Moving Forward with WordPress 5.9 Features and Strategy

Ronald: Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo, and this time we’re going to talk about full site editing and the recent release of WordPress 5.9. So full site editing, Gutenberg blocks, all these terms that maybe three, four years ago are all a bit scary and silly. We’re right in it, we’ve all had to get used to it. Now, I’m going to ask Tammie, first of all, have we got used to it? Are people embracing it, or are we still in a period where people are unsure about it?

Embracing or uncertainty with Gutenberg

Tammie: I think, Gutenberg is WordPress, so I think it’s very interesting when people talk about Gutenberg, it’ll be experimental plugin. So I think people have got used to it because it is in WordPress, and it is there, and it’s part of what’s being used. I think, as regards to the full site editing aspect, that is completely different thing to talk about where we’re getting used to or not. And then there’s another discussion that we can maybe have today about the scale of what full site editing is. I think anyone that’s been using WordPress for the past few years is used to it, just both by the fact that they are used to using WordPress. And Gutenberg is WordPress now. Yeah, in that sense.

Ronald: You were right there from the beginning, from the birth of Gutenberg, as the design lead. And you’ve lived and breathed the whole process. How do you think where we are now, are we still at the beginning phases of what the full capabilities potentially can be?

Tammie: I think the thing about it is it’s a project that has to adapt and has to grow. Because any project that spans a number of years will change, because technology changes. So what we can do now, we maybe hoped you could do at the beginning, but we couldn’t quite do it at the beginning because technology couldn’t catch up to do at the beginning. So there’s an element of that, that has to adapt. It has to adapt with the needs of the marketplace as well. So there is always going to be a roadmap that it was planned to be on because that’s just the way it’s going, the phases. But really, there is always going to be adaption as the languages that we use, the technologies adapt, the way that we use technology changes, the way that we create content has changed, and what we want to do has changed. There’s a central path, but it has to adapt with that. And WordPress has to adapt or die. It’s true, as products. And it’s interesting, your example.

Evolving with Gutenberg

Ronald: If I can go to Robbie, because you’ve experienced it maybe in a slightly different way, and it was presented to you a few years back. And how have you evolved with it?

Robbie: For me, I mean, I worked on WordPress years and years ago before Gutenberg, right? But I would call it minimal work. We did certain sites for clients that requested them, but we didn’t do our full website application building and everything inside of WordPress at the time, we were more Joomla based. Since then, for the last couple of years, we’ve been digging in much deeper into doing application development in WordPress. And obviously, by that time, Gutenberg was the accepted editor. Well, accepted by some, right? But definitely for us, because we were coming in with fresh eyes. And so coming in with fresh eyes, we saw the potential of Gutenberg. And we’re like, this is great. We loved it. I had no desire to back to classic editor like I saw a lot of people were doing. Even if we were using a page builder, we still embraced Gutenberg for certain aspects of it.

Maybe we wanted them to use Gutenberg in their post, but we were going to use page builder for the other pages, things like that. We’ve incorporated it, as well as, where we’ve found it has real true possibilities are the Gutenberg blocks and using ReactDOM. It’s easier than pulling over to React Native. There’s a lot of crossover there then with our code and design. And so personally, we really love Gutenberg. And I was really excited at State of the Word when Matt said, “We’d like to see Gutenberg in other platforms.” I was like, hey. That caught my ear. When I heard that, I was like, wait a minute. So now from a WooCommerce standpoint, if I really dig in and I’ve got some really great Gutenberg blocks that I’ve built, could I then pull that into, let’s say, Drupal? I can pull Gutenberg into Drupal.

So now, could I pull my WooCommerce products over into a Drupal site, even though I’m really still doing everything through my WooCommerce, on my WordPress site? You see what I’m saying? To me, the possibilities are astounding. I think it is the way to go. And we were talking about, oh, people go backwards, or whatever. And I’m all of that. I’m 100% evolve or die. You just got to go, yes, it hurts whenever there’s something new that happens. And you’re just like, no, I don’t want to do it. But you have to. You have to do it in our world. And I say that, and there’s still people who are programming in COBOL, so there you go.

