Episode 23: Steve Burge  If you're one of the roughly 10,000 users of Publish Press, you'll recognize my guest this week, if for no other reason than because it's his name that shows up in your inbox periodically talking about what new stuff his company is putting out. Publish Press is a suite of WordPress plugins for publishers, content teams, and newsrooms. But I didn't anticipate that the journey that got Steve to where he is started as an English teacher in the part of rural Georgia where Deliverance was filmed on a $27,000 a year salary with a wife, a mortgage, and a quiet side hustle in web design that started outpacing his day job within a few months. Unlike some of my previous guests, Steve is not the person who grew up taking apart computers at age 10. He came to all of this sideways, and that accidental path gave him a unique perspective on open-source, on customers, on how software actually gets built in the real world. We talked about Drupal 7 and the backwards compatibility break that became an off-ramp for an entire generation of CMS users, about what it means to build for publishers, not just the enterprise ones, but also the five person local newsrooms trying to fill the hole left by a shuttered legacy paper. And we talked about Steve's method for building software. No road map, no grand vision, just reading every single support ticket that comes in. Without further ado, Steve Burge. Welcome to Community and Code, uh, the podcast where we talk to the human beings behind the commits. And today I am here with founder of Publish Press, Steve Burge. Publish Press is a, I believe, a WordPress publishing suite of tools uh, for publishing stuff on WordPress sites. Uh, and WordPress likes to say that it's it democratizes publishing and there's a lot of publishers that use it. So, I think that that's kind of a pretty cool thing to do. Uh, welcome to the show, Steve. Tell us about yourself. >> Oh, thanks, Chris. Um, I live in Florida. Um, as you can tell from my accent, I was born and bred on the um on the southeast corner of Florida. Um, well, I I came from England originally and now just in a few months ago, I've ended up living in the United States longer than I lived in England. So, I'm more American, I guess, than anything else. And actually, um, became an American uh, about a couple months ago, took the citizenship test. I know like uh who the first president was, who the second president was. Um how many people sit in the House of Representatives? I had to study for all that stuff. >> Wow. I don't know that I don't know that many Americans have had to study for most of those things uh in many many years. Uh yeah, I I recently had a similar tipping point where I believe I've lived uh I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. Um, but I'm originally from the San Francisco Bay area and I believe that that uh I don't know last year or the year before or something. I I crossed the border over to I've lived in Utah longer than I've lived in California. >> You make you auton. >> Um and um I I've been in maybe live lived a somewhat similar life to you. I think we um we got started in the open source world did a lot of Drupal and just because of the way the market has been over the last 10 years or so have ended up more in the WordPress space but the the throughine connecting connecting it all has been open source. >> Awesome. Yeah. So yeah let's let's let's just dive into that like what uh what first got you involved in in being interested in open source in general? Oh, well, I'm not one of those people who you hear those stories of a someone who at like 10 years old had like a an Atari on their living room floor >> and was taking the computer apart, rebuilding it, writing their first program at the age of eight. None of that. Um, >> I think I've had some of those guests. >> Yes. I mean, you've ended up in the right profession. It's it's naturally for you my path was more accidental. Um I was a teacher for a good number of years, middle school, high school until I arrived in the United States and got a wife and kids and also realized how much they pay teachers in the United States. >> At that point, I needed to do something else because um having a wife and kids in a mortgage was more than I could afford on my teacher salary. Yeah, it's it's I mean I think that says more about uh how the United States values or undervalues teaching than uh than it says about your particular path because I don't think that your particular path is is unique necessarily in seeing that seeing that stark like having that stark realization and and being like yeah no I actually got bills to pay. Yeah, we we ended up in a fairly good industry for that. The you work in software, you work in hosting United States, you're going to have a fairly good living. But um in I was in uh in Georgia in the north part of Georgia in the United States, north of Atlanta, uh up in the Appalachian Hills. Um, if you've ever seen the movie Deliverance, um, basically we were where the movie Deliverance was shot and I believe back then, this was like 2004, 2005, the starting pay for a teacher was something like 27 $28,000 a year. >> Wow. >> Yeah. And I I came in with several years of teaching experience and I took one year of teaching in the states and basically started a a web design business in the evening. And it took probably three or four months before the evening job of running a small web design agency was making more money than my day job as a teacher. >> Yeah. I mean, I I I I