Post Status Happiness Hour Session Eighteen

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Ian Stewart, a seasoned WordPress enthusiast and lead at WordPress.com. They discuss Ian’s journey with WordPress since 2006 and his role at Automattic. The focus shifts to “Studio,” a local development environment for WordPress. Ian highlights Studio’s features, including ephemeral sites and an AI assistant, which simplify development and enhance learning. They also discuss the educational potential of Studio and its future developments. The episode underscores the importance of community feedback and continuous improvement in the WordPress ecosystem.

Top Takeaways:

• Focus on Data Liberation: Ian emphasizes the importance of making it easy for users to export data and move away from WordPress.com if they choose. This includes offering flexibility in database options and ensuring there are clear workflows for migrating data from Studio.
• Encouragement for Open-Source Contributions: Ian highlights that Studio is open-source and encourages users to contribute by reporting issues, suggesting features, or even forking the repository to experiment with new ideas.
• WordPress.com’s Growing Feature Set: Ian addresses the misconception that WordPress.com doesn’t support plugins or themes. He encourages users to explore the pro-level tools available on WordPress.com, such as Studio, which help users manage and customize their sites more effectively.

Mentioned In The Show:

• Blogger
• Drupal
• ThemeShaper.com
• Corey Miller 
• Automattic
• WordPress.com
• Jamie Marsland
• Studio 
• Steve Jobs
• WP Environment
• Docker
• Composer 
• GitHub
• SQLite 
• Suno AI
• Taco Verdo
• Progress Planner

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

• Ian Stewart (Lead, WordPress.com)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status 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

Michelle Frechette 00:00:01  And we’re live. I love that, I love that feeling of like, you know, when I record a podcast, you count it down. You have these conversations. If you mess up, you mess up. But when it’s a live stream, you get to say things like, and we’re live with Ian Stewart. And it just makes me feel like I’m like, joined the big time on television or something instead of just our little, you know, YouTube channel. But it’s.

Ian Stewart 00:00:22  Very exciting. I feel like I’m on SNL or something, right? You know, like live from New York. It’s it’s Wednesday at 3:01 p.m. CST.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:31  Exactly. Well, welcome to the Post Status Happiness Hour. Ian, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Ian Stewart 00:00:39  Oh, sure. I hope I can keep it brief. My name is Ian Stewart. I have been a WordPress enthusiast and user for, I don’t know how many years. I think around 2006 is when I first discovered it, I was blogging on Blogger and I wanted to move my blog off of Blogger to something else because I did not like the commenting platform.

Ian Stewart 00:01:02  After some careful consideration of Drupal text pattern and WordPress, I landed on WordPress and my blog soon sort of became a disaster because instead of actually trying to blog, I became really like, enamored of WordPress. my my blog started to get some attention for like my WordPress theme, and, I, I got a I don’t know what got into me, but I decided I could create like a WordPress theme tutorial site that was themesshaper.com And, I had a lot of fun for a few years releasing, WordPress themes. And that was how I, I first learned of Corey Miller and iThemes. And, I think, I think when iTheme started, we’re not before I iThemes or he would, make themes like in the WordPress text editor. Anyway, that that led to some core contributions, leading on, the 2010, WordPress theme. And that was quite exciting. and then after that, I joined Automattic, and I’ve been at Automattic from 2010 all the way to today. It will be, 15 years in about six weeks or so, something like that.

Ian Stewart 00:02:23  So quite exciting. And, for the last three years, I’ve been the, not three years. Not three months. I have been a lead of WordPress.com. So.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:35  Oh very good.

Ian Stewart 00:02:37  So helping to, improve the customer experience. User experience, of WordPress.com for everyone that would like to host their site there. And that’s me.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:49  I get emails. I get emails from Megan when there’s things happening and, you know, press releases and things like that. And she said, if you’d like to talk to Ian I can make that connection, I’m like, I can direct message him. I know how the Slack Channels work. So I cut out the middleman, and I let her know that you were going to be on the show today. So thanks for joining me. 

