Post Status Comments (No. 5) — The First Annual WordPress News Draft

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Written By Olivia Bisset

“This story reminded me that big company, big money doesn’t mean just more profit but can also mean big contributions.” —Aurooba Ahmed

It’s the first-ever Post Status WordPress News Draft! The initial group of news “avengers” in this episode are Aurooba Ahmed, Jason Cosper, Daniel Schutzsmith, Robert Jacobi, and Lesley Sim — with David Bisset hosting. In three rounds of draft picks, this group assembled the most noteworthy or influential WordPress news stories of 2021.

Also: There was also a final “quick link” round with some interesting choices the guests brought to the table.

Post Status Comments 💬 provides a stage for WordPress professionals to exchange ideas and talk about recent topics and trends.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David Bisset: All right. Welcome to the first and maybe even last news draft for post status. My name is David White screen Bisset, I’ll be your host this evening. We have some great panelists here this evening. Let me explain to you the concept of what’s going on first. So there are sports drafts where people pick players within a group.

And at the end of the draft, these people pick the players they want, and they form these teams. Well, we are basically doing that except for WordPress news. So we have five panelists plus myself here this evening. There’ll be introducing themselves in a second. They all have their top WordPress stories of 2021.

I asked what WordPress stories of 2021. They think we’re the most important or the most influential that meant the most to them. So in a draft, there is an order. We have our order set. The only two rules, I think are one. You obviously can’t repeat another pick once it’s out. So you have go to your [00:02:00] alternate picks and you have to be specific in your pick.

So it can’t be just acquisitions. It has to be a specific news story. So X acquired Y and I think there is also one more rule where it’s about the story, not where it’s posted from. So if X acquired, Y was taken from the Tavern, the next person can’t pick the same story just because it was the new story there.

The link that they’re sharing is from another source Post Status. So if we’re all good on that, let’s , introduce our panel and the order that was picked by random.org. Ruba, why don’t we start off with you

Aurooba Ahmed: I’m Aurooba, I’m a WordPress developer, and I’m excited to be here,

David Bisset: Daniel, your name, occupation, and rank.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Daniel’s Schutzsmith. I’m a web developer and get to work on things like WP live streams, directory.

David Bisset: Yeah. And next is Jason Cosper, not Cooper Cosper.

Jason Cosper: Hey, what up everybody? This is Jason Cosper, AKA fat Mullenweg. I am the [00:03:00] WordPress product advocate over at DreamHost and also I cohost WP water cooler with my friends Jason Tucker and Steve Zynga,

David Bisset: Robert Jacoby. You’re up next. How’s it going?

Robert Jacobi: And grade what a wonderful way to end the sort of year Robert Jacobi director of WordPress at cloud ways, a WordPress cloud manage hosting service.

David Bisset: And you go the way of the clouds last, but certainly not least. Leslie, tell us a little bit about your.

Lesley Sim: Hey, it’s Leslie SIM I’m co-founder of newsletter glue.

It’s a WordPress newsletter plugin and also a big Post Status fan.

David Bisset: Oh, okay. Well, that’s not going to get you anywhere, but the the nice remark is appreciated. All right, let’s start off with Aurooba, what is your first pick?

Aurooba Ahmed: I apologize to everyone, but it’s that 5.9 was delayed. This was really, really big.

I [00:04:00] remember at the beginning of this year, complaining and complaining about 5.8 being released with half-baked features and, for developers who were working on products for clients, this was a really frustrating time. So on 5.9 was delayed because some of the features were not as you know, still needed some issues fixed in them.

That felt like we were hurt a little bit. And this was setting a precedent of never doing. A release with half big features and maybe even a president of never doing a release around December holidays. Like maybe this will just shift the whole cycle. That would be really nice. And I mean, I remember someone said that deadlines are not arbitrary and they’re not, but meeting a deadline for the sake of meeting a deadline is also not a valid approach.

And I hope that we can have more discussions around that with WordPress release cycles.

David Bisset: This was not on my list, but because I only have like five or six items on my list, but I agree that this is a bit of a change. I mean, five nine would have come out. It would have come out. Guess when it [00:05:00] would have come out? On state of the word night.

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s certainly affecting next year somewhat because I think the schedule they’re trying to talk about next year as a potential four release schedule, or at least two of the four or two of the three we’ve never had. I don’t think we’ve had a release in January. I think that’s potential.

That’s a very good first round pick. I don’t know if anybody got that, but so far I’m safe, but I think that’s a very good pick. And that’s one of those picks that’s going to be by like maybe middle of the year next year, we’re going to look back on here and say, this is how much this decision made in terms of change.

And I think it was good decision to . All right. Let’s see Daniel, you’re up. What’s your first pick?

Daniel Schutzsmith: This happened this year and I didn’t even realize it was this year was the whole profile press WP user avatar debacle. They had a. 400,000 active installs at the time. And basically I believe what happened was the company got taken over basically and renamed the plug-in [00:06:00] overnight to which it was a bit different than when it used to be.

And for those who didn’t use WP use avatar, it was basically a kind of a one function type of plugin. But all of a sudden you had this profile press, which was much more involved. And it basically changed the user interface of everything. I had a few clients using it, so it was a bit of a shock. And uh, since then, I’ve, I believe on all those, we just got rid of it and just did something else instead.

But to me, I was looking back then, you know, what happened in the past year and 2021 and this stuck out right away. Once I realized it did happen in 2021. Yeah. Well, Collins Collins is the owner of profile press and he’s a developer and owner and really nice guy. There’s actually a great interview with him over on the WP minute.

That was also done around the same time. So it wasn’t a malicious intent at all. I think it was just, you know, just a misstep basically in in best business practices.

David Bisset: And just goes to show you the like, I think now as we get further, along in the WordPress ecosystem, how, like, if that would’ve happened, maybe.[00:07:00]

Maybe with less users, maybe like four years ago. I think it wouldn’t have been such a magnified or a focus type of issue. Right. So as WordPress plugins go on, you know, and people have to be really, even more careful because the audiences are getting bigger. The stakes are getting bigger. My headache medications getting bigger.

All right. But that’s okay. Great. Excellent pick. So profile press debacle, unintended debacle, but debacle was Daniel’s pick. And thank you very much. So, Jason what’s your first pick? Yeah.

Jason Cosper: So, Aruba took my pick naturally. Yeah.

David Bisset: We have our first snipe.

This is awesome. This is like the first night.

I didn’t really think we’d have one tonight.

Jason Cosper: Yeah. well, I mean, she’s in the catbird seat. She is basically you know, there, first up so I applaud you for grabbing that one. So I’ve got to go with what was going to be my second pick, which is the WordPress performance team.

David Bisset: Ah, [00:08:00] I got sniped.

Okay.

Jason Cosper: Yeah, there we go. So I snipe with a snipe. Perfect. So as somebody who has been focused on WordPress performance through a pretty significant portion of my time in WordPress making WordPress faster, I think that it is great that we are finally seeing a focus for this on core and the people who are throwing their names in till Cruz Henry Helvetica a few other you know, just really amazing people and just the amount of activity that’s happening in the performance channel or when they have their weekly team meetings is just phenomenal to me.

