Rethinking Plugins With a Single License for an Expanding Library

Bob:
Hey, Bob Dunn here. And we are back with another episode of Open Makers. Of course, I have one of my elite hosts joining me. I should say co host Cami. How are you doing, Cami?

Cami McNamara:
Oh, I’m doing pretty good, Bob. How about you?

Bob:
I’m doing good. Good. It’s starting to get a little warmer and summer’s coming and all that good stuff. A lot of people hanging at the pool out there. We can always tell. It’s like they gather like little ants

Cami McNamara:
out there, you know, so that sounds dreamy. Like ever since I got home from Arizona at press conf, I’ve been freezing and it’s been sunny in Seattle, but not today. You know what it’s like.

Bob:
No, yeah.

Cami McNamara:
It’s not, it’s not July yet, so it’s not summer for sure.

Bob:
Well, this is kind of cool because we actually have one of our former hosts joining us. So in a way we could say this is three hosts together, a reunion or something like that.

Cami McNamara:
Reunion.

Bob:
Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus Burnette:
You.

Bob:
I’m, I’m sure many of you that have been listening for some time remember Marcus Burnett? He, he’s. Yeah, he’s been involved with the podcast a little bit ago. I’m not sure how long it’s been stuff. And who knows, we may, you know, pop them in to actually be a host sometime. You never know what will happen with what goes on here, so. Hey, Marcus, how you doing?

Marcus Burnette:
Good. Thanks for having me back. Bob and Cami. Nice to. Nice to see your faces. Looks like something’s something. Some things are the same around here. Some things have changed. Some of the decorations are still hanging out. But yeah, I really appreciate you guys having me back to chat for a bit.

Bob:
Very cool. All righty. Well, why don’t you. Even though some of the listeners may know you, there may be some of the millions of listeners we have, not really, but some of them may not know who you are. So give us a short, you know, who’s Marcus? Type of thing.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. So I’m Marcus Burnett. I work full time at Bluehost as the pro services senior manager of design and post published fulfillment over there. The. The short version of that is I oversee a couple of teams that do website design and development for customers that need something to put on their hosting at Bluehost. So I do that. That’s my day job. I also am the creator of the WP World, which is a WordPress community resource and directory of sorts where you can go see who in the space, maybe lives near you or near somewhere where you’re visiting, so you can go reach out and meet up and grab a coffee with them and chat. And then also all the different events and stuff are on there so you can see where, where gatherings are happening in the WordPress space. And then started a new project that I think we’re going to talk about a little bit today called well Played WP, which is kind of a side project, side business, plugin shop. Just kind of wanted to dabble a little bit into taking some of the plugin library that I’ve started to grow for myself and make it available for others.

Bob:
I’m going to have to ask you, how did you come up with the name?

Marcus Burnette:
You know what, that’s a good question and I don’t have a great answer for it other than it kind of just popped in my head. I was just sort of tinkering around with. I knew I wanted it to be sort of gaming related just because, I don’t know, I wanted the site to have sort of a gaming feel. And so I actually started with the design in my head first before I came up with the name and knew I wanted to have something related to gaming or retro gaming. I’m actually not a huge gamer, but I like the aesthetic of it, the graphics, and so I wanted to kind of go down that path a little bit and started with the design idea before I even got to the name. And that one just sort of popped in my head. I just felt like there was a lot to do there with the well played also being WP and being well played WP and the WP standing for WordPress plugins. There’s just, there’s just a lot of different, you know, combinations of things that I could do to play with the, with the letters there. And so I kind of just stuck with it.

Cami McNamara:
Well, the site is amazingly cool for anyone who’s listening right now. You need to go and check it out because it, it is very. It’s a throwback. And Marcus, I just love your designs.

Marcus Burnette:
Oh, thank you. I’m happy with that one. It’s like iteration six or seven. Even though I knew I wanted it to look like retro gaming kind of, I still started with that blank canvas and started throwing some pieces on there and didn’t like it, redid it again, decided to go dark theme instead of light theme. Um, and so, yeah, I I knew what I wanted and then wasn’t able to, wasn’t able to quite get there in the first couple of tries. But I, I did end up getting somewhere that I, that I liked and, and yeah, I’m happy with it now. It’s one of my, one of my nicer sites that I’ve, that I’ve created that I enjoy looking at still.

