it is a, it’s a history show.

David Bisset: The he who cannot be named yes.

Robert Windisch: But without the rests api, many things currently would not be possible because that’s the foundation and like the, um, the sheer energy to put this into WordPress against all arts against, like, why do we need this?
It’s not a visible feature. And when everybody was like, but we need a rest api, XML L P C is not gonna make it. We need to have the future to really communicate with the WordPress backend, and this needs to be in WordPress. We really, really need this. And then we got it like, um, some base features in there, and now we have it like as the foundation of, we cannot name it here.
Uh, we have this, uh, foundation that if you would disable that you would like have a really a timeish and jump back in a time with the features that we are currently having.

David Bisset: Yeah. Yeah. The rest

Simon Kraft: and probably the next, next iteration of the WordPress interface, like WP admin. Is, I guess, very likely to also be based on the rest api.
David Bisset: So here are some runner-ups. Just thought I’d throw ’em out there real quick. Auto updates, I’m,

Simon Kraft: that was the one that Robert meant, uh, I, I should mention. Yeah, uh, we discussed that earlier. Um, all updates were introduced in 3.7 and changed, I guess, WordPress forever. Because since then, every WordPress website is updated, at least patched, uh, to its new version, which is really cool.
And until recently we, we also kept like all the, I dunno, what was the last version of, of 3.7 still supported like

Robert Windisch: 30, something like that. 30 or 30 something. Yeah.
Simon Kraft: So it was really crazy that all these old versions are still still maintained to a degree.

David Bisset: Mihir, did you? I, I had, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry. I wanted to get Mihir. Mihir was shaking her head like a bo, like a bobblehead doll. Um, there, did you grasp auto updates because, uh, Mihir as well as everyone else, I think, because I know there was a lot of controverts in the beginning about WordPress back then. Smaller market share than it does now. Were you comfortable with auto updates, Mihir, in your, in, in your, um, decade?

Uh, well, I’m sorry you weren’t a decade before, but how were you comfortable? Were you comfortable with WordPress updates? Initially,

Meher Bala: no, because a lot of, uh, sites broke. That was because of the theme and the plugins. But as yours past auto updating WordPress is good because at least people have reduced saying that WordPress is not secure.
Yeah. When it is auto updated people, okay. Find that fine. And WordPress is secure, what we add to it with a theme or plugin. There is some vulnerability over there.

David Bisset: So you, you, so you, you got warm to it. What were you saying, Tammie? Yes.

Tammie Lister: Uh, I was gonna take in a different direction, so I’m checking wherever we are done on order updates.

David Bisset: Oh yeah. Well, uh, yeah. The other two I only wanted to mention in, in, in passing was the customizer. Um, that’s kind of, we’re getting, we’re kind of seeing that maybe in the rear view mirror a little bit. For a while though, that was the true no-code interface to customizing a theme, um, of, in core anyway. And la lastly was the, um, uh, let’s see.

I pasted a u URL in this URL does not make sense. There is also smaller things too that maybe doesn’t play to, I wouldn’t say. A huge part, but we had things like site health, um, import exporting, WordPress, um, in from core with the plugins, that sort of thing. So lots of little things. Uh, and
Tammie Lister: I had one from 2012, which was, uh, something that’s gonna get redesigned or reworked mm-hmm.

Uh, in this cycle or this phase, which is the new media management happened in 2012, which sounds a long time ago for it.

David Bisset: Yeah. I, I can’t remember what it was like before then. I think you had to draw something and mail it to your WordPress blog,

Tammie Lister: be glad that you don’t remember it. It was, it, it was a big thing. And I think that, and even you could have picked like the old way we used to do revisions, which even now you look at revisions and you think, oh, that’s quite dated. The old way was even more dated back in the day. Um, and why I kind of thought of those ones was because they looked dated to us now, but. We are redoing them now.

And I kind of think that that’s kind of interesting to think of. Like the cycle of like every 10 or so years is kind of when we kind of redo things, which kind of is kind Oh, that’s healthy.

David Bisset: It’s a project. Hey, well we’re an open source. If we can get to the 10 year mark, that’s a win, right? Uh, pretty healthy actually.
To, just to wrap, just to wrap this section up. Um, completely forgot about revisions. Um, not that I used them too often, but, um, that and the little thing when the slider came in. Yes.

Tammie Lister: From when we first got the sliding,

David Bisset: I’m not sure if I took to the slider very quickly because I’m like, it’s kinda like going to the eye doctor, does a look better to you?
Or B, I worked on that A or B, no, it had nothing to do with the design. It had me trying to keep in my head what, and then the side by side stuff, I think, uh, wa was, was a lot better. But revisions has saved more people’s butts probably than, than one would remember. Oh. Because I, uh, that an auto save. Um, for a while, I don’t think, I don’t remember when, but I know WordPress, when it started, did not autos save your posts as you were typing them.

