From Words to Code: A Creator’s Evolution

Brad: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of Do the Woo. I’m one half of the Woo equation, maybe. Brad?

Bob: One half.

Brad: Yeah. I’d say 50%. We’ll go with that. We’ll go with that. It’s been a week, Bob. How you doing?

Bob: Hey, I’m doing good. It’s been a week too. Yeah. It’s technology breaking. Life in general, the world, everything. So yeah it’s another day in paradise. Yeah.

Brad: It’s been a week. But that’s okay, because we got a great show and we’re excited to dive in. So Bob, who do we have on today?

Bob: Today. We have Eric Karkovack and I did make sure I wouldn’t say this wrong, can’t go back. It is as it spelled. Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric: Oh thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Bob: I see Eric all over the place on the web. He’s talking, he’s writing, he’s building, he’s doing all sorts of stuff. But before we get into all that good stuff, how do you do the Woo in your whole WordPress story here? Maybe a little bit of how you got into it and then how you use WooCommerce?

The web, it all started in 1996

Eric: Well, this story starts way back in 1996, when I became a web designer, of course, working with just static HTML. When CSS came about, I started using that. Over the years though, I found that I had a need to go a little bit bigger with projects and be able to accomplish some things I couldn’t do with the old fashioned ways of doing things. And I found WordPress, really started using it full time around 2010. Within a couple of years, I really started using it exclusively for clients sites. And I’ve since really gotten into WooCommerce. I’ve built just probably at least a dozen pretty nice stores with it, learned to customize it, learned all about the ecosystem and the extensions. And so now these days I build a lot of stuff with WooCommerce and I occasionally write about it too.

Brad: Looking back, you’re obviously an OG, old school, whatever you want to call it, web developer. And anyone that was doing any type of HTML in the mid 90s, I would classify in that field myself included in high school, messing around with HTML and image maps, getting a little crazy with image maps. You guys remember those?

Eric: Absolutely

From a builder platform to WordPress

Brad: In fact, I still have on my desk shelf behind me. I have a box for Adobe PageMill. Yeah. Adobe PageMill version 1.0, it’s one disc, one diskette, three and a half inch floppy. And it just changed everything, right? Going from just raw HTML to using something that you would consider more of a visual builder in a sense in the early days of the web. So I’m curious starting way back then. And we don’t have a lot of people on the show that were starting that far back. So that’s why I’m touching on this a little bit. But obviously coming from that world of PageMill and Front Page and other builders like that, and then ending up with WordPress. I’m wondering, was there anything in between or were you going strictly from that kind of builder platform to jumping directly to WordPress? Or were you using any kind of CMS in between there?

Eric: Well, a little background. I was a terrible student in high school, but I did like to play with HTML. That was my passion when I first started doing that. And so I was a little bit afraid that I wasn’t going to be able to learn how to do certain things, databases scared the heck out of me. E-commerce scared the heck out of me, just trying to hook up to a payment gateway and all that stuff. So, the first CMS I used was called, I believe Acute PHP, which was a flat file database. So you could just go into FTP, into your site and you could see this database that had every bit of content in it. It was just the old text file. And I found I could do some neat things with that. I could start blogs with it and everything, but then I came to a tipping point where I said, “Either I’m going to go all in on something where I can provide clients with actual custom functionality, or I’m just going to keep piddling along with this antiquated way doing things.”

And so I think for me, WordPress just came at the right time to where I saw there was a big community around it. I saw all these plugins that were coming out and the ability to go in to a theme and just hack it as much as you wanted to, to get it to look the way you wanted. So, all those things came together for me. And so once I got a little bit of confidence with that, things just took off from there. And I was very fortunate to find my place in the community and find a lot of resources to learn.

The enticement of WordPress in 2010

Brad: Yeah. So we’re talking 2010, 12 years ago that might sound like a long time ago, it might not. I don’t know, time these days is a weird construct but that was a long time ago, we’re talking 12 years ago. WordPress has clearly evolved a lot, just to put in perspective, 2010, I’m assuming this is probably around the time you got involved with WordPress is when 3.0 was released, and that’s when custom post types were first introduced. And that’s when many of us, myself included really defined the turning point from WordPress being a blogging platform to being an actual CMS. And I think there’s probably a lot of people with your similar story around that time period is when they were drawn to WordPress and they realized, “Oh, this is actually more than what I had thought it was. It’s grown from a blogging platform that everybody knows it as. And now it is actually a pretty legit option for clients.”