Cami McNamara:
Well, it immediately makes my mind go back to either Space Invaders or Centipede, I can’t decide. But yeah,

Marcus Burnette:
yeah, it’s definitely got that feel. It’s got some like Tron colors, some Tron going in a little bit. I liked the idea of some kind of bright neon colors on the dark background.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, it definitely is old school arcade feeling. I love it.

Bob:
What is the premise of this that makes it a bit unique in the space of the WordPress plugins and just tell me, tell us a little bit more about what we’ve been talking about that we really haven’t talked about yet.

Marcus Burnette:
That’s a mind bender right there. Yeah, I wanted to create something where I could share, like I said, some of the plugin library that I’ve started to accumulate for myself. You know, I thought there were some worthwhile pieces in there for others, but I didn’t just want to create, you know, yet another plugin shop where you come to the site, you pick a plugin off the shelf, you pay for it for one site, 10 sites, whatever, and your annual or lifetime or whatnot. I mean that the model works, you know, it’s obviously been proven to work, but I wanted to do something a little bit different. So I started to think about, well, how can I, how can I do something a little bit, you know, different than what I’ve seen from most of most of the plugin shops online. And so I settled on kind of doing a. One of the, One of the Mac OS apps that I really like that I have is called SetApp if you’ve ever heard of it. S E T A P P and it’s basically an app that allows you to have access to downloading lots of other apps. Bartender for like the Mac menu bar. There’s a screenshot app on there called cleanshot X that I use all the time. Anyways, it’s like a library of all smaller, small to mid sized apps, but kind of all in one library. And I kind of wanted to do the same thing with these plugins and so I kind of followed that same model. So when you come to well played WP, what you are purchasing is a Membership of sorts to the entire library, rather than just finding one or two plugins and buying them separately and dealing with licensing separately. And all of that, you get one license, and that one license covers the updates and support and all of that for all of the plugins in the library. So my hope is that out of the I’ve got over 20 plugins in there now, and it’s continuously growing. I’ve got a whole list of ideas for more plugins to go in there. I will say that the majority of them, if not all of them, are plugins that I haven’t seen anywhere else. I’m not trying to create a plugin library that overlaps with a whole bunch of other plugin libraries. I’m trying to create things that I haven’t seen other plugins cover in the past. Or if they did, they, you know, there’s an inflexibility to them that I think that I could. That I could fix. That’s kind of vague, but we can get into the individual plugins in a little bit if we want to look at a couple of them. But you know, I’m not, I’m not offering a forms plugin, right? There’s a lot of great forms plugins out there. Shout out WS form obviously, but I’m not trying to step on the toes of really any of the plugin developers that are already out there. I’m trying to find where there are gaps in either WordPress itself or some. Some of the other plugins. A lot of the library currently is Elementor and WooCommerce kind of extensions as well. So finding the gaps to those in ways that I haven’t seen anywhere else, whether it’s in the repository or other paid plugins and kind of doing those. So my hope, like I was trying to say, my hope is that you find 2, 3, 4, 5 plugins or so in the library that are going to be helpful to you in either building your own site or building sites for clients. And in doing so, grab the membership to the whole library. And then down the line, when you’re thinking, oh, it’d be really great if I had this cool masonry image gallery for elementor, let me go see if there’s something in well played WP that fits that use case because I already have a subscription to that, then it’s an easy one, click install to install that extra plugin into your site or your client site rather than getting another subscription and another license. Right? It’s all already covered under that same one, so that’s Kind of the model, I think that’s what you were alluding to is just kind of having a slightly different model for how these are sold. The only folks that I’ve really seen doing something like this is when you’ve got a big flagship plugin. You know, I think of something like a, like a LearnDash or whatever, like a big LMS plugin and then you sell kind of the bundle of your add ons together as a suite.

Cami McNamara:
Like a suite.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, yeah. And that’s really the only ones that I’ve seen. So this is not that there’s not like a flagship, at least not yet anyways. There’s not a flagship, well played WP plugin. It’s really a collection of plugins that do, you know, that cover lots of, of different ground but they’re all falling under the same, the same license and the same library so that you have access to all of them.

Cami McNamara:
So when you’re creating these, are you like solving issues that you’re having yourself in your own design development and do you plan on like taking suggestions from people on maybe plugins that, that they don’t know how to create themselves that could, could fit nicely in your suite of plugins?