Ian Stewart: Yep. 

Michelle Frechette: You’ve been working for WordPress longer than I’ve been using WordPress. I started in 2011 using WordPress, so.

Ian Stewart 00:03:15  Oh, interesting. Oh, great. Why did you why did you start using WordPress?

Michelle Frechette 00:03:20  So I had been working in higher education for years, and one of the schools I worked at the last school I worked at, actually was a massage therapy school, and one of my best friends was a massage therapist, and we decided we were going to start, a non-profit organization to help massage therapists with continuing education afterwards.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:41  Her husband was a WordPress web designer, and he created a website for us and said, here’s here it is, ladies. What do you think? We’re like, great. We started sending him the content and he’s like, hold up there, here’s your logins, figure out how to use it. And so I logged in and I like to say it was like, like when Dorothy leaves the, the, the sepia toned environment and walks into Technicolor. And I was just as afraid that I was going to make a misstep as she was a little bit right, and that I would hit a button and like, the whole site would blow up. And when that didn’t happen, I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. And I’ve been using WordPress ever since.

Ian Stewart 00:04:19  Nice. That’s amazing. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:24  Yeah. So the newest thing that Megan did send me messages about that I want to talk about a little bit today, too, and we could talk about all the things.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:32  But I’m really enamored with Studio and. Oh, here, let me show we have a comment first. Brian says it was a post/comment on a theme shaper convinced him to change the licensing licensing of Revolution theme to 100% GPL. That’s very cool, Brian.

Ian Stewart 00:04:48  That’s very cool. Also. Hey, Brian, the, yes, Theme Shaper was a, there was a lot of comments on the Theme Shaper blog back in the day, and I’m quite proud that there is, I think there’s screenshots of it in the WordPress history book milestones. I highly recommend everyone listening. Give that that book a read. It’s a it’s a great read.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:14  Very cool. So back to back to Studio. So I first learned about Studio because I get these press releases and I was like, well, I have to check this out. I went and downloaded it and I was like, this is pretty slick. This is like I, I have in the past. I’ll tell you my very first time teaching or being a TA for a WordPress class.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:38  We had to have people bring their own laptops. This was a I live in Rochester. This is in Buffalo, an hour and a half away, and I wanted to learn how to teach WordPress, see how other people did it. So I signed up to be a TA for this class, and they made people bring their own laptops into this room. And some people were on Macs and some people were on PC and they had been told to download either zip or xampp and have that all ready to go. And it was a room full of non-technical people. It was a two day class, and we spent the first six hours out of 16 hours helping people set up those environments. 

Ian Stewart: Yep. Yep. 

Michelle Frecehtte: It was incredibly frustrating for people, and when all I had to do was download Studio, and there I had a local environment right on my on my desktop, I was. I was pretty blown away by that. It has been a few years since I had tried to use xampp or any of those things.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:32  But I had still the pain of that experience resonating. So tell us a little bit about what led to Studio and, like, how proud of it are you and all of the things that have come out of it?

Ian Stewart 00:06:43  You know, I was thinking of, you know, like chatting today and I was I one of the things I like to do is, watch old Steve Jobs videos, and sometimes, Steve Jobs gets on, like, stage and he’s like, oh, you know, he’s just so effusive. And I was afraid that I would come in and just like talk about how much I love Studio, but like overdo it a bit too much, like, it’s like so and what I mean by that is because I envision myself saying what I’m about to say, which is Studio is literally one of the coolest WordPress things I have ever used. It’s, so right now everyone should know the Key URL. It’s developer.WordPress.com/studio. Please go there. Please try it out. It’s free.

Ian Stewart 00:07:28  It’s open source. Oh, wow. Thank you. and it’s beautiful. Using Studio is just one of, like, the best, experiences you can have with WordPress. It uses a lot of the new design language that you see being worked on in WordPress core. And that comes from the Gutenberg project. And, it feels like a, you know, I mentioned Steve Jobs. It was like I’m using, like an Apple, project product, like one of these. One of these things. Additionally, it’s blazing fast.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:03  It really is.

