[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 we might reimagine sponsoring WordPress contributions.

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 wp tavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Roger Williams. Roger leads community and partner engagement at Kinsta, a company specializing in offering managed hosting for WordPress. His role involves bridging the gap between Kinsta and the wider WordPress community, working closely with agency partners, technology collaborators, and open source initiatives.

Throughout his career, Roger has been deeply involved in community efforts and has recently played a key part in Kinsta’s implementation of a sponsored contributions program, helping to funnel time and resources back into WordPress and other open source projects.

Many longstanding members of the WordPress community have contributed out of passion and a spirit of philanthropy, but as the project has grown to power over 40% of the web, the need for sustainable funding and sponsorship has become more pronounced.

Roger joins us today to explore this shift. He shares insights from his WordCamp US presentation titled Figuring Out Sponsored Contribution. Discussing how companies can start funding contributors, why that matters, and how to balance the business need for a return on investment with the grassroots spirit of open source.

We begin with Roger’s background, his work at Kinsta, and how he became involved in WordPress community sponsorship.

The conversation then gets into the ever evolving dynamics of sponsored contributions. How businesses can approach funding contributors. Ways to surface and support valuable work, and strategies for aligning company goals with broader project needs.

Roger breaks down the practical arguments companies can use to get internal buy-in, and the importance of clear processes for both organizations looking to sponsor, and individuals seeking support.

Towards the end, Roger reflects on the challenges and opportunities of connecting those both from the philanthropic and commercial sides of WordPress, and he shares advice for anyone hoping to get their organization involved in similar programs.

If you’re interested in how WordPress sponsorships work, how business and community might collaborate, or you’re seeking practical advice as a contributor or company, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find 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 Roger Williams.

I am joined on the podcast by Roger Williams. Hello, Roger.

[00:03:46] Roger Williams: Hey Nathan, how are you?

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: I’m very good. We could pretend that we’re recording this at WordCamp US because that was the plan, but it never happened for one reason or another. So we took it offline. And several weeks ago, WordCamp US finished, but the intention was very much to talk about what you were presenting at WordCamp US. So we’ll get into that in a moment.

Before we do that though, Roger, would you mind just telling us a little bit about who you are, who you work for, what your role involves, all to do with WordPress, I guess.

[00:04:14] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, absolutely. So my name’s Roger Williams. I work at Kinsta, managed hosting provider for WordPress. Currently my position is partnership and community manager for North America. Very long title. What does that mean? My job is to interface with the public, with the WordPress community, with our agency partners and various technology partners, and just make sure that we’re all on the same page, and that whatever’s going on outside of Kinsta is getting communicated inside of Kinsta, and whatever’s happening inside of Kinsta is getting communicated outside. So I’m basically boiling the ocean. So a very easy thing. No problem at all.

Truth be said, it’s one of the, this is like the highlight of my career, I have to say. I get to travel, I get to meet a lot of neat and interesting people, I get to make amazing friends, and I get to talk about technology, the web, WordPress and Kinsta hosting, which are all things that I’m very passionate about and enjoy talking about this ad nauseam. You can ask my wife, that I am probably too much, need to turn it off a little bit.

But specifically talking about community and WordPress, gosh, it was January of this year, 2025, that we implemented our sponsored contributions program, and I played a role in that. I played a role in getting the conversation happening around that inside of Kinsta. And then once we got budget approval, actually figuring out, hey, who do we want to sponsor? What projects outside of WordPress? Because we also sponsor various open source projects that affect us directly and indirectly.

And so that has been a whole new aspect of my career that has really opened up new doors and opportunities and discussions and friendships that I’m still feeling like a bit of an interlocutor. I’m an outsider trying to understand how to best do this, and play a part in helping the projects that we all depend on to do all of our work.

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you. Yeah, there’s a lot in there to unpack, isn’t there? It sounds like a full and varied role, but also you kind of sound a little bit like you’re figuring this out over the course of 2025 and into 2026 and who you are sponsoring and what have you. And that was very much the tenor of the talk.

So the title was very simple. The presentation that you gave was simply called figuring out sponsored contribution. But I’ll just read into the record the blurb, not all of it, but much of it because it will give everybody who’s listening an idea of where you were going with that. So it says, open source software runs on passion, but passion doesn’t pay the bills. WordPress powers over 40% of the web, yet many people maintaining it aren’t funded. That’s starting to change and your company can be part of it. In this talk, we’ll explore how sponsored contribution works, why it matters, and how companies big and small can participate. We’ll walk through my experience, AKA your experience, working with companies to sponsor contributors from promoting the idea internally, identifying key areas of the WordPress project to support, finding and interviewing contributors, and building an internal framework for long-term sponsorship. And there’s a little bit more, but that basically sums it up.

So basically, I guess my first question is, what exactly are you trying to do here? Are you kind of regarding this as a sort of philanthropic thing? What I’m really kind of asking is, do you kind of expect things in return? So if Kinsta, for example, sponsor somebody, do you have like a tick list of things that we need to see that you’ve done? Or is it more, you are a trusted person, we’ve seen you interacting in the WordPress space for many years, here’s a bunch of cash, go off and just do whatever you like?

[00:07:53] Roger Williams: Yeah, excellent question. And thanks for reading that blurb. I don’t think I’ve read that blurb in quite a few months and it sounds really good.

[00:07:59] Nathan Wrigley: It was a great talk.

[00:08:00] Roger Williams: Somebody really put something together here. Really interesting question and I think this kind of gets to the core of what I was trying to talk about in this talk, in the exploration that I’m trying to figure out in my own head, figure out inside of Kinsta, and possibly figure out in the larger community.

There’s a lot of humility involved in this Nathan, I hope you can appreciate. I feel a lot of the times very, the imposter syndrome, right? Wow, I’m coming into a project that’s over 22 years old. Many, many thousands of people have been involved. Many, many companies have been involved in this. Here’s this new guy, you know, I mean I’ve been around for a little while, but relatively new guy on the scene just coming in trying to tell people how all this is done. And I really hope that it doesn’t come across that way. I’m really trying to explore this topic and understand it better for a few reasons.

The first one is the most immediate. How can I get Kinsta involved in contributing and sponsoring WordPress and other open source projects? And so there’s a combination of things happening there, right? And you brought it up in terms of, are there tangible things that we’re looking for here? Or is this simply just philanthropic, hey, we’re giving money away and everything will work out?

And I think that there’s a spectrum. And we’re playing on the spectrum with it. Traditionally, and this is something that I talk about a lot in the talk is, traditionally in open source the argument has been that I’ve seen, hey, you’re using this software, you should give back to the software and to the project.

But then you have on the other side the business that is very much, hey, we need to generate revenue from our activities so that we can remain a business.

And so they’re a little bit at odds in some ways, right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. And I think that’s what I’m exploring in this talk, and I’m exploring in this conversation, and as many conversations as I can have with people is, how do we play on that spectrum of finding a happy medium where for a company, a lot of times you go to the executives and you’re like, hey, we need to be giving back to this thing that we get for free? And you get a very perplexed look. And so I think we need to adjust that conversation.

I think that the people that are inside of the project, it’s very obvious. Hey, we put a ton of time and effort into making this happen. Whether you give back in terms of time and actually help us work on the project, or give us money so we can sponsor people and pay for hosting costs and different things involved in it, to make the project happen. I think it’s very obvious for people inside of the project how that works.

It’s less obvious, and I kind of see there’s three groups in all, right? You have the people inside of the project, very obvious. There’s very little argument needs to be made.

You have the second group, which is somewhere like, a Kinsta will fall into, or someone like myself, who I’ve used open source software for many years, but I don’t necessarily see exactly how to contribute back, or the immediate benefits, or the need, right? Hey, this thing’s already here. I can go to the website, click download, and I’ve got it. There’s that group that kind of see it but they need a little nudging.

And then there’s the general public or people that just don’t really interface with open source software directly and just have no idea. They’re just like, whoa, what is going on over there? People are just working on stuff for free and giving it away for free. That’s crazy. And so there’s another conversation that needs to happen there.

I think with this specific talk, the group I’m trying to get to is that second group. The people that are just right there, it’s just in a little bit of nudging of like, hey, you’re really close to understanding the benefits of sponsoring and contributing back to the project. What are we missing in the conversation to really get them to understand it? So the answer I’m proposing is we need to talk more about return on investment and ROI, and how do we frame that?

So really long-winded answer here, but I think that there’s a mixture of what are the things we’re trying to achieve by giving back? How can we bring that back in a business sense to show executives, hey, look, the money that we’re putting out here is benefiting us in certain ways?

But then also being like, hey, there’s also just kind of this nebulous aspect to it of, if you help contribute to it, it will give you some benefit. So how do we balance and how do we find the spectrum here to land on? I hope that that made some sort of sense.

[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does. And it’s interesting because where you got to about a third of the way through the answer, I think you said the word tension or conflict or something like that. But I think that’s a really interesting part, because if we were to rewind the clock to, let’s say 19 years ago when WordPress was still relatively new. I wasn’t around in the WordPress space, but I was involved in other open source projects at the same time. And philanthropy was the word.

