[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, enhancing Gutenberg with agency driven block editor innovations.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. . Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Johanne Courtright. Johanne started working with WordPress back in 2011, moving over from a background in marketing agencies, Dreamweaver and Static HTML sites. Over the years, she’s become a skill developer, focusing on extending WordPress through custom queries, forms, integrations with APIs, and increasingly harnessing the power of the block editor and React.

Johanne talks about her journey from the classic world of agency WordPress development to embracing Gutenberg, and the challenges and wins along the way. She shares her experience in building custom blocks, and enhancing existing ones to better serve agencies. Things like improving break points, color palettes, responsive designs, and navigation, all of which aren’t offered in Core yet. These features come together in her growing open source project Groundworx.

We talk about the shifting landscape from classic themes to block-based themes, and why even in 2025, a lot of agencies and users are still hesitant to make the leap fully. Johanne explains where the block editor falls short for her use, and how Groundworx aims to plug these perceived gaps with a foundation of flexible, performant, agency focus blocks and templates.

You will hear about her approach to building modular themes with theme.json, the realities of client work and scope creep, and how the 80 20 rule shapes what belongs in Core, and what’s best handled by plugins.

We also get into the challenge of discovery in the WordPress plugin ecosystem, her wishlist for block editor improvements, and her take on the future of block-based businesses in WordPress.

Whether you’re a developer eager to modernize your workflow, or just curious about extending Gutenberg for real world use, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Johanne Courtright.

I am joined on the podcast by Johanne Courtright. Hello, Johanne.

[00:03:21] Johanne Courtright: Hi. Nice to be here.

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, very nice to have you with us. I put a tweet out not that long ago, seeing if anybody wanted to come on the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, and Johanne was very kind and reached out to me. And we had a little bit of toing and froing. Not a lot, but a little bit. And I thought that the topic of conversation that she suggested was extremely curious.

As you’ll discover in a moment, Johanne has been working hard trying to make the block editor, well, I’m going to use the word improved. Trying to add things to the block editor to make it more usable.

That conversation though, probably would benefit from us knowing exactly who you are, and what your background is. Maybe if we stick to the WordPress bits and pieces, but would you mind just giving us a little biography? Tell us a bit about you.

[00:04:00] Johanne Courtright: Sure. I got into WordPress in 2011, working for a marketing agency. It solved a big problem at the time coming from Dreamweaver, HTML static pages. My writing to that was a lot of convincing, but it was a very welcome change. WordPress made a huge impact on a lot of agencies.

And so we used it for, primarily for home builders, and it was great. Discovered Advanced Custom Fields, tapped into that. Custom post types. It was a lot of fun for many years and I’ve worked for other agencies after that too, and my specialty has always been around extending as far as I can. Custom queries and forms, tapping into CRM and with APIs and all sorts of things. Anything that can be done with WordPress I was doing it, pretty much.

[00:04:55] Nathan Wrigley: Are you self-taught then, or have you learned on the job? Or did you go through like a university program or something like that?

[00:05:00] Johanne Courtright: Just learned on the job. Just looking for solution, and WordPress felt like it was a great fit. A lot of support online, a lot of documentation, just a lot of people providing enough documentation to be able to explore was very helpful. And there was Joomla and Drupal that was also contenders, but I didn’t like Drupal’s interface, and I wasn’t a fan of how unstable Joomla was from updating versions to versions. So for me, it was a pretty fast decision to go with WordPress.

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: I think WordPress is a really great thing to hang your coat on if you are learning, because there’s so much, like you said, documentation. So much of it is prebuilt, so you can just download a version of WordPress and dig in basically, and see how somebody else over many years, in the case of WordPress, 22 years, how that has been built.

Whereas I always found when I was digging in, so this is prior to me using any CMS, I had those PHP books, paper books, where you try to learn. And you’d always learn from nothing and you’d have to start building up and anything that you did wrong, you kind of really didn’t know what was going on.

And so I quickly moved into the CMS space, and probably a little bit like you, WordPress was able to scaffold my learning. And quite a lot of the things that I thought I wouldn’t be interested in, I could skip over. I don’t know, things like permissions and stuff. WordPress already did that, so I didn’t really have to worry about how all of that was taken care of. So it enabled me to learn more quickly. And then of course, there’s the whole community behind it, and knowledge bases and articles and that whole thing. So I well understand your story.

However, you’ve gone in a much more developer direction, I think, than I ever did. Looking at the bits and pieces that you are doing now, I think it’s fair to say that you have become a really competent developer, not just with things like PHP and JavaScript, but also I think more recently with things like React as well. How are you finding all of that, the new React based WordPress? Is it still maintaining the interest or are you banging your head on the wall a lot?

[00:06:58] Johanne Courtright: I started Gutenberg, I started to use it pretty much around the time it came out. I had a bit of a struggle because I had to learn React for it. I didn’t want to be left behind, so I really tried hard, took a course online to accelerate a bit of my learning. And then I faced a time where it was just too much work to be done.

But the last agency I worked at, I started I think like four or five years ago, they were open. They wanted to tackle it. And so we’re a team of three to start, and we made like a core foundation of blocks that we needed over time, building off projects and versions.

And so it was a lot of fun, but in the same time we were still stuck in the old world with ACF for some of it. And I wasn’t quite pleased on some of it, but I understand sometimes like the budget, because I’m allowed to be fully a hundred percent Gutenberg. So when I decided to start something on my own to solve those things, I went a hundred percent Gutenberg, Interactivity API, no jQuery as much as possible. I decided to dive in completely, a hundred percent, because I believed in it. I knew how to solve those issues.

[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, all of those things that you’ve mentioned, you know, things like custom fields and things like that, they’re really curious, aren’t they? I mean, they’re really interesting stuff that you can do there, and it’s very much time saving, but it does feel like in the future there are utterly different possibilities there. And blocks, and all of the different bits and pieces that we’ll get into that you are working on, afford the chance to build custom solutions for every single project, without necessarily relying on downloading a plugin. You know, writing a bit of code, which will achieve a bit of functionality for this particular block or that particular block.

However, all of that stuff being said, and the sort of rainbow version that we’ve painted of Gutenberg, it’s pretty obvious to me that during the last few years, there must be parts of the block editor that you’ve found to be lacking. Because as we’re going to discover, you’ve got a project called Groundworx, which is an endeavor in lots of different ways to bring features into the block editor which you feel probably, I’m guessing you feel, should have been shipped a long time ago.

And I think it’s fair to say that your endeavor here is not to create a new suite of blocks, which you would download and replace core blocks. You are trying to enhance the paragraph block or the whatever block it may be. So you’re taking the core block, adding functionality into it. Have I got that right? Is that the endeavor?

[00:09:34] Johanne Courtright: I have some extra blocks, but I did enhance quite a bit of what was already there, but not too much that it would interfere if they were to ever support. I mean, I have to be cautious on what I’m adding. But essentially, if you take WordPress as is, it’s good enough for somebody who’s starting, but it’s not good enough for an agency.

[00:09:57] Nathan Wrigley: What are the bits that you think are missing? And honestly, feel free to just dig deep here. I know for me what I found lacking, but it only maps to the things that I have had to do. But I’m curious what a different person having worked for agencies and built a suite of blocks, what are the, I don’t know, four, five different things that you really feel are missing?

[00:10:15] Johanne Courtright: You have to be pixel perfect with agencies, and they work with break points, and in containers and whatnot. And so you have to really kind of like stretch it further. And you have to also provide user experience efficiencies, for example, colour palettes and things like that. So you have to make it easier. So having presets of colours that already predetermined based on their branding, is ideal. So they can choose those presets, it already applies all the colours and your set. And then they can still override each components, which is amazing. That was something very important.

So efficiencies and ease of use was great. So a combination of some custom blocks, but a lot of pre-made templates that you can make for them, and colour palettes. So the more you embrace Gutenberg, the more you can make it happen. But if you have those solutions that are not quite fully Gutenberg, it becomes a little bit complex because you’re fighting Gutenberg.

[00:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: Did you build your suite of blocks? And we’ll get into what that means in a minute, and we can highlight the different bits and pieces that you’ve got. But did you build that out of frustration or were there, I don’t know, particular things that a particular project needed that was pretty edge case that you thought you’d build? Or is this more a case of, okay, everybody needs these things, it’s curious that they’re missing in Core? What’s the approach? Is it kind of edge case stuff or is it more, everybody could benefit from these?

[00:11:42] Johanne Courtright: It’s a little bit of everything. Most of the time, agencies would need those extra features I brought in. The problem is, I didn’t want to overwhelm normal users as well with so many options. And I think that’s where Gutenberg is shining essentially.