Ian Stewart 00:08:04  Yeah. So this is probably one of the, the things that I always just am sort of like, shocked by, even, like when I, when I use it, like, I remember even like the first time I had a chance to use it in prototype form with one of the developers was sharing it with me. It was ridiculous. Like, it’s like it’s flabbergasting how fast it is. So, Studio, why did we, build it? Well, you know, Michelle, you mentioned it, like, when you’re using, when you’re trying to use WordPress and you’re trying to start developing on it and you’re trying to hack locally on it, you you’re, Oh, maybe I have to download a xampp, or I have to figure out how to use, like, something like WP Environment or Doc Docker and like composer and like, like, what are all these tools and you know, like get and that’s kind of like a steep ramp and I would say even someone who has, done their fair share of WordPress development, like meant to core, they it’s that’s kind of like a headache trying to manage all of these WordPress environments locally.

Ian Stewart 00:09:10  And so we were hoping to make just the easiest thing possible to develop locally with WordPress. And yeah. And the, additionally, like sort of the first, approach we took with it was, something super near and dear to my heart was, can we make this, like a great place to develop with block themes? Right. Can this just be, like, the best theme development place? Right. Just to start there, to see, like, if we could build that, and, that was sort of where we landed and you can see some of that, drive some of, like the, the friendly quick links we have in there, like, you know, like direct links to the site editor. And, so it’s kind of fun, to develop that way. And yeah, that was kind of like the, the genesis of it, you know, like we launched, I want to say April of last year was when it first, was released. and there’s been updates and changes since then.

Ian Stewart 00:10:16  I mean, I know there’s one in particular that you wanted to get to, or two in particular. And, that would be the AI assistant and, Studio Sync, the, So those are both pretty cool. I don’t know, like, how have you messed around with it? Like, have you, tried to use?

Michelle Frechette 00:10:34  It a little bit. I haven’t done very much with it. Only because I have so many things on my plate every day, and I haven’t had a need to use it yet. But I will be using it next time I build a site just because I want to test it and see how it works. One of the things I read about, and I’m not seeing the button for it now, so you can tell me if it still exists or not. But it was the ability, even though you’re building on your site, on your on your laptop or desktop, whatever is the ability to share to somebody else to see what you’re working on. And, you know, I, I’ve never been able to just like, share things from my from my desktop before.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:08  So I don’t know how that works. I’m not asking for the magic under the hood, but that’s brilliant. To be able to build something and still be able to show somebody else without it being out on the internet, whether it’s unindex, whether it’s behind a, you know, a screen or whatever. To be able to just not have to worry about any of that environment and just continue to build on it and still be able to show somebody else what you’re working on.

Ian Stewart 00:11:31  Well, that’s really exciting to hear there, as you mentioned. so two things like the ability to show people what you’re working on. So we do, as you might imagine, like we have like an internal roadmap. So I’m kind of like, think about what is on that roadmap right now and what is like actively worked on. But some of that can be figured out like we have it’s an open source project and we take contributions and be able to report issues. And so you can see some of that activity there.

Ian Stewart 00:11:58  But I can tell you one that, that feature does exist. That was actually one of the features at launch. And that’s what we made it because it’s you, you want to have this ability to just make a quick, ephemeral site that lasts for seven days. you need a WordPress.com account to, you know, make the magic happen. And it is indeed magic. And we have this ephemeral site. There’s other services that offer this, but it’s synced. Or you can, update it and create new ephemeral sites. They last for seven days from the last update. It’s pretty neat. Now, I the the team actually is actively working on trying to improve that a bit. So it’s really cool to hear, you know, just this in person, feedback that that’s there. I guess that might be like a good segue to just mention, mention what else we have done related to sharing things. So the latest feature is, Studio Sync, right? So now you can actually push and pull to your WordPress.com site if it’s on the business, or ecommerce plan and, including syncing to a staging site, and, behind the scenes, you know, essentially what it’s doing, it’s using, like, our, our backup, platform to, move things back and forth.

