WordPress Translation, Internationalization, and Documentation

Abha:
Hello, and we’re here for another WordPress Way on Do the Woo. I’m Abba Thakor and we’re continuing our journey around the world, finding fascinating people who are doing the WordPress way, but also can tell us a little bit about the Woo too. So stick with us and stay on our journey. So today we have Estela Rueda with us, and Pascal Birchler, and we’re going to have a very interesting conversation about translation, internationalization, documentation. In fact, we might find a few other things that ending in Asian and talk about those two. So stay with us and let’s see where we go. So welcome both of you. It’s so nice to have you here. Now, Estela, I never know where you are currently in which country. So tell us today, which country are you coming live from?

Estela:
Hi, Ava, how are you? Thanks for the invite. First of all, where am I located now? Today I am in Italy. I recently moved, last two months ago I moved to Italy. That’s where I am living.

Abha:
But that’s not where you’ve from, is it before? Where did you grow up?

Estela:
That’s a different answer from where I am from. I really don’t like it when people ask me where I am from because it depends on what you want to know. It’s always a different, always a different answer.

Abha:
I tell you what, tell us some other countries that you’ve hopped over to so that we can get a flavor of the international Estela.

Estela:
Well, let’s see, Mexico, that’s where I was born. I grew up in the US in Mexico somewhere up and down. I went to college in Costa Rica. I got married and moved and lived in the Netherlands for a long time. Then I went back to the us. Then after that I moved back to the Netherlands and then Slovakia, and now I’m here in Italy. See, I

Abha:
Love that. This is why you are one of the perfect people to be on here talking about internationalization, and I know that international background of yours also means that inclusion is a really important part of your work in the WordPress and the do the We community too. So thanks for telling us all that. Pascal, where are you coming in from today?

Pascal:
Hey everyone, thanks for having as well. It’s a bit more boring here. Born and raised in Switzerland and I’m still in Switzerland today.

Abha:
There is nothing boring about Switzerland. It’s one of my favorite places in the world. So whereabouts in Switzerland are you coming from

Pascal:
In Zurich?

Abha:
That is got to be one of my favorite cities. So I think it was last there for WordCamp Zurich seems a lifetime ago, but it was only just before Covid. So I had the pleasure of coming to speak at that. So it’s an amazing place to be right now. We all know it’s a really busy time because when we’re recording this at the moment, we’ve just had beta one for the WordPress 6.5 release and all three of us in fact have been quite busy who had this release. So I wondered if we could just give people a little bit of an insight into why is it that both of you do give time to the release and you do give it in such an amazing number of teams from design, documentation, polyglots, performance and core. So why do you do that and why should people think about that?

Estela:
I think it’s important that you get involved with many of the teams, not just one and just focus on one thing because nothing that we do within WordPress, within Woo, is just focus on one thing. If you want to change the design, you need to talk to the developers, you need to talk to Core. And if you change something, you need to document it. You need to let people know what you did, whether it is documentation for developers, what is documentation on the features that is just for end users. So always, always have to talk among teams. So belonging just to one team sometimes makes most of the time I’m going to have to say that makes no sense.

Abha:
I love that answer. And in fact the blog I’m writing in my head now is just that’s going to start with that answer. And it is true. I work and volunteer in probably about seven different teams actively, but they all have touch points and my work tends to focus on actually where they touch and it really does make a difference. I don’t think I would’ve been a good docs if I hadn’t understood core and I certainly wouldn’t have been as good if I hadn’t understood training. And this time I was doing a lot of work in training too. But performance is the one that really I’ve learned more most about being docs co-lead for the last release because it affects everything. I thought it just affected this little bit over here and this is like an add-on thing, but we look at before or maybe we look at after, but I did not realize until I worked with Pascal and Joe and all the wonderful people in performance that actually it affects every single thing that we do and probably should be more in our focus as people learn to use WordPress and it be something that when you start as a developer or you start making sites as a site builder, performance is right up there in the first things that you learn.
And of course who better to ask that question to than Pascal?