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, 100%. That’s a great question. I’ll say. One of the benefits to leading design and development teams at Bluehost is that I get to see a lot of the requests that our customers have for what they need for their site. Whether it’s, like I said, whether it’s something related to a plugin like Elementor or WooCommerce, or they’re struggling with something inside of, you know, Gutenberg or the block, you know, the block editor and needs something there or just, you know, WordPress in general or a new feature, something that really we haven’t seen before. A different model for the way that they want to sell whatever they’re selling to their customers. In any case, we get, you know, customers that come through with requests all the time for things that either don’t exist or haven’t found a solution for. And that’s a great source of inspiration. So a lot of the plugins that are there now are solutions to problems that I’ve personally had building websites. But I’ve got a nice long list of solutions for our customers that if it makes sense for that customer, maybe I can build it for them, but then broaden it enough that it might be useful for a number of other people to use. I’m not really trying to build one off use cases necessarily for one customer and then add that to the library. But if I can broaden any of those to maybe cover a handful of use cases for a number of customers based on the same problem, then I can build that and I can add it as a solution into the library as well. And then without getting too nerdy into it, I do have Open Claw set up on one of my computers here at home, an old machine that I have laying around. And it does a nightly search through Twitter and Reddit and a couple of other sources to see what other issues that folks in the really just site building space are having that might warrant some kind of plugin to make their lives easier. And so there’s lots of inspiration across the board between my own personal needs, the needs of our customers at Bluehost, and what the OpenClaw agent finds for me on a nightly basis to create a nice long list of potential plugin ideas. And then, yeah, like you said, I’m always open for requests if folks have something that they want to request that they think might be a good idea, something specifically if they haven’t seen it before elsewhere. Like I said, I’m truly not trying to step on other plugin developers toes or recreate the wheel on a lot of plugins because there’s a lot of really great stuff out there already. But if there truly is something that, you know, just haven’t found a solution to, I’m all ears. I’d love to love to hear it and see how we can maybe come up with something that’ll that’ll help them out and, you know, help out a number of other people along the way.

Cami McNamara:
Cool.

Bob:
You know, I’ve got to ask this and I, I’m going to make it very simple because basically I can ask an intellectual question behind the term. So how, what did Vibe coding mean? Play into this? Did or did it play into it?

