Transcript ↓

In this episode, Jannis Thuemmig, serial entrepreneur and founder of WP Webhooks, dives into the world of automation and Open AI with Cory Miller. Together they look at what is currently possible within the world of integration and automation within WordPress. Then they lean into what is unfolding as Open AI finds its way into the mainstream and discuss what this might mean for the WordPress community.

Top Takeaways:

• Integrations & Automations to Save Time: Everyone is in need of some kind of automation. Our main goal is to save time by creating automations wherever there are pain points. Rather than doing things manually, WP Webhooks enables you to automate them within your dashboard.
• Avoiding Automation through Software: Using software as a service partner means hosting your data on their platforms. Using Webhooks for integration and automation allows you to keep things on your server and within your complete control.
• Possibilities with Open AI Integration: Webhooks is focused on using Open AI as an advantage to speed up processes by creating integrations between services and generating original content. They are working on finding cool use cases and understanding the actual power of what it makes possible.

🔗 Mentioned in the show:

• Jannis Thuemmig
• WP Webhooks 
• Open AI
• Zapier
• Teachable
• How to Use Open AI within WordPress (Yoast SEO example)
• Circle
• Slack
• Karim Marucchi
• Crowd Favorite

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Jannis Thuemmig (Founder, WP Webhooks)
• Cory Miller (CEO, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

GMT20230105-161248_Recording

GMT20230105-161248_Recording

Cory Miller: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Welcome back to Post Status Draft. This is another interview and discussion in our Product People series, and I’ve got someone I’ve met, let’s see, last year or the year before Giannis and doing good work, but we were talking about AI and that led to OpenAI and something they’re doing with WP Webhooks.

So that’s what the conversation is gonna be about today. But Giannis, welcome to the draft podcast. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work and WordPress?

Jannis Thuemmig: Sure, totally. Thanks for having me here. Uh, it’s always an honor. Uh, my name is Giannis. I’m from Germany originally, but started traveling a long time ago and since then, I basically work as a digital dumper from anywhere.

And I would say with a, with a very, very deep focus on web. And specifically in automation. This is where W P Airport comes from. So we are basically focused on connecting different services and WebPress plugging to let them talk to each other and kind of just automate the [00:01:00] system and get rid of the human error and save everyone a little bit of time and money, which is really interesting nowadays.

Cory Miller: Yeah, I, and I love it. Uh, one part I’ll just sidebar real quick is I know when you say digital notepad, uh, the several times we’ve had zooms, I’m like, where are you in the world today, y’all? It’s like, . Um, so I, I love that. I love to see the nude, like landscapes you’re in every time we talk. Um, okay. So WP Webhooks, um, I know you’ve been, so automation is key.

It’s about efficiency, um, like really saving that time. In the processes you’re doing, um, what, tell me what all does WP Webhooks do?

Jannis Thuemmig: So basically it allows you to use a set of redefine integrations to let other services and WebPress plugin specifically talk to each other. So let’s say there’s, um, a woo commerce shop, for example, and you have a, a custom programmed plugin that has no integrations [00:02:00] whatsoever.

You can use our plugin as a middleman to allow sending data in between, and that works with mostly any kind of WebPress plugins as well as external data like, uh, external services, something like Zapier or make or integrated. So the, the basic main goal is to just make them compatible, which they, in a lot of cases, aren’t from the beginning. Or if they are, they’re often very limited, which is something we realized as well. So we just want to kind of get that interoperability to WordPress, which is something that was just lacking over the last couple of years.

Cory Miller: Yeah, I, I love that. I know Zapier has used quite a bit uh, obviously we’ve used it in the past at, at Post Status because of all the external services, and you’re trying to link these and do some things that certain pieces of software doesn’t do out of the bat.

So I, I love the premise of web hooks for sure. Uh, WP Web Hooks, what are you seeing or finding? Customers are gravitating to webhooks [00:03:00] for, like is there specific tasks that stand out that people are using these over and over and over and going, this is what I need. I don’t want to pay for Zapier or some other alternative, I wanna do something here with my WordPress site.

What are you seeing from your customers?

