Mario Peshev on the WordPress Ecosystem, Episode 73

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Hello everyone! Welcome to office hours episode #73 coming to you…what is today? August something or another. Yeah, so I hope all of you out guys out there are doing well today and I’m excited to introduce you to Mario Peshev. Mario how you doing today?

Mario: Oh good. Thank you about you?

Carrie: All right. It’s 9:00 pm in your neck of the woods?
Mario: Yep. 9:00 p.m. sharp.

Carrie: Well I appreciate you staying up either past your bedtime or you know being on the show instead of watching…whatever it is you…I don’t know…what you like to watch?

Mario: Lots of series. Today I’m not sure.

Carrie: No Madmen?

Mario: Madman. I think it’s over, no?

Carrie: Yeah. I think it is.

Mario: That was a tricky question from you.

WordPress in Business

Carrie: It was a trick question. Ok. So today we’ve got lots of exciting stuff to talk about especially on the topic of business in WordPress. Which is of course a lot of what this podcast is about. But before we dive in I would love to thank our show sponsors today. We’ve got DreamPress2 by the friends of ours over at DreamHost. It is a managed WordPress hosting service. Actually it’s probably the most affordable one on the market. It comes with virtual private servers, hip hop virtual machines, Memcache and basically all the things that make your site super speedy. Check them out over @Dreamhost.com/officehours and then we also have the WP Development Workflow webinar series. You can check more about that over at WPdevelopmentworkflow.com. Helping developers level up their  WordPress workflow over there. If you are tuning in live, welcome! I always love the questions that we get from the live audience. You can send those into Mario and myself by tagging it on Twitter with #officefm. Or if you’re tuning in from Google+ then just drop it in the Google Q&A and we’ll get to it.  So with all of that preamble  let’s get to it. So Mario, for those who haven’t had the chance to find you online and get hold of your awesome content, can you give us the who are you? What you do? Give us the spiel.

Mario. All right.  My name is Mario Peshev. I’m the CEO and WordPress architect of DevriX. We are a distributed WordPress Agency dealing with a lot of technical stuff. We’re based out of Europe and we’re doing a lot of fun stuff for quite a lot of incredible clients including the airlines, automotive, education, banking and all sort of industries. It’s pretty amazing. I’m blogging at Devwp.eu. I’m writing a lot about WordPress, WordPress development, WordPress business and stuff like that. My background is in software engineering. I’m actually coming from the programming world so to speak. I was dealing with Java, with Python, a bit with .NET back in the dark years when I wasn’t still pretty serious about open source. Nowadays I’m really happy that they’re open sourcing it, which makes it even more possible for more open-source people to start using another great platform. Nowadays what we’re doing is consulting, retainer plans, development, ongoing retainers. We do have experience building software service solutions for large multi sites, optimizing large video websites and things like that.
Carrie: So how many people are part of your team?

Mario: We have 15 people full-time and have several freelancers working with us as well.

Carrie: That’s awesome! How long did it take you to go from just yourself to building up a team of people?

Mario: That’s a great question. I think that I started freelancing in 2008. I hired my first employee who is now a partner since 2010, which is when we established the company. For a few years we were kind of 4 up to 6 people and for the 2 or 3 years we are now 10 people strong.
Carrie: Is your role in the day-to-day management of managing the employees, managing the office and that sort of thing or are you able to do more of actually getting your hands dirty with consulting?

Marie: Dirty. So it’ a great question. Our schedule is a bit flexible so to speak. First off, we are fully distributed. Like some of the people working with us for over two years, I haven’t really ever met. Our management is more flexible. We work on weekly durations with most of the people. Like here is the amount of work for the week. You can imagine it is a Sprint in the Scrum world. So you can kind expect the work to be done by the end of the week. If there are any questions we do have Asana project management which is what we’ve been using. A few months ago we switched to Bitchat which is pretty much used for some integrations and for some internal communication if needed. I and deal with different things like from sales, building partnerships, optimizing the business model, project management, planning, training the team, consulting, and doing development myself as well. So it’s a variety of tasks that I have to do deal with on a daily basis.

Carrie: So when do you sleep?

Mario: Every two or three weeks.
Carrie: (laughs) Yeah. It figures. You’ve got a lot going on. So you’re in a distributed team. We were talking a little bit previous to going life here about client calls.  You said you’re doing a lot of business with clients in the US, so a lot of your calls are taking place at odd hours on your end. As far as your team is concerned are they primarily in Europe or are you spanning 12 hours worth of time zones?

Mario: Yes. I think it’s probably about a 10 hour time zone difference from the Western part to the Eastern part. Right now we have people in three continents and we kind of hope that we will be able to hire more people in the States for different purposes.

Carrie: I just finished reading The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkan. He worked over at .com on their social team for a while. Just hearing him talk about the distributed workforce and team meetings and so forth, I think it would be tremendously challenging to have to work around that. Ok. I’m going to start peppering you with questions until other people get their questions in.

Mario. Sounds good.

