SPECIAL EPISODE – The Plugin Directory

[00:00:00] Zack Katz: Hello and welcome to WP Product Talk, uh, the place where every week we interview an experienced WordPress product owner on strategies, tips, experiences, failures, and successes of running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses. I'm Zach Katz, founder of Gravity Kit and Trusted Login.

[00:01:14] Matt Cromwell: And I'm Matt Cromwell, co-founder of Give WP and Senior Director of Customer Experience at Stellar wp.

[00:01:22] Zack Katz: And today's topic is the trials and tribulations of hosting your plugin on wordpress.org.

[00:01:28] Matt Cromwell: This is a special episode, uh, for timely and significant reasons. We don't typically cover the latest WordPress news and things like that. Uh, especially we don't really do a lot of WP drama types of things. Um, but recently there's been some furor, uh, specifically around the plugin directory.

[00:01:47] And so, and we actually just happened to accidentally have already invited a really special guest named Mika Epstein to be on, uh, exactly this week. And, um, we just thought. All the stars are aligning, so we should just do this in a different format and different way. So, um, to kick us off, I want to give just a little bit of context first, uh, for anybody who might not be totally, uh, in the know, um, but essentially over the last, uh, week or so, um.

[00:02:18] We, uh, we, we experienced a couple different things. One is that it was highlighted that the plugins, uh, and, and I believe also the themes, um, no, just the plugins, um, are, have been ported over, uh, or copied over to wordpress.com. Um, and, um, uh, in terms of like the content of the plugin pages, uh, this was highlighted by, uh, John Blackborn, who's, uh, author of.

[00:02:44] The user switching plugin, which I love that plugin to death. I use it on every single site. And he's, uh, actually written quite a few plugins, uh, but that's just one of 'em of many. Um, he highlighted it because it has some SEO implications. He went to search for his plugin and he found that wordpress.com was showing up at the top of the list.

[00:03:01] Um, and some of that is, is kind of a weird experience when you go to that.com listing. Um, you get when you, when you want to, if you're interested in that plugin, it, there's a button that says Get started. When you click get started, it takes you to a signup form for wordpress.com. Um, that's a very radically different experience than what we're, uh, trying to educate our users on when we want them to use our plugin.

[00:03:24] Um, and there's concerns around SEO, duplicate content, things like that. It was a good concern. Um, it was a good highlight. Um, and honestly, I don't know of any. Previous discussion that was saying, oh, heads up everybody, we're going to have all the free plugins also on.com. Um, so, uh, I think it was a, a worthy and valid call out.

[00:03:45] Uh, Zach is, is, am I tracking? Does that sound about right?

[00:03:49] Zack Katz: Yeah. I think one of the things that wordpress.com did that got people frustrated was that the, it says, free on the business plan. That a free plugin that's on.org for free on.com, it says, free on the business plan for wordpress.com, suggesting that the plugin itself.

[00:04:07] Uh, is only available if you were to sign up for a paid plan on wordpress.com.

[00:04:13] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yep, for sure. Of course, wordpress.com is one of the few hosts. I'm not sure if there's really any hosts really that does provide a free tier. Um, and that is interesting and a unique offering that WordPress has done for forever.

[00:04:28] Um, but you can't install plugins on the free tier at all. Um, you have to have a paid tier in order to install plugins. Um, but I mean, you have to have paid hosting to install plugins anywhere. Um, so it's kind of like one of those 50 50 kind of situations. Uh, the whole thing got actually even more heightened when, uh, Matt Mullenweg got, uh, involved and started talking about like, what would we do about these things?

[00:04:53] I can't control Google. Um, things like that. Uh, a lot of his responses seemed to be a little bit defensive. Um, and folks kind of doubled down on their criticisms and also got a bit pointed in the way that they talked about these things. Um, and then some additional tweets happened, which were, uh, what's the, what's the best, most kosher way to say it?

[00:05:14] Um, he got very pointed and personal in some of his attacks on, on plugin authors specifically.

[00:05:21] Zack Katz: I'd say demeaning is one way to characterize them.

[00:05:24] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Demeaning, undermining them in terms of whether or not they were successful as product owners at all. Um, uh, specifically Dan Cameron, Jason Coleman, um, things like that.

[00:05:36] Um, some of these tweets have been deleted, uh, I will say. Um, but, um, it was, it was. Rough, um, and hard to watch happen, like a train wreck, uh, happening live on the Twitter sphere. Um, but to catch up on all of this, um, in really constructive ways. Um, Zach, uh, has some links for us. We're gonna put 'em in the comments and we're gonna post it on our website when we post this episode later.

[00:06:04] Uh, but the tavern actually covered this twice in two different ways. One, they first, uh, Sarah, uh, Sarah Gooding has always did a really great job showing how developers raised the concerns about the.com content, um, specifically. And then she did a follow up, um, talking about how developers really didn't, um.

[00:06:26] Felt damaged, uh, felt, uh, uh, they lost a lot of trust in the WordPress leadership because of the way in which Matt behaved on, uh, on Twitter in particular. Um, another really good one, a very short read, a very short listen, is from the WP Minute. Matt Ros did a great, uh, session, um, of the WP Minute where he highlights, uh, things that Josepha has said about how WordPress can change your life and how WordPress, uh, is, has so much impact.

[00:06:54] And he said that that can also go in a negative direction too when, uh, when leadership is, is kind of undermining our success as well. So, uh, I think all of those things are really great reads for context for all of this. Last one I wanna do before we bring Mika on, who's sitting there waiting patiently, um, is, um, Zach, I also did a really excellent writeup, um, and that I really hope everyone could read, um, uh, in which he talks about.

[00:07:21] How, uh, we have a code of conduct in WordPress in general. And, uh, in some ways it really appears as if Matt Mullenweg himself might have violated that code of conduct. Um, and the way you worded this sec, I think is just exceptional, uh, the way you walk through it in a very constructive manner. Um, and really specifically highlighting, um, that WordPress is people, which I love that, uh, uh, that background of course.

[00:07:48] Um, uh, but I, I'd love to hear just a little bit, and I'm sure everybody else would just what were your motivations for the post? What made you really think like this needs to be said? This needs to be done.

[00:07:58] Zack Katz: I find myself really disturbed by Matt's public behavior and discouraged because we all love WordPress and invest in it in our time and our energy.

[00:08:11] And even if somebody doesn't contribute code core, if you're working on a plugin that enhances WordPress, and so like the, for Matt to sit in judgment of people's contributions and compare them to his own, it felt really nasty to me in a way that really upset me. And I, I found myself for the whole week, um, unproductive in a, in a large way.

[00:08:36] Uh, when it came to. Uh, my work because I, I just, there was something in the background that I, I was like, what could we do? What could we do about this? What is there to be done? I was like, well, we have a code of conduct that lays out exactly what the process is and exactly what's expected of people in the community, uh, whether you're leading the community or if you're a contributor or if you, you attend a Word camp.

[00:08:59] Uh, and the opening line in my article is a quote from the code of conduct that says, we pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, and inclusive community. And I felt like Matt did not live up to that pledge. And so I wrote this article and, uh, yeah. That's what led to it.

