Post Status Happiness Hour Session Three

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, Michelle Frechette chats with Mark Westguard, the creator of WS Form, a powerful and flexible form-building plugin for WordPress. Mark discusses WS Form’s standout features, including its advanced conditional logic, breakpoint selectors for responsive design, and its capacity for complex customizations and integrations. They explore creative uses of the plugin, from dynamic MadLibs to WooCommerce product customizations, and reflect on their favorite WordCamp experiences, such as WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US. Mark also teases upcoming updates for WS Form and shares insights on making the most of WordPress events.

Top Takeaways:

• WS Form’s Flexibility and Power: WS Form is highlighted as a highly flexible and powerful form builder, capable of much more than just creating basic forms. It includes advanced features like conditional logic, dynamic content generation, integration with WooCommerce, and even the ability to handle complex calculations.
• Responsive Design Features: WS Form supports responsive design with customizable breakpoints, allowing users to adjust form layouts across different screen sizes. This feature is especially useful for ensuring forms look good and function well on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
• Developer-Friendly Features: The form builder is designed with developers in mind, offering hooks for custom and legacy API integrations, as well as the ability to run WordPress filter hooks and action hooks. This makes it highly extensible for those with coding skills.
• Support and Knowledge Sharing: Mark Westguard actively responds to customer support inquiries by not only providing direct help but also creating knowledge base articles based on common questions. This approach helps build a comprehensive resource for all users.
• Community Engagement: Both Mark and Michelle emphasize the importance of attending WordCamps and being involved in the WordPress community. They discuss the benefits of networking, sharing ideas, and learning from others, which are vital aspects of their experiences and successes within the community.

Mentioned In The Show:

• WS Form 
• Eventbrite 
• WordCamp US 
• WordCamp Asia 
• WordCamp Europe 
• GiveWP 
• Bootstrap 
• Foundation 
• WooCommerce
• Barn2 Plugins
• Liquid Web 
• Datakit 
• Zach Katz
• GravityKit 

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

• Mark Westguard (Founder, WS Form)
• 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

[00:00:01] Michelle Frechette: And we’re live with the Post Status Happiness Hour. Hey, Mark, how are you?

[00:00:05] Mark Westguard: I’m doing very well. How are you?

[00:00:07] Michelle Frechette: I am doing well. I was just saying it’s summer, it’s 85 degrees outside, but I had my AC turned out a little too low and I’m cold, which is a privilege, and I’m embarrassed to even say it, but there you go.

[00:00:22] Mark Westguard: It’s almost time to put heating on, right?

[00:00:24] Michelle Frechette: I know, for sure. Right. But, um, I did adjust the AC to be a little less freezing in here. So it’s all good. It’s all good. Thanks for joining me on the show today.

[00:00:36] Mark Westguard: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, sorry about the rush.

[00:00:41] Michelle Frechette: I know. So if we lose Mark at all during the show, it’s because his new laptop has not yet arrived, in which case I’ll just start singing or something to fill the time. I’m not really gonna do that, but we’ll see.

[00:00:53] Mark Westguard: I’ll go get. I’ll get some ice. Put the laptop on ice.

[00:00:58] Michelle Frechette: That’s never a problem. Fingers crossed. The new one arrives very quickly for you for sure. But you’ve been doing some pretty cool stuff with WS Forms. I get the benefit of being one of your best friends and dare I say, your WP bestie. And so I get the late night text, like, look what I just finished. So I have the privilege of seeing some things in advance, but I wanted to give you the opportunity to kind of share with everybody some of the really cool things you’ve been doing and talk about some of the things that might be on your roadmap for WS Forms. So, you know. So first and foremost, welcome. I’m glad things are good and we’re going to see you at Wordcamp US in October, September. I know what it is. I really know what it is.

[00:01:43] Mark Westguard: September.

[00:01:45] Michelle Frechette: But yeah. So if anybody doesn’t know who you are, tell us a little bit about yourself and then give us kind of an intro to WS Form.

