
Lessons Learnt Connected to Building Plugins And Businesses on WordPress
In this insightful show, we dive deep into the essentials of building plugins and launching a successful business on WordPress. Discover key lessons learned from industry experts, including strategies for plugin development, marketing techniques, and tips for maximizing user engagement. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or starting out, you’ll find valuable insights to elevate your WordPress journey.
With Special Guest – Robert DeVore, WordPress developer and entrepreneur WPdispensary in the WordPress space.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 944. We’ve got a friend of the show. He hasn’t been on the show since… He pointed out to me since 2017. God, I’m right. How many bloody years have we been doing this show? That was amazing, Robert. But we have, like I say, a friend of the show, even though it’s been a few years since he’s been back. We got Robert DuVoil with us. He’s a prolific WordPress developer and entrepreneur. I would say that he’s best known for his business WP dispensary, but he has a lot of other plugins. He’s recently launched a new plugin. We’re going to be discussing his experience, business experiences in general, in trying to build businesses on the WordPress platform, and the lessons that he’s learned the hard way. He’s got an enormous amount of experience to share with us, Tribe.
[00:01:31.170] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve been really looking forward to this discussion. Robert, would you like to just give the Tribe a really quick intro? And then when we go into the main part of the show, you can give a more detailed introduction of your background.
[00:01:49.460] – Robert DeVore,
I’m Robert DeVore. I’ve been working with WordPress since about 2005. I’ve developed themes and plugins and custom sites for clients for over decade. Then about five, six years ago, around about now, I joined the agency and started doing agency work and support there. Now I’m transitioning back into trying to get focused again. After having my son, we’re now going back and to, let’s see what I can build and what I can do. That’s what the last few months have actually been, just getting out there and seeing what’s next.
[00:02:22.650] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re probably going to have to do this intro again, Robert. Your sound is terrible. Is it going through the right speaker? Am I correct about that, Kirk, or was it just me? A little weak.
[00:02:36.710] – Robert DeVore,
It might be the area that I’m in because we’re remodeling, so the whole background is nothing but blank wall right now.
[00:02:43.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you get a little bit closer? Just when you moved forward, I thought it was a bit better.
[00:02:48.270] – Robert DeVore,
Okay, let’s see. Does that work better?
[00:02:50.310] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you think, Kirk?
[00:02:51.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s better. I think you’re in that position when you first started talking when you came in.
[00:02:56.690] – Robert DeVore,
Okay.
[00:02:57.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, but when you shoot back, it’s a little like an can.
[00:03:00.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s a little bit better. I think we can just lean in. Sorry, because it was a little bit bad, Robert. Three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. We’ve got a great show here, Tribe. We’ve got a friend of the show. He’s been on the show before, but he pointed out to me that that particular show was in 2017, which made me feel quite old, We got Robert Duval with us. He’s a well-known WordPress developer, part of the WordPress community, entrepreneur, and he’s best known for his work with WP Dispensory, but he has produced a number of plugins. It’s going to be a show about his experience, what he’s learned on his journey. It should be a great show. Robert, would you like to give us just a really quick intro, and then when we go into the main part of the show, you can give a more detailed intro.
[00:04:04.300] – Robert DeVore,
Sure. I’m Robert DeVore. I’ve been developing with WordPress since 2005. Themes, plugins, and everything in between client work maintenance. I’ve done it all. I’ve been here, there, and everywhere around the area. I’m excited to be here again and be back on the show again.
[00:04:20.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show, Robert. I’ve got my great co-host, extremely patient around my Continue nonsense. I’ve got my Kurt here. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:04:38.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas. I also work directly with WP Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:04:47.770] – Jonathan Denwood
I just want to say, Kirk has really… The past couple of years, Kirk, it’s been a pleasure that you’ve been part of the WP Tonic family and being my co-host because you’ve been a great co-host, Kirk.
[00:05:02.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, we would have thought it would have been a couple of years.
[00:05:04.650] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s gone so quick, Kirk. I don’t know what to say about it. But before we go into the meat potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments. Three, two, one. We’re coming back. I want to point out that we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsor services, plus a created list of the best WordPress plugins and services for the WordPress professional. You can get all these free goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/ WP-tonic. Com/deals, and you find the special offers plus the created list that will save you a ton of time all there. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get from that page. They love me saying that, Robert. I have no idea, but it’s become a theme of the show me saying that. Robert, like I say, I’m sure we covered this in 2017, but I can’t remember three shows ago, let alone that interview. How did you get into the world of WordPress development and entrepreneurship partnership through the WordPress platform?
[00:06:33.710] – Robert DeVore,
When I started, it was more I was just building HTML websites, and I stumbled across WordPress. I said, Oh, this is great. It’s something where I don’t have to recreate hundreds of HTML templates and then edit each individual one. This is perfect. I just stuck with it and stayed with it. As it grew and changed, I learned, I packed themes up and just got used to that whole framework. Then from there, it just, okay, people started seeing that I was doing this. I was like, Okay, can you build a site for me? It just snowballed. At the time, I was in my early to mid-teens. It wasn’t like I was… I went like late-teens, probably, but time flies. I’m old now. But it was a It was a slow start. It wasn’t something I started and went, Oh, I’m going to build a business around this. That came much later. I did a lot of affiliate marketing beforehand just to do my own thing like that. It became, I guess, evidence me that there was a need for something like that. I started offering freelance services, and then from there, I started building a lot of the same types of projects.
[00:07:37.520] – Robert DeVore,
I realized, Oh, plugins might be something I could get into. Then that’s just snowballed. That’s where I’ve settled in now, building more plugin projects than actual theme building and website design.
[00:07:50.580] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. Before we throw over to Kirk, what When did you start building on your journey WordPress Premier Plugins? When did that How did this change happen? How long was you in your career before you delved into the world of Premiere Plugins?
[00:08:22.270] – Robert DeVore,
I’d say 2015, I decided I was doing a lot of work just solo, quietly. I didn’t have a social presence. I wasn’t doing anything on social media. So 2015, I went, Okay, I’m going to start doing stuff on Twitter and just put stuff out there. I was building a couple of little free themes and just giving away content because I was getting so much back from the community already at that time. It was time to start actually doing stuff like that myself. From there I went, Okay, what can I build that’s unique? It sets me apart a little bit. The cannabis industry was nowhere near what it is today at the time. So in 2015, at the end of it, I built W. C. S. S. 3. It was a very simple plugin. It wasn’t nothing like it is now, but it was a start. It was something to just say, Okay, here’s my stamp. I’m going to do something just a little bit different. I tried to think outside the box a little bit and come up with something that a market might need that isn’t necessarily being fulfilled. There’s Woocommerce, and you can use that, but a lot of these places can’t accept payments online, so they have to do pre-orders, and it just becomes more…
[00:09:25.240] – Robert DeVore,
We just need a simple solution rather than a robust solution because there’s no shipping involved and things like I tried to find a little niche that I could get into and do things just a little bit different than what I’ve seen out there at the top of time.
[00:09:38.430] – Jonathan Denwood
It was WP dispensary, which was the big stepping stone for you, really?