There were just people donating loads of time because it was more or less this hobby thing. And then in some cases the hobby thing collapsed and nobody ever heard of it again. And in the case of some software projects, WordPress most notably, it took off. It just absolutely skyrocketed and became the underpinning of, as you say in the presentation notes that you made, kind of 40% of the web. It became this critical piece of the puzzle.

And so during the last 18, 20, 22 years, whatever it may be, the project has evolved. It’s become critical. Like it or dislike it, companies both big and small are now relying upon it. They require it as part of their business, Kinsta being one of those companies. And so this tension exists. How do the companies do their bit and how do the individuals do their bit?

And the tension that I feel is, on the one hand, the people who’ve got that heritage of the more philanthropic side sort of saying, can’t we just go back to how it was? Can we never talk about finance? Can we not think about money at all?

And then on the other hand, you’ve got places like where you work, who are, with the best will in the world, it’s about making some revenue, and making money, and paying the bills and all of that. You’ve got to figure out, how the heck do you make contributions? How do you justify that to your bosses? How do they communicate what they’ve done effectively?

And presumably part of your talk as well is about finding people that you would like to just give some money to as a helping hand to say, okay, off you go. You’re not a part of the Kinsta organisation, but we would like to help you. And in return, presumably there’s a bit of mutual back rubbing. We’ll pat your back, you pat ours, and so on and so forth. So hopefully I’ve parsed that about right?

[00:14:39] Roger Williams: Yeah, no, I think you’re laying it out very much as I’m going through in the talk is, we need to talk business. And I know that for a lot of people inside of open source, this can be cringey and not pleasant and not what we want to do. And my argument is we have to get over that phase. We have to learn to start talking business and thinking business, thinking about return on investment.

And so to me it’s becoming practical, right? We have this optimistic idea of like, well, people will just come to their senses and realise that if they sponsor and contribute to the project, it’s going to help them. And we need to be much more strategic and more practical about it. And I break it down into three reasons to start kind of looking at when you’re talking to executives, you’re talking to businesses. And so there’s strategic, operational and second order benefits.

So when I’m talking about strategic benefits, I mean this is where it’s just obvious, right? For a hosting company that does WordPress, it just makes sense. Like, if WordPress isn’t working well, then we’re going to have trouble with our product. So strategically, it makes sense if WordPress works well, if it’s performing, if it’s secure, this is going to lower our cost as a hosting company. So those are arguments to be putting forward there.

From an operational perspective, you can start talking about technical debt, right? And this is where the CTO’s eyes should light up, because technical debt is a real problem for any company that builds software. As you’re building software, you now have to maintain that software. Well, if you’re able to offload part of that software into the open source project, it now becomes something that the open source project maintains. It’s the technical debt of the project.

That now creates a vicious cycle, or not even vicious, but just a cycle of, you now need to contribute to the project to help maintain that technical debt. But you’re now, as an organisation, offloading that to a larger organisation and having more people being able to help maintain that software. So I think from an operational perspective, those are arguments that you can hit people with.

And then finally, the second order benefits, and this is really where it kind of encompasses the arguments that have been traditionally the philanthropic argument, the just maker taker argument and stuff like that. With second order benefits, you start seeing these additional benefits that maybe you can’t exactly measure.

This is where networking is happening. People are meeting and talking to each other. Maybe your developers are talking to their developers, or in the case of sponsoring contributors, those contributors can come into your organisation and help the organisation maybe understand how to use WordPress better and these different benefits.

And so breaking it down into these practical arguments, these practical reasons for contributing can really help people who are not necessarily as well versed with open source or don’t directly see the benefits, see that a little bit better.

And then getting into what you’re also talking about, finding contributors who, maybe they align with your values, making sure that they’re working on the stuff that you need them to be working on. The parts of the project that could use attention as far as your organisation is seeing.

And then also, you know, one of the big things I look for is contributors who are mentors and are helping other contributors get into the project and help to grow the project’s contributions overall.

There’s direct, tangible things. Hey, there’s this ticket, could you go work on this ticket? I’ll be honest, I’m not that in depth yet. I’ve had contributors be like, hey, usually organisations are that pointed. And I’m like, okay, well there’s a goal for me to achieve at some point.

But for me it’s more like, hey, are you doing good work? What are other people saying about you in the project? And then, are you mentoring people and helping other people do their first bug squash, and do their first push and commit and things like that? And I’m butchering the language of course here but, you know, I hope that that kind of helps answer some of those questions.

[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting because I fear that there’s a possibility that the community kind of bifurcates along these lines at the moment. So you get the people, and I was using the word philanthropic, so the people that have been contributing their time for gratis, just because they saw that as a useful thing to do for humanity, let’s put it that way.

So there’s that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, you’ve got people such as yourself who are talking about the necessary things in order for your job and your institution to function, the money. And I suppose I’m kind of worried that we will have these two sides that kind of can’t figure out a way to communicate with each other, that can’t see across the chasm that has been created. And so figuring out ways to make those work to sort of have a happy balance so that the two sides can communicate, that they can be back in touch with each other.

So that’s kind of a concern that I have, this sort of two tier system. The fear more broadly is that, if the money side of things becomes more prevalent, and people find that intolerable, that ultimately will push people away who have been philanthropic and amazing in the use of their time and pushing the project forward. They’ll see this as something that they can’t cope with in the future, and they’ll wish to step away, not contribute to it. That would be a shame.

[00:19:52] Roger Williams: So I can absolutely empathise and understand the argument that you’re putting forth there. I think the way I would counter that is to say, hey, currently if we’re only going to talk in a philanthropic sense, are we just going to exclude everybody from what you’re talking about, the second tier, right? The more money focused. So we’re just not even having a conversation in that case.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That’s the concern, yeah.

[00:20:17] Roger Williams: So what I’m trying to argue is, hey, by bringing in more people into the project and maybe starting to talk in these practical ROI business terms, were now at least having a conversation that before wasn’t even happening. Because just to kind of back up a second, the way I’m looking at it is, if the only argument is, hey, this is philanthropic, you’re doing it for the good of the project, kumbaya, then we’re just going to exclude a lot of the business community who’s going to go, well, yeah, I volunteer time on the weekend at my church, or do different things, but I need to do business during the week so I can buy groceries and pay the rent.

And so I think what I’m trying to suggest is, hey, if we expand the conversation beyond just philanthropic, beyond just the second order benefits, and we talk about operational and strategic benefits in addition, we’re now adding more people to the conversation that weren’t in the conversation before.

And eventually we’re bringing them into the second order conversation, but we have to start by bringing them in with the strategic and the operational, because that’s where their mindset is in the nine to five. And so to me, I think this is the opportunity to actually expand the pie and expand the amount of people in the project and talking about the project.

The concern I see that is a fair argument and concern is, are we going to turn open source projects into just commercial enterprises? That is definitely a concern. I don’t see that happening because you still have the core people in the project. They’re doing it because they believe in what the project is and they have passion for it. And if they are able to expand and have these conversations, these larger conversations, or additional conversations, about strategic and operational benefits, we’re going to bring more people in and hopefully help to influence those people to see the second order benefits, and hopefully eventually it’s all just philanthropic, right?

But I think right now, the argument that has been put forth by different people in open source and in the WordPress community, is that we don’t have enough people contributing. We don’t have enough sponsorship money coming in, and so we need to figure out how to bridge that gap. And my suggestion is the way to do that is to expand the conversation beyond just the philanthropic, beyond just the second order, and talking about strategic and operational in addition to those.

[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: I have so many thoughts about this. So the first thing that comes into my head is trying to bridge a gap between the people out there at the moment who have been contributing. But you go around on Twitter, X, I guess, and you see people, don’t you? You see it all the time. They even sometimes change their Twitter handle to, you know, seeking sponsorship or something like that.

But periodically you’ll see somebody who you know has been in the WordPress space for many years and, I don’t know, maybe they have been contributing in some way, shape, or form, but it’s pretty clear that they would like to be sponsored for this particular rabbit hole that they’ve gone down. And so building a bridge to them is something I think really useful about what you’re saying.

Because maybe there is no way of these two sides talking to each other. Maybe there is no kind of like a la carte menu, if you like. If you are one of these philanthropic contributors, and you’ve never sought sponsorship before, but you’d like the idea of, well, wouldn’t it be nice if, for these two days a week that I typically contribute my time, wouldn’t it be nice to get some finance? I’ll do the exact same thing, but I’ll actually receive some money for that.

But I don’t have the time to go out to a hundred different companies with my, I’m going to use the word begging bowl. That is probably the wrong term, but you get the point. To these a hundred different companies saying, look, I’ve been doing this for ages. Can you help me out?

That kind of feels, there’s something quite icky about that, isn’t there? I think we can all identify that going out and sort of saying to companies repeatedly, please can I have some money? And then getting the inevitable 99% pushback. No, we haven’t got any money for you.

But I think what you are saying is you are going to build a system where that kind of stuff will be more obvious. Where you’ll say, these are the kind of things that we’re looking for. Here’s the application form if you want to sponsor. This is the kind of process that we’re going to go through. These are the interview questions that we’re typically going to answer. This is the pot of money that we’ve got available. This is how many people we want, and so on and so forth.