[00:01:53] Mark Westguard: Sure. Mark Westgard from WS Form. I’ve been a long term Post Status member and find the community to be incredibly helpful. That’s where I go to, to find people. So watch out. And yeah, so I’ve been in the web game for, I want to say, 20 – 28 years now. So way back from Netscape Navigator one all the way through to where we are now and used to run the UK’s second fastest growing web agency back in the day and have really not changed career. Just kept on building websites and working with the Internet and I got into the software licensing, I want to say probably 18 years ago, I guess, and used to run some software licensing myself and then about six years ago decided to get into software licensing in terms of building a plugin with WordPress, and that’s where WS Form came from. So WS Form, in case people don’t know, is a WordPress form plugin. And really pleased with how it’s going. I mean, we’ve been growing and growing and growing year on year and have a great little community of users and looking forward to taking it to bigger and better places in the future. So yeah, that’s me.

[00:03:16] Michelle Frechette: I love the capabilities of WS Form and that you could, it’s so extendable, there’s so much you can do with it, and yet you don’t have to be a developer to use it and use it well, and to use it beyond, you know, a basic contact form, which of course it’s very perfectly good for. But I’ve been able to do even without your help on some of them, some pretty amazing forms. It doesn’t hurt that I can always just text you and say, hey, how do I do this? To which you usually send me back a knowledge based article so that I can learn it for myself, which I appreciate. But also you’ve helped me with some pretty big projects like WP Speakers and how WS Form really powers so much of that site, and also WP Career Pages. We did some cool stuff with some custom posts on there as well. So yeah, I think it’s pretty awesome the way it works. And I like to tease you that of all the plugins on every site, every time I log in, there’s another update from WS Form.

[00:04:22] Mark Westguard: I just pushed another one just before this.

[00:04:25] Michelle Frechette: I’m not surprised. But what I love about the updates is I don’t think I’ve ever seen an update because of a security issue. I’ve only ever seen updates because there’s new features, there’s better features, you’re improving the things that you’ve already created and those kinds of things. So tell us about with the pro version especially, you have to, you know, you have the free version of the repo, it’s a freebie type product. But tell us some of the, some of your favorite. I know there’s a lot of really cool things. I’ll tell you what my favorites are afterwards. What are some of the favorite things that you’ve done with it first?

[00:04:59] Mark Westguard: Oh, there’s so much in there as you say. It’s, you can build your basic contact us form with it, and it does that very well. So it’s accessible. So I think the accessibility side of things is one of the things I’m quite proud of and continuing to work on that, that’s a never ending thing. You get it right and then something else comes out or you add a new feature and you’ve got to get that accessible. So that’s, that’s really important to me. I think one of the biggest selling points of WS Form is just the speed at which you can build forms with it. So it was really developed for me, a developer, to speed up the process of building forms within our agency. We were finding it was taking quite a long time to do that. A lot of custom code, a lot of buying add ons and things to get a plugin to do what it was doing. And I really wanted to try and bundle that into a single product without depreciating any kind of performance or speed of the website. So we’ve got things like the ability to make mobile, responsive forms all built into the product so you don’t have to use custom CSS to do that with breakpoints and stuff, it does all of that for you. The ability to integrate in with posts and users in WordPress has been a really big part of it. And that’s something obviously we used on your website. So people can register, they could add listings and use post data to do that. And then we have integrations in with ACF, Metabox, Pods, Toolset, ACPT and all the popular custom field plugins are in there and that’s all bidirectional. So you can use a form to create a post and that post can include images, repeaters, anything that the custom field plugin provides. You can actually push data to that as well as populating the form with that data as well. So that’s quite a popular feature. That’s been something that a lot of people use. And then we’re quite tied in with site builders such as Bricks, for example. So there’s a big developer community there and we’ve done quite a bit of work with them and also with ACSS, which was developed by Kevin Geary and his team. And they’ve actually done a lot of work to integrate their product in the WS Form. So you can really customize the look of the form by using his product, which is cool. Integration in with OpenAI so you know you can build forms just by typing in what you want.

[00:07:25] Michelle Frechette: I’ve done that. I’ve done that.

[00:07:27] Mark Westguard: Yeah, you have. Yeah. You did that for your daughter, right? I think I did, yeah.

[00:07:32] Michelle Frechette: And that is her DJ site. Yep.

[00:07:35] Mark Westguard: Yeah. Yeah. And so there’s, there’s now, what, 40, 46, 48 plugins for it. So those are all the integration add ons that we have. We’re actually integrated in now with about 92,93 different systems. So everything from Google addresses, Google routing, integrating with mape and Zapier, you know, third party integration libraries, it’s integrating with those and all the usual stuff you’d expect, like, you know, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce, all of those are in there. And that’s growing. So we really, so the way the product evolves is down to what we hear from customers. So when customers come to us and say, hey, I’d like you to do this, then we put it onto a list and if it gets enough votes, then we go ahead and build that. But the product wouldn’t be where it is today where it would not for the customers. That’s really what drives the product.