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, for sure. It’s definitely sped up. AI in general has sped up being able to really kind of create any of these plugins and even launch. Well played WP as a whole, much faster than, than I, I’d say anytime in the past. So the majority of the plugins started out as kind of a Vibe code experiment, right. Like I said, they’re mostly solutions to problems I had. So I knew exactly what I wanted the plugin to actually accomplish. And so I set out to have most of the stuff that I’m using AI to code. I’m using Codex, which is ChatGPT’s or OpenAI’s coding platform. So, you know, I hop into some combination of ChatGPT and Codex to plan out what it is that I’m trying to accomplish with a plugin, and then I set it off to start building v.0.0.1 of that. Just a proof of concept, right? And then I’m running all of these locally just so I can kind of test things and iterate really quickly on them without having to upload a bunch of plugin files and stuff. So, you know, I try to get it to do what I think is a baseline, you know, MVP for it, actually doing the thing that I want it to do. Then I check it out, make sure it’s working. Then we start doing some polish together. And from there it becomes sort of a collaborative effort between myself and Codex to kind of put the polish on these. And now I’ve gotten to a point where I have the prompt set up in a way where they’re all pretty consistent from plugin to plugin. So Codex now helps me with the updater because obviously when these get updated, the WordPress sites that they’re installed on need to know about the updates. They need to be able to download the update so that they have the newest version on their site. So there’s some updater code that needs to go into each of the plugins that’s all consistent across the board. Now, documentation is actually really well done because it can read through the code and spit out pretty great documentation on what the plugin does and all of the different developer hooks and all of that can be leveraged. So a lot of the plugins you can actually modify, if you’re a developer, you can actually modify some of the outcomes and stuff of what’s happening by writing your own code to extend those. And that’s all documented really well. And then I have it do all the language translation stuff as well. So almost all, I’d say 90% of them have multilingual support already and language files included for. Ooh, I’m not going to be able to list them off my head, but there’s six of them. English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, I think. So we’re getting started with five or six of the most common languages in the world for each of these plugins. So they should be pretty seamless. Plugin plug and play, is it perfect? Probably not, but if you’re a predominantly Spanish speaker, you’re going to get a lot further with the pretty good, I would say AI better than Google Translate. And all of that of the past does a pretty good job of translating in context. You’re going to get a whole lot further with the imperfect Spanish version than you are with the perfect English version. And I’m totally okay with that. And so again, if people want to contribute fixes and changes to those things, if they’re, you know, if, if they natively speak those other languages and want to contribute back to those, that’s awesome. I’m, I’m happy to take that as well. But yeah, AI has just enabled so much more to be done, so much faster. And so I’ve really leaned into that, Took the time to build the site itself, mostly on my own, so I could continue to sort of flex my own creativity there, the retro gaming theme and all of that. But as for the plugins themselves, you know, and then I have prompts set up to make sure that everything is ultra secure, ultra accessible. All of that stuff is the machines, the machines, the machines are, are actually so good at that. I know that people are like, oh, you vibe code this, you don’t know how secure it’s going to be, or whatever. I’m like, the machine is going to handle that better than most human eyeballs. I mean, it’s got its claws all the way into the deepest recesses of the code and knows exactly where the holes are and it’s going to be able to patch those things up. And if there happens to be a vulnerability at some point, AI is going to be able to fix it so much faster than, than a human being is. So I’m super excited with how they’ve turned out. Everything’s well tested. I mean, I test all of it up and down. Like I said, they’re solving my issues, solving my problems. And so I have almost all of these in production somewhere on a site because it solved a problem that I needed solved. And so they’re running and they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing and no issues. And I’m excited for others to get a chance to take a peek at them.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, the whole thing, it’s just very impressive because there are more than 20 plugins in here. And so this must be why I haven’t heard from you in a while, Marcus.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, I’ve been a little publicly quiet, I guess, for a little bit. Yeah, I’ve just been, I mean, handful of different side projects. This is one of them. And yes, I’ve been plugging away at again, not only having these plugins that I’m building that are solving issues, but like I said, making sure that they’ve all been run through for security, for Accessibility for translation purposes. Right. Having that consistency across the board where all of them have full thought put into them and not just, you know, it does the thing, I hit save, I create a zip file and I throw it up. You know, that’s, that’s okay, right? Do the job. But I want it to not just do the job. I want it to have the, you know, the experience that someone would expect with an admin screen that has settings that are changeable to, you know, be able to customize things for the way that you need it for your clients and you know, the languages and security and all that stuff. So yeah, I’ve been, been kind of busy but like I said, I’m happy with those and I’ve got a long list of ideas for more and I’m also all ears for folks that might have some recommendations or requests as well.

Cami McNamara:
And it looks like you’ve got different levels on how people become a member. Like so you could do it month to month and you can come in at a lower level and try everything and then graduate. So tell us about that.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, I tried not to overcomplicate the pricing and then still somehow made it more complicated than I wanted it to be. But ultimately wanted, you know, I still, for bandwidth reasons and everything else went the same proven route of 1 site, 10 sites, unlimited sites for like the licensing. While I changed up the model and how, you know and how you get the plugins that it’s not just one, you know, one plugin for one site for what, you know, for the monthly amount or whatever, I still felt like that one site, ten sites, unlimited sites is pretty, pretty proven ground and so I didn’t want to disturb that too much. So those are, those are the three kind of coverage, I guess, options. And then the options, the payment options double because then I wanted to offer monthly and annual. So yeah, it’s, it’s fairly, fairly low at I think $9 a month for one site. And you have the entire library that you can kind of come in, play around with it for one site for $9 for 30 days and see, you know, see what, see what’s there, poke around, take a look at the plugins and if you like it, then you can, you know, graduate to multiple sites. And then as is generally the case, if you commit to annual subscription, you get, you know, a couple months or whatever the math adds up to there just kind of as an incentive, thank you for committing to a longer time span. But yeah, it’s a fairly low entry access at $9, I think to have access across the board to all of them. And yeah, again, I’m all ears for ideas. I think one of the first ones, and I’ve already implemented this was somebody on Twitter said, even though I’ve shared that a lot of thought has gone into security and accessibility and all of that stuff, that they’re just going to throw this on a website and install the plugins with one click and not see what’s under the hood. I thought that that was a fair comment. And so now, in addition to the one click install, I guess I should step just one step back. The way it works is when you become a, you know, when you sign up for a membership, you get access to download the library plugin. It’s just a well played WP library. So you’re not actually downloading all the individual plugins separately and putting them on websites. You download the library plugin, you put that in your website and then inside your website. Kind of the same way that the WordPress repository shows you all the plugins inside the WordPress inside the site and you can click Install. This does the same thing. So all the plugins are listed inside your website then and you can click Install on any of the ones that you want to install on that site. So alongside that install now, based on the Twitter feedback that I got, there’s also a download button. So if you want to download the plugin and take a look at the code yourself, you’re a developer or a security expert or anything like that, and you want to take a peek at the code that’s in there first, you’re absolutely welcome to do that. I felt like if you can install it and then FTP into your site and then copy all the files to your computer. Why make you go through all of that when you can just click it? I mean, you’re going to get the files anyways. Why make you go the hard way? I can just add a download button there. So if you’re one of those folks who’s inclined to take a look at the code of every plugin that you add to your site before you add it to your site, you are most welcome to do that now with a download button as well.