Jannis Thuemmig: So I’d say that’s not a specific use case. There’s, uh, quite a lot. So everyone, literally, everyone who’s in the, in the, has a web presence or has an online shop or something related and does something with website. Everyone is in in need of doing some kind of automations.

Let it be to automatically book orders into your accounting system or synchronize your properties from a property management website with your WebPress website. Or let’s say you have a Teachable account and you sell online courses and you want to synchronize your students with a WebPress website to give them extra features.

This is stuff that they are using it for. So basically wherever there’s a pain point and there’s some time that just can be avoided by automating it through software. This is something where we are, um, jumping in [00:04:00] and it’s specifically interesting right now for people that are very critical about privacy because especially in Europe, a lot of people don’t want to use software as a service partners like Zapier or Integra.

Because they are hosting their data on other platforms, right? So they have no full control over it, which comes very handy with our plugin because you have your own server, so everything runs on your own server. You are in full control where your data is, what your data does. And this is a very, very critical point that is, uh, always, always well seen at the moment.

Yeah.

Cory Miller: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I, you went to a subject I didn’t even think about, which is if you don’t want your information out there on another service, having it in in WordPress, something you control. I think that’s a key facet. Before we start talking about, uh, AI and specifically OpenAI, what are you most excited about with webhooks this year?

Jannis Thuemmig: Ooh, for sure. Bringing that AI space model [00:05:00] web. Because we had so much fun over the last couple of months trying these things out, seeing in which direction it goes. And it’s just incredibly fun to, to play around with it because the possibilities are really endless. And we are, we are fully about saving time.

Right? And this is something we can even use to leverage more time out of our daily task, which is really, really good. Okay.

Cory Miller: Well let’s roll into that because I think that’s one of the most, uh, uh, Interesting themes in our community is ai. I’ve seen a couple tweets saying AI is gonna revolutionize, um, a lot of stuff with a website by the end of 2023.

I can’t remember who said that online. And I was like, well, I’ve been paying attention enough. But talk to me about ai, OpenAI and what you, you see on the horizon for, um, for WordPress particularly, and opportunities and possibilities. . Yeah,

Jannis Thuemmig: so ai uh, specifically in our case with OpenAI, uh, there’s, uh, a little differentiation.

So [00:06:00] right now it’s very much hyped, the G P T three. So the, the kind of chat ai as you can, as you can, uh, think of, which is basically you just type in something and it, it gives you like a very human answer back, which is really, really incredible. And, uh, we specifically talk about the, the OpenAI api, which kind of allows you to.

Communicate data on a programmatic level, which means you basically don’t even need to type something yourself, but you can already use a service to let these things run through the web automatically without ever touching this kind of data. And this is, this is just something that that works very well with, with the automation part.

Right. So we are, we are basically looking into bringing more possibilities that AI through non-static data, and, uh, what I mean by non static data, it’s probably interesting to, to understand what an AI actually is. So it’s a pre-trained network, right? It has the data that was feeded to it at some point. And with OpenAI, it’s made from [00:07:00] mostly 2021.

So it has no actual new data. If you ask it something like what happened yesterday, for example, it could probably not give you an answer to, you could give it the information if you have it yourself. But it can never give you like the, the news and accurate information. And using things like automation, you can basically bring a whole new word to it because you can kind of give the AI the possibility through response and, uh, requests to send data through automation, uh, validate it somewhere else and send it back to the AI and tell the ai, Hey, look, there’s new information.

We can use that, uh, or, or learn about that and, um, send me some more information or summarize me something. So it’s, it’s just a very interesting time in, in regards to giving the AI actual information that you can feed it, uh, that is currently not within its its own, um, possibilities.

Cory Miller: So you said something there.

Um, I, I haven’t even gotten that in depth with OpenAI, but So in [00:08:00] 2021 they fed it a ton of data you’re saying, and then trained it to be able to, to answer questions and things.

Jannis Thuemmig: Yeah, exactly. So basically they had a, a huge dataset or couple of datasets for sure about the information that they fitted. And the AI can basically make.

An answer that is, uh, in a human real reform, and that seems like it is made from a human, but the data that was fed is all from 2021, right? So it is a static data if we, if we want to hear it or not. So if you’re gonna ask the ai, what is the latest model of iPhone, for example, it’ll probably tell you something like it’s the iPhone 13, because I don’t think it has information about iPhone 14.