Use cases of Gutenberg

Ronald: I think you’ve answered a little bit of my next question, if it has opened up a whole complete new toolbox and some really valuable use cases, or things you can do with it. And I think you’ve just, call that one. Tammie, can you think of other things that we might not have necessarily thought of that are really good use cases for good Gutenberg?

Tammie: I think one of the things it’s done is reflecting the outside of WordPress. The world outside of work is using design systems, and that is what there is outside. And WordPress didn’t really have that. It was trying, and has tried to have some unification, but didn’t really have that. And the block started to have that, the blocking of components. And so to be able to have this language that designers and developers could talk the same language and shared components. Now we’re still in that light wheel, tiny little early steps. We’re still using Figma to communicate. Spoiler, that’s not the ideal way. But the outside world is using full code communicative design systems to talk in real product language when things are created. So to take our work into that space and reflect that, that’s really what I personally feel WordPress should be doing. So I think it helps with that.

It also works better to humans seeing things in components, it’s just easier for us as well. So just by us thinking about the block level, or taking us back that level, it both makes it easier, it contains it for securities, all these kind of things. It contains things, it makes it easier, but it also just really makes it scalable or whatever words we want to add. And then it aligns us more with the outside world practices. . And really, that also helps with bringing people into the projects and bringing people into, who give us that knowledge to raise what are other platforms doing? What are other open source… The open web then opens. And then beyond that, what do all these different platforms do? They’re using design assistance, so it brings that common language. I think that is one of the big things that it enables, and that truly excites me. And we are just started on that road.

Transitioning into WordPress 5.9

Ronald: Yeah. Yeah. Robbie, the recent release of 5.9, has there been a welcome final addition to your WordPress sites where you can now certainly start to do things? Or, will you take a more cautious approach? And maybe I’m asking you too broad there, but a careful approach where you say, let’s just see how are we going to manage this?

Robbie: Okay. Yeah, that’s a broad question there, Ronald. So let’s break down full site editing coming out. I mean, yeah, we’ve been so busy though. I mean, I’ll be honest, we have barely any time to play with it just yet. But we’re excited about it. I think it does bring some cool potential. And so will we dig into it? Probably. Absolutely. One of the harder things coming into the WordPress world for us was the amount of plugins that it requires on every side. We’re not used to that, we are pretty minimalistic. And so anything that I see that happens at a core level that can minimize the amount of plugins I have, personally, I’m all about that. To me, I was very pleased to see this coming out, and I’m excited for us to dig in and see how we can incorporate that add into our workflow.

So we work on different types of sites, whether it’s going to be something the client needs to use and work on, or whether we are just going to maintain it. And those have different philosophies behind our workflow of what we’re going to end up with in the end. Right? And so, I don’t know yet about if it’s a client-based project where they’re going to be doing it, I need to see how easy this is going to be. Or better yet, how easy is it going to be for them to mess things up? You know what I mean. I mean, seriously, it is true. Now, but with full site editing, I do think it is fantastic. Because, just like Gutenberg in general, and Tammie touched on it with the blocks.

You’ve got blocks, and you’re dividing things down and you’re making them simpler. And especially, the more complex it is behind that block, the more work we do as a dev behind a block, the more flexible it is on the front end for the person. As well as, it’s getting knit more towards the no code that you’re seeing being adopted by so many users out there. So we’re pulling no code into WordPress with this, with Gutenberg in general, it’s pulling no code. But I always say, the easier something is on the front end, the harder it was to develop on the backend. Because it’s all about up making something easy on the front end, right? And so I went a little deviant there, I just deviated off of your question, I know.

But I do feel that full site editing is a good progression here for us. I don’t know if it’ll be something that is the answer for every single site that we build out there. Not yet. Will it be eventually? Yes. And it will be interesting to see how page builders adapt to this. I think they will. I think that there’s some really… Again, especially when we start thinking about the crossing over to different platforms with Gutenberg, I think page builders have a really vested interest in looking into how they can tap in and work with inside of this full site editing as well.