definitely believe it, especially if you're able to to get a regular a regular stream of of of clients. Um, so in those early days of of like doing your freelancing work of of starting a a web design company, um, I imagine you were looking at open-source uh CMSs and tools like that to to provide uh value to to make your work easier as as a developer. Um, what sorts of things were you were you gravitating toward and what sorts of sites were you building? >> We started with some Jumla sites and some Drupal sites for people. Um, and I was fairly good as a designer but didn't quite have the strong background of some of the people we were working alongside. So I ended up basically taking my teaching background and applying it to open source and trying to teach people how to use it. >> Um we did videos, we did books, we did in-person classes. Um, and it's it's hard to think back now to before even things like linda.com before things like that. But there was a huge market for getting on an airplane and flying to >> some part of the country, standing in front of a classroom and teaching people how to use Drupal and yes, >> how to use open source. >> Yeah. Uh there back in be long before my time at Pantheon um that was a thing that that Devril and other teams were were doing was like shipping folks off uh to have on-site with clients. Um one of my uh one of my early gigs as as a WordPress developer um I was uh approached by somebody from uh Pluralsight which was an online is an online developer training platform. um very early days of Pluralsight um where they were kind of like uh just trying to build out their their video library and like branch out beyond like Microsoft specific stack technologies and and so they they saw me speak at a word camp. Um, but their history too, like they started out as a company doing on-site training for like .NET and like other sort of like ASP and like Microsoft specific things. And then they're like, "Hey, we could like record these things and then distribute them and then not have to fly people places." And that's how like the the web platform got built. So yeah, there definitely like right about that that time is is I could yeah I' been around long enough to have seen that that path. >> Yeah, the the demand was there particularly um this is not a knock on Drupal but this is maybe a knock on how Drupal was seen in the marketplace was that we could sell Drupal training all day long. >> Yeah, >> but we can never sell WordPress. People were like, "Oh, WordPress is too easy. our staff will get it. We don't need to really teach our staff WordPress. It's all self-explanatory. But Drupal, oh, come up here, 5 days, teach our team. It's really complicated. Um, we could sell Drupal training. Uh, week after week of it for years um because it had that reputation in the marketplace that it was intimidating and needed to be explained clearly to people. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, and there's something to be said too of of of that perception that Drupal had and also still has in in many cases of um like it's a toolkit. It's complex. It can handle and as such it can handle more complexity in your site build. Um so like the the budgets that you expect for a Drupal site versus a WordPress site for a long time. Maybe maybe that's that's a little bit different now as as like WordPress has kind of become more dominant. Um, but for a long time like you would expect a significantly higher dollar value associated with a Drupal build for a site than than a WordPress build. I mean I remember you know early days of freelancing like hey can you build this WordPress site for 500 bucks? Well no I'm not going to build you a site for 500 bucks. and also they uh maybe Aquia and specifically and some of the agencies around them did a good job of selling into the enterprise. >> Yeah. >> Um I have a a clear memory of going to one Drupal con I want to say maybe 2013 or so that I'd always gone to Drupalcon's and it had been people look like me or you like you've got a flannel shirt on. I've I've got a t-shirt on. Um people that look like traditional developers and I suddenly remember walking into a Drupal Con and there were salespeople >> like slick suits. One of the guys said he'd just moved from Adobe didn't know anything about Drupal but he was here to sell Drupal for Aquia. Um there was a sudden transformation where some of the Drupal companies um were staffing up with real salespeople ready to sell real enterprise projects. And so uh they were able to get those the big government customers the the big enterprise um and projects like WordPress were behind at that time. >> They did they didn't have the infrastructure. they didn't have the big companies to uh to complete the big RFPs. >> So what facilitated your uh transition away from from Jumla and Drupal into into WordPress? Was it uh was it ease of use or was it something else? >> Drupal 7. >> Drupal 7. Yes. >> There we go. That's it. Um, for people that may not know, it was an enormous back basically a 100% back backwards compatibility break. Um, and really um, compelled a lot of the companies we were working with to take a look outside of Drupal. Um, a lot of them were saying, "Well, if we're going to rebuild our entire platform, this gives us an off-ramp to look at something else outside of Drupal." And a lot of them exited. I think um >> uh I talked with um Josh uh one of the founders of Pantheon. Yep. and he I think he'd done some some research at some point that more Drupal 6 sites