WordPress outside of the US

Carrie: While we’re talking about US, Europe working internationally. Let’s talk about WordPress in the context of outside the US bubble. This year WordPress will be hosting it’s Community Summit right up against WordCamp US. Once again, it will be on US soil. As a WordPress contributor and champion of open source, do you find it difficult being outside of the US in terms of support or resources, that sort of thing?
Mario: Absolutely. I’m pretty sure that’s not the answer that most people would like to hear in public. In my opinion, it’s extremely challenging to be really active unless you’re in the States, Canada or somewhere within those time zones. Probably a good example of that is I’ve had patches submitted to on track for about a year and a half. I went to WordCamp San Francisco. I met Mason and a few other folks. Within the first week I got 4 patches that got into the WordPress core. Over the next 2 to 3 weeks I got 3 or 4 more. This could be interpreted in different ways but again…which is my personal story is that unless I was able to go to WordCamp San Francisco the last time I would probably would not be a core contributor right now. Or at least it would have been postponed to a year or two afterwards. This is one of the things and other things kind of relate to this as well… are things like the community meetups, weekly chats and things like that. I think that the core chat right now…it’s at 11:00 pm my time, which I was able to do for a year, or a year and a half. But nowadays it’s not really possible to simply attend every single week. Especially when there are other teams that also gather late at night or in my time zone.  If you kind of think about it as something that could be accomplished by someone in the States. If it’s during business hours it’s more possible. If you have a family or some personal life outside work it gets pretty tricky to join all those conversations happening mostly during US hours.

Carrie: Do you see any ready solution or something that would be not too difficult to implement to make that situation easier?

Mario: Well honestly there have been many discussions about that at the Community Summit. A lot people have proposed that it may actually happen in Europe this year. Probably in Asia or Australia next year. It is kind of rotating. Another discussion that we had at WordCamp Europe in Sofia last year was that probably if the lead developer of the WordPress releases was in Europe, probably the office hours would be more appropriate to be in European time in order to accommodate more local people being active. Simply doing some sort of a rotational system so that during one release, it’s easier for the US guys, the next one in Europe, the next one Asia/Australia and so forth. So in general there are ways for this to be more comfortable for other people. But there’s this general understanding that the majority of the computers are in the States. It’s kind of a  Catch-22 you know? Like if it isn’t more convenient for other people to join the conversation there aren’t going to be many more people getting involved with WordPress in the first place.

Carrie: That make sense. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that. Whenever I have guests that are outside the US, I like to hear their opinion on involvement in the community when you’re outside of all of the support that exists here in the US. So switching gears…so just fair warning Mario. You said that you liked improvising so you’re going have to do it today. Sometimes we switch gears kind of randomly here based on how the questions are coming in. So we’re just going to roll with it. Going back to talking about your business you mentioned that you are covering multiple industries versus having just a specific vertical industry that you’re focusing on. How are you going about attracting new clients?

Mario: Right. That’s a good question. I’d say being able to work in a vertical is pretty important but I wouldn’t really identify a vertical by having a specific specialty. For example, dealing only with medical centers or with dentists…or something like that. This is one way to look at it. Obviously if you want to specialize you may become the greatest expert in that specific niche. Like medicine or something else. Obviously there are other ways to implement the vertical aspect of that. For example, there are some folks who deal with membership websites, e-commerce, your a famous Genesis expert. If you’ve got a client ,I would assume that as long as it is Genesis and the price range is good you will be just as happy to deal with that, right?
Carrie: Sure.

Mario: So it’s kind of something that we do here. What we do is we specialize in technical development. The majority of the agencies and consultants out there aren’t really providing custom solutions. The majority of our work is building scalable systems, integrating third-party APIs, building software as services or scaling multi-sites. Which is still kind of a broader niche, but it’s more involved in dealing with technical development in large, heavy, slow systems (is what I’m going to say) and integrating various different APIs. So this is kind of our niche. Which is what we’ve been focusing on for the last couple of years.

Carrie: All right. Well we have a great question from Sarah that actually kind follows up on that. So you’ve got this distributed team and obviously they are they’re fitting the bill because they have the skill set that you need to serve the clients that you’re going to serve. How do you even find these people in the first place?

Mario: That’s a good question. Personally I have a thing. Most companies, especially the ones in States, Canada and Western Europe are used to working with Community contributors or people who are really popular in the industry. My personal approach is a bit more unpopular. I’m trying to grow my people. I have over 10,000 hours as a consultant and trainer. I’ve been the trainer of various corporations like VMware, SAP, Saudi Aramco which is the largest petro company, CERN and a lot of other companies. Lots of universities and schools as well. I have a pretty large network of people who are super passionate and motivated and eager to learn more and become better. So there’s a saying…I am not sure what is the English translation…but you can hardly teach an old dog new tricks. I’m not sure what is the exact translation.

Carrie: You pretty much nailed it.