[00:09:44.650] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah. Yeah, that was the first one. That was the big mark where I went, Okay, I can actually do this and build a cool product that I’m giving away for free and then build premium extensions on top of it and give those away for a price and build sites for some of the clients that came through. It was a fun experience to be able to start from nothing and see it blossom. You have an idea in your mind of what the business could be, and then you just go with it and see it grow and shape it as it grows over time.
[00:10:13.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, that’s great. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:10:16.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
I want to expand off of… You and I have a similar path coming into WordPress, except I didn’t build product, but it’s that HTML website, you found WordPress, you started doing stuff And a lot of people don’t experience success on that pathway. I just wanted to ask, what do you think was the linchpin for you that was like, I can continue to do this. I can stick with this, and this is going to have some motivation?
[00:10:45.740] – Robert DeVore,
I think part of it is just the creation process. I love to create stuff and build stuff with my hands, with the computer. It doesn’t matter. As long as I’m doing something, I’m happy. So being able to come up with an idea and start building on that, it just drove me. I didn’t really have a need to say, I want to build a big business. That wasn’t the initial drive for it. It was just creating the stuff and building the stuff and seeing what could come out of it at the other end. You stay up till 4:00 AM, you wake up the next day and look at what you did and you go, Oh, this is actually pretty good. And you’re excited because you hit a new level with that stuff. That’s really the majority of what it was for me was just creating. I didn’t have a, Okay, I need to now switch from this thing to that thing. It wasn’t a It was just like a natural progression.
[00:11:33.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. So to shortcut your… So if you was more internally motivated than motivated by people writing checks?
[00:11:41.420] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, exactly.
[00:11:43.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, similar for me. Similar for me. So that leads to the next question, which is part of this internal motivation talk, I guess, right? So your most recent plugins in the SEO space. And I saw that announcement, I think, December 31st on X. And So what was it that led you to develop the SEO plugin? And what are your plans for it? Because it looks fairly simple in comparison to other SEO plugins. So what’s your motivation and what are your plans for it?
[00:12:15.240] – Robert DeVore,
The initial plan, I had the idea and it sat for the majority of the month and I didn’t do anything with it until towards the end of the month. It was just honestly another plugin and a long list of ideas that I had and I was just working through. But I built it because I knew some of the community I’ve seen said that other plugins feel like they’re throwing AI in everything or they’re trying to promo their premium products or whatever it is. They’re doing too much when they just needed a pairback solution. I wanted one for myself, too. I just wanted to test myself and see if I could do it. I think I actually seen the initial idea came from Brian Garner. I’ve seen him on X. He said he had just with ChatGPT, he used it to build a couple MetaFields for SEO idea that he had. I went, Oh, that’s pretty cool. I it down and then I just started working on it. It was a fun project to build, but now I can see that it’s going to be more beneficial than just another plugin in a list of plugins that I built.
[00:13:10.150] – Robert DeVore,
I do have plans to add schema support, and there’s a lot of updates that I will be putting into it, so it doesn’t just sit as a simple plugin, it can actually grow and become something more and more beneficial to a wider audience.
[00:13:23.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
Excellent. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:13:26.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but obviously, I’m stating the fact there is a number of SEO plugins in this area, Robert. Why do you feel there’s a need for another one? What are some of the key things that you felt it would be worth your effort and time. Obviously, it’s a big market, but also there are a number of players, and that’s a two-edged sold, isn’t it, Robert?
[00:13:54.500] – Robert DeVore,
I don’t plan on coming in and saying, I’m going to become the number one SEO plugin. That’s not my main focus. I wanted to build something fun. I wanted to build something clean and something that everybody could use without having to deal with all the extra that comes along with it. Over time, as I use it for my own sites, I’ll just continue to build on the things that I can see that it needs. As requests come in and the community responds and says, This is what we’d like to see, we’ll look at it and adjust and grow with it in that way. I don’t have a grand plan for it. I know there’s other plugins that are simple and do SEO in a similar fashion, so I’m not coming in saying, This is the de facto best. It was just, again, another plugin in a long list that I was building just because I love the building process.
[00:14:41.370] – Jonathan Denwood
That would be it. That’s clear. Well, Let’s go on to your extensive experience with trying to build up WP dispensary, which we touched upon at the beginning of this show. First of all, are you still very actively involved in that? Have you still got equity in that business, or is it slightly divorced from your day-to-day attention in that? What’s the basic position of that in particular, plugin and business with you, Robert?
[00:15:19.160] – Robert DeVore,
It’s evolving. It’s changed. Actually, the name itself has changed from WP dispensary to now it’s just the cannabis menu. I built a LLC called Cannabis Software. And the plan was to launch a whole hosted platform. Apparently, since the government does not federally legalize it, banks and payment processors are not as playful with companies like this. So I’ve had trouble trying to get it off the ground and actually find a payment processor that will allow me to do that. It’s still in the works and I still have plans for it. And I’ve built actual premium products that I was planning on just using for that platform. Last month, I released all of it as open source and gave it away, and I’ll continue to build on that. It’s a definite plan. I built it and had it going really good in 2017, 2018 when I had a payment processor, and then they cut me off. Then it just stalled everything. I do want to bring it back. It’s been the baby project from the beginning, so I’m coming up now in November. It’ll be 10 years since I actually launched it. I’m hopeful that I can make something happen between now and then to put more effort into it and actually see it become something more than just some code that’s sitting in a repo right now waiting for legalization to happen federally.
[00:16:37.190] – Jonathan Denwood
If it does grow eventually the way you’d hope, and it’s an overnight success, it would have been based on probably 10 to 12 years of hard work and slog, Robert.
[00:16:51.320] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, it’ll look like an overnight success when they legalize it federally and everything gets the push that it needs, but it’s been a long road.
[00:17:00.300] – Jonathan Denwood
So you built this, and so was it a conscious play that you did? I’m just trying to get the cold landscape. It’s something you built. First of all, you found this niche, and WordPress would be a great, I think, would be a great solution for these type of dispensaries. Folks, I live in Nevada, and Nevada is one of those states that this is legal, and the dispensaries all over Northern Nevada. It’s not particularly my cup of tea, but I’ve got no problem with other people doing whatever they want to do. I know a few people in this business because they’re in it, because I in this area, Robert. Was it a play that you were making and you hoped at some stage that nationally it would be legal? Or is it just that you built it and you initially found an online payment gateway provider that would work with you? Or was it a bit of both, really? I think you’re probably going to say a bit of both, are you?
[00:18:30.970] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, I think at the beginning, it was, I’ll say this, I know it’s going to be federally legal. I just don’t know when. So I’m happy to be in early and I’m happy to sit it on the side and wait a little bit longer. I’m able to watch. As I go into different shops, I can see how they’re processing payments and see what they’re doing. And it gives me a view from the outside looking in on how it works. So it was more of a, I know it’s going to be federally legal. And I think open source and cannabis itself just blend well It’s freedom. I feel the freedom for all of it. So I feel like open source was a natural thing to where it wasn’t bogged down by just a bunch of private equity, big businesses that are just looking to get into an industry and do what they’re calling the green rush. I wanted to give something back. People can use it open source. They can go build their own sites with it right now, and they don’t have to pay me anything. They don’t have to pay for that other than hosting their websites.
