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WP Plugins AtoZ – The Now & Future of WordPress Through Our Lenses

– ‘good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today! Coming to you LIVE from …'

Welcome to Episode 618 – WP Plugins AtoZ – The Now & Future of WordPress Through Our Lenses!

Today our dear listeners, we are not doing a regular show, but are instead doing a pre-recorded New Year's Show! For those of you who have decided to tune in and listen, there is a show for today and then back to our regularly scheduled live show for you on January 20th!We don't have a banana to pull out of our pocket to create conversation today, although we do have some ideas we found scattered throughout the couch cushions! You know, sometimes the items found between couch cushions can be a FANTASTIC conversation starter as well – especially if you have younger kids and/or teenagers! After all, the only difference between toddlers and teenager is that teenagers KNOW just how annoying they are being…. aren't kids great?!?

Only a couple of reminders before we start the show today….

Reminders:

• Remember that sparklers are only for OUTside – fire burns wood and materials really well!
• Don't leave your partner unattended for too long, the intrusive thoughts may win them over when you are not looking!
• Fizzy water and juice makes great pop for kids – fizzy water, juice, and a bit of additional flavour can wind up being a fantastic wobbly pop for the adults!
• We hope you made a SERIOUS racket at midnight – if you listen for a moment you might be able to hear us here in Canada way over there in New Zealand with the racket me and mine are gonna make!

That's it for reminders – if I missed anything important be sure to let me know and I will add it to next year's reminders! 😉

Remember that you can send anything pertinent my way at amber@wppro.ca!

 

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Who's Our Featured Artist This Week?

Artist: 

Grok! He is always our artist these days, and I think it is awesome!

 

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WordPress Tips

I have a serious question for everyone out there who is over 20:
WHEN was the last time that you grabbed a taboggan and went sledding?
WHEN was the last time you raced kids down a hill, made a snow angel, or gave your buddy a ‘face wash'?

Having FUN

The question asked above is actually a serious question – because I was thinking about it… and I have not gone sledding since I was 7, have not raced someone since I was in my mid teens, and I have not given a buddy a proper snowy ‘face wash' since I was in my late teens. And Snow Angel making? I think I did that last in my early 20's.

Why not?

Because of the same reason you are probably going to give – I've been busy.

Busy doing what?

Making a living, paying bills, working overtime so that I can be the best in my field that I am capable of being, setting things up for the kids, being taxi-mom (or in your case it may be taxi-dad) – just busy.

Welp, my advice to you today is to STOP IT.

STOP BEING BUSY! It's the bloody HOLIDAYS!

Get out there and race your kids and lose – 'cause you know you will! Get out there and make a snow angel, call your buddy over – force them to stop being busy too!! – and give them a proper snowy ‘face wash' – make snow angels with your friends/family/kids – go dance in the middle of the night with your family and friends beneath the clear winter sky and enjoy the fresh, dry cold air!

Go live a little.

 

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Donations and Support

‘How can you help' I hear you asking – well, there are plenty of ways!
Scratch our backs and we will scratch yours – do an interview, have us review your plugin, send us something to read out for you!
Donate some time or treasure our way, and we will make sure that you receive equal value in return!
You can go and check everything out at wppluginsatoz.com – click on Time, Talen, or Treasure in our main menu on the lefthand side and see what options there are for you!

 

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How to reach us:

We have a real brick and mortar address where you can send in art and/or notes – you can find the address in our show notes!

 

WP Plugins A to Z
C/O John Overall 
20-754 E Fairview Rd. 
Victoria, BC  V9A 5T9  
Canada

 

We also have virtual addresses too!

 

John:

• My website:http://www.johnoverall.com/
• WordPress Emergency Support:http://wppro.ca/wpemergency
• email:john@wppro.ca

Amber:

• email: amber@wppro.ca

 

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Put on your lenses – and GO!!

Check out our talking points down below – you will have to listen to the show in order to learn about everything we talked about though because we did not write it all down!

 

Amber talking points to present:

The changes over the past year to WordPress itself have been quite a few! There are a couple that really jump into my head when I think about changes, and that is first the upgrade to PHP8, and the loss of ClassicPress – but then also this recent change brought on by Mullenweg where we are now having plugins jump ship and requiring you to download a new version of their plugin because they are just off the repository now.

I have also seen a lot of people who have been there since the beginning, beginning to abandon ship. This is happening for various reasons, though the most prevalent are that the WordPress Community is not mentally healthy – if it were a partner in a relationship, the WordPress Community would have a restraining order kinda deal.

I think that the direction WordPress is currently heading is going to be similar to ClassicPress – it is going to be fantastic for another year or 2, then it is going to start falling apart – this will be due to losing so many of it's cornerstone coders, volunteer grunt workers, and the plugins that have really made it worthwhile.

I am hearing chatter about other platforms that are similar to WordPress in the idea of free use and open code – though without the dictatorship idealism of the ones who started it. At least that idealism is not engrained as of yet – hopefully it will stay at bay.

For the Plugins, I foresee repositories popping up all over the place – and I think this could be both good and bad. Good because of easier access, although bad because I can see spammers and hackers taking absolute advantage of this. They always do after all. We will have to be on our guard with this I think.