[00:09:20] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Thank you so much for that context, Zach. Again, I, I said this in post outta Slack. It's a pleasure to know you, man. Like that was really well said and so constructive. I really wanna make sure that, um, in all these types of conversations, that we always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but also have radical candor and be able to say what's on our heart truthfully and always be constructive, um, uh, under these circumstances.

[00:09:47] So that's the summary nutshell. Um, the links are in the chat there. If you are here and you are listening in and you wanna say something, please use the chat. We will highlight you and we'll discuss it as well. And, uh, all of that is context for us to talk about the plugin directory with our very special guest who is finally here.

[00:10:07] Mika.

[00:10:09] Mika Epstein: Hi. I'm actually standing. I have a standing desk.

[00:10:13] Matt Cromwell: Hi.

[00:10:13] Mika Epstein: Literally standing by.

[00:10:17] Matt Cromwell: Thank you so much for being here, Mika. I really appreciate it. Sure. Um, I reached out to you in like, I don't know, June or so, and I was like, be on our show. You're like, yes. But later. Um, and then that was right when I, yeah,

[00:10:31] Mika Epstein: that was right when I had started, uh, the whole like, public process of stepping down from the, uh, plugin directory, which had been in process for about a year and a half before then almost two years.

[00:10:41] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:42] Mika Epstein: It, it, that was a, that was not a. That was a very planned process going down the line.

[00:10:48] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so give some, uh, you know, we know you, a lot of folks are watching know you, but give us a little bit of context. Who are you Sure? What have you done? What do you do? What will you do? Uh, 'cause you're on a journey.

[00:11:03] I know. I

[00:11:03] Mika Epstein: am on, well, we're all on a journey, um, for, oh gosh. Uh, let's see. So right now I work for XWPI am a. WordPress engineer there. I work with our clients. I help build amazing websites for people and make their dreams come true, which I love very much. I started here about a year ago. Before that, I worked for a web host, dream host.

[00:11:27] I loved working there. I learned so much, and the people there are just absolutely wonderful. And before that, I worked at a bank, and while I was working at a bank, I was habitually bored because we had to compile code at the end of every afternoon. And so I would have like three hours where all I would do would watch my computer compile code and couldn't really develop anything else because.

[00:11:50] These were Windows NT Boxes folks.

[00:11:52] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Windows

[00:11:53] Mika Epstein: xp. I, I was part of the project to upgrade everybody to xp. That was fun. Uh, so I started poking around and I was trying to figure something to run a website. I designed and handbuilt with PHP and S-H-T-M-L-A long time ago. And I had used B two Evolution, the predecessor to WordPress back in the day.

[00:12:12] So I installed WordPress, got it up and running, realized it didn't do everything I wanted and then I thought I could code it. Uh, and you know, it just sort of snowballed down the hill that, uh, I started looking for plugins that did what I wanted and when I couldn't find them or I found that they had issues, I used to email Otto.

[00:12:31] And finally one day Otto was like, look, you're gonna have to join the plugin team 'cause I'm tired of handling your emails. You need to handle these yourself. And that was actually how I got added to the plugin team. Um,

[00:12:41] Matt Cromwell: that's amazing.

[00:12:42] Mika Epstein: Yeah. And my job was basically to look through a plugin and then figure out what was wrong and email the.

[00:12:49] The developer, or actually I didn't even have email at the beginning. It was just to let the team know this is what I found this week. And they would do that. And eventually I got added to the, uh, the email system. And then I was doing reviews. And over time I ended up, uh, the, at the first word, camp US was when I became the, uh, representative for the plugin review team.

[00:13:10] And that went on until this year, uh, where I decided, you know, after my dad died in 2019, I started making a lot of big life changes. Like I knew I needed to make a lot of personal changes and one of them was absolutely reducing, uh, the amount of stress I was under. Yeah. Because it was having a negative impact on my physical and mental health.

[00:13:32] And the easiest thing to cut out, you know, besides a couple of other volunteer things I had been doing was in fact plugins.

[00:13:39] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:39] Mika Epstein: And I didn't want to, because I love doing it. But I was tired and I realized I'm not able to do everything. I need more help. I need, you know, a group. And, uh, thankfully we were able to set up a group.

[00:13:56] I wish I'd been able to do more to like, figure out onboarding, but that was never my strong suit. And I was like, I don't even know how to write all this. So it was kind of winging it.

[00:14:06] Matt Cromwell: Hmm. And,

[00:14:07] Mika Epstein: uh, I learned a lot from that experience. Uh, and I'm still technically like I hang out with the team and like, when they have weird questions, they're like, Hey, what is this?

[00:14:16] And I'm happy to answer, but like, I haven't actually reviewed a plugin or even looked at the queue in, uh, about a month.

[00:14:23] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah. I don't blame you. I mean, you've written about this a bit, we don't have to rehash, but there's also a lot of drama involved in like Oh yeah. When you are the gatekeeper, people are gonna come after you and you have Oh yeah.

[00:14:35] A long, a long, long, long story that you've written about. I'll point people at your website.

[00:14:40] Mika Epstein: Yeah. You just go to half elf.org and it's on the. It's on the top menu. Yeah. Um, yeah. And you know, that's really relevant to what's been going on in WordPress this last week. Yeah. Uh, because I was the face up until we finally managed to switch things to be mostly anonymous, I was the person people got emails from and therefore I was the person to be targeted when something wasn't liked.

[00:15:06] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. And

[00:15:08] Mika Epstein: you know, thankfully before all that, I had had experiences being a face of a project and I knew from the get go that there are certain things I cannot get into an argument with people in social media. Because not only is there a no win situation for me, but it has a really strong possibility of hurting the project itself.

[00:15:29] Not just me, but like hurting the whole thing. So, you know, keeping your mouth shut is hard. I'm not very good at it, but like, you know, people are like, wait, you kept your mouth shut? You're incredibly outspoken. You always speak your mind. I said, yeah, but I didn't, I don't always speak my mind. You're seeing the curated version of what's going on.

[00:15:50] Someone out there is terrified now.

[00:15:52] Matt Cromwell: Well, I mean, I think there's so much to unpack in there, in which you have done in a lot of different interviews and, and on your article as well, but the, the, the strand there that you're highlighting is how like being a volunteer for this large, huge project, um, has a cost.

[00:16:11] Um, oh yeah. And, and for some folks like you, it can end up being a mental health cost and it can be really risky. Um, and that's why I think. Like the idea or the concept, uh, that Zach highlighted from the code of contact that we have to have, uh, environment of, uh, of safety and trust, uh, is like so vital into what we do.

[00:16:33] Um, because it's open source and because, um, we can end up, you know, we are out there. Um, I've been out there for so long, I have like a lot of privilege in being a white male who just melds in. Um, and, uh, al uh, also having a Christian background that lots of people find to be just like in the majority or whatnot.

[00:16:53] I don't experience all these things, um, the way that others do. And so I have always felt personally like I have to help to foster as much of a, a good environment as I possibly can. Um, and um, that's, and

[00:17:08] Mika Epstein: that's really important because a lot of people don't recognize that. And, you know, I have a lot of privilege.