That would be something cool to try, but I guess it must be, uh, outdated information. And with that gap of, of using that, that automation in, in connection with ai, you can kind of close that gap and you can actually feed it real time data and use that data to, to do certain things within the AI [00:09:00] and, uh,

Cory Miller: I see, thats a new one.

Yeah, it does. Um, totally to me, and I’m asking as a newbie to all of this, um, because I’ve used it and I’m like, this is pretty dang fast. And I’m like, how the heck are they doing that? That makes total sense. And then from the training side, um, the model itself is, I was like, gosh, if this had access to that, and you could just ask it questions like that.

It’s the, it’s the a hundred times better Google. Yeah, because, yeah, it, like, I was, I, I mean I asked what are the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress, for instance, and it came back. Um, but knowing it’s, it’s a little bit lag on the data side is interesting to me. Um, but I saw the potential for this to truly.

Revolutionized some things on the web. Um, so it’s, it, it’s been really intriguing and I mean, I asked it all kinds of questions that I was just actually curious about and seeing what, not just from the what, [00:10:00] how the model would work, but the answer. And I was like, this is like a perfectly uh, formatted.

Informative, um, short essay that I would’ve gotten in college, you know, so that’s

Jannis Thuemmig: intriguing. It’s actually you can, you can write like on demand stories for your kids based on your own characters. Just type in a sentence, say you run a short story and it spits you out a short story that you can read them from going to bed.

It’s amazing. It’s just like incredible.

Cory Miller: I’m gonna have to try that today. I, I continue. This subject fascinates me and I think it’s something we need to be thinking about and looking at and talking about in WordPress and Post Status, because this new technology coming and then how WordPress is placed in this.

And for years, I think this is a segway to talk about OpenAI and WordPress specifically. But you know, I’ve either built sites for people or known a bunch of people that build sites for clients. And you turn on this awesome, it’s like you turn this car over, you pull this car up to ’em, and [00:11:00] you’re like, here’s your car.

But you gotta drive it with content, with things inside the site, and it’s such a great vehicle for that. But oftentimes people get hung up on that part of. Oh, I don’t know what to, I don’t know how to drive my car. Right? Like these, you know, WordPress sites with the right architecture, the right things can really drive and make a dent.

That’s our kind of thing with WordPress is like it’s magic like that. But you still have to like, Drive it, you have to put gas in it and drive it, uh, with content. So that’s a compelling angle for me with OpenAI. And I’ve heard about all these things. Before we segue specifically to the integration you’ve done too and some possibilities there, what, where do you see all of this and WordPress going?

Jannis Thuemmig: Like, that’s a very interesting question. Yeah, yeah. Uh, I think, I think it will be in relay, I mean, it’s, right now we are specifically in the content age, right? So I, I’ve seen a lot of people. [00:12:00] Going into the space where they try to create on demand articles using an ai, which is probably a terrible idea just through plagiarism because it’s very easily detected if you don’t lose like a rewriter and you use your very own wordings in between.

So this is something that we will see switching, definitely. But what I see as an advantage in the future with WebPress is that people will use to. We, we learn to use AI for the advantage in the sense of speeding up their process. So it’s also kind of a, a way of automating things, uh, in the sense that they don’t need to write their content anymore from scratch, or they don’t need to write a, think about copywriting that much.

They just ask the ai, it’s bit something out. They put it in, maybe adjust it, tweak it in their own way so that it has their very own style. And they probably just make the, the way of, of riding blocks 10 times a hundred times faster than it’s right now. So we’ll definitely see like a, a boost in performance and [00:13:00] probably block block posts over the long term.

Cory Miller: Okay. Well, so that leads into this specific integration you have and the tutorial I, I was looking through before we started. Um, so you saw OpenAI has an api and tell us, tell us about that in WP Web Web Hook.

Jannis Thuemmig: So, yeah, we, we basically started, um, after trying a couple of times how OpenAI works to, um, to integrate it with our plugin.