And it was kind of a late in the year thing, but I’m really excited to see it grow in 2022.

David Bisset: I honestly had doubts in the beginning when I first read it, that it was going to be a thing. It was a proposal when I read it first. And I’m not saying that nobody cares about performance, but it was just, I don’t know.

[00:09:00] It’s one of those things where I guess maybe it was too good to be true. Right. You know, one of those, one of those deals it’s being Frank here, my views and opinions don’t reflect those of any collective or individual Post Status and Post Status team can incorporate. Well, that’s a great first. Okay.

That’s a great first pick word, press performance team. And yes, I would. I would admit I was sniped on that. So Robert Jacobi, please leave me with a list I can share

Robert Jacobi: with the 2017 first pick the Chicago bears choose Mitch Trubisky.

David Bisset: That sounds like a great clam chowder too

Robert Jacobi: Rochelle wrong show.

David Bisset: Oh, that’s been wrong year. Good Lord. Oh, wrong team.

Robert Jacobi: I’m going to snipe. Everyone’s acquisition. Want to be. Drafts and say that the biggest acquisition news of the year was Yoast being acquired by new fold. Digital

David Bisset: hard to ignore that one.

Robert Jacobi: It’s I think it’s important [00:10:00] because everyone knows Yost from like, you know, community hardcore folk to end your end users and users almost got ghosted by Yoast. And I think it really shows what the WordPress economy is evolving into and no opinions here, but it’s changing. And when you have a huge, acquisition by someone like new fold slash blue host, for all intents and purposes of Yoast I think it really sent up flares economic flares throughout.

WordPress ecosystem

it very few long old-school WordPress plugin companies left. And that way I think on a lot of people’s lists was the first one they thought of. Yeah. I’m not going to mention the other ones, because if I say it three times, maybe like Candyman there’ll be acquired or they’re already acquired or they’re already in the works for all I know for all we know.

Right. I think it was the suddenness of it too. [00:11:00] That was a quick one. Right. I think with the like advanced custom fields, you could see it a little bit coming, or you wondered in the back of your mind one lazy day on wonder what’s. I wonder if they’re ever going to be acquired some day, but I personally never felt that way with Yoast.

It’s just the yellow steel was approximately nine to 12 months in the works.

David Bisset: Yeah. Which, you know, obviously for that good, you keep a secret, right? Yeah. But yeah. So, okay. Well our first acquisition pick off the tape. Fortunately for us, we’ve got 85,000 more acquisitions on the table. So that may be a popular one, but it’s not the

Robert Jacobi: I’m following all the acquisitions with that one.

David Bisset: Oh, it’s going to be a long night. So Leslie, maybe you can what’s your pick first round?

Lesley Sim: So my I’m going with an acquisition related topic and it’s extending insight Awesome Motives self-perpetuating marketing machine. So I think like this post was inspired because of Awesome Motives acquisition of [00:12:00] Pippins plugins, but it’s called something else.

It’s not called that. And so what I liked about this article was kind of how it mapped out the huge fast SEO machine that Awesome Motive is building and how Sandhills and all their plugins kind of fits into that and how it kind of, yeah, just like creates this big content marketing machine, which is hard to replicate on a smaller scale.

And I guess like people often talk about WordPress from a developer point of view. I think like most of you here are, you know, developer centric. And so I wanted to bring in marketing the marketing side of things and, you know, like talk about how begin and WP and all of the automotive blog assets plays such a big part in the WordPress ecosystem.

Like anyone who’s not a WordPress professional, if they’re coming into WordPress for the first time, it’s likely that [00:13:00] Awesome Motives blogs will be the first point of contact into WordPress. And I think like that’s really interesting to consider and also what that looks like going forward as well for the ecosystem.

David Bisset: They have a very good content management strategy I used to work there. So I can tell you if they’ve got a nice well-oiled machine over there and that in your right. I don’t, I, you know, maybe it’s just the circles that I travel with or the circles that allow me to travel with them, if you want to look at it that way.

But I don’t think that gets a lot of attention, so, so great job,

Robert Jacobi: David. I think Syed likes it that way.

David Bisset: Let’s quickly move on to my pick. So this was my first pick and it’s a pick from the Tavern and it’s specific it’s Tavern. It’s partly the subject material, but also because Sarah Gooding just did an excellent job.

It’s amp has irreparably damaged publisher’s trust in Google led incentives. This got on hacker news, which appeals to a broader audience than beyond WordPress, which is one reason why I [00:14:00] picked it. The other is if anybody remembers how amp was I’m going to say promoted at word camps. And I remember one word camp, it probably it’s either 2018 one or the 19 one. Like I think it was in giant letters. Google had a huge, and they were advertised. There was other things being promoted there. But I remember all of the discussion and the effort that went into convincing developers to contribute to the amp project. I remember discussions about.

Well, it’s the old automatic contribution controversy that some people like to bring up, like, you know, like it’s open source, but there’s so many people from this company working on it, that they have a certain level of control that is unfair or is unwarranted and so forth. And people made that case for the Google and people again, to, in that project, regardless of where, which site you fell on that.

Cause I ultimately, in the end, I think that discussion never [00:15:00] really reached an official conclusion or closure. There was a lot of talk and this kind of, regardless of how many developers were aware of what Google was doing, their trust there has been broken and it’s broken today. It’s going to take a very long time for Google, I think, to come into the WordPress community and open project or not, and not be looked at with a mark of suspicion, even if the developer, and I’m not even saying the developers involved with NAMP knew everything that was going on or what, or whatever was brought up. It’s an excellent article by Sarah on that. And I thought it was fair and it got picked up by a wider audience. And it does address, not just Google, but you know what happens when we have companies, larger companies that are in the news because of the, you know, of antitrust or because of their worker policies or whatever, what far extent do you trust them?

Knowing that not everybody in the [00:16:00] company has the same evil intentions, what you think are evil, but how far do you trust them when it comes to the, you know, WordPress and open source projects? And I think that’s a good question. And I think everybody has the right to have a different answer. So I thought it was a very thought provoking article.

So that was my first pick there.

Robert Jacobi: Even if I may, you snipe me. That was my number three pick, but I actually came at it from a different way. It was the Jeremy Keith blog post about resigning from the amp advisory committee.

David Bisset: Okay. That’s another good one. Yeah. And what did you think about what stood out from you on that one?

I’ll throw you a bone.

Robert Jacobi: That’s what I think I’ve been I’m not an eight amp. Let’s just call it an amp because that’s what everyone else calls it. I’m not an amp fan in the first place. I don’t like public content being made proprietary. And I think for Justin, all the reasons that he left are the exact reasons no one should be using amp in the first place.

I think it’s bad tech for band.

David Bisset: It’s a shame too. Cause I know some people that were, you had some people [00:17:00] for and against it, but in the end that I think that article combined with Sarah’s excellent evaluation of it. Just really it’s hard to get a lot of positive. Again, this is my opinion.

This is not an opinion of anybody else. So that was my pick. I thought it was very thought provoking and it went beyond the WordPress industry. Ruba. What is your second we’re in the second round pick? What’s your second pick?