Honestly, I would like to see WordPress recover, I would like to see it change its path and go in the direction of recovery – although I don't think we will.

I think the perfect example of how bad WordPress is getting was when that one girl managed to just destroy Mullenweg – she challenged him to make a site using his baby Gutenberg. he couldn't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1hc2abf/matt_losing_a_wp_speed_build_challenge_and_his/

But he wants to push this on everyone else… He has made suggestions towards the idea that WordPress will eventually only support Gutenberg… if that actually happens then I think he will go the way of Yahoo and Hotmail … and simply fizzle out of existence.

 

John talking points to present:

Thought on WordPress current and future
https://kraut.press/2024/wordpress-isnt-wordpress-anymore/

So what is happening in the CMS world also
https://joost.blog/wordpress-roadmap/

 

Here, the future of WordPress as I see it.

Well, what's happening in WordPress right now, especially with all of the stuff that Mullenweg has pulled in the last several months, has made everyone wake up. The benevolent dictatorship problem, and while it seemed great and it went along fairly well with only the occasional flare up here and there, we've now come to a new crossroad in WordPress and that is in dealing with plugins. Now I've been doing this show for 16 years, back at the very beginning. You can go back and find episode 1 which talks about where there were less than 9000 plugins in the WordPress repository at that time. Now there's hundreds of thousands of plugins available however, the WordPress repository has only 59,000 now. At one point the repository had 90,000+ plugins. They have removed a lot from there.

I've been unable to verify the numbers in it easily, I just know I've seen it up there in the 90,000 range many years ago, and I'm sure a lot of my favorite plugins that I used to get are no longer there. So a lot of plugins have been removed and I remember back in the beginning of WordPress, it was coders at the beginning of their career just going crazy because WordPress was open source or still open source. WordPress was the new place to be and do all kinds of fun cool stuff with. We had some fantastic plugins for years, some of them are still hanging around. I've got copies of old ones that no longer exist, that were just fun, but the code no longer works with the latest versions of PHP, etcetera.

So what else do we have about that? What I see happening in WordPress in the coming years is a bit of a fragmentation. More and more people are beginning to not be able to trust the WordPress repository as a place to put stuff and this lack of trust is fragmenting. There are new repositories popping up and some of them will be business models. We mentioned one in a show not too long ago. I can't remember the name of it, have to go back and look, but it talks about the new repository and it's doing things differently now. The big thing that's gotta change in the WordPress core is the WordPress core being tied to 1 repository. What they have to do is open it up to allow people to choose the repository they want their plugins to come from. This will create a massive amount of demand for plugin repositories, especially if someone can curate new ones from all the open source plugins that are out there, the free versions and the freemium versions. If they can curate those into their own repository and that they can curate some premium plugins into their repository that people can buy at affordable prices, that will be an amazing thing.

What I do see happening is WordPress itself is going to continue. It's not going anywhere. It's gonna change. Yes, it's gonna change. Are we gonna be stuck with Gutenberg? Yeah, I think we're stuck with it. Even though, as we mentioned, even Matt couldn't figure out how to use his Gutenberg effectively, which I just found him using his ability, still got frustrated with what he was trying to build. The thing he was having troubles with was margins and padding, which are some basic things that should be there nice and easy. I find that same problem when I've had to use the block editors. I just want to move this just a little bit. How do I adjust just this little header?  I understand why he had problems with it, but hopefully now he understands why everyone was pitching about it.

As far as the plugin community goes, it's not going anywhere. The plugins are gonna stay there. They're gonna stay working. The add-ons, I mean, the core of WordPress is fantastic, is solid. It's like I can't fault Matt and his original coding of the core of WordPress and the expansions to it over the years has been some great stuff that has allowed thousands, maybe even millions of people to create their own small businesses based upon and around WordPress. Actually it's been 1,000,000 because it's not only the people who build WordPress websites but even the home person, the home-preneur, you know, the entrepreneur from home with a small business,  to quickly build a website and add a store to it. Nowadays it's so easy to add in the plugins so that you can take payment processing and more. So that's not going away; it's going to expand. What is going to expand further, and this is going to catch many people off guard, and I see it coming and that is the problem that we have in the world today for everything, which is a subscription service. More and more plugins are going to move to subscription service versus the service that they are now. This is going to happen and it's going to begin sometime in 2025. I think we saw something about it last year, late last year when I brought it to the show. I think I saw one plugin move to subscription service. I'm going to see, we're going to see more of this and of the bigger and better plugins. You know, take for example, it's going to happen with, I bet I can see it happening first with something like Woo Commerce or even Gravity Forms or thinking of the bigger, the biggest and best premium plug-in services, they'll try and do it with Elementor. Hopefully they'll grandfather those of us in that pay the lesser fee currently, which is basically a subscription service and once a year you pay a fee to continue getting your updates and keep your stuff licensed. You know, I don't know if Elementor continues to function without a license or not. I can't remember, I haven't tried. I don't think Elementor Pro does function without license. So that's basically a subscription service, but they're going to try and bring it down to where it's more affordable for people much in the way that Adobe did with its software. So these are some of the things I see