ended up on WordPress than on Drupal 7. >> Um it was just an enormous exit point because of the costs of moving to Drupal 7. Mhm. >> Um >> and and then they kind of did the same thing between Drupal 7 and 8 when like Drupal 8 was was another major refactor, another major uh shift in in how Drupal was built and it would required another sort of rebuild and again like you're when you're facing that choice of do I rebuild my site again or do I move to something where I never have to worry about it. A lot of people had jumped ship and went to WordPress. Yeah. >> Oh, that's true. Yeah. Drupal 8 was perhaps an even bigger backwards compatibility break. Um >> it's where they introduced composer as as a fundamental part of of Drupal core. Yep. >> Yeah. And those two back to back um and so yeah that was a a big change for us. We and it basically also um made a huge caused a huge uh business pivot for us because a lot of our um Drupal customers were like government departments who had no problem flying us up to Washington DC for training but that didn't exist in the WordPress space really. So we pivoted hard to doing books and videos instead. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Do you like from and and we'll get into like what you're working on now, but like I'm I'm interested in this this idea uh that we've hit on a couple times that the basic the the theory that you know WordPress isn't or wasn't uh ready for enterprise or this this perception that uh that it wasn't and like this sort of kind of coral uh uh aligns with like when I started doing like getting into agency WordPress press development. Um, and like that was back in like I don't know 20 probably 2014ish I guess for me. Um, where my first agency gig was at WebDev Studios and they do a lot of enterprise stuff and like like there is definitely it felt like you know the the default assumption for an enterprise company was not I want to use WordPress. we had to like sell them on. You're paying a lot of money for like Adobe Experience Manager. You can do those things in WordPress for cheaper, you know, or like you can or you you want to pay us, great. We'll build, you know, bespoke things for you. Like, but there had to be like there was like you had to go into that conversation with like a defense prepared, you know, like a pitch to sell the software before you could even have the conversation about what the agency is going to do. >> The sales process was always more difficult. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that's something I is that something you also uh saw at the time? Yeah, we um we ran into quite a few sort of government agencies and large companies. They were having trouble with Drupal. They were having trouble with their rollouts. And quite often I'd sit down with them and say, "Hey, what was the decision process? Why did you choose Drupal as opposed to Adobe or WordPress?" >> And often it would just come down to a lack of knowledge. often um they'd say things like, "Oh, WordPress doesn't have the ability to do RO management, for example." Oh, so you can get this plug-in over here. And that that's really an easy problem. Um, I I guess it led me to realize just how many of these RFPs are just um one on almost a random basis that it just whoever is signing off on the RF RFP or making a decision often is really just not that well informed on the decision and um might just make a decision on which platform to use based on a hunch. >> Yeah, for sure. And I I I I read a book recently um recoding America that specifically talked about um like uh digital services in the US uh like the formation of the digital services department which I don't think exists anymore um or has been absorbed into Doge um but used to exist um for a while but like also like the like what existed before and the way the RFPs were were written before within government specifically like federal government. Um, and like the legacy systems and like the level like the requirements and they had to get approval from all of these different people, but like the the different departments or the different people signing off on things didn't necessarily like have the conversations with everybody involved. So like there'd be requirements in there that didn't make sense or like required a whole bunch of extra stuff. Like there was a story in there that was talking about um uh GPS and like they were going to roll out a a big massive update to to the GPS uh software that gets put on satellites, right? Um but because of some old uh loophole or some old requirement in some previous doc the only communication method that was allowed for the RFP was like XML RPC for communicating with the satellites. um which is I mean you're laughing you know like it's old it's slow and like the new stuff was better and faster and would facilitate you know more accurate GPS coordinate coordinates and it like because of delays because of that particular requirement the new stuff never rolled out and we never got the the GPS update and like that went out when when the project was actually signed off on and it was still like XML RPC uh or not XML RPC but it was um No, it was SOAP. It was SOAP API, I believe. Um, >> so they needed a root and branch reform essentially of the way things were done from the technology stack to the way the software was purchased to the way it was the RFPs were written. There a deep deep transformation was needed. >> Exactly. Exactly. And there and there's there's like all sorts of stories about like you know