It’s a bit of a game changer in a sense. So that’s a massively pivotal release in my opinion, with the trajectory of WordPress and to keep it growing and really explode the adoption, was right around that 2010 timeframe. Is that what drew you into it? Were you familiar with WordPress prior to that? And then that things like custom post types or was it just a coincidence of the timing?

Eric: Well, I was familiar with it before that. Probably about 2007, 2008, I built a few client blogs with it. It’s funny, I remember the old Kubrick theme and it was built with CSS and I was still using table layouts at that time. So I remember ripping apart Kubrick and putting tables in place of the CSS. So I’m probably going to go into some hall of shame for that now, but at that time I thought, “Okay, this is good for blogging. I don’t know what else I can do with it.” The custom post types didn’t really hit until I’ve been using it for a little while. Once I started realizing and my gosh, when I found advanced custom fields and the stuff I could do with that, it just completely changed my thinking about what I was going to be able to do with WordPress and the kind of sites I was going to be able to build.

Brad: Yeah. One of the reasons I’m bringing this up as well as because the landscape today versus even just 10 or 12 years ago is so different. If you’re diving into WordPress today, it’s just a plethora of tools of drag and drop builders and now full site editing, and core and Gutenberg and all this amazing stuff. But that’s not what we all started with, right? We grew up WordPress in a sense, and so the barrier to entry is definitely way easier now than it’s ever been to even be on the professional side, if you’re actually doing this for clients. You can dive right in and make some pretty amazing sites with no code now using WordPress. So I think it’s just interesting digging into the history a little bit and hearing how people got to where they’re at, and how different it’s evolved over the years.

The transition into WooCommerce

Bob: So along that journey, where did WooCommerce come in? Was it something that you intentionally thought I’m going to start building eCommerce sites, or was it a request from a client that you thought, “Maybe this is something I should dabble.” How did that play into it?

Eric: Well, the first e-commerce site I did, did not use WooCommerce. It was, I believe WPE store, which was a really old plugin. It was probably the OG e-commerce plugin back in the day. I think it used short codes.

Brad: It probably used a flat file.

Eric: It probably did. And it was quite a bit for what it was, but I had a client that I built this for and he was like, “Okay, this is not really scalable because if you have two or three products, it’s great. If you’re trying to go more than that, it was just a mess.” So I found WooCommerce and started looking at that. I was like, “Wow, this is free.” I believe it was based in South Africa at that point and before Automatic had purchased it, and I started seeing all these extensions and my goodness, I can add a favorites list. I can add this shipping method or that payment gateway and all these different things that could work with that. So the next chance that I got was actually a company that made caulking, custom colored caulking, and they needed this really robust way to search for a manufacturer and drill down the colors just to that manufacturer.

I found the gravity forms add on for WooCommerce that just made that so easy. I was just wondering like, how am I going to accomplish this? How am I possibly going to do it? So I started building that and it just became like, okay, this is my defacto way of building e-commerce now. It’s already part of the WordPress community. It’s already so well supported, even though it is scatterbrained sometimes with extensions just everywhere. There’s official extensions, third party extensions that may or may not be well supported. There’s a lot to dig into it, but I think once you get that level of experience, you can look past that and just see the possibilities of what you’re going to be able to do with it.

Making WooCommerce the eCommerce choice

Bob: I noticed on your site you say that WooCommerce is your choice as far as e-commerce, you do say that. So when somebody comes to you, is there other things you do use to build sites because of maybe specific needs? Or do you pretty much say, “I’m doing WooCommerce. This might be better using this,” and you may want somebody to help you with that?

Eric: Yeah. At this point, I’m basically all WordPress all the time. I have a couple clients that use the other systems. I’ve used Miva Merchant in the past, which I actually liked. The interface was a little tough, especially if you wanted more than just your shop on their service, it was just not the easiest thing. It was a lot of hand coding HTML for that. But these days I just focus on WordPress and WooCommerce. I don’t really see myself as a great fit for other systems because I don’t have a lot of experience with it. Now, that doesn’t mean it won’t change some point. If somebody really wants to explore Shopify or something else, I’m open to learning it. But at this point, I try to look for clients that are a good fit for me, and then I’m a good fit for them. I don’t want to try to make myself into something I’m not and expect them to bend their needs just for me. So, that’s the given take of it for me.

Brad: Yeah. You really speak to just the idea of WooCommerce and the extensions, and add-ons that are available. And it speaks to the power of WordPress and the size of the community, and the size of people creating products and add-ons for WooCommerce, because it’s not just WooCommerce and it’s not just WooCommerce extensions, but it’s also how those interact and play with just general WordPress plugins, like you mentioned gravity forms is a perfect example. The add-on to WooCommerce really combines two very powerful systems and it can allow you to do a lot of things.

