WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 1, Day 1  [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 1, Day 1|Full Document Contents]] ## Document Notes (8) WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 1, Day 1 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmJzcJWa8M Transcript: (25:17) foreign again that's not exactly as good (28:05) all right [Applause] hello so good morning welcome everyone to wordcam Europe 2023 in Athens Greece we're excited to have you here with us well first year in 2022 we were in Porto and enjoyed our first in-person world Camp event since the world break of kovid who was there thank you all for being there and thank you for being part of this amazing Community we have a blast last year remember remember this well fun times let's repeat that so (29:08) Jose evangelia and I'm sure and he managed to pronounce all the names correctly amazing isn't it yeah so we're very happy to be in Athens today a little bit more I'm happy happier than these two uh considering that I'm Greek and we have been planning this event for a long while now since I think it was the spring of 2022 so we are here at the Athens concert hall or otherwise Megan and while we're very happy that we're holding this event we're also very thrilled that we are continuing the (29:47) legacy of the online events and that means that we are live streaming uh the whole world from Europe for all our friends that are connecting and watching from home worldwide so we are welcoming uh all our friends and also our virtual friends to Worldcom Europe 2023 and we are wishing you to have um an amazing event we would like you to be here in person but since this is not an option at least we will have you with us virtually so World camps represent the very best of Wordpress and they bring us together across borders language barriers and (30:31) time zones to celebrate the power of Wordpress community it's not about only only about learning something but also about sharing knowledge with each other it's where Community uh contributes to Wordpress and give back to the community well this year we are very happy to welcome people from well 100 different countries to World Camp Europe this is the events for full inspiration to all of us but most importantly you we will want to thank you again for being here usually Worldcom Europe is when it is in early planning stages we (31:19) plan for around 3 000 people okay so the number of registered attendees for this year's work in Europe is 2862 people I [Applause] no not the Figure 1 332 of you are attending welcome Europe for the very first time so that's almost half of you thank you [Applause] we are welcoming people from all all backgrounds no matter what their knowledge their skill set experience religion age skin color gender is safe and inclusive environment where everyone's voice is valued heard respected and inviting you you all to (32:15) get involved in all aspects of this wonderful event we are really excited to set a full schedule of uh an awesome content this year and this is something that hasn't happened for a lot of time now we have three tracks full of excellent talks on a variety of topics like artificial intelligence for example in WordPress and maybe also tomorrow's generation perspective on WordPress and several other things uh the last topic uh that I just mentioned is presented and that's also a gamma first time by the youngest speaker (33:05) we ever had on stage for Worldcom Europe and it's amazing to see new generation 16 years old whoa so [Applause] so we're having two tracks of workshops also on topics like automating WordPress with no code that could be for me uh or learning how to create Gutenberg blocks from scratch that could also be for me [Laughter] and we also have a lot of other activities because we had amazing content and Community teams so we are including to these uh this year the wp connect that used to be the wp Cafe previously so now it's a different (33:51) structure we have sessions on topics like five for the future which is very important for all of these people who want to get involved and contribute to Wordpress and also WordPress playground who's really interesting this year uh we also have a wellness track for those who try to stay fit and calm because we're having yoga and we also have an evening hike uh with a view of the city and a lot of Raffles and quizzes and games in the sponsors area so you are free to go and you know discover everything and one that's not on a monitor (34:30) the after party oh yeah after party I have more than that later on now always our code of conducts which we present online our code of conduct outlines how we expect our community to treat to treat each other is in a way that is respectful collaborative considerate and in a way that is fair no matter what a person's gender age race religion sexuality or ability is we're also committed to ensuring our event is friendly it's safe and welcoming for everyone and if you notice any Behavior that does not meet these expectations (35:18) please contact one of the volunteers right away and the volunteers that's on the next time volunteers we have around 150 lovely volunteers we have donated their time to help make this event possible many of them have been volunteering for multiple years in a row just because they love to be part of this great event you can spot our volunteers pretty easily by looking at people with the light blue t-shirts like this one they are all over the venue and able to answer the questions that you might have please be respectful and help our volunteers (36:06) helping you thanks so a few words about our venue and macaron is a fantastic but also a very large location so most of the areas are below ground level which makes it comfy and also cool considering the hot Greek sun uh you will find maps available on the website so you can navigate easier inside the venue so yeah about Maps talking about the website during the event we days we have replaced our home page of our website with a simplified page it only holds easy to click buttons and links to all the necessary information (37:00) use it for gaining quick access to all the work of Europe information well join us at the outdoor Plaza for the family photo of worldcamp Europe 2023 after the shoot the lens will be open the photo family photo the community family photo will be then tomorrow at around 13. around 10. one yes sorry 13. (37:33) no in the outside foyer we are enjoying outside photographies since last year so also because we enjoy sharing things on social media especially our experience about work in Europe our Wi-Fi is very easy to find so the network brain basically is wcu and the password is wcu 2023 we didn't want to make it difficult for anyone so every year we see a very vast growing number of devices connected to the Wi-Fi so we plan bandwidth accordingly and we're trying to give to all the attendees and also sponsors volunteers organizers the best experience the best (38:18) wireless experience possible however we would like to kindly ask you not to stream anything while we're using the Wi-Fi just that we have the option to maintain the best wireless connection for everyone okay and of course if you have your connection set up you can share all your welcome Europe moments on social media use the hashtag wceu 2023 and for accessibility please use capital letters when you type the hashtag and you can find it on Twitter on Instagram Facebook LinkedIn Telegram and Mastodon we are trendy (39:03) this event would not be possible without the generous support of our amazing sponsors thank you so for super admin sponsors of stinger and Jetpack [Applause] without our sponsors this event wouldn't be possible uh this is the truth because we are uh funding the event mostly from the sponsorships and the tickets Revenue so we would like a big Applause also for the admin sponsors Bluehost Elemento Google ionos sitegrounds Big Lots who and WP engine thank you [Applause] and also thank you very much for the editor sponsors cloudways PayPal web (40:04) pros and yoasts and thank you all to our offer and small business sponsors [Applause] wow micro sponsors are not exactly sponsors but are people of this community who want to give back and contribute a little bit more from their own pockets and this ye > [!note]+ Document Notes > (8) WordCamp Europe 2023 - Track 1, Day 1 - YouTube > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmJzcJWa8M > > Transcript: > (25:17) foreign again that's not exactly as good > (28:05) all right [Applause] hello so good morning welcome everyone to wordcam Europe 2023 in Athens Greece we're excited to have you here with us well first year in 2022 we were in Porto and enjoyed our first in-person world Camp event since the world break of kovid who was there thank you all for being there and thank you for being part of this amazing Community we have a blast last year remember remember this well fun times let's repeat that so > (29:08) Jose evangelia and I'm sure and he managed to pronounce all the names correctly amazing isn't it yeah so we're very happy to be in Athens today a little bit more I'm happy happier than these two uh considering that I'm Greek and we have been planning this event for a long while now since I think it was the spring of 2022 so we are here at the Athens concert hall or otherwise Megan and while we're very happy that we're holding this event we're also very thrilled that we are continuing the > (29:47) legacy of the online events and that means that we are live streaming uh the whole world from Europe for all our friends that are connecting and watching from home worldwide so we are welcoming uh all our friends and also our virtual friends to Worldcom Europe 2023 and we are wishing you to have um an amazing event we would like you to be here in person but since this is not an option at least we will have you with us virtually so World camps represent the very best of Wordpress and they bring us together across borders language barriers and > (30:31) time zones to celebrate the power of Wordpress community it's not about only only about learning something but also about sharing knowledge with each other it's where Community uh contributes to Wordpress and give back to the community well this year we are very happy to welcome people from well 100 different countries to World Camp Europe this is the events for full inspiration to all of us but most importantly you we will want to thank you again for being here usually Worldcom Europe is when it is in early planning stages we > (31:19) plan for around 3 000 people okay so the number of registered attendees for this year's work in Europe is 2862 people I [Applause] no not the Figure 1 332 of you are attending welcome Europe for the very first time so that's almost half of you thank you [Applause] we are welcoming people from all all backgrounds no matter what their knowledge their skill set experience religion age skin color gender is safe and inclusive environment where everyone's voice is valued heard respected and inviting you you all to > (32:15) get involved in all aspects of this wonderful event we are really excited to set a full schedule of uh an awesome content this year and this is something that hasn't happened for a lot of time now we have three tracks full of excellent talks on a variety of topics like artificial intelligence for example in WordPress and maybe also tomorrow's generation perspective on WordPress and several other things uh the last topic uh that I just mentioned is presented and that's also a gamma first time by the youngest speaker > (33:05) we ever had on stage for Worldcom Europe and it's amazing to see new generation 16 years old whoa so [Applause] so we're having two tracks of workshops also on topics like automating WordPress with no code that could be for me uh or learning how to create Gutenberg blocks from scratch that could also be for me [Laughter] and we also have a lot of other activities because we had amazing content and Community teams so we are including to these uh this year the wp connect that used to be the wp Cafe previously so now it's a different > (33:51) structure we have sessions on topics like five for the future which is very important for all of these people who want to get involved and contribute to Wordpress and also WordPress playground who's really interesting this year uh we also have a wellness track for those who try to stay fit and calm because we're having yoga and we also have an evening hike uh with a view of the city and a lot of Raffles and quizzes and games in the sponsors area so you are free to go and you know discover everything and one that's not on a monitor > (34:30) the after party oh yeah after party I have more than that later on now always our code of conducts which we present online our code of conduct outlines how we expect our community to treat to treat each other is in a way that is respectful collaborative considerate and in a way that is fair no matter what a person's gender age race religion sexuality or ability is we're also committed to ensuring our event is friendly it's safe and welcoming for everyone and if you notice any Behavior that does not meet these expectations > (35:18) please contact one of the volunteers right away and the volunteers that's on the next time volunteers we have around 150 lovely volunteers we have donated their time to help make this event possible many of them have been volunteering for multiple years in a row just because they love to be part of this great event you can spot our volunteers pretty easily by looking at people with the light blue t-shirts like this one they are all over the venue and able to answer the questions that you might have please be respectful and help our volunteers > (36:06) helping you thanks so a few words about our venue and macaron is a fantastic but also a very large location so most of the areas are below ground level which makes it comfy and also cool considering the hot Greek sun uh you will find maps available on the website so you can navigate easier inside the venue so yeah about Maps talking about the website during the event we days we have replaced our home page of our website with a simplified page it only holds easy to click buttons and links to all the necessary information > (37:00) use it for gaining quick access to all the work of Europe information well join us at the outdoor Plaza for the family photo of worldcamp Europe 2023 after the shoot the lens will be open the photo family photo the community family photo will be then tomorrow at around 13. around 10. one yes sorry 13. > (37:33) no in the outside foyer we are enjoying outside photographies since last year so also because we enjoy sharing things on social media especially our experience about work in Europe our Wi-Fi is very easy to find so the network brain basically is wcu and the password is wcu 2023 we didn't want to make it difficult for anyone so every year we see a very vast growing number of devices connected to the Wi-Fi so we plan bandwidth accordingly and we're trying to give to all the attendees and also sponsors volunteers organizers the best experience the best > (38:18) wireless experience possible however we would like to kindly ask you not to stream anything while we're using the Wi-Fi just that we have the option to maintain the best wireless connection for everyone okay and of course if you have your connection set up you can share all your welcome Europe moments on social media use the hashtag wceu 2023 and for accessibility please use capital letters when you type the hashtag and you can find it on Twitter on Instagram Facebook LinkedIn Telegram and Mastodon we are trendy > (39:03) this event would not be possible without the generous support of our amazing sponsors thank you so for super admin sponsors of stinger and Jetpack [Applause] without our sponsors this event wouldn't be possible uh this is the truth because we are uh funding the event mostly from the sponsorships and the tickets Revenue so we would like a big Applause also for the admin sponsors Bluehost Elemento Google ionos sitegrounds Big Lots who and WP engine thank you [Applause] and also thank you very much for the editor sponsors cloudways PayPal web > (40:04) pros and yoasts and thank you all to our offer and small business sponsors [Applause] wow micro sponsors are not exactly sponsors but are people of this community who want to give back and contribute a little bit more from their own pockets and this year another interesting number will have 103 micro sponsors so we would like to thank these people and I'd like also to ask you to make sure you visit all the sponsors in the Expo area when you're not in the sessions go blend with people go networking have some fun meet new > (41:01) products meet new people I don't know maybe search for a job that's also an option and keep in mind they also have brought all kinds of goodies for you because who doesn't love Swag yeah so now let's talk about the postcards game that the lovely Community team has prepared for us everyone will receive four postcards in their swag bag you can get your swag back at the swag station which opens around 10 30 or maybe just be open yet it's on the round in the middle you will see these cards are the same the idea is > (41:46) that you mingle network with other people exchange postcards there are four different cards these images were created by contributors and are part of the Museum of the blog art and were built using Gutenberg to learn more about the museum go through the community Booth located at the Expo area 8. [Applause] so for the other for postcards uh you will have to get them from the community booth you will find the community both very very easily in the Expo area and you will only need to answer some very simple questions so uh > (42:31) these postcards will be given at different times uh between talks today and tomorrow and they were designed by the community and the design teams that wanted to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Wordpress happy birthday WordPress and also to celebrate World from Europe 2023 so another thing we would like to mention is that we have to opposed this year because we we really like these yellow creatures and we couldn't decide that's a Greek problem usually we had two that we wanted so much so we opted in keeping both of them so our > (43:18) first weapon is uh W Athena from our City's name and it was designed by Ohio so thank you very much Haya and the second vapu [Applause] that most probably you have heard the name previously but not as a wapu but as a Greek food there is a reason we are we like food here in Greece because we have Heroes and supplying so we made out of that and we have the hero that was designed by Ellen orantini this one actually makes me very hungry oh so thank you uh thank you also for the big Applause because I was about to ask > (44:16) for it and thank you for the from the community team and thank you uh for the design team because they have done uh an amazing job this year yep thank you [Applause] now when you have your cards why not just send them by old-fashioned yes old-fashioned mail to your friends all around the world you can do it right here in Athens the mailboxes you can see them on screen they're yellow I hope you have brought your own address book so you can just write them down and if you're not fancy on bringing the uh sending their postcards by mail just > (44:58) take them home frame them and hang them on your own wall what can be After parties are always something to remember right this year we have planned another great happening we hope you have a planet some outfits for accompanying the theme of The After parties the 20 years of Wordpress we'll treat you with local food a couple of drinks and a great cover band so we can assure you that you will have a wonderful time Dr party will be held at the lowen Athens Club tomorrow Saturday starting at around 20 30 minutes past 12 20. important very > (45:47) very important bed is mandatory no exceptions taking consideration that for security reasons we have a limit capacity of 1 500 people but you should prepare to dance a lot right yeah of course I mean this is also mandatory okay some people might avoid it and now uh let's get on with the event because maybe we have tired you a little bit and it's early in the morning so in case you didn't have some coffee to wake you up we should you know just get off the stage uh we will take a very short break in order to allow people to > (46:33) get to the first content because we have three tracks and workshops so maybe you shouldn't be in track one in a few minutes um and I hope that you're ready for this yep so track one track one that's over here uh we have after this session a panel with Miriam Schwab Cherry Miller Adam Silverstein and Rahul Ben Sal on WordPress performance Community perspectives on track two we have Viola grenner we'll talk about tests instead of guessing generate more leads through growth hacking sounds good too yeah and for track free > (47:21) uh David Ortiz well so as 10 things that all WordPress plugin developers should avoid um caridals will be hosting Workshop in worship one uh International appeal making your themes and plugins translatable Jonathan wassinger will be hosting Workshop 2 on developing WordPress blogs using plain JavaScript and everything starts at 10. > (47:53) or a little bit after 10 and please don't forget to visit the amazing sponsors area have fun enjoy enjoy this is what can be Europe [Applause] I think we should slowly go thanks > (50:46) okay okay good morning Athens we are ready to start it's very exciting to be here again and we're starting with a bang it's a panel on WordPress performance with four amazing people who are plugin Developers innovators and just the best that our community has to offer now you'll see me do this many times so be prepared this is going to happen now and so we today we have sorry I should have really done this > (51:50) before Adam Silverstein Marion Schwab Terry Mueller and Raul bansal who here they are [Applause] good morning please grab a bottle of water take a seat and the conversation is going to last about half an hour with 15 minutes for the Q a after that there will be a quarter of an hour to you know stay in the room go take a break go to a different track and do whatever you want so here we are Adam I believe you're moderating the panel aren't you great so I'm going to leave you to it give them a big hand thank you > (52:46) all right thank you is this working yes cool awesome thanks so much for coming everyone I'm really excited to host this panel and we're talking about performance today I'm really grateful to my panelists for agreeing to join um just as a brief intro when when I propose this panel um performance for me is about way more than the raw speed of a website it's about how users experience your website and how it performs for you as a website owner or a website builder so we're going to sort of broaden the topic of > (53:19) performance to include anything that can affect the experience that people have on your website so just to get started I'd like to go around and ask each of my panelists to just introduce themselves say kind of where they come from why they might be here on the stage to talk about performance I want to go start for me if Miriam okay hi I'm am Schwab um I'm the co-founder formerly the CEO of a company called stratic stratic is a different approach to publishing and hosting WordPress websites and we do > (53:49) that in a static architecture and by doing that we remove the underlying service stack and in that way sites can be much more performant and scalable Etc and secure stratic was acquired by Elementor exactly a year ago I'm now celebrating my one year anniversary there and uh yeah so now stratic is part of Elementor and I'm happy to be here on this panel hi everyone I'm Terry based in Switzerland I'm a software engineering manager at Google and specifically in Google Chrome and web platform and > (54:26) me and my team we care a lot about raising user experience on the web specifically for WordPress sites trying to make a better web I'm Rahul I'm founder and CEO of rtcam from India so as part of my work I work with clients who are worried about performance and all the metrics that's around it excellent and just in full transparency I have a bunch of questions I'm going to ask here and I have already shared those with the panelists um so we're just going to start out with something hopefully pretty easy so what > (55:03) I'm going to ask is if you would tell me about some work you've been doing recently to help push performance forward in your product or service or work area and I guess I'll start with you again Miriam and then I'll vary who gets to start okay so as I'm sure you know the world of performance is never ending in terms of how we approach it and different ways to try to optimize your sites for performance um that can start with the back end and it also it obviously can apply to the front end so in terms of stratic we've > (55:32) been we're constantly uh taking strides to optimize the front end in different ways because in stratic the back end no longer it ceases to be a function or an aspect of performance just because it's not there with a fully static site that's served up through CDN and you know available in hundreds of educations around the world you kind of have checked that box but then there's that last mile of performance um so there's there's aspects to that uh that you know it's a con it's actually a > (56:02) constant challenge um because in the end if someone builds a site in a certain way and not always a good way then that HTML code the JavaScript CSS is going to be problematic and so how can we help that last mile be better even in a world where people can do whatever they want with their websites including not great things I'll just also represent the Elementor aspect so elementors obviously the page builder plug-in and also the hosting and also there performance has become with on both of those products > (56:32) the very very important Focus um and part of this strategy in terms of making the users like like what you said it performance is so much more than just fast it's about a user experience um and so we've seen really great improvements around that um on the hosting and the plugin as well so as part of um helping with performance to our clients uh so first thing like uh whenever new things come like there was PHP Lighthouse now there's a lot of Buzz around core wave vitals uh we put a lot of stays on educating them about the > (57:13) right metrics for example with web vitals there is a lab score and there is a Crux report so many client thinks that if it's working fast on my site that's it like so it's working fast on my computer then my site should do well for everyone and that's where we try to educate them like you need to use lab data as a reference but also work on the real world data and fix performance issue for everyone not just for yourself if my my part and I guess I can speak a bit on behalf of the team but we we > (57:49) really are on a mission to try to make every WordPress site faster and that you know we we do we have multiple projects going on um you know one area is trying to see how we can improve WordPress core uh make core faster or bring new apis to make more core more capable from a performance perspective and then also um provide better tooling for for all of you Developers for sites or plugins and stuff like this to really try to embed performance as part of like the development workflow and I have better tooling like you know for example better > (58:27) ways of checking plugins in terms of a performance and last but not least is working with the ecosystem so you know with Elementor with other plugin Developers trying to really see if we can work together on on whether it's adopting some of this tooling or actually making the product faster so that's kind of like what we've been pursuing busy with lately excellent thank you um okay so my next question is about artificial intelligence the hot topic of the day uh the artificial intelligence has been making amazing leaps and > (59:01) strides recently so what uh what role do you think artificial intelligence AI could play in performance in improving performance for WordPress and I'll go to your hole to start so uh like it's tough one so maybe AI can generate images that are already optimized to begin with so like all the image optimizations we do like the post processing looseless compressions and all like if you tell AI that hey I'm going to upload this on a website or I'm generating this one for the website then I think it should take > (59:36) care all those optimizations that are required for the web good idea anyone else okay um so well what would a panel be if we didn't talk about AI right like it's required um I'm excited about AI because I mentioned that last mile of performance and it's just it's really hard for humans to get that right it just there's you know a lot of a lot of products and initiatives trying to hack away at that and improve that but in the end you've got render blocking JS you've got render blocking > (1:00:11) JS and trying to shift that around without breaking things is like a nearly impossible feat and I hope that at some point AI will be able to take the output of a site and just like it optimizes at this point let's say the content that we write you know you can have it write a blog post and then tweets I don't know if you do this but I'm just saying you can tweets Etc then at some point the output of a site will be optimized by AI in a way that also makes sure that the front end continues to function so I can > (1:00:40) see that happening at some point and actually on stratic that would be ideal because we output the static and then it could kind of like have a I go better and then you've got like the best site so that's kind of my vision of oh yeah I will help with performance so we'll take it just like it takes a lot of things out of our hands that let's say we're not excellent at so and we're trying to do it anyways so this could be something that I can help people with as well well AI is an interesting space > (1:01:10) um and I think that we are kind of in the Tipping Point ideally you know it would be magical like AI solves all the performance problem and and many more but there's always a risk to do that automatically and so I think that we're far away from that still but the advantage of AI is really that you know we can train the model is based on data and there are a few areas which I think are quite promising for example on uh tooling you know at the moment we have great tools to identify performance problems and stuff like this but not > (1:01:40) really helping to guide what we need to do next there's a checklist of like hey you need to optimize your CSS do your JavaScript and stuff like this but it's not really contextual to any website and so I feel that with AI and more data and trained models it will get better and better at identifying the problems and then giving some guidance more contextually um according to a given side so you know in the kind takes to Wordpress it could be analyzing which plugins are installed or some setup and stuff like this and be > (1:02:12) much better at saying like hey here are the things that you need to do for your website and not just the checklist of of things that you know we have documented essentially so I see that there's like a promising promising um future always AI yeah great awesome um so my next question is just about the general performance of Wordpress as a whole and we've seen other platforms like Wix and Shopify dramatically improve their performance in the last few years while at the same time WordPress has either stagnated or maybe > (1:02:46) even decreased slightly compared to the web as a whole what do you attribute that to and and what do you think we could do to improve the situation yeah um we have I think to look at the different nature of which each CMS is and you mentioned weeks and you know Shopify and they are kind of SAS services and they control the stack base the stack and stuff like this so it's kind of easier to make changes there are also newer cms's and so they don't have kind of the Legacy code base that WordPress has and WordPress is > (1:03:20) distributed it's uh it's you know still a community still and hopefully forever a community open source project with a huge ecosystem um that you know it's it's a beast to move so I think that's one you know like it's just slower moving but I with that said I'm really confident that we will catch up so that's one problem and I think the other one is also maybe the the lack of focus on performance until now um which is you know I think a good and a bad thing but we're really seeing that > (1:03:52) shifting a little bit or a lot hopefully so there's now the the core performance team and there's better tooling and there's a lot more focus on performance we saw in 6.2 for the first time there was a performance release lead so I think performance now is starting to be taken in consideration a lot more in WordPress and it will take some time for the entire ecosystem to to actually do that as well but I think they will catch up so can I yeah okay um so I I think that like those types of platforms have an unfair advantage in > (1:04:25) that they can fully control everything that's happening within them end to end so they also control what happens within them intend by telling their users that they are limited in what they can do right so if you're building a site with Wix or Squarespace at some point many users will hit a wall because they're going to want to customize it in a way or do something with it that it just doesn't allow because it's not open source because it is that kind of wild garden platform so so they have those > (1:04:52) limitations but they also have the advantage of being able to apply changes that they can just Implement across the board and there's sites with confidence because they know exactly what they allow and don't allow within them right so so that's kind of an unfair Advantage um I think Terry's right that there hasn't been a focus on improving performance necessarily in WordPress I think a lot of the responsibility has been offloaded to the hosting companies the attitude has kind of been well you > (1:05:17) know let's let the hosting companies try to solve solve this for us which is legitimate because in the end the hosting companies are the platforms that are running WordPress um and you know that attitude applies to security and other aspects of Wordpress as well however in the end if the underlying software there's only so much that the hosting companies can do and there's only so much that they should do so um you know I've been in touch with Terry and other people on the performance team and I see that now > (1:05:46) there is more support and focus on performance in WordPress which is really really amazing and really important for all of us by the way there's also an environmental aspect to this you know if a site is using more resources hello did I just yell it's like the parties last night we'll just yell at each other um so if you know if it's using a lot of resources on every page load then uh then that actually has an environmental impact as well and I think that um the general kind of ethos of Wordpress is > (1:06:15) better for Humanity type of thing so that's another reason we should be taking responsibility for it so um yeah so those platforms have an advantage but I think that there's a lot of promising things that are happening within WordPress and it's becoming a focus which is really good for many reasons and hopefully already we see like some amazing improvements made on the performance side and just one more thing I want to mention is backwards compatibility also pros and cons to that but like when you're still supporting I don't know > (1:06:40) we're a PHP 5.3 or something like that then obviously it's gonna have performance issues and we might want to as a community say well maybe we want to you know move away from that to a certain extent yeah so as uh they mentioned that WordPress is a big open source project and everything has to move taking uh inter Community into consideration I think the webpage we wanted to make it by default and that is a little in a lot of discussion in that the amount of energy we put in the discussion whether to make it default or not in that amount > (1:07:17) of effort Squarespace weeks and all those appropriate platform just end up doing it and making it like releasing those changes likewise even if you make it default or bring other changes we rely on hosting companies user choose and for example all these property platforms are built in CDN WordPress being self-hosted you download you host it and where you're hosting it whether they provide CDN or not so there are a lot of variables like right from the decision making to the hosting companies the consultant agency you hire their > (1:07:52) technical capability if you are hiring a SEO marketing agency who specialize in that and asking them to give better recommendation for performance that also goes photos if they don't know something how can they make good recommendation about that so there's a lot of variables and then with like this 43 percent of the webs market share uh anything we do we have to be mindful of not breaking because when we make mistakes uh a lot many sides break yeah I'll just add something um regarding like some of these other > (1:08:27) products as well is of course now uh you know with Gutenberg and and some of the projects on improving the content creation um and removing some of the friction and making it better it's very important I think for WordPress site owners to be able to create content in a better way and and more appealing content but once the site is published you know at the end of the day it's about succeeding on the web whatever the site owner's goal is whether it's selling stuff and things like this and then user experience is > (1:08:58) really important at this point and I think some of these other cms's have understood that because they have taken some case studies and they understand that you know with if the site is you know that much faster their own customers will actually succeed on the web and that's a really an important argument for other competitors and it's actually a feature from my perspective right and so this is something that I think that we should all as a community try to do more is tie user experience improvements back to return on > (1:09:33) investment and business goals if we want to succeed on the web it is not only about like adding features and stuff like this it's also about delightful experience for the people consuming the content across the world not only in the US not only in Europe but everywhere right and I think that's a key key thing to keep in mind and for that specifically some of the other sms's have you know taken this specific Topic at heart and we've seen do that really like promoting this like we are offering > (1:10:03) a platform that's going to make you succeed because it's more performance and stuff like this yeah that's a really good point yeah I think that's a really good point you know tying the business returns to Performance is also helps decision makers decide to invest in performance and also thank you Miriam for bringing up sustainability at contributor day uh yesterday we uh formed the official sustainability group in WordPress it's pretty exciting and sustainability is definitely tied to Performance but > (1:10:33) they're not a one-to-one it's not always exactly the same thing but I think it's an important thing to bring up um because it motivates people it's it's something that people already really value and again can help make the right decision um back to my questions so when you're when you're building your site or service or product there's often a trade-off between adding features in and performance how do you think about that how do you find that balance between the two anyone who wants to go > (1:11:04) well I guess I just spoke a little bit about this like I you know I had this forever debates with many people is performance feature I feel that it is in many way and I'll keep it really short but I think that it's it's about finding the right balance right you have to offer the the right capabilities for whatever your goal is for your website but without forgetting user experience you know if the site if your users are not even seeing your features because you know they're dropping up before then it's > (1:11:33) probably another good thing and maybe you know a good way to do that is just try to analyzing the drop-off point of your users you know like what and maybe do some a b testing as well it's like okay if I had this feature obviously it may affect my performance by this much is it really valuable like is it translating to anything that's useful for the users and that's probably the way to find the right balance and like like I said you know if uh if you have some fancy interaction and you see this is the time where all your users are > (1:12:02) dropping off is probably a feature you should remove um so having built a product for the last few years um basically when you're when you're building a product and planning it uh everything that you're going to implement you need to consider multiple aspects to it not just what it does but what it might impact and what it might not do and um so performance is one is actually just one of those things meaning like when we Implement something we have to consider security we have to consider user experience we have to consider you > (1:12:35) know does this um detract from that so from my perspective performance should definitely be part of that and as a product developer if your product is is starting to be slow for your users they're not going to care how amazing your features are seriously I mean if any of you not if any of you you all use products and if it starts to feel slow and sluggish you're going to lose patience I was just using a platform for something recently I won't say what it was because I don't want to you know bad > (1:13:03) mouth it and it's not from the WordPress space I had to use it every day I think it was probably targeted towards users in the US so maybe there it was fast but I'm in Israel and it was so slow that I probably would never use it again like and that's that's just an example so you I in my opinion always consider performance on every part of your product whether it's the WordPress site or if you're like a hosting company or have some kind of platform around it also your dashboard you need to make > (1:13:27) sure that people are getting this kind of Snappy experience because no none of us have patience and we all have other things we want to do rather than wait five seconds for something to happen so I think performance should always be part of the checks okay we're implementing this what will it do to Performance will it make it worse will it make it better we'll say the same super valuable for your user experience and in the end user experience is what it's all about and what will keep your product sticky > (1:13:54) so as agency when