Ian Stewart 00:13:18  And it is also pretty cool because now you can actually use this as a sort of, development tool, which is one thing I wanted to touch on, which is what we did start, trying to make the simplest, fastest, version of Studio, possible. Right? Like this local development app. What we’re trying to do is make sure that it is simple and powerful. I’ll come back to this Apple thing again. I didn’t wear my black turtleneck. 

Michelle Frechette 00:13:43  I was gonna say, you’re missing the turtleneck. That’s the only thing that’s missing at this point. Maybe a clicker.

Ian Stewart 00:13:49  Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. And one more thing, Michelle. Is, we want it to be continue to be simple and fast, but, like, super powerful, right? So, like, making sure that we’re unlocking, like, these, these pro features, but in a way that helps people, you know, like, ramp up. I mean, I guess the ideal user would be someone that’s, you know, like, consider me, like in 2006 or 7, right? Like noodling on themes and, you know, like, maybe then I start getting clients and maybe I start releasing themes and maybe some of them are premium.

Ian Stewart 00:14:25  But then also, maybe I’m like, building an agency, right? Or, you know, I’m helping all these clients. Maybe I’m becoming, like, working on just building more and more with WordPress. I think that’s pretty cool that you can you can have this, like, beautiful app. It’s simple to use, in some way. WordPress is simple. It can unlock all these things. So, yeah, Studio Sync is the newest thing. Additionally, you also wanted to talk with the AI assistant.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:51  I mean, everybody’s all about AI these days, right? So that was something that was more recent. That was that wasn’t with the initial launch. Correct?

Ian Stewart 00:14:59  That’s correct. Yeah. So that was launched. I want to say, October, I was going to say Fall, but your listeners might not some of them might be in the southern hemisphere. So like late, late last year. And it’s kind of like magical and, outrageous to use. Right? So, in the same way that all things AI right, like are magical, and easy to use, where, you know, like, just the other day, we were, actually last week, we were just taking a look at the app and, like, running through things before the call, like, you know, like any, any major bugs were going to be, you know, talking to Post Status, we want to make sure everything’s, like, in a great spot.

Ian Stewart 00:15:42  And, we were just asking you to create plugins on the fly, for us. Right. And, you know, behind the scenes. It can run WPCLI commands, which is fantastic, by the way. So we talked about like trying to like set up xampp or like, you know, like, picture me. I’m in my, my terminal and I’m, I’m like, my development environment has become moribund and I have to update things. And this isn’t working anymore, but I don’t have to use the my terminal environment to run WPCLI commands. I can talk to the app. Right. So anything, anything WPCLI can do. It can do. It’s like having a developer right there with you. It’s like. And if you’re a developer, it’s like having your assistant, right there with you, helping get things done. It’s pretty neat.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:33  It’s better than Googling, right? Like, everybody says that the the tool, the best tool for developer is Google. And now you have this right built into it so.

Ian Stewart 00:16:42  Yep. And it is aware of things on your site. So you can talk to it about the plugins you have on your site and it can offer like, you know, specific advice there. Which itself is pretty cool. And, yeah, it’s every time I would say we interact with it, it’s, it’s just really neat. But I do want to note this other thing, too, where, you know, you were, you know, you were in education. You had mentioned, right, like this, this WordPress story. And, I know myself when I was trying to first use WordPress, it was kind of tough, right? Like, there’s, like, this sort of. It’s not quite imposter syndrome, but I would say like this, this shyness.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:25  There’s a learning curve.Yeah, 

Ian Stewart 00:17:26  There’s a learning curve. Sometimes people have a natural reticence to, like, figure out, how are you going to talk to?

Michelle Frechette 00:17:30  Am I going to break it? Yeah. 