so many systems within the US government are built on these old co legacy cobalt uh systems which run really really well and efficiently because cobalt was super efficient and it had to be because it was back in the day when you didn't have as much memory and whatever. Um, but now there's like all this impetus to like do a a refresh or an update, but nobody knows how to actually fundamentally edit the Cobalt systems. And also the Cobalt systems aren't broken. So there's just layer upon layer of new UI on top of these old systems. So, like when you whenever you encounter anything in like a government system that feels inefficient or does a weird thing, it's probably because there's like three layers deep of like UI that has been placed on top of this ancient Cobalt system that wasn't designed to do the thing that you want to do like natively and nobody knows how to actually make the cobalt system do that thing. I I got to say we with our government work and we did probably at one point it was like 90% plus government work. We noticed a real change when Pantheon came along and had started to get its um its fingers into some of the government business that um the development tools that were provided made the government agencies quite a lot more comfortable. Um we did a lot Oh, sorry. The whole thing went blank there. Um, I I'll start again. Um, we did a lot of work with the government of Arizona. They moved Lock, Stock, and Barrel, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sites over to the Pantheon platform. and you guys had a a slick development workflow and a standard workflow that made them comfortable to basically commit the entire future of the Arizona government online to being on Drupal and being on on Pantheon. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that like I mean that's obviously like that's the that's the sales pitch that Pantheon is going to is going to give, right? is like that we we build the tools that make your development teams uh happier and work faster and all all that sort of stuff. I mean um I remember again even before I was I was working here using uh using Pantheon as a developer and just just the fact that like again when I first started uh in agency work uh was a long time ago. Um and at the time Pantheon I believe was pretty much the only one that already had like a native Git integration. Um so just just that just that you know as opposed to other other providers that we were using like that was made it super easy and then like um you know having multi-devs the ability to like have a a whole uh environment spun off off of a branch was like revolutionary like made my life so much and so I would like I was like why can't why can't we just put all of our uh all of our projects on this? Well, we already have a a contract with so and so, so we can't do that, but I agree. You know, like um and you know, uh there's that that's there's no shouldn't be terribly surprising that I am currently a Pantheon employee because of that experience, because that as as a developer. Um but moving on to like um you know, obviously you did some agency stuff and and you're doing some government stuff. Um what was the but you are the founder of this thing called Publish Press. What is the sort of uh origin story of that? >> Oh, well that came out of a out of a pivot from our training work which was which is getting quieter. Um you you seen most of the big training companies now have kind of gone away. >> Um like Linda got sold and it's kind of like a little tile in the corner of LinkedIn now. >> Um >> I was going to say LinkedIn just swallowed everything. >> It did. Um, there was Udommy, which long past its heyday now. It feels like it's going to become one of those bending spoon um, acquisitions and kind of left for dead. Um, and the whole training market um, got a lot quieter. So, we were looking for what was next and we were doing some software development at the time. started to look at WordPress as an opportunity and really started to s see a lot of gaps in the publishing space in WordPress but that took a a lot of trial and error. Um we we were very familiar with the uh the Jumla world >> and the Drupal world and even the Magento world as well but less familiar with WordPress. And I got to tell you, none of the lessons we learned in those other platforms were worth a damn. And moving to uh moving to WordPress, um I was chatting with someone the other day who's moving from WordPress or Woo Commerce particularly to Shopify >> and they're like it's like starting from zero or less than zero. Like, yeah, if um if you move to a a new ecosystem like that, it might als be helpful not to have any of your previous knowledge because it ain't going to apply in the new world. >> Yeah. Do you think that that is fundamentally like uh a symptom of replatforming or do you think that there's something that is distinct about WordPress that that makes that reset more felt? Um the exception might be if you're getting in very early. Uh for example, if you were moving to WordPress in 20 2008 maybe uh when something like Gravity Forms was just launching >> or if you're moving to Shopify 10 years ago to become a Shopify app developer. >> But those markets are mature now. So you got to play within their rules. You have to uh learn the network of people, how they move, how they interact with each other. And just in particularly with WordPress, incredibly major differences like you're coming from a Drupal ecosystem where no one sells any software. In