So we, we usually go for creating integrations for different services and plugins, and, uh, in that case it’s, it’s once separately for OpenAI, which makes it compatible with all of the other services and, uh, plugins. We are integrated. And the main goal was just to provide the integration, right? Because it’s so new, barely anyone understands the actual power of it and what is possible.

So we, we just kind of created it out of the blue with a thought of, Hey, it would be cool to just have it, you know, let’s see what, what’s going to happen. And right now we are basically just [00:14:00] working on finding cool use cases. And, uh, there are definitely a couple, uh, like I’ve, I’ve, uh, showed you earlier.

We already have a blog post on our. That basically describes how you can auto generate method descriptions using OpenAI and Yost seo. So you basically just feed it in the title and it spits your order, perfectly made method description that you can just use or adjust as you want. And these kind of things, they just now come through trial and error basically.

And, uh, it’s, it’s very interesting to see where it goes. And I can see that with these kind of automat. Um, we can also provide what I mentioned earlier, that that possibility of feeding the AI new information that is not available within the AI itself. So because we can make these kind of workflows, um, if that makes sense.

And this is, uh, this is mostly what we are trying to do right now. We basically just working on, on use cases, see what’s possible, trying out different things and it’s a super, super exciting. [00:15:00]

Cory Miller: Yeah, absolutely. Because I mean, you talk about this car, you some a a site builder turns the car over and they start to use it.

But that meta, uh, description is one thing. Like I honestly confess, I never do, you know, but it’s, it’s helpful, it’s vital. And so like that one little use case in the bigger picture of what I can do, I think starts to step us into this and it is really interesting. Um,

Jannis Thuemmig: oh, totally. Yeah. This is, this is literally just the, the tip of the iceberg.

If you want, you can basically let the AI create a, a full schema, uh, like a shima for your, for your website. So whenever there’s a blog post, it can write the how-tos and everything in, in kind of adjacent format and, uh, spits your order perfectly well formatted SEO description and, and everything keyboards, the, the, the whole how to, and this is just, it’s just such a time saver.

It’s incredible.

Cory Miller: Well, okay. Do you have a tutorial on that [00:16:00] too? Because that’s really interesting. Um, , or if you don’t, we need one. Um, but so you’re going into OpenAI or chat GPT or whatever, and then you’re saying you’re asking a question or something like that, and then it’s gonna give you back those things.

Jannis Thuemmig: Yeah, exactly. It’s just you literally ask it just a humanly written question, something like, give me back adjacent with each of these information. And it spits you out adjacent with each of the information. And Jason, you can always use on a technical level, right? So we can just leverage that out and use it through our plugin to use it in different automations and do different things.

Cory Miller: Oh, that’s super cool. Well, what do you have anything you wanna share about what you’re doing next with this WP WebHooks?

Jannis Thuemmig: Um. As a, as a use case, it’s a, I mean, we, we definitely, for, for now we really try to just work on the OpenAI things mm-hmm. and try to find some cool use cases there. Uh, we had a lot of, um, a lot of actually customers reaching out about the possibilities as well and how exactly it works because the models [00:17:00] and the configuration is a bit complicated if you, if you’re not fully aware of it.

But, uh, yeah, we, we just follow the standards and, uh, things should be fairly easy. But yeah, for us, it, it’s mostly, mostly OpenAI and creating new integrations. That’s something we’re, we are hardly focused on at the moment.

Cory Miller: I, I really think this is, like you said, the tip of the iceberg that, um, I’m really intrigued by our WordPress community post at Post Status to go, okay, here’s this cool technology.

How do we translate this into practical? Um, uses for the end client, the end user in WordPress. Um, so that, that’s, that’s interesting. We’ll be excited to hear what, what you find in explorer and launch launch next.

Jannis Thuemmig: Yeah, you should just see the block post, uh, our, our, our block. There will be a couple of more tutorials coming.

They’re already in the making, so in the next days we should see someone there.

Cory Miller: Okay. Perfect. All right. Um, okay. So. You, you [00:18:00] showed me something as like this. I think this is just showing the power of what it could do when we start to get these types of integrations into WordPress. Do you mind showing me the one you were telling me about?