So it’s kind of bridging the gap, so that the people who have been contributing, who are maybe nervous or don’t see a way forward, can suddenly step into something more obvious, more a la carte, more straightforward and easy to kind of cherry pick.

[00:24:46] Roger Williams: Yeah. I think that, you know, this is getting to the heart of it, right? How do you individually sponsor people? How do individuals find sponsorship? And how do we make this all work? And backing up just for a second , there’s two ways to look at contributing to open source projects.

We’re talking a lot about sponsoring individual contributors, which I would argue is the best way for an organisation to get started, because it’s the easiest way in some sense, right? There’s an established person who’s working in the project. You are giving them cash to do that work.

The other way to contribute to the project is to actually spend time working on the project, right? So maybe you’ve got engineers inside of the company and you’re like, okay, 10% of your time is, or 5% of your time you’re going to actually work on this project. That’s a much bigger ask, right? Because usually when you hire an employee, you have a very specific set of tasks that you need to work on them for the company.

And so asking the manager to figure out, hey, how can this person give 5% of their time to something that’s outside of the company? That’s a bigger ask. So I think, for companies and organizations that are starting to dip their toe into contributing to open source, sponsored contributions is a great place to start.

So that was a long way to get around to the question that you’re posing here, is how do you actually do that? There’s a chicken and the egg kind of situation that you’re bringing up, right? At what point does an individual contributor know that, hey, Kinsta is a company to reach out to, and ask for sponsored contribution. And then on the flip side, how does Kinsta know who to reach out to to sponsor?

And so my suggestion is to create a couple of different systems. So first, from the organisational perspective, really understanding, what are the priorities for the organisation? What would benefit them the most by sponsoring individual contributors?

My argument is it’s a pretty wide swath. A lot of people get focused on core contributors and, actually working on tickets and things like that. I think it’s a much broader effect. I think sponsoring people that are on the Polyglots team, Kinsta, over half of our customers don’t speak English. So having WordPress in non-English versions is huge for us. So sponsoring the Polyglots team.

The documentation team is huge, right? People need to be able to use WordPress . So are they going to contact Kinsta support for how to use WordPress, or can they just go to the WordPress site and look at documentation?

So as an organization, you can get really strategic on this, but my argument would be, don’t overthink it at the beginning. Just get started. And I think that’s how I kind of end my talk is, my biggest piece of advice is don’t wait. Just get started. Set aside some budget that you’re comfortable with, that your executives are comfortable with, and then go and find some contributors.

And then have kind of a process, right? Have an intake form. You mentioned having an intake form. Have an intake form. Ask them questions about, what do they currently work on? What have they worked on in the past? What are their hopes and goals and aspirations on the project?

And then, you know, some very practical questions. Hey, would you be open to doing a blog post about your work and how Kinsta has helped with this? Very low level asks, right? We’re not trying to ask people to get a tattoo of the logo on their forehead or something insane. It’s very low effort, and my argument to companies is be very cautious. Step lightly into the marketing aspect of all of this. That should not be your primary focus.

The primary focus is contributing to the open source project, not getting all this marketing benefit out of it. And so, you know, make sure to frame it that way.

From the individual contributors thing, one thing I do point out is, up until recently, I’ve never actually been formally approached by somebody asking for sponsorship to contribute. You kind of talked about, hey, if someone needed to spend a time reaching out to a hundred different companies, you don’t need to go that crazy. Just reach out to like the major hosting companies to start.

But my argument is you need to do more than just say, hey, I work on WordPress, you need to sponsor me. You need to put together a little bit more of a pitch of, hey, I work on X, it accomplishes Y. I see this benefiting your organisation in these specific ways. And if you’re approaching it that way, that’s going to catch someone’s attention much better.

You know, and then just ask also just simple questions. Hey, do you have a formal sponsorship contribution project for WordPress? And if they say no, maybe, hey, would you like me to help you set that up? If they say yes, then it’s, hey, what’s the process for getting involved in that?

These are just very simple questions. It’s just a conversation, right? I say this, I’ve been in sales for decades now. It’s second nature to me. I understand that for a lot of people, this isn’t second nature for them. And that’s also what I’m trying to help with in this conversation is, it’s not just the organisations I’m trying to educate, but it’s also the contributors and the people that are in the project. Helping them to understand how to speak business a little bit more, so that they can get the businesses to really understand the benefits of this.

[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: There was a few things that you said a few moments ago where the implication was basically just get started. So put aside some cash, decide that you’re going to do it, so this is from the business side, and then just begin and see what happens. I don’t suppose you’re going to be able to simulate the perfect system first time around. It’ll be an iterative process, but just commit to it.

But the ROI thing was also kind of interesting because you know, if you are senior management in Kinsta or whichever hosting company you want to imagine, there’s got to be I suppose some aspect of that in the back of your mind. Okay, we’re going to give away, I don’t know, a hundred thousand dollars this year, but we’re not going to ask anybody at all, at any point to sort of mention our company name. That’s probably unrealistic, but I like what you said there about the gentle approach to it, the write a blog post about it.

But there’s something to be explored there because there’s got to be a way of surfacing good work. So it doesn’t have to necessarily be a big clarion call. Look, I did this because Kinsta paid for it. More tangentially, I did this great work and I did this, and WordPress benefited as a result of this, and I would just like to thank Kinsta for making that possible.

I guess we’ve just got to figure out what that piece looks like because, you know, you can’t give away money for free. There does need to be some ROI, but we have to figure out how gentle that approach is, and how gung ho it can be or not. That’s going to be interesting to figure out.

[00:31:22] Roger Williams: Just to kind of elaborate on that for a second. So the way I would say to companies to approach looking at this is, this is branding, right? And so when you’re doing brand marketing, it’s very nebulous, right? You’re kind of putting stuff out there and there’s a little bit of goodwill to it, I guess, you know, the philanthropy part plays into it a little bit. This definitely, I would say, falls under your branding budget. And so you should treat it as such.

I think that there’s a few different ways that the marketing, and I’m using air quotes around marketing here, because I understand that for people in open source this can be a little bit of kryptonite, a little bit repellent to talk about it this way. So I’m trying to be cautious or gentle here.

But I think the marketing benefits are, there’s a ton of indirect benefits, right? So if I’m sponsoring a contributor, and they’re working on the project, it means they’re interacting with other contributors of the project. They’re going to mention, oh, hey, by the way, Kinsta is sponsoring me, in conversation.

And now you’ve got that one-on-one marketing, as it were, happening where that’s getting put into the project and that gets noticed. And I think that’s my big urge to companies who really want to step on the pedal of ROI. Like, hey, we need to really maximise the ROI here. Is it’s like, hey, the community notices as soon as you do something, good, bad, or indifferent. But as soon as you start sponsoring people, it gets noticed inside of the community right away, whether you immediately see it or not.

So allow that to happen, for sure. I think from like the blog posts and things like that, there’s two ways I approach it. I love it if a sponsored contributor writes a blog post on their blog and mentions Kinsta. That’s amazing. I’m not expecting that. So instead what I’ll do is I’ll invite them onto the Kinsta Talks podcast and, hey, let’s spend 20 minutes and just talk about what you’re doing on the project.

I mentioned Kinsta at the beginning of it, in the fact that that’s where I work. Other than that, I don’t talk about Kinsta at all. It’s all about this individual and what they’re doing on the project, what they’re excited about, how they would suggest people get involved in the project. And so using that as a promotion, and again, the indirect branding benefits. My fingers are crossed, I’m sure my CMO’s watching this and going, either he is loving it or he is gritting his teeth. I get the sense everybody’s very happy. Hey Matt, how are you?

The way I am approaching this is very much as an outsider and I’m trying to be very respectful of the fact that this community’s been around for a very long time. I am sure this is not the first time that these conversations have happened. I’m not the first person to bring these things up. I just see it as, I’m here as a unique person in this point in time and I see a need and I’m, we’ve gotten our organisation to help, start helping. And what I’m trying to promote is getting other organisations to also realise this, and also start promoting and sponsoring and contributing to the project.

[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the things that will be really interesting is if, let’s say that you become the fulcrum for all of this, and so Roger Williams is known at Kinsta. He’s the person to go and speak to. Having that clarity is going to be really beneficial. So you don’t have to go through those email hoops of, okay, you just use the contact form on the website and then get put through nine different people who all say, actually it’s not me. Knowing who you’ve got to speak to, and having that clear process, that contact form, whatever that may be, that intake form that we talked about earlier, that’s really interesting.

I’m just going to pivot it slightly, and I’m wondering what the kind of contributions that might fall into scope for you at Kinsta. So obviously the software itself, the core project, WordPress Core would I’m sure be in view.

But what about other things like, oh, I don’t know, people who write documentation, you mentioned Polyglots? There’s obviously people who do event organising. There are people who do content creation, podcasts, YouTube channels, those kind of things. Do you have any constraints around the kind of contribution that you’d be interested in looking at, or will you listen to anybody?