fact, it's objectively uh looked down upon to sell code to WordPress where that's the entire business. >> Yeah. Well, I mean, and that is that is changing the Drupal space. I mean, they're trying to Dre wants to Drece wants to start uh a a marketplace, an official Drupal marketplace. Uh, one of my uh mo one of my recent guests was uh is Mike Hershel in the Drupal community who is a theme developer who created basically a theme uh a theme shop uh for Drupal themes. Um so, uh for premium Drupal themes. So like that that that is shifting. But it's interesting having those conversations with people like Mike uh because it's it's they're having to figure out how to do from scratch in Drew. It's it's the same thing you just said. It's like it's it's that same sort of like replatforming thing. You have to learn everything from scratch because they're having to learn from scratch how do we do business with code for Drupal when there wasn't like there it's it's wild west, right? Right. So, they're trying to like like he had to learn read up on licenses like and we've been dealing with licenses like I mean we've been having the licensing conversation since Chris Pearson and uh and thesis like 15 years ago or something like we've we've this is well tread territory for for us in the WordPress ecosystem. Um, and they're having to figure that out from from scratch. And they're having to figure out like, you know, like, yeah, he had to make the decision of of like, you know, do I do like how do how do I license things? How do I sell things? How do I distribute things? And all of that stuff basically has been a solved problem in in in WordPress for for a a long time now. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting because I remember seeing last week maybe that Dree had wrote a blog post basically saying Mia Kulpa on backwards compatibility which was fair play to him. He said I was wrong. Um backwards compatibility is more important than I thought it was. >> And it sounds like they've done the same thing with >> allowing people to sell access to modules too. Ma, not modules. Not modules. I I what I have heard from the conversations that I've had with people in the Drupal community is that probably modules won't have that same sort of like marketplace ecosystem. Okay. >> But uh but themes, yes. And what what the the official uh Drupal marketplace is going to be focused around is the idea of site templates. um which is basically like uh almost like like if you think about like a a Linux distribution, right? Like here's here's the whole thing and then within that you can customize stuff like here is a distribution of Drupal for a real estate site that has everything that you need for that real estate site including a theme and like some like recipes for like these modules are going to be installing for this type of content or whatever. Um, but so it's it's basically like the what I think the Drupal association is trying to get at is is um lowering the barrier to entry because they realize there's this history of Drupal sites are expensive and that's actually like for a lot of agencies and a lot of people that were doing business in that space that was a good thing. We want our stuff to be expensive because we are skilled engineers and we want to get paid. Um but for users and especially with the decline of of the the Drupal bar graph of usage of installs um they're they want to lower the barrier to entry to make it easier to as an to get an entry point into Drupal and the theory is that by creating these uh making it easy for me to get started by saying I want this type of a site uh then uh then I you know having a marketplace to buy a thing, a package that's like, okay, here's how you you'll get started in like five minutes, and then you can just customize the content. Um, the idea is that that'll make it uh maybe help help with that uh with that bar graph and and make number go up. >> Steve is now considering building publish press for Drupal now. >> Well, if they're not allowed to sell modules, >> that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. My my initial feeling of that what you've described there is it's a little bit of skepticism. >> I mean it's it's an in like I I will I'm keeping an open mind, right? Like I think that I think that like I see the good intention. I see the value. Um I don't know how it's going to play out. Like honestly like I'm I'm >> I've used I've used the new Drupal CMS. Um I've used their new uh their new editor thing. I've seen demos of um things. I've used AI. They've got like a whole AI project um that has been funded by the by the Drupal Association um and seen that and how that works inside like natively. Like you can you can basically have a chatbot that you talk to and it will do stuff for you. Like I want a content type that for an event and it will build that thing for you. And that's that's pretty cool. So like there's a lot of really cool stuff happening. Um the question that I always ask is is this enough? Is this the thing? Is, you know, how are, you know, how are you going to get over that hump? Um, and I guess that, you know, that remains to be seen, but like competition is never a bad thing. Um, and like I don't know, maybe WordPress needs to be knocked down a peg, like you know, like maybe we've gotten a little complacent. Um uh talk about talk about uh what uh yeah so how you built uh published press and and what like led to the decision that um like publishing specifically was was uh an area that you felt was