Predicting user experience with the full site editor and addressing it

Ronald: And that’s the nice think that they can live alongside, it can work. They are compatible. Just like when Gutenberg was introduced, you could use Gutenberg together with Beaver Builder. And it’s the same with full site editing, the customizer still works, you can enable it. If there’s a plugin or a theme that uses the customizer, it’s there. If it’s not, well, it disappears. And there’s a lot of thinking that goes behind these user experiences. Tammie, give us a little insight of how much research goes into trying to imagine all these millions of site users’ experience and how to address these things.

Tammie: Yeah. I think the big one is the fact that this is still beta, whatever you want to call it. We’re having a year to work on it. And then we’re having however long we took to get to here. So we talk about it like it’s the shit product it’s not. Right? And that is also the mind, like bend for everybody because it’s so unexpected, right? It’s in a release, but it’s not released. So it’s a real thing. So this year really is an experimentation, and that is the big feedback, right? How is this thing going to get used? And I’m going to answer your point by also explaining that full site editing is this big word to describe lots of features that aren’t just full site editing, and can be used outside of full site editing.

You may have a client that it’s super okay to do that. That is amazing if you are, so I don’t want to generalize. But most people will not be in that position to be able to do that within their work, either their plugins on up to date enough to do that, or to unpick their theme or to do something. But to add a theme JSON, and to unpick a little bit of CSS or SaaS to be able to do that, probably quite doable for them. They’re using a feature as a result of that. To use block patterns, pretty doable. To use some block stars, could be doable. And all of those are features, and all of those are things to give feedback to. So patterns is a good one. A lot of these things, there’s testing you can do and expectations you can do based on your knowledge when you are creating this product.

But it’s the feedback from, I call it the stress case. It’s not edge case because they cause stress. Because they really do. It’s the agency that has this client that has extreme hit rates, or has lots of students hitting something in a education establishment. Or something that is going, or a product list that is going to completely break a dropdown. Some thing that is going to completely break that component, or a language that’s going break things and make everything completely broken. Those you can guess at, but you can only know from real world testing. And we get a certain amount of that, but you’re always doing the best guess. So this time that we have together collectively as a community to ready ourselves and prepare what we are going to use of this. And some features, it may turn out weren’t that useful through the majority of people.

And that’s okay, it’s a toolkit. There’s bits of WordPress called that, if you have a commerce site, you probably don’t use. If you have this type of site, you probably don’t use. And that is absolutely going to be the way of all this editor work eventually as well. That is a really roundabout way, but it’s a year of experimentation. So if you haven’t explored it yet, that’s totally okay. You had a long time before this, maybe six to be the thing it removed, but you might not be in a place for it to go to clients before then and you don’t have to be. And I think that that’s the thing, but just start being aware of it, being aware that you can gradually explore things. I think it’s really, really important for people. Not that you have to jump in and suddenly redo your framework and suddenly redo everything. I think that awareness is really, really important.

Ronald: I think that’s a really important message to send out, because I think we’ve all seen messages on social, on Slack groups, and so, of those. It’s like, oh, I certainly this has been forced upon me and now I have to do this, and I’m not happy. I decline this, and they’re going to break this and that. But actually, nothing has changed, it’s an added functionality.

The magic of theme.json

Tammie: All of this only changes if you use a theme that has that capabilities on, or you choosing to turn these things on. And I love being json because they’re tiny little things that you can turn on that make your life better that mean you don’t have to deal with lots of that stuff. So that’s what I would suggest where you start. And those are all compatible with things like WooCommerce and all those kind of different things, because you can just start using those and then gradually move into your experimentation work, if you have hack days or you have hack time, start doing that. But the pressure is not on, we but we didn’t have it in beta label. We had it in the plugin, but we didn’t have it in a release. We have that.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Trustpilot and Mindsize