Mario: Yeah. Awesome. Great. I am pretty happy with myself. What I am trying to do is like I really love giving a chance to people who aren’t that acquainted with WordPress. I find great joy in just getting people were are really motivated to learn. They are willing to dig into everything. How is that working? Just staying and poking, digging and checking stuff. What we normally do is just start working with that type of person. For example, my first employee, that I consider a partner now, I found him at the University. We were studying together and said ok. How do you feel about starting this summer with me? Let’s see how it goes. He didn’t really know that much back then but he was pretty passionate and started simply learning and digging into everything. We started hiring more and more people from my training, different events that I attended and people from my log on videos  teaching WordPress. Unfortunately they are in Bulgarian so they are a bit hard to translate. But people who are simply passionate about that and who are pretty happy. I was just listening to you…some podcasts with Chris Lema and he was saying the like the average amount of time a person stays with a company s about 18 months. He’s able to extend it to about six years or so, which is what I am trying to do. I’m trying to build a company spirit. A community. A place where people are pretty excited about the opportunity given and they feel the internal company spirit if that kind of makes sense.

Carrie: That absolutely makes sense. It’s just a huge undertaking. Because you are talking about building a culture that appreciates the people that work for you and with you and makes them want to stay…while also trying to bring in business that your employees will enjoy working on…while also trying to do a good job. I applaud you. I see why you don’t sleep for every two or three weeks.

Mario: Truthfully, my first job was probably at the age of 11. Then I switched several jobs. During my teenage years in college and everything like that, I had the opportunity to have been given the chance to work at a pretty young age. Even if it wasn’t really common.  Like no one else at my school was working. People were able to see the potential in me. It sounds kind of snobbish but I was really motivated and excited. I was staying late night hours, working all the time. At some point of time, I was going to school, getting excellent grades and working at two places. I was just hustling quite a lot back in the days. That’s what I’m trying to do now. Especially with people who are younger. Like the last year of high school, in college or at the university. In the market it’s really hard if you don’t have experience to get an opportunity to start working, right? Most companies are looking for at least 18 months of experience or even more. It’s pretty hard to prove yourself and when I’m meeting people I can see when they’re motivated. They are able to find their way to Google, Slack or whatever. I’m happy to give them a chance and see if it’s a good fit or not.

Carrie: We’ve got question from Patty. Have you ever had any sort of performance issues that you needed to address? Like maybe you thought somebody was super motivated and it turns out not so much?

Mario: Yes. It happens every now and then. I realize that there are two types of people. At least with the team we’ve been working with. There are some people who want to do some things. They kind of want to reach the end of the tunnel but they’re not willing to make the walk. This is kind of a group with two different dimensions. The first one is people who simply aren’t too motivated. We stop working with them. It they’re not that motivated. We stop working with them. But there is also another type of personality which are people who simply work only under pressure. For example, our front end guy. He’s is terrific. He has it some outstanding designs and he digs all the time through Gulp and Grunt. He’s simply digging all the time. If you don’t give him an assignment and a  deadline, he’ll start slacking full time. He personally told us several times that you need to stab with your shoe on my neck so that I can work. I love working but unless I have a deadline I’m simply not going to work at all. It’s kind of an interesting model. I kind of understand it. This is the way I work myself. I just have like a billion tasks in my project management system to keep myself motivated. I work on as many as possible. If I don’t have tasks for two days, I’m just going slack for two days and that’s it. So I kind of understand this model.

Carrie: I wouldn’t call that slacking if you didn’t have work. You’re just taking a little bit of a rest. I think what you just described it is really interesting. It’s good that your front end guy can recognize that and say hey this is what I need to kind of keep me on task. If somebody wanted to own their own business or freelance, that personality would not work out very well.

Mario: So it’s kind of procrastination. It’s simply a state of a personality really. Some people simply know how to break their day into parts. They go to work, do some stuff and get back home. But some people simply work under pressure. I’ve read a lot about psychology. I took some classes on NOP and some other things in that area.  I know how many different types of people there are. There are some great people who simple work like that. This is a really long topic but in general it kind of doesn’t make you a bad person if you start slacking unless you have a deadline. It’s simply a personality. I can’t describe it better.

Carrie: Yes. Not at all and I didn’t mean to imply that it was. Merely that there are different work styles and that the person who is going to freelance would not be as successful if they needed that work environment. Unless you know, just getting a paycheck and eating…that might be pressure enough. Let’s see. We’ve got a good question from Davinder. Let’s talk about money. So how do you arrive at payment/salary for your employees? Is that based on the kinds of projects that you’re bringing on? Their level of experience?

Mario: About the salaries? We’re kind of trying to stick to industry standards, based on where the person is, what’s the average standard and things like that. It’s kind of a boring question. It is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to cover whatever is acceptable you know? We try to increase it as much as possible.We also try to work out the bonus system. If we have a tough project and say ok let’s sit down and to that, lets sit down and do this…you will have bonuses and team buildings or some other internal company benefits. That’s what we do. We try purchasing company software, books, some licenses for something, some online training licenses and things like that. For some folks we are subsidizing some hardware. So it’s kind of a standardized salary with some other benefits that are part of the deal.

Carrie: Cool. Well I guess the follow up question to this is are you hiring?