maybe underrepresented or something that that had growth potential. A lot of what we a lot of the sort of first principles we took into our WordPress work came from Drupal customers. They were saying these are the things that are important to us at the enterprise level. Uh we need good role management. We need good permission systems and that was a reason for them to choose Drupal. And we looked at WordPress and said hey if these big customers value this they're going to value this in WordPress too. Yep. >> So we took a lot of those lessons on what enterprise companies want and tried to build those systems in and it has worked. We get a lot of enterprise customers, a lot of um universities um uh lot of sort of high-profile names to put on our banner. But the a lot of small publishers are founders as well, newspapers, startups and uh no offense to universities and no offense to enterprise customers, but it's perhaps those smaller customers maybe pay a little bit less that are maybe say maybe 20 25% of our business that have really been the most interesting to me. you see like a little fivep person shop in Atlanta or Tampa starting a newspaper for their area and really trying to dig in and replace all the legacy newspapers that have collapsed in their town. And it's inspiring. Um it reminds me a little bit of some of the startup companies in the WordPress space. like, "Hey, we know we're not going to make $10 million, but we're going to make a living and we're going to try and do something good and helpful to people." Um, I I think there's a real uh kind of similar sense of purpose and got to know some of these publishers over the years working with them and seen their success. Um, and they're all on WordPress. um you're in you're in Utah. >> If there's any um trying to think if we come across any um any like new newspapers or magazines starting up in in Utah or in Tampa near us or wherever it might be, they're on WordPress. WordPress has a 98% market share with these companies. Um, and a lot of the old newspapers have their own legacy CMS's, but WordPress is really dominating in the space. Um, and it's a good thing. It's cheap. Um, these these journalists are paying themselves 30 $40,000 a year, just enough to pay rent and eat some ramen. Um, so WordPress is a a good fit for them. And and do you think that it's it's really that that sort of low cost and lower barrier to entry that that has made WordPress distinct within sort of the publishing space? >> It is easy. Uh the UI is good. I rarely hear any of these customers complain about the UI. They can log in, they're in the block editor, they can start writing. They get it. It's they're people who are who are used to writing on platforms that are similar. It maybe a lot of these people may have worked at say USA Today or maybe a a bigger more brand name newspaper. They they're used to working in a content management system. They move they move to WordPress. They're good to go. It it makes sense to them. >> Yeah. Did you see like one of one of uh a lesson that I learned uh sort of in real time as I was presenting uh at uh Word Camp Long Beach uh a number of years ago. I was um at the time I was working at humanmade. Humanade was a very early adopter of building uh Gutenberg based uh like functionality. We were using Gutenberg and implementing Gutenberg before it was merged into core. Um, and so we were very Gutenberg yay and and and Guten and early adopters. Um, and so obviously my talk uh that got approved and I was speaking at at at Word Camp Long Beach um was uh was about like how the block editor is going to make everything easier, is going to revolutionize uh content editing. And what I realized as I was giving this talk, especially during the Q&A section at the end, was that there was a lot of people there were a lot of people who um were not just like skeptical of the block editor, but really like fundamentally it was it was going to increase the amount of work because they had to learn a new thing because the classic editor edtor was fine um because they were used to it. Um like even though like even at the time I believe there's like there is like data about like the the you know the the bell graph for for learning the learning curve for um for Gutenberg was was smaller. It was easier to learn Gutenberg than it was to learn do things or similar things in the classic editor. Um it was really like the people who had been used to the thing that was in WordPress and now they're having to be they're being forced to you know learn a new thing like there's a lot of resistance and a lot of like I didn't ask for this. Did you also feel that uh as you're you know building this this plugin that's or this suite of plugins that are ostensibly for publishers uh in in this sort of space the same sort of uh resistance to to the block editor? >> No, we get I hear them if if I go on social media I hear them in real life in our work. I don't hear them. um to say something controversial. I think um I think those people are like the uh the cobalt users of the WordPress space. Hey, you want to go and keep on using technology that's that old? Great. It runs it. Like you say, the government, half the government still runs on it. Um, we we still have a Jumla business that has well over a thousand customers still people even though Jumla's kind of been sidelined from the mainstream of open source still people there that love it. If people want to stick on the classic editor, they can be our cobalt users and um let the rest