[00:08:30] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, understandably. Because if you don’t know what people want, it would be really hard to build for those things.

[00:08:34] Mark Westguard: Yeah, it’s amazing what people come up with as well that you don’t even. You know, I did one today. We had somebody who has a website that’s right to left and they wanted emails to be right to left as well, which actually never really thought about that. So now it does that. 

MIchelle Frechette: Wow that great. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so it’s, you know, multilingual is always important, so you can translate the forms and things like that. So having the RTL in conjunction with that is quite important.

[00:09:05] Michelle Frechette: So one of the things that you set up for me, which makes me really happy, is that when somebody fills out the contact form on my side project website, there’s my, what do you call it? Like my link form kind of website. So Linktree website, I get a text message that tells me, hey, somebody just messaged you. So it’s not buried in my email, it’s not in my spam, those kinds of things. And I can respond to them very quickly. So I love that. But I also just love how nicely it plays really, really well with ACF to be able to create displays. And you and I say you and I, as though I did any of the actual work on this site when it was really just you. But my projects is what I should say. We’ve used different products to display how inputs are put. So, like on the Career Summit we had last year, you had it displaying like, WordCamps do all the attendees, that kind of thing. And then we’ve used ACF to display custom post types and then we use Katie Keith’s Barn 2 plugins, table display also. And all of those things integrated really well with WS Form. We have a look. We have a fan in our midst.

[00:10:25] Mark Westguard: Hi, Mark.

[00:10:26] Michelle Frechette: Thanks for being here. I agree, WS Form is pretty hot. It’s pretty cool. It’s on fire.

Mark Westguard: Fire

Michelle Frechette: Fire. That’s right.

[00:10:36] Mark Westguard: Got quite an exciting new thing coming with. So the makers of GravityKit have actually produced a new library called Datakit. And that enables you to push our WS Form submissions to a table on the front end. So that’s coming soon. I’m not sure when they’re going to be launching it because they’re doing a lot of work making that into a really cool product. So hopefully we’ll see that soon. We’ve actually done all the integration work for that. So again, there’s another integration that we’re going to be adding the product.

[00:11:05] Michelle Frechette I may have teased that out to somebody the other day and then thought maybe I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but I was so excited.

[00:11:10] Mark Westguard: No, no, they’re cool with it. I found they had a public website, so I’m not in trouble. 

[00:11:17] Michelle Frechette: And neither am I then, which is a good thing.

[00:11:18] Mark Westguard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re all good.

[00:11:20] Michelle Frechette: Although Zach is a very forgiving person, so I’m sure that he wouldn’t be that angry with us.

[00:11:25] Mark Westguard: But Zack is great. He’s such a great guy.

[00:11:27] Michelle Frechette: I will say one of the nice things about, I mean, I’m obviously part of the Mark Westgard fan club, but one of the nice things that you do is you’re really good at building relationships and strategic partnerships. And I love when you’re like, hey, guess what’s going on with guess what’s being published soon, and this and that and the other thing. And, you know, like, Kyle from the Admin Bar has discovered WS Form and loves WS Form. And so there’s lots of different ways that you’ve been able to build those relationships, which I think is pretty cool too.

[00:11:59] Mark Westguard: Yeah, I think relationships have been key to the growth of the product. I’m a small indie developer. You know, I don’t have a team of 50 people in millions of dollars to spend on marketing, so those relationships are absolutely key. And fortunately, in the WordPress space, those relationships are pretty easy to make. If you’re a nice person, you meet a nice person, those relationships gel. But really the interest in the product has been because it’s, you know, it’s in my opinion, a good product. I built it to be a good product and so people have been happy to shout about it and tell others about it. And I’ve been very fortunate in that regard. So yeah, yeah, Cole’s been a great advocate.

[00:12:44] Michelle Frechette: That’s awesome. I’m going to bring up one of my favorite blog posts that.

Mark Westguard: Oh yeah.

Michelle Frechette: That might be on your website, has my name attached to it, of course. I love the fact that, okay, I think I wrote another post for you at some point about how like forms aren’t sexy or something like that. 

Mrk estguard: They’re not. They really aren’t.

