Why Real-Time WordPress Is the Future  🔗 **Source:** [Why Real-Time WordPress Is the Future](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTRZr2_s8k) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [real-time-web, wordpress-core, websockets, ai-and-wordpress, developer-tools, wordpress-hosting] > author: The WP Minute (Matt Medeiros, host) with Jared Rehtman (guest) > source: The WP Minute (YouTube) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTRZr2_s8k > date created: 2026-08-17 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title: Why Real-Time WordPress Is the Future > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > ### 🔗 References > - [WP Signal](https://wpsignal.io) — Jared Rehtman's WebSocket relay plugin for WordPress > - [World House](https://worldhouse.dev) — Jared Rehtman's boutique WordPress/AI engineering agency > - [The WP Minute](https://wpminute.com) — host Matt Medeiros's outlet; courses at wpminute.com/courses > - [Pusher](https://pusher.com) — hosted WebSocket relay service cited as a non-WordPress-specific comparator > - WordPress Core Real-Time Collaboration initiative (targeted originally for version 7.0, discussed as unlikely for 7.1) > ## 📝 Summary > - **What happened.** Matt Medeiros of The WP Minute interviews Jared Rehtman — a 15-year WordPress developer (10up, Automattic, now founder of World House) — about WP Signal, a WebSocket relay plugin he built after learning WordPress core was pursuing real-time collaborative editing. The conversation moves from WP Signal's mechanics to a wide-ranging discussion of AI's effect on the WordPress plugin economy, WordPress's long-standing identity problem, and the technical shortcomings of core's real-time collaboration polling approach. > - **Why it matters.** WordPress core's in-progress Real-Time Collaboration feature (targeted at v7.0, now uncertain for 7.1) uses HTTP polling every ~3 seconds to keep collaborators' browsers in sync — by Rehtman's account, roughly 90% of those poll requests return "nothing changed." That is a real, quantifiable performance/scalability concern for a feature core intends to ship widely, and it is being surfaced not by a core contributor but by a third-party plugin author building an alternative transport (WebSockets) that plugs into core's own provider architecture. > - **Key stakeholders.** WordPress Core / Core Performance (owns the DB load and editor-crash risk of the current polling implementation), the Real-Time Collaboration initiative team (owns the provider-architecture extension point Rehtman says he can plug into), hosting companies (the majority reportedly lack WebSocket/SSE support, which is the market gap WP Signal exploits), plugin developers broadly (facing what Rehtman frames as AI-driven margin compression), and WooCommerce/Automattic (discussed as a plausible in-house competitor to WP Signal's category). > - **Risks and tradeoffs.** Technical: shipping real-time collaboration on the current polling design risks DB load spikes and editor crashes as concurrent editors scale past 2–3 people (per Rehtman's account). Business: WP Signal's own "moat" is thin by the guest's own admission — "anyone with technical know-how in a couple of months could probably build something like WP Signal" — and its differentiation rests on a hosting-support gap that could close. Rhetorical: several claims (AI as "hype," plugin sales declining, WordPress market share shrinking) are offered as personal impression/anecdote rather than data, which the Logical Validity section below flags. > - **Bottom line.** Real-time behavior — via WebSockets, not polling — is presented as an infrastructure layer WordPress needs regardless of whether core's own Real-Time Collaboration initiative ships on schedule, because the same primitive underwrites e-commerce inventory sync, live chat/chatbots, and breaking-news alerts, not just collaborative editing. > ## 📖 Main Content > The episode opens with host introduction and Jared Rehtman's background: 15+ years in WordPress, agency work in South Africa, a stint at 10up, a period at Automattic, and now his own shop, World House, which does WordPress work with an increasing focus on AI engineering. Rehtman says the idea for WP Signal came about roughly a year before the recording, when he learned WordPress core intended to introduce real-time collaborative editing and recognized there was no formal path to real-time behavior on the traditional WordPress/LAMP stack. > WP Signal, at its technical core, is a WebSocket relay: a WordPress site sends an HTTP request to WP Signal, and WP Signal relays that as a real-time message back to connected clients over a WebSocket connection. Rehtman frames the addressable use cases broadly — not just collaborative editing but chat/chatbot interfaces, live-typing indicators (comparable to iMessage/WhatsApp), e-commerce inventory updates visible to a shopper before they leave the page, flash-sale/Black-Friday urgency messaging, and breaking-news pop-ups in publishing contexts. He has also built a proof-of-concept real-time poker game between two logged-in WordPress users as an exploration of the bidirectional-chat use case. > On the business question of defensibility, Rehtman is candid that WP Signal's technical moat is shallow — competent engineers could replicate it in a couple of months, and WooCommerce/Automattic could plausibly ship equivalent server-sent-events or WebSocket capability in core. The actual moat he identifies is on the hosting side: he