we're building new features it's very easy to get the performance right for us like definitely require some budget uh some efforts the trouble starts when the feature involves some integrating something like header bidding or a third party analytics tracking some kind of service which either puts blocking JavaScript or some way affects the performance and then there's no way you can make it better like without getting in touch with the third party and that's where uh a lot of > (1:14:25) friction happens like uh so the thing is that the client or the site owner wants uh better core Wi-Fi vital better score all those things but it gets tough to tell them that make them understand that this is the site is combination of everything that loads on the page including third parties and if anybody has a blocking JavaScript or something like that that is something we need get to get them on board to fix it and that's where it uh it gets stuff like even if they have budget even if they have desire to make things fast > (1:14:58) um we just end up being dependent on the third parties like sometimes we just move um some of the JavaScript to worker thread so the main thread doesn't block but it's not always possible to do that without breaking the for the very first reason they added that JavaScript in the page yeah I'll just add something very quickly that may be useful for these audience especially those who are building sites for clients I feel sometimes there's this kind of friction between developer or the agency and the client you know > (1:15:28) the client pushing for more features and the developer pushing for like more uh better performance and it goes back to what I was saying about analyzing the cost of features and I think that you know demonstrating to customers that a specific feature is actually hurting their goals for example you know adding some fancy things on the product page reducing the the actual sales or checkout arrays is a great great way to actually inform your clients like okay you want this fancy feature but it's actually making you lose this amount of > (1:16:03) money so with a B testing it's kind of or two more questions here just are going to wrap up um I'm going to ask uh let's see optimization plugins are very popular in the WordPress space they often add features and optimize kind of after the site has been built I see them somewhat as a Band-Aid to Performance problems that maybe you've already built into your site how do you think about that is is that a is that a good thing should should more features that are landing in optimization plugins be in core and or > (1:16:33) is it is it okay that we have this system of optimization plugins what's your take on that anyone yeah we'll go um I think that they are definitely critical and will remain to be critical there's a lot more that we can do in core um but you know I we there's a huge difference between optimization on opt-in and optimization by default and this is only so much we can do in WordPress core we can be maybe a bit more opinionated but not to the extent that plugin can be and it also comes to integrating with external apis being > (1:17:08) WordPress being distributed there is no Central really service that we can connect to and yeah and so this really is plug-in territory and for for a good reason so you know I I definitely think that there's a lot more that we can do in core but I do feel that these plugins are in a really good place to offer more opinionated bleeding edge feature features enabled by default yeah so to add to that like um so as there is some part which is plugin territory I feel like um the WordPress itself run as a part of > (1:17:44) like lamb stack or limb stack and there are things that shouldn't be the WordPress edited also like for example um if you can add like a full page cache using nginx or something like radius or memcache you should try that uh like if you have you can have my MySQL Query caching or PHP op caching so there are multiple levels or layers where you can optimize performance and once you do that then leave the remaining things to the WordPress but um so so I personally try to suggest that if you can move uh things like move performance related > (1:18:22) optimization at earlier level like before things reaches WordPress um that's even better um I just like to add so I think that um one of the great things about WordPress is that every site is super unique right like you know no two sites are going to be the same they're kind of like snowflakes and so to try to have in core optimization that applies to all of those snowflakes I don't know if that's ever going to be achievable um so I think the plugins will continue to serve a role as well um I'm just gonna come back to AI but > (1:18:53) potentially at some point in the WordPress admin it could say something to the user like be like an assistant like hey you know maybe instead of that plug-in which has these resource issues use that one or maybe you know you have this plugin installed click this setting and it will optimize your site like maybe at some point the user will get some kind of assistance from from AI but uh because of the snowflake situation I think the plugins will continue to server all cool are we at times we have one time for one > (1:19:24) more question one more question okay I'm gonna do one more question and then we'll wrap up here so this is actually this is gonna this is the question that I didn't give you guys ahead of time um so this is but it's it's easy so going Beyond uh performance what is your dream or vision from for WordPress we're at the 20-year birthday today or right now imagine we're 10 years from now and WordPress is celebrating its 30th birthday what what does WordPress look like to you um what is it doing > (1:19:52) so um I've been in the WordPress space for about 15 years and um I brought my daughter Sarah to this conference the first time I brought one of my kids and she's 19. and it's been really interesting hearing her perspective as a young person as opposed to me an old timer and also when you're in the industry for a long time you start to like not see things you know um from a fresh perspective and um what I think I would love to see is a situation where WordPress becomes appealing to younger people she's been > (1:20:25) actually giving really good ideas um to me like how do young people get influence in terms of what they use what products they use so we don't do this she's like why do I why do I know about Wix um you know why do I know about webflow but I never hear about WordPress this she's like this is like a whole big world here and like in my day-to-day life it's not something that ever comes across my radar so you know she threw out like Tick Tock influencers whatever I don't know if we're going that > (1:20:50) direction so there's but and if we can but I think we need more exposure to the younger generation to get them in the door to start using it from one one side and then the other side is they are used to a certain type of user experience with the apps that they use on Instagram you click a button you have something online and you can create amazing media whatever and it would you know that's the user experience that the younger generation expects and rightfully so they don't want to think about servers > (1:21:16) or versions or upgrades or whatever and I don't know how but in 10 years time maybe we can get to a situation where uh that's kind of an experience that people can also get with WordPress so uh like we have put a lot of effort on Gutenberg I think a big amount of effort of that scale can go to Media management where so like image formats and optimizes in one part but um so so today like a lot of content creation especially collaborative happens outside WordPress like we build we make like copy editing in Google doc then image > (1:21:59) editing some in some other tools uh then video video editing for leaving feedback for videos so a lot of content creation uh happens uh outside WP admin probably that in coming years will and should move to the wp admin uh and I think performance will play Big role like many people use this different tools because um they have some performance trade-offs uh and also some feature trade-off so I think that's a big opportunity for WordPress to to try to be that content of where like you take pictures and by > (1:22:36) default you upload it on WordPress like media library and later on you decide when you go back your home or these three pictures I want to add to my blog post but rest of also I can keep in my media library so that your your like all the things about you your private notes your content so the wp admin can be your home on the internet this question wasn't written but I have many dreams but I'll keep it really short and uh um you know one that I think is really important and that I hope we get to it's > (1:23:11) not actually performance related but it's the onboarding flow to Wordpress and we've seen many hosting and plugins and stuff uh stuff like this trying to address this problem but related to what you were saying about younger generation and bringing people to Wordpress you know my dream is just that as a user you can easily capture what is your goal on the web uh you know why do you choose the web of other platforms and really to have your website you know created with the necessary tools and set up that you > (1:23:40) need to have a good starting point you know and I would love to see that by default you know in core and so that would be a Little Dream like hey I want to you know um sell something and in three clicks you are able to add your products you know so that's my dream thank you thank you so much to the panel please give them a very very big hand many interesting points came up but before I say anything anybody who has questions please there's two microphones uh halfway up the stairs or down depending where you're coming from so if > (1:24:24) anyone would like to ask a question to the panel please get to the microphone and get asking in the meantime just gonna say I'm delighted that we that certain topics came up such as sustainability and user experience as a designer which is also connected to accessibility of course because that means that we include everyone when the user experience is great and also something else but we were that I will we'll mention in a minute because we've got questions have we yes please uh hello so Matthew here uh you talk a > (1:25:13) lot about weeks and other acid Solutions but uh I think what we have to to work in with WordPress is uh the other version of State solution that goes like maybe well strappy is another solution kind of a little different but they there are a lot of other cms's like ghosts that does the same thing uh with maybe less plugins but more GS related and I think it's where is the performance and if we want to to to do good thing maybe WordPress has to go there a little well GS JavaScript CMS and uh so but can I can I answer well I so > (1:26:00) um there's a reason that WordPress continues to have larger higher market share I think than those platforms and that's because in the end the content management experience is so like straight streamlined and just powerful in WordPress and so flexible but it just I I don't know if you're aware but there is the rest API um in WordPress so people can build a headless decoupled implementation of Wordpress use a react front end or whatever they want to use although in my opinion I don't know why anyone would use react > (1:26:30) for front-end for a website really just don't like sometimes it's developers making decisions because it's cool and shiny but don't let your developers make decisions because things are cool and shiny I'm just saying anyways but you can if you want to because we have the rest API so WordPress can give you that type of experience if that's what you want and that's the beauty WordPress it's very flexible you can use the standard version it can be decoupled it can be static with stratic you got it > (1:26:55) all I think you should also be answering these questions you no longer the interviewer now you can also yeah I think we have a question on the right hi thank you for the discussion um I wanted to ask about WP admin which is a massive performance Wild Wild West at the moment that nobody seems to care about every screen loads about 160 resources of JavaScript and CSS no regard to context what do you guys think about that as a user experience problem for the WordPress platform because admins are people too thank you > (1:27:46) foreign yeah it is definitely a problem and you know the way I personally look at it is we have many challenges and um which one do we pick first right and um you know there's a lot of investment that's going into improving the content creation on on WP admin it's true that from a performance perspective it hasn't been that much of a priority although it should always be taken into consideration but you know like like I mentioned earlier on I think performance caring about performance is fairly new at the level that we are at > (1:28:23) now and it is true that for now the priority has been about trying to make WordPress websites in the front end so for the consumers uh better and not so much in the wp admin although there has been some improvement in WP admin as well this is not to say that it shouldn't be done I think it's just a matter of like priorities and how many resources or people and contributors um Can can work on this so so not so much about saying like we shouldn't it's more like when and you know against other priorities > (1:28:57) um so this actually just came up I was looking for Benchmark data comparing the wp admin performance because the focus around performance tends to be on the front end because in the end we want our websites to succeed and the success has a lot to or mostly to do with how people experience the website when they visit it so most of the focus tends to go towards how the front-end experience is in terms of performance but if the back end is slow then the user experience is bad and eventually that's going to > (1:29:24) impact also how and if people even use WordPress I was not able to get any benchmarking data because again it doesn't like it's not a focus so I think that's a really good question and it's a good topic to bring up in terms of awareness even that it would be good to give some attention because it does create a poor user experience and in the end like I said earlier that's what creates a sticky product or or just doesn't we have one more question I think yeah hi can you hear me okay so I I actually the conversation > (1:29:57) came up with uh like uh the difference between weeks and everything so for me as a user I believe that uh Wix and all other platforms they are actually really easy to use because like there are not much uh like plugins and uh like a lot of other stuff so in in WordPress although it's good that we have like multiple themes and multiple uh options but the main problem uh like which I have seen with people facing is that like if they are for example working with the Elementor so and they will move to maybe Gutenberg or some other uh you > (1:30:34) know uh platform sorry or some other plugin uh editor so they will actually uh they have to learn it from the start so don't you think there is uh like a gap in that one like maybe we need to uh strategize it so that like uh most people who are using it uh so that not only developers can use it some lame uh people like normal people can also use that so yeah that's my question thank you I think it comes back to what we were saying about the like the user experience maybe the younger generation um it uh Terry described like one click > (1:31:14) and I've got a site that does X um it's maybe what WordPress needs is like this kind of very simple straightforward like experience that everyone can get out of the gate and then if they want something more complex then they can do it themselves but it's just I'm just picturing even like almost like Instagram not exactly but something that's just like this is what it is you can't do much to it you can manage your content here get it live um you know add media ad video add whatever you want and and that's it so I > (1:31:45) I think there is a use case for that type of very very simple almost like limited uh user experience in WordPress because like you said it can be very confusing when people see the admin for the first time I mean I think it's just like they don't even know where to look first and then they're like in the settings section there's like what what is a permalink who uses permalink in everyday language right like you know and we're so used to it so I think it's a good point that the fragmentation problem is > (1:32:14) definitely a problem and right now it is a problem that the burden is definitely put on the site owner so when someone creates a site it's overwhelming the amount of plugins and things like this and it's what makes WordPress beautiful is it's very very capable um there's a ton of extensions but it's also what puts the burden on new users and people who are not really used to work with WordPress and and so it ties back to what I was saying about better onboarding you know how can we you know > (1:32:42) remove this burden from the site owners while keeping in mind that you know there's an entire ecosystem around WordPress like all of you plugin developers and stuff like this also you know we we can't just say like use this these 10 plugins right we need to keep in consideration that everyone needs to have a chance to submit the plugin and offer extendability and so how do we make it easier for the site owners while still you know being fair and to all plug-in developers it's it's a difficult challenge to address but I > (1:33:14) do think that there's a lot more we can do maybe you know this is also the thing that AI could help with like saying like hey you know these type of sites with similar goals are using this type of plugins and there's definitely a lot more guidance we can do yeah I think we've got time for one last question may I ask one hello uh my name is boyan I wanted to talk about images we all know that images are a very important factor behind performance not just for WordPress but for the web as a whole and at the moment we are at the point in > (1:33:52) time where we're sort of deciding the Next Generation image formats that we're going to use to replace the Legacy formats that have we have been using for a long time I know Adam has been driving the efforts of including Next Generation image formats in WordPress core so thank you for doing that I wanted to ask you about jpeg Excel specifically it has been a bit of a controversial format as of late um if you all don't know the story basically Google decided to drop that format from chrome late last year which was > (1:34:46) met by the community with a bit of controversy one of the reasons that were cited was lack of Interest by the community uh although there have been many companies that have supported jpeg XL and the reason that I'm mentioning it now is that just earlier this week there has been another major development where Apple um indicated support for jpeg XL is coming in Safari 17 and all of their operating systems as well that announcement another recent announcement was Edge announcing support for aviff um I will just a little caveat that > (1:35:26) Chrome actually never had full support for jpeg XL it was hidden behind like a a flag so it wasn't actually part of chrome it's it's a it's a Nuance there but there was a lot of controversy about it being dropped I think part of the discussion is around in terms of support for on the web is around whether the advantages of jpeg XL over avif are significant enough to make it a viable additional format to support there is sort of a limit to how many different formats browsers can support there is > (1:35:59) some cost to doing that and the other thing about these formats that's very interesting is that they're not static like the avif and and jpeg XL algorithms keep improving so when you look at studies to try to see to compare them it's it's difficult to look at them because you really have to look at the very current implementations and also there's a lot of nuance about what size image is it you know what are you using it on the web you know jpeg Excel has some features that are not available in other formats but to those > (1:36:30) really help us in on the web um I will say that that you know the recent decision by Safari was kind of a surprise I think and it might change how things progress there are some really cool things about jpeg XL that other formats don't support but I I'm not 100 sure that they're valuable to us as especially in WordPress given that the way we generate images is in PHP um at least right now and there's no support for jpg XL and PHP with avif you have to get up to I think PHP 8. > (1:37:04) 1 to get the support but at least we're moving in that direction so I think you know ultimately and and we saw with webp it was very we did not adopt that as the default because there's the other issue of besides can you see it on the web is like what happens when you download the image to your computer and then you try to use it somewhere else so this is the challenge that all modern formats face so right now I'm a big fan of webp because I think it buys us a lot of the improvements maybe not quite as much as > (1:37:31) Aviv and jpg XL but it's also broadly compatible almost everywhere not you'll never catch up to the Legacy formats but it is quite quite good in terms of compatibility so I'm creeping in to interrupt because I know that Adam you could carry on for another you know all day long talking about this but you'll be around won't you so and also I recommend to check out on WordPress TV work in Bangkok where there's a talk by Adam on on images and also very interestingly a talk by Alberto Medina > (1:38:05) who I believe is your colleague Google is isn't he about exactly how do we turn WordPress into something that is as easy to use for younger Generations as Instagram and Tick Tock and all the rest of it so I really recommend that you do that thank you very much to alpano please give them the biggest hand ever thank you thank you very much I don't have I don't have hands left 3s thank you yes yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you before you leave please sorry can I have my sheets again I have a few > (1:38:57) announcements don't let me react I know uh so now I'm putting my glasses back on so first of all there's the first WP connect session at 11 30 at the trianti balcony which is with uh Miriam again and it's on how to pitch your ideas to someone company client sponsor so this is a really helpful session go to it and then this is really important is the game the first question of the day you can't miss this one so the rules are just in case you missed the opening remarks that every attendees > (1:39:34) that's each one of you you have a set of poor four postcards in your swag bag so if you don't have the swag bag go get it and you need to mingle Network meet new people and trade your cards so that will help you meet new people and you will get the other four four postcards from the community Booth after you respond to this question is WordPress older than Facebook and Twitter is that is it true or false this is your first question okay you can go now I mean you've all gone already but that's right > (1:40:33) okay but they did for us yeah I don't know that much because uh this is kind of one of the first times when I go on a holiday um so when I'm at events and when I'm at work I'm like go go go go go you know when I'm with uh when I'm on a holiday [Music] [Music] > (1:42:06) foreign [Music] [Music] a year and okay > (1:45:06) yeah I want to hear I played the violin for 10 years but then I am a performer I love to dance and I still dance but that's awesome I miss music sometimes I get that feeling as you would know that you play guitar and you're feeling your fingers and you're like I crave it yes you're still using it yeah yeah but that's one of those things that even if you if you don't get to pay for for a little while um you just pick it back up and uh yeah yeah it's still there I love learning this one of my favorite parts of > (1:45:49) Wordpress is that we're so diverse like we all love and come together because of Wordpress the software but then we all have other lives whether we're parents whether we're musicians whether we're football soccer players running agencies and I see that a lot in space isn't it so interesting how it > (1:47:30) you know what I mean but uh second Talk of the morning on track one in track one and I am so happy to have the opportunity to present the next speaker she is very special this woman has so many achievements she's this > (1:48:34) Chief marketing officer at wpdeveloper.com which Powers 5 million WordPress websites that is a lot of Wordpress websites uh afsana is the community Deputy for wordpress.org and she's a key organizer for Work Camp Asia 2023 for which I am so grateful because it was a wonderful work camp and she also was an organizer at work and Bureau 2022 and welcome back at 2019. > (1:49:12) so she has an incredible track record in the community as well as in her industry I am very very much looking forward to her talk because afsana is joining us all the way from Bangladesh give her the warmest welcome please here is afsana Dia hi thank you good morning welcome Europe how are you guys doing so I assume you guys are not sleepy I was sleepy so I grabbed the coffee to overcome my jet lag I flew around 14 hours so yeah today we are going to talk about changing landscape of Wordpress marketing how we used to Market our WordPress product and how we are doing > (1:50:15) it now so we are going to discuss that this is afsana I'm the CMO at WP developer WP developer is a WordPress Product Company which is powering up around 5 million user for using their WordPress plugin so before I before I start the session I would like to talk about my WordPress Journey a bit so for me I started uh using Wordpress I started using Wordpress back in 2009 when I was in high school so I started using Wordpress for a Blog I didn't know about the ecosystem I didn't know about the other plugins I didn't > (1:51:08) know about the anything else right and then after a while I tried to make my own uh website for using Wordpress I I tried to make a home base that's back in 2012 so is there anyone who used WordPress back in 2012 I I see a few hands so if you remember there was no base Builder back in that time there was no Gutenberg there was nothing like this at that time so the focus was theme you had to pick a theme and then you build your website with a lot of customization so at that time I don't even remember which team I used > (1:52:05) after that I finished my undergrad back in 2016. I did my undergrad in uh business administration I had dual major in um I had dual major in marketing and E-Business so when I finished my undergrad I joined uh WordPress Product Company I got involved in the WordPress product at that time I reform my personal website since I am no code so for me it was hard to make the website right that back in 2012 and back in 2016 as well uh in 2016 uh there was base Builder so there was Divi already popular Elementary was starting at that point > (1:53:03) but if you remember there was no such customization like this at that time so I still had the struggle then I started working with WordPress Product Company I worked with a Product Company which was doing great uh accidentally how come a company can do great accidentally because they didn't know what's working and what's not so I tried to explore WordPress marketing I tried to do multiple things some of the things work and I got some good Roi from my marketing initiatives move forward to 2018 I joined WP > (1:53:57) developer at their starting point at that time we had only few uh 1000 users for our one plugin in 2019 we got our fast 1000 user for essential add-ons uh in 2019 I also got involved with other uh WordPress Community we had our first WordPress Dhaka in Bangladesh I got involved in make WordPress and then move forward to kovid all of the other pandemic stuffs and struggles and Technology out there Gutenberg rest API react uh today right now we have 5 million users for WP developer with all of our products so that's kind of achievement > (1:55:01) um so the things I have done for WP developer we have done for WP developer some of the thing works or maybe a lot of thing works the thing is that I have been in WordPress ecosystem for last eight years doing WordPress marketing moving with the community I know what is going on and what we did and what uh not so I would like to talk about my experience I'd like to share some insights before that how many of you are marketer here can you raise your hand I see few hands how many of you are WordPress developer > (1:55:56) oh thanks to you because for attending my session and how many of you are WordPress business owner or product owner interestingly that's the lowest amount of people raise hand but thank you so much today we are going to I am going to request everyone uh to don't sell WordPress plugin like it's 2016 because uh why we are talking about that because if they are if there was something that was working great that was great uh probably worked back in 2018 2016 but that's not going to work now and if you are keep doing that you are > (1:56:47) basically pissing your users off you are making your user frustrated with the same things that you keep doing for years the world has changed uh if you look at the CMS WordPress has grown so much over the time so is the Shopify weeks and other other Solutions so if if you look at those platform they have doing uh they are doing so so many things and for WordPress uh in 2016 or 2018 there was very few uh WordPress Product Company there was a very few serious product business but right now if you look there are many > (1:57:37) so if they find a solution which is better than yours if they find a solution that is more powerful than yours that would be the better thing they will go for right so previously people used to come to the customer support in your website they used a lot of time with pre-sale conversation with the support group and then made the purchase decision but right now this is the data from recent time there's only five percent customers who use who come to the website to talk with the support trip before making purchase decision but interestingly > (1:58:30) there are 27 people who actually spent more time on self-research before buying your WordPress plugin more interestingly there are 77 people who actually prefer who thinks that the buying process is complicated uh purchase journey is complicated for a software product so talking about that things have changed so far if you look at the scenario what happened previously uh if you are a business owner or if you are a end user you own the company you would look for the solution that you need then you would request for > (1:59:20) a product demo but right now uh the end user could be the team member of the company who are using your product so the team member will activate the free trial they will add team more team member and then then team member will actually fall in love with your product they will manage the higher authority to get this product for them previously it was done by the product owner or the company owners so why this happened there are some challenges what are the challenges we are facing so far I will talk a little bit about the > (2:00:09) challenges the first thing is technological advancement uh think about the root Gutenberg react or rest app API it has changed the way people used to think and perceive about WordPress ecosystem so there are so many new technology there are new languages that we need to adapt for our company I can give one one short example for our company a WP developer Wayne Gutenberg was getting available back in 2018-19 we tried to explore Gutenberg for our product so we were trying to look for react developer we are based in Dhaka > (2:01:04) Bangladesh so in Bangladesh the WordPress Community is very popular there are big large number of people active in WordPress community so we look for react developer and interestingly there was no one so what we had to do is like we tried to make our in-house team to learn about react we arranged our in-house react course and right now we have a lot of react developer in our team so that's one problem we had to solve in a way but I know a lot of frames of mine who are struggling for the take in recent years which is changing the way > (2:01:52) they used to Market their product and another uh big changes is the behavior of web Creator if you remember previously we used to pick a team and make the website but right now since there are a lot of Base Builders like Elementor DP Beaver Builder and there is Gutenberg which is all alone very much ready to make the website so right now previously the same web Creator the way they used to think they are their mindset has been changed so they try to find a solution which is more relevant so previously there was very few WordPress > (2:02:53) plugin there was very few WordPress theme but right now there are around 60 000 WordPress free plugin in the repository which means you have 60 000 WordPress plugin ready for your next website as well as there are also uh hundred or thousand of individual sellers who are selling from their own website or probably a Marketplace so you have ready solution and WordPress infectious infrastructure also very much ready for the customization without more effort so the attention span of the customers that's very limited > (2:03:44) another things that manipulate the landscape of marketing is uh the race and fall of social media marketing so do you remember about Clubhouse have anyone use Clubhouse two years back there was a whole hyped about Clubhouse it was a invitation only platform so the invitation was also limited for the user who are using the platform so it feels like Superior if you can get a invitation to clubhouse it seems like Clubhouse is going to be the next big thing but where is Clubhouse now are any of you using it now no I don't see any hand > (2:04:39) so yes uh there are many changes over the social platform because that's one of the major thing we use for marketing right now there are few other other social platforms like Tick Tock and other stuffs which could be very interesting for some of the users some of the products but for most of the products probably it's not and then we also have uh another big problem about paid media marketing if you know I can remember back in 2018 when we were trying pay that there was very few uh competitors so the ad cost was very low > (2:05:30) uh Because unless a company is very serious about WordPress products they wouldn't use the paid ads but look at this now uh if you search about WordPress probably on Fast Pace of Google search you will see Hub piece of ads for different kind of products meaning there are a lot of competition in the paid ads which is the reason the cost of ads increase so high and per user acquisition through baders is very expensive and there are another challenges gdpr and privacy concern I I assume by this time everyone is pretty > (2:06:25) much concerned about the gdpr because it can get you sued for 20 million just for one case so that's another thing we need to keep in your in our mind before doing anything and there is another major problem with Google changing their algorithm every now and then so if you are using uh some sort of tools probably it will be easier to manage your ratio on your WordPress website thanks to the WordPress SEO plugins it got easier comparative to five years or ten years ago there is no doubt but when you figure out how to > (2:07:17) rank your landing page on Google before you figure out the whole thing the Google will change their algorithm again it happened to many of you I think so that's another thing Google algorithm is changing so much comparing with the previous time and right now and the SEO become more harder since a lot of people are making a lot of effort to rank on the first place which is not good for you specifically when you are trying to rank higher that's not that makes it harder for your competitor as well right and there is another talent and skills > (2:08:08) gaps in WordPress marketing uh personally when we try to hire the capable and talented people for our marketing team one common challenges is that if there is someone who is who is capable of taking the marketing things well then probably they don't have a take background if they have a take background they don't have marketing skill so you have to actually train people to know and understand that WordPress ecosystem and after all these challenges we need to start selling in a way that our buyer wants to purchase > (2:08:57) so how can we do that one of the thing is you have to understand your user first you have to understand your target audience not the whole WordPress users are your target audience or not that anyone randomly is your target audience you have to be very specific about that you have to analyze your customer Behavior track your user Journey depending on where are your users are coming from where is um they are which page of your website they are actually scrolling which button they are clicking you have to track to > (2:09:39) understand better and make your customer experience bigger for the next and then you have to test your product with the real person most of the time what a lot of Wordpress owners or Plugin developer do they build something they test it themselves and then they release the product and they expect the outcome but it doesn't happen right so if you have built something you need some someone the third party to try your product to understand what it feels like for the end user and if I talk about the team members > (2:10:31) have you ever heard about a person with 10 hands 10 hands mean WordPress developer who build the plugin do the UI do the ux and do the marketing all alone so that's not going to work anymore you need to have your solid team from design team development team testing team marketing name and support team to ensure that your product is ready to meet the users Real Lead so what we can do we need to focus on customers what they want how they want and the experience they are going to get through your product so here comes the plg anyone heard about > (2:11:30) plg so plg is peraculate growth it's a way that you can build your product in a way so it can be used it can sales itself focusing on leveraging the products to drive growth automatically I can give you some examples so you can understand so most of these tools are very well known from slack to Dropbox to figma these are SAS tools but if you can think about the pattern all of this product they need to use by other party for example I can talk about Zoom if you sign up zoom and want to have a video call you need another person so you are > (2:12:30) inviting another person they are signing up for the product so your product needs to in a way that it has to be sells itself and we also have captivity and AI which is another big thing I think we have few sessions about Judge of the AI today I just asked Chad GPT about what they can do for marketing and this is the stuff they suggested so it's not like they can do it uh everything and they will do it better than human but there's still a good way to utilize your team's potential and probably Spain less time on some tasks > (2:13:19) so I have few quick tips for WordPress marketer that I have learned from my own experience for all the products I have been marketing so dig deeper into your competitor editors we do competitor analysis A lot of people actually copied the feature from your competitor but don't don't do that look at the competitors features and websites and they are even customer review to understand what's working well for them what they are not doing well that their customers are complaining so you can actually do bring those things from in your > (2:14:09) products and do NPS and reviews to measure your customer satisfaction I know in WordPress people actually don't use these things much people mostly rely on the WordPress repository reviews or their personal website reviews but if you try to put a email campaign to ask for NPS need promoter scores you can understand if your customers are satisfied with the product or not and again there is a video if if I look back at a few years back there was no much videos in WordPress Eco system but if you search in YouTube > (2:14:59) right now there are 100 videos of each and every topics and there are also webinar and live streaming podcast that people are using for to Market their WordPress product and another tips is that you need to sit up and pick set up your pixel from the start when you launch a product so that you can utilize those visitors when you are ready and then after a while you will try to retarget them for better campaign also make most out of your content marketing publish resourceful content why I say resourceful is because > (2:15:55) for each and every WordPress topic there are like 10 to 50 articles on the same topic so what's the point you have to make your content uh at least that gives some kind of help which others are not providing you also need to keep updating your content so if you have published something back in 2020 which was relevant at that time but it's not relevant anymore so you need to build a you need to keep updating your content and also build guides which can be helpful for your users and also leverage influencer marketing uh if you talk > (2:16:43) about influencer marketing a lot of people think that it's only pay for the uh probably beauty blogs are probably other stuffs but even for WordPress you can actually utilize influencer marketing if you are building a woocommerce plugin we have Bob WB attending what can be wrote if you can onboard Bob to promote your product that would be a great use and sponsor contribute or attend webcam or community events uh you cannot measure the exact outcome from these things but the amount of exposure you will get the amount of > (2:17:33) experience you will gain from these events that's unbeatable so take a stand for a better future through sustainable and ethical marketing uh what I mean is like you need to keep the honesty transparency sustainability and privacy of your user so you can make the marketing space better not clumsy so that you don't make your customer or potential customer trusted about your product so we have few take hours from this session understand your audience will no uh in deep so what they want to do how they want to do and how you can help > (2:18:28) them build a passionate and dynamic team who who really wants to do something with all their passion create a really really good product there is no alternative of that and you need to also add up the technology use tool for better and make most out of it stay updated about the take and the community and whatever is happening around uh make it sustainable and do it ethically thank you thank you so much