Michelle Frechette: Like there’s, there’s, it’s like, right, like it’s not right, but they can be so much fun. And I told you I was going to create this mad libs out of WS Form and we did it. 

Mark Westgurad: Yeah, yeah.

Michelle Frechette: And like if somebody wants to go on that website, they can actually see the little fun about WordCamp, wherever it was.

[00:13:29] Mark Westguard: Yeah. That’s was um. A lot of people say that WS Form is actually an app builder, not a form builder, because it has so much flexibility in what it can do. One of the most powerful parts of WS Form is the conditional logic where you can make the form dynamic. So it doesn’t only do things like if this field equals ABC, then show this field. It does a wealth of different stuff, and we have people using it for measuring up windows and calculating the cost of a window and all this kind of stuff. And then that can also tie in with WooCommerce. So you can actually use it to customize products within WooCommerce with the fields on the form. So yeah, it’s one of these products where you have to keep prodding it, and then you’ll find more and more and more stuff as you go deeper into it. But also we’ve included a lot of stuff like, I don’t know, like adding select two to a select field, which basically makes it searchable. That’s all built into the product. There’s all these little checkboxes that do the JavaScript work for you. So that particular Matliff example, we used our variable system, I believe, to then string it together into a fun output.

[00:14:37] Michelle Frechette: We did, I’m trying to control the wrong screen here, but yeah, so like there’s all those different outputs where you kind of, if you don’t know what Madlibs are, you know, it’s that thing where somebody asks you to tell me a adjective, tell me a noun, and you fill all those things in, and then at the end they read you the funny story that’s been created from using the words that you gave them, and you can do that with a form. Right? So that’s what. That’s what we’ve done here.

[00:15:03] Mark Westguard: Yeah, yeah. You can download the example of that page that’s in the blog. Yes. That was fun.

[00:15:09] Michelle Frechette: A lot of fun. And of course, it does more things than just creative MadLibs, but I love, I call it, like, ikea hacking. And I know that hacking is not the right word to use in tech in a fun way, because. But I still call it Ikea hacking. Like, when you take a product for. And you look at what it’s been designed for, but you find another way to use it creatively. For example, with Givewp, I found a way to use their. I forgot what’s called, though, dedication. Right? Like, so when you want to dedicate your donation to somebody, to use that to create postcards, and you can sell postcards, e-postcards on your website for donations. And when I showed the guys that Give that when I. This is back before we required at LiquidWeb, of course, they were like, you didn’t have to code anything to do that. And I’m like, no, isn’t that cool? Right? So it’s like, it was one of the cool things. They’re like, okay. And the girl who doesn’t do coding figured out a new and creative way to use our product, which was so much fun. So, yes, I’m always thinking of ways to do stuff like that. Right?

[00:16:14] Mark Westguard: Cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually started making a WAPU maker on WS Forms do you remember that.

[00:16:20] Michelle Frechette: I do.

[00:16:22] Mark Westguard: Never got it finished, but it was quite fun. You could choose the colors and the fonts and all that kind of stuff, and it would build a WAPU for you.

[00:16:28] Michelle Frechette: Almost like a mister potato head, but WAPU version.

[00:16:32] Mark Westguard: Yeah, yeah. But, you know, obviously the. The main use of WS Form is usually some kind of inquiry or contact us form or calculator or something like that. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. 

Mark Westguard: So, yeah, yeah. And it’s. It’s interesting because as I get more support tickets from people, sometimes I’ll literally just sit down and write an article about what they’re asking about. So if somebody else asked about it, it’s there and available for other people to look at as well, so. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, exactly. 

Mark Westguard: Trying to think of a recent example of that. So many. It’s called blank.

[00:17:03] Michelle Frechette: I love the drag and drop nature of the form builder itself, and that you can decide how much of the page each input takes up. And then you can also, you have the selectors across the bottom that say where the breaks are for different screens and everything. 

[00:17:21] Mark Westguard: Yeah, that’s the breakpoint selector. And if you’re, if you’re using a framework such as foundation or bootstrap, that breakpoint, so it will actually change dynamically. So it analyzes what your site is using and then changes those breakpoints. So usually I think there’s five breakpoints, everything from mobile. So a breakpoint is basically a screen size, right? A Viewport size. So you go from mobile to a tablet, to a laptop, to maybe a bigger desktop and a huge, huge desktop, and you can actually change the form layout for each of those breakpoints. So it remembers it. So a lot of form plugins will just kind of collapse at a mobile point. There’s only two breakpoints there, but with WS Form there are five. You can actually control it per breakpoint. One of the other cool features we have is that debug console as well.