[00:19:26.800] – Robert DeVore,
So I wanted to do something like that. It’s not still to this day from what I can see, something out there that’s offering that. Everybody’s SaaS and pay me money, pay me money, pay me money. So I just want to keep continuing to give back to open source. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if it wasn’t for open source. So my continuing to give back to that is just from WP to sensory to cannabis software. Now, it’s the same thing. It’s just on a different scale. I don’t know if that answers the original question. I might have trailed off there at the end, but yeah, I think I got it.
[00:19:59.590] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah I’m just looking at the time. Let’s keep going for another question. I’m going to throw it over to Kurt.
[00:20:07.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, our next question deals with what were the biggest challenges of WP dispensary? You’ve covered the debanking issue, but we hear about debanking a lot. You hear about it with crypto currencies, you hear about it with OnlyFans, people that can’t collect their money. It comes up a lot. Even though something could be legal in this country to something, it doesn’t necessarily mean the banks are going to give you the flow for it. Outside of the debanking, what would you consider some of your biggest challenges with growing that product?
[00:20:42.180] – Robert DeVore,
I think for this one, specifically, it’s just the market itself is more hands-on, the point-of-sales services in stores, they’re looking for that more than just a website solution. So I’m looking at other countries, though. In Canada, you can ship it in the mail. If you’re doing payments through your own website, you can set up the WP to spend free code. You can actually have that running and not have to worry about going through a point of sales system because you don’t have a storefront. There’s other areas outside of the US that I think that will benefit from it more, and That’s the push that I’m going for. I’ve translated it into a bunch of different languages and hope that it can help reach out to those areas more. I’m just trying to give back. The overarchingness of it is that’s what I’m trying to do. If it wasn’t for open source, I wouldn’t have a life a business that I’ve built who knows where I’d be. Because of that, I want to always give thanks to that. It’s just a continuation of it. Then the cannabis industry, to me, was a natural fit because I’ve used it since I was real short.
[00:21:43.550] – Robert DeVore,
It just seems like a natural fit for me.
[00:21:46.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Back over to you, Jonathan.
[00:21:50.630] – Jonathan Denwood
How do you think people find WP dispensary? Do you think it’s the development Now, obviously, it’s going to be a mixture, but I think certain plugins are really pushed by the freelance agency market, and there’s other plugins that are found by the end customer, by the end user. What’s your own feeling around WD dispensary? Do you think it’s really found through search and social media from the customer base, or is it mostly driven its usage by the freelance WordPress community stroke agency? What’s your own feelings about this, Robert?
[00:22:43.470] – Robert DeVore,
I’d say about 70, 30 more leaning towards the community and freelancers and agencies using it and finding it before the customers. At the time when I was pushing it heavily, I had a lot of delivery services that were reaching out directly because they just wanted to have a site up where someone can contact them and they could just go deliver it. So it was a lot of that little bit starting to grow at the time. I feel like as the industry grows more, it would become more prevalent that it’s going to probably be a 50/50 split. And the focus would have to shift more from just focusing on pushing it and showing it for developers and how they can use it and actually focusing the marketing efforts and the content around the customer and the actual businesses that would be using it. In the beginning, it’s definitely getting the agencies and the freelancers and the communities themselves involved in having them see it and test it out and use it for some of their clients. But then over time, you got to push and market it to the customers themselves. I don’t think that it would be…
[00:23:44.120] – Robert DeVore,
For a product that’s not developer-focused. It’s not a dev tool that every developer needs. You’ve got to focus on the customer first. The developers will be there and they’ll be able to help and they’ll be able to use it, but they’re not your target market. The target market is the target market. You always have to stay in tune with that, I think.
[00:24:04.120] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to go for our mid-break. When we come back, I’m going to ask some questions about the industry itself and how that affects WP dispensary. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’ve had a great initial discussion with Robert from WP, best known for WP dispensary, but also a really well-known individual in the WordPress professional community. Before we go into the second half, I want to point out, if you’re looking for a great WordPress hosting company that really specializes in WordPress, why don’t you have a look at what WP-Tonic has got to offer? We offer real great hosting, plus we offer all the best WordPress technology in one bundle, which you then can sell to your clients and white label it. We have over 15 years experience in the WordPress community. If that has interest, and we offer some great partnership deals, you can find more by going over to wp-tonic. Com/partners. Wp-tonic. Com/partners, and you can find out more there. When you first started this plugin, what Here’s the lance? Because obviously, you got the world of WordPress, but then you got the world of the end user, the realities of the end user that’s going to utilize WP dispensary.
[00:26:00.300] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know how many states. I might be totally wrong there. I think, is it six or seven, or is it more now that it’s legal?
[00:26:11.520] – Robert DeVore,
I think it’s a little more than that. I’m unsure the I have a number at the moment.
[00:26:15.780] – Jonathan Denwood
I have no idea. Is it the main problem for them is that they can’t take… Basically, all these dispensers that are registered in these separate states, they can’t take online payments because the majority of them, they can’t find a gateway provider that will handle the transaction. Is that the landscape that we’re dealing with at the beginning of 2025?
[00:26:52.440] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, there’s a couple of payment processors. They offer prepaid cards and direct stuff through your bank now. I just I’ve seen that I believe Dutchie is working with Glad, and they’re offering the ability to pay in-store directly from your bank account. That’s what I’ve seen. I’m not sure. I haven’t dove too deep into it. But I would say overall, yeah, you’re running into a lot of cash, it’s cash only. There’s ATMs in the lobby, you can get cash out and pay them cash. I’ve seen some places that they’re running around and they’re accepting debit card payments, and they shouldn’t be. You’re seeing companies trying trying to skate the edges like that, but it’s because everything’s not federally legal. If it was federally legal and the banks could get on board and everybody could be on board, it would be way easier. As a customer, if you’re going into these places, you have to either bring cash or remember to bring your hard with you so that way you can get cash out from the ATM. It’s a little more of a hassle than anything else for the end user. Then for the businesses, it’s a lot of cash on hand.
[00:27:55.160] – Robert DeVore,
Where are you going to put it? You’re becoming more of a target now. If people are paying close enough attention to your business, they’re seeing, Oh, there’s a lot of money coming in there, and there’s none coming out of the building. It becomes way more of a hassle and a way more of an issue on those scales than just the process of how you can purchase it online. The pre-orders That aren’t hard to do. Woocommerce has solutions for that. Wp dispensaries code has solutions for that. It’s not hard to do that part of it. It’s just everything else that makes it difficult.
[00:28:27.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you I think you made it clear the reasons why you entered this because of your commitment to open source. As you have in the first half, you’re a user of the product to some extent, which is totally fine. Do you slightly regret that you got into that particular niche because of the difficulties around payment, or are use?