estimates the "vast majority, 99%" of WordPress hosting companies don't support WebSockets or server-sent events, which pushes real-time capability out to a relay service rather than the origin server. > The conversation pivots to AI's effect on the WordPress ecosystem. Rehtman characterizes much of the "WordPress is dying" chatter as hype, while acknowledging some plugin developers report declining sales and rising churn tied to AI-assisted or "vibe-coded" replacements. He argues technical depth (debugging a white-screen-of-death from a PHP syntax error, for instance) remains a differentiator that AI-assisted "vibe coders" won't quickly acquire, predicting a bifurcation where a subset of vibe coders migrate toward genuine engineering skill while plugin sales broadly decline for commodity functionality. Medeiros draws a historical parallel to prior WordPress "disruption" cycles — the Envato theme marketplace, page builders — arguing each shortened the gap between non-technical users and a working WordPress site, and that AI simply accelerates the same pattern. Medeiros also raises a values concern: that AI erodes the historical WordPress-and-open-source value of being able to "unpack" a theme, a plugin, or the codebase to learn from it, versus AI simply producing the output directly. > Discussion turns to WordPress core's own AI investments — a core decision to add AI connectors inside wp-admin, and the broader ambition (referenced via MCP — the Model Context Protocol) of being able to "talk in plain English" to a WordPress site the way one might prompt a coding agent against a static site generator. Rehtman characterizes core as moving "at breakneck speeds" on AI and sees the connector approach as creating near-term opportunity for third-party plugin developers to build the natural-language-to-block-markup layer core doesn't yet provide out of the box. > On market share, Rehtman predicts WordPress's long-cited ~43–45% CMS market share will shrink, and frames that as potentially healthy: it may finally force WordPress to Everybody, welcome back to the WP Minute. Special guest today, Jared Rehtman. Jared, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Matt. Thanks for having me on WP Minute. >> Uh so, I was just scouring my uh LinkedIn feed uh a couple weeks ago uh and you popped up in the algorithm. Uh I see that you've been working on something called WPsignal.io. I thought it was very interesting the way that you uh had framed it. I reached out and I said, "Hey, wouldn't it be great uh to chat with Jared to learn a little bit more about this?" You do have uh quite a uh seasoned background in WordPress. Um again, cheating and having my LinkedIn open, you've started at uh 10 Up many years ago. Uh you worked at Automattic for a little bit and now you've built, of course, WP Signal and uh WorldHouse. And we want to talk all about that stuff today. So, for those of folks that don't know who you are, uh how do you sum up uh the >> [laughter] >> the professional career in WordPress for Jared? >> Cool. Well, thanks for that introduction. Um so, first and foremost, I'm I'm a dad and and a husband and uh I've been in the WordPress game for over 15 years. Um started out in the publishing space um back in South Africa. And then was fortunate enough to land a couple of gigs with um US-based companies, 10 Up being one of them many moons ago, as you said. Um and after that, uh worked a little bit in the crypto space. After that, then I went and and worked back uh back into WordPress at Automattic. Um that's pretty much wrapped up uh beginning of last year. And I was fortunate enough to have a a couple of clients reaching out to me for some some extra work and decided to start my own company, World House. Uh we're kind of like a boutique little agency where we we service predominantly WordPress touching on more of the AI sort of engineering space at the moment. And I'd say a little over a year ago I decided to I I heard I got wind that um it was going to be the real-time collaboration um getting introduced into core and it got me thinking about uh just some of the limitations that come with a with traditional WordPress stack the LAMP stack. Um and knowing that there isn't really a um a formal um journey to to get to real-time behavior on a WordPress stack. So I I uh the WP Signal was was birthed from that from the idea of creating real-time infrastructure for WordPress sites >> [clears throat] >> which would allow uh real-time collaboration to be a lot more smoother, stable. Um that's being put onto the backburner. Um but over and above the the real-time collaboration at its core WP Signal is a is a word socket uh web socket relay um and what that boils down to is that you can make send off HTTP requests to the the to WP Signal and have those messages um sent back to the client of your websites in real-time using web sockets. >> [sighs] >> Um so yeah, I've kind of been in the last few months exploring what that means and what's uh what sort of capabilities that can that can um give to a WordPress site. Um yeah. Yeah. >> I want to break I want to break that uh unpack a lot of that stuff. I realize I dumbed it down to something that is probably too >> [laughter] >> you know too minuscule of of a feature, right? When I had first had seen this, I was like, "Oh, we can we can do things like maybe build obviously correct me if I'm wrong but a tool like WP Signal would allow a developer to build something like a chatbot in WordPress. Is that am I getting