[00:18:09] Michelle Frechette: Oh yeah. The one I have to ask you how to turn it off all the time. I’m like, just fix it for me, please.

[00:18:18] Mark Westguard: Yeah, I have that thing on all the time, but I’m testing so many forms, so if you’ve got a big long form or even a short form, the debug console is cool because you can click populate and it fills a format for you so you don’t have to sit there and type it all in. Hit submit. Did it work? No. Right, start again. If you’re doing something with maybe a custom API integration where you’ve got to tweak it a little bit, then that populate tool is great. It actually has a populate and submit button. So you just click it once, fills the form out, submits it one click.

[00:18:48] Michelle Frechette: Nice and nice. Nice way to test things pretty quickly and easily, like you said, without having, especially if it’s a longer form, have to fill everything out or populate it with lorem ipsum or anything.

[00:18:57] Mark Westguard: That’s. Yeah, it even fills out signature fields. Yeah. So it’s, it does signature fields. It does. It’ll put first names in first name fields, last name and last name fields, phone numbers, emails, even just passwords. So it’s. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

[00:19:12] Michelle Frechette: I’d say you thought of everything, but I know you’re going to think of something new next week, so..

[00:19:18] Mark Westguard: Somebody will bring something up. Why does he, why doesn’t he do this? Oh, never thought about that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There’s an immense amount of functionality in there and sometimes, actually, I had a really nice lady today send a support ticket and she wanted a time field and she wanted to be able to add a certain number of seconds that were calculated based upon a Google route so she had a start position and an end position. It calculated how many seconds it took to get between those points. And then she had a start date field and she wanted to say, okay, the end time is going to be this. That is when you get there. So played around with it and it did it. So that’s, that’s the kind of crazy stuff that you can do with WS Form.

[00:19:59] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I think too, like, I’m trying to think of different ways, different sites I’ve built in the, in the past and things like that. Like, I bet there’s a, we could write a really cool blog post, actually, about, if you’re having a recipe site, there are so many cooking and recipe sites where somebody fills out all the information for the recipe and the ingredients and the instructions and how long you cook it at what temperature, and then it can display like a recipe card that they can then either print off or whatever. So that would be a really cool feature.

[00:20:28] Mark Westguard: Yeah, I need that.

[00:20:31] Michelle Frechette: You cook.

[00:20:33] Mark Westguard: I love to cook. Yeah.

[00:20:34] Michelle Frechette: Mine is just, how long does this pizza go in the, after I take it out of the freezer, how long does it stay in the oven for?

[00:20:42] Mark Westguard: Yeah, we could calculate the times.

[00:20:45] Michelle Frechette: I would say, could you find a way for the forum to just make dinner? But you’d find, you’d find a way for it to just order dinner and have it delivered to me. I’m sure lots of ways to do that.

[00:20:55] Mark Westguard: John’s pizza have an API. If they do, we could hook up to it.

[00:21:00] Michelle Frechette: They don’t deliver here, but I’m sure someplace nearby does.

[00:21:02] Mark Westguard: Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:04] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I know that’s pretty cool stuff. I love just, I love how easy it is to use without being a developer. But I can imagine if you do have developer skills, how much more you can even do with it, which I think is pretty cool.

[00:21:18] Mark Westguard: Yeah, there are hooks there for people to tap into. We have, if somebody has a custom or maybe a legacy API they need to talk to, then we have a web hook action. You can even run WordPress filter hooks and action hooks with it as well. So you can really get nitty gritty with it. And if you’re a PHP developer, you can take that form data and do whatever you want with it.

[00:21:40] Michelle Frechette: I love that. If people are interested, it’s also in your, your name on the screen. But WSForm.com, i did spell it right? Yes, I did. Okay, good.

[00:21:48] Mark Westguard: Yeah.

[00:21:51] Michelle Frechette: Does it say com? No, it says com. That’s good. If people are interested in connecting with you, if they have an idea where on your website, are they looking to give that information or input that information? Is it just a contact form?

[00:22:04] Mark Westguard: Yeah, you can go, yeah, we have a contact us form. A little, little secret, actually. A funny story. So I’m doing an event and I used Eventbrite for it and Michelle slapped my hand.

