2018·02·06 · 48:20
AWP Gutenberg Interview Series with Joost de Valk
I talk about how Yoast is preparing its plugins for the Gutenberg block editor ahead of its inclusion in WordPress 5.0. I describe the plugin perspective on a change this significant: what breaks, what needs to be rebuilt, and how a team of around 80 people approaches a platform shift that affects millions of sites. The interview is followed by an open Q&A where I answer questions from the community.
0:05 hey everybody welcome this is Matt Cromwell admin at AWP and had a support at give WP comm and this is our first interview series of four that we're going to be doing in the month of February all about the upcoming Gutenberg editor I'm really excited about this for a couple reasons one we've never done this before in advance WP so that's kind of fun and cool I'm also really excited about the guests that we're gonna have in particular today we have Joseph op he's the founder
0:41 of Yoast comm one of the most widely installed and activated plugins in the WordPress repo and we're going to talk all about that next week we're gonna have oh and Yoast is also one of our admins of the of the group so I'm excited about that and next week we have another admin of the group Amada ace is going to be presenting on some developer tools that he's built out for us for for Gutenberg specifically so today we're gonna be talking about kind of the plug in perspective of Gutenberg
1:15 how plugins are going to be adapting to Gutenberg being in WordPress core next week we'll talk about what developers can do in terms of extending Gutenberg and building out new blocks and things like that with a mod the week after that we have a good'n bird core contributor I mean Tammy Lister she's an autumn attrition and she's going to be bringing a design perspective and also talking about general ways that Gutenberg and the core committers from automatic I've been interacting with the developer community and then we're gonna wrap up the whole series with Matt Mullenweg the
1:48 co-founder of automatic who of course built WordPress from the ground up more or less so we're excited about the whole series and I'm glad you guys are all here and definitely chime in and the comments below we can see all the comments coming in just fine this is the first time we've ever done this so there might be some glitches so hang on tight we're trying to watch as quick as we can and yeah there will be bugs or easily it's give them work that are you know
2:21 more or less features you know but chime in and let us know what's going on we're basically breaking up this whole session into two one the first part is about a 20 minute interview me just asking Yost all the hard questions and making him nervous making him sweat and and then the next part is an AMA people being able to ask whatever you want to ask in the comments and we will rapid-fire
2:54 answer them as quickly as we can or Yost will you know I'll just sit and watch and continue making him nervous so that's the idea oh so first off Yost introduce yourself a little bit tell us a little bit about you and what you do so I am Yost I'm the husband of Marika which is probably my most important feat father of four kids live in the Netherlands where a Yost is also based I
3:27 found that Jost in 2010 I hired my first colleague in 2012 right now yes is approximately 80 people of which about 60 in the Netherlands we run a bunch of plugins but our most well-known for a us SEO which is available for a couple of platforms but it's most installed on WordPress itself with currently somewhere in between 7.5 and 8 million
3:59 installs which is a number that scares me to no end well that's what I did basically I've been on the web for ages that's probably a good thing to say I've built my first web site in 1994 which is longer ago than I dare explained to my kids nice well that's always really great to have young so let's get to it first tell us a bit about your general thoughts
4:30 on gutenberg in general what do you think about it so far i think we had a bit of a full start in many ways with with how the project was approached from the beginning and and then presented towards the wider community i think the ideas behind it are pretty solid in that we want a more modern editing experience and well the whole back end could use a
5:04 bit more modern approach I don't always know whether we're really solving any user problems or whether we're solving problems that we as developers perceive that people might have in general although I'm pretty enthusiastic about what it can do and where it can bring us and and how it could bring the entire admin experience not just the editor but the entire and editing experience within WordPress of the entire site not just a
5:35 post or a page to a much much higher level than we currently have and so in general I think I'm very positive actually and there's I think there's a lot left to be done but at the same time that the pace of development is rather insane ya know for sure one big question everybody seems to be having is when do you think it's gonna be going into core I mean matt has said a couple times that he's opened it would that 5.0 essentially would be
6:06 ready in April I'm a little bit skeptical that's gonna happen and that's okay you know it needs to go in when it's ready but what's your feeling right I'm skeptical okay I I think April might be the right month don't think 2018 will be the year oh no I and at the same time if that's true I'd also be very sad I we
