WordPress Blocks Design, Code & Strategy

Kathy: Hi, Nyasha. I’m doing pretty good, and I think we’re allowed to just forget the audience is here. I think that’s best for me.

Nyasha: Awesome.

Kathy: Sorry to everybody.

Nyasha: Yeah, we’re just shooting the breeze, talking about some things we’re working on in the code world and the WordPress world.

Kathy: Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to you in person because we’ve been following each other on Twitter for a little while and banging our heads on the same thing at the same time, I think a little bit.

I think we’ve both been trying to teach ourselves some blocks finally. Tell us, maybe, how is that going for you? Because it’s not going great for me.

Nyasha: So we have our highs and our lows; it just depends on the day. Blocks are the future. Whether people hate it or love it, I don’t know. I feel like we follow pretty much a lot of the same people. I get a lot of people that hate it, but it’s the future of WordPress. So I took it upon myself, which I don’t hate or love, to learn everything about blocks. I can manipulate code all day, but unless I’m breaking it down from scratch, I can’t reach my full potential with block building. So I went back to creating a block from scratch with just JavaScript, PHP, and CSS. Not even any Sass, no JSON, anything like that. So that’s where I started. And it was a doozy. There is not much documentation on creating them from scratch without using the generated… what is it? Was it NPX?

Kathy: Yeah. It’s some build tool that scaffolds a block for you.

Nyasha: Yeah, because I tried that and it was nice, but I was like, well, this is nice to have colorful font, which is what it does, the standard generic one. But I wanted my block to do other things, and so when I went in to manipulate the code, I was like, well, it’s pretty straightforward. I’ve been manipulating WordPress templates and building them up for a little while now, but I still don’t know the ins and outs of this. So I was looking, searching the internet. I was on developer resources, which is hit or miss for help, and I just found, hey, just basically build it up. So I’m like, all right, I’ll go back to my roots. Anytime I don’t know anything, I always go back to my roots. My first coding languages were HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

Kathy: Classics.

Nyasha: Yes, that’s what I did. And with everything we have in WordPress now, because I do build WordPress sites when I’m not doing master WP stuff, I’m doing WordPress sites at my company. And it’s been a really long time since I just wrote PHP from scratch, started out with a blank page of code. Of course, I’m using template data from WordPress, but I know one of the mistakes I made was I tried to open PHP twice inside each other, and I had a fatal error, and I was like, what’s going on? And that was just a basic error. So it’s good to go back to your roots at times. I’ve been doing PHP for about six years now, and stuff like that still happens to me.

Kathy: Oh, it’s super humbling, right?

Nyasha: Very.

Kathy: I spent an entire day looking for a stray semicolon or a space. I think it was a space between the dash and the arrow in an object method call. Whole day. Whole day. One space, because your eyes just see it one way and then the code doesn’t see it that way, and you’re flipping tables really going down the deep well of trying to debug things. And in the end, it was super simple. But I’m also trying to get myself into learning some blocks. Oh, it’s such a, I don’t know, paradigm shift or like I was just saying, it’s so humbling to go back to being a complete beginner. I’m 10 plus years into WordPress WooCommerce stuff now, and oh, now you’ve got to learn an entire new language. And yes, they’ve been telling us since 2015, 2016, it’s time to learn JavaScript deeply.

And I’m like kicking and screaming, dragging me into the future. And I do feel like I’m going kicking and screaming because there’s no way to fight it anymore given how far along WordPress is, and for me, since all of my income comes from my work, WooCommerce extensions, where WooCommerce is really pushing, I’m like, oh man, I’m going to have to go, aren’t I? I’m going to have to do this. I’m going to have to learn some JavaScript. I’d say a couple of weeks ago, I think I was probably tweeting and you saw it about putting myself through another React course, part of it anyway, and trying to build another basic block. I think my block was “Kathy hates blocks,” and it did actually display in the end, “Why does Kathy hate blocks? She just does.” So I got that far along. I’m feeling a little bit better with the React. Obviously there’s another step to go from pure JavaScript, pure React, to the heavily opinionated WordPress block world.