Aurooba Ahmed: So I had a different second pick, but then something happened today that made me change my second pick.

And that was frost being acquired by WP engine. So the reason I had to choose this as my pick is because as a developer and as a person who use WordPress a lot and seeing all these acquisitions happen, I am wary of acquisitions. I wonder how good these bigger companies are going to be as stewards of these plugins and where are they going to take it next?

And when co when plugins and smaller companies get acquired, I tend to think, oh, okay, now this is going to [00:18:00] be more profit heavy, more money-making, less contribution, less being part of the community. But then WP engine did this thing where they acquired a commercial thing and they made it open source.

And it reminded me that big company, big money doesn’t have to mean only more profits and more sales. And in fact you can have big money that brings big contributions back to the community as well. If they choose to. And it made me look at WPS. In a more positive light. So I think that was a great marketing move on their end.

David Bisset: In fact, I didn’t have a chance to absorb it a lot, but I know they refunded. Everybody bought a copy, so yeah. Which in all honesty, no, I probably that was jumped, changed the engine, but I think that’s a Goodwill, both there.

Robert Jacobi: Who created frost again?

David Bisset: Brian Gardner

Robert Jacobi: and Diego. That’s it. Where does where’s Brian work [00:19:00] now

Aurooba Ahmed: at WP engine?

Jason Cosper: Where does Nick also work now

David Bisset: WP engine.

Daniel Schutzsmith: There’s something to be said too, though, for Brian Garner has a formula down for doing this because before he had studio press, that also went to

Robert Jacobi: WP engine. Oh, and PS. I love Brian Gardner he’s. He’s a local. WordPress supergroup because he’s in the Chicago community. So that’s amazing.

But you know, I don’t think it’s an accident that frost followed Brian to WP engine. . If you know Brian up at some other place, frost may have wound up at that other place. That’s all I’m saying

David Bisset: Frost isn’t even a year old or is it, I think it’s barely a year old or,

Robert Jacobi: yeah, I I don’t if it came out.

Yeah. I thought it came out in 21. Yeah.

David Bisset: Yeah. Okay. Well, good. That’s another great acquisition picks. So new off the presses. So new and [00:20:00] still at time, Daniel. Let’s see. What’s your round two.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Yeah, mine’s more an editorial.

David Bisset: Thank goodness. So,

Daniel Schutzsmith: so this was Paul Lacey had done rather lengthy post about his stance on WordPress, how he was going to leave in the community for a little while.

You know, I think he’ll probably come back, but but it was also, you know, truly about his feeling of Gutenberg and the dichotomy between WordPress foundation and automatic and reflections on him, fishing with his father. I mean, it took you for a roller coaster and it’s probably one of the most beautiful reads I had of the year in the WordPress space, which was really odd because usually we’re talking about technology more than anything, and this was a little bit more human felt.

So it, you know, in, you know, everyone should really take a look at it and he voices some really good concerns. You know, concerns of again, of, what’s the role of different companies and what we’re doing, what’s their own Gutenberg and kind of pushing forward and how that’s going to reflect, you know, making websites in the future.[00:21:00]

And how do we bring people into the fold that might be having more difficulty with adopting Gutenberg or, traditionally want to be able to use page builders more often and feel like they’re getting neglected or pushed out of the community? Personally aside, I mean, I think page builders are here to stay.

I don’t think it’s a, this or that. I think it’s just an added additional kind of quality aspect that people can use, you know, to use an element or use you know, ocean’s WP or something like that or oxygen. But it was a really good article and it spread like wildfire through the community.

So you actually saw a lot of people doing blog posts or other posts that were reflecting similar things and, you know, referring back to the specific posts they’re over on the WP minute.

David Bisset: Okay. Great pick. Yeah. And that’s why we have the people we have here tonight, because I didn’t, I w I was hoping to get diverse collection of articles and not just a name, as many acquisitions as we can in the next hour.

So, but yeah, it’s the heart of, and if it impacts you in a heart impacted a [00:22:00] lot of people emotionally, then that’s definitely a good pick. So, Jason, what’s your outreach around to here? Yeah.

Jason Cosper: I’m maybe gonna pull a Babe Ruth pointed the bleachers and call the shot that round two is going to be pretty Gutenberg heavy because my second pick is a theme dot Jason shipping with WordPress five point eight.

I think this is a really a huge deal for folks. I know that you’re kind of when it comes to custom CSS and stuff like that you can either wear in CSS or json it’s not really necessarily the easiest switch to make. Like if you present somebody who is a little less experienced with code however I just think that the impact of this or the amount of things that it can control with blocks is going to be massive.

And the next few versions of WordPress when five nine finally drops when you know, as [00:23:00] things mature. I just think that theme json really is going to make a huge impact on how themes are built, how child themes are belts, how like all of that basically

David Bisset: Who’s doing the theme. I know that more than one person is doing it, but who’s is David. Somebody is doing the theme .Json generator. Has anybody seen that? Yep. Yeah. David, what’s the last name I keep forgetting. Yeah. I mean, it’s looking pretty good, remember when. We had themes and then the underscore generator came out and there was another generator whose name escapes my mind right now, but it seems once we get these generators going, things accelerate.

But I think that’s a really great pick because obviously theme .json is something that can be turned into a builder or tool or a companion there’s so much you can do because Jason’s practically human readable. That’s the point of it. So I think that’s, yeah, I think that’s an excellent technological we’ll, we’ll look back in a couple of years and say, is it, you know, if we [00:24:00] have a thousand themes or variations, is it because of the theme .json and I would venture a guess.

It’s going to have a heck of a lot to do with it. So that’s an excellent.

Daniel Schutzsmith: And it’s also setting itself up for good expansion in the future, too, of what the capabilities will be

like.

David Bisset: So it could have been hopefully extensibility. Yeah, because it could have been that could have gone a different way and not a easily readable editable, text file kind of way either.

So in fact, there’s probably some things in Gutenberg that are, you know, that you have to know some deep knowledge on that. I wish they could just make it like that magically somehow as easy as adding a file. So. Excellent. Excellent pick. Okay, Robert, you’re up. What’s your round number two pick.

Robert Jacobi: I’m going with the, I want to extend the extensibility with open verse.

Welcome to the open verse. Now we’re not adding just the code. We’re extending all the media that comes in contact with work. And the acquisition [00:25:00] technically by automatic of CC search. I think part of the state Matt’s state of the word is going to insanely impact what every single, you know, day-to-day user can do with audio video and who knows what else will wind up in the open verse?

David Bisset: Okay. So what is the difference between for our listeners and for maybe me, but our listeners? What is the difference between open verse and wordpress.org/photos?

Robert Jacobi: wordpress.org/photos will be a curated, subset of open verse. As I understand it from the state of the word and that’ll, you know, have audio and video at some point, but let’s not say it’s going to be tomorrow.