6:39 have to ship this at some point I don't really see it be ready in April I think in April they'll be ready for the merge proposal state if you look on github there is actually a couple of milestones right now where what that they're working towards um I think after Mercia proposal and and we when we get to merge proposal and even more people will hopefully be testing with it um we'll run into a [ __ ] ton of
7:16 bugs in my most optimistic view we'll be ready sometime before work camp Europe that'd be June I think October November is probably more realistic I mean from your perspective you you also just I freaked I'm sorry I forget which version number it was you just have you had a really large version number was at 3.0 that where the whole ghost you I was like revamped completely likes me three
7:48 point notice almost two and a half years ago now we and something that's very close to what Gutenberg is now doing which is basically redo our entire UI and move it all to JavaScript yeah so I mean I'm sure as you were ramping up for that there was a bunch of your customers and users who were like where is this thing where is this thing where is this thing and then I'm sure there's also plenty of on the back end of it oh well here is it but you know it's not making me happy anymore so like can you speak into that tension between
8:19 wanting to get it out for the users but also making sure that it's ripe and ready to go can you speak into that a little bit it's hard because at some point you'll have to actually push it into a lot of people so in any if this if WordPress word curliest ass you could ramp up good and work to say a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand users and monitor their huge usage and there [Music] errors and everything and you could see
8:57 basically you're developing in the blind for an environment in which almost every site is unique I'm a I'm a deep apple fan and one of the reasons that Apple makes phones that are so awesome is because they restrict pretty much everything so an iPhone an iOS developer is is developing for a couple of versions of the iPhone but that's it I wish I was only developing for a couple
9:28 of versions of WordPress and a couple of combinations of plugins but the reality is that we with Yoast and a good purchase similary are developing for a group of sites of tens of millions of sites that each and every one of them runs a unique combination of plugins that tie into each other in a weird way and we're doing all that based on a JavaScript language that is pretty bad
9:59 in terms of if something breaks and it's not properly try catched in the code everything breaks this is what we ran into with Yosi CEO of 3.0 that we we could prevent herself from breaking we weren't breaking hard but a lot of other plugins were throwing javascript errors and suddenly every plugin with more than 10,000 installs that push through a javascript errors in the admin was a major pain in the ass to us you can't
10:30 basically our plugin wouldn't work anymore because they were throwing JavaScript errors yeah that's actually like a big concern of mine with Gutenberg will impact WordPress as a whole is that we don't really have really strong asset management in WordPress in general and we're going from a beach beach driven interface to really a purely JavaScript driven interface and I just can imagine you know not being able to control
11:03 javascript is being loaded on your post edit screen becoming really problematic um yes I I think we're gonna have to explain try-catch to a whole lot of people mm-hmm and we're gonna have to find a way to highlight to people why stuff is breaking a bit better a lot more people will have to dive into their JavaScript console and they used to mm-hmm but we we've been there I mean
11:34 we've been doing this for the last two years I have to say it's been fairly stable in the last year or so and we haven't had too many issues with other plugins throwing major errors anymore hmm so I think it's I think the community at large is ready for this I it's just there's a lot of possibilities for breakage yeah and I tend to want to
12:08 avoid those yeah yeah I I think I think everybody does but at what point do you just make sure that WordPress is moving forward regardless I think that that's kind of the attention that automatic that Matt and the Gutenberg team and automatic are navigating is trying to be like well we need the project and move forward in a way that is you know more modern more attractive to young developers so that people continue to
12:39 build on WordPress and want to build on WordPress well it's not just not just that it's also the only existing people who do not want to work on Gutenberg but once work on other sections of WordPress or currently hampered in their development because like when I was supposed to be Gutenberg and in minor releases they can't add new files and do other things so they can't do any major developments to other sections of WordPress itself so one of the reasons I
13:12 won WordPress to just move on as as fast as possible is that is that I want WordPress to do more than just be Gutenberg in in the end Gutenberg is just the editor and of course there's gonna be more parts of WordPress that will be affected by what we are building in WordPress and we're gonna use it in more places but it is just the editor and it will be the editor and the widget editor and it will be menus and will probably be a whole
13:43 lot more but for now and it shouldn't hold everything else up and that is a bit what it's doing right now that's one of the things that I where I think we we've had a full start um I like good to Merc I don't like that it's tied to 5.0 yep the next one I'd love to hear in detail what you guys that Yost's are working on in order to get Yoast SEO ready for good work specifically so