And then for me, it’ll probably be more WooCommerce admin stuff, and I feel your pain. That was the conversation I had with the WooCommerce marketplace folks. I was like, oh, some of this stuff is not super well documented. I don’t know what to do here yet. I’m digging. Some of the best documentation is in the code source. We can read that, but it’s also not exactly the easiest or friendliest way to get started. And my other big complaint, sorry Woo, but I told you first, my other big complaint is some of this JavaScript stuff, they’re going for a curated extensibility. And I see that in blocks too. And for me, as the plug-in developer who likes to just extend everything, it’s one of the big hurdles to get over. There’s a lot, it’s like Steeplechase maybe. There are a lot of big hurdles, with a big water trap after. In the PHP template, it’s like when you’re making a site, we can literally change everything.

And I think that’s one of the superpowers of WordPress and WooCommerce. And so I get cranky about the direction I see some of the blocks going. It’s like, oh, I really believe, I agree with you that you want to make things easier for people building their own sites. Yes, let’s do it. Because I see, when I see folks use WordPress for the first time, and they’re stuck and overwhelmed, I’m like, okay, there’s space there to make that on-ramp easier for people. But I also have support tickets every day where they’re like, can I do this? I’m like, yeah, here, drop this little code snippet into your functions.php or via the code snippets plug-in. And to have that same level of customization or customizability is not really there in all the JavaScript sides of things. And part of it is, it’s still new, but part of it is, I don’t know that they’re aiming to make it as extensible because they’re like, well, we don’t want it to break.

And I was like, well, that’s on the customer. If they have two plug-ins that don’t really work together, that’s the same issue, that’s an issue. But it’s not, I don’t know. I think that’s a better issue to have than we’re just not going to make something extensible. So I’m hoping to see that, I’m still pushing for that. At the same time I’m like, oh, it’s good for me that you’re not extensible yet because I don’t really know how to do it. I don’t really know JavaScript yet. I’m getting there slowly like I said, kicking and screaming.

Nyasha: Being dragged. That was me when I was first learning JavaScript. That’s me anytime I have to do JavaScript. My JavaScript professor, I’m still in touch with him. He is an amazing person. He’s actually head of the tech department that taught me code. He told us as you do it, it’ll get better. He was like, but if you hate it, you’ll still hate it. And he was like, because I hate it. And we were like, what, you’ve been doing this 15 years? He was like, well, I’m going to be honest with you all. And I love JavaScript. It’s amazing, but I hate JavaScript. And we used to rag on React when we were ragging on PHP, then we got good at PHP and we were ragging on React.

They’re not going to replace us. My favorite part of React is erasing it and using something else. And now I’m like, oh, I’m sorry React. I take back what I said, be nice to React. So it’s a journey, but isn’t it so satisfying when your functions are right, your JavaScript is doing well, there are no errors, it’s just running smoothly? I feel like Steve Jobs just when my functions work, it’s such a great experience.

Kathy: We’ve got to get some level of satisfaction out of making things work or we wouldn’t keep doing this. I remember probably swearing and throwing some things when I couldn’t figure out filters. PHP, WordPress filters way back in the day, because those were not super well explained when I was starting. I did actually write a tutorial about that since.

Nyasha: Nice.

Kathy: Yeah, now I know it. So it’s okay. It’s comfortable. And so I’m not at that place with JavaScript yet. And hopefully, I don’t know, I’ll probably still get to that. I like your professor’s love-hate relationship. I would be okay with getting there instead of just the hate side of it

. I know it’s not fair to just hate on something because you don’t know how to do it, which is where I am. So I’m trying to reserve that judgment. But I just feel the barrier to entry is so much higher than it used to be. Now you do need compilers and build tools and things that you didn’t need. And again, I’m trying to remind myself, well, that allows you to do things you couldn’t do before. Yes. Get it. Well, that doesn’t mean it’s not hard if you have to spend the whole day fighting your Webpack setup or something before you even get to write a line of code about blocks.