So that’ll be. Family-friendly the open-source friendly, the community friendly version of what open verse is because open verse will probably encapsulate a lot more content than probably wp.org can. [00:26:00]

David Bisset: Well, yeah, it’s spot from creative comments. Right? So creative commons looks like they didn’t have the support financially or structurally to be able to have that library automatic acquired it, brought it into the open source.

Robert Jacobi: Correct. So the library technically still exists. The creative comments, it’s the whole search engine and all the infrastructure around that, because that’s the hard part. Right. I could have a billion photo albums that are creative commons license zero. But if you can’t find the folder, you’re looking for, if you’re looking for that flower or that bird, you know, you can’t find it unless there’s a tool to do it.

And that’s the one that takes all the you know, the hit on performance. Yeah, just getting stuff done. So, I mean, that’s the bigger deal at the end of the day. And I think that’s where they were creative commons was having problems running that on a day-to-day basis. And you know, I’m going to give automatic and frankly, Matt kudos for that.

I mean, I think that really changes the conversation [00:27:00] about what open source means. Now it’s not a geeky code thing, like GPL this GPL that now it’s like, oh, I can put up a website and I can click the photos button and I’m not going to get sued for, you know, this picture of a walrus.

Aurooba Ahmed: Keep in mind that creative con open verse still has non CC zero images as well.

That’s the difference between slash photos and open verse because the one on photos will only have

Robert Jacobi: CTCs. Exactly. Thanks so much Aruba. Yup. Yup. I mean, that’s a huge difference. So yeah, on the open verse side, Deal with the licensing voodoo, whereas photos that’s done, you can use it. Commercial pers personal edit, no attribution, whatever.

Yeah. You can do whatever you want with it. So it’s become the free version of of Getty for all intensive purposes. Oh,

David Bisset: and we all know how the, how another site that rhymes with bee splash started that. And Matt likes to, [00:28:00]

Robert Jacobi: the good part is it’s not being called WP slash

David Bisset: Unsplash.

Robert Jacobi: I trust Matt and automatic with what he said, state of the word, you know, about making sure open is open

David Bisset: and automatic had to be involved because they’re the ones with the money in the infrastructure.

So automated the actual acquisition. And I think they had to, because it’s not, it can’t be just mad. It has to be in it. It needs to be a company privately.

Robert Jacobi: Well, there is a WordPress foundation, but they don’t have the money to acquire anything.

David Bisset: Then you’re starting to get into, there’s probably reasons why legally and why it did, why I did what I had to do, but I’m just glad it’s back the word they just said it was contributing it back to the, you know, they use the words contributing back to the open source project.

I mean, for all intents and purposes, I like you, I trust Matt and I trust them that the fact is they’re not trying to make a buck off of this. They’re not trying to take what Getty did with that certain website and turn it into something it wasn’t originally intended for.

Robert Jacobi: Oh no, everyone’s going to make a buck out of this.

This is the best part about of [00:29:00] even photos. It’s the fact that any one can integrate this. It’s Matt said it stated the word. It is open. It’s an open API. Wix can use this.

David Bisset: Careful. We can only say that three times.

Robert Jacobi: What if I use the alternative, if I say Squarespace and Weebly.

David Bisset: Oh crap. There, it goes two more.

No, but you’re right. Anybody can use, and they are the ones, but it’s not it’s like creative commons, like you said, they can do anything with it. They’re just ones to maintaining the database. So I can’t wait to see what like with apple, I can’t wait to see what your, what you’ll do with it.

And I just feel the only thing I don’t like about open versus that it sounds like something else, but Matt Mullenweg thought of the name probably before mark Zuckerberg did announced it anyway.

So anyway, Leslie let’s get to your number two pick. We’ve got some great choices here. I have you been sniped.

Lesley Sim: I have not I feel like I actually picked my picks to avoid being sniped. So I hope

David Bisset: your’e so [00:30:00] smug, I like that, it’s going to be easier to take you down next round.

Lesley Sim: So my next pick is a podcast. It’s called the founder’s field guide and they interview met Mellon wig. The host is Patrick O’Shaughnessy. And it’s it’s just I’m not sure how many, sorry. I’m like flipping between zoom and the sites. I don’t know if any of you listen to the podcast, but it’s super cool.

And it talks. So, basically it’s an hour long interview and we learn about Matt’s kind of approach to WordPress. And, you know, he’s talked a lot about this in the past, but it was nice to just kind of hear it in one hour long podcast. He talks about one day to work on WordPress for the rest of his life and his approach to making WordPress the open source platform or operating platform that also happens to be open source for the web and how he sees, you know, kind of the law [00:31:00] of platforms being.

As a company that’s building a platform, you can only profit 5% off of the platform being built. And that’s kind of like a good gauge of a thriving platform. So he uses Microsoft as an example, like he says that Microsoft benefits 5% and the platform that they built, you know, everyone else that builds on top of it gets the 95% yeah.

Profit. And I thought that was a really cool approach. I never heard him talk about that before and that, and you know, it really kind of expands your mind in terms of what he thinks is possible and what he wants, you know, like it’s not going to be a cash grab, you know, at the end of the day, which and that kind of, I guess, leads into what he’s doing with open verse and what we just talked about.

It really, you know, Makes you feel like you can trust the future of WordPress because he’s trying to build it towards this 5%. I’m trying not to like [00:32:00] add into many different you know, the salsas as well, because then I’m going to accidentally snake other people. But you know, he’s always talking about avoiding the tragedy of the comments and he’s always talking about Firefox for the future and how you know, he wants more people to contribute.

And I think understanding that this is kind of where he’s coming from, like wanting work has to be a platform I want to only ever have take 5% of the profit of the platform. I think that’s like, yeah, just like a really good once you understand that you can make a lot of business decisions from there and be comfortable in those decisions.

David Bisset: Didn’t he say and say to the word that ratio is that 5% ratio is how five of the future was five. I got that. I- if we accidentally sniped someone’s specific article on that specific mention of the ratio, then I guess we’ve done that. But, there’s, if somebody still has something to share for five for the future I’ll I’ll hear it, but that’s yeah.

I think that’s a great pick two and I haven’t [00:33:00] had a chance to listen to the podcast, man. To do now, if everybody’s comfortable with it, I’d like to go through one more quick round, which means share your pick and maybe give a minute explanation.

And then once we go through that, we’re basically we’re basically at that point going to just share real quickly in a fourth round, just basically throwing out. At that point, you don’t need to explain them. They were just going to blow through it. So we’re going ever perpetually faster toward the singularity rubella.

You’re up next? What is, what quick now is your third and third pick and real quick, why?

Aurooba Ahmed: Oh, okay. This is not from a news place, but it’s something that made a really big impact on me. I’m going to post this. It’s a Twitter thread by Nicole Sullivan, where she’s talking about how she doesn’t want to be erased when talking about a utility classes and you know, tailwind, for example, is like a library of utility classes.

And it made me think about in our own community and we’re press who we choose to [00:34:00] amplify who are the kinds of people that we choose to listen to and share more from and how that impacts. What we understand about the kind of work everyone’s doing. So for example, Nicole is talking about this because people were asking, Hey, who started this whole trend?