And I remember Matt said, standing on stage saying, no, now your power can go out or whatever. And you’ve got that post and revisions, incl. And, and that also for me, blended into later revisions where, uh, you, you’re, there’s a previous revision. Are you sure you want to edit this or do you wanna look at that or go back to it?

Tammie Lister: But I think back then revisions was, um, Yeah, I think I always kind of forget the words, but it was when we were trying to make things look real, I think skew morphic or something. It was like when you were trying to make like apple, uh, you’re trying to make things look real or those kind of design things.

And I think unfortunately it did inherit a little bit from that. Um, so I think now we would go a lot more, um, streamlined. Uh, design has come on a little bit. Uh, it’s more information based. It’s more how you are gonna process. It’s more kind of quick. If you look at the way GitHub and all those kind of interfaces are now, you know, we’ve learned.

But back then we were trying to solve a problem that hadn’t really been. Kind of comprehended. We were trying to visualize issues that we hadn’t. So it was kind of really interesting to think of like, going back to it now with everything we know about the complications of those. And now we know that people probably do want to extend those, probably do wanna export them, probably do find them useful as well.

David Bisset: We may see a little bit of a change in this department with phase three, with the, um, multi-user stuff too.

Tammie Lister: Oh, I think we’re gonna see a complete change in that way, at least I hope we do, because honestly, that’s not gonna scale.
David Bisset: Yeah. You think? Yeah, I would. Yeah. I, I always get, I get, my daughter says, I’m trying to edit up, posting your site and it says, you’re still in there.

Can you close a tab? And I’m like, I, or I can kick you out. I’m like, fine. You’re your mother’s daughter anyway, so. Alright, so we have one last category here. Um, Mihir, you are up first. Now this category is how I described this. And I’m getting them, I’m getting these, these are getting wordier as we go along, but okay, so this is a memorable community moment or community initiative or community Cause that wasn’t a WordPress release and you’re saying, well, why did David put not a WordPress release?

Um, well, because there have been a couple of memorable WordPress releases focused on who was releasing, who is contributing, all great things. But we’ve got a lot of that feedback in the, in the past about, oh, it was, it was, um, you know, the WordPress releases, especially the ones where, um, the underrepresented groups took over forward word press release.

Great. That that could be counted as a community moment. Fantastic. But everybody says that when they first think of one. So I wanted us to be a little bit more tougher, no word press releases, but anything else is open game in terms of a community moment initiative or a cause. So, Mihir, I would love to hear what you’ve got to say about this.

Meher Bala: So, For me, when I joined the community, I always, uh, like the very few women who participated and when I used to go to work camps, also the women were fewer. So I just started, you know, gathering all the women and started taking group fit pictures and it became a thing, like if I was there in Word Camp, it was, you know, I had to do a group with them because everyone got excited, new people added.

So pre pandemic, each word camp I went to, I had, I mandatory went on stage in the lunch break and decided a time place where, you know, everyone will get together. I heard a few things, but I said, this is helping encourage other women. So I don’t see any problems, so why not? And I used to put on, put on Twitter as well.

David Bisset: So, so, so you organ Yeah. It’s kinda encouraging someone else. What’s that?

Meher Bala: It’s kind of encouraging another woman to be a part of the community.

David Bisset: Absolutely. Um, so like selfies, but good, but selfies representing under underrepresented groups. I, I, they’re there. Yeah. The WordPress, I mean, you can talk about this all, all day. And this is not exclusive to the WordPress community, it’s tech in general, right. We’re always used to that. I have a daughter who is growing up and she kind of grew up in the WordPress community more or less for the last 10 years, you know, with the word camp exposure and everything. And you know, today we kind of take some of the efforts to make people feel welcome for granted a little bit.

Um, there’s still obviously a lot that needs to be done in the community, but back in the early days it was, um, You know, especially if someone, someone relates to an someone who relates to a subject or a con or a conference, they love seeing people that represent them on stage or representing them organizing an event.

Right. And maybe it’s not apples to apples. Exactly. But you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like, especially, um, especially if, just think if you’re a young woman, I can’t, but I have a daughter, so, you know, I’ve seen her reactions and, um, it’s, she, she can connect so well with when people, when women were speaking at meetups.
So just imagine like back then we just, you know, their focus wasn’t there cuz we were just happy to have meetups in ward camps, period. And then once we started getting people to speak, then we kind of, like some people especially, started to notice a pattern and that had to be brought to a lot of people’s attention.