[00:29:03.460] – Robert DeVore,
No. Can you do- I’m hard-headed. I like this industry, I like this product, and I like this thing that I’m building, so I’m just going to do it. If nothing ever comes of it and nobody ever uses it other than me and a select few other people that find it, I’m perfectly happy with that. It’s something I enjoy doing, so I’ll continue to do it forever. I don’t see it going nowhere. It’s 10 years in, and my son’s growing up, and soon he’ll be coding, so I’ll eventually bring him on board, and I’ll hire him in, and he can code for me, too. Then I don’t have to do that so much anymore. It’s a long journey, but we’ll get there.
[00:29:42.930] – Jonathan Denwood
I Good to you, Kurt.
[00:29:47.870] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m curious about this next question because you had mentioned earlier about the SEO plugin that one of the things was you wanted to make something that didn’t have AI injected into But then the question on the opposite side of that is, what AI tools have you found yourself using to help you run your business and be more productive?
[00:30:10.680] – Robert DeVore,
The only one I use is ChatGPT Pro. I’ve tried a couple of others, and I’ve tried Copilot. I don’t really necessarily like it directly in my code. I like being able to separate the two because I’ll ask ChatGPT questions and we’ll work through some things together, but then I put it into my editor and I’m changing and I’m adjusting, and then I’ll take back with my changes. So I don’t like it being too involved. So I really… 20 bucks a month. It gives me everything I need. I get ideas for different things, content ideas. I ask it questions about business stuff and just to have a sounding board, and then I use that to formulate my own thoughts beyond that. So that’s pretty much it. Just ChatGPT, bro.
[00:30:51.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Jonathan’s turned me on to a bunch of different AI tools that I’ve tried. And unfortunately, it’s not just $20 a month.
[00:31:02.420] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve introduced you to. It adds up. Yeah, you got to be really careful because I’m merciless about trying to keep my costs down, but Sometimes people that work for me are a bit annoyed by my efforts, but it’s half the battle running a business. You got this portfolio of plugins What are some of the ones that you’re most proud of? That might not mean that they’re the most commercially or in user-based, the biggest ones, but what are some in your portfolio that you’re the most proud of, actually, Robert?
[00:31:50.310] – Robert DeVore,
Some of the recent ones that I built, I like bench press a lot for performance metrics on your site and being able to test out different things like that for developers. I I have plans on that for the year. That’s something that I’m putting focus in. I went through, just to preface this, I went through all the plugins I built over the last month and a half, and I organized them into groups of, these are the ones that I’m going to for sure focus on, these are the ones that I think will do well over time. These are the ones that I might have just built for a small utility use. Unless somebody brings it up again, they’ll just probably just sit there being used if they need to be used. The best press one for sure is one that I’m going to be focusing more on. The Markdown exporter, I like. There’s some more ideas on how to customize that, make it better.
[00:32:35.980] – Jonathan Denwood
What is that one about?
[00:32:38.650] – Robert DeVore,
It’s an exporter for your content on your site that will export the content into Markdown format, so you can use it if you’re using a static site generator and you need to export your content, you can take it right and not have to manually copy and paste or anything like that. It does it directly in the dashboard for you. I have plans to build more customization options so you can add or remove to move specific features in it and allow different things to be passed through. Right now it’s super strict, so it doesn’t pass a lot of class names and things from your different paragraph tag if you have those in there. So I have plans to flush that out a little bit more. And then the maintenance mode plugin I like a lot because of the simplicity, and I feel like it’s something that everybody can use. And it’s built with the core editor. So your layouts for your landing pages for your maintenance mode will now be built that way instead of having to use another interface. Just like that one, the boost box plugin, I have a lot of plans for this year.
[00:33:36.880] – Robert DeVore,
It’s another one. You build your popups directly with the core editor. I have a pro plugin for that that I’ll be putting more into. I’m going to be releasing extra patterns and prebuilt pop-up patterns with that. I have plans to grow those and I’m trying to think. There’s so many of them. I’m trying to think of which other one is that.
[00:33:53.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that’s the whole point because you’ve been very busy. Terrific. Click, is the term that I was looking for. How do you cope a lot of people who came into WordPress, and Kirk really pointed this out to me, that are really committed to open Open Source. I am in my way, but I’m from England, obviously, Robert, and I’m in generally a bit cynical. But there’s a lot of people like you in the WordPress community that came into it because you’re really committed to the ethics of open source and that. I didn’t realize that there was a very strong minority of people with similar attitudes to yourself. How do you deal with a lot of people burn out, basically? They have all these support tickets, requests, and in the end, a lot of them I’ve got a full-time job with either higher education that puts food on the table and clothes on their children, and they just burn out. How have you stopped yourself? Or is it the product that comes from WP dispensary that’s helped with not burning out?
[00:35:21.550] – Robert DeVore,
I would say that helps. You find something that’ll ease the stress a little bit. That’s always a good thing. I think it’s more in tune with I do it because I love it. I’m not doing it because I’m just trying to find a way out of some other gig that I already have and I want to build a business to escape a 9:00 to 5:00. That’s not what I’m trying to do it for. I’m just building. It helps with the burnout to not be overwhelmed in your head about what I’m trying to accomplish just because I’m trying to accomplish it, take it a lot less serious than I probably should at times. I’m just more relaxed with it. I do have times where I’ll have burnout, where I go couple of weeks at a time where I’m doing two, three hours of sleep a night, or I’m skipping nights of sleep. Then I’ll have a day or maybe two where I crash out, and there’s 10 to 12 hours to sleep for each of those days. Then a couple of days after that, I know my body and my mind won’t be fully back to normal, but I allow myself that time to just get back into the groove, and it gives me the ability to get back to it without suffering for extended periods of time from the burnout.
[00:36:26.050] – Robert DeVore,
I let it happen naturally. This is something I’ve been working on. I haven’t It’s always been this way. It’s been bad before. So I’m finding the patterns and I’m seeing, okay, if my body is not fully right on a Monday and Tuesday after a long weekend of getting back to it, maybe I’ll give myself a day or two and do something else and then not be so down on myself because I didn’t push a bunch of code on that day because I can look back and see I just did a bunch the night before and the night before that. So take yourself less seriously and just find something to relax you every now and then.
[00:36:57.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s the gray in your beard talking.
[00:37:00.040] – Robert DeVore,
Yes, very much.
[00:37:01.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
Once I got the gray, I slowed things down a little bit.
[00:37:04.630] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, very much so.
[00:37:06.690] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not actively in development at all apart from… But it’s a similar pattern for me because I work Some weekends I work all weekend, and then I have a morning off and I might go skiing, but then I’m back in the afternoon and I work until 11:00 at night. It’s all over the place, but I prefer that because it suits my lifestyle. It suits me, really. I don’t want to pride too much in your business, so if you don’t want to answer this. Is WP dispensary and all the other plug-ins and that, is that the main source of your income?
[00:37:53.620] – Robert DeVore,
No, I got a full-time job right now doing maintenance at another company.
[00:37:57.380] – Jonathan Denwood
This is just stuff that I’m doing.