There’s a number of different examples we could give, but that is one of the biggest benefits of open source. And especially WordPress in WooCommerce is just that massive ecosystem of products and plugins and services that by and large work well together, at least the major players. And then getting that comfort level like you mentioned of this is the platform. If this is the primary platform, you work on WordPress, WooCommerce, whatever it might be. You’re going to learn the inside and out in a sense. And you’re going to know those type of tools that work well for you and well for your clients. So ultimately it’ll help you. It’ll help your clients. It’ll help keep costs and check, and ultimately put together the best options for your clients and not writing it all from scratch, which is doable, but very expensive and very costly and probably not worth it.

Clients using Gutenberg

So I’m curious as we talked about the growth end of this. Now we’re getting into the world of everyone’s favorite topic, which is Gutenberg and the block editor. The Gutenberg block editor, whatever we’re supposed to call it. I love asking people this, because I’m always curious taking the temperature check, right? On just Gutenberg in general. Are you using Gutenberg for your clients? Have you really lean into it? Do your clients enjoying it or not?

Eric: Yeah. I am using it on pretty much all new projects now, have been for over a year. I find it to be getting a lot better. If you compare it now, I tell people that checked it out at 5.0, or even the betas before that, take a look at it again because it’s going to look a whole lot different. It’s a lot better user experience than it was. A lot more I think, intuitive than it was. In fact, I set my daughter up on a blog with wordpress.com the other day, and she wants to do a blog about pets and Harry Potter. So I set her up with this, right?

And I’m going to start explaining all the good stuff with the blog editor. And here’s what you do. You hit the plus button and she just looks at me and says, “Dad, you can go now. I’m fine.” I come back an hour later and she’s already got it figured out. I’m like, all of us old people that are complaining about Gutenberg, I have a 12 year old here that just picked it up in about 10 minutes. I didn’t need to help her. The only thing she needed to help with was getting her Google photos into the wordpress.com, that was about the only thing she asked me for. So she did it herself. (silence)

Brad: That’s a good testimonial for Gutenberg, if you think about it, that’s actually a really good point. Because my son’s six and it’s amazing how quickly kids can pick up technology. I was even impressed by how quickly he understood as an infant, a baby, toddler, I guess. How quickly he could understand the idea of touching a screen and dragging things. It was just almost second nature. But we didn’t grow up with that, right? So it was something we had to learn and get comfortable with, but it’s almost like second nature to kids and the same thing, he impresses me every day with certain things. He’ll learn. He’ll play games. He’ll do this and that. He can’t read yet, but he knows things better than I know. And I’m the one that can read the instructions on the screen.

Eric: It’s like the blocks we played with as kids are much different than the blocks they’re playing with now. They’re stacking up content. We were stacking up letters.

Brad: There you go there. It’s one big vicious cycle. Yeah. It’s cool. It’s good to hear that your clients are receptive to it and they’re all open to it. I agree. I think maybe, at this point we’ve digged get enough around just in general in the community around our people accepting of it, because it feels like at this point by and large everybody is, and now the new focus of course is around full sight editing and how that’s received, and if people really lean into that or not, which is TBD since it’s so new.

But, yeah, that’s really cool to hear that you guys are using it. Another part to that too just to add on is the matureness of the products that interact. We mentioned the global ecosystem and stuff, but all the products that you expect all work with Gutenberg. We generally have custom blocks where it makes sense. They integrate well, when of course when Gutenberg first came out, none of that really existed. So, having a full adoption from the larger ecosystem has been a big plus for Gutenberg.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Klaviyo and Nexcess

Being a writer and a developer

Bob: I wanted to switch over again, going back to your site. And I know just from having seen you on social and on various sites, you’re a fairly prolific writer and you love to write. I admire, because you have the development skills and you have the writing skills and those aren’t two skills that lot of developers have. So I think you’re very fortunate there, which one that came first in your career or were they simultaneously, or is this something you always loved writing, so it just was a natural as you got into the web.

Eric: Yeah. Writing has always been a passion. It was one of those things that even from an early age, I just had a knack for, I don’t know why. When I got into web development and when I started getting into the WordPress community in particular, I saw just a need for someone that was writing not just tutorials, but sometimes opinions, just talking about the experiences I’ve had as a freelancer. All those things hit me. It’s like, “I should be writing about this.” And the main site I’ve been writing for is speckyboy.com.