Mario: Probably the answer to this is we are always hiring. But it’s really hard to find the right talent.

Carrie: Sure. Indeed. Ok. If anybody out there is listening and you like what you’ve heard so far and sounds intriguing, you know where to find Mario. Ok. So let’s get into some WP drama. It’s not actually WP drama. By the way, for folks that are tuning in, do go check out Mario’s blog at DevWP.

Mario: DevWP.eu.  Like Development WordPress.

Carrie: Ok. I don’t know why I was thinking it was Peshev.com.

Mario: I have Peshev.net but it’s another thing.

Carrie: Ok. Well ignore all the botched domain names that I just said. You have a lot of great content around the business side of WordPress. Not only are you…forgive me while I just brag on you a second….you’ve got tremendous technical capability, but you also have a great amount of business savvy. I’m guessing from what we talked about preshow, that you impart a lot of that wisdom either through the various masterminds that you’re in or in a consulting capacity with your clients. The article that you wrote recently was…to sum it up it it was called Blogging and the WordPress ecosystem. I’ll give you my impression of the summary. We get together in our circles and gripe about cheap clients or people that aren’t willing to pay…it’s what we love to harp on. What you really highlighted is, it’s our job to educate and to let potential customers know what they can expect. Can you talk a little bit about what prompted that article?

Mario: Most of my articles are based on various discussions with people or calls with potential clients, Twitter Congress or something like that. The main thing is I think there was probably some discussion on a cheap client here or they want to get Facebook built for 200 bucks (which is something that I see occasionally over and over again). What I’m trying to do most of the time is especially when I did the NOP classes like 10 years ago, I’m always trying to put myself in other’s shoes. I’m trying to think like every single time I go to a dentist or every single time I take my car to the mechanic, I’m trying to think as though the guy on the other side is me and what sort of dumb stuff I don’t want to tell him. For example like today my car was at the mechanic. He called me and said look. We actually decomposed your engine and we figured out that it’s going to cost twice as much and it’s going to take ten more days. I was pretty frustrated and said look I know that there was no way for you to understand that without decoupling everything so this is the only way for you to understanding it.  That doesn’t make me any less frustrated but for you was an expert I want you to tell me what’s the best thing to do here. Whether it’s like sell this or buy a new thing. We’ll fix it, whatever it is. So I’m kind of trying to apply my experience in other fields like the WordPress industry right? That’s one of the things I was explaining here. When I’m looking for services, it’s really hard for me to understand whats the state of the specific market. For example, if I’m looking at .NET services you can see the highest level of professionalism there. It’s a corporate world, it’s enterprise, it’s Microsoft, they have gold certificate partners, that have all the MVPs which are the most valuable professionals there, you have a lot of different certification programs, etc. It smells of professionalism. It simply states that. And when you start looking at WordPress it’s pretty hilarious. It’s like… find the cheapest team. Find the lowest cost. Get this for free; get that for free. Everything is free, everything is easy, everything is fast, everything is cheap. If you look for service providers they are going to provide the lowest value as the biggest benefit. That’s one of the reasons…and I keep seeing that over and over again. On one hand it’s what would be the representation of WordPress for other people. It’s free, it’s cheap, it’s super easy, everything is included by default. Which means that there is no extra work to be done, right? I had a client and I actually have a blog post for that too. Two years ago or so he contacted me with some plugin changes. Okay. I said what what’s your budget? It was a really long list of changes including new database tables, wizards in the admin, whatnot.  I bought the whole plugin for 25 bucks which means that it would be worth 15 bucks for you to implement this whole list of changes. 15! 1 – 5. I was really frustrated by then too. On the other hand, if you buy a car and  you need some changes it’s not going to cost you several times more than the price of a car. If you Google and try to find a way through other agencies or service providers, you simply are going to find quite a lot of service providers working for low cost. This is a pretty long story that could be like a separate mini Ebook as well. What I’d say as a conclusion is that we need to provide more content about better services, better solutions, and high quality. What’s the difference between do-it-yourself or cheap stuff. What are the benefits? People don’t understand things like speed, like security, like hosting awareness.anything. All that service providers are trying to offer is a cheap, fast, big, beautiful solution.

Carrie: By the way, I love that you just you leaned into this and your voice kicked up a notch. We hit on a topic that you are passionate about. So you’re proposing…I guess a blog is just one of many ways we can educate customers… but that we as a service provider need to be blogging to get the word out as you will. Do you think these potential customers are reading our blogs?