[00:37:59.830] – Robert DeVore,
That’s why I’m up so late at night? Because during the daytime, I’m actually doing like Clark Kent. I’m dressed up, and then I pop up into a box, and I come out, and I’m Superman for the night. Yeah, see? Now, Kurt gets it.
[00:38:11.990] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m amazed that your dining then. I think we’re going to call unless… Well, Kirk, have you got one or two questions you like? Because otherwise, we’re going to close up the podcast a bit early. But you got the final question, haven’t you? The I forgot about it. You got the most important question, haven’t you, Kirk?
[00:38:35.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
Only recently has he let me take the most important question, too, Robert. The most important question- I’ve been in a much more sharey mood recently. Is if you had your own time machine, if you had a TARDIS using your product, watching Doctor Who, and you could think, Hey, I could travel back to the beginning of my career, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:39:00.070] – Robert DeVore,
Go harder and don’t worry about what anyone else thinks, because I think I let myself slow roll. When I came back in, in 2015, I’m going to be myself on Twitter and I’m going to just pop out here. I just took my time with it, and I was too slow. I had the capabilities already, and I didn’t trust that. I’m a new guy. I don’t want to pop up and say that I’m good. I want to just show that I’m good over time and prove it over. And I shouldn’t just took that much time. I could have just went way faster. The stuff I’m doing today, I could have did five years ago if I would have pushed the pace just a little bit more and not be worried about what anybody else is thinking or what anybody else is going to think. If I release this thing or I do this thing or I say this thing, it doesn’t matter. As long as you got morals and you’re a good human being on the inside, you just do what you want. Really, that’s the world that we live in today. Just do whatever. That’s what I would tell myself.
[00:39:59.340] – Robert DeVore,
Just do whatever It’s been a great job, obviously.
[00:40:02.160] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. We’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show, folks, but we’re going to have an extended other session where we’re going to be discussing where Robert thinks the WordPress community is at the beginning of 2025 and his own views and observations of what happened in 2024. It should be an interesting discussion, but like I say, we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. The podcast and the bonus, you’ll be able to listen and watch on the WP, Tony YouTube channel. So go over there and also subscribe because it really does support the podcast and WP Tonic and independent media. Robert, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, your views, and what other plugin that you’re producing that week?
[00:41:07.120] – Robert DeVore,
I’m most active on X. If you go to deviorobert, so D-E-V-I-O, Robert, that’s the account I’m using pretty much every day. Then robertdivor. Com, that’s where I post everything, so you can find a list of all the other stuff I’ve built.
[00:41:22.860] – Jonathan Denwood
I refuse to call it X, actually, Robert. It’s Twitter. I refuse to call it X. I’m with you.
[00:41:29.230] – Robert DeVore,
I’m I’m trying to sway the other way now, but I’ve been saying Twitter up until about a week or so ago, I think.
[00:41:36.070] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Yeah, so I have the same problem, but in general, I refuse to use the term X. Kirk, you’re shaking his Kirk, how can people find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kirk?
[00:41:52.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Business-wise, I’m at everything Mañana No Mas. If you go to mañananomas. Com or Mañana No Mas on X, you’ll see me there. But if you just want to connect person to person, LinkedIn is the place to do it. I’m on LinkedIn almost every day, and I am the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn. Easy to find.
[00:42:08.940] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Like I say, we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. We’ve got some fantastic guests this month and some guests in February. Like I say, if you want to hear our discussion about the WordPress community, you can go over to the WP Tonic YouTube channel and watch the whole show plus the bonus content. We will be back next week, folks. Bye. Do you want to go off, Kirk, now?
[00:42:43.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m going to go get ready to do my Lifter LMS calls. But hey, Robert, it was awesome. Awesome getting to know you a little bit, and I’ll catch up to you on X.
[00:42:51.970] – Robert DeVore,
All right. Perfect.
[00:42:56.150] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s go into the juicy part. You’ve been very vocal on Twitter with your views about what happened in the last quarter of 2024. I want to start off, obviously, Matt’s bust up with WP engine was, obviously, I think we were all surprised in a way, but also not surprised in a way. I suppose I’m talking about myself because it was bonkers in a way, but not that unexpected. What was your own feelings when it all blew up? What was your own thoughts and observations, Robert?
[00:43:50.500] – Robert DeVore,
I’m with you. I didn’t not see it coming. When it happened, it wasn’t that surprising. If you’ve seen him in January of last year, he had a dust up many, many times before that. It’s nothing new. It was just on a grander scale. I feel like that is what the difference was. You can tell the landscape was shifting with this one. It’s not just another WP drama hashtag that’s going to go away in a couple of weeks. You could tell that this one was more lasting.
[00:44:23.830] – Jonathan Denwood
What I’ve been some of the things that… I don’t want to speak for you because you’re quite capable of expressing your own thoughts. But what have been some of your own observations of what have materialized since the initial bust up? I think I’m right in saying some of the things that have annoyed you the most about the whole situation.
[00:44:50.650] – Robert DeVore,
I think the most annoying thing is just the lack of respect that I feel like Matt gives everyone because he talks to everybody a child and he tries to circle around you and pretend like he doesn’t hear 90% of what you say. We’ll focus and cherry-pick one thing and then move on and pretend like nothing else happened. When you’re talking to someone like that, you can’t have a meaningful conversation. So at that point, I went, Okay, well, all progress is out the window, in my opinion. We’re not going nowhere with none of this, so we’re just going to have fun with it now, and we’re going to just poke fun at him. Every time he says something that I think is just stupid, I’m going to say it. I’m not going to just sit and just let it happen. I’ve seen times where he would say things and do things where you could tell he thought he was getting away with something and he was going to be slick and funny. And then someone has to come and say something to him, I feel anyways. I’ve said it before, it’s like a bully the bully Bully’s campaign to where you’re a bully, you’re running around trying to treat people with disrespect, and you’re asking who are you to people, and you’re disbanding all these groups and pretending like they didn’t exist and you just learned about them.
[00:45:58.260] – Robert DeVore,
It’s a continuation of definitely seeing that. I went, Okay, well, somebody has to just say something now and not just do it in the same way that they point at and go, Well, you’re just being mean or you’re just being rude. You’re cussing at me or you’re using vulgar language So I just went and I said, there’s no holds barred. If he’s not going to hold back, then why should we? And that’s just… I’ve done this my whole life. It’s not just a Matt thing. It’s not even really a personal thing with me and Matt. I don’t feel like it’s personal. It’s just I feel the person that he is and the type of person that he’s shown himself to be is not a person that I can respect. So I’ll just disrespect that person now. And that’s what I’ve done. The whole December to remember was basically just built around that. We’re going to just show him what the community can do and what he should be doing and point out areas where he’s lacking and point out things that he did wrong. I dropped a diss track because I think it’s just funny.
[00:46:59.300] – Robert DeVore,
I think that it’s That was another way to show him that the people in the community are smarter and more talented than he’ll ever be. He just got lucky building a business around a community at a time that allowed him to become post-economic off the backs of everybody else. That was the goal, just to point all that out.