[00:17:17] I am white passing, uh. A sign. I have a non insignificant amount of non-white, uh, genetics going on in here that most people just never notice. And I'm fine with that because I, it allows me to use that privilege to help others, but I'm also openly queer. I'm Jewish and I'm a woman, and all of those things have worked against me in corporate America.

[00:17:40] Yeah. Uh, I was told to my face that unless I started wearing a dress and makeup, I would never be promoted.

[00:17:46] Matt Cromwell: Geez. Unbelievable. Yeah.

[00:17:48] Mika Epstein: Jokes on them. They got fired.

[00:17:49] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's the kind of thing where it's like, in this environment, we, we, we have to be looking out for each other at all costs.

[00:17:58] Um, and I would, would.

[00:18:02] Zack Katz: And I think that's part of the problem with how Matt was talking to developers and contributors, is that it put people in the position of having to defend themselves

[00:18:13] Matt Cromwell: and,

[00:18:14] Zack Katz: and they're in a lower status position than Matt. So whenever you are in a position of power, anybody in a lower status position, you need to protect them and you need to make sure to be very careful on how you interact with them in order to support their journey so that they can become promoted, uh, and, and not be inadvertently or not, uh, subject to.

[00:18:38] Discrimination or harassment or, you know, the, yeah, the, the way that Matt was behaving resulted in, I'm sure lots of stress for the people involved and yeah. Matt is in a position of power in that relationship and so he, I believe is, has the, is the onus is on him to be, behave better.

[00:18:57] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Like I, I even like in the WordPress space, um, among plugin authors and things like that, I like, I do also feel really fortunate that give has been successful.

[00:19:09] Um, and I have lots of things that I can talk about in terms of like why we were successful. Um, when I talk with other plugin owners who are just on the beginning of their journey or have really struggled or have even like sold their business and folded it down and things like that, uh, like I always really try to be really constructive and positive about their contributions.

[00:19:30] Um, and never like. Never like, well, I'm obviously more successful or whatever, but like, and then amplifying that to the automatic level at which like. I mean, truthfully. Um, how much has WordPress, the project, uh, the code base benefited from all of these plugin owners altogether? Um, I'm certain that Mullenweg knows that, uh, and he has said it at several different state of the words, but.

[00:19:58] Um, in this particular instance, it felt like he undermined that trust and undermined that value to an extent. That I feel like is really hard. I, I, I, I did reach out to Sarah in that, for that article that the second one that she wrote on WP Tavern, and, and one thing I said is, I don't know if he can put the genie back in the bottle with this one, because I really feel like you went far over the line, uh, with the plugin authors this time.

[00:20:23] Um, which I think was kind of rough. Um, but like one thing we said before this show started, um, Mika is like, you've also seen it on both sides. Like, oh yeah. You, you, you are a, a plugin owner. You've written lots of plugins. Um, not, I don't think for a business though. You haven't? Oh, yeah,

[00:20:41] Mika Epstein: no, I, I've wrote, I've written plugins, uh, technically for DreamHost and Oh, okay.

[00:20:46] You know, weird situation. I still own one.

[00:20:49] Matt Cromwell: Okay.

[00:20:49] Mika Epstein: Um, I need to work with them again and make sure, like, are you guys okay that, that I I still own this one. Um, but no, I, I've, I have not written a plugin for it. For like a plugin company, yet I'm sure one day XWP will be like, hang on a minute, you're gonna go write this.

[00:21:04] Yeah. Um, and I'm cool with that, but, uh, I have written plugins for the purpose of a company. Yeah. And, but it's, and then you've seen a very different perspective.

[00:21:14] Matt Cromwell: Oh, yeah. And, and then

[00:21:15] Mika Epstein: most of mine are just indie stuff that I needed and I thought I'll share with the world.

[00:21:19] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. And then you've experienced the wrath of the plugin authors as well, like you've seen how impatient or inflexible, uh, some of us can be when the plugin directory pisses us off.

[00:21:33] Or like if we get And nobody likes hearing.

[00:21:36] Mika Epstein: No. Yeah. Or especially, nobody likes hearing you've done this wrong.

[00:21:40] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:41] Mika Epstein: And, and that's, that's ultimately like the, the problem with getting a plugin review is that from. My end, it was always intended as this can be improved, this can be made better and safer.

[00:21:54] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:55] Mika Epstein: But as someone who's received those reviews as well, I recognize that what it feels like is your plugin sucks and you suck and you should feel bad. And it's very Z berg. Mm-hmm. Um, and it, it's really hard to approach. Uh, Josepha was instrumental in helping me rewrite a lot of the predefined replies for plugin things so that they came off firm, but gentle.

[00:22:21] Oh, and and you have, yeah. You have to be firm because like some things, there is no, there's no brokering, uh, you're including your own copy of jQuery. That's just a flat No, you're making a curl call because the service that you're calling actually won't work if you use the WordPress, uh, uh, API to make the call.

[00:22:41] Mm-hmm. Okay. That can be allowed. And it's just a matter of. Going through things with people and having them explain, but it's really hard sometimes to get people to stop being frustrated that they just got told no. And get them to reread the whole thing that says, Hey, if there's a valid reason, let us know.

[00:22:58] Mm-hmm. We could be wrong. And, um. And instead, it sort of felt for a lot of people, I guess like the word of God. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is, I am not Moses, I'm not Aaron. I am just Mika saying, Hey, these things look shaky. Uh, maybe they're not How not really keen on whales that much.

[00:23:20] Zack Katz: I was So for plugin, for plugin authors and product owners who have, have interacted with.org and now they have a.com listing.

[00:23:31] Matt Cromwell: Oh yeah. I'm,

[00:23:32] Zack Katz: I'm curious to, I'm curious to know what you, uh, like what recommendations you have for them for how to handle this situation where your listing gets scraped and you're now on two websites and you don't know, uh, which one, you know, this isn't the first time people are gonna be looking at.

[00:23:49] Mika Epstein: That's the thing. Everybody's going, oh, this is.com. This is the first time. It's not, uh, there was. And I'm blanking on who it was. Some other company actually made a full copy of the repo and you could go and see people's plugins and download them. And the only reason that I knew this was that someone had closed a plugin on.org and then they emailed us complaining that we didn't take it down from this other site.

[00:24:14] And I'm like, that, that's, that's not us. You kind of gotta talk to them directly. I'm sorry. And they were really upset. They're like, well, I've talked to them and they're not removing the play. I'm like, well, there's literally nothing I can do that is someone else's website. Send 'em A-D-M-C-A. Uh, which I hate saying, but the reason that this one, I think blew up more than anything else is because, as Matt pointed out, if you're logged in to wordpress.com, you get redirected to wordpress.com.

[00:24:44] That comes up as the number one hit. And that makes sense. Accept. If you work for an agency, the odds are you're logged into.com all the time because you possibly have at least one VIP client. So you're logged into.com?

[00:24:59] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. And that

[00:25:00] Mika Epstein: means for me, I was always getting redirected to.com. Now, the benefit to that is that I am an intelligent person who recognizes, oh, Google's silly, and I just changed the com.org and my address bar.