Jannis Thuemmig: Totally. Yeah. Not a problem. Of course. I’m just gonna share my screen, probably this one. Yes, so I, I was basically just fooling around the other day on. With our integration, trying to find some new cool ways we can use to, to present the OpenAI integration. And, you know, like, like I mentioned earlier, you can kind of ask the AI to create adjacent format, um, with specific data.

So Jason is basically just a structured way of presenting data within the web that is something that the, the browser or the, the server can. And in our case, we, we, we wanted to have like, like in here, uh, just a simple field that you can write something and based on whatever you write, it updates the block post of [00:19:00] your choice.

So in our case, we just created a quick contact form seven form as we have an integration with contact as well. And we connected that with open. To create a so-called Jason and update a block post based on a specific information. So I can just demonstrate it here. You can see I have three block posts available and let’s just take this one.

I just need the ID because that’s the way we wrote it. So we have ID 97, and what I would like to do is, let’s say I want to update the, the title of this post, right? So I can, I can write something like, Update the post with the id, let’s say post title

with ID 97 and change it to, um, this is a new title based on OpenAI. So it’s, it’s basically what we read as a, as a human tech, [00:20:00] right. But if I submit that and I let our workflow. The AI basically interprets that and, uh, changes it based on our parameters within, uh, Jason. And when I refresh here and, um, the flow ran, it should display it.

See if it doesn’t, no, it doesn’t. Uh, so the thing is, because it depends what you feed the ai. So the AI basically needs to understand what you do. And, uh, in some, in some cases, that’s, that’s the problem with ai. It fits you out text, right? So you try to, you need to, to format. And kind of use the text in a different way so we can see.

Okay. Just didn’t follow it. Just what I’m gonna do is, so to, to just, so the very same example, I just tried to type the similar thing again. Let’s try it again. So, um, update the post with the ID 87 and change the title to, [00:21:00] um, OpenAI. Something new. Let’s see now

Cory Miller: I always love live demos, . Yeah, I know. When you were showing me before I was like, wow, that’s super cool.

Jannis Thuemmig: Yeah, it really depends on the AI, if I, if I do it right or not. Um, but it seems like you see that it’s not completed. So basically something stopped within the AI and uh, yeah, I would need to, I would need to see what.

Cory Miller: Yeah, so you were showing, you were showing just now the webhooks, uh, pro dashboard. Do you mind taking us for a spin around the Webhooks Pro dashboard?

Jannis Thuemmig: Uh, yeah, totally. So it’s basically like, you know, standard WebPress plugin and stuff. On the site menu we have, uh, our W2 Web Hooks Pro, um, menu item, and basically it’s, it’s separated into two main things, which is the automations, the flows, and the web. So there’s, there’s kind of a difference in between, because originally we came from the web website, which means it’s kind of like a [00:22:00] one-way street for information to present.

Let’s say you, you update a, a post on your WebPress website and based on that post you can send data into a, a certain direction, like directly and instantly to inform another service about that there’s a new post. But then we realized that there’s more of a need to actually automate kind of certain work.

And then we created something called Flows, which basically allows you to connect the, or create a consecutive order of triggers and actions. So web book triggers and actions to do certain things in a, in a specific flow as we call it. So I just head into it, uh, into one, which is the human posture. This was the example I tried to show you, which, uh, was currently not working out because of something that I need to see. Um, but what we have basically, within the floor. You can see we have a trigger, right? The trigger fires on a contact form seven. Within the settings, we basically selected the form that we created earlier, which is [00:23:00] embedded in, in the site.

And we don’t want to send the email as we just want to send the data to OpenAI. And it was tested. We set up some conditionals, um, stuff that’s not really important for now, but, uh, this is, this is basically what causes the actual workflow to fire, right? So, This specific trigger comes along with all the data that was sent within this form, and we then reuse the data in the other kind of actions here.

And as you can see, the first action is something, uh, is our OpenAI integration, where we basically sent that information that we had earlier, as you can see here, to OpenAI as a, as a text. And this is, this is what we read. So it basically says, get the posterity and the PostIt from the JSON, uh, in the JSON format.