The thinking, the fear, the excitement of blocks and WooCommerce

Ronald: Let’s add a little bit of purple dust over this conversation in the form of WooCommerce. And so my question is towards the future and the capabilities. I know that WooCommerce blogs is very much in development. I think I’ve seen a release note today, very much focused on cart and checkout. And I think also product pages are pages that we can start to shape in a very different way. Now let’s assume e-commerce, the way we experience it, and WooCommerce be so familiar, have your product image description or title description. And buy now, and choose your quantity and variations. What if people started to change that, and to some certain extent that we started to lose the flow that we experience e-commerce? I’m going to go back to Tammie, because I know design is a really big thing for you. What’s your thinking, what’s your fear, and what’s your excitement behind this?

Tammie: There’s a way to tell the story of a checkout, and that story isn’t going to change no matter what method you’re having it with. When I said the story about the beginning of a checkout process and how you do it, and how you perform it has to happen a certain way. And the technology has to do that certain way, whether you do it with blocks. I don’t know, whatever you’re doing it with. Right? I’m not super concerned about that. I’m actually less concerned the more we do this, because what this does is give us a little bit more unification for us to establish practices. But it also allows a couple of things if done right. Things like global styles give people capacity to have some styling, but not too much styling.

And this is always one of those concerns when you give an end user or a client the ability to customize their thing. Down to it’s, oh, what if they make everything pink? Or everything yellow, or whatever. They do everything blue, and they change everything. It’s always a color that the person saying it has a problem with. It’s always that kind of emotion of someone, right? With things like global styles and theme.json, because globe styles is the interface for that, you are setting a parameter. And you are saying, within these parameters this is how you can sell. The developer and designer are agreeing that parameters. So you are actually sticking more within that branding than some of the customized solutions, which use color pink. And you can turn off color pink, so you can actually have a lot more control and you can do things like dual tone, and you can actually really give someone the feeling of control, but they’re actually not having damage control because it’s their brand.

Patterns and WooCommerce

It’s really interesting how that works. With things like patterns, you are enabling someone to place a predetermined, pre-selected, well-designed thing together, and that’s a collection of blocks. Patterns even make more sense, so blocks are exciting. Patterns are even more exciting because they are multiple blocks inside them. So that is really interesting for things like this. So you could have a pattern for this, but pattern templates or block templates is where this all gets really, really exciting. Where you start being able to have access potentially to predetermined checkout templates, or predetermined templates. So you wouldn’t have to necessarily change your theme, you wouldn’t necessarily have to change everything that you’re doing to be able to get access to these particular things. And that opens up a lot more possibilities for good design to people. That’s where I get very excited, but we have to make sure that it’s the design level and all those kind of things.

So it is ultimately going to open up access to people, but it’s, how do we deal with? And an e-commerce site is going to have a lot of patterns potentially. And so the problem with pattern management, problem with pattern scaling is something that we haven’t necessarily dealt with in core. And the problem that of patterns getting out, seeing all those kind of things is something we’ve maybe got to deal with. It’s an early problem, but it’s super exciting. We are getting away from the coding aspect, because it’s a shareable and a little bit easier, but we are enabling people to maybe even sell these. So there’s another marketplace situation.

Ronald: Robbie, what’s going through your mind hearing all this?

Robbie: What Tammie just hit on there at the end is what I potentially see happening with the patterns, is that you start to have a different marketplace there. I mean, and if you think about page builders have had patterns really, right? They’ve had this in there. And so what stops them from just putting those over in there? If there’s a marketplace for them, then yes, then that would open up the pattern library to be even larger. I mean, I’m not opposed to that, that you could have free and purchasable patterns out there. It’s great for designers. Like Tammie’s saying, it’s fantastic. I always though go back to, when I’m going to hand it over to a client, is this a good thing for a client or not?