Pascal:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I mean performance affects everyone and it’s not just you as a user of WordPress when you’re writing new continent WordPress or you use your site, but it also affects your visitors and that’s why it’s so important to improve performance across the board, both on the backend and front end. And yeah, I think in the recent years we’ve done a pretty good job already, but there’s of course always lots more to do.

Abha:
Pascal, do you remember offhand how many performance improvements they were in? 6.4? I should know I did the field guide, but I can’t remember at this very moment. I know I was absolutely stunned by how many,

Pascal:
Oh, I don’t have a number in my head because there’s so many, sometimes there’s bigger changes, but there’s so many smaller improvements as well if it’s some caching or some code optimization. So yeah, I don’t have a number, but it’s definitely a lot of improvements.

Abha:
I tell you what, we’ll put it in the link in the show notes just so that people can read how many there were. I was looking at the piece right now and it was quite phenomenal and I think if you are thinking of that performance is an issue for your WordPress site or even that you’re debating working with Wu and WordPress because of performance, you need to check out this post on WordPress 6.4 performance improvements and look at the work that’s happening now because it really shows you that performance does not have to be a problem. In fact, the ability you have with speed with WordPress and Woo is phenomenal. Say Pascal, if you were suggesting WordPress and Woo to other people, what would you say to them if they were hesitant about performance with the software?

Pascal:
Don’t be because WordPress is known for powering some of the biggest WordPress, some of the biggest websites in the world and also WooCommerce. It can scale to super large sites and it’s definitely proven to be a robust and performant choice and there’s performance plugins that you can use. There’s always something that you can do on your hosting side of things as well. So yeah, it’s definitely, performance is definitely, you don’t have to worry about performance when you’re going with the WordPress and Woo.

Abha:
And I think sometimes it’s a misnomer and people have this idea what it is and it limits and actually it’s not. But that also brings me back to the value of documentation because especially in the work for the last few and in our shows here, we’ve been explaining how important documentation is because if you understand what you need to do on your WordPress site to make it perform better, then you’ve got more chance of it actually doing that because it’s not often the software that’s limiting, it’s how much you can read in terms of documentation, how much you can learn about how much you can learn from your peers. And to that, I have to go to Estella who’s nodding at me going, yes, yes, yes, this is exactly what we’ve been telling people. So Estela, you tell them,

Estela:
Well yes, documentation is very important, but documentation in all levels right now, WordPress dot org, we have many levels of documentation. We have the support forums which will give you the one off questions very specific. They also have articles and stuff that they’ve been recollecting from answering many things. Then we have documentation for end users, which are people that are non-developers that they want to know how to do the basic stuff on their side, make it look nice, look pretty working, that’s all they need to do. We have documentation for developers and they go all on the deep stuff, all the code, everything in the backend that not everybody understands, but that’s good for them. And then we have Learn which are longer tutorials, video or just reading that people can learn at their own pace. And these are good when they want to learn about one specific feature or how to create a specific feature, how to create a theme for instance, or how to create a plugin or how to run performance. It’s like very specific topics. That’s what it is. Yeah,

Abha:
And it’s all available for free.

Estela:
Yes, it’s all available for free and many of these things for the longest time, you have to go and look around the web, Google as much as you can to find it. And what we are trying to do nowadays is to have them inside WordPress dot org so that people know that this is, we we’re the ones that build it and we’re telling you how to do it, how to fix it, how to work in it, how to learn about it.

Abha:
And the beauty of course is that right now we’re going to be working on documentation for end users. That starts pretty much in the field guide as well as beta 1 comes in and if you are passionate about these things and you want to help other people or you wish something was documented but you can’t find it, this is the time to come and volunteer. The same for performance because the core performance team have regular meetings, they’re a fairly new team and they’re pretty awesome. And I’ve had Nini who’s been helping me research for this show and she’s just sent me a message to say that they were 64 tickets with a focus on performance in 6.4, which is pretty good. And that’s just main tickets. There was lots of other things as well in addition to that. So this is a happening team as of course this documentation and you get virtual cookies too. These are important things to get. They make you smile and being able to smile in a day is quite important.