The padding system, for example. It’s got increments, but it doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of like, this is the padding for this break point, this is the padding for this break point. But you can still tap into it by using clamp on your padding to adjust based on your screen resolution. So you can solve that problem without having to specify all those extra padding for each break point.

So there’s a lot of different ways to set up your theme.json to compensate for the lack of extra features per breakpoint. And that’s what I’ve been doing. And my goal is to set up enough blocks and provide, I’ll have a theme.json that I want to share, so it’ll be easy for people to have a starting theme to start with. And I’m planning to release that for free. I was just, there’s a lot to be done and provide documentation. There’s just a lot. It’s hard to get everything done fast.

[00:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no kidding. I mean, have you built your own themes then from the ground up, or do you tend to rely on, I don’t know, a default theme and then modify that?

[00:13:06] Johanne Courtright: I actually prefer to use my own theme. In fact, coming from the old world, you would put everything in a theme. You would put just all your functionality. And then you learn over time that it’s probably better to have a plugin, but then you still had the crossover of the two dependencies. You have to be cautious to not crash your site if one wasn’t, like if you switched a theme or if you switch a plugin.

And then Gutenberg made it easier to create that separation because you can set up, if you set up your theme properly, you can have essentially 90% of your theme set up in a way where it’s accent one for colour, accent two for colour base, and contrast. So if you label your things, your keys properly, all you have to do is change the values. Don’t change the key names. And just create labels that are meaningful. You can create another theme super easy from that initial theme by just changing those labels and those values, and leave the keys alone. Sure, you’ll have probably more colours on certain other themes, but your foundation will help you get there faster.

[00:14:19] Nathan Wrigley: I know that many years ago when Full Site Editing, as it was called back then dropped, and so block themes became a thing. I know that there was a hope that it would, over a fairly short period of time, that it would replace what we’re now calling Classic Themes. There was this period of time where, you know, both were still massively in development. And I think the hope was that over time, Classic Themes would become more obsolete, and then block-based themes would become the default.

It feels from where I’m standing now, so we’re recording this in December, 2025, it feels as if that kind of hasn’t really happened. That promise is still, we’re still somewhere in limbo. There’s a few people out there in the WordPress space who are promoting Full Site Editing and all of the things that that can do, but I also feel there’s a lot of people who are not willing to make that leap.

And I guess part of the problem maybe is that it’s easy for somebody like you because you’re in it day in, day out. You know where every menu is. You know where to put the mouse to achieve the exact thing you want at the exact moment that you want. But I feel that for a novice user, maybe somebody who’s got the job of, I don’t know, finishing off a website or somebody who’s got the job of just tweaking a website once it’s been handed over, I think it’s really hard, and a lot of the interface is kind of counterintuitive.

And when you stand over the shoulder, as I have done, of people who’ve never used WordPress before, and you watch them, you see them flailing around trying to figure out how it works, and you see the constant butting up against a UX problem. I don’t know when that moment’s going to be, where everything is all tied off and perfect, but it doesn’t seem like in the year 2025, the few weeks that we’ve got left, or anytime soon in 2026, as if the Classic Themes are going to go away.

And I don’t know if that concerns you at all, because obviously you’ve really invested in all these blocks and theming and all of that kind of stuff. Does it bother you that this is still a problem that we haven’t solved?

[00:16:18] Johanne Courtright: I think what’s out there right now, the third party, what they’re doing, I mean, they’re solving some issues, but they’re adding a whole new platform on another existing platform, and that’s why I don’t choose those solutions. I prefer embracing the Core vision and try to expand what’s already there.

One of my struggles I have is that, let’s just pick Elementor. You have a lot of great options. I mean, for somebody who knows what they’re doing, it does a lot, but it also comes with a lot of extra bloat of divs and CSS that’s not quite built how I would’ve done it. You have to fight the styling. And WordPress does it so different now. With Gutenberg, it’s the opposite. It does very little, and it allows you to override all the classes. The way it’s built, it’s allowing you to override easily without having to use the important on the styling to override it.

And I think that’s a major change of how you think, and how you approach theming in general. This is the way. This is the way how it should be done. And once I stopped fighting how the new way was, and understanding where they were heading with that, something clicked and it just like, yes, this is what I want, this is what I want. And I made that call that I’m not going back.

No normal users want to touch Divi or Elementor. Somebody who doesn’t have the knowledge of basic CSS even, they don’t want to touch that. It’s overwhelming. They don’t know how to touch it. And in fact, they’re scared. And when you present them with Gutenberg, you give them an hour training over Zoom session, they are in love with it. They make edits themselves. They’re just happy. They rarely come back with more questions. They just know how to use it.

[00:18:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think we’re fast approaching a period in WordPress when a lot of the admin UI is about to change. So there’s a lot of foundational work being put in at the moment to really modify it. So maybe some of that dissonance that users might face in the near future will go away. And maybe those kind of block-based themes, and Gutenberg use in general will spike. There certainly seems to be a lot of work being done in that regard anyway.

Let’s just move on to some of the bits and pieces that you have been doing though. Because obviously there must be, well, dissatisfaction is the wrong word, but there’s obviously bits of the block editor where you feel that work could have been done differently.

And so I’m going to point people in the direction of your work. So if you go to groundworx.dev, and worx is spelt with an X at the end. So it’s the word ground, and then WOR and then the letter X, dot dev. If you go there, you’ll be able to find the product menu. And if you hover over the product menu, you’ll be able to see a bunch of things called Groundworx core and things like that, Groundworx navigation.

And I want to dwell on Groundworx core. So this is your endeavor to improve the blocks that WordPress offers, and offer some new ones and modifications to existing ones. Tell us what the philosophy behind this is then.

[00:19:29] Johanne Courtright: So some of the more fun blocks where they have like animation and all that are custom blocks. But they’re flexible in the way they’re easy to set up, intuitive. But I think for me, offering the capability to someone who wants those type of things that are not offered, it’s not necessarily a frustration for those because it’s just in addition to, it’s nice to have, it’s not a must have, essentially. They’re really nice, already pre-made blocks with the inner blocks and content that you can change.

One of the ones that are, I think, lacking, I know we have the accordion block that came in recently. Mine is different, where I can have an accordion, but I can also have a tab. A tab that can turn into an accordion based on a specific break point. So it won’t go from accordion, to tab, to accordion, back to tab at several different break points, but it will have one point where you’ll tell it to break.

So you can have a tab that can turn into accordion, which is nice to have because, I mean, tabs are not very friendly, but you still want them. You still want them. They’re useful visually at larger desktops, but you don’t necessarily want to deal with tabs at a mobile, unless they’re very small text and very few. So you need something to shift that. And you want to keep consistency. With accordions that you already have, so it looks good altogether. So that’s what I created. I have an accordion, and a tab, but the tab can fall into an accordion as well. And when they do fall into an accordion, they all look consistent and the same.

[00:21:13] Nathan Wrigley: So currently if you, I’ll put the link in the show notes by the way. So if you go to wptavern.com and you search for the episode with Johanne in, then you’ll find all of the show notes. It’s probably easier than me reading out URLs and what have you.

Your kind of block suite falls into two main categories, as far as I’m concerned anyway. So you’ve got your purpose built 11 kind of custom blocks where you are doing something that Core didn’t do. Although we might discuss how Core might tackle some of those things in the near future.

But then also, the bit that I find really interesting is the whole section where you’ve got extension to Core blocks. So as an example, I’ll give you some examples of things which, dear listener, if you don’t use Gutenberg, you may be surprised to know that the block editor currently does not do these things.

So for example, you have the capacity to reverse the order of a stack, which is really nice. So you might want to just, I don’t know, put an image above something on a desktop. And then on mobile, you might just want to flip that, or you might just want to flip it because you are doing, I don’t know, copy and pasting rows, but you want the image left, image right, image left, image right, that kind of thing.

You’ve also added in break points for certain widths. So for example, a tablet break point might be in there. You’ve got a full height sticky for the group block, which is nice and interesting as well. Three breakpoints for WordPress headings and paragraphs. That’s nice. So you could, I don’t know, change the font size or something like that depending on what you’re looking at.

Column counts. So you’ve got the ability to have different breakpoints in the Core list block as well.

You’ve got a whole thing about performance optimisation for the video block, and then you’ve got a responsive setting for any break point that you may set. I probably butchered all of that, but you get the idea. You’ve got a ton of stuff that you’ve built on top of Core WordPress blocks.

Why do you, because I mean, all of that I guess is given away to everybody, but there’s got to be an expectation, I suppose, that some of this stuff will ship in Core. Does that bit worry you? Does it worry you that you put in all this hard work and then somebody maybe in the Core project thinks, oh, that’s a good idea, let’s add that to the roadmap and what have you.