Nyasha: That was me with Gulp. I’m not a designer. I’m not a designer at all. My love-hate relationship with blocks. That’s the love. Blocks make everything beautiful to me because I can’t even color in the lines. I color with my nieces and I’m like, oh my gosh, they’re blowing me out the water with their art. And so when it comes to code and website development, I’m like, show me what you want it to look like and then I’ll do the rest. But blocks I don’t have to fight with where I want stuff. Some of the templates are really, really beautiful. Just going in there and playing around with stuff. I used a couple for my own personal website.

I was like, dude, I’d rather do this than code it out and imagine what I want it to look for versus these beautiful blocks that have already been created. Not the designer, but I just want, once I can get that, I’ll feel a lot better about blocks because I can get them to do what I want, but I can’t get them to look like what I want. How do you feel about that? I don’t know what’s your experience on design. And fighting Gulp has been a big issue of why I can’t design. I feel like I’m going back to CSS. So how do you feel about it?

Kathy: Well, I actually don’t use Gulp. I used Grunt and still use Grunt for a long time, but it’s the same process. And I think I fought that for a long time. There’s that Kathy fighting the build tools is my motto. And I got it working the way I wanted and then I’m like, nope, don’t touch that anymore. Leave that whole script just where it is and it is fine. But I feel you on the design part, I used to actually build and design sites. That’s how I started.

Doing theme customization stuff. But now I just get so frozen thinking about how’s it going to look? How should it look? What if I move this rectangle, three pixels to the left? Oh no, let’s move it four pixels. I can’t do it. I just can’t do it anymore. So that’s got to go. I have to outsource that to actual proper designers. But I am seeing some really nice block patterns and full site edited. I hesitate to use templates because they don’t mean them in the classic WordPress template style. I’m building up my business website right now and I’m using the Kadence theme and the Kadence Block Suite.

And they have some just really, really nice prebuilt. Here’s three pages, template, homepage, blog page, about page, three clicks, here’s a color scheme. And it’s like, well, that ain’t bad. So I’m just like, let me just put my name in there and a couple of pictures and we’ll call it a 1.0 beta or something and just ship it. Because that’s not my strong suit of just shipping things quickly. I ship things extraordinarily, painfully, slowly. It’s like pulling teeth to get some code out. I get one, distracted by new stuff. The stuff that we have, the million things we have to learn.

And then, which is part of what makes it fun too. It’s almost never, for me, it’s almost never the same challenge. Even though I think it was last summer, I realized that my name your price extension, that’s at the WooCommerce marketplace is 10 years old. So all these pieces of software that I’ve written are old now. Apparently, 10 years have passed. I’m questioning people’s math a little bit, but it just feels like a time to invest in learning the new stuff. Trying to maybe flirt with building something new. I don’t know. But I just, oh man, I move slowly.

Nyasha: Another big goal of mine is to be able to teach it. I know we keep talking about the documentation.

Kathy: But that’s on us, right? It’s as a community.

Nyasha: It is.

Kathy: We got to chip in there.

Nyasha: So I want to get good enough to where I can actually help with documentation. So documentation team, I’m coming. I’m going to be there. I’m coming to be with you. I just have to learn. And when I learn-

Kathy: We just got to learn what we’re doing first.

Nyasha: Yeah, let me learn. But learn. I can just do stuff, that’s how I’ve been through life. I can get through life doing stuff. I can see it and then I can do it. But in order for me to teach it, I have to break it down. Hence me going back to original. Let me write out this PHP in JavaScript to build these blocks out. No MPX WordPress create block. That’s perfect. That’s beautiful. Thank you for it. I definitely will be taking advantage, but why? How? Let me build from scratch so I know how to manipulate this better. I want stuff to do what I want it to do when I want it to do it. I am also slow at this. So that’s a big goal. I want to be able to teach this. Like you said, a very important thing you said, the barriers to entering into this learning blocks and things like that is so hard.