And people are playing to all these men. And it’s like, hi, I was doing this before the men, but nobody went, nobody’s sharing that because lots of people chose to amplify the men and not the women doesn’t mean the women aren’t doing good work. It means that they’re just not being amplified. It made me think a lot about like, there was a thread also on Twitter about, Hey, who are all the people like involved in all of these acquisitions?

I don’t remember who put out this post Leslie matting but it was like all men. It’s like, you know, there’s women involved in this situation too. Let’s talk about and be more mindful of who we’re thinking of and who we’re involving and sharing about. And that’s you know, it’s a topic close to [00:35:00] heart.

Cool.

David Bisset: So two things first you gave out a Twitter thread. I did not think of that. I’m we’re going to go for it. It’s it’s I think Twitter is news it’s okay. Twitter is news. And second of all, I forgot about me. I skipped myself. So real quick, remember I was at the world with that,

Robert Jacobi: Dave. We’re all good.

David Bisset: Yes. But like my wife, you still have to endure me so real quick.

I’m just going backwards a little bit. I actually have a brand new pick that actually has been ma it’s only been online since December 21st. So it’s only been online for two days and it actually took an acquisition. I had an acquisition pick ready, but it’s moved it down in terms of it’s. It’s a thought piece.

It’s actually, I think it’s a thought piece. Cause I don’t he did talk with Matt, but it’s not an interview. It is from protocol written by David Pierce called, and this has a click baity title, but it’s the only thing that I didn’t like about the article. It was. Can Matt Mullenweg [00:36:00] save the internet?

I think it’s a really catchy I can see now probably the more I get into it, like sometimes writers don’t get to pick their titles. Sometimes the editors or whatever’s do. I thought it was a little click baity. Dan David responded by Twitter. He says, yeah, that’s I, you know, I’ll take that judgment then that’s fine.

But as you go through that, this is not just another profile on Matt Mullenweg. At least I don’t think so. The more I get into it, it is about, it does start in the beginnings where Matt was a young guy, they have a photo of him. He did upgrade parties instead of whatever kids his age were doing at that time.

And which I thought was really cool, but it really kind of lays the impression that, you know, we’re in this phase right now of such closed walled gardens from Google, from Apple, from Microsoft, from all the big players, right. And even the stuff that is coming up front of all the web three technologies and the promises of that being open and ownership, there’s still some controversy in that regarding how that’s going.

I didn’t, you know, once you realize [00:37:00] that automatic has been buying, basically one of everything it’s been acquiring it, I’m going to forget some names here because I’m being put on. I didn’t put, I put myself on the spot, but it’s acquired that journal app. It is a quiet. Yep. It has. We talked about already how the creative comments things was basically acquired slowly, but surely it seems like Matt through automatic is acquiring one, like one piece of something that should always remain open source from various different kinds of categories.

I’m trying to remember, there’s an analytics. If you go to poststatus.com/acquisition, she could probably just look at the automatic parsley. Yeah. So that’s an acquisition type of fleet. So it looks like he, if you look at it and this article mentions that, but it hides it in like a history and talks about Matt and how he uses WordPress and how he will continue to use WordPress for his full-time career, or at least that’s how he hopes.

But once you start reading this, you begin to realize what, and I [00:38:00] think Matt’s state of the word kind of hinted that more this year than any other year, In terms of where WordPress is like Gutenberg, he says going to be bigger than he considers Gutenberg bigger than WordPress. Not just because it’s a product, but because of the openness at other people can use it.

Gutenberg in of itself is in my mind. Now I’m thinking of it more like a parsley or more day one is a day one, the app I’m thinking of, it’s another piece of this family of products that kind of cover what you would want to maintain an open presence on the web. Maybe social network is one thing that it hasn’t been touched yet maybe, but I think maybe wordpress.org could be that too.

Who knows? But if you, so anyway, that was my more lengthier number to pick. I think that if you give it a good and fair read sometimes articles really put Matt on a pedestal in terms of things. But I think if you take a step back and realize the and tumbler too. Yes. Somebody mentioned tumbler.

Yes. That’s a big one too. And we may not see all of the pieces right away, but once you read this and appreciate the acquisitions automatic [00:39:00] has been doing, I think it starts to give you at least a little bit of a different perspective. And that’s why I liked it. It wasn’t just another interview piece about Matt.

It was really well done. So anyway, that was my number two, epic. Sorry I got skipped. Daniel, what’s your quickie number three? Oh, God, don’t get it. Don’t take that out of context either. All right, thanks. Sorry, go ahead.

Daniel Schutzsmith: I gotta tell you, you’re making me nervous. I’m sweating bullets over here.

Cause he just started rattling off all the different acquisitions. Oh no, we got a good one. I think I got a good one.

David Bisset: You can mention some

Daniel Schutzsmith: pocket casts being acquired by automatic. To me, this was a pretty big one. This was actually on the nine to five Mac blog slash easing. That’s just, you know, podcasts is a great podcast application kind of a competitor to apple podcasts and things like that.

So, you know, that’s literally what I listen to on my podcast, but but they have a nice web interface to which most don’t have. And so that’s really, you know, been a key thing for me, being able to kind of listen to those while I’m working and during the day.

David Bisset: Okay. Yeah. And that’s another thing.

Yeah, [00:40:00] like you said, that’s just adding to all these, like the article I was previously talking about. Yeah. That even adds even more to it. Robert, which. At this point,

Robert Jacobi: Mr. Cassper is ahead of me.

David Bisset: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Jason, do you switched zoom? I had my zoom windows set appropriately. Go ahead, sir. I mean,

Jason Cosper: I had to mute my video for a second to get my standout and on my apple watch.

David Bisset: I’m very sorry. Oh God, we’re going through hell right now, sir, but what’s your quickie?

Jason Cosper: So yeah the quick one I have is Google’s flock and the federated learning of cohorts. Yeah. So, flock was a fairly large thing back in. I wanna say April may that had the electronic frontier foundation up in arms, a lot of privacy advocates up in arms.

Basically like we’re replacing cookies with this like federated learning cohorts. There’ve been a few other proposals as well. But [00:41:00] the interesting and the WordPress spin on this is that there was a post up on the make blog about basically like, Hey, let’s treat flock. Like it’s a security concern.

We, we don’t want people who visit our sites to be tracked. So, it seems like Google took its foot off the gas a little bit in part because of large projects like WordPress saying, Hey, hold

David Bisset: up. Yeah. And WordPress, I mean, that decision is not made by one person. Right. So Google would have, or at least Google views that as a decision made by a committee or a party or the project or the contributors.

So it’s kind of hard to predict if that will go through. It’s kind of hard to push that through. Right. So, yeah, I think that’s an XII I’ve actually forgotten about that. I forgotten about flock. How can I forget such an acronym? It was a long year it’s. Okay, man. I had some flock last night with my chicken was delicious, but to Google’s flux just [00:42:00] doesn’t need to go.

Robert, what is your, what’s your quickie three.

Robert Jacobi: Gosh. I’m so like jealous of Jason’s pick for flock. I even wrote about this in April and I, how did I miss that one? I called it flock. Is cash a centralized analytics of segmented humans because that’s really what it was. It was just another, no, I gotta write that

David Bisset: down.