Robbie: If I can limit and say, these are the only block patterns that they get. Then yes, because I can limit what they can pick from and I can limit what they can do to their site. Because, oh my goodness, everyone thinks they’re a designer and they’re not. And so, particularly a lot of clients. They’re like, “Well, I just thought it’d be better if I made this big and bold and red and flashing.” And you’re like, “No, your site is purple based,” whatever, you know? And it’s like, no, pink doesn’t work right here. Or no, you know? And so it’s like, yeah. I think what we will see too is a level, right? That we need to create a leveling inside of there too so that we can limit certain user roles to certain patterns, and not give them full access to everything.

Because in that way you can make editors of the site, your client editors out there, only have access to certain things. And so you’re going to hopefully prevent that from happening where they just went and they went, “Wow, well, I really like the way this one looks,” and it’s some art nouveau layout that they just picked to put in their classic looking website. And it’s like, it doesn’t match. I mean, I know it’s pretty. And if it were on a whole site that looked like that, that would be great. So I do think that we’ll have to start seeing some limitations there. But like Tammie said, it’s in its infancy right now. I think those will come along. They will come along as the builders out there demand for it. And the builders will demand, one, they need more tools themselves, or more access, or more whatever.

You’ll have plugin people who are like, we need to be able to sell in here, so that’s going to generate that marketplace there. And then you’ll have the builders who are then handing over their clients and seeing them tear up their beautiful design. And so they’re going to say, we need limitations here so we can limit this down. And so we can establish that these are the pattern sets and color schemes, and everything that worked in this website. This is what’s available to all my editors out there, and that’s what they can work within these confines. And so it’s like, I do think that we’ll have to evolve that way. Otherwise, we will never want our clients to be able to have access in there, right? Because, some are fine, but holy mackerel. I’ve thought of some of our websites over the years that we’ve turned over to a client and it was beautiful the day we handed it over. And then I go back in three months and I look, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, what is going on here?”

Ronald: I just had this image where they just drop in another pattern for, let’s say a checkout or a cart, and totally mess things up. And things are missing and it doesn’t work anymore. And, yeah. Ouch.

Robbie: Yeah.

Implementing pattern management

Tammie: I think that’s where you have to have the pattern management and a little bit more. So it’s either that patterns have to check, have I got another checkout on this page? And also, that’s also the way you’re talking about the styling. That’s when we’re getting into the style is separate from the theme. That is when I get very excited, because that whole idea at the moment changing themes is really difficult. I have to admit I’m a bit clumsy to, when you change clothes you don’t take your arm off, right? But it feels like that. Like you have to do that because it’s quite traumatic. It’s hard taking themes off, right? But it should be as easy as changing clothing, and as easy as putting a hat or changing songs, or whatever.

Ronald: I really like that analogy actually.

Tammie: Yeah. Maybe there’s a button that you could just apply the style to everything. And your pattern, that style gets taken away and then your new style gets applied. That’s about the style getting taken away. And then the frame of the pattern just working, that helps. What it doesn’t help is your client in storing the hundred patterns. That problem has not helped. That is then pattern management needs to be something. And I actually think pattern management is something that maybe it’s only seeing something to give feedback from the people who are working with it, who are working with people who have shops, who are working with people who have clients.

Because they’re the ones who are going to see it with their clients, or are going to see it coming from their clients. It’s one of those real world examples and it’s something I can feed back of like, “Hey.” The average site is minimum 30 patches it’s going to have at the moment, because that’s what we need to get around we’re not doing full site editing. We’re maybe leaning heavily on that. How do you search? How do you scale? How do you sort those? How do you manage those? And even the library doesn’t load properly, all those things. Yeah.

The futures and the responsibility of the community to make this a success

Ronald: Yeah. But it’s an exciting future. And just as we have this conversation, in my mind I can imagine where other technologies that sit outside of WordPress and WooCommerce can tap into this. And you can have design tools that you create because it’s easy to use, and you copy and paste that into WordPress. Or if you have, let’s say frames that you can control from outside, whether these are SaaS or headless. And it opens up so many new possibilities and make things faster and better and easier. And talking the same language is a really good starting point. It’s a brave thing to start something like that with a lot of, maybe not opposition, but loud voices that say, oh, no, this is not WordPress. But actually, give it some time, we’ll look back and think, yeah, what was all of fuss about?