of us um keep moving ahead, but they can stick with the classic editor if they want. um the real normal people using WordPress um that at least in my experience I I'm sure uh perhaps people doing more complicated things with the editor may have bigger complaints about it but our publishers who are getting there they have maybe two or three big stories to write each week they get on with the the block editor and they like it and use it and not had any complaints >> since since you work with a lot of uh publishers and specifically like uh like specifically newspapers and things of that nature. I I wonder if if you have seen uh effects of like how how the decline of print media has affected uh maybe the adoption of of WordPress or the adoption of digital tools or like just what what sorts of things you you maybe have picked up from just being in this space. >> Oh, you for sure. Um the the vast majority of these journalists have had prior careers. they've worked at a big brand name newspaper. Um or maybe the original, say you're in Orlando, there was the Orlando Senate, Sentinel, um Tampa, Tampa Bay Times, whichever city you're in, there was a leading newspaper, often two or three. And as those newspapers went away, these journalists went and often started something for themselves. And they would go digital only. they would not even consider a print edition. Um, and they would often they pick one or two social channels. Um, the teams are not big enough perhaps to carry across five or six different platforms, but they will pick YouTube. Um, there's one big new publisher in Mississippi. um Mississippi today that does a lot of YouTube work. We've worked with some um uh some publishers in Texas that use WhatsApp a lot because they have a big Hispanic audience and uh WhatsApp use is massive there. So, they have a WhatsApp channel. um uh a couple on Instagram um they will use it these digital tools to move more quickly than some of the big legacy newspapers but the heart of it where their original stories and their original reporting lives is WordPress. Do you see like I I see a lot of particularly like you know individual journalists or individual sort of content creators that maybe have been orphaned by the closure or the downsizing of a a larger paper or a publication. Um moving to platforms like you know at one point it was Medium. I think a lot of people were moving to Substack. Um, do you see uh like like and and in a lot of ways this fundamentally gets into the argument of like owning your own content, right? Because like if you're using a tool like that like Substack which is very popular and you can you know build in subscriptions and stuff like that where you get paid for your work. Um the the downside of that is obviously your content lives on Substack. Substack could go to out of business. They could sell your content. They could do whatever. Um you don't necessarily own that. Do you see that sort of tension or or that sort of like competition um with with publishing on something that you own like an open source tool like WordPress? >> Yeah, the the people that go to Substack tend to be the oneperson teams. Maybe they they start that way and they add a couple of support people. Um but it does tend to be the um the personalities, the bloggers who go to um who go to Substack. We see quite a few newspapers using Ghost um another open source platform. >> Um people who lean more on the newsletter side um often go to Beehive. So, there's definitely some alternatives out there. Um, but when it comes to actually building a brand where you have four, five, six, seven, and hopefully in a couple years 10 or 20 people on staff, then WordPress is the place people go. >> Yeah. Um I as I see we're getting we're we're getting towards the end. I want to I want to at least give some opportunity for you to like talk about the thing that um you know publish press is that like what it's there for what people uh would want to use it for. I mean, I I feel like it would it would be a disservice if I did not give you an opportunity to like at least talk a little bit about the thing that that that you that you built. >> Oh, well, we I I guess let me let me take ownership of this and say I as the the person that got this started have never really had a a big road map. um never never sat down and said publish press is going to be this. >> We started with one plug-in and just listened to our customers like crazy and that's probably led to slightly haphazard development. Um, I know some people have the ability to sit down and visualize the awesome product they want to build and then just go ahead and start building it. I don't have that ability. Um, we we have 10 plugins now and I sent a newsletter recently saying we're going to be about 15 plugins by the end of 2026. And it's always been build feature X, talk to the customers. The customers say, "That's great. What we need is now feature Y." And we build feature Y. Um customers come back to us, that's pretty good, but Y, I wish Y worked like this. And maybe how about feature Z? It's always been iterative. And the focus has been on makes making WordPress a really good publishing platform. So a lot of it is just filling in the gaps uh with what's missing like um both of us come from Jumla and Drupal backgrounds. Um both of those content management systems by default have a expiry date for content. >> WordPress is the best publishing platform in the world but it doesn't have an expiry date. >> Yeah. Um, so one of our plugins got started