Robert Jacobi: My number three is. It’s technically not a WordPress thing. Oh, that’s a loud, I’m gonna, you know, upset the apple cart. I want to talk about the American airlines lawsuit of open source matters and an associated hosting company open source matters is the holding company for JeWella. As we know from the state of the word, the second largest, and really the only other top five content management system [00:43:00] you know, that’s being really utilized out there.

American airlines ha earlier this year, sued open source matters because someone slash someone, created a fishing site with a joomla.com name. Because that was being light. You know, it gets an all into all that.

David Bisset: Am I drawing a blank on this? Oh my goodness.

Robert Jacobi: Oh, that’s, you know, draw, it happens, you know, the WordPress space, but

David Bisset: my medication, it’s not a hundred percent,

Robert Jacobi: but this is a big deal actually, because this will impact how, you know, I think at the end of the day, what happens when you license a domain name to a third party to utilize for revenue or whatever, and this is where this comes to.

So yeah, this happened the lawsuit was announced in August of this year, but actually I think some of the nitty-gritty was happening much earlier.

David Bisset: Wow. That’s an, oh, well, I’ll be reading this right [00:44:00] afterwards. This is news. If I saw this man, I went right by it. This is pretty, very good pick. Very good pick.

Robert Jacobi: Well, I’ll be doing a deep dive of it next week.

David Bisset: Okay. Well, come up for air. Let me know when you come up for air, let’s save Leslie. You’re at the bottom of the three here bef before me anyway, what’s your third quickie. I got to stop saying that.

Lesley Sim: My pick is broadly the introduction of the F S E outreach program that started this year. I think it was talked about last year, but it started for reals this year. And yeah, and McCarthy’s been doing an amazing job. One of the things that I find constantly interesting and maybe a tiny bit irritating is how many millions of people use WordPress, but like, think of WordPress as something that happens to them, like

David Bisset: a traffic accident?

Lesley Sim: Like, you know, like when Gutenberg comes up and they’re like, oh, I hit it.

You know, this [00:45:00] sucks and all that. Right. But like it’s open source so everyone can have their say even, I mean, I get the people who have their essay and then get ignored. But the people who just kind of sit back and just wait for Gutenberg to happen to them or for stuff to happen to them. I’m not such a fan of that.

And so I like the FSE outreach program because it kind of goes out and tries to get people involved. It does a much better job at communicating the things that are happening next. It encourages people to do testing, like the amount of times I’ve seen and kind of reach out to different people in different platforms.

Just trying to get someone, anyone to come and test the next video. This is like, I don’t ever want to do her job. And I’m always constantly surprised by how few people come and help tests. I think 10, definitely under 20 people is the kind of typical number which is, [00:46:00] it said right. So, so hopefully, you know, me talking about this gets more people interested in going to do it.

But yeah it’s a cool thing. I like Alex seeing the livestream she’s been doing and like, seeing it, like she puts out the first time I tried to do on the tests following all the instructions was it was tough. Like I realized it wasn’t actually that easy to test. And I think like that’s gotten better over time as well.

And yeah, so it’s just kind of a cool project that I hope to see it continue next year as well.

David Bisset: Great. Well, I agree. I, like I said, I’d like to see more testing as well. So my third quickie pick is actually an acquisition one. Very quick. It was basically Awesome Motive acquired

sorry, dribble. I’m sorry. Do a blank. I wanted to make sure I got this right. It got easy digital downloads some out of acquired WP, simple pay affiliate WP. And it basically grabbed all those assets and I’m dropping the actual article is from DVB beginner, but there’s also another article. A few there’s few people covered this as well, but [00:47:00] I thought it was just if I had to pick one acquisition, I think this was the biggest one.

I think Sand Hills development, I know was another with bread not on Pippin, sorry. With Pippin basically short term retiring and or another old school, one there all of those products going to automotive I thought was probably the biggest shift. If I had to pick one acquisition that had a big shift, that would be definitely in my top three.

Somebody already picked one and somebody probably will also pick the other one I have in mind too. So, yeah, a lot of products underneath one, one company. I thought that was significant on multiple levels, which I won’t have time to go into. So that was my third round pick. Now comes our last round, which has been called by other podcasts and I’ll stick with it and see if it sticks for our first round here, it’s called the, bring out your dead round, where we are not going to give any explanations.

Just simply read what you have left and let us know if anybody, if including, if you got sniped by anybody else, if you haven’t mentioned already Ruba, what have you got left [00:48:00] real quick listed out for us.

Aurooba Ahmed: I got a snipe when you talked about Pippin retiring. The other thing I had was MailChimp’s sail and the public draft release of cascade layers, which is going to be really big in CSS.

The gravity forms 2.5 release, which was, and ECF being acquired by delicious brains and the element tours, pricing update.

David Bisset: Oh, yeah, you got lots of good ones in there. I can’t pick just one to critique on Daniel. What is your-

Robert Jacobi: element or cloud or whatever they’re calling it today.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Let’s see. I got sniped on the protocol article about Matt. Also got sniped on the uh amped thing there. The ones I had left were let me just bring it up. Yeah. Oh, I got snapped on the frost one too. That’s right. And the man I got,

David Bisset: you got sniped a lot for being somebody who was number two on the list.

Daniel Schutzsmith: I do have a good one here though, which was our future together at post status, which was coordinator’s post about taking over post status. And I had just joined Post Status, I think maybe a month before that. [00:49:00] And so that was a pretty transitional thing for me.

David Bisset: Right. Pretty good. Yeah. That obviously had impact for me for me as well.

That seemed like so long ago, but a yes, at the beginning of this year, Brian Cross guard was still owner of Post Status. So, Jason, I have, I think you’re up next.

Jason Cosper: That’s correct. Yeah. So, let’s just get through my small handful of other articles automatic acquiring frontier. And having their founders working full-time on Gutenberg, like, Hey fantasy, like, you know, you’re a cool looking project, but get out of here.

We need you for Gutenberg.

David Bisset: Yeah. They gave up their rest. They gave up what they were working on to the open source community, which basically means this is your problem then.

Jason Cosper: Yeah. It dead.

David Bisset: Well, I’m not going to say dead. Well, I mean, they gave it up to the open source community. It’s kind of like leaving food out for the bears.

It’s like, just don’t look back and you’ll just pretend the bears had a. [00:50:00]

Jason Cosper: Well, I guess to keep in the theme with the, bring out your dead it’s, I’m not dead yet.

Aurooba Ahmed: It’s just a fresh of stewards and they’re gone and there’s no transitioning team. It’s dead.

Jason Cosper: So, also dropping support for internet Explorer 11 that happened this year.

Wow. Yeah. Out of self-interest WP, watercooler turned nine years old this year. 400 episodes. You know, we’ve been at it for awhile. I came along within the past, like four or five years. So I’ve only been a row along for part of that ride, but you know, it’s just you run into a lot of WordPress podcasts that don’t stick around that maybe only put out like 10 or 20 episodes

David Bisset: or 300 episodes is only that much, but yeah.

Right.