Blogging for customers

Mario:  I learned that a lot of my customers are reading my blog even before contacting me. Some are actually contacting me for that specific reason. What I am saying is…like the rule of thumb in marketing world is that you need to write about your customers. Which means that you need to write exactly about your buyer persona, about the perfect customer that is going to buy your services and so forth. So you need to represent your skills for them. But people sometimes forget that their services are part of a bigger pool of services (which is the WordPress Industry itself). The more you ignore that, the more people are going to show up and try cry about content, about cheap services low-quality and things like that. For one quality blogger they’re are going to be a hundred more writing low quality content and creating websites with cheap and ugly services. My suggestion and the favor that I’d like to ask of people or service providers is that provide high-quality solutions is simply to start blogging more and educating customers. Otherwise, right now, I’m pretty comfortable saying that most people outside of the WordPress Community often see WordPress as a joke. People outside of the PHP Community see PHP as a joke and WordPress as the key to the kindergarten. For real. I was at the PHP Meetup last night. Like 20 minutes in, someone asked me what I did. I said I was giving a talk at the WordCamp Netherlands. He said what about? I said WordPress and everyone was cringing. Did you have to do that or what? I said No. I’m actually working with WordPress. The entire table was silent. I said look guys. We were just talking about PHP7 versus HHVM. We were just talking about optimizing, scaling this, scaling that. You can apply what we discussed now. That’s what I do in the WordPress world. They asked me are you actually able to do development with WordPress? Is it not only building designs, like drawing or painting or something? That’s what most people understand from WordPress because that’s what people outside of the WordPress Community see about WordPress. That’s one of the things I would like to change. In order for me to be more comfortable in this space, in order for me to be able to work with better clients I try to write more and allow more people to be able to find my articles and say Oh Look! There’s actually another perspective here which means I need to compare the first thing to the second thing. Now I have a broader picture of the WordPress system.

Carrie: I’m left a little bit speechless. I’m just soaking in what you’re saying and WP Studio over on Google+ just has asked a question that falls right in line with what you’re talking about. How do WordPress developers get more acceptance/respect in these other PHP based communities…or other language communities?

Mario: It’s a tough question because it really depends on what do people want to do. For example: if your front-end developer you may feel more comfortable dealing with front end stuff and joining other communities. Like the JavaScript community for example. Or go to all of the UX conferences, or HTML, CSS Conference and other things in this area. If you’re a back end developer, at least my personal idea for providing full stack web development services, is that you need to be fairly acquainted with PHP,  pretty comfortable with JavaScript in the WordPress space. Again like back end JavaScript. Back end angular and other things and you need to know your way around SQL and different RDBMS like MySQL. The main thing is that if you are aware of that, if you want to be a developer providing actual solutions…you probably have already started learning more about that by simply reading PHP books, MySQL, JavaScript and things like that. Building applications with other platforms, frameworks, CMS if you will…simply doing software development. I find that WordPress, at least from my point of view because  I have an engineering degree so to speak…is that if you want to provide the entire solution, you need to be aware of every single step of the stack. Which means the operating system and underneath computer architectures. Like how does your computer work? What does the CPU do? The RAM and hard drive…how are they connected to the motherboard? How does the operating system work? What are the differences between the operating systems? What are the different programming languages? What compiles to what? How does the password for engine X work…whatever. For example if you know all of that… you understand HHVM and say ok. Is being compiled to this, you need to prep this, then you need to do that. If you want to provide professional services, and do better and scale more and squeeze more out of that, you just need to dig deeper and try more. Try different applications, different contexts, solving different kinds of problems. For more keen developers there’s a pretty popular book called The Pragmatic Programmer which explains all types of concepts about programming. They actually advise that a new Pragmatic Programmer learn a new programming language every single year. Just in order to extend their knowledge, to understand different paradigms, to understand different design patterns and different application styles. I know that it sounds really geeky, but in my opinion if you’re a front-end developer, then you need to partner up for professional solutions with someone who knows the ins and outs of the backend. If you’re a backend developer, you need not only to be able to use WordPress but apply the programming knowledge. It is pretty much language independent or at least platform independent. Which means that you need to be able to build your own administrative system, dashboard, whatever. Just implement authorization, authentication, create new database tables and things like that. Because if you want to get outside of the small bubble of WordPress you need to do development.  If you want to be comfortable and use WordPress to it’s full extent…and even outside of it…you simply have to know development as well.

Carrie: So a couple of follow-up questions on that. Do you think the WordPress Rest API will help in terms of other’s (outside of WordPress) developer’s perception of WordPress in terms of capabilities and interactions with other platforms?

Mario: The main thing is that it is a great thing and it will be pretty helpful to be able to use it. So I’m pretty hands on with the JSON API…whatever the  latest name is. I think it’s really important. I’m pretty sure that they’re are going to be quite a lot of applications on top of the Rest API. Just to give a pretty quick example with Drupal, they have been waiting for Drupal8 for almost four years now I think. They rebuilt some components in their core to make it Symphony compatible. I’m not sure the best way to say it but they invited the Symphony community by making their core Symphony friendly so that they can reuse different Symphony framework components. I’m really not explaining it in the best possible manner but the thing is that they’re embracing the Symphony Community as developers in order to bring in more technical capable people in their project. That’s one thing that we may do as a WordPress Community. Embrace and invite more technical experts to our core community.

Carrie: I love it. Jackie asked a really astute question. Do these issues that we’re talking about…do they exist in other open source platforms or is this unique to WordPress because it’s more in its infancy? What’s your opinion on that?