[00:22:17] Michelle Frechette: I wasn’t going to tell that story.

[00:22:20] Mark Westguard: I think it’s funny because I was in such a rush trying to do it. I was like, well, this will handle everything, right? Yeah. So it got changed to WS Form, but yeah, so my own worst enemy. But, you know, you can go to WSForm.com and you can reach me through there or you can find me on Twitter. I’m just  @westgard. That’s w-e-s-t-g-u-a-r-d. We also have a Facebook group as well. So if you do a search on Facebook for WS Form, you’ll find us on there. And here comes the cat.

[00:22:50] Michelle Frechette: He’s like, who are you talking to? Hello, cat. How funny. Yeah, well, we send pictures of our cats because we are, we’re tech people. We have cats. That’s the way it works.

[00:23:02] Mark Westguard: That’s right. That’s right. Keep us company during the day, homeworkers.

[00:23:07] Michelle Frechette: Now, you have attended a lot of different WordCamps. You’ve done sponsorships, you’ve attended. What is some of the favorite things or favorite experiences that you’ve had? And maybe like, of all the travels you’ve been to, do you have a favorite camp?

[00:23:21] Mark Westguard: I love, I mean, WordCamp Asia is cool. Love to go and see a new country. WordCamp Europe is probably my favorite one. It’s just, it’s huge. I mean, there’s so many, so many people there. Get to see all my friends, get to meet new people. Yeah. I’ve sponsored, I don’t know how many, how many insta. I’ve actually only attended one WordCamp as an attendee. All the others I’ve sponsored, I tried to give back. WordCamp US I’m just going as an attendee for a change because I just wanted to hang out and meet people for, for a change because also a lot of the WordCamp US has a lot of the UU people anyway, so I’m going to give that a go. I’ll be there with my wife, Casey. So we’ll be looking forward to seeing everybody, I think. I’m trying to think my favorite one, actually. I think Porto is probably my favorite. I loved Porto and I really enjoyed the city and I really enjoyed the venue. I thought the venue was a great layout. We had a lot of, a lot of foot traffic there as well. So, yeah, it’s so many memories. Had I not gone to WordCamps, I wouldn’t be where I am now, and I wouldn’t have met all the great people that I met. The Datakit thing I was talking about earlier was a lunch with, with Zach. So that’s how these, these things happen. So if you haven’t been to one, I encourage you to go to one.

[00:24:39] Michelle Frechette: Absolutely. And there’s one coming up.

[00:24:41] Mark Westguard: Yes.

[00:24:41] Michelle Frechette: In September. And I think there’s still tickets available. Maybe? In Portland.

[00:24:48] Mark Westguard: Yeah, I haven’t seen people tweeting saying that it’s sold out, so maybe there’s some tickets available.

[00:24:54] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. I don’t even know. I probably should know. I’m gonna look. I’m gonna look. I typed in 2025 yesterday or the earlier today to check on tickets, and I was like, wait a minute.

[00:25:08] Mark Westguard: Its still this yeah. Yeah, I just got approved for WordCamp Asia, sponsoring that one next year, so that’ll be fun. Yeah.

[00:25:15] Michelle Frechette: Oh nice. I’m trying to think of what talk to submit over there, but I think I’ve got one, so I’m not going to say it publicly yet, but we’ll see. Yes, there are still tickets available for WordCamp US, which is in Portland, Oregon, September 17 through the 20th. I think it’s the first time for a four day camp, which is pretty cool. They’re not only doing. Yeah, they’re doing a. The first day will be the contributor day.

[00:25:40] Mark Westguard: Yep.

[00:25:41] Michelle Frechette: Followed by a showcase day where different people have submitted projects and products, I guess projects and products that have been built with WordPress and the opportunity to showcase those and show people about those. And then two days of camp, and it’s all during the work week, which means you can fly home on Saturday and have a day of rest before. Or if you want to explore Portland, you can, of course, over a weekend. But.

[00:26:14] Mark Westguard: First day is Wednesday. Is it?

[00:26:16] Michelle Frechette: It’s Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Yes.

[00:26:19] Mark Westguard: Yeah.

[00:26:19] Michelle Frechette: No, Tuesday. Tuesday is. Tuesday is contributor day.

[00:26:22] Mark Westguard: Okay.

[00:26:23] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Because it’s four days. And so we’re done by Friday and home on Saturday, which gives a nice little buffer day to kind of regroup before you go back to work on Monday, if that’s the way you do things.