[00:35:16] Roger Williams: Excellent question. And before I dive into that, I want to make sure that I’m not the only person taking credit for this at Kinsta. I have two amazing colleagues on the front lines with me. Marcel Bootsman, as you’re very familiar with, I think he’s been on your show before, he handles for Europe. And then Alex Michaelson, who is in APAC region. These are both amazing individuals who, we all three of us are on the front line, talking with contributors, sponsoring them, figuring all of this stuff out. So I definitely don’t want to take all of the credit here and make it seem that way.

As far as figuring out who to sponsor and who to contribute, this is the big question. The amazing thing is that this point in time, my bosses, our bosses at Kinsta have given us amazing leeway to really choose who we want to be sponsoring, and who we want to be working with.

And so there’s a bit of objective focus for who we’re sponsoring. Core contributors obviously, like they’re directly impacting the project by actually changing the code and adding features and fixing bugs. So that’s obviously very important.

But just as important is these other groups that are making sure that when a new person wants to use WordPress, there’s documentation that explains how to use the WordPress. When they want to go to a WordCamp and meet somebody, I mean Aaron Jorbin has a great story about meeting someone at one of the first contributor days that he went to. And they then became a core contributor within a short amount of time. And so that contributor day didn’t just happen, right? Like, people had to make that event happen, and organise it and have coffee and treats and lights and all of the things that go into that.

So I think that there’s a lot of levels here. Whether it’s directly sponsoring a contributor inside of the open source project. It’s sponsoring WordCamps, it’s sponsoring amazing podcasts that help to spread the word and market WordPress.

There’s people that have brought up that WordPress has kind of a marketing issue because it is this open source project that has just benefited from just a ton of people realising, wow, this is amazing software to build websites with. And they just started doing that, and 40% of the internet runs on WordPress.

That’s happened very, very organically. And I think though that we’re now at an inflection of the internet and the web where we maybe need to start becoming a little bit more intentional about the marketing and the promotion of WordPress.

[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m gathering from this is that, certainly from Kinsta’s point of view, you just want to make this whole bi-directional thing just clearer. Kinsta’s got some intention to sponsor, and we know who the people are, we know the kind of things that they want to sponsor. Maybe there’s going to be some sort of landing page for that or some intake form. And so hopefully people who have it in mind that they wish to be sponsored, they’ll be clearer on what kind of things are in scope, what kind of things are out of scope. How many people they need to jump through the hoops to get that sponsorship sorted out. So that kind of thing is really interesting.

What do you think about the idea of, so we haven’t discussed this, I’m just going to throw this in there. Do you think this is a company by company thing? So in other words, is Kinsta always going to be siloed in its approach to sponsoring? Or is there any kind of, I don’t know how this would work, but some kind of more overarching approach that may be required? So let’s say for example that, I don’t know, Kinsta do, they sponsor person X, person Y, person Z, as we say in the UK, but obviously that leaves all these other myriad people without sponsorship. Is there a way that you could communicate to other organisations?

Look, this person, they came to us, it was very close, but we didn’t manage to get them on the sponsorship roster this year. But we feel that they were really credible. Here’s somebody else that you can go and talk to. Do you know what I mean? Something just a little bit, a bigger umbrella organisation above Kinsta, maybe. Organisation, substitute that word for any kind of structure or governance as you like.

[00:39:12] Roger Williams: Yeah, there is a lot of stuff already around this. Courtney Robertson has WPCC.

[00:39:18] Nathan Wrigley: WP Community Collective.

[00:39:20] Roger Williams: Thank you. And so the idea with that group is kind of to create an organisation that handles the mechanism aspect of distributing funds and finding people to sponsor and contribute. I could see a consortium of hosting companies coming together and somehow working on this, but that adds additional complexities, right? You have now more organisations, you have more bodies deciding things and making decisions.

And again, going back to what I propose at the very end of the project is, don’t wait, just get started. My worry about having consortiums and larger organisations is it’s going to slow the process down, it’s going to complicate the process.

That’s mostly just because I have a big phobia of organisations and meetings. This is a personal kind of thing rather than, you know, I’m sure there’s ways to figure this out more. I have a job, right? I have to balance all of these things between working on what I need to actually work on inside of the company. Working on sponsoring contributors and focusing on the open source. So there’s a lot of balancing that goes on. I am open to having these discussions with people and organisations and seeing what can come of it.

Again, going back to feeling like an outsider and knowing that there’s already a ton of people and a ton of organisations involved in doing all of this work. I’ve reached out to many of them. They’ve given me great advice. They’ve really helped me get our program organised the way it is. They help me with my presentation and kind of figuring out what to talk about in here. And so I want to remain mindful that I don’t have all the answers, I’m not the only person that’s doing all of this, and I welcome people to come to me with suggestions and ideas, and I’m always open to talking.

[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t think there’s one size fits all really, is there? Because the WPCC feels like a really great initiative. It has more of a kind of escrow kind of service feel to it. In other words, Kinsta, you put in your X amount of dollars and then the WPCC will figure out where that might go. But it may be that, you know, you guys at Kinsta would like to have more of a kind of one-to-one relationship with the people that you are sponsoring. And so that’s fine.

Maybe you will have back channels to the people who do similar work at different companies. And so it will be more kind of laissez-faire than something a little bit more organised. Maybe it’ll just be more back channel kind of thing.

But that’s really interesting. Honestly, the time has got away with us. We’re at 45 minutes so far, so I think we’re fast approaching the amount of time that we’ve got available for us. Is there anything in this that we missed out? Was there any kernel, any little nugget somewhere that we failed to mention, or do you think we’ve covered the whole thing off?

[00:41:57] Roger Williams: You know, I think the one thing that maybe we skipped through a little bit is how to get your organisation bought into this. We’ve talked about the reasoning. We’ve talked about how to sell it from the outside. We’ve talked about how to deal with the individual contributors. Inside of your organisation there’s, again, three ways that I approach this. I like the number three, I guess.

So when you’re making your internal pitch, this is all in the slide deck as well, understanding your organisational goals. So understand like, hey, we’re a hosting company, what’s important for a hosting company? Well, performance and security are pretty top things. So maybe that’s where you want to focus.

Again, also we have a ton of customers that are non-English speaking, so Polyglots makes a lot of sense. Understand the organisational goals so that when you go to your executives, you go to your leadership, whoever’s got the money, you’re framing this out in terms of how it benefits your organisation.

The second one is being patient, but being ready. So I started this conversation, I want to say late 2023, inside of Kinsta. And then about a year later, suddenly, out of the blue, hey, here’s your budget, go get to work. And so I needed to be ready. So we all needed to be ready. And we were. The good news is Marcel and Alex and myself, were already out in the community talking with people. We already were having some conversations about, ooh, who would we like to sponsor, who could use the sponsorship?

And so as soon as the budget was given to us, we were ready to go. And the reason that I recommend being ready is, these can be fleeting, right? Just because the executive has approved it this month doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be there the next month.

[00:43:37] Nathan Wrigley: And also the contributor might not be, you know, I’ve got two weeks now, I can do something right away.

[00:43:42] Roger Williams: Yeah, so be ready because they’re going to want to see results. And the results should be, the way you framed it, the results should just be, hey, we’re sponsoring contributor X, they’re doing Y and Z, oh, and I had them on a Kinsta Talk, and here’s actual proof of we’re doing stuff. So have all of that ready to go. Have a spreadsheet that tracks everything so you can track where the money’s going and it’s all clear.

Understand how your organisation wants to handle these things, right? Is it going to be as simple as, hey, here’s a credit card and here’s a GitHub sponsorship page? Is that going to be okay? Or does it need to be a little bit more, I say complicated, involved, right? Do you need to have a non disparaging contract, right? So that it’s understood, hey, we’re sponsoring you, it’d be best if you didn’t say bad things about us, please. Get that cleared, like figure that stuff out.

And then be ready for common objections, right? So they’re going to immediately come to you with, hey, why would we spend money on this? It’s something that we get for free. And be ready with that strategic and the operational and the second order benefits conversations. And know which of those is going to land with which manager, executive best. So getting that internal pitch ready and really creating the project so it’s ready for success from day one is really important.

[00:45:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting because a lot of it, most of what we talked about in this conversation didn’t really dwell on that. It was more about the nuts and the bolts of trying to connect the two different sides. But you’ve obviously laid out the groundwork inside Kinsta to have this ready. And then the minute that the CEO or the CMO or whoever it is, says, right, Roger, here’s some money, you’re off, you’re ready to actually go and start seeking this stuff out.

I very much doubt that this conversation is going to have a perfect outcome. I don’t suppose there is a perfect system, but I appreciate the fact that you’re giving it a lot of thought over there, and you’re trying to figure out how to make these two sides collide in a way that is mutually beneficial. Because it certainly seems that with WordPress at 40% of the web, the money question is not going away, the philanthropic side of things is not going away, and we do have to have ways for these two sides to communicate successfully with each other.

So, okay, I will put links to anything that we have mentioned in the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Roger Williams, you’ll be able to find everything there.

Just one last thing, Roger. Where can we find you apart from kinsta.com? Is there a place where you hang out online if somebody wants to pick this conversation up and run with it?