Estela:
But if you’re at attend work camps and you go to contribute this, you get real cookies for the documentation.

Abha:
Now I’ve missed out on these. I’ve been at WordCamps and I haven’t had the cookie, so I’ll need to have a word with the development people and see if I can get some wonderful one sent across. So it 6.5 obviously has a lot of things in the release. And for our regular followers, we have got a show that’s coming to you in mid-March with a 6.5 and we’ll be looking at all the wonderful things in that as well. So if you’ve got questions that you’d like to be included in that or that we can research for you, do send them in and we’ll try and make sure we can follow those up too. So for 6.5 and beyond, what would both of you like to see as different in a release in terms of how can we get more of the translation understood, more of the need for internationalization understood. And also just a bit more, I dunno if understanding is a quite word, but there is a lot of work that our polyglots do, our polyglots or our volunteer translators for anyone who’s not heard that term before because they have quite a short time to translate the release into their local language so that WordPress can be used in that latest software more easily in that locale. So Pascal, I’m going to go to you first of all, I know something that you feel very passionate about. What would you like to see if you had a wishlist that would make translations and their importance and all the perfect translations and all the internationalization work that you are involved with, what would make it easier and what would be your dream?

Pascal:
So one dream that actually already came true, which is that on translate WordPress dot org, you can now translate plugins or core itself directly inside WordPress. That is very important because sometimes you have a text that you need to translate but you don’t know where it’s used. But so you can just basically open WordPress and then you see the string in the necessary context and you can translate it right in there and then upload those translations. I think that’s an amazing change that happened. And the other thing, I think it’s just in general maybe for developers to translate their use WordPress in another language during development because just so often strings are not actually translatable and we have to fix that. That’s always a bit annoying. It would help to use some plugins or just change the language to just use WordPress in another language to get that experience.

Abha:
So where do you think that would be the most effective during the beta testing the RC time? Or do you think that would be when we’ve got a live release

Pascal:
Even before beta, I think especially when developing a big new feature, it can happen that things get forgotten, but beta is of course the ideal time because that’s where we start focusing on bug fixing. So especially during the beta period, it’s a good time to fix those translation issues.

Abha:
I’m just thinking about how we could make that workflow easier. Do you think something on Learn possibly might help with that if we showed people how to do that?

Pascal:
Possibly? Yeah, I think the worker’s playground is already very helpful because it makes it easier for you to test WordPress with a different setup. You don’t have to change your main website to do that. So maybe making it easier to do this via playground would be helpful. But I don’t have concrete ideas right now.

Abha:
The beauty of this show is that we have a lot of people who come back after listening and go, actually, we could do it this way. And it also people we’ve had guests before who’ve gone away to their teams and go, could we do this? And it’s great because we like that at Do the Woo, we like not only being about empowering and sharing the community, but also coming up with good ways of people working together. So I think we’ll take that definitely to the next learn meeting as well. So it is really important just so we’re aware that when we’ve got new things like WebPress playground, we will put that it’s in the show notes. If you listen to our show from last month, we had a whole section on WordPress playground as well. But if you not sure what it is, there are tutorials, there is help documentation on how to use it. And as Pascal said, it doesn’t have to change your current setup to be able to use it. And you can test WordPress too and be part of the releases in the making. We’ll share some of those in the cross link in the show notes too. Estela, okay, I need to know your dream now. What would be your dream to make it better for Polyglots internationalization and translation?

Estela:
My dream is almost coming true, almost coming true.

Abha:
I love this.