And I get questions because I haven’t been at WordPress that long. I’ve been at WordPress about four years. And people ask me all the time, oh, were you in before Gutenberg? Do you remember this? Do you remember that? And I want to tell people it changes so often. I go with the flow, but at the same time, for me to bring people in, that’s been one of the barriers because they’re like, well, can you teach me this? I brought someone in right as we went to 6.0. And they were like, this doesn’t look like anything you taught me. Because the color changed. And even that was a big, I had to just explain to them, the color just changed, it’s mostly the same.

Kathy: It’s going to be okay.

Nyasha: It’s okay. Yeah, you’re going to be fine. But just that through the mouth. Imagine coming in and you’ve just never encountered a block before. This is your first time using WordPress and you want to create blocks. You don’t want to just drag and drop. You want to create blocks, but where do you go? Where do you start off your documentation? How do you build it out? Do you just do NPX WordPress create block? If you do, how do you know how to manipulate that? This is your first time walking into that. And I’ve scoured the internet and there are some good, this is what it is, and this is what you do. There’s almost no why. I am a person. I need that why. Why am I doing this? So yeah, I definitely want to get on the documentation team. It is on us as a community, and I’m one of the people. I don’t like just complaining about stuff if I’m not going to help. So definitely documentation team, I’m coming. You just wait for me. I’m coming.

Kathy: Yes. I love that. I love that for us. No, I feel you there in the sense of just how fast things are changing. It makes some of the documentation that does exist out of date. That’s the problem I ran into with I took two React courses and I just ran into a point where everything’s from several years ago, and they’re like, you just get to a point where you literally can’t make it work anymore because it’s all out. The code’s changed. And so that was frustrating because I just got to the point where I was whizzing along, doing cool stuff with React, and then I was going to try to connect it to a Firebase database, I think.

And I couldn’t make it, just couldn’t do anything with it. And I said, okay, this is probably a decent place where I can maybe switch over into WordPress blocks because I don’t really foresee there’s no immediate need for me to connect to a Firebase database. I’m just probably not doing anything outside of WordPress at the moment. So I was like, okay, I have at least enough, I have the way I’ve been learning Italian for the last couple of months on Duolingo anyway.

And so it’s like, you start to recognize things. And that’s about how I feel with some of the React. It doesn’t look as freakish, incomprehensible anymore. So I feel like I can read along now in a way that I wasn’t. There’s still this block another, see what I did there. But there’s still this barrier with where the heck is some of that data coming from? In PHP in the templates it’s so easy for me to say, okay, this is the code I want to manipulate. Where’s that coming from? Oh, it comes from this file. Oh, that’s calling some other function. That comes from this file. That’s calling.

I can find my way back. Follow all the breadcrumbs, but I don’t feel like that yet. So I’m taking it as a positive that yes, I can look at the blocks and the React makes more sense. It’s much more readable to me now than it was last year, but it’s still like, where’s this? Who called this

? Where did this come from? I’m still not there yet. And yeah, like I said, that’s been my complaint to the WooCommerce people. And I’ve also said, oh man, I really need to document more stuff I solve. I’m in the WooCommerce community Slack way more than I should be because I’m like, somebody else’s shiny question. Let me go work on that instead of any of my own really tedious questions that I don’t want to do, I don’t want to deal with today. So it’s like, I don’t know, it’s procrastination, but helping people. And it’s like, oh, I solved this thing. I should probably write about it. And then it’s like, I don’t know.

My poor long-suffering blog gets updated once a year at best. So it’s like, I need to do better about that as well. I’m trying my best. I think I’ve realized that you don’t have to write an award-winning novel when you’re writing a blog post about how to do something. I think when I tell myself that, oh, this doesn’t have to be amazing. It just has to be a couple of bullet points. Here’s a little code snippet. And I recently wrote going back to build tools and my constant fight with them. I recently wrote, or I updated somebody’s… I hired someone else to write my GitHub actions that now compile my plug-in into a zip file that I can upload somewhere.