[00:47:19.890] – Jonathan Denwood
How much… Obviously, time flies, and I think it’s been almost five years since Gutenberg. I sense increasingly, how much of the development of WordPress core has been down to the… I don’t expect a finite answer from you because I don’t think any of us know. I’m just asking a sense because you’re very involved in the WordPress community and you’re a professional developer. How much of the development of WordPress has been really based on a hard core volunteer individual basis? And has that diminished since Gutenberg? Has it been more reliant, more and more really on the resources of Automatic. Have you got any sense about that?
[00:48:22.690] – Robert DeVore,
I’d say it’s definitely changed when Gutenberg came, but I think that’s because on a smaller scale, that was them starting to take more control over the project. They had an idea of what they wanted. Not everybody in the community wanted it, but they said we’re doing it anyway. In the grand scale of it all, I think that the core editor is not bad. I like it. I write my content in it on my site. I use it for them reasons, so I don’t have a problem with it. There’s things that could be better, and I think that a lot of it boiled down to people hate change, and when it came, a lot of people went, I don’t want to use this, and they’re just hating it to hate it, and it’s not all bad. So I think that it’s definitely altered where the direction of WordPress is going and who’s involved in it now. And because it’s a bigger, more robust thing, there’s more control needed instead of just everybody being able to just jump in like it was in the earlier days, a little patch here, a little fix there. Now it’s more complicated.
[00:49:21.830] – Robert DeVore,
So you got to have more technical skills just to jump in and get really involved with it. So I think not necessarily gatekeeping, but it’s gatekeeping from devs or community members who don’t have that technical skill, and they can’t just jump in. And then their voices don’t feel as heard because the people that are actually building it might dismiss something they say or just pretend like it was never said and then have a thing come up a month or two later and it’s, Oh, this person said it now, and they totally disregard that it was brought up before. So I think it’s a lot of that. I think it’s more control from automatic for sure and more focus on It’s the big players and it’s big business. I think Gutenberg was the start of that shift, and then we’re seeing more of that now. It’s business is involved in how much money can we make? Is my business profiting enough to be able to sustain all this private equity, and you see things like BlackRock reducing their investment by 10%, that’s not because Automatic is doing a great job. That’s because they want to reduce their risk.
[00:50:25.150] – Robert DeVore,
They see things happening that they’re not happy with. When you’re on that level you’re doing things as a CEO, you’re not thinking just about the community. At that point, you have to think about the other aspects of your business, but then you’re pushing it off like it’s a community thing, and we’re doing this for the community, and it becomes disingenuous, and then the community fractures, and that’s what you’re seeing now. All the different repos that are popping up in places that people are building and different types of forks and things that are going on, and you can see it happening. The community that it was is no longer what it will be because he’s cut it in half, essentially. You look at a WordPress, I think it was 6.6 when it was released. It’s like 50/50. It’s automatic doing the contributions and then everybody else doing the contributions. So if automatic just took their thing and went with it and the community did their thing, they don’t feel like there would be that big of a downside to it, in my opinion, because they get more control over their project. They have less input from people that they don’t care to listen to, and it becomes more of their baby project.
[00:51:27.230] – Robert DeVore,
And we’ve seen how Matt’s treated it like his a baby project. So that would be where I see it going in the future. And then in the next couple of years, I see it just fracturing and splintering more. The community themselves will just take their own little stances and build up their own WordCamp-type events and things like that will splinter up, and it’ll be less about WordPress-centric because the WordPress that we were building it around originally isn’t what WordPress is now.
[00:51:58.450] – Jonathan Denwood
How do you think none of us know? I’m only surmising this, and I just wanted to see if you think I’m on the right track. I think obviously the legal confrontation that him and automatic I have him with WP Engine, in the end, he will attempt to settle with WP Engine. I offer him a very large financial inducement to settle the matter because I personally don’t really see him stand it any chance in his legal confrontation with WP Engine. The question I want to put, do you think WP Engine are going to take that offer, or do you think they sense blood in the water and they’re going to Obviously, they’ve got to be a bit careful because my understanding of the law, if you made a really good offer in a civil case and you don’t take it, it can actually diminish your possibility, your standing with the court, basically, because you’re not being reasonable. Do you think in the end, he’s just going to be able to just pay off WP engine, or do you think there’s going to be more severe consequences?
[00:53:32.220] – Robert DeVore,
I could see that possibly happening. I could see him settling at some point just for the sake of everyone. It just depends on how hard-headed WP engine is. If they see now that there’s this bigger thing, you see three The free JavaScript project that’s going on right now where everyone’s trying to free the trademark for JavaScript from Oracle. It’s the same similar setup here. If they wanted to go that route, they could spearhead that if they wanted to. I’m sure they would get a lot of support from other people for that. I don’t know necessarily if that would be what their business is wanting to do or if they just wanted to go back to copaestetics so they can continue dominating and being the number one player against automatic lineup of products. When you look at the grand scheme of that, they might just be happy and content knowing that automatic can never potentially catch up for them unless they’re doing stuff like this. It really just depends on how they’re going with it. I could see it going either way. I don’t I don’t really think either way is better or worse because it’s not my business.
[00:54:33.910] – Jonathan Denwood
We do, really. They have not got this emotional, passionate element that you have. It’s just pure business for WP engine. It’s interesting, isn’t it?
[00:54:46.030] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, it seems like it. If you’re going at it from a purely business standpoint, then they’ll go with the business standpoint of the same thing Matt’s doing.
[00:54:56.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Which we can’t judge because obviously… They probably don’t know, they’re probably having these discussions all the time internally. Do we settle? But in the end, this is just my opinion, Robert, he will be driven in the end by the reality of the situation to make WP Tonica offer. They then will probably make the business decision, do we continue? Because through the process of discovery, this can only get worse and worse for Matt, can it not?
[00:55:36.370] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, I don’t see it getting any better. I think I’ve said it recently on Twitter, but there’s a post that he made on Blue Sky, where it’s a page from a book about sabotaging a business and slowing up their meetings. To me, it seems like that’s what this is. It’s a long, thrown-out process. I don’t think he has an expectation to win. I don’t think he should have an expectation to win. But if you’re trying to slow up a business that’s defeating you pretty bad, you’re trying to distract them and make them lose a couple of customers here and there and help your business succeed in some way, it could be a tactic that he’s using just because he knows I’ll never win, but this would help. If that’s what his tactics are, then it seems like, in my opinion, based on him posting a page out of that book right around the time he says all this started, it seems like maybe that’s where his mind was when he was on that track. I’m not going to win, but I’m going to sabotage them and I’m going to slow them down just a little bit so my business can catch up.
[00:56:37.060] – Jonathan Denwood
It could be a yes. Obviously, you got much deeper history with the WordPress development community. I’ve just been running this podcast and running my little businesses. How has all this, in your opinion, affected the WordPress US plugin professional developer community, what has happened over the last three to four months? In general, what’s your own feeling about how it’s affected that community?