Estela:
So the GlotPress team has been working on improving the plugin to be able to take long tests, long text, and it may be they are planning on launching this new plugin in WordCamp Asia, which unfortunately I’m not going to be able to be there. But the people that are going to be there, they’re going to see it and I am really, really looking forward to it. That is one. The other one is one that I’m still working on is improving the style guides for every language. This style guides have been written up while long time ago, I don’t know. Some of them haven’t been updated in forever. In recent years, we have had many issues and changes in the language in all languages. And how do we address, we had the problem of gender, we have problems of how to address people. Yeah, sometimes it’s formal too informal or gender, the feminine and masculine like English is easy because it’s a neutral language, but Spanish, no, everything is feminine or masculine and there is nothing in between. So we need to learn how to address these things not only in the way we name objects because that grammar, we’re not going to change it. We cannot change the grammar, but we can learn and give tips on how to address things like the users. We always call them masculine, so maybe we need to find a different way of naming them this kind of thing. And Spanish is not the only issue with this, right? A lot of other languages have these problems. Also the integration of English terms that are non translatable.

A lot of languages just decided to keep the English term and not translated. So I think that improving the style guide that we have that will make it easier. And then using AI to translate with always, always finishing with a human review doesn’t go from chatGBT straight to blood press ever. You need to check, you need to read it and you need to make sure it doesn’t read like a robot. It needs to read like a human is telling you what to do and how do you do things right?

Abha:
Absolutely. So yeah,

Estela:
That’s it.

Abha:
It’s almost coming true. I love it. So of course that means that next time we will have to find you a new dream so that we can work towards that as well. So for anyone who doesn’t know, can you just share what GlotPress is?

Estela:
GlotPress is the tool that is used by the polyglots team to review the strings, make sure that they are the same, that is the same terms, the functions. I don’t know if probably Pascal knows more about this because it’s used more in development or core than it is in documentation. So I dunno if Pascal knows more about how it’s or what it is, how to use it.

Pascal:
Sure, I mean GlotPress is basically a WordPress plugin and it’s what powers translate WordPress dot org. It’s used to translate not only WordPress itself but also all the plugins and themes in the directory and I think even the mobile apps and some other parts.

Abha:
And we’ll find a way of linking that in transcription as well. So for anyone who’s not come across it before, but those are really cool. There’s a really good things that are coming up. Pascal, you’re also got a hit GitHub work that you’re doing on various things relating to translation, but particularly performance translations. Do you want to share a bit about how that makes a difference to WordPress and therefore also to what people want to do with Woo?

Pascal:
Oh yes, absolutely. So it’s always been known that the translation system in WordPress, how WordPress loads translations, et cetera, is a bit slow, but it never got attention it deserved. So last year we did a very thorough analysis on the performance of the translation system and as a result we built a completely new translation system that is more performant, uses less memory, but it’s backward compatible. So everything still works the same. And we put that into a plugin called Performance Translations. So everyone could just install this plugin and if you are using WordPress in another language, your site should be instantly faster. And the good news is we are now merging this plugin into WordPress 6.5. So technically you don’t need to plugin anymore. So just update WordPress and it gets faster. And the main thing that this new system does, it uses a new file format for translations. So if you have ever translated WordPress or dealt with translations in a way you might be familiar with those .po and mo files that are used by WordPress. And we are replacing that with PHP files. So PHP files that hold all the translations because loading a PHP file in PHP, which is the language that WordPress has written in, is much faster than having to load those binary mo files.

Abha:
And that of course not only improves performance, especially once it’s in core, but also makes that more available to more people who don’t have to do plugins because not everyone has that ability if they are having a site that’s been built for them, they can’t always add plugins. But having that feature facility within WordPress core means that more people could use it. And of course that has a direct benefit for if you’re adding WooCommerce on top because you can already have something where you can translate it much more easily. With WordPress playground, as we’ve talked about, you can test how your service that you’re having may appear in different translations as well. And I dunno about you two, but I definitely think that the understanding of why translation is important really has taken much firmer hold globally in the last two or three years compared to what it was like a decade ago. And I’m going to go to you first Estela on that.

Estela:
I think even five years ago, I think five years ago we were not still so sure about translating. It was one part, the core was being translated, that’s what poly gloves were doing mostly. And people locally were writing their own content, but nowadays we are translating even more. And I have insisted a lot on this and whenever I can I talk part of inclusion is giving WordPress to people in their own language, in their own culture, within their own culture. Why? Because there is this saying, there is this saying that says give a man a fish, feed him for one night, teach ’em how to fish and you’ll feed him forever. It’s the same thing if we teach somebody how to use WordPress, that somebody may have a work for a lifetime, they have a job, they have skills that they can move on and there you go.