This is the sentence, and the sentence basically is a dynamic string that comes from the input that we sent within this form. So it makes more sense if, if we go through it logically while, while building it. But, um, [00:24:00] when you click into a field like this, you will see it shows a dropdown, and inside of the dropdown you will see all of the information that was sent within the trigger, including the question like, change the title of the post idea, ???

So this is basically what we selected here. And this is kind of more details about the OpenAI stuff. Sure. And yeah, when you, when you continue safe, you can test the action directly within here. That’s something I can try, um, just as an example to see what comes back. So basically right now I’m sending a real request with the data that we got earlier.

And this is basically the response. So we can see, we got some text back from the AI, which looks a bit weird as it’s text. But within our plugin we have something like a formatter, which allows us to format the data and change into something readable. So I’m just gonna quickly do that to, to give you a better example of what we get back.

So as you can see, this is what we get back from the AI or from the formatter, which came originally from [00:25:00] the OpenAI. And this specific information we want to then use in another action to actually update the post. And this is, this is literally everything it does. You can just think it of simple steps that, like we have a trigger.

The trigger causes, uh, runs whenever the, the specific contact form was sent, then we sent the data to OpenAI. We format it in a certain way, and then we update the post based on whatever data we got back from the OpenAI. Excellent. So, yeah, exactly. This is, this is basically it for that.

Cory Miller: What, what are some of the automations.

Yeah, I, I saw the create the automation. So what are the, some of the things that webhooks can do from the automation side?

Jannis Thuemmig: Uh, you mean some examples for example? Ah-huh. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like I say, you can, you can, for example, connect the different services together. Let’s, for example, say you have newcomer, right?

So you can go to the, to the integration [00:26:00] screen. You can install any kinds of integrations that you, you are working. So we have around hundred right now. And let’s, for example, say you have commerce installed, right? So you can then install commerce once it’s, once it’s available on your website and within one of those automation workflows, you can then say, whenever commerce fires, then send the data using, uh, a WebBook, for example, to mm-hmm.

your bookkeeping system. Or send, send an email using the WordPress integration. So in here I can show you. Click send email, and then you have the possibility to send an email directly from your WebPress to the customer whenever, whenever, uh, an order was created. So it basically, it basically just allows you to do certain things that you would manually do within your dashboard.

Mm-hmm. ? Yes. In an automated way

Cory Miller: There’s a bunch of those things for the Post Status setup out the way. I’m like, oh gosh. Yeah.

Jannis Thuemmig: I can’t imagine. Same here.

Cory Miller: And, and what are, what are workflows to, uh, or I’m sorry, it’s [00:27:00] webhooks. Oh, I thought that’s a workflow somewhere. I read that wrong. Okay. Yes. So what

Jannis Thuemmig: I can show you, it’s, it’s basically separated in two parts.

It’s sent data and received data. What it basically means is these are kind of the triggers available, right? So whenever a user created, or when a user was deleted or when a form was submitted, you can send data to a specific url. Let’s say, for example, I want to send a URL to my website, um, I cannot call it demo, and I, I add my api endpoint here and I edit, and then you can see it here. Which basically means when ev, every time a user gets created, you can send a direct webhook request to this url and you can test it, you can customize it with, with more features, more setups, um, based on your needs. Gotcha. And this is, this is what I mean earlier, like a, a direct connection.

And the receive data is basically the exact opposite. So instead of sending data out on a specific event, you send data in and to do something specific. So you can, for example, activate a plugin. As you can see, you can call a PHP [00:28:00] function, you can create a comment, a post a user. So we have basically mostly all of the options of WebPress available through, uh, web as well.

Excellent.

Cory Miller: You don’t have a Slack integration, do you by chance ?

Jannis Thuemmig: Um, that’s the, that’s the thing. Depends what Slack has as an api. Um, if they truly have an API and if they have an api and it can be integrated with something like an API key or a hero token, it can also be used with our plugin. Um, and that’s an interesting point.

That’s good that you mentioned that we have something like,

Cory Miller: um, it’s a, it’s a. Post Status specific thing, but I think a lot of membership sites, which is a big trend too. People building membership sites, course sites, you know, a lot of people like us obviously use Slack. Being able to, um, one, this is a nuance and I’m, uh, sorry for sharing, but this is like create a private group or something like that.