[00:46:11] Roger Williams: Yeah, absolutely. I am a big user of LinkedIn. I post there pretty regularly. If you interact with me in the comments, I will love you forever, you’re my best friend. I love it when people ask me questions, or challenge me in the comments like, let’s have conversations there. Feel free to reach out to me and let’s talk, I wanna figure this stuff out.

[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: Roger Williams, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:46:34] Roger Williams: Thank you very much, Nathan. I appreciate everything that you do for the community and thank you for the time and letting me be on.

[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 Dow Jones is supercharging WordPress editorial workflows.

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 Joshua Bryant. Joshua works at Dow Jones, helping power some of the world’s largest publishing sites, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch, all on a WordPress Multisite platform.

His background with WordPress started, as it does for so many, by inheriting a site and slowly peeling back the layers of what the CMS can do, from page building to infrastructure and custom workflows.

At Word Camp US, he delivered a presentation called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem, which digs into how his team decoupled the Gutenberg block editor from WP Admin. And embedded it in a standalone React application, all while keeping content stored in a traditional WordPress database.

This episode is a journey into why time, down to the second, matters in the publishing world, and how headless solutions can address those needs.

Joshua explains how editorial workflows were rebuilt so that breaking news can be published, or updated, with lightning fast speeds, removing distractions and page reloads for editors, while retaining the full power and extensibility of WordPress behind the scenes.

We talk through the technical architecture, planning, editing, and rendering are split into separate applications with Gutenberg customized down to just two or three essential blocks, living outside the typical WordPress environment.

Joshua talks about the challenge of simulating the global WP object, keeping business logic and proprietary plugins intact, and interacting with the rest API for Instantaneous content publishing.

If you’re interested in headless WordPress, editorial workflows at scale, or how Enterprise newsrooms leverage open source tech for real world speed, 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 Joshua Bryant.

I am joined on the podcast by Joshua Bryant. Hello.

[00:03:25] Joshua Bryant: Hi.

[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to meet you. This is the first time that we’ve ever met. We’re going to be talking today about, well, the Dow Jones website, but also about headless, I guess is probably the best way to sum it up. So strap in. This is going to be a tinfoil hat episode. I am also going to say at the beginning that this is an episode for which I am supremely unqualified. So I hope that you are going to be able to shepherd me and call me out when I ask a silly question. So let’s hope for the best.

The reason that I’ve got you on is because headless is an interesting subject, there’s that, but also the fact that it’s Dow Jones that you are dealing with, and the profound importance of that. The fact that, of all the websites I can imagine, there’s not many which have that requirement to be alive a hundred percent of the time. So that whole piece is going to fit in as well.

Before we get into that, would you mind just telling us a bit about you? I mean, we know where you work now, but other than that, tell us about your experience with WordPress and so on.

[00:04:18] Joshua Bryant: Right. So, I mean, I started, I think like most WordPress people started, I inherited a WordPress website knowing nothing about web development at all. And so I struggled my way through Googling, what is DNS? What does that even mean?

And the WordPress offered me the opportunity to grow, and there’s always something new to learn. So from day one, I started learning about building pages, and then themes, and then plugins. And then I got a job where I was building themes and plugins. And then I got a job where I was really working on the infrastructure behind it.

As I continue to grow, I keep learning that there’s always another layer to WordPress. And I think I’m getting close to the bottom, but that’s what I thought every layer. So I did a little bit of contributing last year when I was here at WordCamp, and I’m just excited to keep growing and keep learning more about the power that we have in that WordPress environment.

[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for that. So you’re at WordCamp US, obviously, you’re talking to me, we’re in the same room. Presentation that you did or doing?

[00:05:26] Joshua Bryant: Did.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: Did. We’ll get to that in a minute. It was called Reimagining WordPress Editing: How We Embedded Gutenberg Into Our Product Ecosystem. I might read some of the blurb in a little bit, but first of all, how did it go?

[00:05:37] Joshua Bryant: I think it went well.

[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: Good.

[00:05:39] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. I told the story in the presentation that I teach teenagers a lot. And it was a couple years ago, I’m in the middle of a lesson and I looked down and nobody’s paying attention to me because one of the students had gotten so bored, he had started ripping apart his styrofoam cup and he had been eating it. He was halfway through eating the cup. Halfway through my presentation, I look and nobody had done anything sort of like that. So I felt like the presentation went well, people were paying attention. That’s kind of my benchmark.

[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good one.

[00:06:08] Joshua Bryant: I think I’ve gotten better.

[00:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: So here’s the blurb. And I won’t do it all, I’ll get maybe through the first paragraph and hopefully, dear listener, it’ll give you some context for what’s going to come in the next 40 minutes, half an hour or so.

What happens when you take the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress? This talk explores how we decouple the block editor from WP Admin and the Loop, embedding it in a standalone React application to power custom editorial workflows, while still saving to a traditional WordPress database.

Now there’s a lot in there. And I think that subject would be curious if it was just, you know, the mom and pop website, but the fact that you are actually dealing with, forgive me if I get this wrong, dowjones.com. I don’t know if it is dowjones.com, but it’s certainly the Dow Jones.

[00:06:50] Joshua Bryant: So Dow Jones as an entity, a fun fact, they no longer own the Dow Jones market. They sold it. But they do own a lot of publishing websites. So they own websites like the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Mansion Global. We’ve purchased more, I don’t know if I can say any of the other names right now, but we own all of those entities and so they are on a Multisite.

And so right now our publishing system, all of our editors publish from those websites in our WordPress Multisite environment. And all of that, we can talk about headless, but all of that actually goes into this all knowing database in the sky, where our front end systems pick them up. So WordPress itself doesn’t render wsj.com. We have a mobile team that does that. One way, we have a web team that does it a different way, and they all read from this all knowing database.

But we use WordPress and our editors use it, we call it NewsPress, and we use it to publish all of our content. Our editors find it easy to use, and we like all of the features that WordPress offers. So we’ve leveraged the power of WordPress to do those things.

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: Some of those names were really enormous entities. Did you say the Wall Street Journal, or?

[00:08:08] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.

[00:08:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, these are ones that I’ve heard of and I don’t live in this country, so that’s pretty profound. So I guess they’ve got an incredible appetite for traffic, but also an incredible need to be there a hundred percent. Not this 99.8% of the time. This is 100% of the time, I’m guessing.

[00:08:26] Joshua Bryant: Right. And the topic that we’re going to talk about today, and it applies to all news, but when there’s breaking news, being first to market matters. Being 10 seconds ahead of your competitor when Taylor Swift gets engaged is an important amount of time when you’re sending out a push notification. Or in the case of MarketWatch, when there are going to be fluctuations in the market and we have editors listening in on board meetings, being able to send that information out and get that to our readers as soon as possible is the most important thing to our publications.

[00:08:59] Nathan Wrigley: So is this a project, or an infrastructure, let’s go with that, that you inherited or were you bought in to build this?

[00:09:06] Joshua Bryant: Both. In the most simple terms, I can explain it, we’ll say we have three systems. We have a React based planning tool. We have a WordPress editing tool, where we actually write the articles, save the content, control user permissions, lock and unlock posts. And then we have the front end that then takes what they publish and display it in any way that they need across all of our publications. So we have planning, editing and rendering. And those are three completely separate buckets that have been there for quite some time.

[00:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: So we’re at a WordPress event and we’re surrounded by WordPressers, so it is kind of a bit of a bubble that we’re in at the minute. Everybody in this hall, in this place, kind of would understand what you’ve just described. However, dear listener, hopefully I’m not besmirching you, but there’s going to be a bunch of people listening to this who, what you just said went completely over their head.

They download WordPress, they pay a few dollars a month to pop it on a host that they believe is reliable, and they know there’s a database somewhere but they’re kind of using the front end. And that’s all that they need to concern themselves about. Just explain in more detail what you just said. This React, this editing and this front end. What even is that?

[00:10:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. I mean you can think of them as three separate applications on your phone. You might use one app, like your calendar, to plan things out. That’s what our planning tool is. It essentially lets us coordinate with each other and say, hey, we need to have a steady stream of stories. And we also want to attach, our photographers are going to put some images in those stories, so we might add that to the calendar invite description. Those are the kind of things we do in the planning tool.

And then in the WordPress tool, it’s a lot like what anybody does in WordPress. We’re writing posts, we’re adding images, and in the case of the newsroom, they might do a couple things around SEO, and add some metadata that we want to show up on Google. And I think everybody should be familiar with creating posts.

And then a completely different system picks it up and says, okay, I’m going to show everybody what it looks like. And that part is not really important because that’s the headless part. But you don’t really need to understand that there’s another system that does this thing differently, to understand what we’re going to talk about as far as, we moved our editor into, let’s say, a very simplified tool.

One example that I like to think about is, when we have done this project, we did it very specifically for the newsroom’s needs. So we tailored it very, very specifically. But I like to think of the applications of, I like to collect people who have great quotes. When I hear a great quote, I’m like, oh, I need to write that down. I don’t want to forget it. I like to think of it as, I want to pull up something like Twitter or Bluesky, and I want to just type in a field, hit send, and then it publishes a post on my WordPress dashboard. It’s a custom post that says, here’s a notable tweet. And it posted it.

