In this episode, Malcom Peralty and I are joined by Scott Kingsley Clark. This was the first time I’ve interviewed Scott since 2018 so we began the show with him describing what he’s been up to lately. We then learned what’s new with Pods and the extensive amount of work the team has been doing transitioning to Reactjs. Scott then shares his thoughts on the direction and future of WordPress. While he feels that WordPress is in a good position today, he thinks that it would be in an even better position had Gutenberg been built on top of a Fields API.

Later in the show, Scott describes what his experience has been like managing multiple plugins on the directory. We discuss ideas on how to improve the handling of support and how plugin authors could be better financially supported for their time. Last but not least, if you listen to the very end, Scott plays a special tune with his Ukulele. Definitely check out Scott’s music at Soft Charisma. Thanks Scott for the special song, it was awesome.

Click to View Transcript:

Speaker 1 00:00:19 Welcome everybody to episode nine of the WP mainline podcast for Friday, August 27th, 2021. I’m your host, Jeff Chandler joined up by my conductor in charge Malcolm Perotti Malcolm. How’s it going, man? How’s your week. It’s been a rough one, you know, but, uh, I agree. We’re all allowed those. They don’t all have to be great. They don’t have to be good. I, I it’s so funny. Right? Cause my initial response is a Canadian Institute of that. Oh, it’s been fine. It’s been fine. Um, and not make a big deal out of it, but yeah, you can’t bad weeks and good weeks. Right. So yeah, this, this, this week was rough. I, I, I was reading WordPress stuff in, you know, with me, I can actually write posts, but it’s in my head, but getting from head to keyboard, you know, that’s, that’s difficult a lot of the times, which, uh, which it shouldn’t be, but I didn’t get a chance to publish a lot of things this week on, uh, on WP mainline.Speaker 1 00:01:17 I did, however I did, uh, wake up one day to see 15 spam messages in my Akismet queue. And I’m like, what happened? Uh, you know, it might, it might like famous now. And what happened was I was, uh, one of my articles was linked to, by just entail. I can WP Tavern and I forgot how many websites, republish, WP Tavern content in full. And I actually got pinged back. So I’m like 15, 16, 70 different sites, you know that, uh, this flawed it repost. I forgot about that. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. You’ll get the Tavern effect. You’ll get back to that point with a main line and then everyone else will be complaining about the same thing. So, oh man, know what that’d be a nice problem to have. And I mean, we’re ending the week on a, on a good note. This is gonna be a great show today.Speaker 1 00:02:03 I’m super super man. I can’t even speak. I’m so stoked. So how about that? Yes, indeed. Uh, we got, uh, not only do we have an awesome guest, but we have an awesome surprise at the end of the show. I can’t wait. Uh, there is one headlight before we get to our guests to just one headline I wanted to bring up because I think it’s somewhat important if, uh, you’ve been waiting, waiting with bated breath on what’s going to happen with the classic editor plugin. Uh, well you no longer have to wait. We found out that the classic editor plugin is going to be officially supported by the wordpress.org development team through the rest of this year