that right? Like it's giving them the infrastructure the layer to maybe I want to build a chatbot. Maybe I want to interface with an agent to my WordPress site. If that's correct, help me unpack that more like what are the capabilities that something like WP Signal can unlock for a developer? >> Cool, yeah. So, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. It's that real-time behavior. If you've ever been on a financial website and you see those financial tickets when the time the digits are changing all the time. That's happening through a a real-time connection to the website. So, WP Signal was and is built for developers to be able to give them the capabilities of building something like a chatbot. But it's not limited to chatbots. A chatbot a chat is well, the way that we've that I've created this plugin is it's it's it's really pushing the boundaries of what that real-time behavior looks like. Having typing into a message and then on the other on the receiving end seeing that someone is typing immediately. Kind of like what you would see inside iPhone Messenger or or WhatsApp. That's all happening through a dedicated web socket connection between the clients and webs and WP Signal's infrastructure. Um I mean the the the possibilities are really uh are are kind of endless. Um I I kind of see a lot of value within the e-commerce space. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Changing inventory over here and someone on your website seeing that there something is out of stock and before they leave your website, they can you change the inventory and it immediately appears while they are still visiting your site and haven't left. Um everything from from that type of um experience to I don't know, a flash sale, Black Friday, those types of things. Those immediate So let's say for instance, if a visitor is on your site and this is the last page they're going to see. They get to the end of the page and they leave. >> [sighs] >> Um what that real-time behavior allows you to do is kind of uh send them a little tidbit to keep them on your website to maybe direct them to another uh another page or another product. Um And I see I see real value in the publishing space um where breaking news might happen. Where you're reading an article and a breaking news um pop-up shows up. That's all through can happen through relatively easily through WP Signal. >> Mhm. What does the I want to just shift gears just a touch on like the sustainability of your business. When you or for this product, like when you look at this product, do you go uh what what's I guess the direct question is is what's the moat? What's the moat for your product, which is a dangerous phrase these days through the lens of AI uh of like, you know, how what's the differentiator, what's the value add of of a product because I feel like so many people are either threatened or have already been uh threatened by um AI replacing their, let's say, utility plugin. So what's the moat behind this product? Could could WooCommerce ship this in its core? Do you think about something like that? And I guess what's the value add if they do ship it? Like what could you do more that maybe WooCommerce or WordPress at its core wouldn't touch? >> So, >> [sighs] >> at its core, it's really just an infrastructure layer. Any hosting company, any anyone with technical know-how in a couple of months could probably build something like WP Signal. WooCommerce shipping with a web socket or server-side um I mean service service and events capabilities is possible. I think they might do I mean they they could potentially do it, but the I would say the vast majority 99% of hosting companies don't support web sockets and service and events. So, there's there's that kind of like that niche, the moat that you were mentioning, that exists. And that's that's really at its core the value add from from WP Signal. >> Yeah. Along those lines, um you know, there's there's just a lot of chatter on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I guess I'll start from the top of like the demise of WordPress, of course, right? Like everyone's just like, "I don't think WordPress can survive this AI phase that we're going through. There's so much competition." I don't fully buy into that. I'm just, you know, reading what people are are sort of like where that noise is on on socials. And [clears throat] then you kind of drill it down a little bit more to some of the product owners and the stakeholders in the WordPress space, uh whom are also saying things like, "Yeah, my my plugin sales are down. There's a higher level of churn. Um I'm worried about customers replacing my plugin by just talking to their cloud code account. There's those types of things. How do you see I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, but but how do you see the defense of WordPress moving forward? Is it WordPress and AI? Is it WordPress and some other stack for the future? Or can the future hold like what WordPress has been for nearly the last 20 years, which is like hey, throw everything into WordPress. I could build something really robust with a WP signal and customize WordPress to make my own custom app or or whatever that might be. Where do you land in the defense of WordPress through this new AI era that we find ourselves in? >> Good question. I I think over the years I've seen a lot of this type of chatter like WordPress is dead. It's this new system or framework is going to >> [sighs] >> is going to kill