Ian Stewart 00:17:33  Yeah. And, we’ve had feedback from users that this, this feature kind of unlocks this sort of like, educational environment, like this safe space to, like, just ask a bunch of questions. And that’s really neat, right? Like that you can, kind of use Studio to learn about WordPress. It’s going to help you. It’s going to help answer questions like, if you have problems with code, it can help you with that. It can. When it when it runs WPCLI commands, it shows you the command it’s running. So there’s like a bit of like, it’s like having, like an ongoing, tutorial there. Right in the app. and yeah, it’s, I think it’s like an app. Oh, I’m going to sound corny again. It’s like an app to be in love with, right? Like this beautiful app. It’s blazing fast. It has, a lot of cool features. And has this built in AI assistant where you can kind of like, learn how to use WordPress and keep expanding.

Ian Stewart 00:18:38  It’s really neat. Oh my goodness. Yeah.  No one more thing. Just my, impassioned, excitement about the app.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:50  Yeah. No, I think it’s I think it’s brilliant. And I can think of so many different uses for it. Right. So yes, it’s a great developer tool. Yes. It’s a great way to like be able to be offline and work on your site and all of those things. Classrooms. I think it’s a great way to get kids learning without having them necessarily have the whole internet right there in front of them. And in schools where things are sometimes, behind firewalls and things, you know, there’s so many. My daughter works at a bank, so many things she cannot access from her bank website or computer and those kinds of things. And the same is true for children in schools and those kinds of things. So I think it’s just a great opportunity to teach with and to learn on for any age. Really.

Ian Stewart 00:19:33  Yeah. 100%.

Ian Stewart 00:19:36  That’s actually kind of like really neat. You know, I’ve had I’ve tried to have my, as you can imagine, my kids, use WordPress over the years. And, I quite often set up little sites for them to experiment with. But having this ability to manage these. These throwaway sites sometimes, like you can use them as throwaway sites. I do that all the time myself. The.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:59  Sandbox.

Ian Stewart 00:20:01  Yeah. It just makes everything easy, right? Like to manage things that way?

Michelle Frechette 00:20:05  Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. And definitely, you know, I think about, like, when we’re at WordCamp and there’s a Kids Camp, this would be a really easy way for Kids Camps to to operate and those kinds of things to be able to have somebody come in and just, boom, download it. There it is. It’s something safe. Something we can trust. And it’s a great way to do some experimentation. And it’s a beautiful app, too. It’s easy to use.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:28  It’s it’s clear and it’s aesthetically pleasing, which is important to some of us. Right?

Ian Stewart 00:20:35  Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have a design background so very important to me. The, you know, additionally, to be really great for workshops as well.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:44  Absolutely.

Ian Stewart 00:20:45  Yeah. Where I’ve had, a friend of mine will run workshops locally and, where you can get your WordPress site set up. And one thing he asks before people start is that they have like a website ready to work on. Right. So he’s he’s hoped that they’ve started something up. He’s a friend of mine. So he’ll recommend WordPress.com. But, you know, they might have set something else up elsewhere or they have an ongoing project or something, but with, something like Studio where it’s really easy to set work on things locally that’s not needed. Additionally, because it’s local and if it’s ephemeral, the, you’re allowed to break it. Right. So it’s almost like a challenge, like you can imagine, like using the AI assistant greatly.

Ian Stewart 00:21:30  We’re going to write our first plugin. And if it, you know, white screens your site and everything fails. Okay. Well, let’s start over. Click and you have a new site, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:21:42  Yeah. We could get  Jamie Marsland in and do a, What are the the speed builds using Studio? 

Ian Stewart 00:21:51  Oh my goodness. Yes. Jamie, if you’re watching, please don’t make me, recreate the New York Times.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:59  Oh, so much fun. So much fun. So, so you talked a little bit. There’s a roadmap. What are some things that we can look forward to, or some things that maybe that people are asking for and you’re considering or, you know, if the sky’s the limit, what would you like to see added to it?

Ian Stewart 00:22:14  Oh, sure. Well, you know, there’s a couple of things I would mention. And the, the team might laugh at one of them with they, if they hear me mention them. The so I mentioned that we’re iterating on demo sites to see if we can improve how that works.