Jason Cosper: And the last one, a weird pick Matt Mullenweg backing open insulin open source insulin back in July. And he kind of, put his money behind [00:51:00] that. And I think that is, I mean, it’s not necessarily a WordPress thing for the people who are in the WordPress community affected by type one diabetes.

It’s a huge thing. But just the fact that he did that I thought was super cool.

David Bisset: Yeah. I think I remember hearing about that, but yeah I, it just, so went along with Matt personality and his view of the open web, that it wasn’t a surprise when I heard about it, even if it wasn’t WordPress related, but it is so nice to hear something when it comes to man, and it’s not WordPress related because sometimes that’s rare when it comes to our radar.

Robert bring out your dead.

Robert Jacobi: I’m going to lead with open source is broken by Christine. Daughdrill this, I liken the shaking the up and down nods of approval on this one. It I’ve been in the open source space for almost 20 years. And I know that open [00:52:00] source contributors are treated less than dirt until something completely explodes, cough log for J.

Then the folks all like four of them who are supporting this thing for free get yelled at for destroying the internet for like three days. And that’s ridiculous. What is the, you know, the mindset of, you know, folks who have worked their tails off to make this stuff. And yeah, it’s their fault because no one wants to pay them to make sure that, you know, there’s, you know, syntax error somewhere keeps running.

Yeah. So look at it, look at our lives, everyone here, certainly on this calls. And certainly everyone listening to this is wholly dependent on a million billion pieces of code written by [00:53:00] folks who did it for fun for dinner, for, you know, testing the bounds of tech trying to solve a bigger puzzle, WordPress Linux, Apache, DNS, every, I mean, we could go on and on.

And the support for these communities is crap and yeah, that, you know, that’s going to be. Whether it’s the it’s a story that no one cares about because if they cared about they’d already paying into it. So yeah. Support your open source project. Yeah, I like it. Cause it runs every minute of your day.

David Bisset: I got, when I tweeted something, once it was about like a company saying we have, we make tons of money off open source. We linked to support the open source community and the open source community says pay us. And the company says, but not like that. I like that.

Robert Jacobi: Yeah. I mean that, that’s the problem.

David Bisset: All right.

Well, very good. We’ll just, I’ll put a pour one out for the open source contributors tonight, ladies and gentlemen, [00:54:00] as we move to our final. Leslie, what’s your bring out your deads or mostly dead.

Lesley Sim: So I’m going to piggyback on what Robert just talked about. So one of my picks is Nadia. I’m going to pronounce her last name, wrong her book called working in public, the making and maintenance of open source software.

I think that might have come out last year, but let’s pretend the chemo this year.

Yeah. So it’s kind of, the same as what Robert talked about. It looks into open source, how it’s all structured, the, you know, tiny bits of code that, that run so much of our platforms today. And interestingly, it talks also about the communities that maintain it and how different open source projects have different, have evolved to have different styles.

So for example, some. Some [00:55:00] maintainers like to be contacted on Twitter, for example, and others such as WordPress express, the city don’t ever contact us on Twitter because that’s not how we’re able to communicate. And it just talks to about the size and the scale and the scope of open source projects and how they’re all so different.

And it, it kind of actually sent us around, get hub and talks also about how much get hub has changed, how open source is run and operated any team these days. So yeah, a really good book. How do you recommend it? So that’s one of my picks and I’d quickly just go through the other two. The next one is Wix.

David Bisset: The second one here, second mention. The

Lesley Sim: WP Tevin article title is “Wix takes a jab at WordPress with bewildering new marketing campaign,”.

David Bisset: I got you. Snake me, sniped him. One of my, when my, my, one of my dead ones here.

Lesley Sim: Yeah. So wix going taking a snipe at [00:56:00] WordPress. It’s those army headphones though in know a bunch of people who’ve got them and we were just really confused.

And the last pick that I had was the white house. So I’m not American, but the white house.gov website being rebuilt in like crazy short amount of time maybe a month and completely rebuilt going from Jupiter back to WordPress and being built in Gutenberg, which I thought was really cool.

So yeah, those are my picks.

David Bisset: Yeah. And Helen actually gave a pretty good presentation of how all that went down during the word camp Europe know WordCamp US a couple of months ago she gave the full story. Well, as much as she can reveal, and the fact that they turned it around that fast was mind-boggling. That was also a snipe.

You, you pretty much slept the rest of my dad. Leslie there I had white house runs on WordPress. I also had things like proposed WordPress performance team gets Greenlight that was also taken I had the Wix one as [00:57:00] well, the marketing campaign. How could you forget that? I think the only one I have left that wasn’t touched by anybody here is the WordPress economy drives more than half a trillion revenue, which was a report reported, or it was a report authored by WP engine.

And since our WordPress market share Alexa is being not the Alexa the device, but Alexa company, they supply the numbers for w three texts, market share numbers, which is where we get all of our 43%, 40%, were a little over 43% right now that shuts down in may. So if that shuts down, our ability for that market share number is going to be, I don’t know if anything will take its place, but in my opinion, relying on the market share number, especially when it’s going to stop.

Eventually at some point it’s not a good way to, it’s not a good, real quick way to tell WordPress is a success in terms of growth, in terms of all of this, we ha we relied on that number because of as easy. And, but I think what we should start doing now is looking at other places [00:58:00] to determine the strength of a WordPress the community and all of that.

And one of it is money. I thought this article really kind of, it was the first time I’ve think I’ve seen half a trillion in revenue in terms of the entire WordPress space, not just somebody like Automattic is we’re 7.4. Or some which also I think was news this year. So I thought that was a pretty critical article that other people now can start to build off of and, or add to their collection of how they can tell how the WordPress ecosystem is moving along because market share, it was kind of a poor metric to begin with.

And it’s, you know, the closer you get, the higher you go up, whether we’re presses growth slows or not in terms of market share, it’s kind of like the iPhone market share doubled every year. You know, I phoned for so more than all the I-phones previous years put together iPhone five, the same thing, but eventually that iPhone market share slowed.

But it’s still making record profits. It’s still doing all of these wonderful things today. And I think that’s where the WordPress economy [00:59:00] is going to be. You won’t see that market share number, go up, even if we have a market share number, but you’re going to see all these other factors. And that’s why I think the.

Article from WP engine is a good article to start thinking like that. Well, that was fantastic. Thank you everybody. I I think we had a very wonderful, diverse set. Some surprises, some things I never even read before. Let me see if I can look in slack right now. This may be Barra, edit something out.

Okay. So if you can go ahead right now and just paste the, I only need the top three. I’ll get the others later. If you haven’t put your top three in slack, just all you need to do is just drop the link. I’ll be able to figure it out from there. And then what I’ll do is I’ll go through everyone, read it off, and then we’ll be done.

Since I’m editing this part out anyway, and I’m waiting for Jason and Daniel, you put it in there. So we’re rating waiting on Robert. Leslie. Ruba needs to just update slack real quick. This podcast episode will probably be out next [01:00:00] week. It’s hard to say near the end of the year, cause we have a lot of end of year stuff going on, but I’ll let you know about that.