Skills needed for WordPress development

Mario: I wouldn’t say that it is in its infancy. One thing that I’ve noticed is that there’s no other Community probably outside of the Joomla one and the WordPress ones. Joomla I’m putting in the same hat. Where non-technical people are starting to build solutions. The main problem here is that you have a problem. You find a solution and you see the end result, right? You say ok. I’m done. Everything is done. In practice it isn’t done because you don’t understand the process and you don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. Which is great on hand because the learning curve is super low and it allows for new people entering the market learning more and getting to the services business and so forth. There is zero incentive for those people to become better and to actually understand how things work. Outside of the WordPress and Joomla worlds, everything else in the web development field requires programming skills. Like you simply cannot build an application without knowing at least some part of programming. It’s much more complicated. Which means that people there are simply more technically aware. Whereas with WordPress it’s easy to buy the cheapest hosting, go to WordPress.org install and click next, next and boom! You have a WordPress installation. Most people simply don’t realize what are the consequences of installing a website online and what could happen outside of this process of simply installing something. That’s really a huge picture of things that could happen.  I’m not going to start on that.

Carrie: You can get started if you want. Brother. Come on!

Mario: We need like six hours or something.

Carrie: We can have the late WordPress office hours or After Hours. So last episode I had Tonya on from the WP Developer’s Club and have you heard what she’s doing over there?

Mario: No. I’ve heard nothing about it.

Carrie: Essentially where she was coming from was looking at the specific issue of licensing. So with all these big technologies like Microsoft Oracle etc. etc. there is licensing. So when you get a developer, or you hire a developer that’s got  the badge of having this license, you know that you’re getting a certain quality. In WordPress that doesn’t exist. You can do a five minute install and call yourself a developer. There’s a lot of disparity in terms of the skill set between a bunch of people who use that same word to describe themselves as developers. So she started something called the WP Developer’s Club that’s really kind of right in line of what you’re talking about. Which is getting people back to the core principles of programming and understand what’s happening from the ground up and doing things properly. So when you go on to doing something…whatever it is you’re doing…you’re updating a plugin or you might be doing some mundane task…but you are understanding the components under the hood. So yeah. Anybody listening that missed that episode with Tonya, go back and listen to it. It was just a fantastic discussion. We’ve got another question from CJ. And again always great questions from the folks tuning in. This is exactly what we’re talking about. Mario? You mentioned that you like encouraging people who are keen to learn and grow in using WordPress. What advice would you give to someone who’s just starting out and looking to level up their approach to WordPress?

WordPress Certification

Mario: That’s a great question. I’m actually going to connect that to what you just said about licensing. I call that a certification program or something like that. A training program with certification levels. I tried to raise that question twice at WordCamp San Francisco, including the Community Summit last year. It was really accepted with more hatred. I would have to say it like that. Simply because people kind of expect that it is going to commercialize it in a terrible way or kind of cheat the system. I actually believe that I’d rather have 5% of people who are cheating the system than have 95% of people who have no idea what they’re doing. CJ actually raised a great question. One of the problems that I’ve been seeing is that I don’t have a grade suited for resources that I can give to someone who is just starting. It’s something that has been bothering me for a while. Like I said, I have my training courses but they’re in Bulgarian and it’s just really hard to translate them. I can give them to local people but every time with foreigners I cannot give them anything in particular. I’d be looking at previous tutorials which are pretty good. Bob at WP for the basic things. There are a lot of other people for the basic things. WP101 and Troy Dean. There is no curriculum that you can start, take it from there and start growing. I even tried to write a blog post for that and I spent probably six hours looking for different resources. I simply was not able to connect the dots. So if anyone is looking at that and is in  the training space please start creating a pretty large program for people who know nothing, so that they can become beginner WordPress users, WordPress administrators, implementers and then having branches move from that…like backend and that sort of stuff.  I have considered that myself and we have discussed that with other trainers. I think that it’s a complicated thing. It would take quite a lot of time and it would be really awesome if some of the big guys would support that. Like Automattic, 10up or Webdev…some of the big crew. Simply because it’s going to give the right authority to that. One of the things I don’t understand is Acquia, the company behind Drupal, they actually have a certification program. They do maintain the training resources and they offer you to become a trainer in order to spread the word and in order to teach other people to do that the right way. One of their guys actually contacted me and offered for me to become a licensed Drupal trainer and everything. Going through these materials and like everything was maintained by them. You simply need to know that and go and take their presentations and teach that to other people. Which is pretty awesome.

Carrie: Oh my gosh! I’m going to have to go back replay the episode just to hear all of this again. I really appreciate your honest approach and you know what? It’s not a perfect ecosystem and there are things that we can do to make it better. I am trying to roll around in my head what that would look like to formalize training in WordPress. I feel it would require quite a bit of fortitude and possibly Scotch. We’ll see.

Mario: To be honest, I think that we have some things but they are kind of a separate components. Now we have the theme review handbook. We have the plugin development handbook. These are incredible resources but there are so many other things happening in WordPress and we just need to kind of grow that. Then we need to break it into actual learnable patterns so that there are other ways for people to learn that. For some people it may be easy to read the handbook but for others it would be like a tutorial manner, a presentation, video training, one on one and onsite training. Just different mediums because people can learn better in different ways.