[00:25:13] Once that started happening to people who weren't kind of

[00:25:18] Matt Cromwell: savvy,

[00:25:18] Mika Epstein: aware of these intricacies, that's when it got really noticed. Like that's when John noticed. And not to say that John is not absolutely astute about these things. He's brilliant and I love him. But once more people started noticing it, then it became a thing.

[00:25:34] Then it became, hang on a second. And um, you know, it is a problem because yes, absolutely anyone is free to scrape the.org directory and do with it what they will. It's. It all, the code is GPL off. You go to the race, technically speaking. Yeah, absolutely. You can do it. But much like how I have very strong opinions about don't copy premium code, even if it's GPL and give it away for free.

[00:26:02] Mm-hmm. It's not because it's illegal, it's because it's just kind of a well, so not good look.

[00:26:08] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. I, I have

[00:26:09] Mika Epstein: a more vulgar way of saying usually, and I'm not gonna do that here. Yeah. But it's just, it's not a good look because legal, not

[00:26:16] Matt Cromwell: particularly moral. Um,

[00:26:18] Mika Epstein: yeah. Well I try to avoid a moral argument because like my moral, we, we talked about this before the show.

[00:26:23] My morals are heavily influenced by my Jewish upbringing. And I recog I've recognized from an early age that it does not mesh with, uh, my peers a lot of the time. Um, but in this case, my first thought was, this is really cool for people who are using.com because it helps them upsell, which is important because wordpress.com gives away blogs for free.

[00:26:47] And in order to recoup that cost, and believe me, that is a massive cost. I've worked for a web host, I know how much this stuff costs. In order to recoup, they need to upsell people and move them to business plans. Sure. This makes sense. And if by telling them, Hey, you can get these cool plugins if you move to our business plan.

[00:27:04] That's intelligent from a business standpoint, but from a community standpoint, that's when it starts getting real shaky. Like how do you balance the two? And you know, my first thought was, I think Patch Deck has done this already. Like they've put a thing in their dot, in their Read Me that says, you can get this for free on.org.

[00:27:22] Yeah. Um, which is cool. Exactly.

[00:27:23] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Um, I think that was pretty smart and I, that was

[00:27:26] Mika Epstein: pretty savvy. I like that.

[00:27:27] Matt Cromwell: Um, I mean, like I was mentioning earlier with, with the nuances of how it's

[00:27:31] on.com,

[00:27:33] there is a little bag that says you, you can do this on your cell hosted site. Just download it here. Yeah. But that's only letting you download the zip.

[00:27:42] Mika Epstein: Yeah, I would have had it linked to the.org page. Yeah. You know, that would learn more about this plugin on wordpress.org.

[00:27:48] Matt Cromwell: Exactly. Would be And

[00:27:49] Mika Epstein: like two buttons. Yeah. If you wanted to download, I honestly though, it's like the old download button that we had on wordpress.org. Yeah. Ages and ages ago. If you click the download button, it downloaded WordPress and you didn't know what to do.

[00:28:00] Matt Cromwell: Exactly. And so

[00:28:00] Mika Epstein: then they changed it to go to a download page that explained, and then you download. And that helped a lot of people. And I kind of feel like they need to do that again. Like to have a, you know, self-hosting WordPress go here. Yeah. And just help redirect them. It would, it would let them keep the benefit, but at the same time, boost the community.

[00:28:21] And by boosting the community, you encourage more people to develop plugins. More people develop plugins. There's more people using WordPress, more people using WordPress. We all win.

[00:28:28] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts with the plugin review team. Uh, Amber Hines, a co-host is here and she has a, a really good question.

[00:28:38] Oh, yeah. Uh, Mika and I had a conversation on Mastodon about possibly having ongoing automated reviews and public badges for plugins for things like security, accessibility, et cetera. Would love for us to discuss that. Um, yeah, they're

[00:28:55] Mika Epstein: actually working on that. I'm so proud of them. Um, there, so fairly recently it was made public that there is a tool that there, like an actual plugin check

[00:29:05] Matt Cromwell: plugin check plugin, yeah.

[00:29:07] Mika Epstein: Yep. That, that's going to be able to tell you when you've missed certain things. Mm-hmm. And one of the things that is actually telling you is like, uh, translate now it's pointing out, Hey, you didn't put a translation explanation in there. Mm-hmm. I was never able to sit down and have the, like, the time to sit.

[00:29:25] Do it while still handling reviews and the security situations and all the other nuts and bolts of the plug. And that was really the problem is that like I was a one woman show for a little while. Yeah. And it's really hard to do everything.

[00:29:38] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:29:38] Mika Epstein: And where I absolutely dropped the ball was in two places.

[00:29:41] It was in clearly documenting what I was doing day to day. I fell into the same trap that, uh, WordPress core had in the early days, which was how do you do a release? Because there was one person, Andrew Mason was basically doing it. Mm-hmm. And so it's really hard to stop and like, what am I actually doing?

[00:29:59] Because it starts becoming muscle memory. Um, yeah. So with a bunch of new people coming in. They were able to look at it and go, well, you know, this is great, but it takes time. If we spend time in the beginning to set up an actual tool that does plugin checks, that will do things like security, and we'll tell you before you submit the plugin, Hey, these are things that are gonna hold you up.

[00:30:19] Are you sure you wanna go?

[00:30:20] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Which

[00:30:21] Mika Epstein: is, we've had a few background things, uh, that were always running in, uh, like that prevented an upload, and people mostly saw those as, Hey, you started your plugin name with WooCommerce. Can't do that. It's trademarked.

[00:30:32] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:30:34] Mika Epstein: Trademarks. Yeah.

[00:30:35] Matt Cromwell: I, I reached out to, um, to, uh, Gustavo, uh, Bordone, who's, uh, on the, on the plugin review team now.

[00:30:44] Um, I, I asked him the question. I was like, Hey, you know, everyone's looking at the plugin queue and it's like 1200 plus plugins in the queue and 90 days out till we're gonna get reviews. We're used to the Mika days when it was like three to five days. Um, so yeah. Um, you know, what's the story there? It's not

[00:31:01] Mika Epstein: really a fair comparison.

[00:31:02] Matt Cromwell: Um, it's not, it's not, yeah. Lemme tell you real quick. Um, what his response though? He, he was coming.

[00:31:07] Oh

[00:31:07] Mika Epstein: yeah,

[00:31:07] Matt Cromwell: tell me. I was like, so what's the deal there? He's like, we are onboarding more members. Uh, but training takes time. So hopefully as people get more experience, we will be able to address the existing queue faster.

[00:31:19] Ultimately the goal is to leverage the plugin check plugin. Yep. Um, to address the massive amounts of plugins that are getting submitted. Eventually, the plugin check plugin will be part of the submit form in some way, and that will help us to avoid most of the problems that we have to tell people to fix.

[00:31:34] Yeah.

[00:31:34] Um, our plan is to release a version of the plugin check plugin soon. Uh, and we're hoping for, he says we're hoping for this week or next week, um, which is a big deal. So,

[00:31:45] Zack Katz: yeah. I've, I've been wanting a plugin check plugin forever. Uh, I've been jealous of being developers in that way only for a long time.

[00:31:54] Yeah.

