WP Tavern

On the podcast today we have Jo Minney. Jo is the founder of a small business that specialises in building websites for organisations, mainly nonprofits and the tech industry. In this episode, Jo shares her insights on the challenges of organising WordCamps and meetups in Australia, where the large size of the country and small population present some unique obstacles. If you’re used to a European or North American setting, it’s really interesting how the geography of the country presents challenges not seen elsewhere. We discuss the importance of paying speakers and covering their travel expenses to create equal opportunities for freelancers and small businesses, as well as to give the Australian community a stronger voice. We chat about the challenges faced by the Australian WordPress community, from limited resources and burnout, to the struggle of attracting new organisers and attendees. Jo shares some exciting success stories, such as organising WordPress events and hosting a successful do_action event. If you’re interested in hearing about how the WordPress community is doing in Australia, this episode is for you.

On the podcast today we have Jonathan Wold. Jonathan has been deeply involved in the WordPress community for almost two decades. He began writing tutorials and freelancing, which eventually led him to the agency world where he worked on large enterprise projects. In the past five to six years, Jonathan has shifted his focus to the broader WordPress ecosystem. Jonathan is one of the co-founders of Guildenberg, and in the podcast today we discuss what this project is, and how it aims to revolutionise the WordPress product ecosystem. We talk about how Guildenberg is trying to solve the problem which developers often face in the WordPress space, discoverability. The idea is to create a WordPress 'app store' as a building block to bootstrap the project to other, more community based, initiatives. If you’re a WordPress developer who is keen to find a way to create visibility for your product, this podcast is for you.

On the podcast today we have Dan Walmsley. Dan is a long-time user of WordPress, having started using it even before version one was released. With a passion for experimenting with different publishing platforms, Dan eventually discovered WordPress and has been using it ever since. Currently working at Automattic as a Code Wrangler, Dan is part of the Applied AI team. Although the team is relatively new, with only a few members, their mission is to coordinate and guide the various AI initiatives within the company. Dan talks about how Large Language Models work, and how ChatGPT has driven awareness, and demand, for AI technologies in a way that was almost impossible to predict just a year ago. This has caused many companies to become deeply interested in AI and what it can do for their business workflows. We get into whether the reality of AI can live up to the hype. We move on to explore the differences between site generators and site builders, and Dan introduces the concept of the ‘copilot era’ in which website creation can be somewhat automated. Whether you’re new to AI or have been paying attention for a while, this podcast offers a fascinating insight into its impact on society, and how it can accelerate progress in fields like scientific research.

On the podcast today we have Giulia Laco. Giulia is a web designer and developer who has been working on the web since the mid 1990s. Her primary interests are web typography & font design. This is the last of our podcasts from WordCamp Europe 2023. I spoke to Giulia in Athens because she had just finished her presentation entitled “Typographic readability in theme design & development”. In this session she explored how designers can assist with the readability of websites through careful consideration of the fonts they choose, and why they choose them. It turns out there’s quite a lot to consider, and if you’ve not given this topic much thought in the past, you’ll perhaps learn something new. We begin the podcast talking through how, at the start of the web, we were making do with a limited range of tools to help us make typographic choices. Giulia talks about the fact that the manner in which we read has changed since the dawn of the internet. Many people now mostly consume small passages of text, which need to be considered in a different way to longer writing. We round off the conversation with Giulia telling us where we can find out more, as well as some of the thought leaders in this space. It’s a fascinating conversation about a subject that often gets overlooked. Website designers, this episode is for you.

On the Jukebox Podcast today we have Aaron Reimann, and he's here to look back over the last 20 years of WordPress and tease out which aspects of WordPress' evolution were pivotal in making it the CMS that it is today. We talk about the major milestones such as the addition of plugins and themes, as well as custom post types. We get into the fact that it was by no means certain that WordPress would come to dominate the CMS space at the beginning, as other offerings such as Joomla and Drupal were also creating their own solutions. We discuss the importance of Gutenberg as well as the community which binds the whole project together. Will WordPress still be the popular choice for website building? Who knows, but it’ll be fun to see what the future holds.