safsana for a fantastic talk I've I've got so many takeaways from it on top of what you have said and personally I am so > (2:19:24) delighted that you once again said something that is that is so important which is research and test and know exactly what your customers want what your customer wants super interesting now as before if anyone has any questions the microphones are halfway done or up the stairs so please um gather and ask your questions to afsana in the meantime I have well I have more than one actually but the first one is it's a really incredible growth that you showed us of your of WP developer so you went from I mean already a hundred > (2:20:01) thousand users is impressive but then you jumped from that to five million do you think that the pandemic helped or well you were at the Helm of the marketing so what did you do to get to such an amazing result well uh that's a secret very good answer we did actually a lot of things uh from our perspective it's not like uh just a pandemic we were actually growing before the pandemic as well but definitely pandemic held the whole ecosystem as well one of the major thing that I personally feel is very unique > (2:20:46) about my team is that all of them are passionate and we do whatever we do with all their passion and we do it constantly so there are also a lot of things that didn't work but the things that work those are the things that a lot of people probably didn't even try consistency and a great team we have a question please hello thank you so much for the talk um I had a question if you could just get a little bit more specific about how you track the customer Journey there are many tools to to track customers Journey for example if you are > (2:21:35) looking for WordPress have you installed Google tag manager and other stuffs in your website I'm coming at it from a more of a video angle so yeah on the on the back end of things I was just hoping just to get a general idea yeah okay so um Google tag manager and uh also a Google tracking system if those are perfectly set up for your website it will all you will see already few things like which platform which source are your users are coming from your Google dashboard and there are also few other tools which is SAS tools you can use for > (2:22:26) more in-depth understanding I hope I have answered your question thank you very much thank you any other questions let me I'm gonna just check if we have any questions from uh online audience in the meantime I don't think so unless I think we have a question oh yes please yeah I have one question yeah great presentation great numbers to see on the screen so I'm sure this question could be a lot of other people are asking about this question like what's special specifically for WordPress what source > (2:23:09) of Channel you were using to generate those numbers like content marketing social media marketing or maybe Google ads you know I'm sure this is more like test and try thing but yeah yeah definitely based on your experience what you suggest uh actually there are many different platforms we have pride for our company we have around 10 products and we have the we are using different platform for different products so for example um if you have a product which is relevant to end user who roam around in Facebook for > (2:23:56) that product Facebook would work so for some of our product some of the platform work and other didn't but in general if you ask me for WordPress as the best platform is Twitter I think most of you would agree and Google ads also retargeting campaigns worked well for WordPress Facebook and other platform is for very Niche user but right now YouTube is also getting popular YouTube ads I hope that I have answered your questions thank you we still have got time for a couple more questions if anyone wants to to ask but > (2:24:49) in the meantime I have I actually have quite a few but one thing that interests me a lot and already we've only we're only like a couple of hours in and already AI has been mentioned many times and we have a panel coming up and various lightning talks about AI but so you mentioned this as well and in the list that you had earlier about what chat Jeopardy can do for you there was also market research which obviously it can do but how do you feel about actual customer research because that's something that you pointed out as very > (2:25:27) important how do you feel about that can that ever be substituted uh for market research and actual user research so talking to real users can GPT do that yeah yeah so for customer research we did the competitor we do the computer research in depth so we not just the WordPress repository but also for all of the relevant and probably not just full competitor even the partial competitors who are having similar type of product so we try to check whatever they are doing from their website from their social media from their Community > (2:26:19) which which things they are doing and how they are doing we try to see that for users experience we try to talk with our users we try to uh send different kind of customers feedback built a one-to-one relationship with our customers so understand better even we were just talking about this yesterday that if you send a survey people will send you generic answer but how about you connect with those in some community in probably some group or Forum so let's have limited budget so for them probably get started with the content marketing > (2:27:08) share those in Twitter and other platform but more important is uh get connected with your existing user even if they are small in amount I mean if you are connected with your users they are the one who can recommend to other people who might need your product so get started slow but get started at the first fast phase of your product so you can get some visibility from social media that could be Twitter that could be your personal Forum but get connected with your users great thank you very much thank you any more questions anyone > (2:28:01) well afsana this was great thank you so much so interesting and I'm sure that people if you've got more questions that you want to ask afsana you'll be around uh uh holiday and I will be available tomorrow as well actually for WordPress marketing it depends for WordPress marketing any kind of marketing it depends based on your product depending on how your audience are Cesar so if we can talk in details with the background you you have but probably I could help or I could suggest few things for you so > (2:28:44) I'll be available feel free to reach me or even get connected with me in my Twitter is afsana there I would love to have more talk thank you great thank you thank you so much thank you thank you thank you right now uh has are you playing the game before you leave there's a game I at least didn't that uh you need you it's on yours in your swag bag nobody did nobody did nobody did nobody what's going on there's a voice oh she's still oh that's what she says okay sorry I was completely it was like > (2:29:34) what what's going on um yes just reminding you to play the game you can find the cards in your swag bag and the first question that I gave you earlier is um is WordPress older than Facebook or Twitter if you don't have the swag back go get it I don't have it either so I haven't seen the postcards yet so uh it's a very interesting game so next at 11 no sorry at 12 the next panel is AI and WordPress so make sure not to miss it be back here at 12. > (2:30:12) [Applause] foreign foreign > (2:32:01) because [Music] Athens is amazing yes have you been here > (2:33:18) before no first time for sure first time what have you done so far uh we came in on I came with my family uh which I'm super excited about and so we came this last Saturday and we went to the Acropolis and the museum and we just have been taking like the metro to different spots uh went to the National Museum and uh went to the Food Center yesterday and uh it's an amazing City really really great wow you've done everything well not everything we went to the beach um beach is nice jumped in the water > (2:33:49) um was it like cool and crisp how is it I've never been in the Mediterranean yeah yeah I guess it's technically the agency or whatever it's yeah it's amazing it was I was expecting a little bit warmer I'm from California and the Pacific is ice cold all the time so I was expecting just a little bit warmer but once you're in it's like gorgeous absolutely gorgeous yeah I love now I remember seeing your posts and you also celebrated a huge milestone thank you yes celebrated 20 years of marriage this > (2:34:23) week so yeah congratulations yeah we're super excited about it it's literally this week and so we thought you know we have an opportunity to go to Athens and we might as well merge them all together so yeah I love it now I've known you for a while and we used to be sort of neighbors uh you were in California and I'm in Arizona and you made a huge move to Germany yeah how's that been it's been great my wife is German and that's the big reason why we moved so we're closer to her family now > (2:34:53) and [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] um uh > (2:36:12) yes now um what kind of sports do the kids do like versus American like what are like is it all the same like my boy was already really into American soccer football um and so he's still been doing that for sure and my oldest was into volleyball so and they had tons of volleyball in Germany so that German volleyball teams are amazing yeah yeah yeah they're really good so soccer football and um volleyball still happening all the time I myself am a disc golfer not a lot of people not everybody knows what this > (2:37:01) golf is I just got exposed I love it it's also like one of the most accessible Sports because it's just like just go out on a field and throw some discs and get it in the basket together and it's fun and uh but the professionals are crazy they throw like 600 feet long it's crazy so but disc golf is happening growing in Germany right now so yeah I'm excited how often do you get out the course is like an hour away so I really only get out like one once a week at the most um so but they're building a new course > (2:37:32) closer to me about 20 minutes away so I'm excited about that too I love um while you're here are they chilling now because you guys have done a lot yeah my wife is an adventurer so I couldn't stop her from doing things at all like she's taking all the kids and having more sites and whatnot but you know after a while too the kids get tired so absolutely definitely like they take a lot of breaks and get a nice uh coffee or a juice there's lots of really good uh like smoothie juices out here I've > (2:38:05) seen yeah they're really good so they've been doing that will we get to meet them PR [Music] [Music] > (2:40:03) volunteer work is worth it right yep absolutely yeah and it's fun really to just be able to be around here and feel like um I'm helping all these people have a great event yeah um because the kids come home from school at like 1 30. um and I'm often working all the way till like eight or nine o'clock yeah um and so what I try to do is I try to start earlier and like probably like 10 and then I take a break at 1 30 when they come home and I have about an hour with them um and then I do the rest of the day > (2:41:01) um and I can't really avoid it because that late afternoon early evening time is the prime time for meetings yeah um yeah it I made it work yeah and it does work yeah and it's fine um but as my role has been changing slowly I'm probably hoping to reduce my meetings and maybe get my schedule a little bit more into a normal routine yeah we'll see yeah I love that yeah with you and um correlation [Music] people do it though it happens all the time it does I told Adam the other day I can't go to Florida without people > (2:41:48) calling me Adam like he's from Florida um every uh Florida Camp I've been to they're like hey Adam I'm like downtown [Music] I don't remember > (2:43:50) oh yeah cheated security [Music] [Music] yeah in between there so from uh working > (2:45:00) with food plugins and working on better WP security uh I partnered up with Devin Walker in San Diego and we said we want to tackle a really big problem in WordPress um and both of us had a lot of experience building websites for non-profit organizations and we're like every non-profit wants to do online durations and it's always terrible it just is not a great experience so we're like What if we solve the online donations problems uh for WordPress and so we built give WP um and we launched that at San Diego > (2:45:32) 2015 um and um and yeah that has definitely drawn us a ton until we were if WP was acquired by liquid web in uh 2021 two years ago now already um and Dev and I have been doing more and more at uh Stellar WP ever since then so that was a lot of terms and names it makes a lot of sense but um yeah that's what we do so good yay hello > (2:47:12) quite a few people ambling in I'll give you time to settle down in the meantime who's excited about AI good who's nervous about AI anyone nervous yeah anyone sort of ambivalent both excited and nervous so I had my head firmly in the sand for a long time and now I've taken it out but um so today we have a fantastic panel to talk about AI not for the first time in the course of the day it's come up quite a few times already and although I have a good memory I think I'm gonna need this so Shane palman is moderating hello and > (2:48:03) we have Gabriela Gabriela lasta and I'm going to do this because it's easier then Daniel kanchev and Constance Creator and sujay Power so I'll give it to you Shane yes you can yes you can indeed I was told I had to do more people don't hate me uh broke my leg and sitting hurts so uh as a starting point this room is amazing yo like we got to give it up for the great organizing team who put together a phenomenal venue and such a good place like mad props um all right so as a starting point I kind of want to get a sense of where > (2:48:51) we're all at so we can have the right conversation all right so so limber up a little I'm going to ask you some questions I actually want you to move your body uh raise your hand if this is where you're at you've heard a lot of noise about AI but you've never actually used any of it and you're just like I'm here to figure out what's what that's you don't be shy it's okay all right cool what about if you've used like an AI generative chat tool like GPT or Bard periodically here and there like you > (2:49:24) went in you're like where should I go in Greece chat GPT and it said oh you should go to peloponnesia um all right cool what about if you've assisted used in like AI assisted tool in your work maybe co-pilot to help code or image generation all right what if you've actually built AI into your end facing products your work you've created and trained models ah okay we've got a really good spread surprisingly good which means this conversation is going to have to flow at all altitudes uh if you're > (2:49:59) not sure what's going on just like put it in Social and somebody will shout it and we'll we'll roll with that okay so why are we here let's start with that and then and then we'll go into a conversation this is not a theoretical high-flying conversation we're not going to talk about what what we are going to focus on is real and tangible examples of how AI is being used in WordPress today things that we want to happen in AI now soon so that you can walk out of here and go to the next six AI sessions > (2:50:33) and be like cool I want to do this about how do I do it and you can practically and tangibly start to execute the stuff so this this is like a product conversation not a technical conversation we're not going to get into the how we're going to talk about the what and look for Concepts and ideas when we're talking about what AI just a frame because that's actually a real big catch-all term that means lots and lots and lots and lots of things what we're really going to talk about today are generative language models these are > (2:51:06) like services like chat GPT that you can engage with they've captured a ton of data and can parse and create new ideas with it and we'll talk a little bit about specialized models that people are using to execute specific tasks is there any any other sort of things that fall under the AI that no good all right sweet so what we're going to do we're going to go and do some quick intros I've asked each of these folks these folks are here because they have stuff in the wild they've been actively using launching > (2:51:39) executing uh products for consumers for their internal teams using Ai and we just want to talk about them um so from that perspective Mike sujay make the most of it if he goes over two minutes I'm gonna start making weird sounds Force I'm a C1 co-founder we have a bunch of products uh the flagship one is Astra theme which is the most used uh one of the most used now theme in the WordPress repository about two million installations so one of the things people use Astra is for building their website launching > (2:52:24) their website uh we solve the onboarding problem for users where without a product like ours if people are going in a traditional route people have to install the Mr bunch of plugins start with a blank screen and start their website from scratch so uh we help people have the first version of their website ready uh so with AI like our mission is to help people build their website in as little clicks and as little time as possible so that's what we are really focused on we have been working on this for like uh > (2:52:57) past one and a half year uh uh and AI has been you know evolving a lot so we have made multiple iterations of the product uh so yeah it's pretty exciting time I believe and thanks Shan yeah well you've got some actual AI products at a sure Rider yeah and a handful products that you can go and use today and they are powered and facilitated by yeah absolutely yeah I wanted to focus on just one product so oh yeah and that's the biggest one okay but he's got lots of them hello I'm Constance I'm based out of > (2:53:32) Austin Texas and I work for big Commerce so we create e-commerce platforms we create a platform for people to create their websites their stores and I actually am the Physicians manager this is working okay I managed the team that establishes relations with the developer we create all the documentation and we want to create an awesome developer experience so really I'm developer focused and our connection is to Wordpress we offer WordPress plugin and most of the folks I talked with today they oh yeah we know > (2:54:09) Bigcommerce AI for us in the beginning it was a buzzword and as a company we've really been trying to narrow it down because it has huge potential for e-commerce in many different ways that we are trying to explore also for our developer communities we actually just introduced an AI section our Marketplace to enable developers to develop AI applications in addition my company also acquired feed Dynamics through an M A and freedonomics they are pretty much autonomous but they have one important product called feed > (2:54:48) AI that focuses on feed optimization which is a huge thing for product categorization and I'm super excited to be here with everybody just personally love to play around with Code Pilot and all these kind of things and really looking forward to this conversation right hi I'm Shane I wear a number of hats I'm a VP at liquid web I'm president of modern tribe and we do a lot of r d for a number of different brands so from an AI perspective we are going to be launching uh Cadence AI in this weekend next week really > (2:55:28) really really soon uh we've got Brands like learndash that just put out their first AI plugin which creates course outlines we've got one that's about to create quizzes it'll tear through your course and build out and there's an entire framework to allow a lot of our products weeks to leverage it and and move forward so that's coming as well as support and we'll talk about a lot of the others soon hi there my name is Daniel I am director of product development at siteground and at siteground we've been using Ki for > (2:56:00) years now before the boom of AI we do incorporate AI into some of the products that we do and also internally in the company for development for pretty much cutting the costs of many things one of the things that we've been using Ki for quite some time now is actually translating our website in many languages that we sell in different countries and also we do Provide support through the help of AI so that helped us a lot in terms of other things which are not so WordPress specific because we're a web hosting company we do also use AI > (2:56:38) for Content classification when you think of spam email messages that we want to block when you think of spam commands that people get on their websites so that's also something that we're doing right now and of course with the boom of generative AI we are now into that fast lane where we want to help people get started with a website and say Hey I want a website there you go that's the topic and after that easily manage that through the help of AI but we'll cover all those topics later hi can you hear me yeah can you hear me > (2:57:14) now hi I am Gabriela Laster I am a product marketing fine it's not picking her out oh let's try again here sorry sorry about that hi so I am Gabriella Laster I am a product marketing manager at Elementor and in the past few couple of months actually I have been responsible for launching our new AI products so at elementary what we do is we make website building more accessible so we had the drag and drop Builder and I think we're doing something similar with AI so we are making AI accessible within our Builder > (2:57:51) we were actually the first ones I think to introduce AI into a page builder so we've already integrated the ability to generate text you can add a heading to your website you can change the tone you can translate as well to different languages but what I think was also really cool that we added was the ability to generate custom code custom CSS HTML so we've seen people use it to even create their own widgets and what we're trying to do is make that accessible for people who don't necessarily know how to use AI so we are > (2:58:22) integrating it within our product and making it easier for other users we have engineered it also to make it any prompt you make it knows that is up that it is operating within a website so it is already engineered to give you results that are more appropriate for your our website and we're actually going to be launching a new product actually within the week I hope we're integrating AI for image generation as well so we are going to make it easier for users to just describe what they want to create they > (2:58:56) can edit images they can customize images we are thinking of the web Creator so what we're doing is also enabling them to change the aspect ratio enlarge it giving them all the tools they need to create their websites at scale to create content at scale to improve their workflow and we've been doing that for the past couple of months our chief product officer has actually been working on AI for the past year behind the scenes so he's very knowledgeable when it comes to where AI can go in the website building space > (2:59:30) all right so we've got a mix here we've got hosting we've got sass e-commerce businesses we've got WordPress plug-in businesses and and services um there's a lot of place that we're actually seeing AI start to show up and I'm going to travel across the ecosystem um given Gabby's comment why don't we start with themes and website set up that seems to be like one of the most common places we see people going like well one of the biggest challenges in creating a website is the blank page > (3:00:04) now a user shows up and they're like what do I do it's like having a giant bucket of Legos poured in front of you and so AI has this opportunity to start to bridge that Gap and people are approaching it really differently and so I'm I'm curious if you talk about how you're approaching that problem and um and what what's on the road map ahead like what what isn't being done what could be done where where does this actual particular trend of website building go as AI evolves whoever wants do you want my ticket do > (3:00:35) it well I I think we don't really know where it's going because it does change on a daily basis but I think we need to I think it's going to change experiences it's going to change how people interact with websites it's going to change how people consume content how people generate content you started you said by people have it becomes overwhelming to start a website from a blank page you don't have to do that anymore when I started using AI before I learned anything about prompt engineering I > (3:01:03) would ask a question and I would get horrible results but that would even that helped me understand what direction I did want to go in so all of a sudden it became a little less overwhelming it focuses you on what you want to achieve although I I'm going to cheat I'm going to be an attendee and a moderator uh although I would argue that right now we're in this really weird early stage not a critique to Elementor I apologize I think what you guys are doing is awesome um where people are just shoving prompt > (3:01:34) spaces in and then expecting users to figure out how to get the AI to do what it wants which is weird and sort of a half step because the reality is most of us kind of already know what they want you ask any freelancer hey you need to build uh Church site a community site a small Business site the patterns get the information that they don't know specifically it's going to be useful for the side building process then you're gonna cut the time in generating a really nice website for them or it could be as simple as not staring > (3:02:11) at a blank screen when you are trying to design a landing page for your business or a marketing camp and right so it could be as simple as uh you know I mean right now when you have to create a landing page you have to click many buttons find out the exact block that you want or a widget that you want or whatever right of your page building tool so it could be as simple as uh there is a you know button you click a button you tell AI like what kind of landing page that you are building and out of the database or whatever it has > (3:02:39) uh the patterns it has it can put up a really nice landing page with the filler content that you can improve upon and take it ahead rather than studying at a blank screen so we're we're making this assumption at least I was until just recently we're making this assumption that this process starts in WordPress but I don't think we're all that far away from the process you know whether you're actually going to a generative AI I call it an agent or a tool that enacts things for you but I > (3:03:10) mean they're going to be built into Ros real soon they'll be built into our browsers and so being able to be like Bard I need a website for my kids school embargoes all right cool let me gather some quick information for you now let me generate I think one of the interesting challenges we have as an open source community is well what's Bard gonna pick what's chat gbt going to pick like how does it go about through the decision process I mean last night I we were hanging out and I was like huh hey chat > (3:03:42) I need to make a website what should I use and it gave me a huge list of like well you could use WordPress and I was like no no I don't care just pick something and it came out and it's like well then you should just use WordPress which and unexpected and kind of interesting but what I really wonder is how do we continue to build our platforms such that if the decision maker is an AI not a freelancer not a consumer not somebody in this room does the project need to evolve in a particular way that it is a good solution for an AI to > (3:04:20) build a site my stake on it is that those AI agents that you are talking about if they're in the browser or the operating system doesn't really matter when you ask them something and they're connected to part of the internet or know about certain list of apis they will require those apis to be very well structured to have very good documentation so that the AI we will understand what you want and then it will pick WordPress instead of for let's say Drupal or Joomla or Wix because it knows that with that specific > (3:04:53) API a WordPress I can achieve that and I can do it in a way that's gonna fulfill the request of the user so for me that's through really interesting approach of things like how do we shape the apis and documentation so that GPT or Bart or whatever understands that I mean that yeah I totally uh we have to be basic things you want to take mine so we'll have to get to the point where we train our dogs hitting the mute button okay so yeah we have to train our documentation our content to be picked up by Ai and I've seen this a lot > (3:05:53) because we manage a whole developer Center for our platform and it's very actually hard for developers to discover what they need and we can train AI we can train the apis to pick that up and that's how I see it at least in our business when it comes to developer developer experience we have to do exactly what you're saying I mean it's interesting because if you think about when Matt came up you know and we heard him recently simulenweg recently say learn AI deeply my first thought was you know probably > (3:06:27) the most important team in core is about to be the documentation team I was thinking if you want to go and actually have influence they're fundamental to the future of the project yeah yeah all right so so we got site building we've got like awesome future robots are going to spend outsides for us what what else what else is coming to where what house are you using it today what else we got we're using it internally basically to help our support teams both the developer support and also the customer > (3:07:04) support to right now basically get to the right documentation be able to answer support question automate support queries and all that and that makes it very easy and we're planning to also have it built into our support sites into our developer site so that our customers and also our engineers get to the right information more quickly and just really speed up the process and get targeted consumer information so you're uh you're an e-commerce business and when people come ask for support they're probably handing over > (3:07:45) potentially some pretty private or risky stuff money stuff data stuff customer stuff sometimes when you're debugging if you're using AI how are you doing it in a way that doesn't give you like pii or security problems like that's absolutely so first off I'll uh we're making sure that this information does not there is a way actually even to have a plug-in even with chat GPT where you can have it privately and it does not it's not used for any future queries so we're doing that we're also really > (3:08:25) not using it so much for customers directly but for our internal support teams that they have that information and that it does not get outside our internal teams I think that's super important we have to gate the information basically or otherwise you have to make it clear to the customers but make sure no private data is shared it's challenging how many of you oh my gosh how many of you are using it to support to um bolster your support teams either helping them create better answers understand translation like actively > (3:09:09) today how many of you yeah yeah sure so yeah we're working on it cool so are we uh I mean actually to be fair we're using it to consolidate and create a much better way to experience documentation so we've been using a doc spot little plug for Aaron Edwards plug-in which is really really fascinating if you want to try getting your own model and putting your own plug-in customer product documentation in it it'll create a chat bot it's your own system you got to train it but it's a great WordPress project that came out > (3:09:42) a couple of months ago and it is and I quote Big in Japan uh that's where it blew up that's really interesting um what what about on the consumer facing side are any of you like direct interaction yeah so on the consumer facing site where people get uh where people get to go to our support so right now we do have that quick help thing which is inside their user area and when you go there people usually type just to words or DNS problem or cannot log in something like that so what we do there is first of all we give clear indication > (3:10:21) to the user that they can select AI model to answer their question because there could be something written in there which they don't want to share for example so the user has the option to opt out and go for traditional support so what we basically do first we have a small model which tries to match the query of the user to our whole knowledge base and all of our tutorials once we find those matches that we know are super super targeting that question after that we get it as a context and we give it to an in-house model which is > (3:10:56) based on gpt3 and after that we generate a reply which is kind of sort of generated as if by an operator and if the user gives a thumbs up or thumbs down we can train the model so it gets better next time and after that of course they can go to a real human if they don't want to this may be too Technical and we can pause it but how do you train the model because like user thumbs up and thumbs down are complicated it could be like that's a weird answer it could be like I don't like that answer which doesn't > (3:11:28) mean it's wrong it just means it's not what they were hoping for yeah you need to get some more context after that so we tend to get part of that data and after that run surveys so it's not all the terms up or all the terms down like we're gonna contact you additionally but percentage of those we do send them uh surveys so they can fill it out and give more information about why they rank it up or why they did not like the answer so that's how we get more information I think also for those of you who are > (3:11:59) playing with it a lot of them tend to try just a smiley face frowny face thumbs up thumbs down but that's going to give you a fake answer we've been playing with did this answer make sense or you know like get way more targeted so that the answer you're getting is actually helpful as opposed to like well I'm first I came in frustrated and I'm still frustrated which is like that happens sometimes but I think also that's where you have to test it internally because AI doesn't always give you the answers you expect > (3:12:27) it to or right ones or the right ones um it gives you sometimes the very wrong answers in a very convincing way so it's important to to test that to evaluate random samples and make sure that it's giving you the answer that it wants to and if it's not to train it to bring provide a better answer so relying on people's feedback at scale that's great because generally when you're working with larger numbers that will give you a better Insight but also it's very important to review the > (3:13:01) own review the answers occasionally yourself to really make sure that people aren't just filling out some random content just to close the conversation bubble they don't want to deal with it they're lazy they just want out so there's also some manual work involved yeah so one thing that we're experimenting right now with in order to get it to the next level is that we're putting a bot inside of the view that our Support Agency on our end so how would AI reply to that question and how > (3:13:35) I reply so like newbies for example they can get the information from the knowledge base if they're not familiar with the topic or experienced operators they can see that the AI is pretty much talking nonsense so they can Market us okay that's not fine so that's another way to train it internally that's a great idea it's like co-pilot for customer support exactly or you're like well that looks sense um probably the first place that I personally used AI although I mean I'm sure out here almost everybody you just > (3:14:08) probably wouldn't think it was was Google translate and eventually deep ell and some of these others are are any of you I know you mentioned it are any of you leveraging translation as part of creating products as part of interacting and support and and how is that evolving I mean we haven't tried it for the translation because I mean I English is not my first language so I have the first hand experience with the translation so whenever I try to translate something at least for my language I like speak four languages and > (3:14:45) still Google translate itself is not as good with the translations it oftentimes make mistakes so I'm like a bit doubtful about that like what kind of experience my customers would have so for example like you know a simple what is a theme a theme can have like different meanings right like theme in the WordPress concept is a very different and it can mean something else so I'm a little bit conservative on that so I haven't tried AI for the translation but I am like you know very happy to see like how it is > (3:15:12) working for siteground and that makes me or gives me some confidence to try it out for our teams as well talk us through that yeah so we've been using AI for translating our websites which is not a tiny website so we do have a lot of things to translate and in the beginning it was a rough ride I'm not gonna lie like it was generating things that do not sound correct in German or French or Spanish but with time we figure out ways how to improve that so for example when there are many technical terms in tutorials knowledge > (3:15:48) base or even on sales pages and it doesn't do good what we figure out that we can do is we can get the translations from Firefox so for example you can get ton of technical terms translated properly there like SSL certificates encryption yeah and stuff like that and that helped a lot to increase the accuracy of the translations and after that of course we have people that speak Spanish and Italian and German and French we had them give feedback about that so internally it's about not believing that you're gonna get the > (3:16:21) perfect translations but a year from now if you start you're gonna get very good translation how does that work so you're saying you've got like Google translate and then on top of it you feed it through like a small model you built yourselves so we are using Google translate but not the free version of it so we're using the paid version obviously and after that once we generate the pages we do have a small model which is used by our internal people that are translating so they're giving feedback for every string that we > (3:16:49) have in our lingua application and they're changing it so every time you're typing in that field we're sending feedback to that small model and after that we bring up tons of VMS with uh with cards in order to train the model again so it takes time and it takes expertise but we're lucky to have an AI team of four phds so we're not on SMB here yeah yeah so to me where that gets interesting is are you using that as well to power customer conversations and support yeah so right now if we don't have operators > (3:17:25) on shift that speak for example Spanish and we have a Spanish-speaking client because we do Provide support in Spanish they come in there type their support ticket in Spanish we translate it through the models and after that the operator writes in English and we do translate the reply to the client in uh in Spanish the cool thing about it is that at any time in our internal systems you can see the two replies by each other so you can see if the context is right and if the the feeling is right there and what you wanted to convey is > (3:17:56) an idea in the answer was actually done so we do have people after that reviewing some of those so I think I mean when we talk about what sujay sujo said like hey I'm I'm uncomfortable because I worry that it won't have the technical accuracy that I need but if you look at we are so Global and the odds that somebody is providing you've got a support person the odds that they can work in their native language and then whoever is asking for support can also work in their native language and it's > (3:18:26) the same one as pretty low and so most often what I tend to see is two different people who may not be native English speakers attempting to figure out wpcli commands in English between each other and like that's the Target right the target isn't native language it's the Perfection the target is can we get the model to do a better job than two non-native English or two non-native speakers trying to work it out where it's literally more comfortable and more effective for them to work in their > (3:18:54) native language you know if if he can be in in Bulgarian and I can be in Spanish and the two of us can have a functional conversation without worrying about it and if something's weird we could be like okay what is that that's I mean the Staffing implications the comfort and customer success implications are huge yeah by the time people come to to support they have wasted probably a couple of hours to fix something and they want their issue to be fixed they don't want perfect native English speaker on the other end they want the > (3:19:24) issue to be fixed and if it's fixed that's the most important thing for them so that model like do we think that whether it's deep Bell or Google do we think they're going to get there technically or do you think like the WordPress Community needs to make uh you know as part of the documentation translation team can essentially build the linguistical layer we need for translate because WordPress is translated like it's got a huge translation team we're doing a lot is this a gap that is a community we can > (3:19:53) fill and train the model and then every SMB every small plug-in house every small freelancer can have access to a translation tool that actually works better I think that fine-tuning a model similar as Google translate with the already translated core and yeah all the plugins and teams and everything that's going to work out pretty well it could be interesting I don't know how that works yeah I mean it works but it what I'm trying to say is uh the translations were great but it go it takes you to like 90 percent 80 percent > (3:20:29) 85 percent somewhere like that so even we internally translate our products uh so that they are accessible in multiple languages right uh and we try to use the AI to translate them but after that we require a human touch so that we make sure that it is not translated in a very robotic or inaccurate way and as getting smarter and smarter so hopefully like that 80 or 90 percent will go to like 95 or 97 whatever but yeah still like I would say like two percent three percent like some sort of a human touch is uh probably > (3:21:02) going