[00:23:16] Johanne Courtright: I mean, it’s always a worry when you release something for WordPress because everything is GPL, but it’s just part of the ecosystem. I mean, I reverse engineered their blocks to learn what I know now.

[00:23:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah.

[00:23:28] Johanne Courtright: And if they think it’s great idea then, you know, as long as they give me credit, I guess it’s fine.

But I say, not everyone will need break points. I mean, this is really more like, I’d say agency type things that usually you want those things, those features. They’re nice to have, but break points are not necessarily, I have to have it kind of thing if you are just a normal user. It’s more, if you want fine tuning for, like if you’re a designer and you really want those fine tunings, then they’re there.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: Does it kind of surprise you though that we are now, oh goodness knows how many years we’re into the Gutenberg project, but it’s many, many years. It’s more than you can count on one hand. Does it surprise you that this stuff is still missing? That somebody like you needs to build this functionality and, well, needs is maybe the wrong word, but desires to build this functionality. Does it surprise you that this kind of thing wasn’t in it when it shipped, that a layout system with all the break points taken care of and all of that completely customisable, does it still shock you that that isn’t there?

[00:24:34] Johanne Courtright: I have not done a whole lot of research, but based on what I’ve read so far is there was no intention to support it. So that’s why I decided to do it because I was like, I’m not going to wait for them to do it because they’re not going to do it.

[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it was never something that was intended that was missing. It was just, it was never, literally never intended. So somebody needed to ship it. It’s kind of like that WordPress 80 20 rule. That’s the other curious thing about WordPress usage. Somebody like you and somebody like me who is constantly in there and fiddling the entire time, you kind of have this expectation that a lot of this stuff, oh, everybody would need this because I need it.

But the reality is, I guess most people are just logging in, changing a piece of text, maybe uploading an image, writing a blog post, clicking publish, and they’re done. And they’re relying on their agencies who’ve got the CSS, JavaScript, all of that React expertise that can build all of the different bits and pieces for them. So maybe it’s just me obsessing about these things because I’m in there all the time and I can see how they’re missing.

[00:25:36] Johanne Courtright: I think the way I build themes these days is like extremely light. It’s like, there’s a theme.json, there’s very little CSS and very, very little JavaScript. Everything is moved towards plugins. It’s really meant for colours, font types, branding type things. I have very little things in my themes these days because I believe that somebody who has a website and tomorrow they want a different theme, even for Christmas, and they decide, oh, I want a Christmas theme, should be able to do it easily by just swapping the theme.

[00:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: Clicking a button and it should all work, yeah.

[00:26:14] Johanne Courtright: Click a button, and all of a sudden it’s the new font, it’s the new palette colour, and it just works with minimal effort to just change anything or tweak anything. That’s how I see it. You shouldn’t have things that are baked in your theme where if you change your theme, now all of a sudden it’s not available for that theme. Don’t lock your clients into essentially a theme with features, and then they’re stuck with your theme.

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s an interesting way of kind of spinning my question around in a sense. That whole thing that we have with clients where we have scope creep, you offer something, they agree to it, and then there’s this whole thing after you’ve built what they wanted, where they say, oh, but can we have, and then can we have, and what about this? We’ve got this idea as well. But that’s not the intention. The project was what we said it was going to be.

And so in a sense, the WordPress project is a little bit like that. You know, it’s not trying to be every feature for every human being who ever thought a thing could be achieved. It’s more, here’s the foundational stuff, and if you really want those things, well, either build it yourself or go and find somebody who has built that for you.

That kind of makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? You know, if you’ve got this foundational platform, and I know the 80 20 rule, like I said, applies within WordPress. If 80% of the people need it, then it comes onto the scope of Core, and if it doesn’t reach that then it really doesn’t belong in Core. That’s kind of interesting because that reframes the whole thing and makes what you are saying true.

Most of the things that you’ve got, that you’ve built on top of Core, and again, I’ll direct people to the URL on the WP Tavern website. They probably aren’t for 80% of the people, they probably are for the 20%, the people like you, the developers, the designers who are building websites. The inexperienced people, the 80%, maybe they don’t need this stuff. That’s an interesting reframing of it.

[00:28:07] Johanne Courtright: Yeah, most people will probably be satisfied with just the basic theme that comes with WordPress. It’s got enough patterns at this point to have a good starting foundation. We need to get away from overbuilding our blocks in such a way where they’re rigid, this is the only thing it can do.

So when I build my blocks, I build in such a way the HTML can be moved around with grid system CSS, where I can move things because I built it in such a way that it’s very flexible. So all you have to do after that is just you create like some styling to accommodate that other different behavior that you want.

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: So we’ve spoken just then about the bits and pieces that, you’ve extended WordPress Core and we described all of those. But there’s obviously bits that you felt were entirely missing that you thought might be useful to have. As I said a moment ago, some of these maybe are things that, I don’t know, maybe you’ll drop in the near future, or perhaps you’ll tweak in different ways because you did say that your accordion block behaves differently. But I know that the accordion block is coming to Core and what have you.

But you’ve got things like an Accordion Block, you’ve got an Accordion Panel Block, a Tabs Block, Tabs Panel Block, Media Section Block, Media Content Split Block, that’s interesting. Card block, Card Reveal Block and many others. This is, I guess, is this you sort of dogfooding projects that you’ve had in the past where a client has wanted a particular thing and you’ve thought, oh yeah, I’ve now built that, let’s see if we can sort of make it more generic and add it into your suite of blocks?

[00:29:43] Johanne Courtright: Those are pretty much blocks that keeps happening and being reused over and over and over. And they kind of become your basic foundation, if that makes sense. And they usually solve 90%, 95% of what you need for a site is essentially what’s part of the Core, is how I solved it. Another one that I solved that is very similar to what WordPress does was the Core Navigation.

[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you’ve got a whole other thing there, haven’t you? Yeah, that’s interesting.

[00:30:12] Johanne Courtright: Yeah, this one is completely free, so I mean, my navigation falls very similarly what WordPress does, where I have a custom post type, I have blocks in it, and essentially it will use those menus that I can reuse in different parts of navigations. And the major difference is that WordPress is only this big modal and then you have very little customisation. It can go left or right, I think center.

[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: That’s more or less it really, isn’t it?

[00:30:45] Johanne Courtright: Yes. And it is annoying because if you choose left or right, well, it also affects your desktop versus modal, I didn’t like that. But I did like the idea of having the blocks sitting into a custom post type. So mine in that way does that too. But I didn’t want to interfere with what WordPress had done, so I created my own custom post type for it. But I’m still following the same principle where I have my blocks sitting in that custom post types be shared so I can reuse them.

[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: So you can use Core navigation blocks containing the pages and the posts and things like that. How do you build them up?

[00:31:25] Johanne Courtright: Well, I essentially copied over the link and the sub menu and I brought over some of their features, because I did like how they were, but I changed the HTML in it and what it’s capable of doing. Had a couple different things. That allowed me the flexibility to create accordions, and all sorts of different things without having to worry about having, you know how some sites will have a mobile menu, but they’ll have the same menu for the desktop, but it’s like a clone, but you don’t see it. I didn’t want that. Everything had to be done from the same HTML structure, and all it had to do is just essentially fall back gracefully into that other mode. And what was important also for me was that it was all Interactivity API.

[00:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay, you’ve been leveraging that.

[00:32:23] Johanne Courtright: Yeah. So they’re all leveraging that. I was inspired also by Gutenberg Times website to do the vertical menu.

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, they’ve got the, I don’t know which theme they’re using, but that I think was a default theme. Was it 2020?

[00:32:37] Johanne Courtright: I was like, this is different. I want one like that. So I did support it too.

[00:32:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I see that. So on your navigation block, one of the options is to have this kind of full height column, which you can invoke and the menu, I guess slides out, but it then collapses back into that full size column. Have you had much feedback on that? Because it, I always worry that that’s going to consume quite a bit of the real estate when it’s not being invoked. Whereas, you know, a little hamburger icon, which is sitting at the top of the screen is obviously not consuming anything once you’ve scrolled past the navigation menu. Does it stay there all the time? If you’re not using the menu at that moment, does it live there all the time or, how does it work?

[00:33:14] Johanne Courtright: The bar stays there all the time. It’s up to you to add links that are useful in terms of what you’re doing. But, yes, it does stay there. It takes a little bit of the space, but it’s fine. You can choose also at what break point it will be sitting at the top instead.