Ian Stewart 00:22:32  Maybe we could make them more like, snapshots or something like this. If you, if you go into the backlog, in GitHub, you can see that we’re taking a look at, Linux releases. Right now we have like Windows and Mac. and the one thing they might laugh at is that we have an open issue for a dark mode, and I’m eager to see us get a dark mode in there. Who doesn’t love dark mode?

Michelle Frechette 00:23:00  Me. I am that person that does not like dark mode. There is at least 1% of the population, and I’m that person. But that’s okay. I appreciate that for other people.

Ian Stewart 00:23:10 I will share. In that note, I do have one funny, thing to maybe even share publicly. I don’t use dark mode everywhere. and in particular, to the confusion of every developer on Earth, I do not use dark mode in my text editor. I use a, like, a soft light. Light mode. Because I find it much more pleasing there. But, many people, as you said, 99% of people that are maybe not like us do like dark mode.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:38  I think it has to do with astigmatism. And the light on on black is something that’s difficult. 

Speaker 3 00:23:45  Oh, yes. Yep.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:45  And so that is, that is my, my my hurdle when I have to read something that has no other option is I close my eyes. I will see that text for the next five minutes.

Ian Stewart 00:23:55  I have the same issue. The yeah. And additionally, you know, one of the things behind the scenes that is pretty neat is that, one of the reasons why we can be so fast with a Studio is that we leverage WordPress playgrounds, right? Which is this, near magical, technology that lets you run a WordPress in your browser. Right. And so, we are always looking at ways to expand on that capability and sort of like, see what we can do there. Right. But additionally, along with that, we’re constantly, working on just refining the experience, right. As you can imagine, there’s always like bugs and edge cases that pop up.

Ian Stewart 00:24:47  And so we’re always eager to hear lots of feedback, to see how we can improve. And I will say to the team, because I’m sure you watch this. They’ve all done an amazing job at like, responding to user feedback, right? And so, we really seek it out. It’s really driven a lot of the, the roadmap thus far. I would say.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:08  How big is the team that’s worked on this?

Ian Stewart 00:25:10  Oh, that’s a great question. It’s ranged from, I want to say 4 to 8 people. Over the like the lifetime of it. And, it’s sort of like, ebbed and flowed. And, the one of the reasons why is because when we first started doing this, within our engineering team that was working on it, this was kind of, this idea of releasing an app is not something that we had ever really done before. So we were all very used to continuous deployments on WordPress.com. As you can imagine, right. You know, we’re just deploying constantly.

Ian Stewart 00:25:48  Hundreds of times a day. But, packaging something up. And releasing it was like a new enterprise for that team. We also have WordPress.com. We have our jetpack app and, you know, like a woohoo app and so on. But for this particular team, that was new. So we were pulling in experts around the company. You know who had experience here? How can we, like, make sure we’re releasing something like high quality with this sort of, iterative, not iterative approach? Trying to get the right I word. This approach where we’re packaging something up and releasing it. And the so that was new. And you can imagine at one point, I have a beat up old laptop around here. You know, so you can imagine me trying to use it like on a, sorry, a PC laptop. Like, like in the oldest version of windows is possible. And like, does it actually break and do things render right. And that that kind of experience. So like all hands on deck chip in.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:52  That’s really cool. Is there anybody in particular that you’d like to give a shout out to that did just kind of pour their heart and soul into it?

Ian Stewart 00:26:58  Oh, well, you know, we you’ve mentioned that it’s a beautiful looking app. I’ve mentioned it’s a beautiful looking app. And we have as the team has, expanded and contracted over that one time, we have had one designer working on this. That designer is Matt West, and he’s done an incredible job. But I would want to give like kudos to the whole team. absolutely. Everyone has done a fantastic job on it, and it’s something to really be proud of.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:29  That’s awesome. You you keep referring to it as an app, which it is. Is it something that can be used on mobile as well, or is it really designed for, you know, desktop?