WordPress. It's the WordPress killer. I think AI has real potential to disrupt that market and we've already seen stuff like N-dash um come to light. But I think at the moment, I think it's it's hype. Personally, this is how I feel about it. I feel like it's it's really hyped up right now and we've got a lot of vibe coders thinking that they can build the next WooCommerce um or Yoast plugin. And I I think just to a certain degree, if you don't care if really care about the code and the optimization and how it runs, I think that's to a certain degree can be true. But there is a lot of a lot of things that you can't learn through vibe coding like when your site goes down and if there's a white screen of death and it's because of a syntax error inside your plugin. Um I think those calluses and and um that scar tissue takes time to learn and and and kind of keeps you um really interested in doing these these really interesting hard technical challenges and overcoming them and rinse and repeat and as a developer that's kind of what keeps me interested in being and staying a WordPress developer. And I don't think that everyone's got that. I think I think once the hype's over, I think there are going to be outliers [clears throat] where there will be five coders that kind of move to towards having a a a higher technical understanding of WordPress and kind of take on that engineering developer role. >> [sighs and gasps] >> But I think for the vast majority, I think I think plugin sales will go down because I mean again, you could five code something where you can achieve that. It's It's an interesting landscape at the moment. I'm I'm a little uncertain of what's what's going to happen, but I do think there's a lot of hype involved. Personally. >> Yeah. I mean this is something that I feel maybe not at this level or at this uh extreme extreme and like short amount of time. I mean WordPress has always gone through this ever since I I got into WordPress which was late 2006 and then started an agency mid-2007. But we've seen these phases of like when the Envato theme marketplace came out. And you know, for for years years. I mean yeah, for a short few years people are like I got to customize a WordPress site, I have to build a theme. I'm I'm hand coding all of this obviously and then there's like the dawn of Envato themes and now webmasters back then or web designers back then, all they had to do was buy a theme for $79, $59 and suddenly they're a web designer, right? They They found this thing, they buy it, they implement it, boom, they can start a web design agency. Fast forward a few years, page builders come out, right? Where [laughter] where and now suddenly people are like, oh, I'm I'm I'm a quasi web developer slash front-end developer. I can build things, I can move things around. Um and even before that, like when you started to learn how to just install WordPress, you had to kind of understand I've got a database, MySQL, I've got this coding language PHP, and there's HTML and CSS. I kind of got to understand this stuff and and slap these together in a hosting account. Um and and and we've seen this, you know, time and time of again of like the disruption of of shortening that gap to build something, and AI just accelerates that. That's just a long [clears throat] way of me getting to I'm sort of torn. Like, one of the best things about WordPress for all of these years has have been those milestones that people could take it off the shelf, learn how it works, and do something with it. Uh whether that was to unpack it and write their own custom code, whether that was to buy a theme off the shelf, whether that is to get a page builder and start their own design business. It has enabled people to do a lot of cool things. I'm worried about that compression of AI and how people will never have to learn how to unpack these things again. Um that's a that's like a real value for WordPress and open source to be like, I see it, I can unpack it, I can learn from it, and I can go multiple ways with this new knowledge. That AI just says, yeah, you don't even need that anymore. Let me just do it for you uh and skip to the finish line. And and that's a real worry for me. So, uh no real direct question there, but I wonder if you have those thoughts of that like nostalgia of WordPress and like how that shifts people from from learning these days. >> Oh, yeah. Funny you mentioned the the I remember that disruption. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's been an interesting few decades to be honest like and I come from I originally started out with Flash ActionScript and we all know how that ended. I think you're on to something. I think that's uh You know, and going back to what you said about learning what a database is, that took that took a few days to learn to make that um to make that connection of how it all fits together. And you know, as you said that's AI is just narrowing that down and there is that important for them to know? I don't know. I don't think I don't think it is. I think it's becoming less and less important and my wife who's a she's a a product owner. She is just live coding the crap out of everything. And uh And I speak to her about these things and uh She built an app and I'm like, "So how are you saving this How you saving this data? How you keeping up the context, the memory? How you doing all of that?" And she's like, "Well, I'm saving it to a markdown file." So like the database became the markdown file became the database