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Got it. Right. There is an option to remove it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

[00:33:38] Johanne Courtright: Yeah. So you’re not, let’s just say you wanted to stop doing that at laptop or something, or tablet, then you just choose the option and it will just break to the other one at the top instead.

[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you’ve built a suite of blocks, so six at the moment that work in concert together to build that. So you’ve got the Navigation Block, which I’m guessing is kind of the wrapper for that, I’m not sure. But then you’ve got the Branding Block, which I presume holds logos and things like that. The Menu Block, which is the responsive bit where you can display stack menu items and things like that. Sub Menus, which I guess allows you to create those accordions where there’s a parent item, but things hidden underneath. A Link Block where you can just add a single thing, which I guess isn’t inside any other navigation anywhere. And then a spacer block, just something to create a bit of breathing room to separate one thing from another. And those six things, you just build in your custom post type, and once you’ve built them there, you can then invoke it and construct it entirely in the block editor.

You see this kind of stuff is really cool and really clever. Just the idea that you can build that in a, in this GUI, the block editor. Build it, style it, do all of the bits and pieces that you need to make it look nice inside the settings panel. It’s so great. The promise of Gutenberg delivered, really. This is the kind of stuff that it was always supposed to do, but people only seem to be getting to it now.

[00:34:57] Johanne Courtright: You know, you did ask me a few times if there was a feature I wish was in WordPress, and I do have one right now. Theme.json, you can specify specific colours for your buttons and your texts, your background, but I wish there was a way for us to set up other variables or some other things to specify more colours. So for example, my navigation, I have a lot more colours than two. I wish there was a way for me to set those up instead of using CSS and then the variable name and then manually injecting those.

[00:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Overriding things. Yeah.

[00:35:36] Johanne Courtright: Allow me to have custom keys or something where I can just say, oh, put your colours here, and then it will just generate whatever it needs to do. So if there was a way for me to have a block and specify, say, this is going to be the selector, this is the selector and this is the key. And then in the theme.json, all the person has to do is set up the key and the colour and it just applies it. That would be a nice feature.

[00:36:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s curious, you know, if for example, I was to go to, I don’t know, Squarespace or something like that and build my website with their technology, I guess there’s an expectation that what you get is what you get. This is it. You know, you pay your $20 a month or whatever it may be, I have no idea, and the features that you have are what you have. Maybe you can put in a support request somewhere and ask for another feature, but basically it’s very unlikely, I imagine, to happen.

Whereas just about everybody on the developer side of things, fiddling with WordPress, is constantly coming up with new ideas and different ways it can be adapted. And so there’s always this sense of, oh, I could build this thing into it, or I could do, and so it kind of breeds, not dissatisfaction, that’s the wrong word, but a curiosity for what it could do.

So you’ve just given a perfect example there. You’ve got this use case, which I don’t think I would probably make much use of. I think I’m probably happy with the two colours, but clearly in your scenarios that’s a way that you would like to adapt it.

And that’s why the platform is so cool. Maybe at some point somebody will listen to that request and will implement that for you in Core. If not, you maybe have to suffer the CSS load that you’ve got in the meantime. But that is really what separates it. You know, we’ve got this idea that, if you contribute, and you put your ideas in and you show up and you, you know, you offer your time, then that kind of stuff can be changed.

[00:37:28] Johanne Courtright: I have to say, I know that it creates a lot of friction at the moment and how they’re guarding and guiding very specifically. And they’re clear in their vision and they want to follow that vision, and it creates some frustration for some people who want things done differently. But I appreciate that they’re doing that because it was a long term project. The frustration probably comes from, I wish it was there, what it is today, many years ago, when it came out. But I do appreciate that there’s somebody with a vision who stick to their vision because I think it’s the right way.

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and interestingly, everybody else’s vision can also be lived. So, you know, there’s a variety of different page builders, and I know that’s not your thing, but it is the thing of many millions of people. They love that, and that’s their preferred way of doing it. You can’t do that on these other proprietary platforms. There isn’t a different entire UX and UI that you can inject into it, but we have that, you know? And if you want to use a page builder, or you want to use whatever it is that you want to use, that’s the way it is.

I suppose the only thing we’ve got to be mindful of is the flame was that sometimes occur. You know, people saying, well, my tool is the best tool. Anybody else that’s using anything else is missing out or what have you, or maybe stronger language than that. And just recognise that, well, the reason that you can do that is because there’s this foundational stuff, the WordPress Core.

[00:39:00] Johanne Courtright: They’re allowing it.

[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and it’s allowing you to have that, and you don’t have to use Gutenberg. But it does feel, it really does feel as if in the latter part of 2025, it does feel as if there’s a little bit more excitement around the Block Editor and the different bits and pieces. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on that, but there seems to be more stories. There seems to be more people shipping products that latch onto the block editor. Yours obviously is an example of that.

[00:39:24] Johanne Courtright: The biggest hurdle is to learn it’s a different mindset, different language, it’s different in so many ways. There’s just too much to learn to jump from old way to new way. And it’s very overwhelming for a lot of people. It’s very, very overwhelming.

[00:39:45] Nathan Wrigley: Genuinely don’t know how we bridge that gap, to be honest, because I think you’re right. If you’ve been familiar with using WordPress in its classic form, then it is, it’s seismic. But more or less, every developer that I know has at least some curiosity in Gutenberg and things like that, so probably.

[00:40:00] Johanne Courtright: Once people fully decide to embrace it and take the time to reverse engineer and understand it, they’re like, oh, wow. All the cool stuff I can do. Yes. You know? And they change their mind completely. It’s a bit challenging because I mean, even like, let’s just say Tailwind, which is the CSS framework. I mean, it’s great. Tailwind is amazing, but when you start trying to use it with WordPress, that’s another one that fights WordPress. I stopped using it. I’m just going with SCSS and I build my own stuff. Now I have very little CSS into my blocks and it’s just, there’s no real point to have CSS framework in WordPress. You don’t need that.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to pivot the subject a little bit, and it’s because of a tweet that I saw yesterday, I believe it was. A friend of mine tweeted that he’s yet to see a block solution. So I don’t think that those were the words that he used, but he’s yet to see an out and out successful business built on top of blocks. So the example might be that, for example, on WordPress Core, you’ve got all of these really successful products. So you’ve got things like Gravity Forms and things like that, that have made real, they’ve got a real stable business going on. And he was questioning, have we seen that with blocks yet?

So you are trying to make that happen. You are trying to sell a commercial product. I know that there’s, free versions and things like that, but you’re trying to sell a commercial product. How is that? What is the landscape for that at the moment? Because I’m guessing it’s not like you are printing money at the moment. I don’t know how difficult that is and whether or not it’s been the fountain of cash that maybe you’d hoped it would be.

[00:41:44] Johanne Courtright: I don’t expect it to be a fountain of cash. I love what I do. I do it for myself first, and if other people happen to enjoy it, then But if they don’t, that’s fine, I’m using it.

[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: That’s very sanguine approach. I think his thought when he made that tweet is that maybe we’re on the cusp of something. Because it feels like there’s a certain speed that the flywheel needs to achieve before people become really interested in it. I’m not sure that that has yet happened. But give it some more time, give it some more interesting products, some more attention, some more marketing and what have you. And definitely a lot of the stuff shipping in 6.9, which is actually coming out today. And then 7 next year, and all of the AI bits and pieces that are going to be put in as well. You never know. Maybe with a fair wind, we’ll be printing money for you.

[00:42:38] Johanne Courtright: I do have a message for Matt if he listens. He needs to work on his plugin and themes website. It’s not usable at the moment. It doesn’t leave room for new development, new plugins to be seen. It needs to be feeling more like a community.

I come from a background where I did a lot of desktop customisation. We had featured skins and themes and wallpapers and there was, people were excited. There was somebody reviewing. Think about it about how Apple does their Apple store, where they had like featured apps. Somebody went and tested a few of those plugins and featured them. They pick them. We need more, something like that.

We also need to have a better search. Search is awful. It’s all stuffed keywords. And if you’ve been around for a while, if you’re new, there’s no way for you to rank for anything. There needs to be true categories and easier ways to find what you’re looking for.

[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, that’s a whole interesting other conversation, isn’t it? Maybe we’ll have that one time. But I get what you mean. When the iPhone came out, don’t know if you sort of remember or go back that far, but when the iPhone came out, it was this curious but beautiful object that had a lovely screen and could play songs and things. But the moment the app store came along for the iPhone, that’s I think when it became really interesting.

And it does feel with the advent of blocks, like there’s an opportunity similar to that in that WordPress is no longer just these plugins and themes. We’ve got this whole other thing now, these blocks, these mini applications if you like, which really in many ways have full capabilities like plugins would do. And being able to surface those and find a block or a.