And I was like, this is cool. And then I told you before that I use Grunt to do all my stuff. So it was a nice jump to go from Grunt to the GitHub action. But the GitHub action calls all my Grunt stuff. And one of the things it does is create the translation file, the pod file that WordPress does all its translations from. With the blocks now the existing Grunt package can’t read the strings and the JavaScripts. I’m like, oh no, what am I going to do? I need a new build tool. I was trying so hard not to touch that ever.

Nyasha: Understandable.

Kathy: But the same WP scripts that does the create block also handles that. So I was like, all right, how do I get this to work in that GitHub action? And I did find, I figured it out, you can actually run the translation file from the command line with the WP command line interface.

So I don’t know, I figured that out and I was like, oh, this is neat. I don’t know if other plug-in developer nerds need this, so let me make a blog post. So I actually did that. So I was like, good job, Kathy. There’s your one blog post for 2023.

Nyasha: You can make it two. Let’s shoot for two. Double it.

Kathy: Got another couple. I got some months in here. I can probably find something to write about. Maybe if I do ever finish writing a block, that’s something other than just this block says “Kathy hates blocks.” I’ve got some use cases for them. Let me tell you what, one of my free .org plug-ins is just a listing of, it’s like a directory. Just lists users. When I needed to do that for a long time, it’s also another really old plug-in at this point.

When I needed to do that, the existing plug-ins all had, were so opinionated in the styling and I was like, oh, this is so annoying. I don’t want to have to spend all my time, classic developer approach. I don’t want to have to just remove your styling. I’m going to write my own plug-in. It has no style to it, but it’s all PHP templates classically with hooks and filters and things that make it very extensible. And I’m like, oh, I guess this short code should be a block. Right? So I’ve been trying to tinker with that as it seems like a good place to get my feet wet. Another Twitter follower that you probably follow too. Aurooba, right?

Nyasha: Yeah. I work with Aurooba. Yeah.

Kathy: Yeah. She is so rad. And she was like, I’m going to help you do blocks. And I was like, good luck, but okay, I’m here for it but unfortunately that call was so long ago that I forgot how to do it. But she helped me get all set up and I was like, yes, this is great. So Aruba, I’m still waiting on your blocks course because I will be your first customer.

But that’s just an easy, not easy, I hate using the word easy, but I figured that’s something that exists and it’s a clear use case of someplace where I could maybe, I don’t know, make a block. So that’s still on my agenda. I don’t know if I’ll get to it this year because sometimes it’s hard to justify working on your free plug-ins. It’s like, these don’t even make me pizza money. But they’re still a good excuse, not a good excuse. It’s just a good, like I said, good use case to learn React in blocks and everything. Because that’s going to be relevant in all of my premium plug-ins. They’re going to need a massive update as I go forward.

Thanks to our Pod Friend Hostinger

Nyasha: I’m also not coding for pizza, not making pizza money practicing mine. It’s been for me when I first thought I need to learn these, I’m doing a personal project, a family tree website. I have a long, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to discover and know through oral history passed down through my family and just research trace our family all the way back to the 1700s, which a lot of African Americans cannot do.

Kathy: For real.

Nyasha: And I have a lot of elders in my family who have contributed to that. And just knowing nicknames of people because that shows up on the census sometime. And that helped me trace so many people back. I have so much information, newspaper clippings, I have so many images I found of people who are no longer here that we need to identify things like that. It’s so much information that my elders and my family, they can’t just go on Ancestry and see it. Ancestry is great. A great resource. But everything is just packed there together. It’s so much to go through. So what I’m doing for my personal website is I want to know block building well enough to build blocks to help me show that information better and more quickly. I’ve been working on this website for two years. Most on and off and mostly off.

If I had my block set up, it would go much faster because I have a massive family as well. My mom is one of 10 siblings. My grandmother is one of 15, 16. So just right there. We’re dealing with so many people. Going back we have one of eight, one of 11, one of 13. So just finding ways to use the blocks to compile that information better to show my images better will help me a lot and get this going for them and get it on my surprise, I don’t know if they’ll be listening to this. My surprise for a few of my elders is to actually supply them some tablets because they can use tablets. We’ve gotten that far. First it was cell phones. That was tough to teach cell phones. Now we’re up to tablets. One day we’re going to get to the Mac, but I want to give them fire tablets or some type of tablet.