to require so that we verify if the translations are done accurately and in a way that uh they will not rather confuse users rather than solving their problem I tend to agree with you absolutely I used to when I was in college I used to make money translating I like us speak four languages and I could never trust at first machine translation how it works but like for us in e-commerce there's a huge potential as we have the multi Geo multi-regional website multi-language websites you could really use AI to do that job to Transit all the > (3:21:38) product descriptions and everything but of course there will always have to be the human touch of I am hoping though for AI to do things like that you know convert like a pricing model or a shipping model there's more than just translation there's localization right um that to me would be a great thing if we could utilize AI because if you have a store in the US it differs from yeah a store in Germany with anything taxes shipping so on so that would be a cool aspect as well so we haven't we haven't talked about > (3:22:11) media yet so it image video sound I know you just announced that like media Ahoy uh yeah awesome um what are the different ways that you're seeing uh even just image Generation image categorization being used that's that's effective busan's like three armed babies and and weird I think it's gotten a lot better from where it started and it's getting better every single day so you can even if you're trying a tool like mid-journey if you tried it a month ago and you try today the results you're going to get > (3:22:48) are very very different um I see it helping us create more content more variations of content at great speed so if for example I think we spoke about it yesterday I'm not sure it was in one of the conversations for sure where we spoke of you can have an e-commerce website you're not I think you mentioned about the photographer you're not going to need a photographer anymore so that that was your photography yeah yeah but also creating variations I don't need to take a picture of this shirt in five different > (3:23:19) colors I can just instantly create it in five different colors I don't need Photoshop I don't need anyone else to take care of that for me um but in addition to that I think that over time and this isn't I think over time our expectations of content media and images is going to change we are going to expect more extravagant images more extreme images because that that's some of the capabilities that AI produces so over time we're going to expect that and want more of that so I think our styles are > (3:23:47) going to change also over time it's going to take time but I think our expectations and styles will also change that would be pretty sweet I have so many like half-assed photos that if I could just take my photo feed it to Ai and it could be back and be like here's a great product photo of nearly the same thing and now I don't have to worry about copyright infringement and I don't have to worry about is this really my content it's just elevating the quality of what I'm producing uh it can you imagine an > (3:24:18) e-commerce yeah like you sell a shirt like this shirt and you sell it in five colors you don't have to take the pictures anymore I mean so many things also approaching different markets different countries like different kind of product presentations they have different focuses if you could use AI to provide those kind of background images or settings and have basically I was called localized product pictures would be super awesome for websites or we use a lot of banners and everything have that AI honestly > (3:24:52) Banner Generation generation would be so sweet yeah what what about so I on our side we Purdue as an agency our arm we do a lot of work with government we do a lot of work with education we're accessibility is really really important WordPress cares a lot about explosion it puts a huge amount of effort to making sure and and it's an ongoing Journey but we all know that the biggest challenge in accessibility isn't actually WordPress it's convincing the users of Wordpress to fill out alt tags and to have the correct color contrast > (3:25:28) and all the challenges that come to creating great products um you know I think there's a lot of opportunity AI to fill a lot of those gaps that humans aren't interested in spending the time on yeah we were discussing yesterday that when you need to write the altac for an image AI could do that automatically like mid-journey for example most of you have used it to generate images but you can also give it an image and it will describe the image for you so after that you can use that description and fill it > (3:25:58) automatically and that's been around for years it's not something new so in terms of accessibility I think that that's going to be also a revolution because it can give you a checklist of things that you haven't done and proposed let me do those for you automatically do you want to change something here because it knows that they are not pretty much done yeah I mean there's plug-ins out there that are already starting to do this with varying degrees of success I know the yoast team's > (3:26:26) probably working on stuff like this uh I know classif AI from from uh 10 up already does a lot of this type of work and so I think we're getting to the point where there will be Solutions out of the box I just like to see that in core like I don't see why that has to be a third-party solution that feels like some WordPress should do in terms of democratizing and making it really accessible um is there what about I mean I search and personalization like one of my critiques of Wordpress has always been that our search is > (3:27:04) behind lots of other solutions that exist in the world um where where do we go in terms of just making it really easy to find and understand things are you do you have any active projects or work I know we've got stuff well the thing that we've tried with search because our knowledge base and tutorials are based on WordPress and we're pretty much using it as a headless platform as that when you put AI in there it's very difficult to measure and the other thing is that it's kind of slow because we're not just trying to > (3:27:42) give you here is a link of your search like that post we're trying to correlate that information to the user to see if that's the best result and it gets sluggish at this time you know how if you're using right now gpt4 for example it's much slower than 3.5 and I think that if it needs to be done properly it needs to be part of course as you said because if you're just thinking a third-party API for that it's going to be even slower so I don't have the vision to to tell you how it's going to work to be honest > (3:28:16) because it can be obviously part of Wordpress itself but the foundation needs to be late there and I think that those language models the large language models that we are querying right now years from now that will be a commodity like you won't have to go to open AI specifically or Bart there will be so many open source models that you can run on commodity Hardware so on every single server which is running a WordPress website you will have a decent model which can do that for you and we're already seeing that with the release of > (3:28:50) metals lightest model which had to be released slowly but it kind of leaked right now people are innovating super quickly and Building Things on top of it and I think that's going to be the future in a couple of years like you will have a language model running on every single server and it's going to be local for that server it's going to work well for specific tasks I mean that's that's uh like if you think of something like woocommerce or Bigcommerce you know as a shop owner the ability to go in and > (3:29:22) be like hey what are my top selling products and I don't like have to query or find something hard to find and I don't remember what that brought like a natural language experience to get reports surface it right away that would be so awesome that would be amazing I want somebody build that for me oh yeah and then Implement like really act on it too what is the best selling product um do I need to like do inventory management you can use AI for that too just my inventory just my pricing all that that's really something super cool > (3:29:55) I think it gets interesting when you mix that and the first conversation we had around site building yeah yeah so if you can get to the point where you have a co-pilot AI an agent that can look at how your data is performing your shops performing and be like hey here are top three pages let's rejigger those let's run three you know the unit you were talking about the feed Ai and so the conversation that can do multi you know and some of that can do multivariate tests and there's no reason you as a human need to figure these out > (3:30:28) like the if you've got you know like Cadence will have the ability to build Out full Pages for you now and so if you could basically tie that into the take that eye and say hey every period of time look at the performance try something experiment with it see if this has a better result and that result doesn't have to be Financial although obviously that that's an easier thing to measure um so last as a as a wrap-up to respect our time uh We've we've talked about some things that are being built some some > (3:31:01) wishes what are you hoping over the next year that that either people in this room that the community watching online that the community builds either in core or as independent products like what kind of solutions are you looking forward to seeing not go ahead okay thanks um so I think one of the things that's really important is we're having a very in-depth conversation with a lot of you who understand Ai and how it fits into our lives but I think the majority of the population has not adopted it yet so > (3:31:34) I think it's very important to help the community help everyone inside outside adopt AI better so making it more accessible for them making it more of a commodity so that we can become more Innovative as a society but I think and I can't take credit for this this is something our chief product officer said is that currently we're looking at AI to replace functions that we are performing ourselves so we're looking for AI to make our lives easier to improve our workflow but I think the next step is > (3:32:02) understanding what does AI Empower us to do that we could have never done before that we could have never even imagined before and I think that's where things become very very interesting and I would want to see more of that too yeah so we people usually overestimate what we can do for one hour for one year and to understand estimate what we can do for 10 years still waiting for my self-driving car yeah so I have two answers for that question the first one is the professional one obviously we've discussed how AI will > (3:32:35) help the end users build their own websites with just requests like I want the Church website I want the contact form and it just picks it up for you it builds it the next step is actually using an agent to help you run your business like let's give an example with the e-commerce like give me a report of the best selling products that suggests three things that I can do to sell more or give me analysis of something and after that not just that but give it a go and iterates in order to achieve that goal so that's the professional thing > (3:33:08) and my personal wish is that the AI should be able to do my taxes for me and deal with the government because that's a whole of work WordPress is on it brother yeah if it's powered if it's powered by WordPress immediately you get 40 coverage of everyone on Earth so um God you stole my answer uh so I'm gonna skipped you all I think I mean to be really honest for any of you who've worked with business intelligence tools they're painful you know and even like Google analytics like the average person to go in there > (3:33:44) and actually get any insight out of it is really hard it's pages and pages and numbers and queries and not I don't want to that I just want to have a conversation and so like honestly I would love to see our community start to build tools whether it's in the e-commerce space or whether it's in the content space that looks at how my community is engaging looks at my content looks at my stuff and says hey try this or hey we've noticed that you know if you're a plug-in owner uh all your sites that have woocommerce and > (3:34:19) have your plugin at this have these characteristics you might want to put more focus on this part of your product and can create insights that allow you to create better Solutions like that to me would be transformative oh totally agree you took part of my answer yeah with the community for me like there's two like looking in e-commerce at a shop yeah I would love to have that kind of AI that really optimizes my source tells me from the beginning this is what I need does it analyzes improves optimize it maybe even have that automatic > (3:34:51) translation into a different language so I have a store in English Okay half a i launched the same one and you know Spain Greece that would be awesome for communities we work a lot with Community Development Community feedback it is super hard to get the right sentiment get the right data and I so agree power bi not to say anything back but it's uh disabled tool and so it would be super cool just to have a overall analyze the community sentiment the community feedback aggregated and provides recommendations on Improvement on and > (3:35:28) maybe even helps us yeah react to a lot of that and optimize love that the business owner like we use so many Tools in our business it starts with a WordPress website contact form LMS analytics CRM and the list can just go on right so for me it would be awesome if uh there is a just a slack bot or some sort of a AI tool where I could just ask question and get insights for my business right now I have to like open that page visit that website click 10 tabs and open 10 things and find that number right so wouldn't it be awesome > (3:36:08) if I could just say hey how many visitors did I get for my this website in last 24 hours or something like that I mean it's realistically like even just to sit like we were talking about search if there was a native AI interaction with the content in a WordPress look I broke my leg three months ago and I had to go through a whole conversation and charge it just figure out how to navigate that and all the answers I didn't need a human to tell me they were all buried in a h you know in a quarter of a manual it would have been great if > (3:36:38) I could have just gone to a chatbot and I like broke my leg what do I do oh well you're gonna well actually screw it we'll fill out the forms for you don't worry about it you know we'll get you how much PTO do you need doctor says three weeks okay filed for you all good like I think there are opportunities for it to take data that's accessible which we all have in an internal Wiki and act on it as a simple agent internally and make our lives better so with that there are a ton of sessions > (3:37:09) over the next day and a half today and tomorrow uh on on how to leverage air for accessibility for Block building for um go mob them learn experiment get like real creative I think the biggest thing we don't know today is what's actually even possible yet we're we're in just pure Discovery phase within this but uh you're going to get really surprised so that thank you [Applause] just to be on the safe side here we are thank you so much for this incredibly interesting conversation people if people want to ask you > (3:38:08) questions they can grab you in the hallway in the hallway track so here's your uh gifts thank you so much again [Applause] foreign in the meantime before you leave just reminding you that lunch is served from more or less now until two o'clock and it's on three levels so it's on the skullcota's hall which is on level one they trained the balcony on level plus one and also at 2 30 there's another WP connect session which is uh in the trianti balcony and it's about coming back to in-person > (3:39:00) events how the community lived this phase in 2022 and what to expect for 2023 so see you there and remember that the sessions start again at two o'clock bye bye enjoy your lunch North Carolina I mean we've got um yoast here today and > (3:40:11) we're gonna ask him some questions um so I guess the big Topic at the moment that everyone's talking about is AI there is a lot to chat there's a lot of chat yeah um and you'll see a SEO Guru so I guess broadly where what's your have you been taken by surprise of how quickly this has hit us I guess I've been mostly surprised by Google's response to it I it so chat TBT came and suddenly everyone was in panic yeah and it was hilarious to see that um and also a bit frightening in in that > (3:40:49) they really seem to have been caught a bit a bit by surprise yeah um it's interesting I think it it has many many implications of things that we can do with it that are awesome it also has many implications of things that we're gonna do with it that are going to be fairly bad for everyone involved yeah yeah so fake news was a problem already it's not going to get any smaller with this yeah um and I think that that's going to be hard to bustle for Google for for a while because suddenly it's not just fake news > (3:41:26) it's fake everything yeah so recipes uh reviews whatever you want suddenly all becoming well a lot harder to to realize like what's real what's not and I I saw that Google is starting to experiment with generated generated changing the search interface so yeah the top bit's gonna um potentially start to use chat to VP like answers I guess a few questions one is do you view that as a good thing two how do you how do you view that's going to affect content creators and actually three how do you think that will affect > (3:42:02) the SEO business community so I think is the answers are actually all connected because I view that not necessarily as a good thing okay um mostly because these models are not built to generate truth yeah they're built to generate text yeah which is something entirely different and I think that we have we have been so trained to think that what we find on Google is true yeah and that is a very scary thought um and those those large language models just generate the next word I mean they it's it's like what's the most logical > (3:42:46) word is next it's not like what is the right answer to this question yeah um I hope to deal its rate and make it actually good but so far and what we're seeing from the early people that have access there's a lot of nonsense in the results and um well I hope we get rid of that before um it becomes really adopted mainstream then the problem is that once they start generating their text um the question is how do they send traffic back to the websites that they base their answers on and so far the answers that I've seen to > (3:43:25) that question are not very positive so I think it seems little featured Snippets maybe yeah yeah and and some of them have some links Etc but yeah I think overall traffic will go down yeah and uh so Google will become less of a referring Source yeah which is not good for anyone it's certainly not good for sites that rely on that traffic to make money to be able to generate more good content the problem then becomes if if more of those models don't work then there's less new good content to train the AI on > (3:44:01) and it sort of becomes a self-defeating thing yeah and do you think do you think uh Google's business model is going to hold it back from for example the Google search search page has been kind of broken for a while it really I mean in terms of the I see a lot of searches where actually they're almost like the whole page is almost like yeah it feels like it's kind of been broken for a while right the thing is is that broken though I think it's actually working quite well in terms of their business okay but from the from the > (3:44:30) users sort of search intent experience so for a normal user if they get what they want from those paid ads they're perfectly happy right so yeah if Google's succeeded actually giving results that are good and and get paid for it and they're actually doing a quite good job yeah um I don't think they're always doing that yeah uh and I think that if they struggle with that too much then they leave room for competition yeah which I sort of like yeah bing bing was the first to have chat gbteen or interface > (3:45:03) that's also why Google is now trying to push it so hard because suddenly they get beaten yeah and I love that because we've had Google dominance for far too long it's not good for a company to be that dominant that long um I think that will bring improvements I think there's a lot that we could do with AI in all sorts of ways that can help all of us I think we have to realize also that we need to maybe train people and what they can believe and can't believe on the web yeah and and that with that > (3:45:38) it also becomes more important who wrote a piece of content a a generic host about SEO is worth a whole lot less than a post written about SEO by jono Alderson a colleague from yoster in the past the head of SEO there he I mean if he writes something and you want to read that you you know that you're reading his opinion if you're if you're reading a generic piece of content whose opinion is that and and what is it based on and is it actually true so the author becomes more important than that in a way is very good for us > (3:46:16) in the WordPress ecosystem yeah because suddenly blogging becomes a thing again yeah absolutely and so do you have any like discrete advice for Content creators who are starting to leverage AI in terms of the content they're producing like would you say yep go for it or would you say hold off and don't use it or so I think it's a good tool yeah if you make it generate too much text and then you need to check after you fact that's in there so that's a bit hard yeah um because the the things that you won't > (3:46:50) check because they seem so logical will be false yeah I mean the first time I had chat gbt generate a bio for me it said though I was an investor in rank math and while I appreciated that that is a plug-in company as well I certainly did not invest in rank math so it is like confidently wrong a lot yeah and and it is very confident in how it works those things and that me and that means is you have to check everything yeah but at the same time having it help you create summaries could be very worthwhile yeah so do you have a if you > (3:47:28) were going to predict like a year two years out of what this all this all looks like for us what do you have a vision of what that might can you start to piece what that might look like I think that's hard actually it's moving so fast um I think that what we're seeing so far in the general World dude like generic text creation yeah is only a tiny bit of what's to come I if you look at the uh the AI agents space a bit yeah that is super exciting so you can create an agent you can ask it to do something > (3:48:07) like research a topic and it'll come back to you with stuff I think that using stuff like that will become a major driver of of innovation but also of of making people more productive yeah it's already like there's large companies out there that have built their own coding models to make their developers more uh work faster and work better and and you see people saying things like hey 30 to 40 faster more code being committed by the same amount of developers I think that can actually resolve some of our scarcity issues yeah > (3:48:46) so I think there's a lot of good yeah I mean I was watching this um Ted talk about um the Khan Academy and he was talking about the fact that every kid could potentially have their own personalized tutor yeah right so I think there's great things that we will be able to do with it it'll it'll take some time so just a couple of final questions what um this is a negative question uh there's been a lot of catastrophizing around Ai and governments are getting involved in trying to put guard rails so > (3:49:14) do you worry about some of that stuff or do you think that's overblown um I I think the guardrails I need it yeah and I My worry is that governments are not moving fast enough okay um yeah the guardrails are needed we we need to also well train people a bit more in what is this actually yeah and and which things are they doing and which things are they um um which things are they are we telling people that that AI is good for and is not good for yeah and uh so that yeah there's a there's a bit of a a worry there it's interesting because > (3:49:59) it's just hit my kids at school they're just they're um Snapchat have introduced me yeah yeah yeah so suddenly all the kids in all the schools in England now know there's this thing I don't know I I I think that there's already quite a few uh Macbeth uh type reviews and stuff being written by Chad GPT I think uh organizationally it's interesting how school's going to be uh forced to change really quickly and probably won't be able to change that quickly no same with government so > (3:50:27) they're gonna try and stop it which I think is weird because it's not that's not how this works yeah but use it right is is also hard yeah so yeah it's going to be an interesting thing I I'm not necessarily very like thinking that the world is gonna blow but yeah but it I do think it needs guardrails and do you think final question um the big worry for me has always been around this single uh like we're creating like information systems used to be distributed and then we started to centralize them with things like Google > (3:51:00) this this feels like a further consolidation of like we're creating this super brain that we go to for our single source of Truth um but then I kind of start to investigate the fact that we might have different llms that we actually I think we'll end up with lots and lots of different llms yeah and that's actually better than having one big Google yeah um I think we'll I mean if what's one of the things I think should be regulated is like when you work with an llm you need to know what's in it yeah and that > (3:51:32) should be like public knowledge public knowledge yeah and if you know what's in it then you know what you can use it for yeah and I think that that is something that um there's no visibility on that at all at the moment no no right no there's not and I I desperately hope there would that will get laws very quickly they say okay if you're uh if you're a an open AI type company you have to tell us what's in your model yeah yeah and and then some Publishers will start complaining like hey but why are we not getting paid > (3:52:05) for this yeah and that's the discussions we need to have yeah brilliant thank you so much my pleasure great foreign > (4:35:43) thank you amazing > (4:45:54) was it good that was good for all the watching live stream uh audience went crazy when I asked this question just so you know uh so yeah welcome uh for all of you who are like here for the first time uh This is how we do it you know this is the the size and the hey uh this is the size of the the regular uh work in Europe I would say uh so yeah Joker aside so we have in this afternoon session we have uh lightning talks too like two lightning ducks and for you who are not uh who don't know what the lightning > (4:46:29) talks are those like 15 minute sessions uh with no questions but you can reach out to our amazing speakers after catching like in the hallway or outside or whatever so yeah our first first speaker is actually musician and songwriter uh so with his uh band called helica which is now back from sabbatical thank you Dario for uh bringing that one that one in uh he comes from Slovenia and he's going to talk about AI using like translations and stuff but I'm not gonna do it you're gonna explain all it like so a big round > (4:47:03) of applause for Dario [Applause] hello thank you um thanks Milan uh so um let's talk about translating your site WordPress site with AI let's see quickly about me uh that's me an old photo uh I work for undergo systems company uh you probably noticed by our plugin wtml for translating your site and toolset uh as Milan said I live in Slovenia with my family my wife and my daughter Gloria hi Gloria if you're watching and what I do is I lead the content team so everything with writing like announcements uh > (4:47:46) technical documentation um you know every partnership articles everything that's content that's my team and obviously when we talk about Ai and all the hype today this is something that interests me right so um let's start um about AI translations today okay to tell you about what I think about air transactions today I need to go three years back when I was first really really kind of Blown Away by AI translations there's this site I uh often visit it's fubis. > (4:48:25) net I don't know if you heard about it it's about like art photography digital art so I came up upon an article with great photos it's nice but it's in French I don't speak French so Chrome tells me like do you want me to translate this page for you and I said sure and it does and it's just like great it's like talking about art which is not always an easy you know topic not always easy language and it was great and this was three years ago so now I just took this is not the text I saw that day but I just wanted to show > (4:48:58) you so this is in French or as they say It's All Greek to me so you know let me just read you one sentence the first sentence how to recreate in a cinegraphic exhibition generic atmosphere that terrains in the masterpieces of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick pretty nice I don't know if I wrote that in English I would be kind of proud it's nice okay so that's my point that's kind of like that was three years ago that I was blown away and we've gone so far from there and with Chad GPT and everything going on you can only imagine > (4:49:32) where we are today so how does it work I wanted to tell you like all about it but it's really complex and it can get very technical and you could actually have a whole talk about how a translations and AI Works in general maybe even five talks so just very generally um it's it's like neural networks learning from vast amount of language data and finding kind of um statistical probabilities of like what comes next and that's how it works in essence there are tons of articles there so if you you're into this just > (4:50:12) Google it you'll find tons of it but language is complex so um you know it's it's it's hard to predict everything right um so the thing is today for what we usually do like the sites we build at at least in my experience and from my colleagues and friends like AI translations today are great they will cover you completely you know there are exceptions of course like science and medicine and you know law like that's all that kind of has their own like intricacies so there you would probably > (4:50:49) want something human like a human review okay now my opinion is like I can talk to you about how AI translations are great for like whole two days and it doesn't matter unless there's a why okay and you need a why like why would you do it okay so here's me trying to kind of tell you why in my opinion okay the obvious why is like reach a larger audience okay so you know if you translate to you you're from come uh from a country that has like 10 million people maybe you can translate to a bigger order that's 100 million people > (4:51:28) people are proven by like science research that they prefer buying and shelling out cash in their own language okay so it convert conversions and sales are better you get better SEO because now you're not ranking only in like your language or the default language you're ranking in more languages so that's better for you of course and you boost your brand awareness because if you're present in a company sorry in a country that you know you're not translated to your it doesn't make sense like imagine > (4:51:59) here in Greece having like I don't know Microsoft without being translated to Greek it's kind of weird right it wouldn't work at all and of course user experience is better it's it's definitely better most of the people prefer doing stuff in their own native language so it makes sense but in practice okay the why in practice so this is where I live now in Slovenia so Slovenia is a beautiful country that has two million people okay so that's one million less than Athens the whole like City you know so it's it's a > (4:52:35) small country like with with not too many people so how do we reach more people by translation okay so let's add Croatia the I don't know if I mentioned I'm originally for Croatia so I translate my site to Croatian now I'm from 2 to 6 million Hungarian 16 million plus Austria they speak German so I put 25 Millions but actually many more millions of people speak German so it's more and Italy 84 million so we went from 2 million in Slovenia to just neighboring countries to translate to and we can now reach 84 million people > (4:53:14) of course you don't reach them all like like anything else but you have a much larger pool of people much larger audience to you know work with Okay and finally it's not only about uh just translating so uh when you reach to other markets for example I'll stick with my kind of example I'm for Croatia I now live for a long time in Slovenia and I know both countries I have my networks I have my friends you know but even with all of this if I want to expand my company to Croatia from Slovenia if I don't > (4:53:53) translate it to uh Croatian it doesn't make sense it won't work no matter my network no matter my reach and no matter the fact that we used to be in the same country we used to be in Yugoslavia together and our languages are both Slavic similar but also pretty different okay and another part of this why that I would like to share is why AI translations because you can use human translation you can do it yourself but a translations today are super fast super affordable and super accurate so that's > (4:54:28) that part of the why now how do we do it in WordPress because we're here all uh into WordPress right so how to use AI to translate our WordPress sites you need two things first you need to decide which engine you want to use okay there are a lot of options there I'll mention them and then you need a plugin because as you know WordPress core doesn't have multilingual features yet I will touch upon that in my last slide so let's choose the translation agent first we won't choose I will just tell > (4:55:03) you about it deeper Google translate Microsoft Azure uh you have Amazon and a bunch of other options okay and the thing is they are all great really so there are tiny differences like between some language Pairs and like uh you know but they are really good uh so you choose from what you need but in my experience and kind of our experience as a company Who Do Stuff related to translations deep L has the edge okay it's it's it's leading the pack a bit okay but it's not like by a big margin but I would choose depel > (4:55:42) and then you need to choose my little modeling or Plugin so you know what I would suggest there there but so you have options that's I think that's great like you have options you're not stuck with like one or two solutions there are multiple Solutions there so you have wml you have wigload G translate translate press uh polylang you know there are a lot of options okay so how do you choose my suggestion is think about what you need okay I know pricing is uh important to everyone myself included but don't let it like uh > (4:56:20) kind of only that to guide you because look for what you need really so first does it uh support the engine you want to use be careful because not all of the plugins support all of the engines you know so if you want a specific one be sure it's that translation management it sounds a bit abstract but it's actually very simple and very important what can you do with your translations can you send them to not just AI but to other people to your friends to reviewers like this is important you may not know it > (4:56:56) once you decide to start building a multilingual site but with a bit of kind of research online you will know what I mean and then we come to pricing which I mentioned and there are two prices of course plug-in and air translations so be careful because some options start free but if you want some very basic kind of features it kind of adds up and then you're kind of in the very expensive area and finally do you need a human review it depends it depends but like many many people do want it so you know if that's important definitely look > (4:57:40) which plugins allow you to review and edit AR translations again not all of them do so how does it actually look like of course it depends on what plugin you use so this is from wfml as you can see it's very simple it's like a dashboard and this mode that that is on the on the screenshot is actually where wfl takes care of everything it translates in the background all the posts or the all the pages whatever you tell it to and when you add edit it just works okay but you don't need to use development > (4:58:16) mail or other plugins like that you can also uh tell it no I just want to translate this and this and this and this you know and be in charge of what goes on this is for example for translate press you can see like translation the English original language on the left side and the translation the right and most of the plugins allow you to edit translations but not all so be careful there okay and also if you need a full-blown translation editor which I very much suggest that you kind of go with a solution that has it it will help you a > (4:58:54) lot because it saves time it's it's kind of like a translation tool for you it has glossary and stuff um and this is the question so how do we get it reviewed be careful because not all of them allow you to do this like there are plugins that allow you like okay you can edit the translation by yourself okay but like if we take that site for example I don't speak French so how can I review French language so obviously I need to invite someone it can be like a user a friend so this is what I would definitely keep in mind > (4:59:28) when when going uh with like translating your site with AI and so here's the point but it's not all about websites because we are WordPress Community we do many more things so we build teams teams for clients teams for the ecosystem we will plug-ins also for clients we build plugins for uh for everyone you know free premium premium whatever so how do we translate it and I can tell you from our experience experience we have been translated in our own plugins for years and it's a pain in the behind > (5:00:13) and um and it's super expensive like we we went the professional translation route and it's thousands of dollars it takes time it's you know it's just like complicated okay so um what I want to just like um mention here today is that we built a free tool for everyone on this site ptc.wpl.org and it's free and it will stay free and it's this is the first iteration that we wanted to share with the community uh and uh please if you if you're into this if you need this to translate your team > (5:00:50) plugin you know use it and let us know uh you know your thoughts feature requests whatever because this is the first iteration we are only working on better stuff like for it um there will be like a something premium later but this stays free and we are already starting to use it for ourselves and it's really nice so this is what I uh wholeheartedly suggest and let me know how it goes so in the end what's the future of multilingual uh WordPress uh I don't know best thing so Gutenberg phase four promises this multilingual > (5:01:29) multilingual features uh I if any I don't know what what's being discussed what's what's being decided probably not too much yet because we still have like phase three you know so it's it's some time away so it will take a bit of time um but um by the fact that jetpack just released um an AI assistant in their own plugin I have a feeling that multilingual phase of Wordpress will and should definitely include some sort of AI integration because it's the only logical thing and I'm sure that like people who will be > (5:02:10) working on it will um you know they will they will they will know what to do so but it's for us to see how it goes and I'll be happy to to you know if anyone knows more please let me know so that's it thank you very much and that's it thank you yeah thank you Dario this is a small gift we have for you thanks a lot thank you Milan thank you so much for your time and thank you for the tool thank you for sharing so our next speaker is a huge horror fan um we're gonna learn about how to harness an AI to enhance the > (5:02:49) accessibility of our website and resulting in increased user engagement and better overall user experience that's it Sarah thank you a huge round of applause for Sarah please thank you come here are we all tired of the eye yet or okay I promise this one is going to be quite a specific and it's light short and I want to ask questions so please be ready okay uh oh that's my last one oh you got the spoilers oh hahaha okay sorry that's all yeah okay first thing uh I want to tell you that my slides they are I'll kind of with a little help > (5:03:50) of some AI tools and it's not relevant to talk about them but I put some notes on there can you read it yeah so if you wonder about 10 of them you can just ask me later okay so a little bit of background my name is Sarah he said I'm from Norway but I'm actually from Brazil and I'm 36 now and I've been calling since I'm 16. > (5:04:20) I'm a full stock senior developer and I'm created coder on the side but apparently I cannot make the all the Emojis work so I have I start working with WordPress 10 years ago when I moved from Brazil to Norway and I'm a partner in a company called Guinness design and it's probably the northernmost worst Presidents in the world we are in Trump so really really up so Tromso is a very peculiar place you know there is there are three weird things I want to tell you about my place where I live the the first one that we have Northern Lights all the time like > (5:05:07) in winter when it's dark and we have Midnight Sun right now like there's no night to just sun or 24 hours and the third weird thing is that the European web directive they were implemented in such a strict way in Norway that it's literally illegal to have an inaccessible website any reasons here okay you know that right yeah yeah so uh worst case scenarios you get uh okay you get 15 000 per day Euros to pay and we saw it happen you guys remember SAS yeah so it's like there is random controls but they only make on big > (5:05:57) companies so it's not like for everyone but it's it's pretty tough and even though the responsibilities on the companies