[00:44:26] Johanne Courtright: You should be able to set, are you supporting Gutenberg? Is it using jQuery? Is it using those basic little things like check, check, check? And if some people are looking for those things, they should be able to find you.

Right now it’s useless. It’s very useless, even for me looking for a plugin. Most of the plugins I found these days are because I use Google or AI, or there’s other means, but it’s very hard to find. I don’t even rank in the first 40 some pages for my navigation, so it’s ridiculous. Look for navigation, you won’t find me.

[00:45:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so maybe that’s work to be done in 2026. But hopefully somebody has heard your plea there and you never know. If they have and they want to reach out to you, well, obviously we know that you’ve got the Groundworx with an X, .dev website. Is there another place where you hang out online that people could find you if they wanted to have a chat?

[00:45:23] Johanne Courtright: I’ve been hanging out a lot on X these days. I get a lot more response there. It seems to be WordPress community hangs out there a lot, so I think that’s going to be my platform of choice for a while.

[00:45:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, into the show notes, along with the links to all of the bits and pieces that we mentioned, I will bury the link to Johanne’s X profile as well, so you can go and connect there.

Thank you so much for chatting to me today. It’s really interesting getting your insight into all of the bits and pieces that you’ve done extending Gutenberg, but also all of the bits and pieces that you’ve done with new stuff as well. Go check it out. It’s Groundworx.dev. Johanne, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:46:01] Johanne Courtright: Thank you for inviting me. Thank you so much. It was great.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how public contributions can shape careers in WordPress.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Topher DeRosia. Topher is a web developer with over 30 years of experience, and he’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community for the past 15 years. He’s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, contributed to projects like HeroPress, and has made it his mission to highlight the power and value of open source and remote work, especially in the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, Topher joins me to talk about the value of working in public, and how sharing your work openly can create unexpected and lasting opportunities. Whether that’s boosting your career, finding a sense of purpose, or building connections across the globe.

We start with Topher’s personal journey, discovering the WordPress community and the profound impact it has had on his life and family. The conversation explores what makes open source communities, like WordPress, so unique, and while working transparently can lead to moments of serendipity and even job offers from people who have seen your contributions many years before.

Topher shares stories about giving back, the motivation that comes from helping others, and the long-term satisfaction that comes from being generous with your time and expertise.

We also discussed the tension between the philanthropic and commercial aspects of WordPress, and how individuals and companies navigate that balance.

Towards the end, Topher reflects on building a body of work over time, trusting in the slow and organic process instead of seeking instant influencer success. He explains why he still chooses to create and share resources for free, motivated by the hope of helping the next person just starting out.

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of sharing your work, finding meaning in open communities, or how to make a difference over the long term, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Topher DeRosia.

I am joined on the podcast by Topher DeRosia. Hello.

[00:03:19] Topher DeRosia: Hello there.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to chat to Topher. We’ve done this before. We’ve had many chats online, but I just want to pay a special thanks to Topher for reasons I won’t bore the audience with, Topher has sort of joined me at extremely late notice, like minutes of notice.

We had a bit of back and forth yesterday about topics that we may cover, and the one that’s going to be covered today is the one that we decided. But he wasn’t expecting this, and so he’s arrived and I’m extremely grateful. So firstly, my deepest thanks for carving out a bit of your day unexpectedly.

[00:03:50] Topher DeRosia: You’re very welcome. This is always fun, and fit my day perfectly.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Thank you. So what we decided to talk about was, and I’ll encapsulate it in a sentence that Topher wrote to me, and then we’ll just sort of get into it and see where we go. Topher said, he’d like to talk about the value of doing things in public, and how this can come back to you later as a way of potentially, I don’t know, boosting your career or just offering some guiding light to the community and what have you.

So first of all, in order to give us some idea, I’m sure that there are people who know you, having listened to the things that you’ve done or consumed the HeroPress website or what have you. Will you just give us a little potted bio of yourself related to, I guess the WordPress community, makes most sense in this context?

[00:04:30] Topher DeRosia: Sure. I have been a web developer for 30 years, which is old, but I got into WordPress about 15 years ago and I did not know there was a community for several years. And Brian Richards said to me, hey, we should do a WordCamp. And I said, what’s a WordCamp? And then of course, my life changed forever after.

Oh, you know what? We started with a meetup, but like 2 weeks later he said we should do a WordCamp. And he said, we should do it this summer. And we were talking, like we were talking in June. So we went from never hearing of it before, to having a WordCamp suddenly. And I’ve been in, all in on the community ever since. I’ve been to nearly 80 WordCamps, all over the world. I’ve been making stuff, building stuff, meeting people ever since.

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:05:13] Topher DeRosia: It’s pretty great.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 80. Gosh, that’s profound. I mean, I don’t consider myself to have a high attendee account, but 80, that really is remarkable.

So I think it’s fair to say that the profundity of the effect of discovering that community is pretty important in your life. You know, it’s had a material impact in every way.

[00:05:31] Topher DeRosia: Hugely. My wife got into the community. My children, both my kids have spoken at WordCamp US. My wife has spoken. My kids have friends in other countries that I don’t know because of the WordPress community. Every parent has that fear of, what if something happened to us? What would happen to the kids? And we have family that would take care of them, you know? It’s nice to know we also have that backup where there are people all over the world who would say, hey, we got room, come on.

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. I joined the WordPress community, so I’d been involved in lots of open source projects, things like Magento and Drupal and things like that. And I know that Drupal has, there’s definitely stuff in the Drupal space that you can attend. But I never did.

And to be honest with you, I didn’t know that that stuff existed until after the fact. And then in about 2014, something like that, I discovered WordPress. And just like you, I had no conception that it was more than some downloadable bit of software. Honestly didn’t even know that it was done by volunteers. I just had probably some assumption that there was an organization or a company behind it that in some way monetised it and made it free and what have you.

And then just got this intuition, I guess, with social networks, the way that they were at that time, you could find groups and discover that there were all these ancillary groups of people doing things with WordPress, you know, groups focusing around page builders and groups focusing around plugins.

And then for me to discover that there were actual events that you could attend was, just like you, really remarkable. And I attended the first one and I kind of thought, oh, we’ll just see how this goes. I’m a bit of an awkward character in person, so I sort of stood around at the back. But it didn’t take me long to sort of be welcomed in. And just like you, completely changed my life. And ever since then, a sizable proportion of my free time has been devoted to curious WordPress things. It’s amazing.

I can’t quite work out what it is about a project like WordPress that inculcates that, fosters that, makes that possible. Because I imagine if you attended, I don’t know, a Cisco networking conference or something like that, it’s not going to have the same feel. So I don’t know if you want to speak to that for a little bit, why you think the community works.

[00:07:36] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have two thoughts about it. One is that I think it’s absolutely because of the people. And it may be chance that the right people found WordPress and got together at the same time. But to that point, that it’s the people, I recently went to two non WordPress conferences in one week.

I went to one for higher education in technology. The people who attended were from universities and colleges, and they were looking for ways to manage web stuff on their entire campus. So do you offer a blog to all 24,000 students, you know? That kind of thing. It was my first time there, but I saw a number of people who were greeting each other and not having seen each other since last year, and the year before, and the year before. And it was very much like a WordCamp. And people talked about how this group is so wonderful and they wait all year long to come back here. And I thought, oh, okay, so this is WordCamp.

And then while I was there, I met somebody who worked at Umbraco, which is an open source .net based CMS. And they’ve been around for 20, more than 20 years, but it’s a very small community, like 0.01% of the market share. And I told her, you know, who I am, what I do, and she’s like, oh, we would love to have you come to our conference this weekend in Chicago. Can I pay you to come? I was like, oh wow, sure.

So I went and it was about a hundred people and it was WordCamp. Everybody there loved the software, loved the community, everybody was friends. It was the same. And expanding just a little more, HeroPress says it’s about people leveraging WordPress to make their lives better. But in actuality, what it is, is open source and remote work combined. It allows people in Malaysia to pick up software and compete on a relatively equal basis with somebody in New York. And in our world, that’s WordPress. But it’s exactly the same with every open source remote work option, Drupal, Umbraco, anything.

[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe open source then is, forgive me, the secret sauce. Maybe that’s the component, the bit that binds those communities together in a way that perhaps, I don’t know, something where a proprietary thing or something was locked down, or profit was the whole point, maybe that is the bit. The fact that there’s a bunch of people gathering together in a kind of philanthropic way. You know, there’s no expectation that my attendance will definitely lead to finance, let’s put it that way.