That way I don’t lose that and I can have it in my WordPress, which is where I keep most of like, I keep my recipes, and my notes, and my blogs, and everything that I want to remember. It’s like my personal online notebook. But now we’ve created a mechanism where we can kind of take that and extend it anywhere we want outside of just the WP Editor, and be able to pull something up and say, hey, there’s a different application. You type it in, you hit send, and then it all runs through WordPress itself.

[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: What are the reasons why that needed to be done? So just sort of going backwards a bit, really. Obviously that is what is possible, but why is just a default version of WordPress on red hot hosting not something that is suitable in this situation? What affordances does it get you? What performance does it buy you? What UI does it allow you to create that makes this possible? And I think you said you built your own proprietary system. What did you call it, press news or news?

[00:13:15] Joshua Bryant: NewsPress.

[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: NewsPress, sorry. Wrong way around. So, why? What are the limitations in WordPress that were unignorable that required this?

[00:13:22] Joshua Bryant: I don’t think there were necessarily limitations. We are talking about shaving seconds off the editor process. And so there are a lot of things in our WordPress system that we want editors to do before they publish a normal article. We want them to have certain SEO titles listed. We want them to have fallback images for headline videos. We are okay with the way everything operates inside of WordPress, but we’re talking about shaving seconds off by putting it, first of all, in a tool that the editors are already in. They’re planning their day, they’re planning their month in the planning tool. And it’s a single page application. There’s no page reload. It’s all in React. There’s no calling a database that we have to worry about.

We’re literally just pulling up the Gutenberg editor, typing out a breaking news or a market watch, we call them pulse, some update that we need to get to our readers. And if there’s a bunch of information that comes in, we need to be able to hit 10 posts with as limited information as possible and get it to publish all the way to the front end, and do 10 in a row as quickly as possible.

[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: So the raison d’etre there then is time. It’s all about shaving seconds off because in the industry that you are in, if you’re five seconds late, you might as well not publish.

[00:14:46] Joshua Bryant: Right. It’s time, and it’s also distraction for our editors. They don’t have the full editor experience anymore. They don’t have the sidebar, and all the tabs because we have a lot of stuff in our editor.

[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so in this three step process where you’ve got the React, and we’ll talk about ripping out Gutenberg and pushing it to this React app in a minute. But we’ve got the React app where the planning is done, then presumably when the planning is finished, and I’m going to use the word publish, maybe it’s not publish, but you hit a button, presumably that pushes it down the funnel towards the WordPress install, which then pushes it to the front end. So there’s this kind of like one way cycle.

But the idea of the React, Gutenberg bit is that it’s fast, really fast and distraction free. There’s just no clutter. It’s just, you’re familiar with that interface. Because with the best one in the world, WordPress, there’s a lot of things going on. When you click publish, quite a lot can happen at that moment. You don’t want any of that. You just want publish. Boom. Done.

[00:15:39] Joshua Bryant: Right.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you’ve pulled the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress. And, okay, I think it’s important at this point to say, Gutenberg is an open source project. We’re mostly familiar with it sitting inside of WordPress, but it doesn’t belong there. And you’ve put it inside of this React app. How have you customised it to get it there, and what have you stripped out, what have you added in?

[00:16:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, great question because part of the reason we decided to continue to use Gutenberg instead of some other React tool is that we’ve already invested so much time and effort into the business logic around our custom plugins and around the workflow, and we’ve put so much into our WordPress environment that we asked ourselves, how can we maintain all the equity we have in WordPress and leverage the power of WordPress, but put it in a slightly different place where we can take care of all of our editor’s needs? And so that was really the driving factor behind, okay, we’re going to move it here, but we still want all the things we have there.

And so what we did is we limited the number of blocks. While we might have most of the Core blocks in our regular editor, we have the paragraph and list block in our planning.

[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: That’s it?

[00:17:01] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, because that’s all we needed. That’s all we needed. And we have a couple custom plugins that we’ve moved into our planning tool. For instance, in MarketWatch, if you’re writing a story about Target, you’re going to want to tag the Target company, and we call it tickers, the stock tickers. And that lets our front end know, hey, this is a story about Target, let’s put the real time stock ticker information into this article, so it’s not like, when I wrote it a week ago, this is what the the stock ticker looked like.

It’s, when I’m looking at it right now, this is the real time stock ticker data. We put a lot of time and effort into building that plugin for WordPress, and so we wanted to find a way to not have to rewrite any of that code, not have to redo any of that work, but take what we’ve already done and just move it to the planning tool and have it work in both locations in the same code base.

[00:17:55] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to understand what that looks like. So let’s say that I’m in this planning tool. Somehow I get to that planning tool. I don’t know where it lives, whether I’m on a desktop or a website, or an application which lives on Mac OS. I don’t know. I probably don’t need to know, but I’m in it. And it looks like Gutenberg, yeah? I mean it is Gutenberg. Everything’s the same, except you’ve got this tiny limited arrangement of blocks. So paragraph, list, and then a couple of others, bespoke ones which you obviously need.

So what happens then when I’m doing that planning and then I click, I’m going to use publish again, I don’t know if you’ve overhauled the UI to make it something else, but let’s click publish. What happens at that moment? Where does that go? And how does it fit into the whole flow that we talked about?

[00:18:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. So everything that you do in a normal WordPress editor, you can also do using this thing called the REST API. And they’re just endpoints that exist that you can call to do things like lock a post, save a post, publish a post. And so when we do anything like that inside of our planning tool and we hit publish, it just hits this backend location that says, hey, post number 1, 2, 3, I want you to do what you normally do WordPress, and publish that post for me. And it doesn’t have to load anything inside of WordPress, it just hits that endpoint and WordPress says, well, I know how to publish. Okay, I’m going to publish.

And we didn’t have to load the page, we didn’t have to hit the WP Admin. It just skips all those steps and says, okay, I’ll publish for you. And then that sends it off downstream and they all do their thing. So it’s essentially the same, we just skip some steps.

[00:19:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So again, just to emphasise, the whole point of that was to save time.

[00:19:39] Joshua Bryant: Yes.

[00:19:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating that time is such an important commodity. I’ve never come across a scenario, I mean I just don’t live in that world. I don’t have a scenario in my head where the amount of time it takes to hit publish and wait for WordPress to do its checks and balances and what have you, or load it up and all of that. But those few moments is important enough.

So you build the React app, it looks like Gutenberg, you hit publish via the REST API, it goes to WordPress, but it misses out all the intermediary things that may happen, and we can get into that in a minute. And then it just hits, it just publishes it immediately.

[00:20:15] Joshua Bryant: Right.

[00:20:15] Nathan Wrigley: That is fascinating.

[00:20:16] Joshua Bryant: And the great thing about keeping WordPress in the loop there is that if there’s a breaking news article, we do as rapidly as we can. We’re going to publish that article. But now it exists in the WordPress database, and we can go back to it and do all of the things that we normally do, but it’s already published.

So it’s out there, but now we can go and, just like the regular WordPress editor, we can add images, we can add SEO data, we can do all of those things we’d normally do. We can post updates, but the post is already out there. So we’re no longer in a rush, but we still are going to make that story more robust.

[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m just trying to be clear, because in your, the blurb for your presentation, you used this phrase, which was custom editorial workflows. I think we just went through that. So React app, WordPress, it gets published, we’re on the front end. But then at that moment, any modifications, let’s say, I don’t know, there’s an update, somebody has to modify something about it. At this point, you’re in the middle step. You’re going to the regular WordPress site and you’re updating it in there. Have I got that right? You’re not back the first step.

[00:21:20] Joshua Bryant: Right. We’re doing all of that in the planning tool. And then if you’ve been to some of our websites or I think any news website, you’ll see, last updated, and it’ll give you a timestamp. That’s when you get that notification that, hey, this has been updated. It’s because we’ve gone back into WordPress and we’ve added more information that our readers are going to find interesting or important. And we sent it down and there it goes again. Version two is out.

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: Is this kind of standard practice in the journalism industry to have something akin to this because time’s so important? Or is it something of an affordance that you can have because those publications are already so successful?

Because I’m imagining it’s not all that cheap to put that together and maintain. Presumably there’s got to be developers surrounding it all the time and making sure it’s updated and kept alive. So I was just curious as to whether or not this is typical or something that you think is pretty unique.

[00:22:13] Joshua Bryant: Well, I’ll tell you this. This is the first time ever in my career that I have tried to Google things and got zero results. So I don’t think that it happens a lot. I think it’s pretty unique. I know our parent company, they own a bunch of other publishing corporations and none of them have done anything like this either. I think this is something that we pioneered and that it’s great, it was very unfortunate for me to try to figure it out.

[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: Were there headaches along the way? Was it really quite a challenge? Have you learned things which other people listening to this podcast, they may think, okay, I need to talk to Joshua. I have a similar crisis on my hands. Was there a lot of learning along the way?

[00:22:51] Joshua Bryant: I think the main thing that I learned was that WordPress has a lot of really good documentation for using it the way that it should be used.

[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: The normal way.