So that kind of, we kind of evolved into a way where, yes, okay, now we’ve got the ba, we’ve got some basics down, but now we’ve got a lot of improving to do because if we want this community to grow and be decent human beings, we should try to make things as as. And you know what that does for me as an organizer, I was focused on speaker stuff, but there were so many people at the work camps like you, Mihir, we’re doing these, um, side, I don’t want to use the wrong term because they’re important, but um, Site events, right?

Or something like that. But I mean that respectfully in terms of like, yeah, let’s, let’s take a, let’s get this certain group together and take a photo or let’s, or, or have this, um, mini meetup or like an after dinner thing at WordPress meetups and that sort of thing. Or even now online, you know, there’s various, um, communities out there that exist for particular kinds of groups.

Um, black Press and so forth that, um, that I, at least I’m familiar with. So I think that was a fantastic idea. I don’t know if anybody else is familiar with anything else or wants to jump in, but I think putting down a moment in terms of, now I don’t know how to word this exactly, so maybe you can gimme a term.
I can put in the show notes. I have women’s selfies written down here just because that’s how my brain works and I don’t wanna be canceled later. WordPress, sorry. If you can gimme another term. That’s what I got. What’s that? Women in WordPress. You got it. I will quote you on that.
Tammie Lister: Have you seen that? It’s possible to not just see one of you though, as well, which is what you are identifying.

You are, you are saying that there’s more than one of you and there’s more than one possibility of you as well, which is really, really important. Um, seeing all the different possibilities that you could do in all the different areas, I think that’s important for whoever you are as well. So I love that. I think that’s amazing.
David Bisset: And more of it, and in the WordPress leadership roles too. So many are women. My family, women are the hardest working ones. Anyway. Okay, we got that on tape. All right, good. All right. Just, just made just a little insurance from, from my wife later. Um, alright Robert, let’s talk, let’s talk a favorite community moment. Or cause Okay. Something along those lines.

Robert Windisch: So my, my job, uh, my day job is to challenge processes. Now, let’s see if I, if I come, if, if I have a runner up. So I just want to see if it’s like how close I am to the things that are not allowed. Okay. Uh, my, uh, favorite or my, like most re uh, community moment is when the, when the whole room at the, at the state of world guest.

Um, the point was when met stopped the release cycle, so when, when the, uh, before like, uh, before the, um, um, five oh release, um, like we had this like every three months we had to release and then, um, this was like, it not going to, it was not gonna cutting it because the, the changes we needed to do, um, were really, were too big.

So we cannot, we, like I heard from so many core people that was not, um, um, Like was, was not gonna like cut it in a few months back to just get it in. So my question is, does counting of a re uh, like starting a release cycle counts. So because, um, that was like, I, we were in the room and was like, yeah, and now that’s why we, uh, need to explain.

Matt explained that and that’s why we stopped the release cycle now and everyone was like, what the hell just happened for me? That was like, he dropped the mic amenable

David Bisset: moment. I think he dropped the mic too. I can’t remember. Uh, when was that?

Robert Windisch: Um, 2017, like, uh, weekend as Tammie, because she was uh, um, uh, design, I think Design team rep after that. Yeah. And like Matt was simply,

Tammie Lister: it would’ve, I think it would’ve been, well it would’ve been 4.9, but we didn’t do that. Uh, and so yeah, it was four, 5.0. Then we. Had a pause, ended it. So yeah, I think it was 17. I dunno the year exactly. 17. There’s many years. 17, 18 blended into each other during that time.

David Bisset: But there was a 4.9. There was a 4.9, wasn’t there?

Simon Kraft: It were many 4.9 s.

Tammie Lister: It would’ve been like 5.0. It was after 4.9. It would’ve been. So,

David Bisset: so it’s kinda like 3.0, sorry. It’s kinda like walking toward a, walking halfway toward a wall and then walking halfway toward a wall. There’s 4.9, there’s 4.99, 4.9 9, 9, 4 0.99, nine, oh, not 5.0 yet very

Tammie Lister: long. 4.9 release,

Robert Windisch: Yeah. But the, the, the beauty was really that, that there was no release. So there was like, we will have a release when we have a release and like there wasn’t release in between where we like fixed small stuff because we still needed to do while like Tammie and other people were like, okay.

How, what are we doing? How do we, like, what is the goal here? And, and that’s why it was really for me, like it sh it, it really, uh, in this, in this moment, in this room at the Word camp us, you really could, like, you could feel a needle drop in the room because like, it was something that never happened before, because like you could, uh, um, um, you can set your watch to Roberto releases.