[00:31:55] Mika Epstein: Well, the biggest holdup with that has always been the complexity of what plugins are. Yeah. And I, I say this without. Ever wanting to bash the hard work that goes into theme development. I do it myself for work. Mm-hmm. Theme development is more or less straightforward. You're making a theme. It has to interact with WordPress in a very specific way, and yes, you can make really cool features and things, but at the end of the day, you have made a theme.

[00:32:25] Yeah. And it must be a theme.

[00:32:27] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:32:28] Mika Epstein: Now go look at plugins. What are they?

[00:32:30] Matt Cromwell: Anything? Whatever you

[00:32:31] Mika Epstein: want. Yeah. They can be as, they could even

[00:32:33] Matt Cromwell: have theme templates in them. Like Yeah. Plugin. They can be as complex as

[00:32:37] Mika Epstein: WooCommerce and, and Buddy Press, they can be as small as Hello Dolly. Yeah. All of those are plugins.

[00:32:43] Yeah. Um.

[00:32:45] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. And you know, it, the irony though, there a little bit though, Mika, is that the, the theme review team, it's gone through a lot of things too, but they are also super rigorous and sometimes like a, a theme will go through like five different iterations. They'll be like, Nope, you need to do X, Y, Z and then come back and, nope, you gotta do it again.

[00:33:04] Um, like I, it's, I don't know, they've gone through a lot of iterations too. Um, and I don't know if there's, like they used to have a

[00:33:11] Mika Epstein: pretty big backlog too.

[00:33:13] Matt Cromwell: Yes.

[00:33:13] Mika Epstein: At one point.

[00:33:14] Matt Cromwell: True. Yeah. Absolutely. Um,

[00:33:17] Mika Epstein: but that's the trade off. Either you're super rigorous and you're gonna have a backlog because of that, or you are, is it more, or is it mostly safe enough to keep using?

[00:33:27] Like, are there no big, oh man, this is totally wrong issues.

[00:33:31] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Uh,

[00:33:31] Mika Epstein: does it do what it says?

[00:33:33] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:33:33] Mika Epstein: And does it actually work? And believe it or not, those two things should have been the same, but they're not. Yeah. Uh, and, and for the most part, that's what I was always checking for. Is it safe? Is it doing what it says?

[00:33:47] Is it actually functional? Yeah. And if it passes all those three, even if it's not accessible, I know even if they didn't do the translations properly, I might warn them, Hey, you're using variables for a translation. You don't wanna do that. It's gonna break the system and you won't get your translation.

[00:34:01] Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:34:03] Matt Cromwell: yeah. You

[00:34:04] Mika Epstein: know, uh, uh, but the reason that I was doing that was a, it was a lot of things to cover and B, not all plugin developers come from the same place. Yeah. Uh,

[00:34:19] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:34:19] Mika Epstein: Everybody thinks, oh, all of these plugin developers are professionals. No, folks, professionals are the minority. Yeah. The majority is, you know, uh, Jane Hobbyists,

[00:34:29] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:34:30] Mika Epstein: Jane off the street who says, Hey, I figured out how to write this cool thing. I wanna host it. And I wanted to encourage those people and make them part of the community, because once they got a plugin. Uh, approved. I would hear from people at Word Camps. Oh, I'm so happy you approved my plugin. Yeah. I feel like I can do anything.

[00:34:48] You gave me the confidence to go. I'm like, that's good.

[00:34:51] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:34:52] Mika Epstein: That's good for the community. Absolutely. And trying to balance those two things. It, it, it's rough. And right now we're at a point where WordPress plugins have to start looking harder at the security issues because we've got some bad actors in the community who are gonna zero day you

[00:35:08] Matt Cromwell: and Yeah,

[00:35:09] Mika Epstein: I hate those guys.

[00:35:10] We have to be more conscientious of translations of accessibility and. Due to that, this is the perfect time for the plugin review team to start

[00:35:22] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:35:22] Mika Epstein: Enforcing those things. And it really sucks that it made such a backlog.

[00:35:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, totally. But like, I think part of the issue there too, we've had this common thread here of the issue of trust, I think.

[00:35:33] Yeah. Like the thing with Mullenweg was difficult in a trust environment for sure. The thing about plugins is also there's a lot of trust going on because from, uh, when you submit your plugin, there's a review process, but once it's been submitted and approved, there's not a whole lot. I know that you scan every, you did that you scanned, uh, regularly.

[00:35:53] Um, and you can't catch everything in those giant scans either. Yeah. But like there was talk about using WP Tide for a long time and, but like, I think there's this, what I mean about the trust part is that. The trust that users have in WordPress is most often eroded because of plugins. Oh, yeah. Or plugin conflicts or, because plugins are the things that are vulnerable that, that let their site get hacked.

[00:36:19] Um, and I think there's a, there's a a, a lot of room for us to grow as an ecosystem in terms of ensuring that every release we push out there is a lot safer, essentially. Yeah. And I don't know what your take is on, in terms of what response or what options do we have from the plugin review side? Uh, like how, how gatekeeping do, do we want Yeah.

[00:36:42] Y'all to be? Not you all them all. No, I, no,

[00:36:45] Mika Epstein: y'all,

[00:36:46] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:36:48] Mika Epstein: I was always really torn on this. Mm-hmm. On the one hand, if you're having the plugin review, team review every single version of a plugin, you are never gonna get through the day. Exactly. It's just that, I mean, it's just, it's impossible. On the other hand, if we're not doing that, how can we bring back the trust for users to have with plugins without needing to do a significant amount of education as to how to discern if a plugin and its developers can or cannot be trusted?

[00:37:20] Uh, for example, I am a huge proponent of Yost, SEO. I love it. It does exactly what I need. Uh, it's cookable. It's filterable. I've had wonderful success with it. They make mistakes. They've made a couple of mistakes that crashed my site. They fix them very quickly. And in my book, you know, it, even WordPress core pushes out.

[00:37:41] Uh, bad updates. Mm-hmm. We've had a case where we've done an a minor update and then the next day, or even the same day, immediately started on another update to fix it. Mm-hmm. Because humans are humans and it is impossible for a computer even today to check everything and every possible permutation of how a thing is working.

[00:38:00] Um, where I was at some Word Camp or another chatting with, uh, Otto and Barry and I said, you know what, if we checked every plugin against all the other plugins in the directory to see what's incompatible, and we did the math and we came out that it would be about a week and a half per plugin to check the update for compatibility.

[00:38:21] Matt Cromwell: Unbelievable.

[00:38:22] Mika Epstein: And it be, it's because there are somewhere near 60,000 active plugins and over 115,000 total. The 115 includes rejected. It also includes, uh mm-hmm. Ones that are closed or reopened and mm-hmm. In some state of. Non-public. Um,

[00:38:39] Matt Cromwell: yeah,

[00:38:40] Mika Epstein: it's a lot. And that will never even touch on the plugins that don't exist in the directory, which again, is a totally reasonable thing for people to do.

[00:38:48] Sell a plugin. I'm for it. I fully support people's ability to take what is a free plugin on.org and then have add-ons and features that you can buy to make it even better.

[00:39:01] Matt Cromwell: Mm.

[00:39:01] Mika Epstein: Uh, and to make a living off of that because development is hard work.