Cami McNamara:
So you have that option.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah. So I mean all that to say I’m open to any and all feedback that people have on not just the plugins themselves or ideas, but the, the library plugin and how it works and you know, the model. I like the model. I think I’m going to stick with the one license fits all model. But if anybody has feedback on any of it, I’m open to it.

Bob:
One of the things I like is the $9 for one month because I was just thinking back on something. It was a video SAS thing that I was wanted to basically buy, but they had no free trial because I wanted to see if actually would do. And I ended up asking Google and then Claude if they have a free trial and they found it buried way within their sight somewhere in a weird spot. But I guess what I’m thinking is that it’s kind of a semi free trial. I mean, for nine bucks you get to explore this for 30 days. You actually have some time to really. Because I know how, you know, seven day free trials are great. And I download it and then I. Some shiny thing distracts me and then I’m thinking, oh, and it sends me a message that says, you have one day left.

Marcus Burnette:
It’s like, oh God, now I gotta

Bob:
go in there and do this. But that gives us a nice onboarding. I guess I would say, you know, really try it out and see if these are the things, you know, or at least some of these are the things that really would solve your problem. And it seems like it’s also that old adage I always used to, you know, talk about on the podcast is do one thing and make it work well, instead of, you know, having a bunch of plug in or a plug in that has.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah.

Bob:
And there’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes being able to pick and choose from a suite is. Yeah, I mean, I don’t, you know, I don’t do a lot of that myself these days, but I remember the pain and agony of lots of plugin experiences. And this one Sounds pretty sweet.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, a couple of good points there actually. And that is the, yeah, software is hard to have free trials for. Cause once you’ve downloaded it, you have it. I mean, you basically just got it for free. So, you know, $9 I think is, you know, a reasonable price task for someone to poke around. There is, I don’t think I have the, I think I need to get the verbiage on there in a clearer place. There is a money back guarantee if you really just don’t like it and really can’t stand that you spent $9 on it for a month. You know, I’m, I’m not going to, not going to get all, you know, upset about that. I’ll, I’ll give you your $9 back. But, but yeah, I think that that’s a reasonable amount to, to jump in and give it a test run and see, you know, if it’s going to solve the, the issue, you know, an issue that you have or like I said, hopefully you find a handful, nobody’s going to need all 20. I would not recommend any site installing all 20 of anything that they find anywhere. That’s too much. But you know, my hope is that you find a handful of plugins that are useful for you and, or clients that you’re building for with the potential for, you know, other plugins that you’re, that you’re looking for down the line to be added to the library. Because I’m going to continue adding to this library over time. But yeah, I think the price point is a fair entry, $9 for a month and you can kind of tinker around and see if it’s going to work for you. The quote that you said about doing one thing and doing one thing well, that’s kind of the sweet spot for these plugins too. They’re more than a code snippet that you would paste into a website, but they are far less than a learning management system or a great form plugin or any of those. It’s not, there’s not going to be a WooCommerce replacement in there as a plugin, but there are going to certainly be plenty of things that extend WooCommerce that would take a little bit more than a code snippet to do. So that’s kind of the sweet spot that I’m looking for these plugins. I want them to a solve a problem that really isn’t solved out there anywhere else. Again, I’m not trying to recreate the wheel unless the solution that’s out there is just unusable. Right. And I need to create something that’s much better. I’d much rather you use the thing that’s already out there if it exists for you. I’m not trying to overlap a whole bunch of other things, but, you know, come up with, with a suite of plugins that is relatively unique and then that each one of the plugins does one, you know, small to medium sized thing really well. And so that’s kind of where I am with it. The elementor stuff is like the one that I mentioned earlier is a photo gallery replacement. There’s no way that you could. Or a photo gallery widget. There’s no way that you could do that with a code snippets plugin and 100 lines of code and recreate that entire gallery widget. But, but at the same time, I didn’t want to include 15 gallery widgets in that one plugin. And then you only need, you know, you only need the one or whatever. So. Right, that’s that middle ground there. Like it, it’s bigger than just some, you know, a handful of lines of code, but it’s smaller than all of these, you know, giant bundles. I’m not. There, there’s some really great elementor widget packs out there, but man, they add like 200 widgets to your site. You only need two or three of them. And it’s, you know, there’s so much extra code now that’s just sitting there that’s, you know, vulnerable to attack, that’s slowing down the site. It’s more stuff that your site has to churn through and ignore ultimately if you’re not even using, using that. So, you know, that’s kind of the, kind of. I’m glad that you brought that up because that’s kind of the sweet spot for these plugins is that kind of doing one thing and doing it well. Middle ground.