Mm-hmm. And then we simply stopped doing that while deciding that we, like, stop doing it because it doesn’t make any sense. So it was really, really weird and really good because it, it helped us to make this leap that we not talking about right now, but it, it helped us to really, uh, prepare for that.

Tammie Lister: It was also a stop and help was also kind of part of it.
It was a stop and this is how you can get involved. I think that was kind of the other bit like once everyone kind of gets over that Uber stopped, it was, and then here’s how you can get involved. So it kind of had that double um, or this, that was my, my through the haze of time impact, um, was it brings about the, okay, now I can get involved cuz people do like a release circle.

Right. Um, so consistency. Now I get involved and now I can do that. And it, it did get us to 5.0, it absolutely got us to it. And without that we would not have had the 5.0. You know, there’s no point in releasing something there. We are radically different from what we were, but there’s no point in releasing something that would’ve been half-baked. It wouldn’t have worked.

David Bisset: Yeah. So we have actually done that once in our, at least once in our WordPress history. Right. Yeah, I, I, I don’t know if we’ll see a moment like that again, at least anytime soon. It seems like Gutenberg phases seem to be planned out, or at least not like that drama ish type of thing.

Right. It’s not, it wasn’t a press release Rob Robert’s. Right. I remember. I remember saying Matt, Matt said it, and I think a few people had to change their pants. It was that kind of a moment where you just kind of expected like, this is all, this is all we’ve known, you know? And that’s funny because, you know, fast forward to a few days before working at us and, and, uh, you know, me in a hotel room, super caffeinated trying to finish something as Matt is in a chat room saying 5.0, it’s coming out now, whether we like it or not, it’s coming out, you know.

Anyway. I better stop with the analogies. It was ready. Oh, it was, it was, it was ready. Kind of kinda like I’m on top of this, uh, on a heel skiing and somebody says, oh, you’re ready, you’re ready. And slowly pushing me off the ledge. It’s, it was that type of ready. Oh yeah, it was ready. It was ready. Um, I just did, you know, just, just thinking my life flashing before my eyes right before it came out though. Um, let’s see, Tammie, I think your next, um, community initiative, cause whatever,

Tammie Lister: I’m going to take you back to 2014 to, I don’t wanna go Miami and the first ever kids workshop.

David Bisset: Ah, you actually snagged something.

Tammie Lister: Oh. Cause that fell. I still have. Really fond memories of it. It kind of felt really incredible to, it wasn’t even really that organized. It wasn’t really that.

David Bisset: Thanks Tammie, really appreciate it. It was that big in,

Tammie Lister: I’m sorry, but there’s no, like back then we were David all over initiative. I’m sorry. We weren’t, we weren’t trying to do we, we were just gonna be doing the event. We weren’t gonna necessarily try and do anything bigger with it.

And I think it planted a good seed that maybe took a bit of time before anything else happened, but that was absolutely fine. Um, and it was really important for just to start that. I think it’s both important for representation, but also important for an open source project doesn’t work with older people only working on it.

So for me it was incredibly special if I think of the people that were in that room as well, who were passing on. Many of them are still involved, contributing, in fact, all of them that I can think of. And it was just really special for me. Yeah. Yeah.

David Bisset: Um, that, now, just to be clear, for someone who was about to write that email to us, this is not the first kid’s camp ever in a work camp.
It was the one Tammie attended? No, it was a kid’s workshop. Workshop. It was a, well, I don’t like to use the word kids and work very close to each other because people get sensitive about that.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. It was 2014. It was no like kids camp or anything like that. It was, it was just, I, I don’t think it was that long, either, we weren’t doing it for or anything like that.

David Bisset: Kids don’t exactly have long attention spans. So, yeah, that’s under we,

Tammie Lister: no, it was, it was nothing official. It was no official kids camp. It was nothing. And it, it was, it was long time ago, so there was no kind of officialness of it. Um, but no, it was, I think we got them set up on a blog and we got them to customizing a theme and writing their first post.
That was as far as we got. That was our goal for the day.

David Bisset: Some people vowed never have children after that. Our younger, uh, younger volunteers look, well, I mean, I, I, it was there at Miami because I was at Phoenix and saw something very similar. I think it was a one day event at Phoenix. I saw there, I was there watching the kids.

Which nowaday, it sounds creepy when you say, are you here? Do you have any kids? No, I’m just watching them seeing how they do things. All right. Sarah, security and, uh, but I was watching how they did it in Phoenix, and this was, I don’t know, maybe it’s 2 20 12 or 2013 or something like that. And then, yeah, that’s when we started doing in Miami and now it, now there’s lots of kids’ camps.