[00:39:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:39:05] Mika Epstein: And you know, it, it's gotta be respected. Um, but having an automated tool, if it was possible to have a perfect automated tool that could say this plugin has passed all of our security checks and have an automated little badge.

[00:39:19] To have an automated little badge to say, this plugin passes all of our required accessibility checks. This plugin has a badge to say, this plugin has passed our test to be fully translatable. That would rock. I don't know how to do it. And I don't know if any of us have figured that out yet. Yeah. But. A lot of it still has to be done manually.

[00:39:39] Yeah. A human has to go through and look at the results and go, oh, the robot's wrong here. Like, if you've ever used P-H-P-C-S and wpcs, which are code sniffers that I absolutely support, they're fantastic to help you with consistency of your code style, of your formatting, and of your security and functionability for your code.

[00:40:01] Those are fantastic tools, but sometimes they're wrong. Like it yells at you and says, Hey, you're not doing ance check here. I'm like, I did it up there. Why are you being like this? And you have to put in a thing to say, PHPS shush. I, I did that already. But those have to be, you have to use your brain to figure out, maybe I did the check wrong.

[00:40:20] Oh no I didn't. It's okay. Great. I can move on. And robots can't do that. AI is not there yet. Uh, I am well known for not actually believing in artificial intelligence. Mm-hmm. It's just a bunch of, if then statements all nested down the, the line, um. And you have to tell it what to look for. Yeah. So it's always gonna miss stuff.

[00:40:39] I don't know, uh, if there's ever going to be a way to say any product, even WordPress itself is a hundred percent secure and safe. Yeah,

[00:40:49] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:40:50] Mika Epstein: Realistically, and because I've got that realistic long-term view, I kind of start at the, well, if we can't make it sure that it's gonna be okay, should we be telling people it's probably okay, because then when it's not, we're in a worse situation than now where we're just saying, look, we reviewed the initial plugin.

[00:41:11] Whether or not they actually uploaded the plugin, I approved. Actually, I don't know. A lot of times I'll approve a version of a plugin and they would've, uh, uploaded the one, three versions ago that has all the problems I told them to fix. And then I had to close the plugin and say, look man, you gotta upload the right one.

[00:41:28] That one drives me up a wall, drove me up a wall. Now I just look at it and go.

[00:41:35] Zack Katz: So when you're, uh, in the pa when you're taking the rules that you've developed, uh, for the plugin directory Yeah. And how those have changed over time to address more and more ways to get around the rules. Um, how do you find the code of conduct for the community?

[00:41:56] Uh, do you find it sufficient currently? Do you feel it needs, uh, modification? Uh, is there, is it, is it enough?

[00:42:05] Mika Epstein: I think it's a very good start. Um, I don't think any code of conduct is fully complete. Be, uh, for, for two main reasons. One is that humanity is an ever changing, uh, stew. You know what, what, uh, when we all used, started using the internet and it was dial up and we dialed into bulletin boards.

[00:42:25] The internet was a very different place than today with like seven different social media platforms where you can go and talk about things. And behavior in those smaller communities didn't scale well to these larger ones. And similarly, a code of conduct that is written for a specific situation, a specific environment, will have to change and adapt as we change and adapt.

[00:42:45] Um, that's why the OT likes to say that the original intent of the, uh, plugin guidelines was, uh, don't be a jerk.

[00:42:54] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Don't do

[00:42:55] Mika Epstein: bad things. Mm-hmm. Kinda like Google Don't be evil. You'll notice they don't say that anymore though.

[00:42:59] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:43:00] Mika Epstein: and ma, we, we call them guidelines for a reason. If you call them rules.

[00:43:05] Then people start playing rules lawyer and going, well, doesn't specifically say I can't do that. So we've got that 18th guideline that says we reserve the right to enforce these guidelines to the best of our ability to, to give people chances and to not give people chances depending on the situation, which is sort of the catchall of, look, if we look at you and we know what you're doing is intentionally harmful to the community.

[00:43:33] It doesn't matter whether or not you violated other, other guidelines. It doesn't matter if you can argue, well, technically I didn't. What matters is that your intent is no longer, uh, positive for the community. Yeah. And that's just not cool.

[00:43:48] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, we want

[00:43:48] Mika Epstein: people to be constructive with each other, but there's always been a big difference with the word, uh, the plugin guidelines and the theme guidelines, and it's this a theme.

[00:43:58] Guidelines say that all of your themes have to be GPL. All, even if they're not hosted on wordpress.org, the plugin guidelines have never said that. And I was adamant that I would never add it. Mm-hmm. Because what you do outside of wordpress.org, outside of Slack, outside of our official community, is not beholden to our code of conduct.

[00:44:21] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:21] Mika Epstein: Because it is unfair to say that if, you know, Zach and I get into a screaming argument down the street and start, you know, shoving each other and posturing, and then we walk away, should both of us be kicked out of a Word camp? If we happen to be in the same town as a Word camp and we're both attending, were we doing it an official WordPress function?

[00:44:39] If not, I don't think it applies. I mean, I would say that our friends should go, Mika, Zach,

[00:44:45] Zack Katz: calm down. Let's talk. Got some stuff to work out. I'm more, I'm, I'm intimidated at the moment.

[00:44:51] Mika Epstein: No, I'm not.

[00:44:51] Zack Katz: I don't wanna fight you. I

[00:44:53] Mika Epstein: don't, I don't wanna fight anybody. I've been in one fight in my life and that was enough.

[00:44:58] Um, but you know what you do. Outside of the community is absolutely going to impact how the community views you. Yeah. But it's not a violation of the community code of conduct. Now there are gonna be exceptions to that

[00:45:11] Zack Katz: outside the community when there you run the community. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:45:14] Mika Epstein: That's the problem.

[00:45:16] Zack Katz: There you go.

[00:45:16] Matt Cromwell: And I mean, I'll truthfully like that was highlighted. I mean, this is all to Twitter is like the public forum, you know? I know. And it's all for everyone there. It's like as if this happened on the, on the street corner somewhere and was recorded or whatnot, but at the same time, like. For one reason or another, which I'm not totally sure about.

[00:45:36] Twitter tends to be where we like to have this kind of business. I don't understand that part, but that's like the place to hash out all of our issues in public.

[00:45:46] Zack Katz: Well, yeah. I think part of it is where people choose to reply. Like, oh yeah, Matt Mullenweg, for example, replies in Twitter and sometimes he replies in post status Slack, and I don't participate in.org Slack, but maybe he replies there as well.

[00:46:01] But it's, it's hard to get a hold of him, right? Yeah. So when he replies, that's where the, that's where the conversation happens, which

[00:46:10] Matt Cromwell: I think is weird because like the conversations that we have on wordpress.org make posts, for example. I feel like that could be a lot more constructive, uh, since it's also just threaded conversation, um, for the most part.

[00:46:26] Like, why aren't we having. Well, we do. I, I have seen very constructive, uh, comments on a lot of the make posts. Um, like there's a, a, a post right now about, uh, support forum guidelines, um, that's relevant to this conversation. Oh, too, yeah. Those

[00:46:42] Mika Epstein: need an update. Yeah,

[00:46:44] Matt Cromwell: and they're, I haven't been

[00:46:45] Mika Epstein: touched seniors.