Bob:
Very cool.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah. When I look at your list of plugins, Marcus, I just, I have to ask you about WP Lifeline because one, I love the name of that and two, I recently had to do a couple of site cleanups and I’m looking at your plugin and realizing like, wow, Marcus has this all bun. These are all the things I was doing one at a time. This is great. So talk to us about that.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, that’s a proactive one. Right. So by the time that you’re using WP Lifeline, hopefully you’ve thought ahead. Right. If your site is crashed, that’s not the best time to Add WP Lifeline

Cami McNamara:
right, right ahead of time.

Marcus Burnette:
What you do, right, what you do is you install the plugin ahead of time and then it gives you a custom URL for your site that you want to save away somewhere like in a 1Password or you know, your own database of saved URLs so that if something happens to that site, you can hit that URL. And what it does is it loads basically a dashboard of tools before the admin interface would load, right? So it kind of hooks in right in between, you know, you hit enter on the URL and before the admin interface would load, which is where, you know, the issue is where you’re getting an error or whatever and then gives you a number of things that you can do. You can disable plugins from that spot. So if there’s a plugin that’s causing the issue, then you can kind of whittle it down to which plugin you can disable or enable plugins individually there or wholesale disable all. You can do the same with themes. There’s some error logging stuff that you can see there. So you can see what errors are popping up.

Cami McNamara:
Reset passwords. I like that one. You can do that all at once.

Marcus Burnette:
You can reset passwords there or send the reset. Yeah, send the reset password emails from there. Or you can also, if you. This is one that I’ve run into a number of times where the site got handed off from one agency to another or to no one. The agency handed the site off to the client. The client comes to you saying, hey, I had some other agency build this. I don’t know how to get in here or any. You know, you can actually create an admin, an admin user from that WP Lifeline page as well, so that you can get back in, get back into the site. You know, they don’t, they don’t know the admin password or have no idea how to get in. As long as you have that URL and can get to this WP Lifeline page, which I would honestly, I recommend now that, now that that exists, I would recommend everybody install the WP Lifeline plugin and save that URL away for later. Hopefully you never need it, but if you do, you’re going to be happy that you have it, right? And then you can get back there and like I said, create an admin user. If you can’t get back into the site for whatever reason, you can create an admin user from there and then get back into the site and do what you need to do to clean it up or, you know, reset the user accounts for the client and all that stuff. So, yeah, that’s a fun one that I’m glad that I was able to put together there. And it works really well at saving your butt ahead of time. If you.

Cami McNamara:
Right.

Marcus Burnette:
If you think proactively and get that in there, then you’ll have that when you need it.

Bob:
Very cool. Before I even ask you anything about, you know, kind of closing this out and where people should go, Kami. Well, the three of us were talking before this and I think next. Next time Cami and I are together, we’re going to find some weird fun topic to talk about on our Channel 4 channel and stuff. But anyway, it occurred to me that I should probably ask you this very important question. Question, both of you. What was your favorite concert you ever saw? That has nothing to do with the plugin. Has nothing to do with, well, kind of technology because they did have to plug in stuff. But anyway.