So I think that that’s what we need to be doing now and we need to take away that part that says if you want to learn WordPress, you must learn English or speak English. I don’t think that that is true and that should never be true. We need to stop that, we need to avoid that and we need to go around that and say, okay, we want to include as many people as possible and we’re going to teach as many people as possible how to use WordPress, how to work with WordPress, how to create a life with WordPress, a business, anything that you want to do. And that’s why I insist on translating documentation from developers for end users. Because also is that thing, you do not need to be a developer to create a blog and with a simple blog you can create a business,

Abha:
Right? Definitely. And it is about empowering and it’s about having that empowering globally. And I know one of the questions that we did, part of the research for this podcast today was about well, but we was different. But actually there is for everybody out there who thinks that there isn’t a localization aspect of WooCommerce, I can tell you there is and there’s lots of people actually involved with it and you can contribute to your localization to core and they maintain translations of the WooCommerce project on GL press. So you can translate it, you can take part in the teams who are working@webpress.org, the whole thing works together and that’s the beauty of it. It isn’t that, oh, I have to start again. The more we can translate to WordPress, the better that is for people using it for WordPress and all its different ways it can be used, but also for those using it for WooCommerce products, it really is about the future.

And we’re not going to go back to a place where everything just has to be in English. The world has moved on considerably from that and that is a good thing. So if you haven’t thought of these things before or you thought a plugin was what was standing in your way, have a look at 6.5 and we will include in the show notes after it becomes into core, we’ll get Pascal to write as little paragraph to go in it as well and a link so that people who think, okay, what do I do now? Where do I go? We can direct you because a lot of it is about education and education in a positive way because as we share, we learn. And that’s why we have so many hundreds of locales. We have so many people and in the shows on Undo the way we do try and get across different countries as well and to see what people are doing.

So if you’re listening to this from a country we haven’t featured yet, please let me know on NonstopNewsUK or Do the Woo on Twitter, or actually you’ll find us, look us up and we’re there and better still subscribe to our do the Woo feed and you’ll have lots of ways to be in touch. I’m going to move us slightly sideways and Estela, apart from living in lots of different countries and having just a huge amount of international experience and also probably a lot of dishes and foods that you’ve tried, which I’ll come back to. How did you first start using WordPress and feeling that actually it was the software that you wanted to invest your time, not only as a professional but also your volunteering time because that’s quite a commitment. When did you have that moment where you felt, this is what I want to do?

Estela:
Yes. Let’s see, I started long, long time ago. I think it was with 1.4, 1.7 something around there. I started building my websites, my first site just with S-D-M-L-C-S-S because that’s what we had back in the days because, and I had my first business as a virtual assistant. I needed to find something that would allow me to make money while staying home because I had a little child, I had a little boy and I wanted to make sure that I was there for him. Somebody recommended WordPress, I went to WordPress and then I made my enemy number one, the Codex. Okay, I hate the codex with everything that I can. I don’t think I hate anything else more. I just couldn’t understand that I’m not technical, I’m not a developer. So the codex always, always stop me. So I went back to CSS and TML, I took a class on WordPress and I learned how to use it and that was like three point something when I learned how to use WordPress and I loved it and I’m like, oh my God, you can do so many things with this.

And I started going here, going there and learning how to do things. And then mobile fast to nowadays, I went to work in Europe in Berlin, which was two 19 at a contributor day. I was sitting at the design table and I’m just going, we were beginning with Gutenberg, it was the beginning of the development of Gutenberg and everything was magical and nobody knew what we were doing, but everybody was there. And I told someone like, I don’t like this. Just reviewing tickets, giving, making comments on tickets and stuff. I think I need something more. I need a project. I don’t feel like I’m giving much. And they said, okay, that’s easy. And they sat me at the documentation table and then these people started talking about things. I had no clue that existed. It took me probably about three or four months to understand that they were talking about moving the codex into documentation, separating from the end user documentation and the development documentation.