And then have the website so they can scroll through and they can just click to see their information versus Ancestry having to know how to navigate Ancestry and look at their image gallery and their read old censuses and stuff like that. So that’s my biggest motivator. That’s not money. And I really want to make that happen for my family. They’re wonderful people. They’ve been helping me with this research since I was 13 years old. So they deserve.

Kathy: I’m floored, that is such an incredible gift. I really applaud you doing that. That’s so incredible.

Nyasha: Thank you.

Kathy: That’s really cool.

Nyasha: Yeah, I’m excited. I was like, all right, once I get the block to show, I got it to show yesterday, my block to show up because it wasn’t showing up. It’s changed my icon.

Kathy: The double fist pump.

Nyasha: Yes. I changed my icon from a flag to a heart. And mine was Nyasha block plug-in. And my husband was like, is that a red flag up there? Because it’s a default flag when you make your blog. So I was like, whatever. Change it to a little heart. And then we’re going now. So I’m trying to make it useful, going to get it changed and get it to fit my family tree website. So that’s what I’m going to be working on for the near future.

Kathy: Nice. Yeah, I made not a family tree website, nothing quite so cool. My family runs a road race in honor of my uncle who passed away 10ish years ago. He was a very prolific runner. So my other uncle was like, we’re going to have, obviously the most thing you could do to honor your running uncle is have a road race. And that side of the family really likes running and that didn’t come into my DNA at all. If I’m running and unfortunately I’ve picked some sports to play that involve running. But in general, if I’m running, you should run too because something is chasing us. But I built it, I want to say I think it is using blocks and I want to rebuild it. There’s our classic developer nerd problem of, I want to rebuild it with maybe some Cadence blocks. But I will say that the block editor has made it so that my mom no longer has to call me. Kathy, can you change the date on this page? She can do that

now.

So I’m like, yes, go Mom. We’re doing the thing. You can edit the website. Now there’s still stuff she can’t do and that’s fine. So she still has to call me. I still get paid in hugs I guess, which is fine when it’s a site for your mom. But she can go in and edit text. So it’s like, yeah, the next level for her would be inserting another type of block, insert an image or make a link or something. That’ll be Mom leveling up.

But I think it’s cool because I remember when I tried to help my sister make a website, a photography website portfolio thing a long time ago, so well before blocks. And she was like, this is so complicated. So I’m really pleased to see what the block interface does for some newer folks who are, she is able to go in there and make some changes. And it also tangentially, it reminds me of, I made a website for the US team handball women’s national team when I started playing because I’m still on that team because I’m not smart enough to quit playing.

Nyasha: So cool.

Kathy: We made it. My best friend and I made it back in the day 2000, let’s say 2005, 2006. And we made it in Dreamweaver and it was all tables.

Nyasha: Dreamweaver.

Kathy: Yes. Dating myself. And then I was like, let’s make it in let’s use a content management system. I have no idea why I thought that, but it’s that initial step that brought me to WordPress. And even though that step wasn’t WordPress, because it was Joomla at the time, and it was just literally the biggest fight the two of us ever had was, I hate this content management system she would say, because I can’t visualize what things are looking like. You’re just writing your post and you can’t see the outcome.

Which I think is what we’re trying to address with some of the blocks and the block editor. I don’t know that they’re quite there yet. I still feel like the editing side doesn’t always look like the front end side the way a builder does, a Beaver Builder or an Elementor or the other builder tools, but it’s way closer. And I was like, but this is so much cooler, you can have it all in the database and display it all this way. She’s like, no, I can’t see anything. It was just hilarious. We’re fighting over whether to use tables or a content management system.