I want to go to the next topics part of this, because I feel a responsibility. And listening to Robbie as well, educating your clients, your user, your ecosystem around you. Tammie, you’ve been a voice within the Gutenberg, especially in the UK here. Lots of questions answered. And this is a question to both of you, do you think we could do better? We all have a responsibility in this to make this a success. It depends a little bit what you’re good at, whether it’s contributing, giving feedback, testing, having a small user group. I run a meetup and we are planning, for example, to do five minutes of let’s show how you can change the menu. Let’s show a few things on changing a sidebar.

And by the way, and the question goes on, so apologies for that. But I must say, the work that the contributors of learn.WordPress.org are doing, and I’ve checked it out this week. With these little lessons, and for educators to use that to show somebody, a group, how to do something. That’s excellent. It’s really good work. I think I need to plug them and say, check it out and give some credit. Anyway, back to the question. Do we have a responsibility? And what’s your interpretation of that, and maybe the message to others? Robbie, can I start with you?

Robbie: Yeah. I think, okay, and this is on any platform. But we’re talking about WordPress, so I’m going to say from this point, yes, whenever you have anything that comes out in the CMS, you need to have support from the people that are vocal out there. Those are the speakers, pretty much, right? So the people that are going to different conferences and speaking, the people that are talking at word camps. Those people, whether they agree with it or not, they need to adopt it and they need to talk positively about it. Positivity, it’s always the hardest thing to keep going in any community, any platform. Because the more you get used to something, the more you want to resist change, right? But if you are out there and you’re being a public figurehead, as I will call it, for all the speakers that are out there, then you need to stay positive whether you agree with it or not.

Now, you can say that it needs work, it’s whatever, but you do need to stay positive. I think that’s very important. I think it’s very important for all of the people that are out there that are, like I said, being vocal, they’re speaking at events and things. You just need to, and you need to include these things in the presentations that you’re doing, you need to be positive about it. Learn WordPress, that is fantastic to the stuff that it going over there. I’ve actually just started getting involved with the team, and they’re such an amazing team. And that is also a key element, obviously, education, right? So speaking about it is education as well, but that’s a little more advertising is what I will call it almost. It is really advertising for WordPress, right? All of us going out and speaking about it.

Because we don’t always just speak at WordCamp and WordPress events, we’re at all different types. I was at one that was for a CRM, but I talked about WordPress. And so it’s, you can spread the word, and it does spread. So you get asked to speak at the Better Business Bureau here, or whatever, you get asked to talk at other things, and you’re talking about WordPress, so you are spreading the word. So again, you need to be positive about changes and evolution that’s happening in the CMS world so that it doesn’t paint an ugly picture on the community, in my opinion. Because I think that hurts us all there. You’re going to have enough grumbling and griping amongst the community.

So outside of that community, you don’t really want to be spreading your bad juju. Right? We can talk about it internally, we can test things, and that’s where those discussions need to happen. But training is uber important. I have all this training, so I obviously think training is very important. I think it’s important for anything you’re going to be doing. And technology changes so quickly that we all will be continuous students. As long as you stay in IT, you will be a lifelong student. That’s just the way it is. I mean, we know. It’s like, every six months I feel like I’ve replaced my brain almost, because we have to learn so much new stuff. I mean, it all changes that quickly. The basics are there and the fundamental is there, that it remains, but you’re learning all kinds of new things.

I mean every release that comes out on any plugin, any platform, it’s like, well, what’s new? What do I have to learn for this one? So learning is very key. I’m glad that the learn initiative is very strong in WordPress, I think that’s excellent. There are a lot of other training websites that are out there too. There’s just a lot of people who have YouTube channels and give a lot of training away out there. It’s very important. I don’t think that’s going to go away, because like I said, it can’t go away. The only way you can continue evolving your technology is if you do have training out there. So I do think that it is key and it can only grow. I mean, especially every release that happens too, it’s like, what might have brought a couple of new things, it feels like every release out there brings 10 new things now. We’re getting more pack in each release as well, I feel like. More things are happening.