[00:23:02] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And so if you want to learn how to use WordPress, the documentation’s great. If you want to learn how to misuse WordPress, there is not a lot of good documentation out there. And you’re going to have to read a lot of Trac tickets and GitHub issues and Slack threads and, you know, read through the code.

And so, yeah, I will say that, pro, WordPress, great at documenting, but if you’re going to do something out of the box like this, you’re going to have to find those alternate sources of documentation, which is just, and how they built it. That was a good lesson and a good learning curve. And I learned a lot about the contributor process through that.

[00:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah, I’m sure you did. Did it deliver, or does it deliver in the way that was anticipated at the planning state? So when the stakeholders were sat down and the green light was given to this project, did it come out exactly as expected, or were there things where suddenly you figured, oh, we cannot do this particular thing? Maybe it worked out better than you had originally intended.

[00:24:00] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, so actually, we rolled it out for MarketWatch first and it worked, and they have not complained, at least to me about it. But it was so good that they rolled it out to wsj.com next, and we developed it in such a way that it would be very extendable. And when they rolled it out to wsj, I didn’t know about it. So it really was a seamless transition. Now we have two of our biggest newsrooms using it, and I think we’re going to roll it out to Baron’s next. I don’t anticipate having to do any work for that either.

[00:24:32] Nathan Wrigley: I find this so curious. I think you maybe made yourself fairly indispensable.

[00:24:37] Joshua Bryant: I wouldn’t go that far.

[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: It certainly sounds it. So let’s get into the sort of technical bits and pieces about it, because I’m reading, cribbing from my notes here. You mentioned in the talk, simulating the global WP Object. And whilst that sounds interesting and is no doubt complicated, what are the critical components of the doing that? How did you replicate it? What was the biggest challenge? Stripping out the editor and making it work somewhere else.

[00:24:59] Joshua Bryant: Well, that’s one of the great things that I learned about the way WordPress works behind the scenes. When you’re building plugins, you import a lot of WordPress packages that do very specific things. And my assumption was always, when I build my code, it’s putting all of those packages into the code in one file and then ships it to my website. And that’s how it works.

That’s not exactly how it works. The bundle process for WordPress actually pulls all of those scripts out for speed and efficiency. You don’t want 20 plugins to have 20 different versions of the same code. And so they’ve pulled all of that out and it just uses one version of that code. Whatever version of WordPress you’re on, if I’m on six three, it’s going to run the six three version of all of the scripts.

And so when we moved our code over into the planning tool, there is no six three in React. It doesn’t know that these scripts are supposed to be there, and so it was referencing this global object, this Global WP. And if you’re familiar with doing things in the console, it’s, you type wp.data.select Core Editor, and you get a bunch of stuff back, right? It doesn’t exist in React or in Gutenberg. And so that was our first hurdle.

What WordPress is doing for us, building this object that all the code runs through, we’re going to have to manually do in React. We’re going to have to import those packages and set them at the global namespace level just so that the WordPress code will run.

[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: And how challenging was that?

[00:26:40] Joshua Bryant: Well, discovering it was the challenge. Implementing it was the easy part. We went through many iterations of, why is it not working? How will it not communicate? Before we realised that WordPress is doing this for us. And then once we had that realisation, the implementation was rather simple.

[00:26:59] Nathan Wrigley: To me, that would’ve been quite a frustrating process. Going backwards and forwards there. Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it working? And then sort of suddenly realise, oh, it’s not working because, as you’ve just described. Yeah, that’s really interesting.

But you are happy that you went through that process. There’s no bit at which you thought, okay, we’re backing out. We’re not going to use WordPress. We’re going to use some sort of custom CMS that you can buy off the shelf, any of that.

[00:27:22] Joshua Bryant: Right. Oh yeah. I mean, if you had asked me a week into my back and forth, I would’ve said no. And it gives me a deeper understanding of WordPress too, and a deeper appreciation for the decisions that the contributors made when they built it to make it efficient. I never thought about how the WP build process helps developers build efficient websites, even if they don’t really know what’s going on. You type in WP scripts build, and then a lot of things happen. But the developers don’t need to know everything that happens. It just happens. And that’s great for developers.

But when I went that step further and I’m like, why is this happening? I went down the rabbit trail of figuring out what does WP scripts build do, and how can I break it? I want to do something else with it. And then coming all the way back to realising, no, they’re doing it the right way, the good way. And now that I understand what it does, I can design our system to be in alignment with that.

[00:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it sounds like you kind of went full circle there.

[00:28:28] Joshua Bryant: Oh, I did.

[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s really interesting.

[00:28:30] Joshua Bryant: Circle, spiral.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, I’m sure there was a few spirals. So without giving anything away, how do your stakeholders that need to be a part of the first stage, the planning tool, how do they get to that? Can they access that with their phones? Can they access that with their desktop? How do they interact with that?

[00:28:46] Joshua Bryant: Yes, two things are important for us. We want to be able to access it in the office, on a desktop, plan out things. But we also want our reporters to be able to give us breaking news in the field, wherever they are.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That was where I was going with that, yeah.

[00:29:03] Joshua Bryant: Right. And so that is one driving factor for the decisions that we make when we make these design decisions, and make these application decisions. We need to remove as many barriers from our editors to publishing.

And sometimes that’s, how can we reduce the number of clicks to get a full fledged story out the door? Or it’s, how do we make this work with as few distractions as possible on a mobile phone when somebody’s sitting in the back of a boardroom?

[00:29:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So available on everything, everywhere. Where there’s an internet connection, you can get to this.

[00:29:37] Joshua Bryant: Yeah.

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. One of the curious things, and again, we’re going to go into the technical details here, so forgive me if this question is misplaced, because you specifically mentioned replacing Core / Editor with Core / Block Editor. I’m not really familiar with what that distinction is, but the fact that you mentioned that kind of gave me an intuition that there was something there. So why was that important? And you are going to have to go slightly gently on me cause I don’t really understand.

[00:30:01] Joshua Bryant: I will gently wade into the weeds here. When we’re building custom blocks in our process here, a lot of times we use the data stores. And there’s an editor data store, and a block editor data store. What does that look like in the WP admin? When you pull up a post the block inserter, when you hit the plus on the top left, or you hit add, all of the blocks that show up, that’s one part of the Gutenberg editor.

The big chunk in the middle is the second part where you do all your typing, you put your post, you add your images. And then the sidebar on the right, where you make adjustments, is the third part. All three of those components are the Block Editor. Everything that exists outside of that is the broader editor. Think of that as like a giant wrapper around the entire thing. That has like the save button, the publish button. It has information about the post and all of its attributes.

And so it has much more information. The Block Editor just needs to know what blocks exist on the page. The Editor needs to know about a much broader context inside of WordPress. When we moved the Editor, we moved the Block Editor. So the save button isn’t there. We’re not using that. We wrote our own save button that hits the API.

[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just pause you there? So when you say the Block Editor, you are describing the three things. The panel on the left, the central area where you create the content, and the sidebar on the right, if you like, where the settings for those might be. But not the wrapper.

[00:31:36] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we actually went one step further and said, we don’t need the left or the right. We just need the part in the middle. We want to make it as distraction free as possible and move it over. So we have the option to put the sidebar there, and the sidebar works, but we have chosen as a business decision, we don’t want it.

And since we’re headless, whether they change the font or the colour, none of that actually affects our front end. We don’t want editors to be able to bold and italicise and make all the text red that they think is important because they would go crazy. They think all my text is important.

So yeah, we moved all of just that middle piece, just that Block Editor is what we moved over. And we have a save button, and a publish button that don’t interact with the WordPress Editor, they interact with the WordPress API.

[00:32:28] Nathan Wrigley: The REST API pushing it to the regular WordPress site. Okay, and again, just harking back to what you mentioned a moment ago, when we began this conversation, I was imagining a different thing. I was imagining that you pulled the Block Editor in its entirety out. So I’ve learned something there. So this is just that content creation area.

And by stripping out the left, and the right, and the publish and all of those things, that’s where the time saving comes, is it? Is that where the few seconds can be shaved off because it’s the bare bones of what it requires to create some text on a screen.

[00:33:00] Joshua Bryant: Yes, exactly. Because a lot of times it’s headline, paragraph, send. That’s it for the first iteration of that article.

[00:33:07] Nathan Wrigley: So one of the questions that I had, which now appears to be not necessary, but I’m going to ask it anyway. I was asking about things like, for example, manually editing the content that you would make in the React app, undoing things, history, and so on. That’s not really what’s going on. You’re doing it this one time in the React app, then everything after that is happening in the WordPress website.

So the history and everything is stored in the regular way, the bolding, the italicising, the, I want to make it red, that’s all done posthumously after the fact, once it’s been published, or at least shunted via the REST API to the WordPress, you know, the database, the regular WordPress website. So that all happens there. The amendments happen there.

[00:33:49] Joshua Bryant: Right. And we still have access to all of the toolbar options. So if you want to add a link, you would do it the exact same way that you add a link in your WordPress post. So we have some of that available to us, but we’ve locked it down. Not because it won’t work, but because we don’t want it to be a distraction for our editors.