[00:26:34] Mark Westguard: WordCamps are exhausting.

[00:26:39] Michelle Frechette: They are. And I have come home from both flagships this year, sick once with some weird lung infection, once with COVID So I may mask this year. I’m still thinking about that because either that or I got to get in there and get my booster shots. Whether we get my flu shot and my COVID.

[00:26:54] Mark Westguard: I escaped it somehow. I don’t know. I usually catch conference funk, but not this time. I was okay. Fingers crossed.

[00:27:03] Michelle Frechette: I made a home from WordCamp, Canada unscathed. So that.

[00:27:07] Mark Westguard: Good, good.

[00:27:08] Michelle Frechette: Maybe it’s flat. I don’t know what it is anyway, but I’m excited about. About seeing people there, being there and having the opportunity to kind of just, you know, meet different people and that kind of thing. So that’ll be good for sure.

[00:27:20] Mark Westguard: Yeah. Are you going to be doing your selfie challenge at WordCamp US?

[00:27:24] Michelle Frechette: I think I will. I think I will. Yeah. I need to get some, like, labels made up or stickers made up with my little WAPU that says the information on how to do your selfie so that people aren’t going, wait, what was I supposed to do again? I could just hand out the stickers.

[00:27:39] Mark Westguard: So what’s the hashtag again?

[00:27:42] Michelle Frechette: Michelle and me. Yep. I know that. Then I always have to check for hashtag me and Michelle because people will reverse it sometimes, which I thought if I hand them a sticker sheet, like a little sticker sheet, that’ll be a good idea. 

[00:27:52] Mark Westguard: An excuse for another sticker.

[00:27:55] Michelle Frechette: I mean, I kind of like stickers. So definitely gonna do something like that. And I was thinking about getting Michelle WAPU pins done this year, too.

[00:28:04] Mark Westguard: Okay.

[00:28:05] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, so I do. I have little stickers. I gotta find a new pin place, though, so maybe we’ll talk afterwards. You can give me some ideas of where to get pins done.

[00:28:15] Mark Westguard: Sure.

[00:28:17] Michelle Frechette: So, yeah, so people can stop by and get a sticker or a pin. Take a selfie. A lot of fun, for sure. Anything else coming down the line that you. When it either, even if you can’t tell us all about it, you might want to tease it out. Or is it just kind of like. We’ll see what happens.

[00:28:34] Mark Westguard: Yeah, there’s. There’s stuff in the pipeline for sure. We’ve got some new stuff coming with translation. We’ve got some new stuff coming with styling. So, yeah, a couple of. Couple of big updates coming. It’ll never end. It’s just one of those plugins that doesn’t stop.

[00:28:51] Michelle Frechette: And it’s completely, like, adjustable CSS wise. Like, I like that too. Right. You’ve made it so that you can change your help text. You can do all those things. Yeah.

[00:29:00] Mark Westguard: Super clean HTML. So if you can do a little bit of CSS or a lot of CSS, you can start it pretty easily. And we’ve got a huge knowledge base, so you can always go in there, do a search for CSS, and you’ll find all kinds of examples.

[00:29:15] Michelle Frechette: Exactly. Love it. So, anything else to mention today before we kind of wrap up?

[00:29:21] Mark Westguard: No, I think that’s it. I mean, I could go on. I could bore people for hours.

[00:29:27] Michelle Frechette: You and I could definitely talk for hours.

[00:29:29] Mark Westguard: People have to get on with their lives.

[00:29:33] Michelle Frechette: Again, if you’re interested, WSForm.com, you can go to w on twitter, it’s WS_Form. Or @westgard to talk to Mark. And, yeah, thanks for joining me today. We’re gonna. I’ll let you go before your laptop overheats. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. Do it. Okay. It must like me.

[00:29:56] Mark Westguard: It’s on granite. It seems to be working. Okay. New laptop next week. Expect me to work even faster.

[00:30:03] Michelle Frechette: Oh, my goodness gracious. Your fingers will be on fire. All right, well, thank you, everybody, for joining us for this week’s Happiness Hour, the Post Status Happiness Hour. We’ll see everybody next week. I’m working on a guest. I won’t say who it is yet, but we’ll have somebody. I know I love teasing things out, but every week we’re going to talk to somebody in the WordPress community, talk about things that are happening and what’s happening in their lives. We’ll see you all next week.