[00:46:46] Matt Cromwell: They're, they're simplifying them in some ways and, um, and I, I, I think it's really helpful. There's good conversations happening there. Why aren't we having more conversation there? It's, it's almost like another show, honestly, I've been really curious about. Like, as this formerly known as Twitter Place continues to be highly not trustworthy.

[00:47:05] Like, where are we gonna have these conversations? Um, because we have several good spots. I think, um, make WordPress Slack is a really good spot for these kind conversations. I wish more people would have 'em there. I think the Make, uh, blog is a really great place to have them. Um, I would like to see more constructive conversations there.

[00:47:24] WP TAVR just kicked off forums, which is interesting. Mm-hmm. Um, it's almost like a callback, but it's like, yeah, it's new again. Um, but it's still BB press, so, um, I mean, we'll see how that goes too. But, um, so you, you talk

[00:47:39] Zack Katz: about, you know, Twitter being an untrustworthy place to have that conversation. Why is that?

[00:47:43] Is it because there's a leader who is, that's my opinion on that

[00:47:46] Matt Cromwell: one. People, people behave differently there. They behave differently there. Like, Matt did have conversations about this thing in Post outta Slack. I felt like he was more constructive in Post Slack for some reason. Which is weird because Post Slack is more privatized, uh, it's not out in the public as much.

[00:48:05] Um, why do we behave more wildly when we're out in public? I don't know.

[00:48:11] Mika Epstein: I'm, I'm an old internet denizen, um, like dial up, like I had, dial the phone, put it on the modem, uh, NovAtel stuff. Um, when you're in a small, curated place, and I recognize how large WordPress is, so calling WordPress, slack is small curated spaces.

[00:48:32] Kind of ironic. Yeah.

[00:48:34] Matt Cromwell: It's like 40,000

[00:48:35] Mika Epstein: versus Yeah. Right. But versus when you're on, uh, what is effectively the world's largest open forum. Mm-hmm. And that would be. Whatever Twitter's called from, not

[00:48:47] Matt Cromwell: Twitter,

[00:48:47] Mika Epstein: whatever Twitter's called today. Um, I dipped out of Twitter, uh, a year ago because I do not support, uh, the rollback to their code of conduct as it actually happens.

[00:49:00] Mm-hmm. They removed protections against people saying horrible things mm-hmm. About people of my sexuality mm-hmm. And my gender and my religion, and I don't feel safe there, so I will not participate. Yeah. And I hold that true, by the way, to any social media that I'm using if I cannot be allowed to be mm-hmm.

[00:49:19] I don't wanna be there. Absolutely. And it, it even extended to like, I will know, I I, I love Word Camp Miami. We're talking about it before this. I can't go to another word camp in Florida until some of those laws change because it is physically no longer safe for me. Yeah.

[00:49:33] Matt Cromwell: Not about Word Camp. About the state.

[00:49:35] Mika Epstein: About the state. Yeah. The word camp's fine. Yeah. Uh, I just can't go to the state. Um,

[00:49:38] Matt Cromwell: exactly.

[00:49:39] Mika Epstein: But. The reason that being around the internet for so long, the reason that social media tends to bring out the worst in us is this curated algorithm that is especially true in recent days that you can't turn off.

[00:49:55] It used to be you could just have your timeline be, uh, linear, newest post on the top. I'll just post on the bottom, scroll up and down. You really wouldn't lose a post. Now, if I re, I have still have a Twitter account for a, a thing that I, a project that I work on, and I check it out occasionally, and when I do and I hit refresh, I get a completely different set of posts.

[00:50:12] Sometimes I get the same post over and over again for four days. That algorithm is being kind of buzzfeed forward, so the more interaction a post gets. The more popular it gets in, the higher up in your feet. It gets, the more people see it, the more people see it, the more you get that dopamine response of I've been seen, I must be doing this.

[00:50:35] Right. So we get in this vicious cycle of, I'm gonna say a hot topic in a way that draws people's eyes, gets attention. I'm gonna get that dopamine hit and I'm gonna feel so good.

[00:50:47] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, and

[00:50:47] Mika Epstein: you do. But the problem is that what we have found gets elevated faster is, uh, harsher comments.

[00:50:53] Matt Cromwell: The louder. Yeah. More hyper folks.

[00:50:56] Yeah. Uh, Courtney Robinson's here in the wings too. And, um, uh, she says, with the correct place for, uh, for this type of thing, be the make projects and a unique channel in Make Slack for. Diplomacy discussions. I would love it. I wanna

[00:51:11] Mika Epstein: say that there like is a channel for that. Is

[00:51:13] Matt Cromwell: there? Uh, I would love it to be the case that we could do things there, but I know from other experiences that we can make a channel, like, actually it was funny Work Camp Europe last year, uh, Mullenweg from the, from this, from the, uh, his, um, what do they call it now?

[00:51:32] Not a state of the word. Um. From his town hall. Uh oh. Yeah. Said yes. We're gonna make a, um, uh, uh, environmental responsibility channel happen and like it happened, like the, the next minute. Um, but what happens in that channel? Uh, we haven't talked a lot about it since then. Yeah. Um, so it, the, these channels are only as good as we refer people to them, and they're only as good as we actually say, this is where we do these things.

[00:51:58] Um, uh, so it's more than just like, whether or not we have a channel, it's, it's about how we promote it, which Courtney's actually really good about. That

[00:52:06] kind of stuff.

[00:52:07] Really needs

[00:52:08] Zack Katz: buy

[00:52:08] Matt Cromwell: in from

[00:52:08] Zack Katz: the

[00:52:08] Matt Cromwell: top.

[00:52:09] Zack Katz: Uh, yeah. If, if, yeah, Matt doesn't want to participate, then it, how meaningful is it? Or just sofa? Josefa, like, uh, she can speak.

[00:52:18] To the project, but can she speak for Matt? No, I don't believe she can. So, yeah. Yeah.

[00:52:24] Matt Cromwell: Well, we, we, yeah.

[00:52:27] Mika Epstein: It's, it's a, it's a bigger question because like all things, even with features on, in core, it needs someone to champion and be the person to carry it until enough people get buy-in. And that, you know, speaking of volunteerism and burnout, that's really mm-hmm.

[00:52:42] Really hard. Mm-hmm. And I lauded anybody who has the fortitude to do it. Yeah. In a, in a productive way.

[00:52:51] Matt Cromwell: Well, we are gonna wrap up here. Um, and the way we like to wrap up, uh, is always having practical advice for, uh, plugin authors. We'd like to think of like somebody who's just go for it.

[00:53:04] Mika Epstein: I just said, Ooh.

[00:53:05] Matt Cromwell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. What somebody who's just, uh, getting, uh, started, uh, with plugins or has been doing it for a year or so and they wanna grow their business in one way or another, their on wordpress.org, um, what do we say to them? To, um, to, to, for best advice nutshell, elevator pitch. Um, sure. Who wants to go first?

[00:53:25] Zach?

[00:53:27] Zack Katz: Uh, sure. My best advice, uh, in context of this week and this past, you know, past couple weeks is, uh, behave yourself.