14:15 we're very close um I think we're like a couple of maybe six weeks or so away from having like a working version of us SEO on Gutenberg we were already working on on on moving to react with our interface which is the same code base that Gutenberg is based on so we were actually very happy to see that part of
14:48 it our snippet preview and a couple of other things around that still need to be fixed are our SEO analysis are constant our readability analyses are already done and are already fully react um so it looks like what we'll be doing is we'll we'll take over or we'll have a plug-in in Gutenberg that takes over the right sidebar and you'll see our readability analysis or SEO analysis our internal linking suggestions etc there
15:20 on top of that we're working on a commenting API actually some other people have worked on that as well it's called the annotations API I think on first get up very close to Google Docs commenting and we want to use that for inline suggestions on how to improve stuff in general I think
15:52 actually Gutenberg ties in pretty well with what we wanted to do which is more actionable feedback as you type in on censuses etc the book that you were typing for a readability advice and and for our overall view of how we want to approach us SEO we want to we want you to do more cross post optimization so more on site stuff where we go like hey this post could use more links we think these five posts would be good ideas to
16:23 have linked to that one post that's let's take you numbers one through five and and and make you add the links actually having an API for and an interface that allows us to do things like that simply and in a in a cool good-looking interface and more apt like experience instead of having to reload the admin all the time I think it will make our plug-in a lot more powerful
16:55 than it already is I'm very excited for what we will be able to do with it I'm also I there's two people on my team currently working on the last api's that we need to have all the content that we need to be able to build our analysis so these are Guttenberg api's that they're working on that basically allow us to get all the content out of Guttenberg that we need and then we can do the the last bits of work to tie everything together but four
17:26 to six weeks should probably be enough for us to have a first working version of Yoast SEO for Gutenberg and then we can start polishing nice so are you satisfied or I don't know if that's the best word very satisfied with with the face that Gutenberg provides you to be able to do all the things that you want to do I mean so far there's a lot of developers and plug-in owners who are developing blocks you know and that's a real straightforward type of experience
17:57 that encourages like yeah that's what Gutenberg's all about and people are building blocks like crazy already but what you have to do is not block orient it and so you're dealing with that little drawer on the side and then in one way or another how they're able to add you know meta information in one form or another like are you you feel like there's enough stuff there in Gutenberg available for you to really do what you want to do with content yeah I
18:29 think so actually I think we will be able to use the right-hand sidebar we'll also be able to do a basically a complete screen takeover of yeah for specific sections though so a snippet preview and a facebook preview and stuff like that will show unlike the entire screen you'll be able to because it's much more of an app you can flick things away you can add things and move things in a much more natural way than we currently I'm not worried I actually
19:03 think it will it will improve a lot we also have decided to actually bring our classic editor experience in line with our Gutenberg editor experience because otherwise making support books is going to be hard which means that will will move towards that interface regardless of when Gutenberg launches we will be preparing to move to to a different interface for Yodas where we're more in
19:35 the right-hand sidebar uh-huh anyway because otherwise it's just it becomes impossible for us to to maintain documentation it's better yep yeah exactly I know you're a big fan of react so now that you know once Gutenberg is there react is going to essentially be in core a lot of folks might not even know that there was a JavaScript framework called backbone in core for forever just simply because developers just didn't like working with it so nobody really built a whole lot I think ninja forms actually
20:08 leverage back backbone a lot but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on react specifically and how how you think that having react in WordPress core might benefit development in general and plug-in development specifically um I I think we're finally using something that I think we should do slightly more often the WordPress community which is looking outside of our own bubble and fairing out where other people are building cool
20:39 things react is probably one of the most advanced JavaScript libraries out there of course there are other options and and everyone can have their opinions on what's better and what's not better we show who react because of its stability and and because of everything is offered we were also we also chose to react because the dock point automatic was already looking at it as well and we knew that and they'd built they were at that point building Calypso and when we