Cami McNamara:
Well, I. I know, I know right off the top of my head. So in 2014, the Foo Fighters did a small show at the Showbox, which is like a 600 person theater in downtown Seattle in. And the tickets were $25. And they announced it on Facebook. And I left my house so fast I couldn’t remember if I turned the oven off because I was baking pies for Thanksgiving. I drove to Easy Street Records, which is the, you know, biggest record store in western Washington because it’s like two miles away, and got a wristband saw the show stood like four people away from the stage and they played for three hours and 20 minutes. It was $50. Right? So, like, nothing is ever going to top that. For a while I thought I’d never go see another concert because it’ll. But I have. So anyway, that’s really. Like I hit the concert lottery that day.

Bob:
Yeah, no kidding, Marcus.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, that’s a. That’s amazing. Gosh, there’s been so many really great ones. The one that I think kind of comes to mind quickly for me is there’s this band called the Rocket Summer. And I use the word band loosely because it’s one guy and he plays such amazing talent that he plays every instrument. It’s kind of a pop punk type sound. And I’ve seen him in concert a couple of times here in Orlando. He plays, it’s not super well known, so plays smaller venues. But it’s really cool because those venues, like, like you were saying with the Foo Fighters, so intimate. You’re like right there at the stage. And so just love staying there, being that close, that intimate of a space, and listening. But one of the things that he. I don’t think he’s done it every single time that he’s been. I’ve seen him like three or four times here in Orlando. But he’ll come out at the very beginning, and it’s all kind of dark, mostly dark. And he’ll just sit at the drums and put down a drum loop and just play drums for a minute and then hit save on that. And it’ll just continue playing, and then he’ll walk over to the bass, and he’ll put down a bass line to go on top of the drum loop and then save that. And then he’ll walk over to the guitar, and he’ll put down a guitar riff to go with it. And it’s just like building this song. But he’s doing. Because he’s so talented and he’s doing it all himself. It’s just so impressive to watch him basically build the song in front of you. And then he gets over to the piano, and he, like, you know, adds the piano accompanying part to that, and then it leads into, you know, whatever the first song is that he’s doing. So, like, you know, he. He hits all the stuff at once, and then he’s singing and he’s going with it, and then he has a couple of people come out. Like, he tours with a couple of people, so he’s not playing all of the instruments the whole time. So there, you know, there’s a couple of people that’ll join him on band or on stage to play, like, guitar and drums and stuff. But just coming out at the very beginning and just walking from instrument. I know it’s kind of showing off, but, like, just walking from instrument to instrument so you can see, like, oh, he really knows how to play all of these instruments.

Cami McNamara:
That’s cool.

Marcus Burnette:
And so, like, all the. The albums and stuff that he’s done, he does all of the music, he writes all of the music and does all the instrumental stuff for all of the albums. And of course, that’s a little harder to do on tour, but if as he walks around to each one of those, it’s so cool to see him just basically build up this song, instrument over by instrument by instrument by instrument, and then get into the show and stuff. It’s. It’s super fun.

Bob:
Wow. That’s pretty cool.

Marcus Burnette:
I wish I had that.

Cami McNamara:
That’s very cool.

Bob:
Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus Burnette:
I can barely. I can play a couple chords on one instrument. That’s it.

Bob:
That’s amazing. Yeah, I think I’ve seen something like that somewhere on the Internet once. Somebody kind of building the song like that.

Cami McNamara:
Reggie Watts does something like that now. I’ve seen him twice and he’s from Seattle, so, you know, he ended up on the Late show or something. But he just uses his voice and so he builds a song on anyway. But it’s really incredible to see something like that.

Marcus Burnette:
That’s cool. Yeah. Ed Sheeran also did like a tour where it was just him and the loop pedal thing. And he just like. I mean, he’s mostly guitar and he can play a couple of notes on the piano, I think. But just listening to him build up just mostly with the guitar and like, he’ll hit the guitar to do the, like, percussion parts and stuff and then loop that on top of each other. Yeah, he did like a whole tour where it was basically just him and a loop pedal playing all of his songs.

Bob:
Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Very cool. Very cool.

Cami McNamara:
What about you, Bob?