Like I said, I don’t really have much experience outside the WordPress world, and so my assumption was that there was something a little bit unique. But from what you’ve said, this same exact thing is happening probably a thousand times over throughout the globe, but your expectation there is that the open source component is the bit, the bit that unlocks it.

[00:10:32] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I agree. WordPress has the advantage of a very large user base, which is good and bad. There are certainly more wonderful people in it than if there were fewer. But at that scale, you are just as likely to have really terrible people. I know people that have left the WordPress community because they’ve been treated horrendously, abused, and it breaks my heart. And I want to say, oh, WordPress is different, you won’t find that here, but you will. It’s too big a community to not have that.

[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder what it is then about that sort of spirit of giving back that creates some kind of, I don’t know, hive mind, for want of a better word. You know, there’s just this ethic that you’re all combined on this slightly higher purpose. So in the case of WordPress, and you mentioned Drupal and you mentioned the other CMS with the small market share, the principle there is that you’re working on something, and I guess publishing is the point. You are enabling people who may or may not have a voice to get on the internet and do something, publish something, write something, put images, videos or what have you.

There is some kind of higher calling there. It’s very hard to sort of grasp that, and to really understand it. But do you know what I mean? You’re doing something which, at the end of your days, you can look back and say, there was something there. There was something meaningful, there was something significant and important. And that feeling, that thing, whatever that thing is, is important, and enough to propel people to give up hours and weeks of their lives to do this.

[00:12:04] Topher DeRosia: I think most people enjoy making other people, I don’t know, so many things, more successful, happier, more stable. And there are open source projects that will shrivel up and die because no one ever says thank you. People work on a project for years and years and they think, you know what? Nobody cares. I’m going to go play Frisbee.

But I think the WordPress community is large enough, and we have these events that everybody goes to, that you run into people who have been impacted by the work you do.

There’s a, boy, can’t remember his first name. Heisel. He’s Dutch but lived in England and now he lives in Malta or something. Anyway, I met him for the first time at WordCamp London and he walked up to me and said, hey, I need to shake your hand. I said, okay. He said, a few years ago I lost my job and I didn’t know what I was going to do and I needed to support my family, and I got on OS Training and learned WordPress from your videos, and now I support my family with WordPress. I about broke down in tears right there.

And that kind of thing happens to lots and lots of people. People who say, you know what? This plugin you wrote, it changed my life. I make a living with this now. I support my family.

[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what’s kind of interesting there is that, I guess you did none of it with the expectation of that person wandering up. You know, it’s not like, Topher, you sat down and thought, the more thanks I get, the more I’m going to do. There isn’t that kind of expectation. But it certainly helps, doesn’t it? When somebody does come up and express those thoughts to you. I bet you that carried you through the next days, weeks, or months. You know, the capacity to drag that out of your brain.

[00:13:42] Topher DeRosia: It still is. That was years ago.

[00:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that interesting?

[00:13:45] Topher DeRosia: I do think though that you don’t do it for the thanks, but it’s a lot easier to do if you think it matters. When people say thank you, it feels good, but it lets you know that what I’m doing matters. It’s making a difference. It’s making somebody’s life better. It’s making the world better. That’s a huge motivator.

[00:14:04] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the big thing. So this is a curious question, right? And it’s not really related to WordPress. Did you have those same intuitions at an early age? Was there some part of you can remember even as, I don’t know, let’s say a 15-year-old or 17-year-old or something like that. Where you had already made the leap that life is better when you are being helpful? Or did you learn that later?

Because I kind of have the intuition that quite a few people in our community probably figured that out at some point fairly early on. And it enables them, I’m obviously not suggesting that people who didn’t make that intuition early on can’t join the community or what have you. But I’m surrounded by people who seem to have this almost bottomless capacity to give. And I’m always struck by how did that begin for them? Where did that start for them? So because I’ve got you on the line, I’m asking you directly.

[00:14:58] Topher DeRosia: When I was in college, I just randomly became interested in motivations. What makes people do things? What makes somebody mean all the time? What makes somebody happy all the time? What makes somebody be kind?

And I thought through the process of how gratitude is an influencer. If you say to somebody, thank you for what you’re doing, it makes them feel good. It makes them want to do it more. If they’re, you know, working at a food pantry and you say, hey, thank you for what you’re doing, it’s changing lives, just feeding children. It makes them want to do that more. If that person at a food pantry were faced every day with angry people who abused them verbally and stuff like that, they’d be a lot less inclined to do that.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I listened to a podcast not that long ago, and I actually can’t remember which one it was because I listened to several in this line. But essentially it was trying to peel back the latest studies in what causes some people to be happy. And I am not going to explain this and have the expectation that everything I say is true, nor that this is the limit of that. But a fairly reliable indicator of happiness, whatever that means, but on a fairly profound level, happiness can be boiled down to these two things, apparently.

One of them is that you are giving of your time. So it may be that you are, as you say, working in a soup kitchen. Or that you are doing something in the community. Or you are just putting into your children or what have you. There is a real connection apparently between the capacity to give something from which you expect nothing in return. Humans apparently find great, deep satisfaction from that.

And the other one is friendship. If you have people that you regard as friends, on a deep level. So obviously acquaintances, we can all have many, many thousands of those, especially online nowadays. But it’s that core little group of really impactful, meaningful people who in the time of crisis, you know are going to have your back.

Those two things apparently are a real predictor of one’s happiness. And both of them seem to stray into our community, you know? Although it’s an online thing, you’re still giving your time, and you know that in a fairly ephemeral way that you maybe can never grasp, people will be benefiting from that. And also you make friends. So there you go, it’s the root to happiness.

[00:17:19] Topher DeRosia: It is.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: So all of that, having said all of that, you have this wealth of experience in the community. You’ve done so many projects in the community. And as I said at the top of the show, the thing that you wanted to talk about was, not just the mere fact of doing things in the community, but about the fact that you are doing things in the community in a sort of public way, and how that can sort of impact in the future. So just tell us a little bit about why you wanted to get into that, or maybe some anecdotal evidence of how that’s helped you.

[00:17:50] Topher DeRosia: Very little of it in my life has been deliberate. I’ve done some things and then later thought, oh, wow, I didn’t realise that this would be the consequence. I made videos for OS Training for a lot of years, they’re behind a paywall, they paid me by the video. I wasn’t thinking, oh, I’m going to go teach the world. It was a client, I made videos.

And years later, Brin Wilson from WinningWP got a hold of me on Post Status and said, hey, I want to start a YouTube channel. Would you make videos for me? I said, sure, but why me? He said, well, I’ve seen your work. You’ve done this, you have given evidence to the world that you know what you’re doing. And that was a good contract. And I got it because I had previously done something else.

With HeroPress, I didn’t set out to become a relatively known person. I was just doing it. But I remember the first time I talked to a stranger from India and introduced myself and they said, oh, of course we know you. I said, what do you mean of course? You live 5,000 miles away from me. How on earth would you know me? And, boy, it is just stuff like that.

I have some plugins on wordpress.org. I think cumulatively they have 12 installs. They’re not big plugins, but they’re there. And people look and say, oh, Topher knows how to make plugins.

I contribute to the photos project. And people who aren’t necessarily contributors don’t necessarily understand the different kinds of contribution. They just see my name on the contributor list like, oh, Topher builds WordPress because I take a lot of photos or something. But just the fact that I’m out there doing that makes a difference.

I’ve been blogging for years. I did blogs in the GoDaddy Garage back in the day, I wrote on OS Training, I wrote all over the place. And recently I thought, boy, I wish I had had all that on my own site.

And then it occurred to me that WordPress does a lot of RSS, and so does YouTube. And so I built a site called topher.how. Found everything I’ve ever done and just used WP All Import and pulled it all into one place. So now at topher.how you can see stuff I’ve done decades ago, and it’s nice. It’s a place to say, look, here’s stuff I did. But I have gotten, no, you know, I’m not going to say I’ve gotten jobs, I’ve gotten consideration, interviews, interest because people who know who I am, because I did something once long ago.

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the interview phase, to get yourself over the line, you’ve still got to sort of show your metal, haven’t you? But that whole thing of just being represented by your past, it’s really curious. We live in a world which is so dominated by, I don’t know, the financial motivation for this, that, and the other.

It is curious when nowadays you can have a legacy which is not the CV, it’s not the line items on the CV. It can be much more ephemeral stuff. Things that you did, videos that you made, blogs that you contributed to.