Nyasha: That is so awesome. That’s really cool by the way. You mentioned sports and running. I’m doing couch to 5K right now because I need to get in shape and I actually hiked during the pandemic and stopped. So I’m like, I’m trying to get back in hiking shape because I love hiking. Oh my god, South Carolina and North Carolina have such beautiful mountains and that was a dream. So I’m getting back to it. So it’s funny that you mentioned that. If I’m running, then you need to be running too, that’s my motto as well. It’s something seriously wrong.

Kathy: Something is coming.

Nyasha: I think blocks, and I hate that there are people that think it’s going to take our jobs or something like that. And I’m like, no. That’s why I’m learning how to build one from scratch because there are always going to be people that the block doesn’t do what they want it to do or they have an error or things like that. I’m going to be the person jumping in and doing every single thing that I can with it, and I’m going to have the best of both worlds and still have a job. But I love that people like my mom could jump in. My mom is the person who she could do computer stuff the best because she loves her games and she loves typing.

And so I’m going to get her up to a level where I can get her to do website manipulation. She’s probably going to tell me no, but I need her. She needs, she doesn’t know that. I won’t tell her that, but I need you to do this. So that’s my goal, to get my mom where your sister is.

Kathy: Yeah. Like I said, I want to level up my mom, but I’m not even going to try it with my dad. That’s too much. That’s way too much.

Nyasha: My dad thinks I fix iPhones. He still doesn’t know what I do. He’s like, oh, you’re in tech. And I know that. And he was like, can you fix my phone? And I was like, girl, what?

Kathy: Probably yes.

Nyasha: Yeah, yeah. But I think I can, but no, dude, that’s not what I do. But yeah, I am with you on that.

Kathy: We just got my dad onto a cell phone in the past year. And it’s actually, Jitterbug intentionally targets phones towards, sorry, Dad, senior citizens. But what it is, it’s like, it’s an Android phone and it just has this user interface layer on top of it that surfaces the main couple of things you’re going to be doing. Texting, he used to say he wouldn’t text before 7:00 and then… It’s always before 7:00 because if you don’t specify AM/PM, it’s literally always before 7:00. He can get a text now as a result of that really simplified UI. And I think that’s a nice reminder that UI helps people. It’s not just to look cool. It makes your thing, whatever your thing is, more usable.

Nyasha: And accessible. It’s all about accessibility.

Kathy: And accessible. So I try to remember that and channel that into my plug-ins. How can I make this stuff easier for people to use? Like I said, they’re not new anymore either, so they’ve had a lot of time to get feedback from customers. If I’m getting support tickets saying, I don’t know how to do X, Y, Z. And it’s like, well, that clearly if I get multiple people saying they don’t know how to do X, Y, Z, okay, we’ve made X, Y, Z too complicated or not discoverable enough or not clear enough in its inline documentation. So I don’t know. I did some big rewrites in the last two years. I think two of my plug-ins got really big 2.0, 3.0 type of releases.

I of course spent way too long on them, but it was like, okay, I really want to get this right so that one, people don’t come to me in support and ask about it and just like, yeah, just how can I make this easier? Because my dad circling back to my dad and his cell phone now we’re trying to get him to get… He doesn’t know how to send pictures from the cell phone, so we need to get it onto the computer. And that has actually proven to be really, really difficult for me to walk him through remotely because I need to see what’s on his screen and what’s on his phone screen simultaneously.

And it’s just a nightmare. Thank you to TeamViewer. If no one has heard of that, that is a godsend for trying to provide tech support to your parents in another state. Just being able to see what they’re seeing so you can try to help, but that’s been really hard. So it’s like, oh man, that’s the same reminder of okay. Whereas sending a text has not been too difficult for him, uploading a photo has been brutal.

We still don’t really have a good solution for that yet. Probably won’t until I go home to visit. This is going to have to be an in-person class. That’s just that kind of reminder of the value I think of user interfaces and really putting yourself in the seat or the hands, eyes, whatever, in the place. There we go. In the place of the people using your software and remembering that they don’t have our code chops all of the time. They don’t have our experience. So how can we make this easy and clear to them?