And that’s even down to simple plugins. A simple plugin used to update and maybe one thing changed, maybe it was something you didn’t even see changed. Right? It was just a security thing or whatever, you didn’t even see that. But now a plugin releases a new release and you’re like, oh my gosh, they’ve added this whole nother panel. They’ve added this. And it’s like, there’s so much that’s happening. And so that just means we’ve got to up our game on spreading the word, doing speaking gigs, talking about it, showing demos of things, and doing training sessions out there, things like that.

Ronald: Nice.

Robbie: It’s important. It’s important for everything.

Ronald: Yeah. I just imagine if you’re in a coma, let’s say you fall asleep for a year. You struggle for a good few weeks to catch up on all the new things. Tammie, same question to you.

Tammie: I think it’s really important to consider things like this a two-way street with feedback. So every time you output, you have to input. So you have to listen as well. I think it’s really, really important. Student speaking is great, but also listening is also really, really good, and really, really key. So observing and seeing how people work is super important. Anyone who’s worked in core, I think that’s one of the foundations. And anyone who’s working on the WordPress product, that’s probably essential to the work they’re doing as well. That is a big cycle that goes around, but also experimentation. This goes back to the experimentation. Yes, we need to learn, but we need to learn through doing and pushing the edges of what we have. So yes, you can train on how to use something, but you also got to shake it a little bit to find out how you could use it, and what possible ways you could use this new thing, and what possible ways you can’t use this new thing that weren’t thought about that you need to use this new thing.

So there’s also that, so that we have learned, which is super important, but also tests. So there’s a full site editing program, which is super great. There’s, but there’s testing programs. Anne runs these great testing programs along with other people, I think they’re doing one on media, or something like this. But where everyone joins in to doing testing, and they have hallway hangouts. Things like that, go along, or test what media impacts for a WooCommerce site. Or it impacts for your real site and give that feedback, because otherwise that voice isn’t heard. And I think that’s also very important. You’re training the people who are creating to know that space that you’re in, which is also that feedback channel, which is really, really important. Because they are amazing, but they are not all seeing, they cannot know every single voice. And I know when I was creating in that space, I tried to know as much as I could, but I couldn’t know what it was like.

And now I create sites of agency and I now know something I didn’t know then, so I now try and relay that information. So it’s about those of us who know that information, and taking that information back and closing that loop. And also then listening. I don’t know now necessarily things that are happening in the core bit. So it’s about that communication and just listening. And then your clients, listening to what your clients are telling you, and from an education perspective of their scale and their shops. Just making sure that the client and the project is ready for the stage that you think that they should be on, or you think that the project is telling you it’s ready for. Client might not be ready for that, and there’s going to be some education that you need to go through. You’re probably going to need to have some training workshops with your clients.

You’re going to need to have a format for that in your company. You’re going to need to look at, do you have an education system? Do you have some PDFs, some workshops that you start having on project releases? What is your processes that you’re going to need to develop over this year to be prepared for all of this kind of thing? Yes, you can lean on the community for things, but it’s also going to need to be process adjustments that you go through collectively. So it is a lot, but it is also really interesting to not just think about it as a one-way street. I think it’s the two-way street is really, really important.

Ronald: That’s a really good point. Do you know, speaking to both of you and having heard some of the things in the last couple weeks now since the release, where this is happening and also looking into the future, I feel really confident that what’s happening. But it’s also, at the same time, a good moment to standstill and say, well, actually we do have all the responsibility, not just for yourself, for your clients, but for your fellow developers and those involved or invested into a WordPress to make that an understanding success the way that we all envisaged it to be. So beautiful and easy to use. I’m going to leave it with this sort, if that’s okay. I want to thank both of you very much for your insight, and into how you experience this so far, but also how you excited are about the future.