Post Status Podcasts

After Post Status Publish's main talks concluded, Joe Hoyle and I recorded the podcast during the reception. It was a laid back format where we discuss the future of WordPress, including our own wishlist features, and then we spent the majority of the hour taking questions from the audience.

We recorded this prior to the announcement of the new development schedule and changes to major releases, but most of our conversation remains relevant, as many of our wishlist items are within the three release focus areas that have been chosen.

You can listen to just the audio, also on our podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher.

Or watch the video on YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe to my new channel on YouTube.

During contributor day of WordCamp US in Philadelphia, I was able to interview Matt Mullenweg to follow up on several items he announced in the State of the Word.

We mostly discussed the new WordPress development cycle and how it will work with the three focus areas. We also discussed how that will affect other non-major updates and WordPress features.

Matt also talked about the WordPress REST API, how he defines success for it, what he hopes to see out of it, and what he thinks would cause it to revert to a plugin only feature.

And as this was the second and final year of WordCamp US in Philadelphia, we reflected on the event, and talked about what there is to look forward to in Nashville for WordCamp US 2017 and 2018.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard.

In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about how they learned WordPress development, how employers should look at candidates for skill hiring, and various resources they find valuable for learning WordPress.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard.

In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about the WordPress REST API and the core approval process

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard.

In this episode, Joe and Brian answer listener questions. You can go to poststatus.com/ask to ask questions for a future episode. We spent the second half of the show talking about innovation in WordPress and what makes big innovation difficult.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard and this week's special guest host, Diane Kinney.

Diane is a web professional and solo practitioner based in Florida. She’s writing a book with Carrie Dils called Real World Freelancing, and I thought it’d be fun to chat with her about freelancing.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard.

In this episode, Joe and Brian discuss WordPress themes, the functionality people put into them, and the challenges that face the WordPress ecosystem with the current state of theming. They also discuss various theme frameworks and how they are setup, common post types and how they can better be supported, and the popularity of page builders.

In this episode of Post Status Draft, I talk to Pippin Williamson, and we discuss the renewed effort he and his team have made to rejuvenate Restrict Content Pro.

Restrict Content Pro was initially sold without even a dedicated landing page, was successful on Code Canyon for a time, then he let it sputter as he and his team concentrated on Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP.

But Pippin knew that Restrict Content Pro still had more life in it, and he wanted to see it become the kind of product he knew it had the potential to be. So when John Parris -- at the time primarily working with Easy Digital Downloads -- said he was interested in helping make RCP a proper membership plugin, Pippin jumped on the opportunity.

They have had a good bit of success early on in the attempt to rejuvenate this product:

We’re at the five month mark and have increased monthly revenue by about 1.5. That’s not double yet, but it’s getting close. Within another few months, I expect we’ve surpass $15,000 in monthly sales. Even with just an increase of 1.5, we’re still looking at more than $100,000 in annual revenue, and the monthly revenue is higher than it ever was in the past, so we’re succeeding.

If you are a business owner, or aspire to be one -- or if you are curious about managing multiple lines of business at once -- then I think you'll really enjoy this episode.

And, if you're a Post Status Club member, Pippin and I recorded a bonus segment, where we discuss hosted WordPress eCommerce, and Pippin shares his opinions on the concept, and whether or not it's something they are considering for Restrict Content Pro and/or Easy Digital Downloads.

Sponsor: Design Palette Pro makes customizing Genesis websites simple. The Design Palette Pro team has integrated with every Genesis child theme, and it’s the perfect place to send folks who need custom design, without a custom budget. Go to GenesisDesignPro.com for more information, and thanks to Design Palette Pro for being a Post Status partner.

Original photo credit: Marc Benzakein at WCSD

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard.

In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about various third party publishing apps available and how they work with WordPress. They dig into apps that currently exist, how the connect to WordPress, how the future of WordPress could improve the third party ecosystem, and many of the challenges that must be tackled when interacting with WordPress as a third party application.

WordPress 4.6, “Pepper”, has been released. It’s named, as always, after a famous jazz musician, and this release is named after Park Frederick "Pepper" Adams III, a baritone saxophonist and jazz composer.

The Release Lead for WordPress 4.6 was Dominik Schilling, known often as Ocean90, and the Deputy Release Lead was Garth Mortensen. There were 272 total contributors to this release. According to Aaron Jorbin, 85 of these contributors were first timers, so congratulations to all new WordPress contributors!

For this release, we did a special episode of the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle — the CTO of Human Made — and me, Brian Krogsgard.

In this episode, Joe and I discuss WordPress 4.6 and deep dive on a few of its features.

Overall, this was a planned iterative release from the beginning, with a goal to fix as many longstanding bugs as possible, and to refine existing features, rather than to focus on a lot of brand new features.

Folks have been clamoring for a release like this for a long time, and in most respects 4.6 delivered. According to Trac, 489 tickets were closed, across 53 components, during the 4.6 milestone. Also, it shipped exactly on time.

This was the second release where "shiny updates" features were a focus. To see some under the hood considerations for developers, there's more information on that from Pascal Birchler.

By the way, the declaration of fonts has a good bit of science behind it, and may be useful for those of you who wish to do something similar for your site body copy. Marcin Wichary has a really interesting post describing Medium's process for the switch.

And if you're curious, the new declaration is this:

If you copy and past a URL into the link editor, but don't include http:// at all (I do this a bunch), it auto detects and inserts it for you.

So I typed the first sentence below, saved a draft, then typed the second paragraph:

Then start typing some more, because that's what bloggers do. And I chill here for a few seconds, then stupidly just reload this page?

And just like that, the content is back, because it was saved in the browser's local storage. Pretty cool.

The show_in_rest key, an experimental key (until the API endpoint goes in), finally solves the issue for the REST API for knowing when to include meta data in the API's default responses. It's one step of a few that need to be made to better support meta for the API, but it's a good step forward.

For plugin developers not using register_meta(), be sure to learn more about it and the advantages, as there are quite a few. Jeremy Felt describes how to use register_meta on Make Core.

Commercial plugin authors will still largely follow the same internationalization procedures they always have.

In a related note, and quite impressively, WordPress 4.6 shipped 100% translated in 50+ languages.

In 4.6, WordPress adds an API to register and use resource hints. The relevant ticket is #34292.

Developers can use the wp_resource_hints filter to add custom domains and URLs for dns-prefetch, preconnect, prefetch or prerender. One needs to be careful to not add too many resource hints as they could quite easily negatively impact performance, especially on mobile.

There is now a persistent comment cache, allowing more performant comment loading functionality.

The WordPress HTTP API now uses the Requests library, as Ryan McCue describes.

Aaron Jorbin describes some of the lower level WordPress loading priorities and defaults that have changed. He also describes how WP CLI and core have reconciled their differences in wp-settings.php, which makes backward compatability for WP CLI possible now.

Boone Gorges describes the introduction of WP_Term_Query. He’s the term whisperer. As Joe and I discuss in the podcast, these sorts of changes make for better consistency in WordPress, and provide an improved developer experience.

Also check out the official 4.6 Codex page that has a lot of handy information and links to source Trac tickets. You can see all closed tickets from 4.6 on the Trac milestone. View all new functions, classes, methods, and hooks on the official Developer Reference. And learn more about some of what I discuss above, and other items, on the ever-helpful field guide.

For the record, WordPress 4.5 was downloaded more than 45 million times. You can track 4.6 downloads on the page dedicated to the task.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 4.6! I hope you have a 🍺 or 🍻 to celebrate if that's your kind of thing, or otherwise 🎉  your efforts.