There’s a whole kids’. Section now of learning and, and people in charge of that type of thing now. And there’s probably gonna be something at, uh, us, I know there’s something at Europe coming up, uh, which is fantastic. So it’s exploded. And then when we did our 10th anniversary word pr, our 10th anniversary were Camp Miami.

It is prog, it progressed to a point where we had the kids, I forget what the ages were, I’ll be gonna say like seven to 11 or seven to 12, seven to 13. That age group doing what you said, more or less. But then we kind of took the pe, the teenagers, 14 to like high school level. And then we had a day where we taught them WordPress.

And then a day after, like we taught them WordPress and how to build a store in WooCommerce. Then the next day we taught them s e how to market it.

Tammie Lister: Wow. I think it was also back then we were being very experimental with what could a word count be? Remember the day of rest and all the different kind of buddy camps and different things.

Oh, yes. I think we were just kind of experimenting with different formats as well. Yeah, exactly. We were just, uh, I think that was part of it as well as like, how can we start? And it’s great to kind of think about that as well. So I think that was kind of amazing.

David Bisset: Fantastic. Memories. Still one of my mentions. So Simon, um, let’s, let’s cover, let’s cover the, um, anything from a community moment standpoint that stood out for you.

Simon Kraft: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll stay in the, um, event space, I guess.

David Bisset: Oh, he’s, he’s choked up. This is a, this is gonna be so good.

Simon Kraft: Um, and I just noticed that we’ll stay in the 2013 ish, uh, kind of timeframe.
David Bisset: It’s the WordPress 3.0 3.0 of years, right? Yeah.

Simon Kraft: Um, because in, I think it was early October, 2013, uh, we had the first word Kim Europe in, in Liden and it was such a stupid idea, um, back then and still.

David Bisset: Wait, let me, let me write that down, Simon. Yeah. Stupid. Okay, go ahead Simon. Just wanna make sure I got this cuz

Simon Kraft: it’s just the, the kind of stupid idea that hold on and exploded into the kind of mega event that what computer is today. And it was totally different back then, but the idea to bring like a whole continent together and have a joint event, um, It was beautiful and also it was a nice event.
Um, I have to say that, um,

David Bisset: possibly the first regional event, although I don’t know if Word Camp Asia or it’s forced in existence. What’s that?

Simon Kraft: Yeah, yeah. Oh, it really was. And uh, there was no word can be asked before that, at least. No, no official one.

Robert Windisch: There was none. There was just the, just San Francisco, the global one as, as we European call that. Yeah. And I think it’s,

Simon Kraft: it’s some, sorry.

Tammie Lister: No, you go. As it was the first, and it was done in an incredibly short time. Uh mm-hmm. I don’t think anyone ever realizes how short a time it was done in the end as well.

David Bisset: Somebody only had a few people, only had one change of clothes was that quick.

Tammie Lister: But yeah. And, uh, so as, as someone that was involved in it, I, um, it was one of those things that I, I think you, I.
Rarely get to experience, but the venue was incredible. Mm-hmm. I plus one that mm-hmm. That was one of those venues. Um, we, several of us had gone to a conference before in that venue and got to see that venue and it’s was one of those venues that I would love to use again for something. It’s just a great venue.

David Bisset: It really also symbol started to formulate the idea that we could have larger word camps and the community had matured to that point where we could bring in a larger event and we could coordinate across multiple countries for that sort of thing. Um, before that, um, you all you had was cities or I think in a few places or, you know, general regions like Word Camp Southeast or Midwest or something, some direction in the us.

Um, but that was a very memorable moment in terms of community history. Cuz again, I don’t know, I, I think, I don’t know when Japan. I know Word Camp Japans have been very, very long standing, but, but for Europe it was, it was got a lot of attention and I think rightly so. So I’m, I’m really good for that cuz it kind of set the, it set the pattern for all for, for camp us a bit.

It set a precedent for, um, the scene. There’s War Camp Asia and there’s probably, I feel like I’m leaving somebody out. I think there’s one on the books and I just can’t remember what region is now gonna be. I know they want to have a war camp, Africa War Camp

Robert Windisch: Nordic. You had a WordCamp Nordic regions in, in, in Europe.
Mm-hmm.

David Bisset: Yeah. And you know, who knows in 30 years War Camp Mars. So anyway, that, I think that’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good thing to put a pin on in terms of the community there. Now I, uh, I could, as, as much as I like my, uh, work camp Miami, there really was nothing. Uh, there’s, there’s nothing that equals that level.

So I’m gonna leave that out because I’m biased anyway, I do wanna put together. You mentioned two things, um, from a community, uh, cause or initiative standpoint. One was reco, and I may have mentioned this in the past episode, so listener, I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but it’s also when we talk about the community, recognizing those that we no longer have in our community.