Actually, it’s was about 10 years ago. I started writing for them. They actually just had one of those little, contact us if you want to write for us type of links on their site. And the owner of the site, Paul Andrew, he lives over in Scotland actually. He’s just a wonderful guy. And he gave me the opportunity and said, “Here write whatever you want.” And I did. And people reacted well to it and just kept going from there. That’s why I’ve been there so long. I get to choose my topics and get to express myself and interact with other people in the community, which I just enjoy to death. I think it’s the best thing in the world.

Brad: It’s a great way to give back. We’re big at WebDev, big proponents of giving back, fight for the future. Obviously, if everyone stopped contributing to open source, there would be no project, right? So, and this is an area I think a lot of people overlook as a great way to give back. This is sharing knowledge and information, is a great way to contribute to WordPress in my opinion. And I think a lot of people overlook that. They think you have to be writing code or speaking at an event or something. But if anything, this is actually has a larger scale impact because at an event, yes, the people there are going to see it. More people will probably watch it. Or this piece of content that can just be out there and be evergreen in a sense where it makes sense obviously. This is open source, things move fast, but it’s an awesome way to give back.

Eric: Absolutely. I know I’m not the world’s greatest developer. I probably wouldn’t trust myself to write anything for core, but if I can share my experiences and help somebody else learn something about WordPress, I think that makes me feel so good. I love to do it and my DMS are always open for question and things like that. And I get a lot of them and I enjoy answering them. I enjoy helping people with it. That’s a nice side benefit of all of this for me.

How writing skills help as a developer

Bob: Do you think the writing skills that you had, did that help you in any way in learning web development? Is there any tie in at all?

Eric: I’m not sure there’s a big tie in for me. As I said, I started hand coding everything back in the day. So, I had to learn HTML and I had to learn every tag and what it did, including the blink tag. I had to learn CSS when it came out. PHP was a bit of a bigger step for me, because it’s more of a object oriented language I wasn’t familiar with. So I don’t know if writing helped with that so much more than just repetition and finding great tutorials, WordPress documentation’s been a huge help there in most cases. It seems pretty much anything I’ve ever needed to accomplish was already out there somewhere. And I could learn from it. GitHub’s great for that. CodePen’s great for that. So I found all those things through the community. But writing it, I don’t know. English is a little bit different than all the other stuff I’ve got to deal with.

Brad: Well, one area that I bet this has actually helped you and it maybe it’s just not as obvious, but it’s something that I’ve noticed within my own team in writing and blogging is the soft skills, right? Being able to take a technical topic and explain it to someone that’s not technical is an actual extremely important skill to have in this industry, if you work with clients. And by writing blog posts like this publicly, you have to write those to the lowest denominator, which is someone that may not really understand what is a custom post type or what is the block editor.

And you have to preface that whole section and explain it as you ease into what you’re going to dig into in that topic. So, those soft skills of just good communicating and understanding the audience you’re speaking to. You’re talking to me and you know Brad’s a technical guy. Can we can get into the weeds all day long? Or are you talking to someone that has no technical capabilities and you really got to break it down for him. So, I feel like just writing inherently helps with that. So, which has to help with the client communication and working with clients of all different levels of technical abilities, so.

Eric: It does. And I’ll tell you what I mean, I think also over the years it has brought me a lot more confidence to see your ideas go out there and people accept them. Not everybody agrees and that’s cool and it wouldn’t be the internet if everybody agreed. But just seeing those ideas go out there, seeing them accepted, seeing people respond well to them. That has brought me a lot more confidence, even when I am communicating with a client that I can understand, “Okay, I know what I’m talking about.” And I used to let clients just pretty much dictate what they wanted back in the day.

And it’s like, “Okay, you really want that flash banner there or whatever. Okay. You can have that. I think it’s awful,” but I won’t say anything. Now I have the wherewithal to say, “Hey, I don’t know if that’s going to be the best course of action for you. It may not be the most beneficial. Why don’t we… You may also want to look over here at this other idea as well,” and get them thinking a little bit. So I think that’s where writing, I think had the biggest benefit just to my business in terms of being able to communicate and being confident and sure of myself, whereas before I wasn’t.

Brad: Oh, I get it.

WooCommerce challenges

Bob: So back to WooCommerce, do you have any challenges? Is there anything when you’re working on WooCommerce sites these days and it’s moving along just like everything else. Is there anything you hope to see change in the future or is there specific parts of it that you find a bit challenging still?