is always falling for us as agents and content creators so we at Guinness we had to like oh my God we need to step up our game normally accessibility was like our afterthought but then it became like it had to be part of every step of our process right so how do we do that and do you guys think nor is azure rating hold the thought okay let's talk about something fun for change yeah > (5:06:36) uh AI so specifically generating AI so there is like countless of AI tools popping up every day right it's like AI can write and can write really good I heard the from yova yovanova harike that's his name something like that's really on point that AI is hacking the operationing system of human civilization which is language right so it's um yeah hey I can compose music a I can code and me as a developer I think we talk about this today as well but like how many developers here have tried Copilot > (5:07:21) yeah and co-pilot together in combination of chat repeat is like it's super cool right it's amazing uh but uh yeah AI can also illustrate that's like the most a fun thing we can do with AI so for now but can you really see the full picture now I don't think so right like we we still like for sure is changing our way of working as designers developers and coders and and content creators actually and but we cannot actually grasp the capabilities of AI even the developers there like keeping surprise of what what the > (5:08:05) outcomes and the speed of their learning and um like even to keep up with information I I'm sign up for all the newsletters and then for papers and then like we cannot just read what's going on like every day there's news and there's something and then bad good you know so it's it's has this overwhelming feeling right it's like we cannot keep up do you guys have this feeling too about AI it's like who has it okay good good we are on the same page so that is this frustrating feeling and > (5:08:45) then this I cannot keep up with things that 60 of the global population they experience every day and they are uh people with um uh Advantage uh not Advantage uh disabilities in the world so it's like 1.3 billion people that might not be able to ask a Vital Information on a website for example in that frustration feeling you know that like come on just because we as developers and content creators didn't think about them you know so I think that now that we we're related with the frustration feeling > (5:09:26) can we agree that noro is actually not so wrong on making it really hard really restrict on with accessibility um yeah so because we had to like keep up our game and as early adopter I'm like obsessive of AI so I thought that I could save you guys some time because AI could help us to to automatize things and and make it think faster and then maybe your next project can be a bit more accessible but first of all what should we be checking you know like you guys know like how the all the rules what's okay what can we > (5:10:08) check where to go you know the how the areas so for that I have a tip for you and I think they are here are they here is is this open source initiative called a l i y and there's it the idea is to make accessibility easier and they have this check released with everything we need and it's like is updated if it's needed and it's so well written and easy to understand and also you guys should go check it out so it's like it's super cool and then I'm gonna bring you three uh of my favorite tools powered by AI one for > (5:10:50) design one for uh code and all for content to but related to accessibility of course so the first one is design I want to know how many designers are here okay not so many okay do you guys use uh figma figma XD or sketch so have heard about Stark okay just my colleagues because they use so I Stark it's um it's a plugin you can add on your on your design of choice and it's gonna the the sidekick one it's a plugin of the plugin that it scans your design and gives the tips like normal tips of own like > (5:11:44) General contrasts and stuff for for accessibility but with the AI it's gonna read into your context you know because it's not um one one fits all especially with design and accessibility we know that there is just a whole conversation of accessibility and design it has to be boring so now it might not need because we speak Portuguese because uh AI can help you into the context of your own design you know so the second one it's a code so after you made your design and you you feel like it's good enough > (5:12:24) you can do a prototype the coders go there right coders here okay yeah so we we normally have our way of working that's like you go you put the right tags no I I know you guys do it right so everything is there but it's still good to test it out right so apart from the other the tests that we we guys know there is this audition here which is a website a service that can you can send your link and then the audit and they they're very specific AI powered to to give you some insights and also with the context of of your project > (5:13:10) and give a full report is super good with tester out this is amazing and what I like most on this it's they come with a WordPress plugin that added out of the box kind of a tube a toolbar on your website accessibility menu kind of you call how we want that it comes with some specific user needs that we might not remember or of course the user could have it on its own browser but what if it doesn't so uh it will just change the UI of of your web we don't have to do anything and it's just gonna fix it for them so I > (5:13:54) think it's pretty cool and now a Content tip for you guys do you know that for your website to be accessible it needs to be 8th grade level of your content do you guys know that nope so how how do you know that your content is eighth grade no like or of course there's a specific case but in general right but how how can you check that you know you you could use a plugin that can be your assistant while you're creating code or creative content and this is probably what you guys heard about this plugin it's super cute but is > (5:14:41) actually super useful on content creating on on your website you you get like content generator but you can also has a chatbot that you can just double check like is this is this uh Thorn good or should I to the change this is my target to the to the change my text should I change the tone and one little thing of that one that I really really like that they you can add your own chatbot on your project and you can train your chatbot to just talk about your project to your client you know uh you you're gonna need the API > (5:15:22) key of open AI but if you already use the chat GPT you already have a login there so you could just go and get it it's not like you don't have to do anything more than that and this is an example of that chatbot of him or for the the website of them and that example remind me something really important when it's about AI that's uh it's written I don't know if you can read don't believe everything Neo says so right now we are in the in a level of AI that we cannot first 100 right so if > (5:16:05) we're creating content please always check the source and if you are you don't be afraid of AI take your jobs for now just saying and if you are if you're generating like music or art that it's uh you are a referencing to some Style please check copyrights and if you are coding please I'll check documentation because AI school can be awesome but it's not the Oracle of Duffy you see the the Greek talk so but yeah AI is not out all that yet but if there's something that I really believe AI can help us right now is to > (5:16:54) overcome this gap of accessibility we have in websites that's like come on like instead of making AI draw a super new masterpiece why not ask them to do useful things and be more inclusive you know because and I really believe our community WordPress is so powerful you know so if you work together we can totally make the internet a more inclusive place one website at a time thank you [Applause] thank you Sarah right on time wow and it's a small gift for you thank you thank you what a great introduction to for our > (5:17:38) next talk uh just after we are finished with the third lightning talk please don't really leave the room just yet because I will ask you the second question that you're gonna need for your cards so um our next speaker an amazing guy he comes from Germany and he's going to talk about the chat GPT and all the amazing things that Chad GPT can help us out with the SEO so a big round of applause for Sylvia [Applause] Hello nice to be here thanks for the um invaded for the speaker here on Volcan Europe no content creation will have of IA > (5:18:34) um which ah no that's me I'm a media designer and front-end developer from corn cologne from Germany all about me you can find on my website now unless the power of automation but how we can start it should entered out this is important for the conversation of AI for slowering complexing tasks official intelligence needs this thesis of information goals expectation inverse and examples with this three pieces of information you create your own prompt but what is the prompt its input sense which > (5:19:39) which is intended to stimulate the AI to generate a certain type of output now now you learn these three topics with you when you use chatp you can topic research content structure and content creation and if you have time my bonus slide my my case study no first one topic search this is one of the important first in the content processed to find relevant and intervest topic for you for the Target group now how you do it um I call or I sent to jttp and the main goal > (5:20:47) the intentions to create numerous details and in deep Advanced articles on the topic dog and cat food and Beyond so this is my example my acceptation I need concrete topic successions example I give charged piece the following instruction so the topics is actually into the following categories conversation conversion related topics product new topics close to the topic topics and future topics reference and chat GDP response on the right side for example for conversion related comparing red and dry food Brands and cons > (5:21:49) and the further topic Maybe choosing the right football for your pet now we have found with this prompt many topics thought by the relevant categories so prompt you don't write down you can look later on on the website and now we want to create content for a relevant keyword maybe get food without sugar and grants let's start with the content structure oh it's the better you formulate what you want that's more likely you will get what you want I asked would I write to the HTTP can you please give me > (5:22:55) all all topic suggestions that I should described in this detailed full guide article it's possible please structure the topics already as possible headline for Advanced article Android each heading information absolutely you must be explained there in detail and charity to peer response generally here's our topics headlines for example white choker and clans are bad for cats or making or making your own sugar and uh and grants free cat food you need more no problem ask the HTTP for more and try to be response more > (5:23:50) finally we want to create content now I give church gtps the following instruction write out the first headline for me I asked Church EDP to address the following subtopics um explanation of import ance for sugar and client-free diet and cat food and possible head effects of sugar and grants on cats and future GP instruction to all keywords Maxwell's brackets so I can find later JDP following my instruction and response this article on the right side so he you write me a headline a see your friendly headline and a content and all > (5:24:48) the um [Music] task he do it for me so I have a tickle about a cat food without sugar and plants so now we have time really good so my case study I am I make two domains one topic and two and over 100 different continents I analytics 10 kpis and I make affiliate shop one for for cat in dog food and one is one the condenses created with jtp and another Ai and another version is created by unique writers and as a result yeah uh it's about two months > (5:25:55) um the index uh say AI version have more pages IA version has more impression more clicks better position in on Google um more page views the duration time it's more the bounce rate it's smaller and action per visitors are higher more clicks on the button to the store and more sales so it's critical what you do with this information so I'm finished really quickly yeah thank you can I take a picture [Applause] this was really good so everybody wave thank you thank you thank you this is a > (5:27:02) small gift for for you Sylvia so here it is thank you thank you so before you leave you remember the game the postcard game we had on uh we still haven't but we discussed on the opening remarks so if you missed the first question uh go to the community build in the Expo area so uh the second question is in how many languages is WordPress translated into that's the second question just say no but if you missed the first part it's in the community booth at the Civil station so yep we take a quick break for 15 > (5:27:40) minutes and after that we continue with the state of worker security insights from 2020 2022 with Oliver sales so thank you uh session uh with me I have a guest uh > (5:29:09) Viola gruner she's from Germany now living in Austria and this morning she had a session uh it's called test instead of guessing generates more leads through growth hacking yes Yola hello hello welcome thank you so nice to see you enjoy work in Europe I love it it's amazing really it's so great I'm so fascinated with my first world Camp Europe and yeah it's it's amazing it's your first book we're a computer but it's nice uh but I heard that this talk you had this morning uh it's not a first > (5:29:43) time on a webcam is that right that's right I had one in word Camp Lisboa but it was a lightning talk so it was my first big talk today yeah so now it was a big talk and it was a small talk in in Lisbon yes you know why we just liked your story thank you so much okay that's so nice I thought it was worth having a a larger uh session for that so can you share something uh on the information you gave on stage yes I just I can share some so thank you first that I got upgrade no not upgraded but then I had this chance to make a > (5:30:23) bigger talk out of it because yeah testing instead of guessing is a very important topic in my view because out of my experience I learned that you often think okay my God feeling says that's the right decision but if you test it you see hey wait no it's not the right decision so yeah I I brought some examples um what and in this example is approved really how we are not having the results we thought so our gut feeling sometimes plays a trick you know so it's important to test and especially in marketing it's > (5:31:02) a lot of blah blah blah very often but if you are testing you can show things and it's great because yeah you you can celebrate also a not successful test because every test is a success can you give an example of how this would work yes I yes for example um the sales team they told us they want to have to add one more form field to the contact form and my gut feeling said oh my God no we cannot do this and one more form field will drop the conversion rate and yeah so we researched it and there are a lot > (5:31:40) of proofs that the conversion rate will drop and if you add more form fields and so yeah I said first no but then I said okay let's test this and the numbers showed something different so the conversion rate didn't drop and and there was yeah then we implemented the new farm field to the website so you already had the idea what to do because you did the testing yes so I had the idea because you know sometimes the sales team says hey we need this or we need that and you're in a conflict but then you say okay we test it we test > (5:32:14) your idea we test your form field and then we tested it and then we saw we can implement it and we had the significant proof that the conversion rate is not dropping so everyone should test I think yeah so the manager was happy yeah I was the signature sorry about that no no but the founders were very happy as the sales manager was very happy and the marketing team was happy no but it's not to make someone happy it's just to prove some things and the team was happy so it was not my work it was the work of this great team > (5:32:52) and it was us always together you know yeah so do you have any other key points you shared or want to share with the people maybe something you just left out in the your talk is something you want to make clear to the audience yes no I just believe for marketing you need to be creative and um open-minded and yeah take decisions together with other people not alone always you should not think okay I need to do it's always good to be together you know that was also my learning and also often I saw some people told me > (5:33:34) no that will not work and then it's good to test and to prove things yeah because even when I started to test I was very unexperienced in marketing so I was 19 years old I studied and I worked in marketing and I needed to take important decisions yeah and I had no one to ask and then I just asked the numbers a little bit and that helped me out very often so you're eager in in asking questions and asking yourself okay is this right yes and not just assume we should go and accept the results yes it's so not for every small > (5:34:15) thing you are doing you should make a a test I think it should be if you have very important things to do and very big numbers then you should test yeah and then you can see also if it's significant you're still young in career yes and you are able to ask the right questions yes but not just meat was always also the team that's it's always the group you know together so it's it's good to be able to ask questions even uh if you're still young in in your career yeah and you can work for people because > (5:34:54) of course you have not the experience uh not the background experience so you're not uh you don't have an opinion shaped by your own experience you ask the right questions yes and this is also a great opportunity I see because I see that many people who worked for a long time in marketing they say we do this and you ask but why yeah my God feeling says it I know this I'm I'm working very long in this segment I'm an expert and that's for me in terms of marketing a critical statement because I saw > (5:35:33) you have off and so many proofs that it's you know not that it's this test will not work and then you do it and you see for your Target group it works so also for people who are not that experienced in marketing just ask questions sometimes ask hey is this really right and then just try it just test it be brave try and don't yeah listen too much to someone who says always it's good to have experience I don't want to say something bad about this but for me it's I saw out of my experience it's > (5:36:12) important to test and often it was also sometimes that I said I think this test will work and my whole team said never never and when we tested it they were all you know it's always right or the opposite so it was great so everyone had the same results the same results and we were voting as a team everyone is equal there was not the manager deciding for the team everyone had the same Empower for raiding for this different ideas and that was great that's great now you work for Inside Yes um I can imagine there are people > (5:36:48) curious about you should they contact inside or should they contact you directly do you run your own company as well or are you available as a marketeer for excellent parties foreign and I think it's a great company but of course you can reach out to me also on Twitter on LinkedIn so if you have any questions or if you're not sure uh something just reach out just contact me okay and we can book you for talks uh [Applause] that's so important so also if you would like to see my talk I also shared the > (5:37:42) tool I worked with we had our own created workflow so everyone can have it because I really think we should Empower each other it should be not um it's me we should work together so if you have any questions I help you out and because it's a great community so what you do here volunteering and everything I want to give also something back and yeah just reach out to me always uh which is the place people can reach out to you on LinkedIn yes LinkedIn Viola gruner Viola yeah all right and that's it better maybe Twitter > (5:38:20) I'm on Twitter but I'm not long on Twitter I'm so new in this WordPress Community just eight months so my Twitter account is very it's okay but it's very small but Twitter is the a lot of people use Twitter yeah in this community I know okay so I want to say thank you very much thank you so much and thank you to everyone I just want to share that I'm so glad being here thank you so much to this great community and thank you so much to all volunteers it's amazing really the organization and > (5:38:51) everything lovely no really it's it's so great what you are doing and everyone is putting their free time in it a big thank you to you thank you very much okay thank you so much enjoy welcome thank you don't have a car you just cannot see stuff hunger version of our talk so this is > (5:46:05) basically 45 minutes long slot where speaker has uh 30 minutes for his talk and 50 minutes for questions just you know we have the standing mics over there so queue up um when you see that speaker is about to close up queue uh for the questions if for some reason you can't reach uh these microphones there will be handheld mics like this one going to be held out for you to give the questions so um our next speaker comes from Estonia and fun fact I learned about his last name is that it means bridge in Estonian so Oliver he's > (5:46:41) the CEO and co-founder of patch stack come on big round of applause for Oliver okay thank you hello everyone I think that's actually the biggest crowd of people that I've seen being interested about security so thanks um my name is Oliver I'm the co-founder and CEO of patch Tech a little bit about my background I've been working in WordPress since 2014 when I was running a web development company which was focused on WordPress actually about web application Security in general but we very much so focused > (5:47:25) on WordPress from the early days already I'm also an active Community Builder so in Estonia where I live I've also co-founded a co-working space which has turned into a startup Center in our town and I've also been organizing hacking events which called Capture the Flag competitions where hackers are uh challenging each other and competing against each other so we've been doing it for NATO and different kind of organizations um today I'll mostly use your time to give you a little bit of an overview of > (5:48:01) what we've seen over the past couple of years in the WordPress security space I will dive into a little bit into numbers but I'm also going to talk a little bit about what are the biggest challenges that we've seen that need to be hopefully solved or improved I will then then share what are the expectations for this year something that we've already seen this year but what we should expect uh in this year and Beyond and then dive into like what we as a community could do to make WordPress ecosystem even more secure > (5:48:37) than it is today so let's start with the very good news I think WordPress ecosystem is more secure than it has ever been before if we look at the data from the past years in 2020 there was 541 security vulnerabilities disclosed in the entire WordPress ecosystem that includes plugins teams WordPress core everything is included in 2021 this number jumped to 1 382 and last year in 2022 these numbers skyrocketed into 4528 security vulnerabilities what's important to mention here is the fact that these vulnerabilities are not like > (5:49:18) they just popped up this year uh on on those years and like they've never been existing there before this is kind of like you can expect it like a backlog of security vulnerabilities that are getting fixed from all these previous years because they have actually existed there for many many years so now we're finally like cleaning up the backlope of security issues within the plugins and themes and in the WordPress uh ecosystem in general so that's a really good thing because now you know the Bad actors the > (5:49:48) the hackers who would otherwise exploit these issues have you know much less issues to find because the plugin developers have already fixed them and teams as well out of those 4 500 security bugs that were disclosed in 2022 99.7 were actually found in plugins and teams um most of them like most of these issues as you can see are from the plugins and teams and only 26 of those in total were actually from the WordPress core and the good thing about this is that those issues that were fixed in the WordPress core itself we > (5:50:23) never seen any of them actually be actively exploited what it means is that WordPress as a platform itself is very mature it has a very mature uh you know release cycle it has a very good attention on security and the issues that are found in the core are mostly solo severity that they're not really useful for anyone to even exploit that's not the true unfortunately with the plugins and teams if we look into 2022 in terms of the data that we saw in all the vulnerabilities that were reported within this year actually we > (5:50:56) saw a little bit of a shift into vulnerabilities that were disclosed and there is a reason for it which is actually on the next slide but before I get to it I will give you a little bit of insight into what those vulnerabilities look like so cross-site request forgery which is on top of someone on top of the list is something that you actually tricked a let's say admin user into clicking your link that directs them into the page where they are like tricked into let's say clicking an option or changing some option on > (5:51:24) your website then there is cross-site scripting vulnerabilities where a you know malicious code can be injected into the website so the visitor loads it and you will basically see the website then loading something that shouldn't be there this is one of the most common vulnerabilities that is being exploited and then we have actually one that is very important to mention is the broken Access Control where the plugins don't necessarily maybe use the WordPress hooks in the correct way I think many of you have heard about the ease admin > (5:51:53) function which a lot of people are actually confusing in terms of what it does but one of the issues with the broken access control is that the you the the plugins may be having unauthentic unauthenticated access to a function that should only be available for authenticated users and in that case you know attackers can either you know turn on registration make the make the registered users admins by default and you know all that kind of crazy stuff the reason why the cross-site request forgery which is actually the lowest > (5:52:22) trending fruit you can find in the WordPress echo system was on the top one position is actually the the issue in the software supply chain or the security of the software supply chain how you can think about that is like websites like all our websites use some level of plugins and you know if a plugin has a vulnerability that releases a patch for example you will go there and get it patched and you update the plugin right now what if the plugins themselves also use plugins and you know then what it means is that the plugin > (5:52:53) that the uh the plugin that or the framework or library that was used within the plugin is getting a security issue fixed then all the plugins that actually use this Frameworks also need to go and update and then eventually if they do then the then the end user needs to go and update you know plugin on the website and like with each additional layer we are actually adding delay for the end users to get protected and that's a really big challenge in the space right now and the last year the number actually spiked because there was > (5:53:24) two big Frameworks that were actually used within thousands of plugins uh and they shared then eventually the common security vulnerabilities it's actually also very hard to secure to report security issues to plugins to give you a little bit of context behind this chart that you're seeing on the screen what we do at patch deck is running a program called patch stack Alliance it's a community of ethical hackers who reports security vulnerabilities in any of the plugins in the ecosystem and they're getting > (5:53:54) rewarded for that they're getting rewarded because they are using ethical processes to make sure that plugin developers have all the necessary information to fix a security vulnerability before it's being found by someone else with much worse motivations let's say so 1160 security vulnerabilities unique security vulnerabilities were reported last year into the bachelor clients program out of those 1160 there were 748 that were accepted by us which we validated made sure that there are correct issues that there was > (5:54:28) enough information about that so that the plugin developer could fix it and then you know big portion of them got patched even though it takes a lot of effort to actually reach out to the plugin developers because very often you can't find any information on their website you can find information on their forms even if they do have a form then very often you just get like an error message saying that whoops that form is not working so you have you basically have like a black hole where you're putting your uh your security > (5:54:55) reports and you never get the reply on the other hand you have those security security researchers and Technical hackers who are waiting for you know hearing pack when are those vulnerabilities getting resolved so here who is actually helping us out a lot and I think we should give a big Applause to the wordpress. > (5:55:13) org Plugin Review team because they are being done like amazing job in terms of how much they have actually dealt with those issues so really come on guys it's yeah so the Plugin Review team is helping us when we need to escalate security issues to them to make sure that the end users will eventually get the information that they need to patch to update the plugins that are vulnerable and from those 748 issues 148 uh cases were actually escalated to the plugins team and what they've done is then they try to reach out to those plugins again as well and > (5:55:49) if they can't do so then take our code going to close the plugin now what is a scary part here is that over 10 percent of those you know cases they actually remain closed which means that the plugins are still to this state actually closed down if you go to the wordpress.org repo you can see that the plugin is closed for security reasons or if you know in some level of that in that kind of message now if 10 of these vulnerabilities that are getting escalated how many plugins actually are there that are abandoned > (5:56:20) that the developer doesn't respond to and how many of how many websites there are that are running those plugins that are not maintained by anyone anymore and you know are basically vulnerable but without having without the website owner having any information about that so this is a big issue actually so way too many security bugs are not getting patched actually last year 26 percent of critical security bugs were not receiving a timely patch at all that means that these critical security issues are the usually the ones that are > (5:56:55) unauthenticated the attackers can you know run Mass exploitation campaigns to take over website inject malware and do pretty much whatever they want right so 20 26 is a big number so even if you have like auto updates enabled you know you're not really you know protected in any way because you just don't get an update so even though those plugins get removed from wordpress. > (5:57:20) org they still stay on websites and even worse so closed plugins have no indicator of active security issues on the WordPress admin panel that's a big issue because if you look at the wordpress.org repository you actually see that the plugin is closed for security issues but now who is actually you know who should know about this issue the most is the site owners the ones that are actually running the WordPress website where they see the list of plugins that they have installed but to this date WordPress core itself doesn't have an indicator within the > (5:57:52) admin panel that would tell you that hey you're running this you know plugin on your website but this isn't this is closed by the wordpress.org repository and it's not you know actively maintained anymore that brings me to something that just happened very recently I was speaking at cloudfest last year uh sorry earlier this year and I were talking about this issue as well so we actually found uh an old 80 year old ticket in the WordPress uh you know basically a feature request to add an alert into the WordPress admin panel > (5:58:27) to show the user that the plugin is removed from the WordPress you know repository for the security reasons so there's a QR code link to that entry so if anyone wants to kind of share their ideas or kind of like add additional information to that please do so because I think this is a very big thing that we should look into and have maybe a bit more of a deeper conversation around to make the WordPress ecosystem much more secure so let's look into what else we could do as a whole Community to make WordPress more secure > (5:59:01) I think we need to accept that it's okay for projects to come to an end I think it's okay when we build plugins and we build projects in general and we eventually come to a conclusion that maybe it's not maybe it wasn't used by anyone that much that you were expecting or maybe it didn't go as well as you expected as well but if you built a plugin then you need to kind of keep in mind that other people might still be using it so I think it's very important to communicate very transparently and > (5:59:30) let the users know whenever you are planning to maybe you know drop the project or like move on to additional things what you could also do for example is you know reach out to the community talk to people on post status for example ask maybe someone wants to take this plugin over maybe someone else wants to maintain it in the future and I think another thing that we might want to think about is maybe it's okay to send an end of life date until the users receive security patches let them know that hey I'm planning to move to other > (5:59:59) things so here's a data until I'm actually you know getting the security patches if there's anything you know needing to get patched but I'm not adding additional secure additional features to the plugin so I'm not you know then the users will get some level of kind of time when they can find Alternatives and figure out how to move forward and please don't reject security reports because you're moved on on the top corner you are actually seeing uh an interaction by our security team with a > (6:00:27) plugin developer uh I think it happened last month where we reported a security issue to them was a serious issue which actually needed the patch quite quickly and the only response we got from there is that sorry we no longer maintain this plugin this plugin currently has over a hundred thousand active installations so again this is a problem and we don't know how many of these situations actually are there even more in the ecosystem and I think we need as a whole Community to talk about that a little bit more to make the entire ecosystem > (6:00:58) more secure another thing that what we and it kind of like applies to the previous talk where we uh to the previous slide where we reached out to developer and saying hey there's a security issue you know we could help you fix it is then please don't you know avoid security research as well what we've seen over the past years is that in many cases where security reporter or security researchers report the vulnerability to plug in they are kind of like you know reacted with negativity you know why you > (6:01:27) are like looking into our stuff and you know who asked you to check our plugin and you know that kind of stuff so one thing that we should I think look into is considering security researchers as equal contributors as our developers when you when a developer is submitting nice code into your plugin into your open source project you're actually happy right so why shouldn't you be super happy and thankful to security researchers who point out in your code base to a places where you can improve and also provide a better product to > (6:01:59) your customers so plugins actually thanks to the security researchers in the space plugins around fixed vulnerabilities before but actors can exploit those zero days so from the past years we see this you know increasing number of security vulnerabilities being uh you know fixed and reported these are all the vulnerabilities less for the bad guys right so it's good so it's good for everyone it's good for the community it's good for the you know open source project maintainers and really think of > (6:02:26) researchers as the good hackers on your side I think we like if anyone gives you like an uh option like do you want the hackers to be on your side or do you want the hackers to be on you know on the other side which one would you pick I think it's a pretty simple you know option to choose and I think we need to think about that in the sense of incentivizing their security researcher and the good hackers to be on our side and not on the other side so I've talked a lot about like you know plugins ecosystem and teams ecosystem > (6:02:59) and the projects in general but like I imagine in this room there's also people who just maybe build websites or have their own website built so what should you do uh you know in the light of all this information I think it's more and more important to choose the your you know stack wisely and keep plugins to minimum it's a very common you know security recommendation but it's very important and I think it's still not praised enough I think it's very much easier to choose a stack or you know a > (6:03:27) selection of tools that you like to use like select your favorite page builder select your paper you know forms plugin select your favorite you know tools that you in general build the websites with and if you're a developer building websites to a lot of different customers try to stick to that stack because when a security vulnerability is being found then you actually have much smaller attack surface like if you use like hundreds or 200 different plugins across all your websites you would probably need to deal with security > (6:03:54) vulnerabilities every single day that's a fact so another thing to look into is a WordPress specific firewall something that is actually being able to detect whether there are vulnerabilities on your website and to actually provide you a very targeted protection for those vulnerabilities something that is called nowadays as a virtual patching which means that the vulnerability is being found on your website and it receives a security rule exactly for that vulnerability I think it's very important because what you are what you > (6:04:24) receive then is to actually keep in mind that 20 I mentioned just 26 of the security or like the critical issues from 2022 were not patched so what virtual patching actually gives you is the time to stay protected until the developer releases a patch or it gives you a little bit more time to go there and update your website so it's definitely an essential thing looking into the light of you know how much of those security vulnerabilities are out there and you know how big is the chance that you might end up with one as well > (6:04:55) and really choose a good hosting service that lets you know about vulnerabilities as well because there's a lot of Hosting companies who actually do that so we have you know managed hosting providers who have like a panel where you see all you know plugins that have installed and everything a lot of the hosting providers nowadays actually also include the information whether any of those plugins recruit you know security vulnerability so ask this from your hosting company or choose a hosting company that already does security out > (6:05:20) of the box and helps you to at least be aware of those security issues so what to expect from 2023 so a lot more ethical hackers will get interested in WordPress that's for a fact because WordPress has a huge impact and there's so many different plugins and themes and you know so many different projects to look for security issues so nowadays we have also like you know bug Bounty programs and different programs which incentivize statical hackers to report security vulnerabilities more ethically and you know obviously if we have more > (6:05:53) ethical hackers you know get interested in WordPress we will see a lot more vulnerabilities to be reported and patched as well not only because of you know if we have more ethical hackers on board and we get more vulnerabilities reported unpatched but also plugin developers themselves and you know team developers and project owners they actually put much more effort into security as well last year we saw optic actually of uh projects getting security audits setting up Security Programs for their plugins and and so forth I won't > (6:06:24) even start mentioning AI because everyone is doing that so but you know you can kind of also think about that line of things because we do have a lot of tools available that would help you know ethical hackers to also find vulnerabilities more easily in the plugins um and all that taken into consideration what we need to again keep in mind is that if 10 from the last year there was 10 percent of the plugins that remain closed after security reports being reported to them we're probably going to see that number increase as well > (6:06:55) as a final note here I actually want to also mention something that is upcoming over the upcoming years is that governments start to regulate open source security uh and supply chain security as well so if public sector and Enterprises need to stay compliant they need to understand what kind of Open Source you know tools they rely on you know what kind of Open Source projects they actually even use what kind of you know plugins they are running on their you know infrastructure what is the security status of those then developers > (6:07:26) and agencies who provide services to them need also to kind of you know provide that kind of overview insight and security services so this is something that you know the developers and agencies in the space already need to think about is that a lot of those you know larger Enterprises and public