The people out there making the decisions about who’s going to get those jobs, well, you have proved that that kind of history of being online definitely works, and in unexpected ways. It’s not like there’s always a through line between, okay, I’m going to make these YouTube videos so that in a few years time I’ll have this credible body of evidence that will make it so that anybody can employ me. It’s much more ephemeral than that. It’s more, I’m doing this video because I think itll be helpful, and then serendipitously that then leads to something in the future.

[00:21:14] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, very much so. Before we started recording, you mentioned my background here. It’s a piece of fabric on a photo stand. And I bought it just the other day because, you know, I’ve been making videos for years, I’ve never appeared on camera. Always been a screencast. And I recently got a client that said, well, we want you on camera. And so I got this thing.

But the interesting part is that the client is a company in Bangladesh. And I know them quite well, they know me quite well because of stuff we’ve done together in the past in the WordPress community. And when they needed videos, they came to me, because they know me and they know that’s what I do. That wouldn’t happen if I hadn’t been out doing stuff years ago. What are the chances I would know somebody, me in Michigan, I would know somebody in Bangladesh?

[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Right, I mean, the world of 50 years ago, it’s tending to zero basically, you know, unless you’d been on plane or somebody had been on a plane in the opposite direction and you’d met where you are. The opportunities afforded are amazing, and it’s that kind of long tail that you’ve got as well. That I suppose is going to be hard for somebody that’s younger to listen to because, you know, they kind of see this mountain that they’ve got to climb and this great body of work that they’ve got to build up over decades. I guess that’s, it’s not all about that either, it’s about sort of just chipping away at it and doing things piecemeal.

[00:22:31] Topher DeRosia: I have a funny story about that. Early in my WordPress career, I got to know Pippen Williamson. You may remember him.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I do.

[00:22:39] Topher DeRosia: And he was very well known in the WordPress community. I got to know a few people who were very well known. I was like, man, that’s cool, everybody knows these people. Wonder if people will ever know me? We were talking about it, he and I, and he quickly urged me, do not seek to be known because that will only lead to tears. If you’re doing it for the wrong reason, then it will just turn out badly.

And so I thought, well, you know, maybe in 10 years. Well, here we are. And I didn’t set out to be known. I’ve never bought a banner ad saying, look at Topher. I just went to WordCamp and spoke. I wrote blog posts, I made videos. I shook a lot of hands. I listened to a lot of stories.

[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: It’s about sort of spreading the network organically really, isn’t it? Which I suppose in a sense leads to, okay, rather than the word fame, I’m going to use the word notoriety because I think they’ve got two very different endpoints. But the idea of seeking fame is tied up with, you know, you just want random people to know you because they know you, and that’s the kind of end game, you know? Oh, you are famous because you’re famous, that sort of flavor to it.

Whereas notoriety for me has much more, there’s a body, a corpus of work behind you that leads to that understanding that, okay, that’s Topher. I know Topher because he did this, this, this, and this. It’s not famous because they’re famous. It’s more, there’s the guy who made those videos that I watched. Or there’s the guy that wrote that blog that I read all the time. That kind of thing. And so it’s not fame for fame sake, it’s accidental fame more, if you know what I mean?

[00:24:10] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I heard the term not too long ago that I like called community known.

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s nice.

[00:24:15] Topher DeRosia: Within a community, you you could say famous, very well known. Outside that community, people do not care and have no idea who you are.

[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. Yeah, it’s curious, inside of our community, there’s this one person whose name kind of precedes all others, and it would be Matt Mullenweg. But I’m willing to bet that if Matt was walking down the street, more or less anywhere, that his life is just the same as yours and mine. Nobody’s going to know who he is unless randomly they happen to be a WordPresser. But he’s fairly thin on the ground. You know, it’s not like he’s Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney or something like that, where that fame is probably quite an oppressive thing in their life. You know, the capacity to just walk down the street.

So yeah, anyway, the point being that you’ve done stuff over time without the intention of it being this fame for being famous. It’s more about being community known, as you said. But that has had amazing consequences.

And that kind of leads me to this next thing. I wonder, this question comes up all the time, but I do wonder if it’s more material now than it ever has been. I wonder if the community can always cope with the commercial pressure that is being born by the community?

So for example, you know, you up to events and there’s a lot of people trying to sell you things. And maybe WordCamps from 15 years ago would’ve felt very much more a room full of like-minded individuals. Whereas now if you go to WordCamps, maybe there’s more of a feeling of, okay, that bit over there is more commercial, that bit over there is less commercial. But there’s always that kind of commercial angle.

I don’t really know where I’m going with that, but the commercial side of things, I don’t know if you’ve got a feeling on, or a intuition on that?

[00:25:54] Topher DeRosia: Sort of. Something I’ve noticed over the years is that it’s entirely possible to write a plugin, start selling it, have it be successful, build a business, hire people, maybe get a relatively large business, maybe hundreds of employees. And it feels good, it looks good, it’s great, it’s wonderful until it starts going, or getting hard. And then people who never thought this would happen start having to make difficult decisions that hurt people.

If things aren’t going well, we need to let some people go. Maybe we need to let a lot of people go. Maybe we need to reorganise, whatever. And people look at this golden company, the pinnacle of WordPress, open source, love, family, peace, blah, blah, blah, and they’re letting people go. And you think, what? They’re just another business. They were just in it for the money. And they’re not, but it can feel that way when you’ve been let go.

And at some point it has to be about the money. If you’re building a plugin because you love it and you’re selling it because people need it, that’s cool. If you’re running a business and people are depending on you for their livelihoods, you have to make the decisions. You have to do some hard things sometimes. And it’s never going to be comfortable. And at some point it’s going to look like you’re just another company. I’ve never been in this position, but I think it can be incredibly difficult to maintain a culture that we associate with the stereotype of WordPress community, in a full on company.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do know exactly what you mean. I think we, let’s say for example, let’s go back to Cisco. I used that example a minute ago. Let’s say that I work for Cisco. It’s pretty obvious what the goal there is. The goal is to ship loads of units of networking hardware all over the world, and then next year ship more than we ship this year and innovate more and.

[00:27:45] Topher DeRosia: And you have investors that are going to hold your feet to the fire.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, so make money, make the investors happy, make the shareholders happy, and so on. That is so straightforward a bargain. But we in our community have this extra layer underpinning it of this philanthropic bit, which forms the basis of it. It’s literally the bedrock of it.

And so that whole thing is propping everything else up on top of it, which I genuinely don’t know how the shifting sands of that all work. We’ve managed to get through 22 years plus, of that building up slowly over time, there being arguments here, there and everywhere. Minor arguments, some bigger arguments. We’ve somehow worked it through.

But I don’t suppose that will ever get perfectly resolved. It’s going to be just part of the understanding that if you’re in open source, there’s a commercial bit. And if you can’t cope with that, well, that’s something you’re going to have to think about and look at. But also there’s going to be this whole philanthropic side, and that has to carry on and has to be funded, and figured out, and made important and advertised and all of that. I don’t have the brain to figure all that out, but it’s part of the jigsaw puzzle.

[00:28:52] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. It’s truly something I’ve never had to deal with, and I hope I don’t, the scales of money. I had a job once when I was very young. We’re at home, we were newly married and money was tight, and we were talking about where to get $20 for groceries and things like that.

And at work I was allocating hardware for new employees and, oh, let’s pick up two or three extra computers at $4,000 each because we might need them. That scale of money is, it’s something I’ve tried to be aware of.

I look at a WordPress plugin company that has employees and I think, oh man, you have so much more money than I do, so much more. And maybe they do, but they also have so many more bills than I do. Just because they have several employees, and they’re doing well and things look great on Black Friday, doesn’t mean that they’re super wealthy or anything.

[00:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I genuinely struggle with this component. I don’t think I’ll ever resolve it. I’m just aware that it exists. I’m aware that there’s people who are very polemic about it. There are people on the far this side, and there’s people on the opposite side who maybe are kind of struggling to shout across the gap. But then there’s people sitting in the middle who are somehow managing to figure it all out, or at least be sanguine about it, and not worrying too much about it. Time will tell. In the year 2026, I’m sure that it won’t get figured out, but it will probably carry on.

I’ve got every hope that WordPress is exciting enough to carry on and that people will continue to use it. So I don’t worry too much about that. It’s just more whether or not the two sides of the argument, in an increasingly polemic world, whether the commercial side of WordPress and the non-commercial side of WordPress can figure out some way to walk upon the same path.

[00:30:28] Topher DeRosia: There’s an element to WordPress that I think will carry on, even if it looks like WordPress is starting to fail. And that’s going to be the earliest people, the smallest contributors. Things have been really shaken up in WordPress in the last year or two, and I have friends who’ve left the community. And business is getting bigger and WordPress itself is changing. Gutenberg is a big thing now and AI is moving in and all that. So much is changing.