I’ve looked in some of the Slack API and. I’m using us as a [00:29:00] test for a second to say it is a broader thing. I think a lot of membership sites, they’re using Circle, for instance, maybe they want to use something else. So I, I stopped you though. Keep going.

Jannis Thuemmig: Oh, no problem. No problem. Um, yeah, but what I, what I mentioned earlier is that, like you say, with, with, uh, slack, we can kind of integrate with any service that allows, like simple API calls or web and uh, we have an integration available that is called Web itself.

So, When you install one like that, for example, and you go to, let’s say an automation workflow, I can, I can come within here, add a new action, and you see I have a WebBook endpoint available, which basically allows me to send data or send a request to a specific site. So if you have Slack, you would, you would uh, add your Slack U URL here, for example, right?

Slack API or something, and then you. Select the method you want to use to send data, and you can send the data and add it here along. [00:30:00] So if there’s a, a service out there that just follows the standard rep hook or api, um, standards, you can integrate them as well with our plugin. So there’s not directly, uh, integration necessary. Basically.

Cory Miller: Excellent. Well, one thing that’s intriguing about this is for as long as I’ve been in WordPress, I, it, it has led the way in truly democratizing publishing, but over the years, you see Facebook, Twitter, what name, whatever default. Closed wall type garden come out. And um, I just did an interview with Mattias who does activity plug plugin for the Fed averse.

And I was like, the, you, you think about what you’re doing here with webhooks and then the Fed averse is kind of bringing that power back to the. To the user and saying, okay, fed averse can help. To me, I just see the potential to go, let’s, let’s decentralize some of the social [00:31:00] networks. So when a billionaire buys the next thing, or they change their policy at one of these closed set social networks, you’re, you know, all these people are affected by it.

And, and taking some of that control. So that’s where I see FE averse. And then I go, what’s the power here is. Ground zero for what you’re doing is your WordPress site, and with things like tools like this, then you can start, I don’t know, it’s just helping bridge that gap of power. There’s so much usability and features that these closed gardens have, but tools like webhooks and potential with the Fed averse is like bringing some of that power back, and I see WordPress truly being in the space to lead and innovate and bring that power back to the users.

Jannis Thuemmig: Totally. Yeah, I fully agree with you. The, the, an interesting point about that is actually that using our plugin, for example, you can use it kind of as a standalone on WebPress. So if you say you want to make automations, you don’t necessarily need to use WebPress, but [00:32:00] you can just set up a WebPress environment and install our plugin and you can.

Automate external services through WebPress. Right? So you can use it kind of as a middleman for yourself without actually using WebPress.

Cory Miller: And you still maintain control

Jannis Thuemmig: in a lot of ways you have full control. Yes.

Cory Miller: Even if it’s not a public facing site where you have content on like using that, that’s the power, that’s the other side of WordPress.

Do this has been become this huge power powerhouse of a, you know, a software. I talked to a lot of people on the enterprise and they mentioned. the connections. There’s a, um, my friend Kareem at Crowd favorite talks about WordPress being the open source hub to connect services. So, like your example there.

I, I resonate with it cause I just talked to Kareem a couple weeks ago. I love that example. Yeah. Yep. Well, Gianni, anything else you wanna share, um, that you all have going on or you’re excited about or anything I forgot to.

Jannis Thuemmig: Uh, yeah, I’m excited to make this tutorial work, so I think the next blockbuster [00:33:00] will see is probably about this example.

Okay. .

Cory Miller: I love it. Just to have, I love it. That’s the beauty of being a part of this community as I get to ask cool, smart people that can do these things and see, see how they go. But I, I’ll be playing around with open api. OpenAI’s, API’s, mouth, um, just cuz I was playing with that and like, wow, this is powerful and I love this kinda stuff and I love there’s people like you experimenting with it, testing it, and giving users, um, that opportunity to do that.

Um, so thanks so much today for being on the Post Status draft podcast. Uh, this is under our product People series. I love our innovators in our community like you, and so thanks for joining me today.

Jannis Thuemmig: My pleasure, really. So it’s an honor. Thank you very much as well for inviting me.