Eric: Yeah. Think sometimes it’s hard to deal with just how piecemeal it is. You get some nice functionality right out of the box with it. If you need a certain kind of shipping type. I have a lot of clients that like to use table rate shipping. And I understand everybody has to make money. That’s one of those things I think should just be built into the core. And maybe someday there’s a professional edition of WooCommerce that bundles all that stuff with it. I don’t know …

Brad: This is like a SaaS product or something.

Eric: Well, people are starting to do that. So I but it seems like it can be a challenge too, and I’m actually writing about that, this month it should be coming out over on The WP Minute, about the challenge of selling clients on WooCommerce, because it is so piecemeal, just getting the project requirements down, it can be very difficult. You have to ask a lot of questions or else you’re probably going to come back in the middle of the project and say, “Hey, I’m sorry. I think you need this other extension and that’s going to be another a hundred bucks a year, another 200 bucks a year.” So, those are the kind of things that I think should improve over time. I understand the ecosystem and I love what it does, but there’s also a drawback to it. And I think as a designer, you really got to be on your toes when you’re judging what these project requirements are, otherwise you’re in for a surprise at some point during the build.

Brad: Yeah, that’s fair. At the end of the day, it’s open source, right? So even if automatic had some type of offering that bundled things or whatever, it doesn’t mean you have to do that, right. There’s always going to be options.

The future of WordPress

Bob: So, the future of WordPress. Do you have any thoughts of where you see things going? Any particular piece of it? Whether it’s WooCommerce related or not, where you have an opinion or you foresee it going in a certain way.

Eric: I’m very interested to see what happens with the block themes. These are fascinating to me, because on the one hand you have this easy way to drag and drop your way to a custom site, right? But then as a developer, you might want to lock certain things down, which I know there’s some methods for doing, but how do we build a project that has everything the developer wants in terms of making sure the layout doesn’t break. Making sure that a client can inadvertently destroy something, while still allowing this cool technology.

That’s why I haven’t used the full site editing theme or block theme yet. So that’s what I’m waiting for. I’m waiting to find that happy medium for developers and for users. Most of my clients probably would never touch what’s going on in full site editing, at least not at this point. I might have some that are adventurous and want to do it. But that to me is going to be the more interesting topic for six to 12 months down the road, how are people using this? What lessons will we learn from it?

Brad: Yeah. I’m definitely on board with that because with great power comes great responsibility, right? I always talk about page builders and how I’m a backend dev. I can make things very functional, but they’re not going to look great. And if you give me a drag and drop builder and tell me to make a page that really looks awesome, I’ll probably struggle with it, right? So how do you find that balance of give them some flexibility and some control, but not too much where they can literally go and destroy everything that they paid for and make their brand, and their business and everything to look cheap and thrown together, whatever. It’s like there definitely needs to be a balance. We’re seeing a little bit of that with the block editor, because there’s so many blocks now, core blocks, and you add some plugins, it adds more blocks.

And if you don’t have a plan with your clients to say, “Hey, are we styling all these blocks? Do you need all these blocks?” You either going to end up styling a hundred blocks, or you need to figure out a way to turn the ones off that you don’t need, because then at some point someone will use one that you didn’t expect them to use and it won’t be ready. It won’t look good on the front end. Something won’t work right. So, it’s this idea of taking things out of the box and then turning them a little bit. So it lines up with what your client or what you actually need in a product. So I’m very interested in that too, because that’s the only way I think some of the certainly larger corporations would even buy into this, if you can really lock it down certain ways where it makes sense.

Eric: Yeah. And then what happens with classic themes too? I’ve been thinking about this. Is there going to be a point where WordPress no longer supports them? Is there going to be a point where so much stuff no longer works with them that people are going to have to go to block themes? There’s a lot of kind of philosophical questions, I guess, coming down the road on that. And we’re been an interesting time, between time. If you’re starting a project today, how do you start it? Do you just keep doing what you’ve been doing? Or do you have to bend to these other ideas and I’m interested to see how people want to handle that.

Bob: Yeah. We all see where this all leads to. So been a great conversation, Eric. Really learned a lot. It was great to hear more of what you do in the space. Where is the best place for people to connect with you?

Brad: You can usually find me on Twitter just about 24 hours a day.

Bob: Remember that, 24 hours a day.

Brad: 1:00 AM tweets. Let’s go.

Yeah, this has been great, Eric. Definitely appreciate you sharing your story and experiences and having some fun conversations and speculation on what the future holds for WordPress and block editor, and full sight editing, and all that great stuff. But definitely love hearing the stories, especially the OG builders back in the 90s, that’s when I was going too. Brings me back a lot of good memories.

Eric: Those were the good old days definitely, but not really. But I really thank you guys for having me on it. It’s been a pleasure and honor.