Bob:
Oh, God, I don’t know. Yeah, it was like in the 70s was my concert time. I. I think I saw over hundred bands and they were, you know, the touring bands. But, you know, it’s. It’s hard to say which I like the best, partially because I can’t remember a lot of them, but let me just say probably. Oh, and I did see the Doobie Brothers in a gymnasium, so.

Cami McNamara:
Oh, yeah, gym shows are great.

Bob:
Yeah. Yeah, they were at the. Yeah, you know, this place, Cami. They were at Gonzaga University and they were in the gym. It was very laid back. People were throwing balls around and beach balls and balloons. And it was right when they started getting. Their very first song started kind of, you know, getting traction and stuff. So that was a very laid back. I think I won the. Me or my friend wanted the tickets on the radio station. You know, you call that even.

Cami McNamara:
Makes it better.

Bob:
Yeah, so it was really fun. But, yeah, there’s some of the. At my very first concert, big concert I ever saw was Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And they were very much into the synthesizer. They’re not like a kind of a household thing, but they were quite huge. And they just had this wall of synthesizer stuff hooked up. And it was, you know, it was just like they would come out and start almost like what you were talking about Marcus. They come out and do their song, but then they start sitting all these things on the synthesizer and just leave the stage and be out there playing by itself for A while, then they come back in and so, yeah, a lot of different ones and I’ll have to think about the favorite one a little bit more for a future episode maybe or something.

Marcus Burnette:
Do you miss the times where there were radio contest tickets and that was like the only way that you could go see something that was a big

Cami McNamara:
deal trying to win those. I didn’t know. I’ve never known any, anybody to win them. That’s very cool.

Bob:
Yeah, I, I think I won quite a few on, you know, radio contests and stuff. The thing was, when I was growing up, you didn’t have redial, so it was this manual dialing, manual dialing, hang up, manual dialing. It was like, you know, it was a chore and you know, it was amazing when you did get through. But yeah, good times. So anyway, I went a little bit off track there, but I thought I loved it the, you know, concerts and it’s always nice to hear a little something else. But your site, tell us where you pretty much have. But tell us anything we need to know about going to your site and getting all those great plugins.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s well played. Wp.com um, head there. I got all the plugins listed, what they do, descriptions, change logs, all the different features and languages and all that stuff. Documentation is there. I think everything’s really well documented. So if you have any questions, they should be answered there. But if not, always free to reach out. To me, easiest place is either on Twitter, that’s where I’m most active, or through the WP world. Obviously I’m on there as well.

Cami McNamara:
And you have some special pricing for early adopters right now. Is that accurate?

Marcus Burnette:
Excellent reminder. Yeah, I actually don’t know when I’m going to run that through, but probably through the end of May at least I have 50% off of the annual pricing. So whatever. Couple of months that that annual pricing took off, adding six more months to that. So I think that comes out to like four months worth of the monthly pricing for an annual subscription at this point. So just, yeah, go ahead and do it. Go ahead and sign up for that annual plan at the extreme discount. I’m just going to leave it that way. So if you sign up for it at that price this year, that’s what it’ll renew at next year. I’m not going to bump it back up. Um, you know, as a thank you for being an early adopter and founding. Great idea founding a helper to help this library continue to grow. That’s my, That’s My thank you to anybody who stays subscribed is that you’ll. You’ll just continue to pay that every year. Um, I’m not going to bump. There’s no introductory price. That’s just the. The price it’s going to be as a thank you.

Bob:
All right. Excellent.

Cami McNamara:
I love that, Marcus.

Bob:
It was great having you back. I kind of miss having you around regularly or, you know, we might have to drag you in here every once in a while.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah, I appreciate that.

Bob:
Talk stuff.

Marcus Burnette:
Love to be back every now and then. Admittedly, the schedule is just crazy as it is for everyone, but, yeah, I do miss coming on here and chatting with you, with you both. And so, yeah, I’d love to be on. Maybe not monthly like it was before, but a few times a year, I’ll come pop in and can chat about whatever.

Bob:
Very cool. All right. Always enjoy my time with you, Cami, and.

Cami McNamara:
Oh, yeah, same Bob. Love seeing you, Bob. That makes it feel like we’re not so far apart.

Marcus Burnette:
Yeah.

Bob:
Okay. Well, thank you, Marcus, again. And, yeah, thanks. I will, you know, definitely do this again sometime. And who knows where what we’ll be talking about.