Um, so I thought, uh, one thing that stood out to me, that representative was the Kim Marshall’s Memorial scholarship. Um, and you know, and because a lot of the old, old timers remember her, um, I remember her at Work Camp San Francisco. Um, But also like all those other people that, you know, our community, the older community gets, people get old.

Um, that’s, that’s life, uh, currently. So people will leave the community, uh, in that manner. Not, you know, not, not, not drama wise. I’m never coming back community, but people pass away or people have, uh, accidents and that sort of thing. So it is that, that kind of represents to me, not just the scholarship itself, which is a great initiative on its own, but it’s a recognition of, you know, we have important people that we want to remember the WordPress community, whether it’s in the form of scholarship or honoring them on social media every year, seeing their names and releases.

I know there’s a couple of people, and I am really, really bad at remembering his name right now, but he created a plugin. He was race, he was into a race car driving. I remember him in a race car. What’s that? Wipo? Yeah, VI, right. But what was his name though? Yeah. What was the name I, I’m gonna kill my why was 0 0 7?

Yes. The user name. Yeah, but I’m talking about his real name and I’m frustrated with myself. I can’t remember it, but I remember when he passed away, I forget what plug-in he did. I guess I’ll have, I’ll include that in

Simon Kraft: Shownotes, but he did the regenerate thumbnails plugin and his Alex,

David Bisset: yeah. Oh, okay. So we, we remember ’em by reputation, but it’s all of those people that do these plugins and Alex Mills. There you go. I’m horrible at remembering names, but yes,

Robert Windisch: I’m googling ju just like,

David Bisset: oh, I don’t judge. Just keep your hands here. So we have Kim Parcels, we have Alex Mills, all of these people that, that are involved, that with the community that, that we, that we’ve taken their plug-in, we’ve taken their plug-ins and their work and they’re, you know, and it’s in WordPress core now to our popular plug-in now.

And the other, the other thing I wanted to point out as a community initiative or, or moments was the Wampoo itself has, and, and I see one behind, um, Tammie, hopefully she knows it’s there. And we have so many, it’s incorporated, like every word camp now has a wpu. Um, it was also a lot of the kids’ stuff had wpu involved as a cartoon character and, you know, that was part of the kids’ camp stuff.

And, um, I’m sharing a link with you all right now. One of the, one of the coolest swag moments I ever had was, um, for, I don’t know which, where Camp Miami was, but we came out with these UNO cards, with wpu s on them, and. I put it on his open source on GitHub and be, this is the community angle, like a couple of work camps from like the other side of the world.

I think from, I think from India or Indonesia, I believe it was somewhere in that general area. They pinged us and said, can we use these? I said, yes, they’re open source. So what they did was they just changed the design a little bit. Like they, they put the work camp logo on it and made it, maybe translated it a little bit in their language, but now people are saying, oh, those are cool cards.

And like, you know, I have a little bit of pride. I said, yes, those, I, those are cool when we thought of them over in Work Camp Miami. But I am, so I’m even more happy to see people repurposing swag like that. And I thought the Wampoo, um, was an original great idea and I’m glad that, um, um, Matt kind of adopted that as part of the unofficial slash. Unofficial. I’ll say unofficial mascot cuz I’m not seeing it on official.

Robert Windisch: Unofficial. Official. It’s the official term for the, it’s unofficial official.

David Bisset: Just think of all the pins, all the badges, all the shirts. I don’t know if you ever saw the Work Camp Wpu shirt from Work Camp Miami that had the face,

Tammie Lister: there was an actual physical wapuu.

David Bisset: Yes. The one walking around there.
wapuu became physical. I was wandering around. It was the best work camp Miami 2019. I know the people that were in that suit. It was like a walking Cheeto, but it was so worth to see a walking wapuu around.

But yeah, it’s just, think of all the swag and like the MAs, the just the very thought of a mascot, um, itself. Not a logo, but a mascot I thought really helped shape the WordPress community was a great community moment. So anyway, thumbs up to all those people. I have one to, what’s that?

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I have one to add. I think the sustainability initiative, which is a newer one. I think that’s just getting started. But I think. And gathering momentum and finding out what it means. But as someone that’s organized a word camp before and tried to do it, sustainability when we in Brighton, um, I think it’s really good from that app. But I also think it’s really good from just the impact as a project that we leave and like the technology, I think it talking about like trying to be around as a project for a while, we kind of have to be aware of all those aspects.

So I think that initiative deserves a kind of mm-hmm. Call out because it crosses so many of our areas and it doesn’t necessarily get and so much kind of eyeballs I think.