Carrie: That’s a great thought. We’ve got a little bit of time left here with Mario. So if you’re tuning in live and want to get you question in, do that with #officefm on Twitter or over in the Google Q&A app. DreamPress2 a managed WordPress hosting service if you’re looking for another host and need a place to host your client websites or even host your own websites. Check them out. They have a really fantastic service over there at Dreamhost.com/officehours. And then also the WordPress Development Workflow. It’s a webinar series. Actually it’s right on queue with talking about education but showing folks how to go from starting up a project like a custom theme build and putting in version control using tools like SASS and Grunt to make your development life a little bit easier. And finally, how are you keeping your local development environment synched with your live development environment? You can find out more about that over @wpdevelopmentworkflow.com. Ok. Did we miss covering anything that you wanted to say about the topics we were just on?

Mario. No. Like I said, you need another six hours. So we’re good for now.

Carrie: Ok. Yes, we’ll have an extended session. So let’s see. Jackie is asking what challenges in WordPress do you face when scaling and working with third-party APIs?

Mario: I don’t think I have issues with third-party APIs that are WordPress related. Most of the stuff is really server related. All the time we have complete access to our servers, so it’s pretty easy to get control and to install whatever software is needed for us. Like if we have soap APIs, we can simply install the PHP soap extension then get it up and running with CRM and everything else. Probably the only problems that we have are whenever we need to do a product, like whenever we’re building something for a client and it needs to be hosted everywhere. The problems that we naturally face there is that we have an unlimited number of hosts with different server environments and different restrictions, different firewalls, different whatever. Some hosts are restricting specific libraries and some don’t have specific tools installed. Others limit the external connections based on some rules and whatnot. These are pretty much the main issues that we have. Most of time having external APIs means that you need to like fetch some data from somewhere and send some data to somewhere. I think that the HTTP API in WordPress is pretty stable and they took care of almost all the bad issues that may have been due to specific environments. They actually have a stack of things that they do. Like they first try this, then they fall back to circuits, then they do this. It makes it possible to spin up as many different environments as possible. You are muted, yep.

Carrie: I couldn’t get my hand on the key board short cut fast enough. We have a question from Davinder. When it comes to page builders and these drag-and-drop themes and basically things that perpetuate the idea that WordPress is super easy even for someone with no skills are those adding to the problem? Or are they legitimately serving a market need?

Mario: So that’s a great question. Now I have two different points of view on that. I think that there’s nothing wrong with page builders in general. I think that the main problem there is that there aren’t very many products that are retailed in the best possible manner. It kind of comes from the problem with pricing in the WordPress context. Because like most people see WordPress as it already solves  95% of the problem and it’s free, which means that it doesn’t make sense to pay quite a lot of money for the final 5%. This means that visual composer is under 30 bucks per license and there are a lot of other problems that all that cost just a few bucks. The other high-end problem that I’ve seen is Conductor by Matt Madeiros which is in the higher range. They actually spent a lot of time to make it more for the enterprise. I’ve seen other examples for front-end builders and other sorts of tools, but my personal experience so far is that they’re simply trying to solve too many problems. They don’t care about performance that much. It’s kind of understandable because it’s super expensive to make them work properly. With that business model with that pricing and the potential pool of customers it’s really possible to make it work.

Carrie: Yeah. That is a definite conundrum. I don’t know. I guess there’s always going to be people…even let’s say the Community as a whole rises up. We all get better with our pricing and charging what we’re worth and we’re educating our clients and were giving out quality solutions, there’s always going to be the lower end of the market that wants to be served.

Mario: I don’t really see a problem in the lower end of market. Again, I believe it is great to have something where you can do it yourself and have it for free. But I really see some sort of suppression on the hierarchy of the market. That is the main problem. I read a case study at vip.wordpress.com (Automattic’s blog) from some sort of company that I think worked with10up. And they said that the plugin infrastructure whatever…like there’s tons plugins but we were super afraid to use any of the plugins. Because we know what poor quality they are. Because they worked with 10up because they were super afraid to work with something that’s poorly coded, it’s going to break their site, it’s going to be insecure and everything else. I think that’s one of the main problems. It’s great to have something for the lower tier, but trying to suppress the higher tier, not having an enterprise market, not having a validated plugin suppository for things that are safe to use…that’s the thing that’s kind of slowing down WordPress. It’s bringing it entirely down to the lower tier.

Carrie: Wow. That’s amazing food for thought. I’m not being a very good host because I’m just chewing on what you’re saying. Jackie has a question. It kind of made me laugh when I read it. I love it and I think you’ll answer it. In your opinion what is the weakest link in WordPress?