Ian Stewart 00:27:40  Desktop.Yeah. not not. Not quite. Mobile. Mobile. Ready at the moment.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:46  I mean, I do log into WordPress sites from my phone on occasion to tweak a word or check on donations and things like that.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:53  I do not design on my phone because my little thumbs get my big thumbs get in the way. For sure. I would necessarily recommend that, but there are people who do, and I do that. People in developing countries, even who that’s what they’re using to build websites on. So I was curious.

Ian Stewart 00:28:10  Oh, absolutely. I will actually say my, another person that might watch this is my dad, who, is in his 70s and for the longest time he was blogging on, WordPress.com, solely on mobile web, on his, on his phone. So he would not use an app. He would, did not know he was stress testing WordPress mobile web implementation. And he would open up Safari and he would he would blog solely that way. he has now expanded to using our jetpack app on his tablet. And this has been an eye opening experience for him.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:50  Shout out to dad.

Ian Stewart 00:28:53  Shout out to Graham.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:56  We do have a question here. Are there any tutorials for setting up dev environments with Studio? Dan would like to know.

Ian Stewart 00:29:02  That’s a great question, Dan. Yes, we have actually. You know, I was speaking of, shout outs and kudos to the team. I haven’t yet given a kudos to the team that worked on our developer docs. In particular. And for Studio. They’re pretty good. Actually pretty good. They’re really great. So, developer.WordPress.com/docs. We have information there about getting set up for developing on WordPress.com across the board, not just Studio. And you will find there, a whole section on using Studio getting set up. Letting you know how to. So right now we have syncing from Studio to WordPress.com. However, you know what, if you don’t host on WordPress.com yet, then you know and maybe you have a project on another host. Well, here’s how to, like, use jetpack backup to move from Studio to that other host. Or maybe you’re.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:06  Not. You’re not chained to dot com. If you want to use Studio, then there’s.

Ian Stewart 00:30:09  No, absolutely not. And actually, because you mentioned that, I have to mention, I feel compelled to mention like something that’s really important to WordPress.com and like, I think WordPress in general.

Ian Stewart 00:30:22  Right? If we look at data liberation, we want to make it easy. You know, sometimes people don’t want to use WordPress.com. We want to make it easy for them to leave WordPress.com. Right. So, like, make sure, we have a team that looks at imports and exports, and we want to make sure those issues there with importing, exporting and, even with the Studio, we do want to make it possible. Like, we have a workflow that’s documented there for how to, move off, to export from Studio to somewhere else. Additionally, I was going to mention, you know, it’s it’s pretty in-depth. the documentation right now we use SQLite for the database, with Studio, some that we’ve inherited from playground. But there’s instructions there on how to, like, change to a different, SQL database. So, and if there’s something missing, that’s actually a great issue to report in the GitHub repo for, Studio. And we can get that updated and it might even turn into a new feature.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:23  I feel like it needs a theme song. You need you need to go to like, Suno or whatever that app is and write a theme song for studio two. That would be kind of cool.

Ian Stewart 00:31:30  I think that might be a good feature. Request for the AI assistant.

Ian Stewart 00:31:35  We can use Suno plus Runway plus the AI assistant to have a whole music video produced.

Michelle Frechette  00:31:40  There you go. To celebrate.All about WordPress in Studio.

Ian Stewart 00:31:45  Yes. 

Michelle Frechette 00:31:47  yeah. I don’t know if other people have questions, but, if you have questions, please go ahead and put them in the chat and we’ll answer them. We got a few minutes left here. I don’t know how much time you have devoted to us here, but, I also want to know what’s the dog’s name because I heard a dog bark. Unless that’s you. But I think it’s a dog.

Ian Stewart 00:32:05  No, the kids are not currently barking. That was that was, my friend Ruby. she is a, 6.5 months old goldendoodle and, Oh.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:19  Oh very nice. 

Ian StewartI’m very aware of her age. Not just because I love her, but because she sleeps at 6.5 hours a night. so.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:27  Oh, funny.