that way by just providing an expiry date. Um or um WordPress has a revisions feature which allows you to see all of the changes that have been made to a particular post you're writing, but it's kind of tucked away in a very small corner of the screen >> and um really hard to navigate and actually browse through all those changes. So we have a plugin that makes it easier. Um, so we try and work with the WordPress core and basically fill in gaps as our customers find them and tell us where they are. Um, so WordPress is WordPress's aim is to democratize publishing. We kind of try and piggyback on that and um, the core can't do everything. We try and fill in all the important gaps that the core is missing to help publishers. Yeah, I I definitely like one of the or the most rewarding times for me as a developer have been when I was building a specific thing. Um, could call it a product, but like a particular plugin or whatever. Um, and really being able to take the feedback of the people that were using it and use that feedback to iterate on the thing that I was building. So it may feel haphazard. It may look haphazard, but like I like I I really like that that feels like a good approach even if it's not the approach that like a product manager would approve of of like having the whole thing because a lot of times like the grand plan like is like what if what if one thing on that road map is not something like you didn't you to for that road map to be appropriate you need to user research all of those points, right? Um, and by the time you do all the user research and then you build all those features in and then you release the thing, it's entirely possible that your users have moved on to something else. Uh, so I I I believe that the the iterative approach is is um like I I I think that's a really good approach. So so don't don't like downplay that. I think that that's a really valuable part of the of the process. Yeah, there are um there's a guy uh Kevin Giri who >> is a a character on WordPress social media >> and he has that ability. I think that um he basically fund fundraised like maybe a million bucks or so, some enormous amount of money to build his Etch site builder platform. He basically laid it out. this is what we're going to build. >> Mh. >> I do not have that ability at all. It's always been um step by step and um some days it feels exhausting because I I read every single customer support ticket that comes in which is exhausting. >> Yeah. >> Um but I think by the time I mean it's if we scaled up to Pantheon's size um that's not going to happen. it's going to break at some point. Uh, but we're at about a dozen staff members and say 10,000 customers total. So, it's still feasible. Um, and you read every customer support ticket, you kind of um through osmosis, you kind of understand what your customers want. >> Yeah. You pick up on the patterns. Yep. Yeah. But you would never read that in a project management book. Um, project management for dummies. Um, they'd say that's a terrible way to work. >> Yeah, they probably would. But at the same time, I know project man I know product managers that like feel like they don't talk to customers enough and like want to have more of that. So like there's like Yeah, at either end of the spectrum, I think you can't win. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean once you get to something maybe perhaps a pantheon size then talking to the customers is much more of a a formal exercise often like hey do you have 20 minutes on your calendar where you can sit down and give me formal feedback. Um a lot of the feedback you're listening to in customer support is oh beep this isn't working >> right >> or like much more visceral. >> Yep. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Well thank you so much Steve for coming on. Uh before we go, I'd like to give you an opportunity to to let people know where they could find you on the internet uh and what things you're working on and and any links that you might want to share for for our our audio listeners or video viewers or whatever. >> I would say these days that I'm mostly on LinkedIn, it's uh the most high value platform. You can find me as Steve Burge on LinkedIn. >> Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you again uh Steve for coming uh on the show. Uh Steve is again available on LinkedIn and uh publish press is publishpress.com uh I believe uh and uh yeah go check >> go ahead >> there there is a funny story there. >> Oh >> oh that um some enormous YouTube social um uh social influencers also um decided to call their company uh Publish Press. >> Oh cool. And >> they getting a lot of free traffic. >> Well, entirely the wrong free tra traffic and they I get lots of their emails now. >> Um like I get like NDAs contracts offers to do things. Um and um uh recently they opened a the YouTube word is merch, right? Merch. Selling merch. They opened a merch store and put publishpress.com instead of their different um tld on the all the emails. So I got all the customer all this merch store complaints coming through as well. >> Well, see we are publish.com the YouTube guys are publish press and some other tldd. >> Well uh you are the you are the real publish press uh in my in my mind. uh not those other published presses. Um thank you again for joining. Uh thank everyone else who's uh watching or listening to this in the future. Uh and we will see you on the internet. >> Thanks Chris., Episode 23: Steve Burge, YouTube, 01kn568ejmqtvt36z89297x4s2.