I need a picture from every one of you at some point in the next couple of days to put in graphics for promotion for this. And I’ll try to keep you updated in terms of anything else I might need from you. But I think that’s basically it because we should have all the links in slack. I can order them and all of that.

If this goes well, we were hoping to get a second episode out of this with some other people who couldn’t make it for this time zone too, but you are the first congratulations, no longer a draft versions, as they say, well, I should probably shouldn’t use that word. Okay. Strike it. New word, newbs noobs.

There we go. This is why I have, this is why I have producers. They have poo-pooed my ideas so often. And I didn’t really, I didn’t say poopoo in the beginning, but they told me to say that word instead. I’m calling

Robert Jacobi: Corey right now.

David Bisset: Oh, you can come, please. It probably thinks of

Daniel Schutzsmith: you. Oh, also too. If you want to spice [01:01:00] up the podcast, you should throw in some more combat stuff like bonus round

David Bisset: finish. Well, that’s why you, we should deal with the end. We should just finish it. Alright. Let’s see what we got. All right. Jeff is still alive that he’s only in slack. We should’ve just brought him on. He could have just listened. All right. So here we go. Running through the top three here. Ruba.

Yours is up there we go. Yours was the WordPress 5.9 release. It was frost being acquired and made open source and stubborn Nella utilities classes, Twitter thread. That was your three picks. Excellent picks. Daniel, your picks were you w the WP user avatar tobacco with profile press.

That was how Gutenberg has divided WordPress. That’s what the article was titled. Remind me of the author again on that.

Robert Jacobi: Let

Daniel Schutzsmith: me see. I

David Bisset: don’t remember. It’s a long night. I’ll edit this. Hopefully [01:02:00] don’t worry. It’s from the WP minute. I’m just remembering who policy. Okay. Thank you very much. He deserves the credit and then finally podcast app podcast acquired by automatic again, another great one of those. Acquisitions that you may not have thought of at first in 2021, but I think definitely fits into a grand scheme of things.

Let’s see Jason, your top three, the WordPress performance team. That was an excellent one. The theme digests on another great one with 5.8 and Google’s flock and WordPress they’re pretty good. Solid picks. Robert yours were the Yoast joins the new phone, digital acquisition, the open verse announcement and the American airlines, Susan sues online publisher and host over fake website involving Joomla, which is something I’ll be reading right after this.

And Leslie you’re top three was the marketing machine blog post from the get elliptics.com. It was the the article about the past, the present of the future with Matt mullenweg’s. And that was from my [01:03:00] podcast. Joined Colossus that the name of the podcast, or that’s at least the URL where we’re pointing out.

And then your last pick was the waking of, excuse me, working in public, the making in maintenance of open source software. I won’t try to pronounce the author’s name, but it is a book on amazon.com published in August of 2020. I thought that was a very excellent pick as well on our first book pick. So,

Lesley Sim: and also the FSC outreach program.

David Bisset: Yes. And that too, I don’t know. I can’t remember if that was in your quickies or your deads definitely need to be renamed. My, my final three or my big three was the amp was, has a rapidly damaged publisher’s trust. And half of the credit goes to the subject matter. Half of it goes to Sarah Gooding’s writing on that piece.

Ken saved the internet from the David from the protocol. Article written by David Pierce and the acquisition of automotives acquisition of easy digital downloads, [01:04:00] WP, simple pay affiliate WP, and all of that stuff from Sandhills development as well. I think that was my one acquisition pick, which I I’m surprised nobody got to Pagely, but that’s fine.

They’ll they? I managed

Robert Jacobi: chat, but it’s just, you know, it happened so recently. And there’s just so many other things that

David Bisset: I have to say it once, because it’ll show up in the transcript. It’ll just make everybody feel good. Yeah. We’ve only said Wix twice. Oh, crap.

Robert Jacobi: Well, let’s say go daddy mode. What happens when you say GoDaddy three times?

David Bisset: I get a coupon in the, in my email for free months. I was thinking, so why do so ever? I know what I do on the first of.

Robert Jacobi: It’s like a Sinatra. I’m going to give him a shout out for that.

David Bisset: It should, he should. It’s a lots of companies did a lot of hard work this year. I will. So I want to thank my panelists and I’m going to go on the order of which they were delivered.

And please let me know as you’re closing off here, where people can find you on the internet, let’s start with Aurooba.

Aurooba Ahmed: I’m a [01:05:00] Aurooba.com or twitter.com/aurooba, Aurooba. Thanks for having me.

David Bisset: No, thank you for having us. I think you were one of the first people that said yes. It’s very rare. Yes. When it comes to this podcast.

Yes. At least anyway Daniel where people can find you.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Yeah. Danielschutzsmith.com. You know, I do a lot of different projects, but really just find me on Twitter. So it’s S C H U T Z S M I T H.

David Bisset: Great. And Jason Cosper, where can we find you? Yeah.

Jason Cosper: You can find me at Jason.Cosper.ME or on Twitter at B as in boy, O G as in girl, a H

David Bisset: like, Ooh.

Yeah, it sounds like I, yeah, something I should yell in the middle of the Costco’s and see what happens. Robert trying

Robert Jacobi: to spell Jason’s Twitter handle. Hold on. I’ll be there. I’ll be back in a minute. When I figure out all

David Bisset: the letters well, admire your a mustache in the meantime. [01:06:00] Go ahead.

Robert Jacobi: You can always reach me somewhere at cloudways.com but on Twitter at Robert Jacobi spelled like it’s sounds except it’s an I at the end and Robertjacobi.com.

Well, there’s Jason, you know, we’ve got triple J who’s got the Jacoby with the.

David Bisset: Yes. Yes.

Robert Jacobi: It’s really supposed to be an eye.

David Bisset: I’m just telling you, we don’t want to get you too mixed up. That’s right. Definitely not different facial hair at the very least. And finally, Leslie, my darling, Leslie, where can people find you?

Lesley Sim: You can find me on Twitter. I’m there too much. I’m only second to you. And your means stated you can find me on Twitter at lesley_pizza, L E S L E Y underscore pizza. And you can find my plugin at newsletters new.

David Bisset: Yes, that’s right. And if you need a newsletter and a plugin form, put her on the list and definitely I [01:07:00] want to thank you all for coming this evening.

This was the first time we did this first time I’ve done this. I think it went really well. I, we there’s a lot of people doing into the year roundups. In about two weeks, you’ll see everybody doing the predictions for 2020 twos. That’s your, if I’ll be able to do anything differently there, but I wanted to close out the year what our best picks were in a format.

That was we’ll show these off on post status.com as our, as kind of like our teams, you know, this is, these are the picks that represent us and what we thought. And I think we got a really great mixture. Thank you for not turning this into acquisition. Allie, really appreciate that. I probably will be our invite by five VCs on next time.

And, you know, I’ll just sit here and just, you know, watch Seinfeld or something while they rattle off all their acquisition acquisitional hires. But thank you very much for coming. And I hope you guys have a good night and I wait a minute. Let’s back up. Let me re edit that. I hope all you people have a good [01:08:00] night.

All right. Thank you.

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