And I’m like, oh my God, I love that. I’m all for it. Get rid of the codex. I don’t like the codex. Now I know that the codes has been useful, it had a lifetime, but I think that we have surpassed it, right? And yes, there are a lot of documents in there that are not being updated and we are little by little retiring it until it will go away eventually. The documentation that we have nowadays been it’s different. And I work in a special project with the documentation team for the end user documentation to everything. The articles give them an order, giving them a reason to be somewhere and they have a life or more a path. It’s like what is WordPress? Is this something the CMS good for my project? And then it teaches you requirements, maintenance, all the stuff that you will need before that teaches you what is WordPress, the parts of WordPress, the features.
And then you have all the information you need, all the tutorials you need to make it look great in a way that a non-developer can understand it. And yeah, that’s it. That’s where I’m stuck. I just love it. And I’ve learned how to write technical documentation and I’ve learned a lot. And that’s why you see me sitting at meetings at different meetings where sometimes I just say hello and I’m just sitting looking at Slack, just going like this, reading, reading, reading, reading. So that I learn what other teams are doing. Sometimes I understand the conversation, sometimes I don’t. But it’s okay because I have things in my head that tells me, oh, okay, so somebody was talking about this, so the topic is this, or they are working on this feature, they’re working on that feature. And I can talk about it or at least I know about it. That’s what I do.

Abha:
Well, if that’s not a reason to be inspired to join in and learn not only more about the projects and how to do the different things, but also improve your own abilities and knowledge so that you can use it in your own workspaces too. It really is. Thanks Estela. And it’s been an absolute pleasure to work with you now over, oh, I’ve lost count how many years? But it’s been wonderful. We’ve worked at WordCamp Europe’s and documentation Polyglots. I think core releases it goes on. But as Estela said, even if you don’t understand something straight away, observing is a great way to actually learn and there isn’t really a stupid question. So it is about working together because at the end of the day, we also want to encourage the next generation of people contributing to the project. And that doesn’t have to mean a younger generation. It can be just people who, at whatever time of their life may now want to contribute and not know how to start or need to see someone that they can relate to and who has skills that are similar to them or an area that they’ve always wanted to work in. So come along, get involved. And Pascal, I know you are just amazing. I’m going you to tell a little bit about what your day job is as well and just to show that you can mix the two.

Pascal:
Yeah, sure. So my day job right now is actually contributing, or for the most part it’s contributing to WordPress, especially WordPress performance. It wasn’t always that way. I used to work for a WordPress agency building websites for clients, but now I’m part of a team that is focusing on improving performance in CMSs like WordPress. So not just WordPress, but mostly because WordPress is powering 40% of the web or something. It’s pretty big. So yeah, main focus is performance. The performance team that you mentioned earlier. Right now I’m a co tech lead, co core tech lead for Repress 6.5. So I also have to make sure all the tickets are done and closed and fixed for the release and make sure all the deadlines are kept and things like that. It’s maybe a bit more project management in coding I would say on that part. But I also have fun fixing box. The performance translation thing was very dear to my heart because I started using WordPress also not in English, it wasn’t German. So performance translations has always been very important for me. We have so many contributors to performance team, but also 6.5 in general. So I try to make sure people feel welcome, guide them wherever possible, point them in the right directions.

Abha:
And Pascal, you’re a developer relations engineer in your day job working with Google. And do you feel that your work there is enhanced by the fact that you have been a contributor for so long and you have worked with people across the globe?

Pascal:
Oh absolutely. I think having contributed to WordPress before is why I was able to join Google to work on WordPress. It’s not about only about knowing the software, it’s about knowing the people, knowing the culture, knowing the community, how things work. When I’ve seen people just arrive at WordPress and I dunno, proposing some change without knowing how things work, they usually get upset or frustrated and leave again because it doesn’t match their expectations. So yeah, being in the community for so long, it’s definitely made it easier to how to see how things work and go with the flow and go basically I changed from spare time contributor on my weekends to it full time, so it made the transition much, much easier.