and like to me that would be like "No, you got to throw in like Sequelize or do do something like legit." Yeah. >> Yeah, we have to have global redundancy. We don't even need that stuff yet. >> Right. And for her it it didn't really matter and it she's still getting the value of what it is she's trying to build using the tools that she has at has has at her disposal. Um So I don't know. I think those those really technical understanding of of things is still going to be really important at least for the next 5 to 10 years, but I think it's it's becoming less and less important as like WordPress core move towards having AI connectors inside the admin. Like there was a there was a core decision to do that. Um I'm going to get a lot more slop, like AI slop articles. Um I don't know. It's a really interesting time and yeah, it very nostalgic. Um Everything you made me think >> dry mouth. >> On on the AI connectors thing, again, this is another slice off the um, you know, negative sentiment of of WordPress pie that I see on social media. A lot of folks are just like, "Hey, I'm going to jump to that M-dash." And by the way, I haven't seen anything really substantial come from M-dash. Or at least it's not hitting my algorithm uh recently. But anyway, you see these folks who are you know, just like when Gutenberg came out, which was a milestone obviously in WordPress time. Uh where it's just like a lot of people were up in arms about Gutenberg and they were just like, "I'm out. I'm going to go try something else." They were you know, staunchly against maybe JavaScript or how it was all being developed or decided on and they moved to a new tool, whatever. Um and I think maybe we're having that same thing now, where people are like, "Okay, AI's here. I've been using WordPress for 20 years. I'm out, right? I'm I need to go find a new shiny object." But a lot of criticism is well, I just want to be able to open up Claude code and chat to my website and build it. Like uh moving things in the site editor or in Gutenberg, that's a thing of the past. I just want to chat with it. And WordPress simply doesn't do that out of the box right now. Mhm. The question to you is like, how do you like do you feel like WordPress is moving fast enough? Um too fast? Um because I'm of the mindset that we're just just going to turn that corner and we will have that talk in plain English MCP connection up to WordPress will be easy-ish soon. Uh And I think we just need to turn that corner and like people are just going to look at WordPress and go, "Oh, I can just Now I can just talk to it just like I do with a static site with Cloud Code or M dash or Astro or whatever product." What's your thoughts on how fast or not WordPress is moving for this AI era? >> Yeah, I think it's I mean they're moving at breakneck speeds when it comes to AI. Um and I and I like the I kind of like the approach that they took with the connectors. I think that's going to give some some breathing room to developers and um some opportunists to be able to kind of capitalize on that, you know? So like right now you can't talk in plain English to have it build a site. You can There are various things that you can do and and whatever plugins you have installed and the capabilities that that plugin grants you. Um I think there is uh I think there's going to be a few interesting months ahead where we're going to see other plugin developers launch these new plugins that are going to make that process a lot easier. Uh I've come across one or two um interesting plugins that you talk in plain English in a separate window and it goes straight into the I won't say into the block editor, but it creates block markup for you in a beautiful presentable way. Um but again, it required that that um in intermediary to to be able to facilitate that. So I think there's there's still room for plugin developers to to capitalize on that. >> Yeah. >> Maybe in the short term maybe it's going to change pretty quickly. Don't know. >> Yeah. I I I I think that uh I mean certainly AI we do live in a bubble where we're like we're the we're the early even though we probably like I mean I specifically me, I guess speaking for myself, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like I use Cloud Code every day. I'm building stuff all the time. Like and I still feel like I'm behind. Like I feel like I'm behind, but I know like the rest of the world is like Cloud Code. I don't even know what you're talking about. Like like what is this thing you you you speak of, right? So I know that uh the average let's say business person who maybe people are afraid or going to start building their own websites, they're not going to touch this stuff. And ultimately at the end of the day, they're probably still going to hire somebody. They'll just be like, "Okay, even if you use AI, you just go do it. I need to I need to build houses, right? That's what I do, right? Like you go build the website. I need to build a house." Or I'm a publisher at a big media site. We need to create the content. We don't have time to uh build a website for ourselves, even though even though we could. Um so anyway, I think that we have some time. Uh and I think that WordPress uh can sort of live in that uh for a little while. But here's my my last working theory, and then I want to get back to talking about WP Signal. I think that what we'll see is probably we we will see the the the percentage of WordPress shrink, right? In terms of like that 45, 44, 43% that's