The OSTraining Podcast

In this episode, we will be talking to Dan Maby, Director at Blue 37 a Wordpress design firm and CEO of WPandUp, a non-profit designed to support & promote positive mental health within the WordPress community. Dan shares with us more about the origin story and services of WPandUP, as well as, the online event they are hosting on Giving Tuesday called DoSummitGood.

In this first episode of season 2, we're happy to welcome Miguel Balparda of Nexcess to talk about Magento 2.

Miguel is a globe trotting ambassador for Magento and for Nexcess. If you've been to a Magento event, there's at least a 50/50 chance that you've run into Miguel. He lives in Argentina, but is on an airplane traveling the world for Magento most of the year.

We kicked off the podcast by asking Miguel about the changes that he's seen in the Magento community since the purchase by Adobe and - spoiler alert: There've been a lot!  And then we talk about some of the work he does working with the Adobe team to keep Magento going and particularly to develop some of the front facing headless JavaScript based features that are increasingly common with more high profile and more difficult website builds.

In this week's episode, I'm delighted to welcome April Sides.

April is a Drupal developer who works for Lullabot, one of the biggest and most reputable Drupal agencies. She's worked on all sorts of fascinating projects, and at the moment she's helping Georgia.gov (the state of Georgia), move many of their Drupal sites over to Drupal 8.

We talk about what she's been doing in the Drupal world, about DrupalCon Seattle, which happened the previous week. And, what it's like to be part of such a massive government project, helping people out, by making government websites easier to use and easier to search.

In this week's episode, I'm delighted to welcome back Zac Gordon. If you spend any time in the WordPress world, you've probably come across Zac. He's a really enthusiastic and charming teacher who specializes in JavaScript for WordPress. He's done video classes, online conferences, live talks, podcasts, video casts, you name it. He's been out there trying to teach people how to use JavaScript, particularly in the WordPress context. For the first time, he's written a book, and he did it with OSTraining. React Explained is available now, and it teaches you how to use the React framework, which is increasingly popular in WordPress, but also Drupal, Magento, and other platforms. We talk with Zac about his background, his love of yoga, and also about why he decided to focus on React for his first book.

This episode features Jason Coleman, who runs Paid Memberships Pro, one of the most successful plugins for running a membership site in WordPress.

Not only does Jason have his own membership site to sell extra features and support for Paid Memberships Pro, but he's also spent years looking at the membership sites of his customers. So Jason has all sorts of fascinating tips and tricks that he's picked up from his customers and applied to his own site. Hopefully, you'll be able to get some useful advice for running your own membership site.

In this episode, we welcome Ben Pines, the Chief Marketing Officer at Elementor.

Elementor is a page builder which is technically in the same space as Gutenberg, but does approximately 1,001 extra things.

Ben is doing pretty well at his job, because Elementor is probably the fastest growing WordPress plugin around. In the last two and a half years, Elementor has grown from zero installs to close to two million, and Ben has led many of the efforts to get the word out about Elementor and its growth.

In this episode, we welcome Amanda and Karlyanna from the DrupalCon team. DrupalCon is probably the biggest open-source event that happens in North America every year. And for about the last 10 years, it's been pretty much the same event with pretty much about the same number of attendees. It's been about 3.000 people every year, moving around to different cities. This year, the DrupalCon team are taking a different approach. It's in Seattle in April, but they're changing up the format adding all sorts of new twists and interesting changes to it. So I sat down with the team to talk about what's new with DrupalCon.

In this episode, I'm talking with Randy Fay. He has been a longtime member of the Drupal community. He's written about 1,001 modules and has worked with whole bunch of leading Drupal companies. After a while, he got burned out from excessive commitment to Drupal. We talk about some of his crazier adventures such as cycling from the northern tip of Canada, all the way down to Argentina over the course of several years.

Then we get to the meat of the conversation, which is his work now with a project called DDev-Local. Recently, we released a book at OSTraining all about DDev-Local, and how it can give you a much more modern development environment based on Docker containers. We talk with Randy, who's the lead developer for DDev, and explain why, if you're using MAMP or WAMP, you should consider using DDev instead, as it will greatly speed up your development and make it much more reliable if you're working on multiple projects.

In this episode, I talk with Robby McCullough from Beaver Builder. Robby is from Silicon Valley originally, and with his two co-founders he started the Beaver Builder plugin, which has half a million installs now and is one of the best-loved page builders in WordPress.

In this first episode of 2019, I talk with Josh Strebel from Pagely about his new project, NorthStack. Whereas Pagely was the very first "Managed WordPress" service, NorthStack is best described as a "Managed AWS" service. I talk with Josh about NorthStack and what it tells us about the future of WordPress.

I apologize for my audio on this epsiode. I'm a little embarrased at the quality - I should have tested my new microphone more carefully.