Nyasha: You made me think of something I’m very grateful for that I never thought I would ever be grateful for. My first job out of college was for a cellphone company. I won’t say the company. And I did tech support. I was a tech support. So I can actually fix my dad’s phone, but still. And you brought up the Jitterbug, which I used to walk people through using their Jitterbug back in 2014, so some time ago now. But that was my first full-time job. It was a call center. Overall it was one of the worst jobs I’ve ever had in my life, but not what I was doing. The work, not the work. The job was, but not the work. I really love doing tech support. I really love talking people through things. I really love teaching people. And I really love the feeling that people gave me once they’ve learned from me.

And I never thought about why, because I want to help more in WordPress. I want to be a part of documentation. I want to be a part of training. I want to make courses for people. I want to make this easier for people. And I never thought of what made me want to do that with tech. I love that in general. I’ve been a tutor before, things like that. But in tech, you saying that made me realize, I remember when I would get on the phones and someone would call in from I got to meet people all over the country too. I love that. And they would say, could you please show me how to send a text message on my phone? And for some of us, it might be okay, that’s basic, that’s simple. But for people who’ve never done that before, think about your first time sending a text message.

Think about the phone you may have had and how quickly that technology changes. That’s what

we’re essentially dealing with WordPress. When we first got into WordPress, it’s not the same WordPress. It’s the same WordPress, but it’s not the same WordPress. And I think about the feeling I had when I could go in and I say, hey, do you have your phone in your hand? All right, what’s the screen look like? Are you on your home screen? Oh, I think it’s a webpage. Oh, back out of that. Okay, we’re on the home screen. Okay, I want you to go to your messenger. It was like, I love that type of interaction. And then at the end, people saying, wow, there it is. That was simple. You think it’s simple now. You didn’t, and you think it’s simple now and that’s all that matters.

Kathy: You didn’t.

Nyasha: I want that for blocks. I want that for WordPress. I want that for tech in general. I want that for the code I do. I want to be able to get back to where I know it so well that I can make someone say at the end of our conversation, wow, that was so simple.

Kathy: Right. That’s a good goal. Like you were saying earlier, just the whole concept of when you can teach it, you really know your stuff. And that’s how I got through school that way. It was like, okay, I’m going to teach you physics because now I know physics better. Now I don’t use physics for Jack, but the concept is still the same. If I can teach you how to do it or if I can write a blog post, that helps further. Even when I help the people in the community Slack with WooCommerce things that furthers my understanding of WooCommerce too. So it’s not entirely selfless. It’s like a mutually beneficial relationship there. I’m teaching you, but I’m learning something. And yeah, because none of this stuff is, I actually really try to stay away from using things like “simple” and “easy” or “just do this” when I’m replying to my users, my customers.

Because like you said, it’s not easy when you don’t know how to do it. That’s what we’re seeing right now with blocks. It’s not necessarily easy for us yet. We’re still at the hello world block stage. Like, oh, we changed an icon. Good job, team. We have quite a long ways to go there, and it’s not easy. But if we can keep ourselves going and help someone else along the way, that helps us further too. So that whole community aspect is one of my favorite aspects of WordPress in general.

Nyasha: I’m out of stuff. What about you?

Kathy: Yeah, I probably could keep talking to you because it’s been really fun.

Nyasha: Yeah, it’s been so fun. Oh my gosh.

Kathy: So I think we should try to wrap up this Woo devchat. I don’t know that we talked about Woo a whole heck of a lot. Sorry, Bob, but we touched a little bit tangentially, very tangentially. So no. Cool. All right. Well, like I said, very happy to have virtually met you and I will be tracking your block progress on Twitter.

Nyasha: You too. Thank you.

Kathy: And hopefully, I get back to my block progress because I got tangentially distracted by some modern PHP architecture. I was like, let me go learn this.

Nyasha: Lovely.

Kathy: So there’s an endless amount of stuff to learn, and you can’t learn it all.

Nyasha: I will give PHP that. Yeah, PHP has a lot of good resources. Thank God. That’s my one thing I give PHP.