David Bisset: Yeah. Make sure to throw that in the show notes by the way, cuz. We’ve shared so much here today. And, and, uh, no, I’ll include everything that you’ve mentioned. Everything you thought of, throw it in the show notes. I’ll do a array matching thing so we don’t get duplicates. Um, all right, so I, we’ve covered kind of the categories and we’ve covered a lot of stuff and I’m really happy cuz a lot of stuff we’ve talked about here today is, is not been mentioned in depth in my other conversations.

So that’s fantastic. I got exactly what I wanted out of you all. But, so what I wanted to do is I wanted to go around one last time and see if there’s any random thoughts that appeared in your head about anything else. Sky’s the limit. In terms of, in terms of any moments. Um, you know, I was gonna say good, bad and ugly, but let’s just, we’ll, let’s just keep it or good or bad because I don’t have time to cover ugly.

Um, Mihir, um, what have we left out here? What did we not mention that you think could, could be mentioned real briefly?

Meher Bala: Uh, recently Michelle has created a side WP speakers.

David Bisset: Ah, yeah.

Meher Bala: So this. I see this helping the organizers with finding out, uh, speakers in their areas or n nearby do not go and approach them. So that is one thing which just came across my mind right

David Bisset: now. Yeah. Kudos to her for that initiative. She does so much now, the job things on Wednesdays and all her, all her community work, which we don’t have time to go into here. That’s fantastic. Yes. So speakers of speakers project. My, um, Robert, anything we might have, we haven’t touched on at all briefly?

Robert Windisch: Yeah. Um, so small thing, um, the time when W P C L I became a make project, Because it was a project outside. And, uh, it’s really like if, if people like, cause the people who work, um, professional with WordPress sites and like on local, on local, um, machines and like automating stuff like the W P C L, I be becoming like a, a real make project with all the um, good and bad things around it. It was really, really good for the project and for Daba P c I to jump the simply make sure it stays around

David Bisset: wp I, yeah, develop. If, if you’re a developer and you’re not familiar with that, slap your face twice and get reading in the documentation. Tammie, what have we not mentioned here at all?

Tammie Lister: This is almost like project management, but I’m gonna say in core, when started to have more organization core meetings and recognizing roles for releases, I think that that started to allow people to see where they could be part of it.

Um, and. Gave enough order to those meetings that someone could follow along, you know, you can follow the agenda. Um, so those kind of things. Having enough project management, uh, so that someone could belong. So just being able to have a call. We didn’t do that. We didn’t have calls for releases and Oh, yeah.

And people being part of it and, and having like, Hey, would you like to have these roles? And people been able to step up and have those roles, that’s really important. And it’s not that far, but we’ve had that. So I think that is really, really important for us. Yeah.

David Bisset: You take that stuff for granted sometimes, not realizing how you do, it’s never been, and

Tammie Lister: it’s not just like tech, it’s like documentation and it’s growing.
Right. The options that people can step up and be part of. So yeah, I think that,

David Bisset: and that’s what some people that have come into the WordPress community in the last couple of years, they haven’t known a time before that. It’s kind of like

Tammie Lister: no. And Core Chats used to be a lot, there used to be a lot to be part of and try and follow and keep up with. Um, and it would put off a lot of people. So this is an incredibly welcoming, so yeah, more inclusive.

David Bisset: It’s trying to explain what a V H S tape is to my daughter today. Yes. That was, there were times before digital media. So Simon, what? And one or two things briefly. We may not have covered that. Yeah. Could see.
I can see your gears turning. Sorry.

Simon Kraft: No, no. I have something, uh,

David Bisset: stuck in your teeth . Oh, um, oh, I’m sorry. I thought I could read, I thought I could read people. God, what else? You got anything in the tank?

Simon Kraft: I would like to give a shine a light on a make team that I think has its work a bit undervalued sometimes. Um, the accessibility team. Uh, you do like a really great job speaking of inclusivity, um, in making sure that more people can use WordPress, and I think that’s part of democratized publishing. So they do very, very important work.

David Bisset: Yeah, I can’t argue with that. I, I am always amazed at the new, it’s especially so much harder now with all the more complex technologies, especially in the admin, right?

And that’s still a work in progress. I think all the initiatives that we’re doing today, you know, ev moving forward, I, I want, I wanna, I wanna see more attention to them, um, because a lot of accessibility needs that kind of attention and just like performance or anything else. And so many times accessibility is, is not a first brain thought type of a thing.

So I really think that deserves a real good shout out as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got three random things left. I, we’ve talked about acquisitions in the previous. Shows, but I always thought the Tumblr acquisition really stood out to me in terms of a potential that it has for WordPress moving forward that isn’t WordPress.