[00:57:15.640] – Robert DeVore,
I think it’s changed. From a community standpoint, we’re all more fractured now. You’re going to see subcommunities pop up. You’re going to see groups that are more content marketer-based. You’re going to see groups that are more developer-based. I don’t think it’s going to be the same in that aspect. And then from an actual business standpoint, if you’re building a business around WordPress, I think the days of being able to build a generalist plugin, that’s something… If you look at it from a standpoint, can WordPress put this in core or should they put this in core? You can’t necessarily build a viable business on that and expect to just keep doing it without the risk of potentially having it taken from you. If you can niche down and focus on different areas that are more, I’m going to help this subset market, I think that’s where the attention could benefit more for a business standpoint now because of all of this. It’s shifted. Not everyone’s trying to build on a WordPress brand as much anymore. The WP and people’s names are changing. They’re trying to shift and alter stuff like I did with WP dispensary. I don’t want WP dispensary no more.
[00:58:28.390] – Robert DeVore,
It’s going to be the cannabis menu from cannabis software because I want to separate from WordPress itself. So my products don’t have to be centralized around WordPress because of this.
[00:58:39.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think I totally understand why you’re doing that, but I actually am not that because I think… I don’t know because like I laid out to you earlier, it really depends on when he has to settle or attempts to try and settle settle with W, and he will, in my opinion, I don’t know for sure, but it’s my honest opinion, Robert, he will be driven to have to attempt to settle with WP engine because his legal team and the realities of the situation will drive him to that. But if they are prepared to settle with him, I think this whole usage of the term WP WP and other elements will have to be part of the settlement because I don’t think WP engine will want to change their brand in just because he makes claims that, in my opinion, are unfounded. I think that will be part of the segment apart from financial element of it, which will be considerable. I want to go back to Gutenberg, because I’ve been thinking about this, because I think what you outlined about Gutenberg have been my own feelings. But there’s a subgroup, my criticisms of Gutenberg, apart from full-site editing, which I think we needed a more longer period where the whole UX and other elements should have been dealt with before moving on to full-site editing.
[01:00:44.110] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s my own opinion. But I think there’s a whole sub stack of the WordPress community that really dislike Gutenberg because of the technology that it’s based upon. Because these people make a really good living, but they’re more from the CSS web design with an element of work, PHP, coding, including background who really don’t want to get… And that’s my background. Initially, I worked for our agency. And that’s where you come from. And they’re They’re really not in the world of React or Vue or any of these JavaScript libraries apart from Jquery. They really think the power has been moved to box and react, and they want the ability to adapt by utilizing modern CSS technology with some PHB. Phb as a language that a lot of people thought was going to die through projects like L’Avel, it’s actually found a new step A new sprint in its step, really. I think these people, it’s not so much… There’s a group of people like yourself that are a bit that are outraged by Matt’s content. Then there’s another group who are not that bothered, but they’re unhappy because of the technology stack. Do you think I’m on the right track there?
[01:02:40.420] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, there’s definite separation between groups. Some groups, all they want to do is rage tweet. They want to be mad. They want the views, the engagement to go up so they can say, Look in my Follower account. Then there’s other groups They don’t care about anything that Matt says. They’re just focused on what they’re doing, and they could care less about that aspect of it. The business is the problem, and the actual coding on top of Gutenberg is the problem, and they’re mad about that. Then there’s another group that they’re just upset at him morally, and they think that he’s morally corrupt, and the things that he’s doing are disgusting. There’s different groups, and I’m conscious of that, and I don’t want to all into one specific group, because I’ve said it numerous times, I don’t have a problem with Matt doing business things with WordPress.
[01:03:37.740] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s WordPress.
[01:03:39.020] – Robert DeVore,
I understand that, but I feel like a lot of people don’t get that separation, and that’s where the community needs to work on that a little bit, some of them, because it’s still a business. It’s still his business, and regardless of what any of us think, he’s the one running it. If he has things that he’s going to do, he can do that. But then he has to, on the flip side, understand that the community is now going to have a response to that. We’re going to have an opinion about that. I feel like I don’t want to be pigeonholed into just a Matt hater. I’m not a Matt hater.
[01:04:10.640] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I’m not at all, actually. I want to put… This is only my perspective, Robert. I just want to… Because I think you were correct at the beginning of this conversation in our bonus content about the part of Matt’s character that I I think, irritates you a bit. I just want to put this to you. I think, and this is only my opinion, my reflection, it strikes me as somebody that has different… I’m going to use this term ‘buckets’ He has these buckets of different people, different groups that he puts in different buckets. He has different conversations with these different buckets, He has a group of investors, and he has a conversation. Well, it’s open source, but the reality is I own it all. I’ve set up this very consciously ownership structure through these different layers, and I’ve hidden this from the WordPress community. So yes, it’s open source, but I own all the intellectual property. So don’t worry, your money, your investment with me is going to be okay. Then he has another conversation, another bucket, which he uses a different type of language, like at WordCamp USA or WordCamp Europe. Then he has a different language that he uses online.
[01:05:57.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you see where I’m coming from? And I think when people like yourselves, I myself observe these different discussions in different… We get a bit irritated, don’t we?
[01:06:12.010] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah. It’s the lack of genuineness. To me, it automatically lets me know this person is not being real with themselves or the people they’re talking to. He’s trying to do something to appease the person he’s having a conversation with rather than just honestly answering whatever questions come up or involving himself in the community discussions and just listening and actually being a part of it. When you’re genuinely yourself 24/7, you don’t really worry about none of that stuff. The words that come out of your mouth, it’s an afterthought. For him, I feel like it’s more of a stage presence. He gets in front of this group, he’s going to speak this way. You said he gets in front of the investors and he’s bumping shoulders with them and, guess what, guys, I did all this good stuff. And then he goes over to the community and goes, Hey, man, it’s these bad guys over here that are doing it. And it becomes a game of cat and mouse of where does he really sit and what’s his real agenda and what is his real plans with all of this, because nothing that he’s saying to anybody seems real.
[01:07:15.460] – Robert DeVore,
I’m offering my personal opinion, I think he’s mad he’s not as famous as Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg because he built something that powers half the Internet, and he feels like he should be more famous. Now this is his chance to separate from the community and to appease all these people. In turn, now he can ascend the business world and become the business mogul, billionaire he seems like he’s always wanted to be. That’s just how I see it when I’m looking at him based on how he’s acted and reacted in different situations.
[01:07:46.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, to finish our discussion in a more positive tenure, I’ve been surprised how robust WordPress has been, not just just around the last quarter, 204, and what we are observing at the beginning of 205 with Max problems. But I’ve been actually quite surprised how in general, which is slightly different to most people’s views because I don’t think the Gutenberg project, I think a lot of its problems has been the way that it’s been managed and the times scale. But on the other hand, refactoring code on something that drives almost half of the web of the internet is a little bit difficult. I don’t have the technical knowledge to make a reasonable judgment call there. I think deciding to just refactor and combine old code with new code as a host of its own problems, but it also deals with some other problems if you just start afresh, because other platforms have attempted that and it’s been quite damaging. It’s a lot of gray there. But I’ve been quite surprised because there’s a whole group of developers in the SaaS world, the bootstrap, in In the world of Ruby, in the world of L’Avel, in the world of React that really despise WordPress.