been around for for quite some time. Um and I actually think it's a good thing, even though it might be a detriment to the WordPress economy. But I think it's a good thing because I think what will what will land on is the use case for WordPress. Which has been the struggle >> [laughter] >> for like 20 years. Like what is this thing? Who should be using it? Who's the best use case for this? It's been a general tool for a lot of people, right? From bloggers to folks like you and I who are building solutions for customers uh to e-commerce stores to the portfolio site. WordPress has always struggled with that identity. And I think that this is an opportunity where WordPress can land on an identity and like be an open source tool for a thing. I don't know what the thing is yet. >> [laughter] >> But I think it will be a thing soon and that's just my own thoughts. I I don't know if you cuz you have a a breadth of knowledge. Like you've seen large media scales large scale media sites at at 10 up in your other jobs. And and and I just think that maybe there's an identity that WordPress needs to find and this might be the cause of that. I I I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. >> I mean, as you were talking, I was like I such an interesting question like whether it has this identity. I mean, it's it it kind of did. It was the blogging platform and then custom post types came around and then the REST API happened and then that became like an application framework, you know, like I've I've got several clients that's that hit the REST API through their mobile apps. You know, so it's I don't know if it would ever find its its like a granular identity. I think it's going to be this general purpose kind of CMS solution for for a while. I mean, what are the alternatives? Like Drupal, M-Dash, Payload or one of those one of those those types of like headless solutions. Uh >> [sighs] >> I don't know. I think there's I think there's too much experience too too big of a community to for it to go anywhere anytime soon. I do see that as you said that market share, I do see it shrinking, but I don't see specifically people jumping ship, leaving WordPress to go to another solution. I just see an influx, a plethora of new sites hitting the market like these Astro sites and um whatever it may be. Whatever Claude decides is is is the best solution there. >> Yeah. Yeah, whatever Claude makes makes you build and then we're all following that. You know, along the same lines again, I want to go back to WP Signal for a moment. And some ideas just popped into my head. When real-time collaboration started to get developed in core WordPress that is did you see that as an opportunity for WP Signal like when you maybe first had the idea before you even started building this product? And when it got pulled from 7.0, did you jump for joy or did you What did you say like, "Oh, no, this is not good for me." Like how do you see competing or augmenting the real-time collaboration with WP Signal if at all? So, the birth and the idea the concept of WP Signal was birth from the the real-time collaboration initiative. So, in the early build-up towards version 7, there was a lot I mean I I was at working at Breakneck speed trying to get this this plugin launched in time for version 7. But as I was following along, I started to notice that there this wasn't really going to happen just because of uh the performance issues that that come with the real-time collaboration and just hammering the DB to keep both browsers in sync. And add that's on two people, add three people, add four, five, six people. Then you've got one issue with the plugin inside in the block editor which can crash the entire editor. So, it's I kind of had the the feeling that it wasn't going to make it. But then I started to you know, like I like I mentioned explore the possibilities of what that real-time behavior can can kind of give a WordPress owner WordPress site owner. Um, and then I started to look into the bi-directional chat. I even created a recently created a um a poker game that you can play between two uh uh uh WordPress logged-in users. Um, and now I'm starting to explore and um create examples of what you can do with e-commerce. So, I'm augmenting it in that way. Um, but I'm still closely following the real-time collaboration initiative. It's I don't believe it's going to make it in 7.1. Um, I think it's going to still be I don't know if it will make this make it in this year, but we'll see. >> From your product perspective though, when real-time collaboration does hit, if at all, is WP signals set to augment that experience? Like in terms of like your own marketing messaging, are you able to say, "Okay, now that WordPress core has this, I can bring this experience 10 times for you like with all this other stuff that I can add to it." Is that the positioning for a product like yours? >> Uh absolutely. Yeah. So, the the lovely folks who've been working on real-time collaboration built it in a in using a provider architecture where you can as as a provider as a web socket um real-time collaboration I mean a real-time web socket relay, I can just plug into that provider architecture and instead of using the the polling mechanism that's that's kind currently implemented. So, it's essentially this is HTTP polling mechanism that exists within real-time collaboration and it's it's literally just sitting there hammering the DB every I think it's currently set to 3 seconds. So, 90% of those messages are empty because it's saying, "Has anything changed? Has anything changed?" Um, what the web socket relay allows is that you've got this open connection and only when things change, only when things need to be synced are messages synced across that that wire. Um Yeah, I kind of I kind of lost my thought there. Uh my kind of but but basically that's that's how it's all made again. Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean I I know from obviously I'm not a a developer, but um I vibe got a lot of things and uh early on uh when I when I started using Cloud Code uh probably a couple years ago at this point, right? Um one of the first things I started to work on was something for podcasting, right? Uh like a way to communicate with you right now and have like a list of questions uh that you could see and I as we went through them, I could check them off and you could kind of see where we lived in this conversation. Not the best way that I like to hold interviews, but it was just an idea I was kind of playing with. And I learned [clears throat] quickly about trying to sync multiple browsers. Uh and it wasn't as easy as me just, you know, typing some things, but what I found were like um Well, you can answer this question too cuz maybe this is where you're thinking. Um there are like hosted I guess like web socket companies, right? Or or like ways to There are companies that will host these this type of infrastructure to push messages and states around to to different browsers. Is that a thing that you would eventually maybe get into with a product like this and and not do the flat plug-in pricing? Cuz I'm looking at your pricing page, I see a lot of like your higher tiers are still to be determined with a contact us button. So, how do you how do you think about the scale of the business when when you think long term? >> Right. So, like >> [sighs] >> I mentioned a little bit earlier that it this is built for developers and right now it's just a passion project. I'm I'm still trying to onboard users and until it starts costing me money, I don't really see the need to change that that that pricing page and and it might stay for free forever. It's just a really cool for the way I look at it, it's just a it's a really cool thing that I that I find a lot of value in and see myself using it a lot going forward. But I do see so there are other companies that web socket relay companies like Pusher is one of them. >> Pusher, right? That's one of them. >> Yeah. So Pusher is just like a general you can through any sort of architecture use Pusher. I wanted to create WP Signal that it worked really well within uh it's one of the way that you're you're comfortable and familiar working with in in WordPress as a developer. Um so it like it uses hooks to be able to fire off HTTP requests when you're setting it up. Um and yeah, it's I eventually I hope to see it it moving into that space of of becoming a not necessarily a hosting company but becoming a web socket relay infrastructure that people reach for when they're looking for real-time behavior. >> That's very cool. Uh very cool. Jared, thanks for hanging out today. Uh I again if if LinkedIn is correct, it says you're in Kentucky. You certainly don't sound like a Kentuckian. Uh >> [laughter] >> how did you end up in Kentucky? >> Oh, um so well I was working at 10up. Uh they had their annual summit and in 2019 they had it at um at Disney World. And I'm originally from South Africa. Um so in 2019 I flew across to Disney World and my wife also working for 10up, we bumped into each other and hit it off. I moved back to South Africa. I mean I I I traveled back to South Africa and a month later I moved to Kentucky just before COVID and we got married within the month. >> Yeah. >> Got pregnant and nearly 7 years later I'm still >> So she lived in Kentucky. >> Yes, she's she's born and bred. Yeah. >> then she she got you at the opportune time because it was like you're in Kentucky now, you ain't going nowhere because COVID hit. So you you were kind of stuck there. That's really cool. How does Kentucky compare to to South Africa? I'm sure there's some major differences. >> [laughter] >> Major major differences. I would say the only similarity is really nothing actually. The weather's completely different. People are completely different. Uh >> Yeah. No surfing. >> No surfing. The humidity is just brutal. I never I never I've literally never seen snow until I moved here. Uh >> To be honest, I didn't even know Kentucky got snow compared to where I live. >> Yeah, we get I think we get one snowfall at least once a year since I've been here. Yeah. And we get our tornado warnings which is also completely foreign to me. >> Yeah. >> Uh um But yeah, it's it's a beautiful place and I'm really fortunate and happy to be here. >> Just in case just in case his wife's listening. He is very happy to be living in Kentucky. Some great some great bourbons, some great whiskeys, some great barbecue, I'm sure. All that great stuff. >> Yeah. >> Uh Jared Rethman Rethman over at worldhouse.dev. You can contact him there if you want to hire him to work on some some projects wpsignal.io. Check that out if you're looking for real-time WordPress events uh, in a plugin. It's a great project. Jared, thanks for hanging out today. Um, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks? >> No, I think you you hit them you got them all. Thank you so much, man. >> Awesome stuff. 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