And I have people say, why do you stay? Why do you keep doing WordPress? Specifically, why do I keep doing HeroPress? And I think my experience tells me that there will always be a 17-year-old picking up a computer at the library for the first time and discovering WordPress and starting a new life. And I want to be there for that person.

[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it’s going back to the 17-year-old you as well. You know, that bit that we had earlier where you figured out you had this intuition that there were some things in life which mattered more.

One of the things that I think is really, like it’s so difficult to square this argument though, the whole thing where you see incredible wealth being generated by WordPress and you see incredible endeavors being put into WordPress by people who are really struggling to make ends meet. And I simply don’t have the capacity to figure out the solution to that. I cannot square that circle. But that is such a bit of cognitive dissonance that so much wealth is generated, on the one hand, and yet so much of the foundational work is created by people who may be struggling to put food on the table and what have you. And that is really challenging.

[00:32:12] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, it is challenging. I don’t think it’ll ever be solved. I think it’s a universal problem of humanity. But similar to other areas, I think WordPress does better than other communities. There have been a bunch of discussions in the past about inclusivity, diversity in the WordPress community. And even people who point out the problems and say, look, we messed up here, this is bad, we need to change it, will say WordPress is probably the best of the IT world. There are problems. It’s bad. There are things we need to change, but we’re way ahead.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s a really, sorry to interrupt. I got really caught up in what you just said then. I wasn’t expecting that to hit me quite as hard as it did. That was really interesting. That sort of sanguine approach to it. It’s never going to be perfect. We’re probably going to have division and factional fighting, I’m going to do air quotes around the word fighting, but you know what I mean, like infighting and what have you. But we do all right. Given how it could be, it’s okay. These things are just a part of the evolution of it. It’s a journey, not a destination. Yeah, that was interesting.

[00:33:18] Topher DeRosia: We do have to take care though to not rest on our laurels, as it were. To say, oh, you know what? It’s okay, we’re better than everybody else, and so we don’t need to work on it. As soon as we do that, then we will not be better than everybody else.

[00:33:30] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s curious because I think the people that I end up talking to when I attend things like WordCamps have that intuition. I think some, on some innate level, they get the bit that you just said. They know that it’s not perfect. And they know that work needs to be done. And they’re there for that thing. They want to fight the good fight, and make it so that this platform is available to the 17-year-old that you just described, so that they can pick this stuff up and publish their own stuff online, and have their own voice, and create their own identity and all of that. And it’s, yeah, really interesting.

I think I have one more question. So we were talking about the impact of you doing stuff in the open. You obviously did all of that stuff in the open. You did everything, you put everything online, you got HeroPress and all of that kind of stuff. Would you still advocate that in the year 2025, 2026? Do you still think that’s probably the best way forward?

The reason I’m asking that is because we see so much out there in the world, beguiling stuff. TikTok, YouTube, all these people getting YouTube famous, making giant amounts of money and all of that kind stuff. They’re doing it kind of purposefully in order to gain wealth. So it’s less that philanthropic side.

If you could replay your life, would you do that? Is there any part of you which thinks you’d go down that route of being the kind of influencer, or are you happy that your life would replay in, if you were the youngster that you were many, many years ago and you were now that youngster, would you still do it the same way, do you think?

[00:35:00] Topher DeRosia: I think I would. A couple years ago I did a video tip of the week on HeroPress. It was a video on YouTube. And people would say to me, you know what? It’s good that you offer this free stuff. You should put something behind a paywall and make money off it. And I think, oh, you know, that’d be cool. I could make money and pay the bills. But then I think, anything I put behind a paywall is not going to be able to help a 17-year-old who’s making a dollar a week. And that’s where my heart is. And I struggle.

I’m doing a project right now that I would love to tell you about. Over the years, I’ve done support a lot. And I, early on, made a rule, if I get asked a question more than three times, I’m making documentation. And so I can just say, oh, here, go check this out. And over the years I’ve had many clients come back to me three months after I built a site and say, you know, you taught me how to use the WordPress admin and I don’t remember, can you show me again?

So, I don’t know, a year ago I thought, I’m going to make a course for beginners, and it’s going to have videos that are one minute long about how to make a link, how to put in a picture, how to edit your form. Stuff that we all take for granted every day. But somebody who just got a website three months ago and used it once, they don’t remember.

So I started down that road. I got MemberPress, I set up a site, and I made a list of videos to make. I was going to sell it to my clients as part of, you know, you bought a website, for an extra X dollars, here’s all this documentation you can have. A WordPresser at that educational conference said to me, I want to sponsor you to make those videos. You pick the topic, but do it on our hosting platform, just so that our name is there.

And she gave me some money to do it. And she said, I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel. I didn’t have one. All these years, I didn’t have my own YouTube channel for my own videos. I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel, and once you get 2000 subscribers, I will pay you for every video you make. Just to put them on my own YouTube channel. I get to pick the topics. It’s just to get their name out. And I thought, wow, okay.

So I pivoted, rather than make a course behind a paywall, I am doing this thing, but they’re all going on YouTube. And I started three weeks ago, and I’m putting up a video Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I have 57 subscribers.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a little road to go. That’s so nice.

[00:37:23] Topher DeRosia: But this goes back to doing stuff in public so that it’s more significant later. Maybe in a year or two or five, I’ll have thousands of subscribers. And life experience has shown me that I need to not assume that I’m going to have thousands of subscribers within a month. That’s not how this works. You do stuff now, you build your foundation and you grow it. And eventually it gets big.

HeroPress happened that way. You know, I did a few essays, and I did a few more and I did a few more. And then one day I thought, oh, I have 200 essays, and now I have 300. I never set a goal of how many or anything like that. I just did one at a time, and then suddenly there’s this big site full of stuff.

And so that’s my current project is to make these videos, helping people figure out how to use WordPress. It’s not going to be just the beginners, it’s going to be, well, have a heart for beginners in any area, so I’m going to do some beginning programming stuff. I’ve built some cool stuff like WP Podcasts, aggregates podcasts. It wasn’t hard. It’s WP All Import, pulling them into the posts type. It’s not that big a deal. But I can make a 10 minute video on how I did that, and some developer’s going to go, wow, I never realised you can do this kind of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about it.

[00:38:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your life seems to represent that kind of long term approach, and I can completely empathise with that. Obviously my thing is podcasting, and I have the same sort of story that I just began it and kept doing it and kept doing it, and people obviously, you know, found that there was something there for them, or they didn’t.

But there was something that kept that propelled. And now I look back and there’s a few episodes that I can look back to and, it’s pretty amazing what that brought in its train. Most of it completely unexpected, most of it never intended, and now podcasting in the WordPress space is kind of what I do.

And it just goes to show, if you do things with the right intention, and you do things for the long game, there is a way to make it work. You know, obviously you’ve got to keep the wolf from the door, and if you live in a part of the world where it’s incredibly important that you earn lots of money in order to just meet the bare essentials, then you’ve obviously got to take care of that at the beginning. But then after that, there’s these opportunities on top of that to sort of grow who you are, grow the community that we’re in. And maybe in the long term, over 2, 3, 5, 10, in your case, probably approaching 20 years in the WordPress space, it has an impact. It’s slowly but surely. Slow and steady wins the game, as they say.

[00:39:57] Topher DeRosia: It does, yep.

[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, I will say thank you for that conversation. It was very unexpected and really, really powerful in some regard there. You really made me think on a couple of occasions as we were chatting there, and I really appreciate that.

So, Topher, where can we find you if somebody wants to see some of the stuff? You’ve already mentioned one. It’s probably topher.how. I don’t know if that’s the one you want to drop again.

[00:40:17] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, let’s say topher.how. But if you search Google for Topher1Kenobi, you’ll find me pretty much everywhere.

[00:40:24] Nathan Wrigley: Love that.

[00:40:25] Topher DeRosia: I’ve never found anyone else use that name.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s the number one, like the numeral one.

[00:40:29] Topher DeRosia: Yeah.

[00:40:30] Nathan Wrigley: Not the wan.

[00:40:31] Topher DeRosia: My personal blog is at topher1kenobi.com. There’s HeroPress. I did an episode the other day with Christos Paloukas, and he said, hey, send me your links.

[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: An essay.

[00:40:40] Topher DeRosia: I sent him 15 links.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do that to me as well. Whatever you do send me, then I will put them into the show notes. wptavern.com, search for the episode with Topher. It’s T-O-P-H-E-R. If you just look for that, you’ll probably find it. And thank you so much for chatting to me today. It was very pleasurable. Thank you.

[00:40:59] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I had a really good time too. Thanks.