On the podcast today we have Carrie Dils. Carrie is a WordPress-loving freelance developer with more than twenty years experience in web development, and full-scope WordPress projects. She teaches WordPress and front-end development courses for LinkedIn Learning, and blogs regularly about WordPress and the business of freelancing. This is another of the podcast interviews which were recorded at WordCamp Europe in Athens. It took place soon after Carrie had completed her workshop at the event. This workshop was entitled ‘International Appeal: Making Your Themes and Plugins Translatable’. In the podcast we talk about how developers can make their plugins and themes available in multiple languages. Carrie explain why this is a good idea as well as how you might achieve this. She also discusses some of the resources which have been most helpful to her when learning about this important topic. If you're a developer who is curious about making your code available to a wider audience through internationalisation, this podcast is for you.

On the podcast today we have Louise Towler. She joined me at the recent WordCamp Europe in Athens to talk about websites and making them more sustainable. Louise is the founder of Indigo Tree, a UK based agency with deep expertise in WordPress websites. She gave a presentation at WordCamp Europe entitled, Digital sustainability: The benefits for business and the environment in which she emphasised the impact websites can have on our planet. Her aim was to deliver practical tips for users and developers to help them make informed decisions. This presentation is the focus of today's podcast, and we cover quite a lot of ground. If you’re interested in how your sites can become more sustainable, this podcast is for you.

On the podcast today we have James Dominy. James is a computer scientist with a masters degree in bioinformatics. He lives in Ireland, working at the WPEngine Limerick office. This is the second podcast recorded at WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens. James gave a talk at the event about the influence of AI on the WordPress community, and how it’s going to disrupt so many of the roles which WordPressers currently occupy. We talk about the recent rise of ChatGPT and the fact that it’s made AI available to almost anyone. In less than twelve months many of us have gone from never touching AI technologies to using them on a daily basis to speed up some aspect of our work. The discussion moves on to the rate at which AI systems might evolve, and whether or not they’re truly intelligent, or just a suite of technologies which masquerade as intelligent. This gets into the subject of whether or not AI is in any meaningful way innately intelligent, or just good at making us think that it is, and whether or not the famous Turing test is a worthwhile measure of the abilities of an AI. We then move on from the conceptual understanding of AI to more concrete ways it can be implemented. What ways can WordPress users implement AI right now, and what innovations might we reasonably expect to be available in the future? It’s a fascinating conversation whether or not you’ve used AI tools in the past.

On the podcast today we have Angela Jin. She's the Head of Programs and Contributor Experience at Automattic, where she oversees the work of multiple teams dedicated to the WordPress open source project. Several weeks ago, Angela wrote a blog post entitled The Next Generation of WordCamps. It laid out how WordCamps have been run for many years, as well as trying to begin a conversation about how they might look in the future. After much consultation Angela thinks that it's time to see if varying the format of WordCamps and other WordPress events might be beneficial for the community. But what are these changes and how might they be rolled out? Angela talks though this and more on the podcast today. If you’re curious about how WordPress events might change in the future, this podcast is for you.

On the podcast today we have Robert Abela. Robert is the CEO and founder of MelaPress, formerly known as WP White Security. They make niche WordPress security and admin plugins. He has over 18 years experience in the IT and software industries, and has written numerous web security articles and white papers. We all know that your website is potentially under attack 24 hours a day, 365 days of this year, but why is that, and what can we do to mitigate that risk? Robert talks today about the threats posed to your website in terms of WordPress Core, plugins and themes. We also talk about how website security is an ongoing process, what worked yesterday might now work tomorrow and so your organisation needs to be mindful of this as an ongoing concern. The discussion moves on to the layers of tech upon which your website is built as well and the need to prune your legitimate users from time to time. If you’re curious about how you can secure your WordPress website as it grows, this podcast is for you.