[00:53:36] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:37] Zack Katz: Be professional in everything you do. Uh, if you need to have a venting channel, create a personal venting channel and don't have that, be connected to your profiles in any way.

[00:53:48] Have it be an anonymous, whatever the people say for anonymous Twitter, like have a, a hidden account. Have that be where you say things that are controversial. You are a business person, behave like one, be kind, be generous, model yourself after people who are, I am the way I am, in part because of Pippin and the, the grace, the grace that he showed me is why I have my one core contribution to WordPress core is because he sat down and showed me how to do it and was so patient with me and answered my questions.

[00:54:20] So I have an internal, uh, gratitude toward Pippen for doing that because he modeled what it means to be a business owner. So absolutely, uh, be be the, be the WordPress you wish to see.

[00:54:32] Matt Cromwell: Love

[00:54:32] Zack Katz: it. That's

[00:54:32] Matt Cromwell: good. Love it. Mika, how about you?

[00:54:36] Mika Epstein: Uh, I have a, a, it's kind of a multi-part, but, uh, don't idolize, don't elevate the people you look up to as paragons and perfect because they are like you humans who.

[00:54:51] Do make mistakes. Treat them as humans. Be the WordPress you want to see in the world. Be the person you wanna see and give people a little bit of that grace at the same time. My best advice for a plugin author, you wanna be successful, write a really good, read me.

[00:55:11] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. Explain

[00:55:12] Mika Epstein: exactly what your plugin does, why it does it, and how to do it.

[00:55:16] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm. That

[00:55:16] Mika Epstein: read me is don't fill it with buzzwords, don't fill it with SEO. Copy, drama. Sit down and write it. Clearly more than anything, those plugins with the simple and direct, you know, you, you look at gives read me. You know exactly what it does. I don't have to have questions of, will this meet my brief?

[00:55:37] I'll know this is what it does. If you wanna do more, click here. There are some add-ons you can buy. Here are other add-ons that are free. You know what you're getting into. If people see that. They're more inclined to try it out, and if they're more inclined to try it out and give you a chance, then you've got eyes on things and you will start to build.

[00:55:56] But if you can't get eyes on with honesty, you're not doing it right.

[00:56:00] Matt Cromwell: I love that. Eyes on with honesty. Okay. That's, that's really good advice. Nico,

[00:56:05] Zack Katz: work on your reads. I'll work on mine War too.

[00:56:07] Mika Epstein: It's, it's, it's the simplest thing and so many people are like, how do I make my plugin more popular? I'm like, make that, read me sing.

[00:56:15] Make it be so that a stranger who's never heard of your product reads it and goes, that's exactly what I want. Mm.

[00:56:22] Matt Cromwell: Answer

[00:56:22] Mika Epstein: the questions in the forums except the bad reviews, they're gonna happen. Yeah. Everybody's gonna hate your plugin. You made a plugin that doesn't have a unicorn. You don't know why somebody's mad about that, but you gotta just take it, man.

[00:56:34] Zack Katz: Yeah. Sometimes folks are weird. You can hire people, you can hire people to edit and like write. Oh yeah. Write your reme for you. You don't have to write your own reme. Are you a developer that doesn't know how to Yeah. You get a copy editor sentences that make sense. Write, fire, hire somebody on Fiverr. It doesn't matter.

[00:56:49] Just get it well written and that's great advice.

[00:56:52] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. I, I have a passion about the Read Me as well. I don't know, we, you and I have never talked about that, but the Give Read Me is intended to be educational as much as possible. We do try to have our cake you needed too, because it definitely is designed towards SEO as well.

[00:57:07] Um, but it,

[00:57:08] Mika Epstein: that comes naturally educational

[00:57:10] Matt Cromwell: and helpful first.

[00:57:11] Zack Katz: Um, that's now you're ranking on.com as well, so Good job.

[00:57:18] Mika Epstein: I I have always been of the belief that if you write well, SEO will come naturally.

[00:57:23] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, true. Because that's the idea.

[00:57:25] Mika Epstein: After you start looking at, okay, how can I improve it? You say, oh, okay.

[00:57:29] SEO things would be like, make your sentences shorter. Get to the point. It's like taking a writing class. Take a writing class. Seriously take a news writing class because they'll teach you how to distill a paragraph into four words. Yeah. And that is amazing.

[00:57:43] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. I'll say my best. What's

[00:57:46] Zack Katz: your, yeah.

[00:57:47] Yeah. What's your best advice for product owners?

[00:57:49] Matt Cromwell: My best advice in the context of all of this that we're talking about today is participate, participate, participate. I really want. Product owners to be in WordPress, slack, um, talking with folks in all the channels, learning about all the nooks and crannies of the project that they've never heard of.

[00:58:07] There's a bajillion channels in there. Uh, there's really interesting conversations. There's a ton of weekly meetings that you can go get on whenever you want to. Um, and, uh, and all of those conversations are both just educational for you to understand the board WordPress project better. They're also really great, um, market research for your product.

[00:58:29] Um, so I think that that's really important as well. And, um, it's also the best way to understand, uh, what's going on that's bigger than your pl plugin, uh, what's going on outside of, uh, of your plugin and outside of your sphere. Um, and to really get to know other product owners to get to know other WordPresses, um, to, to get to know o other people around the planet.

[00:58:52] So I really like in this context. It's the best place for you to, to broaden your mind, to recognize how diverse and huge and powerful the whole entire WordPress community and WordPress project is. So participate

[00:59:07] Zack Katz: and me reach out and say hi to somebody, anybody that's, I love that. Like we are all on, I'm, I'm on Slack all the time.

[00:59:16] People are on Slack all the time. Say hi. Say, introduce yourself to somebody. Anybody. You like what they do. Just say, Hey, I like what you do. I'm me, but don't be creepy. Don't be creepy. Uh, that's, it can be hard, but try not to be. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:59:32] Mika Epstein: I say that for every single woman out there who's gotten the very bizarre, oh yeah,

[00:59:35] Zack Katz: no, don't be, you are beautiful.

[00:59:37] I

[00:59:37] Mika Epstein: love your code. And you're like,

[00:59:38] Zack Katz: no, no, that's not what I'm talking about.

[00:59:41] Mika Epstein: Yeah. No, but that's it. It needs a reminder these days, I'm afraid.

[00:59:44] Zack Katz: Don't be creepy. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:59:46] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. All right folks. Next week we are going to be discussing effective live product demos with, uh, special guest Vic from, uh, NCWP.

[00:59:59] So I'm really excited to have him on, um, been looking for an opportunity to have him here. Um, and uh, next week's gonna be great. Um, our hosts next week are, oh, me again, and Katie. So that's next week. Yeah. And,

[01:00:13] Zack Katz: and special thanks to post status for being our green room, where we stage all these conversations and we, we, uh, get to prep.

[01:00:20] Uh, if you enjoy the show, uh, please do us a favor. Hit like, subscribe, share it with your friends, tweet about it, or, uh, toot about it. Uh, add us in your newsletters and, uh, and thank you for watching and we hope to see you next week. Uh, thank you.

[01:00:35] Mika Epstein: Thanks for having me on.

[01:00:37] Zack Katz: Thanks.