21:16 we're very happy with it because it's a lot more of a modern interface I think it might have a slightly steeper learning curve for new plug-in developers and do things with at the same time most plugin developers will not have to do anything close to what we need though for most plug-in developers it'll be blocks and blocks alone and blocks are fairly simple I mean I'm not will probably talk about that next week
21:48 but we were building some ourselves now and it's just works I mean of course there's pieces that we can make better and things that we can improve on but it's a lot better than I mean you know I we've ever had for anything like that and WordPress before these shortcodes bye-bye a lot in terms of user interface huh in terms of developer interface I think it's fairly doable it's just a new language one of the
22:19 things that we have to start and to stop talking about in my opinion is how hard it is for everyone to learn a new language because there's also a ton of developers out there that already know JavaScript and it already note react and that can suddenly start building things for WordPress that couldn't before and I know that we've had a last hard time finding a react developer stand we fund and we have a hard time finding a really good peach B developers interesting
22:50 interesting I think it's a good move and I think reacts will allow us to make the WordPress afternoon a lot better in many many many ways because there is a lot of horrible things in the WordPress admin that we need to fix and all of them can be fixed at once but anyone has ever looked at list tables for longer than five minutes will agree with me that act because needs like drastic change yeah that's basically every table that we're under in the backend yeah
23:23 yeah we're already talking about it for our stuff for donations and give that we would love to not have to deal with WP list tables at all so I think it is Brian McHugh who's done a WP list tables react saying you should look it up and play with it for like ten minutes and there you go this is what the world could look like so it's it's I think it's awesome at the same time one of the things I see is that there's actually
23:54 quite a few issues where we are assigning people to to do things in the REST API because there's stuff that Gutenberg needs that's not an arrest API yeah there's a lot of layers dirt need addressing but yeah I I like react because of those choices I'm not deep enough into it because I am a core PHP developer I know I'm not I like I most of the code I do also in Yoast SEO
24:26 is PHP it's not JavaScript there's a whole lot of people here in this company a lot better than I can but Dave they reviewed a lot of options and this came out as well is this really the only real option having the entire discussion that we had about reacting core and and a licensing you know all the discussion we had about that a couple months back has actually resulted in more people looking
24:57 at it and looking at WordPress deeper so there's Facebook core reactives involved with all of this Google is actively looking at Gutenberg II I've seen their job at like two days ago where they are saying that they want someone to work on Gutenberg right Google released a couple weeks ago a board game thing API in react we all like thank God was very interesting um I think it's I think
25:28 we're moving in the right direction and we have a chance there and and we have actually already used the power of WordPress to force the licenses reacting to something that we can work with but I mean that's a we assume it seems obvious that that's the case I mean Facebook never like admitted that but it seemed pretty obvious I mean Apache was there to I've actually also said you know we're not gonna do this so yeah combined yeah and Apaches no user-facing as much yeah
26:05 so I think there's a that's a a difference yeah but it's yeah I like it and I think it's a it's a very good step for all of us yeah I got two last questions folks if you want to start bringing in your your questions we'll start paying attention to them we can see all the comments coming in already I saw a couple comments about the the title being a little bit a little bit covering up yo space we don't want to do that I'll probably
26:36 just show the titles for like five seconds and hide them again just so everybody knows where we're at in the whole and the whole thing but two questions and then we're gonna take questions AMA style so get them ready and prepared Yost what is your advice for plug-in authors and theme authors for getting their plugins and themes ready for Gutenberg what what tips do you have for them start with that like now don't wait because this this whole thing might move a lot faster than
27:09 demand a lot of people realize and let's say it's gonna be April May let's say that happens then if you don't start preparing now you're too late hmm why don't that's what a lot of people are saying is like oh I can prepare now but then everything's kind of changed I mean like no and we're not at the point anymore where we're all that much is going to change I mean locks are not going to change all that much anymore the interface is not we're adding to it I don't see us I don't see a lot of taking away I see us
27:44 discuss certain UI elements but I don't think we'll will suddenly break that and I'm waiting till everything is stable and I will mean that you have to wait till Gutenberg reaches like its first major version yeah because it will only become stable as it's released to the WordPress community because that's you need to battle justice there's one of the reasons I like react a lot because react