[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: So is there any type of content that, I’m trying to imagine a scenario where, presumably not everybody needs the React app. So for example, if I’m writing a piece about, I don’t know, gardening or something, you know, it’s really not time sensitive. I could write this next year and it’s just as important, or a recipe or something like that. Do I need to be in the React app? Or is that just for the kind of, the journalists out in the field who need things quick? So have you got like this two tier system of editing, the, I need it extra, specially quick, you are in React, but the gardening post is just done as a regular post?

[00:34:41] Joshua Bryant: Yes. And that’s the majority of our posts, are all regular posts, and they’ve had time to plan it out and gather their assets, which they do in the planning tool, and all of that information syncs over to WordPress. But they don’t do any editing other than our breaking news.

[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It’s the breaking news React app then basically.

[00:35:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes.

[00:35:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s curious. Sorry, this is sort of sidestepping slightly. So they just create text. They create text and lists and that’s it. Paragraphs and lists. That’s all they’ve got. And when they hit the REST API, does it publish automatically or do they hit some other editorial workflow where somebody more senior gets to look at it? Because I’m guessing in this scenario where Taylor Swift got married, you just want to go straight to front end.

[00:35:28] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. It goes straight to the front end. They have a paragraph and list, that’s for the core, but they also have some of our proprietary plugins that, like we have a correction, and we have a ticker inserter, and there are a couple ones that we moved over, like our byline. We have a author database, and so they can say, hey, I wrote this. And so that’s a block that we wrote, and it works in WordPress and it also works in the planning tool, but it’s very limited what they can do because that’s all they needed. So we said we’ll strip everything else out.

[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: Is it a common workflow then where the same author who’s written this really time sensitive piece will hit publish over there, it goes from React app, REST API, to WordPress, to the front end? They would then almost immediately, do they at that point let go of it or do they then almost immediately go back to the WordPress website and think, actually, do you know what, I do want that bit bold, I would like to underline that? So yeah, I’m just curious what that workflow looks like.

[00:36:26] Joshua Bryant: I think it depends on the situation. And so in one case, while it is a breaking news story, as long as we don’t convert it to a full article, we can make updates in the planning tool. So he can go back, we can edit that and say, well, I wanted it bold, I’m going to do it in the planning tool. But if you wanted to, you could also do it in the WordPress environment. When we say convert to an article, we mean, this was breaking news, but I’m going to click a button and that’s going to let other editors know, we’re about to make this a full fledged article.

[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see.

[00:36:57] Joshua Bryant: Yeah. Because a lot of times we have multiple editors working on the same article. And so we need to be in coordination, especially around breaking news. Hey, this is happening right now. I’ve pushed it out. I’m going to pass this off to you. Can you go in? Hopefully there are no typos, but fix any typos, or change the headline, or add SEO data. So they really work as a team, especially around breaking news and then pass that off to other editors.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess because you’re in the weeds of this, it’s so self-evident what this workflow is. It’s just for me, it’s so curious that there’s all these interesting little steps, and behind it all is this desire to save seconds. And it really is absolutely, this is nothing like a WordPress site that I’ve come across in the past. Hope you’ll forgive my ignorance for keeping asking the same kind of question. But I find that really fascinating.

So the gardening post is done on the website, the important timely post is done in the React app, and yet there’s a convert to, I don’t know, regular content or something like that, button that an editor can go in and, yeah, it’s wheels within wheels. It’s absolutely fascinating.

[00:38:01] Joshua Bryant: Yes. This is why I said earlier, there were so many business rules and so much time spent into building our WordPress system that we didn’t consider another tool very seriously. Because we have so much invested in there, and there’s so much power in the WordPress system that we’ve, first of all out of the box, but second, what we’ve built on top of it that we said, we need to leverage this in this use case here.

[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly, I think we could probably spend all day talking about this, but we probably should move on.

I’m curious as to whether any of this knowledge that you’ve acquired building this, because I know that in the WordPress community, most people don’t do headless, but there is a hardcore of people like you who just love this stuff.

And I’m just curious as to whether the knowledge that you’ve gained in the building of this, whether or not any of that gets put back into the open source project, whether there’s a commitment on your side, on the Dow Jones side to make this available, to open up a repo, to give away the content, the way that you’ve done it, the knowledge that you’ve acquired along the way?

[00:39:02] Joshua Bryant: Yeah, I think that is ultimately my goal. I started a repo just to show how we moved Gutenberg. There’s a lot of proprietary stuff that I had to take out of there. This is just my repo at this point. It’s lacking a lot of the, how do you get a custom block to work over there, at this point? I want to continue to add to that, but I think I’m also considering what, does this do for the broader WordPress community? How can this be applied to help Core, or to help contractors, or to help people who have a lot of clients.

One thing I’ve thought about is, if we have clients who may be difficult, right? I think we’ve all run into people at one point or another that said, I don’t like WordPress. I’ve heard the word React. I want React. People say, React is cool, right? Or I want a Vue project, or I want it to look like this. I don’t want to go to WordPress backend.

This is opening up a whole different set of opportunities where we can say, okay, I’m going to throw together, I’m going to vibe code, which I hate, but I want to vibe code a one page React application, and rely on the WordPress API to give me database, to give me user management, post saves, revision history. You can use WordPress as its own complete system and then just slap React on top of it, and have the full Gutenberg editing experience and save all of your information and still do all the things that you know how to do in WordPress, and your client’s happy and they don’t know anything about it.

[00:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of like WordPress without the WordPress. It’s the look and feel of WordPress without the overhead of WordPress.

[00:40:43] Joshua Bryant: It’s the power of WordPress. And what I say is the power of WordPress at the speed of breaking news. But it’s the power of WordPress at whatever the client wants. And so if they want one thing, you can give it to them there. And if you have a lot of clients and you have people spinning up different interfaces, maybe it’s React, it’s Vue. You have eight different clients, you can put them all into one Multisite and you can use WordPress as the backend for all of them. And each application looks completely different, tailored to those needs, and it all just goes through the same old WordPress functionality.

[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess that the way the interface looks is kind of the key bit there. You could make it look like Gutenberg, you could make it look nothing like Gutenberg. It could be anything that you liked. Simple, complicated, whatever.

I’m guessing this is really enterprise stuff, though. I don’t think we’re ever going to be straying into, I don’t know, I’ve got a dog walking service and I would like to offer that in my town of 3,000 people. We’re not for that. This is kind of enterprise, publishing, big pharma, that kind of thing.

[00:41:46] Joshua Bryant: Enterprise or people who deal with a lot of particular clients. Or people who want to build something cool for themselves, like I want to collect quotes when I hear them. I might build that application so that I can just pull up my phone, send out something like a tweet. I can say, Nathan Wrigley said this. It was really cool. Send. And now it’s a custom post type on my website called notable quotes, and it’s just your quote attribution.

[00:42:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. I guess the beauty of the open source project, and thank you for honoring the commitment there, hopefully we’ll get the knowledge distributed, is that the first time around you doing it, it would’ve been very expensive because you’re a developer, your time is valuable. So presumably all of that got wrapped into this project. The company that you are working for could afford that. But maybe now it’s going to be a slightly easier bridge to cross. And I guess communicating with you might make that a little bit easier. I don’t mean to open up your calendar or anything, but would you potentially make yourself available through email or Slack or whatever? And if that’s the case, where would people find you?

[00:42:54] Joshua Bryant: Of course. I would say that I would love to pass this off. I try to tell myself, when I do something new, I always say, this is going to be the worst it ever is. And so when I’m looking at this, I see a lot of potential, but I also realise that this state that we’re in right now is the worst this idea is ever going to be. And I would love for people to come and make it better, and tell me what I did wrong and tell me what I can do better. And to say, but what if we did this instead? And that’s the beauty of open source. We want to see it grow. We want to see all of the possibilities that we can do with this.

And so please, first of all, take it, run with it, make it better. And second of all, yes, I’d be glad to meet and talk with anybody about it. And if I could save somebody the two week spiral, or the two week loop, I would love to do that as well. So yeah, I will absolutely make myself available.

[00:43:47] Nathan Wrigley: Where can you be found? What’s the best place to find you?

[00:43:50] Joshua Bryant: The best place to find me would probably be at my personal email address, which is j b r y a 0 2 9 at gmail dot com. And that is a carryover from my college years, so it’s a little weird, but it’ll work.

[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll make sure not to put that into the text on the WP Tavern website, but it’s in the audio now, so hopefully people can find it. Anything that we’ve talked about, if I can find a link to it, I will put that in. So listeners, head over to wptavern.com, search for the episode of Joshua Bryant. That’s Joshua, J-O-S-H-U-A and Bryant, B-R-Y-A-N-T. Search over there and you will find all of the bits and pieces.

I’ll link to the presentation that Joshua gave at WordCamp US, and maybe that’ll be on WordPress TV by the time you come to consume this. Anything else that Joshua wants to send me, I’ll put on there as well. So, Joshua Bryant, thank you for shepherding me through something that was much harder to understand than I’m capable of. So thank you so much.

[00:44:49] Joshua Bryant: No, thank you. You ask great questions and I appreciate it.