[01:09:42.290] – Jonathan Denwood
If you say that you were developing and you’re active in the WordPress community, they would think you’re a bit odd. But I’m fine with it because they’re a bit… But they are in the SaaS world of Ruby, on rails, they’re in the world of L’Avall. In some ways, they’re going to have that attitude, aren’t they? But I think the world of SaaS has its own problems as well. I think a lot of end users are exhausted with endless subscription bills. Do you think I’m on the right? Have you been surprised by the robustness of WordPress, and do you think I’m on the right track about the world of SaaS having its own problems?
[01:10:35.530] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, I think WordPress itself is really robust. It can’t be a simple project if it’s going to power what it powers. The things you can do with it are amazing, and you can build all kinds of stuff with it. I think that’s awesome. The ease of use, the flexibility, the backwards compatibility, I understand the need for those things, and I can respect all of that. I think that I don’t necessarily… I don’t know how to answer the question. I think that it’s definitely robust. It’s in a good way and a bad way because you’re getting the technology advances of what it’s being built with now versus what it was before. But then now you’re having to build with that. You’re having to maintain that, that whole world, them whole frameworks are now changing consistently. So now WordPress has to change and adjust with those. And it’s not just WordPress looking after itself. So it adds extra problems. But I do think, like you said with SAS, I think everybody’s going to pick their own island. If you’re over in one area building in one space, that’s going to be your home base. And you’re going to always look at everybody else a little bit differently.
[01:11:46.180] – Robert DeVore,
Wordpress developers have tended to look at outside places differently. Why aren’t you just building with WordPress? You could do that with WordPress. So I think everybody has their own viewpoints on it. I think if anything, the stuff that’s on will benefit the community because everybody’s trying new stuff. We’re branching out now. You see people building apps, you see them building different tools and stuff that they might not have done three months ago. So I think that if anything, it’s springboarding that creativity and the development community within WordPress to branch out. So I think you’re going to see a lot of bridges gaps between WordPress and then the different SAS communities and the different tools. I think you’ll see more Laravel projects that actually utilize WordPress. You’re going to see different things like that pop up more now. I think it’s good. I think it’s a great thing, and I’m going to be a part of it. I’m going to be building stuff and doing things that are outside of WordPress, but still work with WordPress. I think that’s where it’s going to shine over the next couple of years.
[01:12:49.340] – Jonathan Denwood
I just want to finish off. I think other people in the past month, six weeks, have been agaced at Matt’s reaction to very reasonable proposals from people that have got a lot of public influence in the WordPress community, making very reasonable requests and advice and how that input has been totally rejected by Matt. But I’m not surprised at I’m utterly not surprised at all. Have you got any insight why these people have been surprised? Because I haven’t been.
[01:13:38.960] – Robert DeVore,
I think it comes down to how you read people. Some people are able to just read a room easier. If you can understand human nature a little more, maybe some people just interact with people on the surface so they don’t dive too deep. But maybe you and I see it and we look at him and go, Well, why is he doing this? Why is he acting this way. I wonder what happened. And you start connecting dots and you can make reasonable assumptions based off the information you have that, well, if this happened and this happened and this happened, then down the road, you can see how we ended up at this space. This is from the beginning of the project, three on, he’s been pretty much the same exact map. If you watch and you paid attention and you don’t get blindsided by the lights and the.
[01:14:23.360] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re partially right, but I also think it’s around this term that I used buckets because I think he can’t be that flexible because I think the bucket that are his investors, he told them a story that doesn’t allow him to change.
[01:14:47.050] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah. I think that comes from being able, like I said, to being able to read them. You understand if he said and done these same types of things, you can see how he puts these buckets together, and you can almost infer that, Well, If he’s talking in this way to the community, but he’s running around and doing the things that he’s doing that look like he’s trying to appease the investors, then obviously there’s a disconnect in what he’s portraying in public versus what he’s saying in private. You can see that the buckets are there, definitely. I don’t think that… I’ve never been able to get along with people that do that just because I feel like you should just be the same. I’m the same person that I am.
[01:15:27.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, I’m not. I’m very devious, Robert. I’m English, so it comes from the history of being English. But I don’t think he’s doing himself any favors, really. But I think it’s more about what conversations that he’s had with the investors. And then I think he’s put himself… He’s not an idiot. He’s a highly intelligent individual. I think he’s high on his own importance a bit. I don’t think this bust up with WP Engine is going to end up very well for him. I don’t think it’s disastrous because I think they will make the decision and it will be settled out I thought, in my own opinion, but I might be wrong there. But I don’t think WordPress itself, the outcome for the next couple of years, which is all that you can really look ahead because things change. I don’t think it’s that bad, actually. Would you agree with that?
[01:16:38.500] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, I don’t think much is going to change other than how you approach your business with WordPress. I think that will change. But building a business with WordPress is going to be the same. You can still use the software, you can still build a product, and you can still market it and promote it, and still make sales and help people. I don’t think that’s going to change. I think as the core editor progresses I think that it will become easier over time for other developers to pick up the tools that are-Yeah, I’m not.
[01:17:06.910] – Jonathan Denwood
I really don’t, June. People say, Well, you’re so anti-Gutenberg, Jonathan. You’re part of this group. I won’t name… There’s a couple of names that are very public influences that are very negative, but they’ve got their own commercial projects that make them very negative to Gutenberg. I take what they are intelligent, and I just take what they say with a pinch of salt. But I totally understood why Gutenberg was necessary. I’ve just been very frustrated with the slowness and the way in general it’s been managed, but in general, I’m not one of the total. As you pointed out so clearly, they are there. I think we’re going to end the conversation. You have to come on the show a bit more regularly. Don’t leave it till six years. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation, Robert, and thank you so much, and doing this bonus content. I think we’ve had a great discussion. Would you agree with that, Robert?
[01:18:27.790] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, I appreciate it. It’s a lot of fun being here, and I do think it was a fun time. I’ve had a blast.
[01:18:33.390] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we’ve been respectful and we’ve really just been honest about the situation, really. We haven’t really I don’t think you have, and I definitely would not want to be seen as attacking Matt on a real personal level because I just don’t think that’s necessary, and that’s not really very constructive It’s quite effective, isn’t it? But on the other hand, I’m not prepared just to be a yes person and just say that everything Matt’s doing is right because I just don’t honestly believe that’s correct. I think you’re the same, aren’t you, Robert?
[01:19:15.930] – Robert DeVore,
Yeah, I feel like there’s a time and a place for everything. You can be aggressive in your approach with how you talk at certain times, but then we’re having a business discussion about the business of WordPress. I don’t feel like it’s a time where it’s, Oh, let’s just go bash Matt for 30 minutes. That’s not important. It’s not going to benefit anybody. There’s no real insight for that. There’s a time and a place for it, but this definitely just wasn’t it.
[01:19:40.830] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to end the bonus content here, folks. We’ll see you next week. Bye.
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