sector customers will start asking hey why did you why did you choose touch stack when you know starting to build our application and what does that you know what kind of risk might come with that if we rely on that kind of Open > (6:07:55) Source software um and this also brings higher security expectations toward product developers because if if developers in the agencies need to start choosing the stack more wisely and making sure that they have like a good overview of like how how well it's maintained what are the previous security issues how well they are how fast are they are actually fixing security issues if they're reported how well is it communicated and so forth then what we are going to see is that you know plugin developers will > (6:08:22) have higher expectations as well and to be honest I think plug-in developers have the most to win from here I think what they can do is set up you know Security Programs maybe even incentivize the ethical hackers to report vulnerabilities to them to make sure that they are more actively looking for vulnerabilities in their software set up a bounty program I think this is all in benefit for the plugin developers right now because the developers who will use your product they will trust you more so I think the key takeaways here really > (6:08:57) is that right now the WordPress ecosystem is more secure than ever I'm looking forward to say the exact same thing next year and then year again and then year again um I think plugin developers have a lot to win here and there's a community I think plugin developers have also the most to do in terms of making the WordPress space more secure and yeah if you want to see the data from which I actually used on the talk from the last year and a little bit even more data and the QR code actually sends you there > (6:09:29) and thank you all for making the worker space so much secure and thank you and thank you Oliver for sharing um while we so just you know we have the standing mics there if you have uh questions we have time for questions um while we're waiting people to queue there I have a question for like what we as the plugin developers you know can actually do to make those we're talking about the security like how to make but what we can actually do to make those plugins while developing it more secure yes definitely one of the things that > (6:10:09) can be done well is to kind of follow the code of conduct for example or like the you know uh the documentation of how to use the maybe hooks in a correct way um definitely sanitized inputs um you know wherever you can to do so um and I think one of the things that uh can be done well that will improve not only the security of the plugin but also how the you know the users of your plugin will see um kind of your professionalities to have like some third-party security audience done once in a while maybe once > (6:10:38) a year or so or maybe after like every like a larger release there is service providers in the space different ones that are actually providing code reviews code review services so this is something that you know should probably be done more often especially if you have a lot of active installations and the other thing is like if you don't have you know uh if if your open source project is not generating Revenue then obviously you know you can't have like a large sum of money to pay for those security Research Services then what you > (6:11:06) can still do is set up a security program like a managed vulnerability disclosure program where you just tell the ethical hackers that hey if you have security issues to report report them here and make sure you know that this these issues are then going to be you know handled in an ethical way basically so these are like one or like two very good ways of how to do that so I think in general if we kind of like put them into context and it's all about communication right so communicate well to your users how the security of your > (6:11:37) plugin is covered what you are doing as a plugin developer to make that code much more secure and also like if something is found in something is patched how well you are communicating is much more important than the fact that there was something found in the first place well thank you we have a question from the audience there hi Oliver great talk thank you thanks um so has there been any discussion with the plug-in review team about Maybe not immediately closing plugins when they have a significant active installed base > (6:12:07) but maybe taking it on and patching it and treating it more like a core security issue and perhaps Force pushing an update and then closing it yeah I think it always happens based on a situation so it's not always the way how like it's not always that they're closing it down right away I think what they're also doing is trying to reach out to the plugin developer receiving some level of answer you know whether and when they are going to do that so it's not the case that you know they were just like close it down immediately > (6:12:36) in most of the cases uh but obviously like if there's no reaction whatsoever then you know closing the plugin probably will get the reaction uh which will eventually get to you know fixing the Plugin or fixing the fixing the issue that is affecting users but I think there's still a lot work to do right because we are still you know we're this growth that we are seeing in terms of the vulnerabilities being fixed from the past two or three years I mean we are still in a very much of a baby shoes like we are still I think there's > (6:13:03) so much more security issues to still iron out and I think as we are moving forward in this process and if the volume grows I think we also need to have even more you know worked out processes in terms of dealing with those security issues so yeah there's definitely work to be done there nice and then the second question hi I recently started experimenting with uh WordPress blogs and downloaded a lot of blocks plugins and they tend to lean into the JavaScript ecosystem a lot more um and what I noticed is that some of > (6:13:35) these plugins have like a note modules directory with 30 to 50 dependencies aren't we opening up ourselves to even more dependencies by adopting these JavaScript types of working absolutely the answer is correct yeah I mean it is happening because and that's why I mentioned the supply chain thing right it's going to piggyback on top of the other things so and the layer and the rabbit hole goes deeper with you know each level of each layer so uh like even if we see already plugins using also a lot of JavaScript libraries like even > (6:14:09) WordPress uh core itself use like jQuery right and there was an issue in jQuery so like these things actually go deeper and deeper and and I think yeah JavaScript as we introduce more more and more JavaScript into the WordPress core I think the problem also you know is going to get deeper and I mean there's just more work to be done nice we'll take the question from that side hi yeah you talked about the way the metrics Are Climbing so we went from 541 in 2020 1382 year before last 4528 99 of those are from plugins but there's > (6:14:49) 60 000 or more plugins in the plug-in repository like that still seems like there's a very small number compared to the amount of code out there and then there's obviously plugins beyond the plug-in repository yeah am I right to still be alarmed that there's a lot of surface area in the plugins to still be examined or are you seeing a Slowdown in historical vulnerabilities and now it's newly introduced vulnerabilities can you reassure me or should I remain alert I think you should definitely stay alert > (6:15:31) because what we are still seeing like we don't see any slowdown we're definitely seeing increase even right now in this year and I think there's you're you know absolutely right there's 60 000 plugins in the ecosystem and you know right now the vulnerabilities that are getting reported to us and to the other vendors in the ecosystem these are done by you know ethical hackers who actually look for those issues but they you know select in most cases plugins with higher you know installation numbers or they > (6:15:58) are looking for you know easier kind of security vulnerabilities that you can scan the entire Ripple for and look for like for example cross site request forgery and stuff like that so I think there's a lot more of those you know serious security issues still hidden in those lower install count plugins and I think that's why I was also saying that we're still in a baby shoes like all these numbers are still like the tip of the iceberg in a way right and another thing to mention here is that we have > (6:16:26) almost no visibility into the premium plugins uh the ones that are not hosted in the wordpress.org and these are most often much less checked for security issues in general so this is another kind of you know thing that we need to look into in the future as well thank you nice thank you your question please okay um greetings from the other side of Gulf of Finland go Estonia are you aware of uh solution or even an initiative to set up a kind of a harness perhaps like a devsecops harness for plug-in developers that would contain > (6:17:03) like basic sanity things like um vulnerability scanning static analysis um things that are pretty standard on most of the other run types or if not standards at least there's a toolkit that you can just take into use for Supply Chain management npm audit and things like that so are you aware of something that would help plug-in developers and if not should there be something like that I mean thanks for asking our own product does kind of something like that but yeah this was a paid advertisement thanks for the question I mean yes we > (6:17:40) actually do something like that as well so we do vulnerability management and virtual patching so we identify those vulnerabilities in your application and provide you like you know on understanding when should you patch something you know what needs to be patched first before something else what are the criticality levels you know how fast should you react but also provide you that kind of like a protection before you know you go there and maybe update or maybe there's no update available so it covers your kind of back > (6:18:05) until you can do so and I'm sure there's other services as well but I'm obviously not going to mention them okay actually just kidding thank you thank you Leslie thank you for your presentation and for the ethical hacking you all are doing I find that example of the plug-in developer who has a hundred thousand installs and received this notice from your team quite distressing because I also suspect they have other plugins out there in the environment so I wonder what other things can we be doing to put > (6:18:38) more pressure on that kind of plug-in developer including naming and shaming putting pressure on their other plugins like what what are the ethical things that you can do in your role but that we as a community can do as well I think instead of naming and shaming we should just kind of focus on highlighting those who are doing better right so if we are talking about like for example we we have something called like a VDP directory so we have a directory of all the plugins in the WordPress ecosystem who have kind of like opened up like a > (6:19:09) security program where they kind of very well say like hey here's how you should report security vulnerabilities to us here's how fast we are dealing with those issues it's all about communication and in terms of this com specific example as well I think what is needed is to have like some some level of like a common understanding of how these issues should be coming communicated um I don't I never kind of believe in like naming and shaming because I feel that this is making people eventually > (6:19:35) hide from a lot of facts not to get named and shamed right and I think naming and shaming is also kind of like the problem here uh why they are even like in many cases reacting negatively if they are receiving a security report because they don't want that attention on their you know project that on my God we had the security vulnerability right so I think uh what we can do is kind of just collectively talk about security issues more in a positive matter we should talk more about like that's great like we got another security issue fixed > (6:20:06) in the ecosystem there's you know again like hundreds of thousands more websites more secure thanks to that and we should praise that place the plugin Developers for fixing issues transparently and openly I think that's kind of the only way to go nice one more question on this side hello thank you great talk so I have a question uh lately I've seen this a lot in some especially premium plugins that the under the pressure of the marketing teams these outdoor stages hide or of even bury these vulnerabilities that are > (6:20:43) reported in the changelogs they they have so it's pretty difficult to find what actually happened and to learn from this so how do you you find these practices and also is this only like a WordPress thing or you find this also in another ecosystems I I find it more relevant in the WordPress Circle system not that much in the other ones where maybe the development practice is a little bit more mature and you know we're a little bit more enterprising customers are using uh the Frameworks um but the good point that actually you > (6:21:14) brought out is that a lot of developers in or like not many but in still like we see a lot of cases where yeah the information is like hidden from changelog or it's like hidden under like something like minor fix or something super vague right there's no point of doing that to be honest because what hackers do and what other security companies also do is that they monitor the SVN we also monitor the SVN on a daily basis so we see actually the code change diffs we see if you have escaped something we see if you sanitize > (6:21:45) something new on the plugin we see if you've added nonsense we actually see this information and so do hackers so even if you find even if you hide it from the users actually the only ones who are going to benefit are the bad hackers so there's really no point of doing that that's why America and said like the communication is the key and instead of kind of like trying to hide it from it or like try to kind of like you know stay away from the maybe bad publicity of you know there was a security phone issue found I would > (6:22:13) say that the plugins that actually fix security issues in my mind are much more secure than the those that haven't fixed anyo at all because I have no idea if someone has even checked you know these plugins at all so so yeah change hiding information in the changelog should not be done really and I think uh yeah the only people you are going to eventually hide information from are those who need it the most thank you thanks nice nice just stating the obvious this side is killing it guys to be the question just say no just you > (6:22:45) know they're killing it so if you have more questions there is a mic there thank you your question hi great talk so basically uh I was just wondering although it's uh like against the community or something like that but still there if there can be a possibility that someone uh like WordPress can have a place where like before uploading a plugin we they can actually access like there is there a certain level of security you know being maintained over there like that can be a good option uh that uh will actually > (6:23:17) check like what uh like it should not be you know very uh that kind of a plugin which is easily hacked or something like that so can it be a good thing uh like if a community come together or either WordPress itself come together and develop something like that actually WordPress uh the Lord Plugin Review team does that they do it on the first uh submission of the plugin if you upload a new plugin to the to the system then they are or to the repo then they're actually checking to plug in for those security issues they use uh not actually > (6:23:51) 100 sure now but they use one of those like assessed or like a static code analyzing tools to actually check for the unknown issues so they check if there's like you know maybe potential SQL injection vulnerabilities and stuff like that but the thing is that after that like after plugins start to receive like release updates these checks are not done anymore so you know a lot of plugins that are actually applied into the repository are not at all anything similar to what they are today right so um I think there is yeah I think we need > (6:24:23) more tools that help plug-in developers in general and I think we need different kinds of ones we need the ones that are for you know helping the community out with the communication but we also need to have access tools for example that they can run their plugin code through before they push a next update for example so you're completely right yeah we definitely need that kind of tools more thank you thanks nice and this side is waking up so we have the question there like csrf xss SQL injections and like > (6:24:57) most of it is handled with sanitizing escaping and using nonsense is there like any other major category of vulnerability that we should look out for is I feel like it's too easy or is there anything more to hacking because I don't know how those sites are attacked I think a lot of that like like more complex ones that need more attention are definitely the ones with uh involve broken authentication or like misuse of like WordPress existing hooks obviously we have a solution that you could just you know read the Codex right > (6:25:34) and you know use the use the hooks in the right way but unfortunately not everyone does so another thing to look out for is when code is actually reused because what we've also seen is that you know some developers just build you know we're in WordPress we build plugins in PHP and you know you can find a lot of PHP in you know stack Overflow right but that doesn't necessarily mean that the code on stack Overflow is also secure so we can see a lot of vulnerabilities being introduced in these kind of ways > (6:26:03) as well into the plugins but I think the more complex ones that I think need more attention are the logic issues are surrounding authentication and like how the kind of like WordPress core and apis are being kind of interacted with I think these are the ones to kind of like look more closely yeah wow and this concludes probably the longest q a session that I ever attended just you know so many questions that's cool good that's good do you have any more questions I have one just you know just select the > (6:26:39) prepared so you mentioned cloudfest so cloudfest or work in Europe which audience do you prefer and big round of applause Oliver thank you so much before you leave the stage we have a gift for you those are my notes underneath thank you so I haven't heard that but that was funny so Mr Bridge thank you thank you so our next session actually is it four so it's going to be second round of the lightning talks about Gutenberg static websites and future Generations you heard about that speaker and the opening > (6:27:26) remarks so uh also you have the delpi connect at four with Hari Courtney afshana and Emmanuel happening just you know so yep see you in 18 minutes here thank you welcome everybody this is Raquel and we're at word Camp I was about to say Phoenix we're working Europe I'm from Phoenix and today on day one of where Camp Europe we have with us Martin bellman's hello welcome thank you how you doing I'm good I'm good enjoying > (6:28:29) bird Camp so far yay how many Work Camp Europe's have you attended this is my third one I did uh portal last year yeah and then before covet hit uh Berlin as well oh nice yeah so okay yes making this the third yeah yeah exactly exactly how do you like has it been great coming back to work camps like since the lockdown yes yeah yes I mean when I went to the first one that I did was which was Berlin I didn't expect that it would be so nice that there was this feeling of community and and you know you would > (6:29:02) just meet people that you've seen online but you've never spoken to in real life and you come here and you hit it off right away and you talk about you know WordPress or life and and it felt really good and so I think this is going to be a yearly thing now where I return to wordcamp because yeah it feels good it feels it feels really good I was bummed that you know everybody was bummed that Kobe hits and then there was no word camp or at least not in real life so was that your first word Camp ever yes yes > (6:29:33) wow I love that never did a smaller word camp in Belgium or the Netherlands no it was like the first the first one and it was a big one yeah but uh yeah it's been really good it's good experience so I can recommend it to everybody if you can make it to try and make it to one of the word camps near your area so it's really nice I've been to a local camp or not no no the like the the first word Camp I ever did was the big word Camp Europe I have never been to a local one oh my goodness yeah yeah I should I should > (6:30:03) really and you're located in Belgium yes that's correct has there been any local camps there um I think there used to be a couple of years ago when an Antwerp um but not anymore but we live very close by to the Netherlands which has a word Camp um so a lot of us belgians we would travel to the Netherlands to to go there so well word on the street is word camp it's happening in September okay maybe you could attend that one yeah I mean if I'm in the country I like to travel a lot so I don't know if I'll be there but > (6:30:35) yeah I'm a traveler so if I'm in the country I would definitely make it to the Netherlands yeah so I heard a rumor that you actually traveled here like was it a road trip yes yeah how long ago did that start uh so we started on the 19th of May which is a good three weeks ago um and we took the car over uh we crossed five four countries wow and then we took the ferry from Italy to here um and just taking it slow me and my partner just traveling we went to a few Greek Islands just it's a working holiday > (6:31:11) thing where we just we have our laptops with us and we can do the work um and we did this last year too when uh when we went to Porto just stopping in Spain taking it slow you know making a road trip out of word Camp Europe and maybe this will be become a yearly thing depending on the location that it'll be at but I really enjoy it because it's it's just a nice way to see some of the of Europe some of the countries around us so where did you go what countries did you head up so uh so we start in > (6:31:41) Belgium then we pass France then we pass Switzerland then we are in Italy we have to drive through all of Italy then we take a ferry then we are in Greece then you have the option to do some islands or you travel Inland and now we are here at the other side of Greece yeah that sounds it's quite a few countries yeah now do you still drive this is a very American question but I'm assuming you drive a stick shift ah no really no I no so because uh the idea was because electric cars are coming and they're all automatic so > (6:32:19) when we had when we bought the car uh three years ago I really wanted a manual a stick shift but then the thing was yeah we're all gonna be driving automatic soon anyway yeah so let's already you know buy an automatic and then uh we can practice so it is an automatic yeah but it's against I don't know it feels it feels a bit weird I like them I like the manual manual gearbox yeah I feel like you're a lazy driver now like a little bit a little bit here yeah I mean a little bit Yeah there's nothing to do anymore well > (6:32:50) I mean you have to pay attention obviously but yes but yeah it takes some getting used to but I think now going back to manual might be harder because it I mean it's a luxury so so I actually had a Jetta that was a manual stick shift in the early 2000s and went away for years and just recently bought an Audi that's a stick shift in America it took me three months to find it oh yeah it took a little like maybe just a little bit like riding a bike again if you haven't rode in 10 years so you did fine would you go back to well to an > (6:33:27) automatic I mean if eventually with an electric guitar yes a guitar electric car I mean yes but there are times when I had to go back to driving and an automatic and I'm like oh my gosh I have so much time and so much like lesion yeah yeah I could just chill yeah that's exactly it so that must be lovely though on a road trip to yeah it yeah it is it is very comfortable yeah yeah what kind of car is it it's a Volkswagen it's a Volkswagen t-rock yeah a bright blue one oh my goodness I'm very partial to > (6:34:02) be sorry I'm probably acting like the biggest American right now but tell me about your plugin you a product owner right yeah I sell uh several woocommerce plugins yeah yeah um I started with this around 2017. um all the stories that I tell usually involve traveling and the story of my WordPress career let's say also involves traveling uh I quit my cozy I. > (6:34:35) T job in Belgium and traveled to Australia with my partner for a year we bought a four-wheel drive vehicle like uh and and we just yeah we just like slept in it and traveled through the whole country love and yeah that was also my impression after it like this is amazing and then the question is how can I do this again okay and that's by becoming a freelancer or a product owner and so I started looking into WordPress looking into woocommerce and I saw a few gaps in the market where I might you know launch a plugin that is beneficial to the > (6:35:07) woocommerce community very smart and that's basically how it all started uh around 2017. Wow have you been loving it yeah yeah it's absolutely amazing yeah it's it's definitely the right choice for me because it combines freedom I can have a bit my own agenda there's no customer deadlines um I mean I love customers it's not that but I'm not as I'm not as good with deadlines as I should be so like owning products is a good fit for me and uh yeah I mean there's a lot to learn in > (6:35:38) this journey because there's a lot more to owning products than just developing the products you have to market the products you have to yeah the website has to be there it has to work you have to service a lot of customers there's a whole support area that I've never had to deal with so it's a lot of work but it's definitely very rewarding and and I'm very happy that I made that step so it all led to this point and it's it's it's been good for me yeah you have a team or are you still solo > (6:36:08) um I have a team but we are just three people so it's me my partner is doing everything content-wise and then I have a support agent who is helping me handle the support load so we're a very small team it still feels very Indie I love it but that's how how it starts right it's so easy yeah yeah I mean like anything right if you start something new it's not always easy uh or not as easy as it looks but the end result is just it's very rewarding so I'm very happy yeah with this journey but it's not always easy > (6:36:48) you know there's there's a lot that goes with it uh you know marketing talking to people customer experience Customer Support I'm a very typical developer so these are things that I had to learn you know how to it sounds so simple but how do you talk to a customer uh so that they don't run away or so they understand what you're trying to say because I I might want to approach everything very technical yeah but the you know the average WordPress user is not technical at all so you have to > (6:37:15) learn how to deal with those customers how to talk to them on a level that everybody understands so there's learning curves everywhere but so far it's working I love that how about in Australia tell us any sort of like what was the craziest story or animal or creature you encountered or anything there are a few um so everything in Australia tries to kill you that's basically I mean that's it's a bit of an exaggeration but there are a lot of but there are a lot of animals that can kill you but the the > (6:37:49) upside is that in the last 40 50 years no animal has killed a human so it's you know it's fine too funny but the the most dangerous spider in Australia is is very small and I remember we came across it once and uh we were at a campground and it was in the communal kitchen and it was just sitting there like very open and like if children were playing there the spider might have bitten any of the children so I was like I went to the staff of of the place and I said there's a you know a deadly spider there > (6:38:24) um can you take it away and and they were very Australian about it they said yeah no worries we'll we'll handle it no problem after an hour the spider was still there so I decided to capture it myself so we we took a boxes like that we had with us and it was very you know very scared and trying to capture that spider in the box and just make sure to put it somewhere uh so that was like I mean it puts things in perspective because I'm I'm very tall the spider is very small but it can you know it can hurt me any > (6:38:56) second so when I try to get it away so that the area was safer children to play at in um so there are a few stories like that but I mean it's it's not as bad as as you make it because these are the stories that you tell right but it's a nice place it's a very nice place so I I if I get a chance I will go back because it's it's very nice so I'm from Phoenix and we have scorpions same thing everyone's oh my God you have a scorpion what do you do and I'm like dude scorpions are > (6:39:27) annoying yeah that's it yeah you know they're just creepy looking but I mean the deadly spider will kill you though right so if if not treated then depending on your weight and your height it can kill you yeah but it's it's those are fun things to say at parties but the chances of it killing you is still low so yeah there's no there's no worries but you do have to take you you do have to you know take it out of sight so that people don't accidentally trip on it and it gets angry that would that would not be a > (6:39:59) good plan too funny so when did you get in to Athens uh we got in here a couple of days ago actually so we already had some time to explore um yeah just wander around the city yeah yeah awesome and are you going to be heading up parties and things tonight uh yes there is a party organized by freemius yeah for um several product people so people that create teams or plugins so they're kind of my peers and colleagues yeah um so that's a very nice thing to do at freemius to organize that party because there will be a lot of you know people > (6:40:37) with the same interests in the same place right so I'll be I'll be definitely I'll definitely be going to that yeah now earlier you said you're a bit on the introverted side yes so will you stick to one party tonight I might two but the the problem is word Camp is too short it's only two days and so a lot of parties are at the same time so you have to make it work to go from one place to the other so it's it's kind of depend on you know how one party goes if I can go to another one right but uh > (6:41:05) maybe maybe yeah I have my eye on a few but we'll see how I don't I don't want to rush it just for the sake of going everywhere so we'll just see how it goes and I've done that before in word Camp US 29 19 I went to eight you went to eight parties eight on two days one oh one day one night one night I did eight and was that still fun I wouldn't recommend and I've not done it ever since so there's a bit of a competitive spirit in me where I want to see everybody you want to love everybody > (6:41:36) so then I go to all of it yeah so we'll see if I hit four tonight is that is that the goal or is that okay okay all right so are you speaking or volunteering this uh no um I I'm a bit of too much of an introvert to speak in one of the tracks I think because it's a bit daunting like this is as far as I'll go an interview um uh so I'm not speaking uh also not volunteering although I'm I might do that or I might sponsor next year I'm really looking into sponsoring yeah because that seems fun like a lot of a > (6:42:15) lot of the experiences of word Camp actually happens in like you know the main Square where all the booths are and where everyone's talking yes exactly that's where the networking and everything happens so I I might want to see what it's like to be part of it from a sponsoring point of view so yeah something to think about for next year right yeah I know absolutely so what's your plan for tomorrow planned for tomorrow is probably just to hang around here try and do some networking in the hallway track yeah uh > (6:42:49) see some people visit the woocommerce booth uh just to talk to them about product updates just to see what they have on the roadmap because this is I mean this is the only time I get to speak to people in real life right they have a slack Channel and WordPress has a slack Channel but it's still different too oh absolutely to be here and to talk to people so I think I'll be doing more of that just talking but yeah that's that's really what it's all about and that's what I love about it just connecting with the community > (6:43:19) seeing who's here and and seeing who I know or from Twitter mostly and then yeah and then talking to them and and you know getting to know them in real life yeah that's what it's all about do you ever catch any sessions yes I do I do catch a few but um like I'm not planning in advance like I want to go to this session or this session it depends on where I'm at during the day because like for me the hallway track is the main thing of the event and then I will fill it up with sessions here and there > (6:43:49) um but there's nothing that I plan like I don't have an agenda like I want to go to this session or that session right that's uh no I'm not a I'm not a planning person per se so uh I will never try and plan anything and we'll see where it goes and right I'm very similar actually so we share that I am extroverted but I am almost always in the hallway track talking with people throwing my voice away but it's so much fun it is it really is yeah do you have any kids no no good for > (6:44:20) you no kids are great I have kids but okay this are your kids with you here because there's a kids camp too right there's okay yeah no I wish I love that I love that they brought some babysitting for kids yeah that's awesome yeah well thank you so much for being on you've been wonderful and I'm glad you have we're good thank you very much that was awesome that was perfect foreign foreign > (6:47:12) thank you so welcome to the second round of the lightning talks so once again uh lightning talks at the 15 minutes long there are no time for questions but you can ask our speakers uh all the questions after so we're opening up with uh Ivan my brother from Bulgaria and he will talk on How can any website benefit from WordPress uh editing experience text thanks to Gutenberg Ivan a big round of applause please hello thank you everyone for coming thank you Milan for the introduction I can't really express my gratitude to be > (6:47:54) here a year later after being here in Porto so thank you very much for again attending today I will try to put some light on How can any website benefit from WordPress editing experience thanks to Gutenberg so let's start and let's take my remote because I definitely need it so a quick presentation about myself I am CEO of vibe Studio it's a WordPress Agency for Enterprise development and custom coding I have been doing web development since 2003 and my first touch to Wordpress was six years later in 2009 > (6:48:37) through the years I have worked on roughly thousands and many more websites and the clients of our companies company is from four different continents despite its lightning session I would like to spare a moment to thanks my team because without them this topic and this presentation won't be possible in general so let's take a moment to recognize the team efforts to my best Yvonne Village thanks you can meet them in the hall and let's say hi um we'll quickly do a topic overview so we can be aware what are we going to > (6:49:14) talk about we are going to revise the WordPress editing experience and how it is superior than any other online editing we'll take a brief look at the WordPress Builders and also the power and importance of Gutenberg also we'll see the challenges for non-cms websites or any online app and online application in general and their inflexibility compared to Wordpress but also how they can still benefit from WordPress all of the Enterprises mobile apps third-part web apps everyone or we'll see how Gutenberg comes to the > (6:49:54) rescue and makes this all possible and finally take a look of the life cycle of such process so we are all familiar with WordPress editing experience and it is unparalleled to any other editor there we all know that we use WordPress because it is super user friendly back in the days when Vibe Studio got its first clients the one of my selling points was that using Wordpress for editing your website it's no harder than just managing a text document and this is all the skills you need to maintain the content > (6:50:33) I still believe this is one of the main advantages of using Wordpress the other advantages we are all familiar it is that WordPress is super SEO friendly and it is loved by these search engines and in the last years I think a lot of efforts have been added to make WordPress also accessibility to improve the accessibility of how the WordPress products are used which is super important nowadays and finally last but not least is the community and support we all know that the reason WordPress is great is the community itself and if you > (6:51:10) have any question how to use it you can find the answer easily by the community um to expand the topic in order to make the word presenting experience even greater there are a lot of what you see is what you get Builders we all know them they are super famous you can see most of them outside the house and they all provide great editing experience so we can't argue that they're improving with the time it is superb however um I'm pretty sure there are a lot of Star Wars fans here we all know that Darth Vader is the strongest but he > (6:51:47) can't basically lives without his mask and I think it's the same with most of the builders which are acting as third-party Builders they can't live without WordPress however Gutenberg who is Inaugural part of Wordpress is um fully it can provide content to any other system because it is generating HTML it relies on full independency from the additional post meta data tables of Depot storage in the traditional WordPress architecture and also Gutenberg as a system is working natively it is not so required to > (6:52:27) install an additional plugin in order to have Gutenberg it just works it even can be disabled but it's another topic when it comes to managing WordPress website content in general not just WordPress we need to take a look that for the non-cms websites or any online based application in general there are a lot of challenges for example those non-cms online applications lacks the ability to do layout changes quickly lacks the ability to manage the admin area they lack the ability to create some new landing pages quickly and whenever the > (6:53:12) marketing team needs to react quickly and efficiently they are not able to do it without the help of a word of a developer who can help them to make even the smallest changes um in my career I have even seized that some Enterprise websites who are customly built in order to make a marketing campaign they are building um subdomain web page that is connected with some cname records to third-part services that are allowing full website editing which I think is not that um it's not making the results that needs to be achieved it's not working > (6:53:51) natively you're disconnected with your website structure it basically creates more issues rather than Solutions however Enterprises and non-cms WordPress webs no CMS websites in general sorry or online applications in general they can still benefit from WordPress and this is called thankfully to Gutenberg Gutenberg can comes to the rescue for all of those websites and online apps we all know the motto from for the 20th anniversary of Wordpress it is called from blocks to blocks and it's I can't total I can't agree more we all know > (6:54:31) that Gutenberg allows us to divide the content to individual blocks and each of these blocks can represent any different type of content like text image video or whatever visual representation of our website monetizes and communicates with the clients who are in the website on the top of that blocks can be easily moved edited they can be styled they can be basically reused and even repeated on the same page so this is all possible through Gutenberg what is uh the biggest advantage of Gutenberg is not the flexibility of > (6:55:15) editing because this is something that is presented by other web Builders as well it is how it actually saves and generates the content and the data when it comes to the development side of the things and we can separate this into five different points it is that Gutenberg provides simplified data management it is the portability and compatibility of Gutenberg it is a factor that benefits with search engine optimization it is that Gutenberg provides future-proof content and last but not least is the performance and speed > (6:55:55) so when it comes to data management Gutenberg stores the data in the database in the form of HTML which is a universal language and it is understood by all web browsers and no web applications it is universal across no matter if you're using Wordpress an on WordPress website online app or whatever they all can read HTML this contrasts with certain plugins that store data as metadata and basically it only makes sense if you're using the plugin and if you want to use it outside of the concept of this plugin you need > (6:56:33) to code a lot more because it is not um Universal when it comes to portability and compatibility as we mentioned the usage of HTML basically allows this provided content to be used everywhere and on the top of that when it comes to search engine optimization HTML is super easy to read it is what the search engines requires and this allows the website to be read also it is super future proof and durable because HTML is likely to remain it's even likely to improve but the skeleton in the base will be basically > (6:57:15) unchanged on the other hand metadata can become obsolete last but not least HTML is typically quicker to load than metadata tables and it can lead to improved site performance um generating the content with Gutenberg basically requires a technology to pass these contents to the third-party application to the non-cms website happily we have different options to