Um, Gutenberg is supposed to transcend WordPress. Maybe, maybe that’s, uh, Matt’s made that comment a couple of times, so it’s interesting to see where that might go. Um, P two. Speaking of things that, like some, somebody just said, does he need to do at the restroom? No. The letter p and two. Is a, if you don’t know what that is, Google it.

But because, but when, when, when Tammie said something about the structure of, of, of backend WordPress organization, um, it is a blog that Matt and Matt actually talked about this a number of times, and I think they have a new version called oh two. Um, I’m not sure if that’s out yet in terms of a, like a plugin or a theme you can download. I think, I, I can’t remember. All I remember is it was, Cutting more cutting edge in them. But we used to,

Robert Windisch: it’s a hosted version on wordpress.com. Yes. The

David Bisset: hosted version version. It’s like halfway. It was halfway. They’re like, you can’t get it, but you can. You can get it because it’s hosted this place. So if you don’t know what those are, just go ahead and Google ’em.

But P two was fundamental to the organization of a lot of WordPress stuff, even it as it exists today. So like as early as last year, I remember like Word camps, having a P two doc with people organizing writing notes in there. And Matt was always a big, big fan of P two in terms of like, you know, because it’s basically more or less a block for teams, right?

A big, big, big use at automatic. And I’m pretty sure it still does. And finally, I have elevator advertising at work camps, and we’ll just leave it at that. So thank you very much for everybody. Um, Mission here wasn’t to cover everything. That’s impossible. But I wanted to cover things from your brains, cuz all you I respect and are unique and I you brought the game today.

Thank you very much. I greatly appreciate it. So, um, let’s go around and then do your, do your, let’s, let’s say we’re people, I was gonna say do your closing remarks, but this isn’t a talk. Um, where can people find you, uh, on social if they want to cont if they wanna follow you, because these days we, we, it’s, who knows? It’s social blog, whatever you want to, whatever you wanna share. But here you go first.

Meher Bala: Uh, I’m on Twitter, me, I’m on LinkedIn and my website meher.com.

David Bisset: Yes. And we’ll also put these in the show notes too, so I don’t have to worry about spelling everything out cuz I can’t spell. It was very nice to have you, um, Robert, um, the, yeah, if, if, uh, yeah, go ahead.
I was gonna say, where can we buy that hat? But I don’t think that exists anymore.

Robert Windisch: That’s very like with pins or without. Um, so it’s, uh, it’s nubis on, on Twitter and otherwise it’s nubi it on the WordPress profile.

David Bisset: Thank you very much, Robert. It’s good to see you in the hat again. And, um, if you ever wanna sneak into a Word camp, just don’t wear the hat and people won’t recognize you. Um, Tammie, uh, where can we find you?
Tammie Lister: You can find me at karmatosed on all the things.

David Bisset: Yes. Pretty much still and don’t What about, yeah, well, we’ll just put show notes. Just that. And well, people will find you again. You also have a, um, you also have you started a new blog recently too, or am I, I have now next slab.

Include that in show notes as well, because we’ve been, I’ve been reading, I’m, I, I, I’ll, I, I be ashamed to admit, I don’t know when you started it, but I’ve been picking up the last couple of posts, so they’ve been very insightful. It’s only been a couple of weeks. Thank I’m so God. I put myself out there and it will work.
I’m sorry, go ahead. Yeah,

Tammie Lister: I’m just starting to write just generally about where could WebPress go in the now and the next. Oh yeah.

David Bisset: Okay. I’ll throw that into show notes as well. Just some thoughts. Yeah. Well, you’ve always had some good thoughts. I think it’s worth sharing. Simon, where can people be finding you?

Simon Kraft: I think the easiest is https://simon.blog/ . Yeah. Yeah. I was an early adopter.

David Bisset: Um, you don’t have to rub it in, but Okay.

Simon Kraft: And I think I’ll link to basically all the other things from there. So I won’t try and, uh, spell out my masteron username and domain thingy.

David Bisset: Sorry. Please don’t, because it sets off my Amazon Echo for some reason when you start saying master on things. Nope, we’re good. All right. We’re fine. Uh, yes. Yeah, Simon Dolo. Wow. And you’ve got an English translation too. Oh, that’s great. Last crappy Twitter in beds, please. Ooh, I’d like to read that one. All right. So Simon Dolo for you. So, um, just if you’re hearing this and you wanna follow me, um, best place to go would be either david bis.com or David bi.social.

But thank you all for coming. Your time is precious. Greatly appreciate it. And, uh, we will talk later. Thank you.

Simon Kraft: Thank you. All right.