Ian Stewart 00:32:28  We’re hoping that that changes month by month. We’ll see.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:33  They really are like babies, aren’t they?

Ian Stewart 00:32:35  They’re like. They were tougher than babies sometimes.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:39  Although you can put them in a crate and you’re not supposed to do that with human children so. 

Ian Stewart 00:32:42  That is that is very true.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:48 Anyway, anything else that that you can think of that we should be talking about? I mean, I, I tried to think as many questions as I possibly could have anything coming with WordPress.com that we should be aware of. I know we’ve got some, you know, WordCamps coming up, so we’ll we’ll have a WordCamp Asia is  a little over a month away, and then we’ve got Europe and US this year. And y’all are usually somebody from dot com is usually there to talk about all the things.

Ian Stewart 00:33:15  I will be at WordCamp Asia. So Kumusta, to anyone from the Philippines that’s, watching. 

Michelle Frechette: I’ll be there. I’ll see you there.

Ian Stewart 00:33:23  Oh, excellent. So, getting ready for that, and the, anything coming up? I guess the only thing I have is, I mentioned the developer documentation. I would encourage anyone to check out the features on WordPress.com. One of my personal missions in life is to no longer see a thread anywhere that mentions that WordPress doesn’t have plugins or themes. I’m sorry WordPress.com doesn’t have plugins or themes, and not only do we have plugins and themes on WordPress.com, but we have a host of features that help support users in creating sites for others and even managing your own site too. Right. Like, I know I want pro-level tools like Studio when I’m working on my own site, and so I encourage everyone to check that out.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:11  Excellent. Well, that that’s that’s all I’ve got for you. If, if anybody’s listening, we will have this, packaged up and on our website on Friday with links to all the things in the show notes as well.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:23  So I’ll make sure I double check and get those from you. Ian, if people have questions. Is there a is there the what’s the best way to get questions answered about Studio or anything else coming up with dot com?

Ian Stewart 00:34:35  Oh great. I mean, if anyone has any questions, they can always email me directly. I also pay attention to all the WordPress socials. I’m Ian at automatic, so feel free to like ping. And don’t put that in the show notes, though. But the, that’s just special for anyone who watches and who’s paying. Yeah. 

Ian Stewart 00:34:57  and, the, Yeah. And if there’s issues with, studio, I encourage you to check out the, the GitHub repo because again, it’s open source. So, we love to hear issues, and, you know, if anyone wants to fork it, even if we have a developer that’s, like, very eager to try that out. That’d be super cool. You know, because we’ll get more feedback that way.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:21  Absolutely, I love that.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:23  And if people find bugs, you want to know about that too. Right. So those are the best way to make things better is for people to find those things. But you don’t have to go hunting for them. But if you encounter problems.

Ian Stewart 00:35:33  No, actually, I would say go hunting for them. We love to hear things.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:37  I mean, I’m not somebody who’s going to go hunting, but if I find them, I’m going to report them for sure.

Ian Stewart 00:35:40  Excellent. Thank you.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:42  My pleasure. We hope people come back next week. I’m going to have Taco, whose last name I can never pronounce. But Taco is going to be coming and talking to us about Progress Planner and their launch of the Pro version of Progress Planner, which helps you keep track of the things you need to do. It’s a gamification of keeping your site updated and developed, and I think that’s pretty cool. So I’m looking forward to talking to Taco about that next week. And we’ve got a few more people coming up in the weeks after.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:11  I’ve been working on some, getting a schedule up here for this year and talking to other people and, Thank you so much, Ian, for joining us on The Happiness Hour and talking about happy things. I think it’s pretty awesome.

Ian Stewart 00:36:23  Thank you. Michelle. It was great.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:25  Yeah. Pleasure to have you. And so, thanks again. And we will see everybody next week on the Post Status Happiness Hour with Taco. Hang in there. We’ll see you then.

Ian Stewart 00:36:34  Thank you.