do that when it comes to Wordpress those different options can be separated two of them can be a rest API and graphql in order to compare them rest API its > (6:57:58) biggest Advantage is that it is supported by default in WordPress it provides all of the data regarding a single poster page into Universal Json format it is super well documented and if we can find a disadvantage is that it relies on many endpoints on the other hand graphql it is supported but with an additional plugin it outputs the data data in an SQL like format it is also well documented but it requires a lot more digging and the bigger but the biggest advantage that is way in front of rest API is that it relies on a single endpoint which is > (6:58:42) important for your development path um in order to see in um in fact how such a setup can look we can take a look at the life cycle of um such structure so most importantly we need first when when let's say we have an ocms website it is let's say for a highly Enterprise and we can't afford to use non-custom websites but our marketing team still needs the ability to change the data and to upload landing pages whenever they need so this is what the possibility life cycle of the app can look using Wordpress first we need > (6:59:22) to create the predefined blocks which for the process let's say the UI in the ux team they are designing the different set of blocks we are going to use in our websites and then the developers are coding them into Gutenberg blocks the second step is that the marketing team starts working with those blocks so every page that is on the non-cms website is presented on WordPress and they can basically change the content to reuse those blocks and just call a block that they need reorder the design as the content text and images and just saves > (6:59:57) it they can choose their colors they are text whatever finally the developers using the technologies that we showed in the previous slide rest API rest API or open graph they use those to pass the data to the third party site or app and they code it in a way whenever a new call a new content is made this to be immediately represented on the third party application in order to conclude all of this I believe that the flexibility of Wordpress editing eventually and also the evolution of other Technologies and other coding languages different than > (7:00:37) PHP it is possible that ultimately the main products of what WordPress is about it's not itself the WordPress as a Core 2 but the editing experience that is provided by the Gutenberg as a solely tool I believe this is what WordPress can still benefit rocking in front of other technologies that are available on the market and not only keep its percentage of usage but also increase it at some point of course this is just a suggestion um I'm sure that whatever happens in future the the community that is in > (7:01:17) front of us and the WordPress Community you just face it and we'll we will benefit in the ultimate way possible that's it from me thank you very much for your attention thank you thank you even we have a small gift for you thank you very much thank you thank you another round of applause for even thank you our second speaker is the first time working speaker and he comes from Germany and I need to read this fun fact so whenever someone reaches out to the simply static team I think about adding my dog to the website as the company CEO > (7:01:57) sometimes we even have strategic meetings together but he's pretty picky about adding new features so a huge round of applause for Patrick Patrick please grab the remote oh okay this is yours as well let's see that's a pretty big stage cool hello everyone this thing ah okay what perfect so yeah welcome everyone um I want to give you a quick introduction to running a static WordPress website um let me quickly introduce myself a little bit further and there are not that many bullet points here but after > (7:02:46) that's fine so I'm a WordPress developer since 2010 and I'm also the developer behind simply static which is a static site generator plugin for WordPress we will see a quick view into it in a minute um I'm also a solopreneur which means I'm running a plug-in business full-time selling maintaining building plugins and so on so yeah let's get started with static WordPress so yeah the start is pretty obviously so we have to make our WordPress website static what means static um we take our Dynamic WordPress website > (7:03:23) and make convert it back into HTML CSS JavaScript and obviously your image files pretty much like 1999 but in a good way so I built this little plugin called simply static you can see a screenshot on the right hand side of the screen and the generation process is pretty much straightforward so you can install it for free from the WordPress or from Power repository activated go to Simply static generator and there's a big purple button label generate static files right you can click on it and the process starts running > (7:03:58) depending on the size of the website that might take a while so I would suggest for testing purposes you might take a a little bit um is is not a simpler website to get started once the process is finished you will get the download link where you can click on and it will download the zip file containing all the static files so Next Step let's talk about hosting um it's a little bit different compared to what you might be used to when it comes to traditional WordPress hosting because you don't need an actual > (7:04:34) database and you probably don't even need to have WordPress hosted somewhere and that use like something like local WP um so where do you host my static website well that depends a little bit on how familiar you are with certain concepts for example GitHub so if you are familiar with GitHub and you know the basics to upload your files to a GitHub repository and connect it I would suggest using GitHub Pages or cloudflare Pages let's see two two at the top because they are free they are pretty powerful and you get a lot out of the > (7:05:14) box without having to worry about things like caching and so on um if you are familiar with GitHub and you're looking for the quickest way to get started I would suggest starting with netlify netlify provides a little drag and drop zip uploader where you can simply drag and drop the zipline you got from Simply static and upload it to netlify and to immediately you get your static website running on a temporary domain that you can use you can always switch on your preferred domain later if you're a fan of traditional > (7:05:47) deployment which means using SFTP and copying over your files you can do that as well the both the two most popular options here are digital ocean spaces and obviously Amazon S3 so now that we have a static version of our website and we have probably already deployed it to a hosting provider let's take a quick look at some Dynamic features and how we can make them work on a static WordPress website so yeah pretty much every website these days has some kind of form be it a contact form or a newsletter sign up and > (7:06:27) you still want to use like a contact form on your static website sure so there are different ways you can handle that there are external tools you can use but in my talk I'd like to prove I like to stay to Wordpress as close as possible so we're using contact form 7 there's a free plugin available for contact form 7 which is called cf72 webhook that you can use to offload the submissive data from the form the user has submitted on the front end to an external webhook a pretty popular service you might already know is zapier > (7:07:04) zapier is like an no code automation tool and you can send off the the data from the contact form to zapier and in the API you can configure get all the data converted to an email and send it to me so this way your traditional WordPress website isn't involved anymore in the steps and you can still use and start style and modify your form based on contact form 7 as you already used to the next popular thing is search so the traditional WordPress search works with PHP and UL parameters and both will not work on our static > (7:07:43) website so we need some kind of replacement why there are a lot of different tools in the for the use case and some of them are pretty powerful and some of them are simpler I chose the simplest one which is Google custom search engine Google custom search engine is like a little external tool you can sign up for free and you get like a little API key that you can use and in combination with the plug-in mentioned WP Google search the only thing you have to do is copy in the API key and save the settings and you get a shortcode and returns that you > (7:08:17) can place anywhere on the web on your website and it will render a little search box already available with auto suggest so once a user types something in search results will pop up if it hits enter or clicks on the little search I can provide it it will open my pop-up which contains search results from Google but limited to your own domain which is important because you don't want your competitors in the in your own search results right so yeah that's pretty much the second important part now we have > (7:08:51) covered the basics and you probably have a question on your mind why the hell should I use a static website so why the extra effort and what are the benefits so let's quickly cover them one thing that a lot of people already know is that static WordPress websites are pretty fast that's because there is no database interaction there's no Dynamic processing everything is already generated and we just deliver the static file and optimized assets to the user or to the user's browser so speed is obvious but the impact on the > (7:09:29) performance is even higher if you compare it to a bigger web site let's say you have traditional Business website but translated into seven languages depending on the Plugin or on the on the framework you have used to do that that might take some time for the user to get the translated page so to speed that up we can pre- pre-generate on pre-convert the HTML efforts for each language and once the user switch the language he automatically gets a translated HTML page back and that is a lot faster than compared to a traditional multilingual > (7:10:12) website even with a powerful caching and some kind of Premium hosting another important benefit for me even more important than speed but I know everything everyone is kind of hyped about performance it's security so aesthetic website is almost unhackable why yeah because a hacker doesn't have any export vectors that you can use to inject malicious code into your website or try to inject some additional Styles or whatsoever so because your website is static and your database and WordPress is either offline or protected behind basic > (7:10:54) of end or a firewall a hacker will have a pretty hard time to do anything relevant to your website as long as it's static um the third point and I'm sure you agree with me is maintenance so updating the WordPress website can be a pretty daunting task especially if it's not your main business let's say the average business with a website how often do people take care of updates there are several plug-in security updates each week there are multiple WordPress updates each year maybe your themes updated each month who knows so > (7:11:33) it's cool if everything works as expected if you click update but that's not always the case so if you have a static website you have like a snapshot and time so you have your static website running no matter what happens it will remain unchanged on the other side you have your WordPress website which is now practically a free staging environment for you to update to test to do whatever you want and only if you're happy with the results and you have tested everything you will update the static website and get the updated changes to > (7:12:08) your official websites so to say there are a couple of other benefits I tried to keep a choice um one I like to mention is cost reduction so I'm sure we can argue about that but I would say premium WordPress hosting is kind of expensive um especially if you want something secure reliable automated backups done for you so compared to that static hosting is insanely cheap so we're talking about depending on the website site and service about one Euro or dollar per month or even per year depending on the traffic the side of the the size of the > (7:12:55) website the amount of pages and so on um another thing it's not really a benefit but a question I often get is the difference between headless and static WordPress headless WordPress often use jamstack which requires to rebuild your existing website or built a new design based on the modern JavaScript framework like react or vue. > (7:13:21) js oswaltio whatever Wireless static WordPress is a static replication of your existing website so you will still use your existing tools your existing theme your existing plugins you may have to adjust one or the or another but all in all it's your WordPress website replicated as a static one that you can use right away without any technical requirements involved so that's all from me um one thing I like to note is sadly I missed two as a download link to the presentation I collected a pretty detailed page containing all kinds of > (7:14:03) tutorials and additional links and resources I will share that in the middle on Twitter but if you see me running around there's a QR code on my back you can scan that and there is a link to the resource page where you can download the presentation and also additional information so that's all from me thanks for attention and have a good day Patrick don't go just yet don't go just yet we have a small present for you there it is thank you thank you another round of applause Patrick you heard about our next speaker in the > (7:14:42) opening remarks um we weren't sure about the detail that he is the youngest speaker ever at the work appearance but he is he is and huge Rondo Applause so in advance and apologizing for butchering your name I'm gonna really try really hard but just you know in Spanish your teacher so yeah that's even worse that's even worse from my pronunciation so yeah it's good oh that's good so uh a huge round of applause for tiho he's going to talk us about what the 16 can do and how can we get involved in the > (7:15:16) WordPress right so make sure to yeah again I'm butchering your decision something like that I apologize so make sure to grab your clicker and another huge round of applause please well hello everybody and welcome to my talk thank you for coming um uh yeah there it is um today I'm going to talk about tomorrow's generation's perspective on WordPress my name is Tico de Falk I'm 16 years old and I still attend high school I've worked at Yost for three years as a sport engineer and besides that this year I started my > (7:16:02) own web development agency but let's let's dive a little deeper into my childhood I like to say that I grew up in WordPress as I'm a WordPress kid my parents are Jose Falk and Marika Von The Rock who owned the company yoast until about two years ago um so all my vocations existed of me going to the Google offices and me having to walk around in Legoland with my yo shirt on you could say that I was tortured with WordPress I once wanted to try out a different CMS and my parents found out about it I didn't get any food for the rest of > (7:16:47) the week that's a joke I love my parents um but one what I want to say is even though I grew up with WordPress there are still some things that I don't like or that I think can be done better so what do people my age think of Wordpress support this I've done a small survey amongst my peers and people in my Social Circle which I'll get back to during this presentation in this presentation I'll talk about three reasons why WordPress fails to appeal to young people firstly being at WordPress is not > (7:17:28) focused WordPress marketing it's not focused on young people and secondly WordPress is hard to get started with certainly WordPress does not look appealing or as appealing as its competitors so as I just mentioned I did a small survey amongst people my age and I asked them to check the books boxes of the logos that they recognize two of these logos were WordPress and Shopify um yeah almost 60 percent of the people I surveyed were they recognized WordPress which I think was quite a lot this does not mean that they know what it is > (7:18:12) they just recognize the logo but now the thing that I found weird is the exact same amount of people recognized Shopify which is weird right because we're much bigger so they should recognize us more so why is that well as we're aware young people don't use the same social media as old people do WordPress and social media networks mainly on Twitter newsletters Facebook I guess I don't know I don't have Facebook um while young people use YouTube Tick Tock Snapchat Instagram and we know that influences are really important > (7:18:56) a study done by HubSpot shows that one in three gen zias has bought something recommended to them by an influencer in the past three months so coming back to that question why did the same amount of people recognize Shopify as they did WordPress it's because Shopify does Market young people this is a screenshot from a video from Mr Beast if you don't know who he is I hate to break to you you're old foreign this is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world this moment he has over 155 million subscribers and > (7:19:42) almost 40 billion views across all of his channels this guy's big in this particular video he traveled to Antarctica where he went to the middle of nowhere he started to climb a mountain for six hours he got to the top and he named it Shopify which I think is an insane marketing stunt because this mountain is now actually called Shopify so I think we WordPress should should do something like this as well moving on to my second Point WordPress is hard to get started with I and I'm sorry this is what you see > (7:20:25) when you start a WordPress site welcome to Wordpress thanks I can learn more about the newest version why would I want to do that my site health status is it sick already what happened I can create a quick draft why would I want to do that and I can attend an event yeah never do that uh so it's not clear what to do it's chaotic well our competitors they do have a clear startup path if we take a look at Shopify for example you don't this is not even the first thing that you see this screenshot you first see you first get some questions > (7:21:08) about the kind of site to run and based on that you get this setup guide Shopify will help you set up your site to help you add your first product to help you customize your online store they'll help you personalize your own store the same goes for Wix to do the same thing you get some steps and it'll help you customize your store if I wasn't forced to work with WordPress I would have quit right here because oh yeah it's not clear how to get started you'd rather have something like Shopify wix > (7:21:51) and this correlates with my third point workplace is not that flashy it doesn't look as appealing as a competitors it's over you could say so as I mentioned before I did a small survey amongst my peers and I also showed them three uh screenshots of different interfaces one of Shopify one of Wix and one of Wordpress and as I expected 75 of people liked the Wix or Shopify interface better than WordPress but how could we fix this right because we want to and we should well recently woocommerce released who > (7:22:40) Express which I think is a great solution for this it looks cleaner looks it's not it's a lot nicer to work with I feel like and it helps you set up your site so it solves the setup guide issue as well but that's only for woocommerce right so how we solve this for the entirety of Wordpress extendify it's a good solution for that extendify helps users onboard that were precise identify sales to hosts I think they're here at the conference right now so go ahead and talk to them but they make it easier to get started > (7:23:21) with your WordPress site which is something we should look into so now what I've mentioned a couple of solutions already but let's let's get them straight once again we should start with social media that is focused on young people social media like Tick Tock face no not Facebook Tick Tock Snapchat Instagram and YouTube and we should collaborate with influences to promote the WordPress brand then we should make WordPress easier to work with with Solutions like Works press and extendify which will make it more appealing to a young > (7:24:09) audience but we can make it more appealing but we also have to get the brand known because apparently the same amount of people know Shopify so we should fix that as well and to do that we shouldn't keep promoting our own Brands we should all collaborate and promote WordPress together a good example of this was a couple weeks ago when wordpressed in 20 years old yeah I know big four years older than me um and we all the big Brands celebrated WordPress they didn't celebrate themselves they celebrated WordPress > (7:24:51) and this is one of the big advantages that Shopify and Wix have over us they are one brand they are one company they make all the money which means they can spend whatever they want on Advertising well we we can't do that so we have to collaborate and do the marketing together which means we all have to become the WordPress marketing team and we might end up with a mountain called WordPress as well [Applause] thank you thank you so much I just followed Mr Beast I just followed it this is again this is again thank you so much so much thank > (7:25:41) you so much called me old and taco as well I saw the Tweet buddy I saw the Tweet so we gonna take a short break and then we continue at five just you know uh they just told me that I should tell you that there's a day two tomorrow just say no that I need to remind you that there is a day two tomorrow and with more talks more panels and more interesting talks swags whatever so just so you know there's a day two as well So yeah thank you thank you so much it's tomorrow that's why it's called > (7:26:16) yeah so confusing so confusing So yeah thank you so much we continue here at five like in 19 minutes thank you hello from World Camp Europe 2023 we are > (7:30:05) in Athens broadcasting live and we hope that you are having an amazing time even if you didn't make it to the event so we are sending hacks to our virtual friends over there I hope you're all doing great and I wanted to say hi I am evangelia I am one of the global lead organizers this year and I am Greek so with me today I have SEMA America and she is one of our media supporters and we're gonna discuss her involvement as a media supporter with Worldcom Europe hello welcome hi thank you so much so I would like to ask you uh is this > (7:30:44) your first time that you are a media supporter for working Europe it is not my first time I was able to be a media supporter for word camp in Porto last year but last year was actually my first world camp and first word Camp as media supporter but this year is is still a bit different so it feels like a first that must be like a crazy experience first time welcome Europe and first time immediate supporter a little overwhelming yeah okay okay so uh how did you decide to apply last year as a media supporter you know it actually was > (7:31:18) not very planned we saw it that you were like calling for media supporter and we had this Blog the publishing blog and it's in Sherman and we were not sure if that was a fit for word camp but because there was an application and because people would like tell you to do it we thought well let's let's just ask them if they think we're a good fit and it actually worked so we got picked and I was very nervous about that but I loved it um yeah so which is I think it was at first it was a stupid idea but it ended > (7:31:53) up really being also good for our Blog and Good for for the our readers to to get to know what's happening at World camp and how things are evolving in Porto so Samaya you're basically behind publishing.blog and your experience last year helped you apply again this year as a media supporter what made you made you take the decision for a second time well it was obvious that we were going to go to word Camp Europe so we thought why not apply again also we love that you are being supported to find people to > (7:32:29) interview so there's this guy shout out to Mike who helps me find the right people to interview who helps me schedule the dates or find rooms find quiet places which is not easy here so um yeah it's it was really we felt supported so we felt that that was a good way to take place um or to be here yeah um also I think like since since covet is over and more people are starting to come here I think it's a good way to get people to know the word Camp so it's also a personal interest for me to getting people to to know what's Worth > (7:33:05) Camp and coming in and yeah coming back to how many years have you been with the WordPress Community oh um that's a good question actually so my first word Camp Europe was Porto so like the in person um Community was two or three years but I actually started just before covet hit so I was a long time Community member but just online yeah I'm really glad that you found a PR team really helpful and supportive to be honest for the years I have been with the peer team and also this year uh I think they are kind > (7:33:44) of a superheroes for sharing our news out there as per Worldcom Europe every year so more ears and more eyes get to find out what's going on and I guess this is the first time you're being interviewed because usually the media supporter or media partner is the one conducting the interviews does it feel any strange uh yeah it does I would like to ask you some questions though oh maybe we can reverse the roles yeah let's do it so uh how long have you been doing that uh organizing yeah well as a local organizer I started with a Greek > (7:34:21) Community back in 2015 and as per World Cup Europe I think my first organizing experience was Berlin 2019. so you have a lot more experience than I have then well you will have that experience in a few years too I hope so I wanted to ask you uh because you mentioned that you're you've been a Community member for a while but your world-camp experience is fairly new did you feel intimidated being um let's say a newcomer in order to participate as a media supporter or even as an attendee to the event > (7:34:58) I think you could say that also because I was not used to in-person events so every Meetup I had attended or almost every Meetup I had attended every local World Camp I had attended was online so wordcamp was my first local like in-person event ever for WordPress so it was quite intimidating I was happy that I was not alone so I had some people around me that have had been at events in person so bring your friends that's my reason the one um advice I can give but also the community is so welcoming so it's really intimidating for the > (7:35:34) first five minutes and then it's not how did you find uh the two experiences you had so far Worldcom Europe in Porto and Worldcom Europe in Athens do you see any difference between the three vans uh yeah obviously the heat um we planned for Portugal we we thought that it would be warm and stuff but it wasn't kind of and Athens was really warm but that's I think that's the only difference I mean the the things that stayed are the good things the many people the people you get to meet um I also think that this layout here of > (7:36:11) the location is really good like you can walk around and meet people everywhere you can grab a coffee everywhere which is very important for me so I think the location is really good but also it's it's a word Camp it's it's supposed to be a same every year a bit well yeah the concept behind the events should stay always the same um I wanted also to ask you what do you think you're gonna have in mind next year uh when somebody says World Cup Europe in Athens um well that's a good question I know it > (7:36:46) might be you know just a little bit early to ask about this since the event is practically ending tomorrow but is there something that you saw and witnessed this year that made your experience extraordinary you know something that struck me this year was how close we as a WordPress Community are to to the things that we need to address so we are talking a lot about AI we are talking a lot about accessibility we're talking a lot about how we can talk to no coders low coders and I think those are all subjects that > (7:37:17) we should touch on and we do and that's something that struck me this year um especially to like see and understand how we as a Workforce Community or the organizers the content team they managed to to find the right subjects to address and that was the one thing that stuck with me until now but maybe I can tell you a different story tomorrow so basically so far it is the content of the event that uh gave you you know something uh extraordinary um is there something that you would like to see getting changed in Worldcom > (7:37:50) Europe evolving for something better for example or a suggestion or a tip that you would like to give to the organizers um no I mean world Camp is great I maybe workshops I I think there's there's many but there could be more um and also I love that I heard about the kids workshop and also me as a young person I'm only 23 I I think we could do more further youth um so maybe that that's one thing but I don't have a fixed idea of what we could do but I would definitely love to see that next year something that we do for > (7:38:26) the younger generation coming into WordPress as a media supporter how do you select the content that you would like to uh get out there like for example how do you select the people that you would like to interview yeah um that's a good question I looked at the schedule obviously and I looked who's here and um yeah we got to meet some people but it's also sometimes just a question of who's ready to meet you like who has the time but there's also plenty of people you can meet when you just walk around I > (7:38:57) just bumped into somebody from yoast we got to do an interview with them tomorrow so walking around is just a great way to to plan and maybe not plan too much ahead so yeah things evolve you you realize oh that's maybe an interesting subject that's something we could touch on and obviously I'm trying to not forget the people that couldn't come to work on Bureau so I posted the live stream stuff which you are doing so um that's also important for us is there a specific topic a specific talk that > (7:39:28) you have already watched or that you're looking forward towards today or tomorrow um just before I came here I was in the talk of tickle the walk the the young guy let's say and I was I was struck uh to see him being so young and so also enthusiastic I would say about WordPress but also very honest and that's the kind of talks I love but also the panel discussions have been really great I watched the one with AI and I found it very interesting like seeing AI really put to use in a good way already yeah > (7:40:04) yeah practically New Generation I mean he is only 16 years old that's so true he's almost 10 years younger than I am not compare myself how I was when I was 16 years old that's how uh how he is so it's amazing amazing and basically I guess we're going to be seeing him a lot in the future I mean if he's 16 he has a lot more years to be with the community um is there something that you saw in Athens these days that would make you come back here have you roamed around the city or anything like that I have > (7:40:40) been here since May 29th we were at a location and I have to say the food I mean it's so obvious but it's so good I I ate way too much to take you and I I love the food um we have Greek friends at home and I knew that the food was going to be good but I didn't realize it was going to be this good so yeah I I'm gonna have to stick to the food well I'm afraid there is a reason the Greeks are always hungry yeah I assume and maybe there is also a reason why this year instead of a normal wapu we have uh a > (7:41:14) hero pool definitely definitely is also an all-time classic for the Greeks too it's not only for people that come to our country um so it's not your first time in Athens would you suggest something else except for the food for someone that visits first time um yeah I what I loved most we took many walks through the city and we just stopped where we felt like stopping and I can definitely like tell people when you're coming from a big city walking maybe it doesn't feel um the most obvious thing to do but just > (7:41:51) walking through the city we found the best spaces to eat to stay to chill and that would be a tip I think if you come to Athens just walk around and see what do you find and then the obvious thing is Acropolis Hill it's just stunning what are the plans for your blog and you're working with the WordPress Community for the future um so we are not worthless exclusively so um we try to touch on many different subjects and what I like to do is is connect WordPress with the other Trends going on in the WordPress industry so AI > (7:42:31) is a big subject we are touching on and also I think one of the big subjects for WordPress will be Gutenberg phase three because we have many publishing companies reading our blog and collaboration is so important to them so that's the next phase of Gutenberg and I'll be very excited to blog about it to make YouTube videos about it and to see yeah what what's coming next update videos are something that people apparently love and I love it as well is there a message you would like to give to our virtual attendees that are > (7:43:04) watching us live from their home or their office at the moment uh yeah have a good time at wordcamp grab some satsiki at home I mean everyone has yogurt and for next time if you can come come to word camp in person it's so different it's so much better in my opinion so if as soon as you know where and when wordcamp Europe is next year just grab a ticket if you can that's very nice and I want to thank simea for being here with me today it's always exciting to see different aspects of the event and also how people are > (7:43:40) part of it people that you haven't seen um on the stage or you don't know they are working on the backstage so thank you very much for being here with me I appreciate so much your efforts and your time and we're gonna see you all afterwards after the next topic we're gonna have another time slot for live stream studio with another interesting person joining us stay tuned of today we have from UK we had an > (7:47:12) amazing speaker who's going to talk about the code review sorry the art of the cult review a big round of applause for team Nash foreign I told someone earlier today there was going to be five people in my talk there's at least six of you which is a little disconcerting I would say to ask you how many of you actually are here voluntarily or versus how many of you your boss told you you had to come uh if you do I'm going to try and make it as interesting as possible if you're being forced to I could also do if it's > (7:47:52) like today so today I want to talk to you about code reviews and possibly the Dulles subject on the board but a really really important one and I want to start off with a cautionary tale well just a tail just to set the scene many years ago there was a younger version of me he wasn't his dashing and he was rather small Dev agency and we wrote a plugin this was a long time ago this was at the point when if you were writing a commercial WordPress plugin you came to an event like this you got food some of you are so young you don't > (7:48:36) actually remember these times and we wrote this some code and it wasn't for a membership plugin and we were writing some code to deal with refunds now if you've ever had to write any code to do with anything to do with pricing you can imagine where this is going to go but with refunds it's a particularly interesting problem you have a membership site and let's say that you have refunds for you someone signs up for 12 months they have three months and you want to pro-rata that refund that doesn't sound too complicated > (7:49:10) you start writing the code you start finding the edge cases then someone says yes but we have groups because the plugin allowed for you to have groups and you could have members and extra people could join the package so halfway through five new people came in and therefore the value changed so now you have to refund based on that but from this time point over here okay we can do this more code gets changed then somebody says I'm still running on a 32-bit system and actually this whole process was set for 99 years and so it > (7:49:48) doesn't matter about the refund because all my all the expiry dates saying something in 1970 and so when I refunded them what I actually did was direct debited them for nearly 40 years okay that's a new Edge case when you write it in by the end of an iterative cycle of what felt like decades but was in fact only a few weeks we had code it was perfect well I say perfect if you looked at it you would have said it is horrible it is a mess it doesn't make sense it really doesn't make any sense there are > (7:50:33) code comments in there but they're basically talking about developers pain not necessarily about what it does it got to the point where I was like okay it works we're going to put it to one side a few months later new developer comes on board they look at that code code is horrible it does it looks like this it does this it's not it's all right he starts to have a go at fixing it because in his mind it's broken he fails he makes no progress whatsoever and he just admits defeat in fact some new comments have been added to the code > (7:51:11) with the levels of pain that he's affected this happened for many years we ran this code was in the code base for about four or five years and by the end of it it had a comment at the top that said here be dragons and it was signed by each one of us that we would honestly never touch this code again because it was so bad that your head would blow up the thing was and the thing that young me never got it worked it always worked it was ugly it was horrible it hadn't hurt your head but it worked we should never have touched that > (7:51:54) code again we should have written some tests to make sure it constantly worked but then we should have left it alone but we couldn't because as developers we like pretty things and we like things to be our way we like to feel like the things are working well and feel and feelings are an odd thing for me to say about something that's so logical yeah so much about code is about how we feel throughout this the reason I started with this talk with that was because if only at some point we'd done some proper code reviews some of this could > (7:52:31) have been solved if only we'd really grasp the concepts of what's behind a code review whether it's informal or formal we might have got there so I think we then have to ask the question what is a code review and of course what I did when I thought about this entire doing this talk was I'll go to Wikipedia and they say something like that a code review is a software quality assurance activity in which one or several people check a program mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code and > (7:53:01) they do so after the implementation or an interruption of implementation this has clearly been written by a project manager who likes to go on Wikipedia no developer has ever said this so let's think about probably a more accurate reflection of what most people think of a code review I think it's more likely where we pick it's a code review is where we pick developers in a fight to the deaf over which Hill they wish to stand on I like to think it involves lions but it doesn't have to you know if your > (7:53:34) company is not comfortable with lions or you may be you're not a cat person maybe you would like wolves it's totally fine with me the thing is a code review often comes across as adversarial we often think of them as uh I'm being judged I'm being tested and of course that's the last thing we want to do we don't want to have people feeling like they're judged and tested and there are so many ways to do a code review and we can hide the fact that it's even a code review in first place in fact lots of what you > (7:54:04) will be doing every single day whenever you talk to somebody about their job as their writing code can be a code review so maybe rather than asking what is a code review let's think about why we might do a code review in some way so why do we do code reviews well the first one is because we might have to um somebody might have said hey we have a specification and you must meet it whether that's PCI DSS whether it's something to do with gdpr whether that's something to do with like if you're in > (7:54:38) the UK and you have to do anything with the NHS with Medical Services they have a specific standard and they often say your code must be audited to meet this somebody else is saying You must do this that's perfectly fine and by the way you have every right to be grumpy about it because it's not your choice it's somebody else that's being set upon you that's annoying that's fine you still have to do it that's one reason we might have a code review the second one is we might be required > (7:55:05) to meet some sort of Standards internally um and that could be a coding style that could be we have a set of how we do certain things how we have certain tests set up how what certain design patterns we might be using and those things are done from our internal perspective been a manual code review you're doing it wrong and I don't want to say wrong because everything is different but in this case this is the one time I get to say you're doing it wrong because you can automate all of that if you're if you as a company have > (7:55:41) a standard and it is not automated it's not a standard what you have is a set of guidelines and fidget things that you can just news along with find bugs I mean I think if I'd actually ask you what does a code review do I think most people would assume that was where we're going to be at the start but actually code reviews aren't necessarily about finding direct bugs but finding where things work differently to what we're expecting which is different because sometimes a bug is a feature after all > (7:56:16) again we could test and heavily automate this with tests this is um where we find things like functional testing acceptance testing and unit testing come really handy the problem is that if we rely solely on testing as our way of finding bugs we're going to miss stuff because we only test for what we test for and if we let the developer write the tests and they want to get home by five o'clock and some things aren't working you quite often find at 459 when they really do need