Abha:
Thanks, Pascal. I know both of you are very valued in the team and by many contributors valued to dear friends too because that is one of the things about the community is that you get to know people really well and you may not get along with everybody, but that’s okay. It’s such a big community that you can find people that you can work with and learn from and also learn different ways of thinking. And I think anybody who does join, I think particularly we’re focusing on translation today. If you get a reply and you think, oh, I don’t quite understand that, or it seems like maybe they don’t want me there, it’s probably not the case. It’s probably just remembering that the person you’re writing to or write or is writing to you, English may not be their first language and sometimes it can come across differently than it’s intended.
And I think that’s one of the big learning things. And I think the more you get involved in translation, the more you actually understand that. That is super important to know. And when we we’re writing and talking to think about, will somebody else who is not used to doing this day in, day out or to translate everything in their head as they’re speaking or reading, is it easy for them to follow that? And if not, how can I make that a little bit easier? Because that all comes down to us as well. And of course more things join us together, then they do that separate us. So as people know who know me from for a while now, know that I have a thing about WordPress and food and recipes and as we’re particularly after Covid and during Covid, getting people to think about eating health relief for their wellbeing, but also as a cultural way of coming together, keeping in touch and for sharing cultures.

It’s a great leveler and a way of people to discover other people that they may not have contact with. So I was really surprised when interviewing people from one from Italy and one from Germany, and they came up with the same food that they love to cook when they’re working. So I am intrigued. Did you two speak to each other before this broadcast? Because you both came up independently with the fact that you liked one particular food. And I did a quick look in. The trusted researcher in the background here has had a look at how popular this food was. Now I’ve got a slight pause before I tell you what this food is and see if you can decide yourselves. So Estela, can you describe it without mentioning its name?

Estela:
Lemme think, it’s a sauce. Some sort of sauce. Not really a sauce, but some sort of it you can eat it with. I actually eat it with Italian bread, which is amazingly delicious. Oh, I moved two blocks away from the best bakery that you have in Italy. So you see me, you find me there every morning at seven o’clock in the morning so I can get good breath. Recently coming out of the oven. There’s also, it’s a Mediterranean dish, we like. Ingredients? I dunno, you can also add flavors to it. I like to eat it sometimes with extra olive oil, sometimes I put a little bit of chili on it. If I’m feeling adventurous I add extra garlic and yeah, I tried even one time with avocado now it’s not good. Trust me. Do not mix it with avocado. It turns very weird. Green color.

Abha:
No. I’m going to jump quickly to Pascal. Pascal, you have 10 seconds to describe this dish without telling people what it is.

Pascal:
Alright, creamy, great for dipping goes well with pizza bread as well. Or I dunno, maybe cucumber for example. You can do it at home as well, or just buy it in store.

Abha:
And I think we’ve given them enough time and thank you Nini, who’s just popped into the chat for me that the global market for this product is worth 2.62 billion in 2020 and it was projected to grow to 6 billion by 2028. Now I should tell them really why it is, shouldn’t I? Because they’re going to want to be able to cook it. So the favorite item for these wonderful people, a developer relations engineer, in your case a UX strategist, is hummus. And I am going to want your hummus recipes so that we can pick some of the best ones to make live on our cooking show that we are going to have while we talk about Woo and WordPress. Because why wouldn’t you? And hopefully we’ll see two of these people with us as well, sharing their recipes. And I told you we’re going to have to cover food at some point.

All that leaves for me to say is thank you very much to Estela and to Pascal for joining. Do the Woo and talking about WordPress and WooCommerce. We’ve loved being in Italy and in Switzerland today. If we can come to be your country, then let us know. I really want to cover as many continents as I can this year. Thank you for joining us. We’ll put everything in the show notes. If you’ve discover something that you’d like to know a bit more about, do let us know on our different, do the Woo channels and we’ll make sure that we come and talk about those too. So thank you to both of you and we’ll see you soon.

Pascal:
Thank you.