Mario:  That’s a good question. I think probably one of the things that’s in my head now is that it is super over connected with everything. Which means for example you can’t really  decouple the backend. Like the theme API itself is super connected to the front end and so forth. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about BackPress you know the potential framework that’s running similarly to WordPress. I think that especially for enterprise kind of projects there is quite a lot of overhead coming from WordPress. For example if you install WordPress on an enterprise you get millions of hits on a daily basis. This is pretty tricky to scale even if you install 2015 or 2014 one the latest themes. For every single front-end request and I think even for back end, you have 4 database calls trying to fetch some widgets options that are not displayed there. There is no conditional for there. There are a lot of things in WordPress that are built for generic purposes, like to be able to serve 90% of the cases. But if you want to build something custom, like for the enterprise and you want to scale it, every single query is like 1 million times slower simply because you have 1 million requests to take, right? You simply cannot detach specific components that easily with WordPress.  With the admin or with the theming thing…like there is no specific core with modules that you can decouple and make it work just as a base. Just as an API or framework.

Carrie: Interesting. I had a guest a while back. He was talking about specifically his whole job is increasing speed.  A lot of that is by reducing trips to the database. Andy. I forget what episode he was on. I have to go back and listen to that. Sorry, I was reading Twitter. My question to you is, if you could look into your crystal ball and see the future of WordPress, where you see it in 5 years or 10 years or is it even around?

Mario: Well I  still see catering for the small user.  The blogger, the small business owner and for the general user. The reason I see the is that most of the decisions that are landing in core now are changes for the customizer. An enterprise user doesn’t need the customizer. It’s not something that they’re, going to use. They need different things. On the other hand, a blogger or small business owner, they kind of need the customizer. A lot of the decisions are leaning toward that market. Those who love to praise WordPress are the huge percentage who use it.  They are on 24% of the web.  They are trying to reach 50% of the web. If you compare it to Drupal, they own 2.5% of the web or something like that. A 10th of what WordPress offers. But most of their clients are in the enterprise market. Statistically speaking if we want to get to 50% we have to do as much as possible for the smaller tiny market of bloggers and small business owners, which is they reason why I see WordPress going there. The other thing is like Matt’s UI tried to land in core in 3.6, it was an idea that was pretty similar to what Tumblr had back then. The customizer is something that Squarespace had. I think that some of the things that try to get in come from Squarespace and Wiks. Other than comparing actual framework and tools that are meant to be used for high scale projects. I really hope that I’m wrong, simply because I’m kind of in the other market. At least that’s what I see right now.

Carrie: There’s an article or discussion…I’ve slept too many times to remember where it originated.  But it talking about the idea of forking WordPress. Like what you’re talking about.  Decoupling some of those components.  You’ve still got WordPress hanging around back here, but maybe you have an enterprise branch that has stripped out a lot of those unnecessary components. A blogger’s specific brand which would incorporate a lot of what WordPress has now. Can you see that? Did that even make sense?

Mario:  Because of everything that’s happening with WordPress’ philosophy, I can potentially see some forks emerging from WordPress simply because Drupal had BackPress, which is a specific theme which is kind of a fork of Drupal. Joomla kind of started from Mambo. There are a lot of projects in the history of the technical world that happen to fork. Personally I don’t really see a problem with forks. I think that you can still maintain backwards compatibility but create a pretty amazing platform just as WordPress kind of started from bb catalog. It would be more focused on the enterprise there. If you take a look at BackPress it is pretty outdated. It is 5 years old or something. The idea of just having libraries, just having components to use is pretty awesome. I think that something like that would be incredible if it was in WordPress itself. Other than that having a fork would be pretty nice for a specific group of people or agencies

Carrie:  All right. Mario that brings this to the end of this hour. I look forward to having you back for another 5 hours in the future. If you enjoyed today’s show, I would appreciate a review over on iTunes or Stitcher letting other people know. I would for more people to be able to hear the things that Mario is saying because it lifts all of us up. If you want to be sure to get reminders for the next episode of this show, go over to officehours.fm/subscribe and I will only be in your inbox once a week. Mario. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts. There were not rotten tomatoes thrown.  At least on Twitter that I saw. Any parting things that you would like to add before we sign off?

Mario: Thanks for having me. Probably as a parting thing, I know that my opinion is pretty unpopular. I know that it may sound as ranting to some people. What I am trying to do is bring a different perspective and different point of view of using WordPress one way or the other. I really love feedback and different points of view. If we gather up and share our thoughts and opinions reasonably by backing them up with some proof, there’s a really bright future for WordPress. I know the guys behind WordPress are watching that. They are kind of the “big brother”. If they see something reasonable, I am pretty sure they will actually consider using that and potentially implement it in WordPress as well.

Carrie: Yep. That’s the beauty of open source. The diversity of skills and personalities behind it. If people want to give you feedback where can they find you online?

WordPress Developers in Europe

Mario:I am @no_fear_inc on Twitter with no underscores between no and fear and inc. Devwp.eu which is like DeveloperWordpress.europe. I will be happy to answer all sorts of questions and follow-ups from anyone who has anything to discuss. I am pretty happy to help.
Carrie: Awesome! Thank you Mario and thanks to everyone who tuned in live today. If you’re listening to the replay, I am happy to have you as well. We’ll catch you next week. Bye.