to get home that magically the tests are passing > (7:56:54) it's a lot easier when you can go well there were 12 tests and now there were 11 but they're all green and then we have make sure it does what we expect which is does it actually work now I've put that separate from Bugs and try and Bug fixes does it do the thing we actually asked for does it work I imagine there's lots of people here who have given given a code to review and you've looked through the code and it's looked beautiful and it's been a thing of beauty and everything looks lovely and then you > (7:57:29) thought in the last second before you went to permit and put that push in you went hang on a minute I'm just going to run that locally it doesn't actually work and then you look at it again and go oh Chachi PT okay my final thing that I think why might we do this is to share knowledge and I think this is the most important one uh and I think this is the thing that actually is the biggest benefit from code reviews is that we can share knowledge in both directions with the person who's doing the review > (7:57:59) and with the review e it's a really good way to help people understand code help people understand what's going on within your code base and it's a really really useful place to help people who perhaps your Junior developers uh actually get into that feedback cycle and gain some knowledge through and that doesn't mean that just doing code reviews against Junior developers but also allowing Junior developers to see Senior developers code and reviewing that code in many ways that's more helpful for > (7:58:29) them they also get to nitpick their boss which depending on your personality is a positive or negative thing so with the why what what what does a code review look like well it depends because every organization is different so and how we where we put it in the cycle makes us important so let's go from uh what does it look like to when should we do it and really there's three phases the first phase is during development and that's where we're busy writing these small chunks and we often will put > (7:59:11) that into like pull requests or maybe if it's less formal you might do something like pair programming because I genuinely believe that pair programming is a really important and useful code review Style uh can't really see you all so I'm just going to assume everybody knows what pair programming is is there anybody in the audience who doesn't it's okay if you don't I can't see any hand so I'm going to assume that's fine if not ask me in the questions or come and ask me afterwards and I'll do and > (7:59:39) we'll talk through it but I think pair programming is a really useful tool but it's not something that you would traditionally call a code review even though it is imparting all the things that we would do in a code review it's just happening in that with a real-time feedback attached to it the other option is to do a code review is when it's ready so we put it at the end and we sign it off this is good code yay and normally whereas in maybe when we were doing our iterative feedback loop it would be more likely that any member > (8:00:12) of this team would be doing it when it comes to the sign off it's probably going to be the person who's going to get shouted at who's going to want to sign it off and that review is normally a senior person it might be subject Specialist of some sort and until they sign it off nothing is going to happen so it's important to understand from their perspective what code review should be because for this person and this is probably the way the the scenario most people think of as a generic code view > (8:00:44) it's really important to understand at this point that the job of that reviewer is still to get code into production as quickly as possible not to reject the code and I've met too many reviewers who think that it's important to nitpick the answers and send it back when your job as a Reviewer is to get things into production this caveat to that is it has to be good or work those are two separate things and then the Final Phase is in the after and the post-mortem um I'm hopefully not too many postmortems hopefully it's just > (8:01:22) permanently into production everything is happy and Rosy but um the knowledge sharing this is where you come back and say okay we're going to look through the code we're going to take what we can learn from this oh and this is the time where the code review is generally positive or should be generally positive you're not necessarily looking for the negatives because you know what the negatives were because we're at the post-mortem stage we know the bugs that failed and everything went wrong and it all burnt > (8:01:50) down we can learn those lessons well we were learning them in production so this is the phase where we go oh I know I really like Singletons don't know why but I really like Singletons I like the way you implemented that we should take that and that should become a standard across the board I like the you know we we as a company can learn these things out of this we can share this information we can share what went was good we can share what's wrong as well in this stage but it's primarily about sharing what is good > (8:02:22) so if we've got the um when now we're under the who and who should do a code review um and we've got GateKeeper that is the senior member of Staff who goes I am very important and I push the button you you help you have passed and gone through I deliberately use the term gatekeeping because it's immediately you're like I don't like that person but that's how most of our institutional setup is you have the senior person who I am in charge I will push it um it's approach if you you know if you've got > (8:02:59) lots of money on the line and your businesses run on this this is not a bad thing it's not a terrible thing um and anybody who's been in that position will know that that's you have to do it this way sometimes but without their sign off we're back into this we are not pushing code until they have signed off um we've got pair program which we've mentioned before and that that could be the colleague being a senior or a junior um it works really well if you pair different levels um unless you're directly problem > (8:03:31) solving and you might want to have say two senior developers working because things are not going well so this that is the standing over the shoulder look I've got hey should we try this yeah should we try this should we go for a coffee much better idea and then everyone um because and by everyone I mean literally everyone indeed and that can be not just be developers that can be people who are coming from ux it could be design team it could be people who are doing quality assurance it can literally be your mum > (8:04:11) um has anybody ever had their mum review their code oh just just me okay she's a very harsh lady or she was a very harsh lady um but everyone can get involved in in that in a code review in one way or another ultimately our technical stakeholders know when we make mistakes um because somebody else tells them the email is down or the site's not working Etc about anyone who has access to the code could theoretically be involved in some sort of code review then you have something Specialists like me I'm a WordPress security specialist I > (8:04:51) do WordPress security code reviews both um so I come along at any point inside your cycle and come along and say yes have you met these security helper functions yeah okay no you haven't good right well we're going to implement them here and here but in likewise you have accessibility Specialists you have legal specialists you have people who have specialized in performance they might come in and give their own reviews and they tend to come in at the end so before the post-mortem but at the end of production or while it's in production > (8:05:28) and come back with a list of bugs for you and you know you're received like a lead balloon um nobody likes it when you come back and say by the way you're now in production everything's wrong but having bringing your specialists in early and going them through as part of your cycle all the way through is a really valuable thing and having Specialists looking at your code is really useful I've separated out from everyone Junior developers and I've already mentioned it once but I want to mention it again > (8:06:01) your Junior colleagues involved in the code review cycle from both sides it's code reviews are much more about knowledge and education than they are about anything else it's almost not about does it work what bugs can we find does it meet this standard does it need this it's about imparting knowledge across the board we bring in our colleagues we bring in people to look and do things because we want to learn because we want to improve and if we think about that for ourselves then we immediately want that across the > (8:06:36) board otherwise we just do our own code reviews now there are two types of people who do if you do dry you're doing your own code reviews there's the type of person who says I am brilliant it's passed and then there's the other person the one who can't get out of bed this morning because they're crying because their code was so bad it was the horriblest thing that they'd ever seen it wasn't of course but we self-internalize and hate ourselves and say it's all wrong and it's all and the > (8:07:06) harshest critic of those of all um and for those people they want someone they need someone to come along and actually say no no did a good job but I want to change this this or this for the person who says I am amazing well you're never going to get help them you might as well just push it into production because clearly it's perfect code so where what I mean if we're going we're now going to go into the gritty of what is the code review where are we going to do code review how are we going to do it > (8:07:36) so where um this one's a bit weird because I reckon this has changed dramatically in the last two three years for some strange reason I can't think of but the first option is in person and in many ways having a really informal code review where you are either at the person's desk and you're staring at the screen with them and walking through it that that it's probably really beneficial and for a lot of people in the room that's how you started doing development if you worked as a development agency > (8:08:07) as the as the junior who came in this is how you learn this is where you got that experience and we're going we're sort of losing that now um oops backwards you might have you might take them off into a hustle into the small conference section uh you might do a stand-up with no screens where you talk about I've been there it's weird imagine just being standing literally standing off in a room with like six of you talking about code you can't see had tried from memory having to remember what the thing was you were talking > (8:08:42) about it's a weird experience but there are people that still do that yeah I mean more likely now we're going to use online conferencing style tools whether that's something like Zoom whether that's Google me etc etc slack any way we can communicate we could even use um email and that gives us like Freds and chains and stuff there's also specific online tools aimed at doing code reviews and there's stuff like jira and GitHub issues for going through but also things like GitHub pull requests and then you have dedicated > (8:09:16) code review software um I find that if you have go into the dedicated code review software some companies will insist that they use it and for me personally I find that that stipends communication and it makes it formalized in a way that doesn't necessarily work for everybody but it does for some companies so this is a talk about the art of the code review and I use the word art very specifically um because art is not often when we talk about Computing and we talk about development we don't necessarily talk > (8:09:58) about it being a creative thing and code reviews are fairly creative they are you need to have decisions you need to be opinionated and you need to be able to express it well and communicate well on both sides as well so the first thing to do with a code review is to automate uh I'm not going to go and do a run across the screen yeah I'll automate automate automate but if you can any test anything any standard any specification anything we can do to automate will be better I couldn't find a decent automation quote > (8:10:34) so I made one up um but I believe this to be fairly true that if you can automate it and then the computing do it faster it's going to be more accurate than you and you can go outside and play or you know do more work whichever you prefer so if we can automate as much as possible then we're left with the chunk that we the only we can do and you can feel good about that because you shouldn't have to do the things that could be automated you should only be doing the things that you are good at and where's we as humans are good at > (8:11:08) communicating and thinking outside of very structured things and that's how we find and solve problems and bugs and things is because we can look and go we can take three jumps ahead to find out where we're going whereas computer system can't do that a computer system can't ever completely do a code review it can try and but it can't yet I should probably say do a full code review some things to keep very in mind if we're going through the iterative process keep your pieces that you want > (8:11:44) to be reviewed as small as possible remember the goal is to get code into production that is it we the code reviews are not a barrier to production a code review is a blessing a channel that we're going to send to production and our goal is to get it there as quickly as possible so if we keep up what we'll be viewing small then it's going to get through quicker and out into the Big Wide World your reviewer the person who's going to give you is going to I almost said go and give you it's going to give your > (8:12:16) code a review do as much of the pre-work for them make sure that the automation tests are working make sure it's linted make sure it's going to do it works you'll be amazed people send code that doesn't work because they didn't test it don't be that person test your code at least so you can say it works on my laptop um and be open to like suggestions don't be afraid to say when the person comes back saying all of this is horrible and you you've just done this wrong and you've done this and > (8:12:51) I don't like this oh and by the way you use tabs you don't be afraid to say you're wrong I I won't use spaces um or whatever it is that you're against it's okay to feedback and be and have a two-way conversation it should never be a one-way thing likewise if you're a reviewer be consistent so in when you're doing reviews consistency is key if what if what I want to do if I keep changing my mind and keep moving the goal posts and keep deciding that hey this review is about this now and now all of a sudden we're > (8:13:31) about this if I keep changing what's going to be able to get through it's never going to work you need to leave any ego at the door and that's a hard thing to do but it's you have to keep in your mind it's not about whether the code is even pretty it's not about if it it's about does it work does it meet the specification yes then your job is done can I help them progress further with some bits that's that's a good addition can I beat on this person because I'm having a bad day > (8:14:07) or can I show them how wonderful I am because I would have done it 10 times better you can't do that you need to leave it at the door you also need to be timely and I know we are we all work in a really busy world but if you're not going to review that piece of code quickly it's sitting there and there's someone at the end of that who's sitting there now chances are they're onto another job that could be even worse because when you come back and see when you have to start context switching > (8:14:42) it gets horribly messy very quickly but if you leave something just hanging there and hanging there and hanging there and hanging there it then gets dropped altogether or someone takes over and it just gets pushed through when you're providing feedback make it if your feedback cannot relate to an action that is going to be done it is not useful feedback if I cannot have if I sit there and say you must then it's two and three paragraphs long we've all been there you've got the reply back and it's > (8:15:17) masses of paragraph So you're going I'm not sure I see the question the statement or even anything other than words it's of no use there's a direct analogy at conferences where at the end we ask questions and there's the there's always that one person who will come to the microphone and then he starts talking at the end of it the speaker is there going was there a question I think there might have been no there wasn't in the same way if we you need to leave some sort of actionable feedback > (8:15:49) some feedback that they can take and do something with without that the review is pointless unless you're going to say it's blessed have a nice day but that is still an actionable feedback that is action that the code is going forward and above all as a reviewer your job your number one job should be to be nice at least to use nice language we do not need to use horrible nasty or negative language because language make it for man and it really really matters so there's few things that I've always > (8:16:31) when you hear when you're talking about language and one is don't take it personally there is that's the quickest way to make you go what you mean don't take it personally what did I do and he immediately puts you on edge don't be that person never whenever you're doing a review it's not about the person it's about the code don't be rude these are literally your friends your colleagues and more importantly next week the person who's reviewing you as a just a thing as a Brit as a and as > (8:17:10) a person who likes sarcasm and it has a horrible tendency to use it myself don't don't use sarcasm in a code review especially in a larger team especially in a team that's an international team especially in a team where you are no longer directly person to person if you're going to use um if you use sarcasm and someone doesn't get it it's going to go horribly wrong I'd never demand to ask questions and um Never Say Never because you're going to find out you want to be wrong and I want to leave you > (8:17:44) with one final thing and that is feedback is a loop and therefore every time that you say anything as a reviewer don't be surprised if the person coming back to you comes up with something better and gives you a better answer and tells you you are wrong you are wrong if we can keep that Loop going we will be in a much better place everybody in this room does a code review every single day and everybody or everybody who writes code in this room does a code review every single day because you're if you're interacting > (8:18:21) with anybody else it doesn't have to be a formalized process but whatever you're doing be nice be kind but make things very actionable so my name is Tim Nash I'm a WordPress security consultant you can even hire me um if you want copies of the slides and there's extra resources like actually lists of tools and things bits you can go visit that QR code hey it works people are actually filling it up now the question is whether I had actually published the page or not but if not go back to it later now you've > (8:18:55) got a picture of it I did yeah you someone but what I'm going to do is going to put these slides up on there and put a bunch of other stuff on I think everybody's taking a picture now and thank you thank you thank you Tim thank you Tim so we have some time for questions just so you know there are two standing mics here where you can ask the questions so you can you can queue oh already either they're running away or they're asking questions I know he's guessing the question I was going to say they're > (8:19:29) running away I'm used to this this is going to be a good question I know Alex hi um so I think I've got two items I just uh need to find them so um one question is like if you ask everybody to do a review do you really want that and what if the review drifts off into like flame Wars conversations you need to draw the line somewhere so so the question is how do you stop the as the person whose code's being submitted how do you stop the reviewer wandering off under territories yeah you can kind of go too far by inviting > (8:20:06) everybody to review like too many opinions sometimes are counterproductive yes I think I wouldn't say that I would Aria where I had that it went out to review to everyone and I had to wait for feedback for everyone to come through when it's a one-to-one and the person is drifting off it's back to this um can we oh no we've gone off the sky it's going back down to keeping this in a feedback loop and having the confidence which is a really hard thing to do having a confidence to say no can we go back on to the subject > (8:20:42) um certain reviewers will always behave in a certain way and the worst thing is if you didn't make it randomized if you did have it so that um you could pick your reviewer certain people will always pick certain people and they will start because you'll you know what they want what they're looking for so you'll go to them so it's getting that balance because as you say you don't want the person who wanders off and or Worse wanders off for two weeks comes back with a half answer then changes the goal post every five seconds > (8:21:13) and adds a bunch of stuff and the only way you can stop that is by feedback to them and saying please stop doing that which is a really hard thing to do this is normally where you hope you have some sort of management that will help you it doesn't always though so it's not a very helpful answer is it because it's like well I think it's it kind of is attached to my other question or like point is that you as the person who is requesting review you also need to do your homework and I think that's an important part > (8:21:45) especially about if you want to get timely reviews like as somebody who's also reviewing like doing the context switch I'm getting into your review what do I need to review how do you review so as a developer you can you actually have a really big part in how timely you will get a review yes I mean I think we had the slide anyway talking about what developers can do and any pre-work you can do to make the reviewer's life easier will lower that barrier to them coming and doing the review in a timely fashion uh > (8:22:21) as one of the ways of doing that is if you know the expectations upon what the reviewer is going to be based then you should be able to already match to that this doesn't always work because code reviewers tend to have their own opinions on that same specification this is sort of why we do these in the first place though because if we uh if we could all manage to come up with exactly the same answers to the code review for each every time the code review if you had four people and they all retired with the same things > (8:22:52) you can automate that and it's no longer a code review with people and that's fine but yeah as a developer if you're writing code make it I think get making it small is the thing going to review making it as small as possible do as much work as you can ahead to make the reviewers life easier and don't be afraid to say hey have you had a chance to do that review now because I have to context switch and if I have to context which this isn't going into production for the next two weeks um that I think that's a perfectly valid > (8:23:21) thing to say to somebody um on the other side be as a reviewer getting doing those reviews in a timely fashion is really important because otherwise you're holding up the system and I think quite a lot of reviewers think of the code review as an extrovert and an extra thing that they're doing and it's not it's part of your job you're there to do that review so it has to be factored in as well does that help yeah it's it's okay to re-request the review yes I think that's also an > (8:23:53) important point to make and I think it's can be part of the culture of a project that you explicitly state that yeah I mean I it helps I think if you're in a company especially if you're in a company rather than maybe a an open in an open source environment we actually have really good contributing guidelines where we can talk about things like wow this is how we're going to review things it's weird actually most companies don't have the exactly you'd think that they would have their own like contributory > (8:24:18) type guidelines some do they have sound operating procedures but quite a lot don't quite a lot are quite casual about how these things are done it might be good just to have some sort of uh almost the contributor guidelines for the given project that you're working on which is separated from your standard operating procedures nice next next question hi and thanks for your speech it was right actually you need the microphone just lift it up for you I I can hold it oh there we go hello how are you so as I mentioned uh thanks for your > (8:24:55) speech it was really interesting uh you mentioned in your speech automatic reviews tools that you use for automatic reviews could you highlight some of them um so I mean mostly so most of when I talk about automated tools I'm talking about tools that we actually already probably as developments will be using so for example um if you've got a coding standard then having a code sniffer running before you go it should be running before you even start a code review process if you are if you have to say any form of testing > (8:25:29) those testing should be running you should be already using those things like unit tests within code within um there are specialist code review software that will allow for like creating a checklist that say have you done this have you done this and actually when you do like a pull request that you can create certain rules that say this must have been around this must have been run and I know I I try to make to make talks um agnostic of in any individual software um but if you're using something like GitHub you already have the GitHub > (8:25:58) actions that can be processed on a pull request a pull request is a form of a code review and that by how we can have the GitHub reactions running and therefore you can get have all those tests passing before we start the manual review in the process um but I'll I've got um the page that I linked to earlier um it's Bare Bones at the moment but I'll fill it with some software and bits in there for you as well oh thanks for that and I had another question but I forgot it so thanks in case you remember we will have time > (8:26:35) hello thank you for your presentation it was pretty interesting uh could you please tell us maybe a tool or something uh to ask colleagues to keep the piece of pieces of code to be reviewed small because uh always getting those huge merch commits and how to fight them I mean uh if it's genuinely become a point where you need to have a tool to do it there's a wider conversation I mean you could you could automate that and actually have it come through so that if you put a just running a script on a pre-commit hook that says hey this is > (8:27:21) how many lines are you sure you wish to send this to some poor soul um but I think daddy that well you can do that with code and you could come up with software to do that I think that's a process problem that's a change that's an expectation within a company that they're expecting to have larger bits and not smaller so I think it's more about um talking to engineering managers or individual developers and say hey we need to do this in smaller chunks and that's a conversation to have rather > (8:27:56) than a formalized way so I quite like the idea of having a a pre-kit equipment hook that just goes no you've written too much today goodbye thank you awesome awesome have you remembered the question no yes if you did yeah and that is the last question okay so as we talk about tools have you tried any AI based Stills on there and what are your feelings because I tried pair coding with chachibiti and it wasn't the best experience when you say you who was doing the coding and who was doing the pairing laughs > (8:28:45) um I mean I obviously the future is clearly AI at the moment whether we like it or not uh you if you went and looked at the sessions today you would have thought we weren't out of Wordpress talk conference just by the Sheeran of AI even content that's available on the tracks you can make use of any tool and AI is just a talk I use chat gbt to write some code once it was fun um and actually I do use chat gbt to write some to write tests it's a really useful tool for writing acceptance tests because you can get it to write its > (8:29:23) tests and then you can get it to write some code and you can get it to test itself it's brilliant to have to be here at all I don't know why I'm a developer I don't think I need to be one anymore I've got an AI to do it for me um ultimately though at the moment AI systems are not smart enough to be able to problem solve you've got to remember that in all of our all of this they are incredibly clever or look incredibly clever but they are language processing models that are doing things > (8:29:55) in fact quite often they have no basis in logic and they do not have imagination for all of its wishful thinking I know it appears to have imagination when it goes and says something that's completely random and off topic but it doesn't actually have the capabilities that you have as a developer and it doesn't have the capability to solve actually solve bugs and find things that you have so a useful set of tools yes but um other than the sort of standard Dev tools so things like copilot Podium on vs code and talking to things like bad > (8:30:28) and chat UBC I haven't seen anything specifically for code reviews it will be there it will be rubbish and it will tell you things like your code you should do this in your code and you'll look at it and go what because that's the nature of how AI works at the moment 99 of the time it's good and the other one percent of the time it's what okay thank you cool cool thank you thank you Tim you're amazing thank you it is a small small gift for you thank you so much thank you so much and yeah that wraps up the > (8:31:13) speaker session yeah we have another one a huge round of applause for Tim and you'll get another gift so just to wrap up so uh tomorrow we start at nine although the yoga starts at 8 15 just so you know for everyone attending um and yeah and there's a group hike that leaves at 6 20 from that's what that's what it said just you know so thank you everyone we meet here at six to wrap up the the day one thank you foreign welcome everybody it's the end of the > (8:33:51) day day one for word Camp you're up 2023 and this is our last interview of our entire day one and with me is petsia do you go by Patia petia awesome welcome how are you I'm very well thank you it was a nice day yay yeah I've had a very good day oh I love it so what do you do patio what do you do for WordPress um in WordPress I mean I've been involved uh with WordPress for the last 12 years I think uh started just like in a regular way just uh using the platform and then I started translating and then > (8:34:30) I joined the Bulgarian translation team and then I joined the global uh polyglots Team then I started leading the global polyglots team uh in the communication side and I've mostly done translation work and work with the translation community but I've also I also organized volunteered and organized in the first several editions of world Camp Europe so yeah I was in the organizing team for Allied in Vienna uh and Sofia which is where I'm from I live I come from Bulgaria um and yeah I mean I I do quite a lot > (8:35:05) like I have done quite a lot in the past like not for the past three years but yeah love it yeah do you run your own agency or do you work for another uh I am currently director of agency operations at human made which is uh one of the biggest WordPress agencies yes how do you like it there uh it's amazing I've been with them for eight years I think they had hunted me after World Camp Europe and Sofia where I met them uh in 2014 and uh yeah I've been there ever since I really love it I started as > (8:35:36) a PM uh grew into like a more senior position and then started running Ops alongside some other wonderful humans I no I agree with you I don't know much but the little I do know of the team you guys seem like you have a wonderful Bond yeah well the thing that they did for me back then was I was very actively Community sorry being involved with the community at that time and I was looking for a company that would be able to accommodate my contributing time and they very graciously uh just let me dedicate quite a lot of my my time to > (8:36:11) both the WordPress polyglass projects and organizing the early editions for Camp Europe anything else that I wanted to be kind of involved with um they support it so that was that was an amazing thing that's uh that kind of brought me um brought me to them did you help with the organization of this iteration of word Camp Europe I did not I am a firm believer of the fact that once you kind of leave your mark in the community you need to move to something else like try and create as much possibility and opportunity for others to do what you've > (8:36:45) already done and move into a part of the project that more needs your support and skills so I've been kind of moving through uh different different parts of the projects where I can I can add value and I think we're Camp Europe's team has grown exponentially and there are so many people that have been involved with it throughout the last 10 years that I don't really need to be involved with it anymore for it to be great yeah what I can do is like transfer knowledge and I think that's the early organizers we try > (8:37:15) very hard to do that creating documentation living processes leaving kind of a Mark um and I mean it you can tell yeah the events get getting bigger and bigger the teams are getting bigger and bigger and yeah some of the organizers are still working out of processes that uh we created so that's very fulfilling to understand I completely empathize it's wonderful and you just mentioned Sofia which is third in 2013. 2014 oh 14. > (8:37:43) after Lyden that was yeah so lightning was the first iteration and then oh gosh yes okay I think we compete against Lisbon for the second iteration we applied to host and um yeah we won it was one wow but the organizing team back then was um eight people oh my gosh yep yeah and now I believe you're like 80. > (8:38:06) wow so yeah 18 is it really well 18 18. oh 80. I think yeah I think so yeah something of the sort I don't know it's it's huge that's what yes yes I remember organizing for Work Camp us and there were 16 of us back in the day and now there's in many and I'm not organizing for them anymore so I empathize that's awesome so what have you done today did you go to sessions have you spoken are you I'm speaking tomorrow okay uh at 3 P. > (8:38:32) M I'm gonna do a talk on um developing cultural intelligence which is basically all my learnings in like both in my professional and contributor career because I work human made as a distributed company so much like the WordPress project yeah are people all over the world our clients are all over the world so uh I think for the last 10 years I've accumulated quite a lot of kind of knowledge and know-how right so that's kind of a current topic that I'm digging quite quite more deeper into because I really want to put the > (8:39:06) structure around my learnings to be able to kind of pass it Forward share it yeah oh I love that I bet you you were a huge pivotal piece of this community and that everyone appreciates you um I mean I can't speak to that I uh I hope so I hope that I have been enough of a kind of role model and inspiration for people to get involved to the listed level which I have been involved with not necessarily because I you know I've I have been dedicating quite a lot of time but I mean I think valuable contribution can be done with much less > (8:39:39) time but I hope you know us early organizer what kind of work Camp Europe and like the people that are trying to kind of mentor and encourage more people to get involved are enough of a role model for people to uh to kind of follow on our in our steps and kind of um expand the community yeah no I love it so pivoting I heard a little rumor that for a hobby you like to dance yes I do yeah I uh I mean I've been dancing since I was six and gone through like several different styles it was a ballroom dancer when I was in high school and for > (8:40:14) the last maybe seven or eight years I've been swing dancing uh yeah yeah Greek Greece by the way has an amazing swing dancing Community I was just here last month at their boogies lotion Festival oh my goodness yeah so you and I share a very similar story I've been dancing since I was young too and then I actually have kids and took a 10-year break but then discovered ballroom and smoothed in Latin Styles and Latin is my absolute favorite yeah I love it well whatever the dance is as long as it's > (8:40:44) social dance which as you know the go the goal is to to build the language between you and your partner be able to lead and follow so like basically communicate through them yes that's the essence of it like social dancing is what I do like I love swing dancing but like it has so many styles uh yeah right South is also social dance so like yeah whichever dances if you're kind of listening and kind of following and picking signs from your partner you know that that is a uh the best way to kind of have fun with that and it's not > (8:41:12) restricted in any way which is also what I love isn't it crazy the correlation of how with work it's all about communication and then with dance it's all about communication it's exactly the same if you cannot listen at work you will not be able to listen to your partner you know it's like roles if you're holes are not defined when you start and you don't kind of agree in between who's going to lead right follow like you're gonna you're gonna have issues you know it's not that it's not > (8:41:36) going to be workable but it's probably not going to be as fun for everyone right how many people have thought you're going to learn about dance hair we're Camp here well we've had some wild dance parties for Camp Europe's throughout the years uh you're bringing up one of my favorite things I still no matter what I've been to a lot of work camps all over the world and where Camp Europe has the best after party I'm just calling it I say that every time yeah well um we've been trying to kind of we've > (8:42:03) been touching the on the boundaries of like what is acceptable I think for a year sure every time exploring kind of a new area of being able to have fun together as long as it's all respectful and in good faith like it's I just love that after I work Camp Europe after party you have to shove people out and like yeah nobody wants people don't want to leave yeah exactly that is just I mean I haven't experienced that at any other word Camp ever so yeah that part is my favorite um what do you have plans for the rest > (8:42:32) of Greece while you're here uh well I am here with my goddaughter and my dog oh my God so yeah I mean obviously there is tomorrow which is going to be like another full pack day uh there's the after party which like lets you if we survive that yeah um and then I have a lot of uh my humans here with me so like I really would love to kind of catch up on a more informal way with them on Sunday I'm going to draw I'm driving here because I'm Bulgarian as I said like so we're gonna jump in a car and kind of go around the > (8:43:03) islands for a while yeah go through a friend's house and Volos um yeah and um and then drive back home oh wow yeah how's the drive the drive's perfect uh Greek roads are really good like Bulgarian roads okay but the drive is fairly easy it's 10 out it's 10 hours like highways and you can have like mini breaks along the coastline which is also really really nice oh my gosh it sounds beautiful yeah it's really cool I love road tripping in the early years when we started uh traveling to Work Camp so I > (8:43:33) started going to you know organize Peak Etc um a couple of my colleagues would like spend months and months on the road just like going from webcam to word camp but in my car so like it's kind of a it returned to normalcy for me a little bit Yeah road tripping toward camps is uh it's kind of a thing that I do now when you do that do you stay in like hotels or Bed and Breakfast yeah we're rent like we rent apartments we rent airbnbs like whichever whichever is kind of more pertinent and uh depends on where we're > (8:44:05) going how long we're staying but yeah we've been all over like renting apartment we are a distributed company obviously can work from anywhere so I would say that we have taken full advantage of that uh uh throughout the years and it's been wonderful I've had like Majestic 10 years thanks to Wordpress and being had gotten into a distributed company yes absolutely well thank you so much for being our guest yeah and being the last person to round off today well it was my pleasure thank you for inviting me and uh thanks for > (8:44:33) doing this this is uh new and really exciting to see yeah thank you yeah okay I wonder if that's like intentionally stealthy right there or if it fell off something of audio yes we have audio can I have my slides please yes thank you so this was day one and it's been an amazing day and it's hard to believe it's already over yes so today we heard about AI in WordPress but also about developing WordPress blocks and about diversity in WordPress lands and a lot of other topics as well thank you for attending them > (8:45:38) so we have a couple of notes for tomorrow um before you head out today mind this the hallway track is open until seven tonight feel free to hang around and chat with other people from inside of Megan or in a lovely outside foyer the Mega Run itself will open again tomorrow at 8 30. you can join the hallway track over there and get a coffee and chat with other attendees volunteers or organizers and then we will continue our schedule at nine one more reminder tomorrow we will make the group photo make sure you're there join us at one > (8:46:22) o'clock at the outdoor Plaza and be part of that nice picture and after photo shoot the lunch will be open and of course tomorrow at the end of the day we will announce the city which will have work in Europe in 2024. make sure you don't miss that enjoy your evening in Athens and see you tomorrow thank you [Applause] ## Highlights - again ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h3anrgkj5vcteqf4zxhx3w2d))