28:15 has been better testing more than any other JavaScript library more and so that part is not gonna break there's but there's parts of Gutenberg that are gonna break now and that might mean change even might mean changing api's but changing all that much I would dive in and I would urge most people to consider whether what they what they do in wordpress can be a block and should be a block and I don't think there's all that
28:50 plugins that need to tie into a weed if we could get rid of a whole lot of masa boxes and replace them with blocks where people are editing the content in context in the position where they want it to be on the page I think we'd make the editing experience a whole lot better for everyone yep and we're different in that we are metadata don't have a position on the page and we give feedback on what you're
29:24 writing but it's I I think 95% of the plugins that even need to be on that page need to be blocks and people need need to start playing with those I'm not sure how to pronounce his name Jerry Yan Roddy he just as Linux you in your room nice he's actually asking my next question so my next and last question that I'm gonna let everybody else ask
29:55 the questions and I'll just watch you also get uncomfortable what do you have planned for 2018 in general I know that Gutenberg is a big deal in general but I'm sure you have lots of other stuff that you're anxious to push out there and and improve with your whole suite of products so tell us all the inside stuff so there's a couple of things we'll be doing yo sister company and has two sides like we have the plugins and we have academy we'll do a whole lot of work on us Academy this year so there
30:27 will be more courses are our existing courses will be improved etc for Yoast SEO I'm currently working myself on a pretty major overall doco admin because we have far too many settings and we need to get rid of them and make them more meaningful to people stupid things like we asked you to whether you want to index no index a specific post type and
30:58 whether you want to include that post type in the XML site turns out that 99% of people doesn't know what that means nor wants to know what that is which is not a weird thing but we're changing that so do you want us to appear in search engines and I make smart decisions on top of that so there's a lot more user-facing and a lot more thinking about okay so how do you use or see this and how does that make sense to them and now I'm as Gutenberg
31:29 rolls out I think we'll be able to expand on that when what we've been starting to with our internal linking feature in occo premium which is give more actionable SEO advice as you type and give you more feedback on how you could improve your site right now a lot of people enable an SEO plug-in and think that they're done and well even though it helps and I've been telling
32:01 Matt Mullenweg if he just installed us SEO on on his blog he would probably rank for his first name a lot sooner again just by installing it because we automatically fixes Canonical's but reality is that most people actually to do work when they install an SEO plugin you need to write content you need to think about what you want to rank for every week so we we want to help you more with that and give you more actionable SEO advice nice let's jump into the AMA because we have a good
32:32 amount of questions rolling in already and not a ton of time so let's start with Kevin Hoffman as blocks are trickling now we are seeing a hodgepodge of visual styles within those blocks which can result in a different UI and UX per block how do we develop a common design language throughout the plug-in ecosystem that is a good question to which I do not happy on sorry I'm making you sweat already I why it's it's something we've discussed and I see a lot of blocks also
33:07 using inline Styles which makes me very sad we'll need to figure something out we Gutenberg to have an API for that and do it properly yeah we're gonna ship something that does inline Styles everywhere be in turn what development community will laughs us yeah I think that's actually a really good question for Tammy that will make sure and ask that to Tammy in a couple weeks Ahmad has the question yeah Amada is a question I wanted to ask how
33:39 does your launch timeline look like let's say you have your Gutenberg Ghost module API ready by the end of this month when how would you release it are you waiting yeah you get the question question um we're not waiting um we are going to support those the classic editor and Gutenberg where at least three years after Gutenberg has been released so as soon as we're ready and we're gonna ship it we're gonna tell
34:15 people that when they have when they have to Gutenberg mita we're gonna tell them that we have an integration but that our integration is in beta too because what we haven't had all that much testing but it will be there as soon and even right now and some of it already works and we'll continue on making it work as well as we can so we'll have both side by side one of the things I would like the entire WordPress project to do is something similar where we say okay we will support the classic
34:46 editor for at least two or four years because I think that's something that that we need to maintain stability for everyone yeah next question I know this question might be a bit too deep I'm curious what are you handling Dinah how are you handling dynamic blocks I'm working on a plugin for custom fields I want to have a good birth clock which simply displays fields I know it's not completely in the style of Gutenberg to do so but it would be useful when somebody needs to develop something quickly what I still need to use your
35:21 JavaScript API directly well I don't know why it would not be a good merge thing to do I actually think that dynamic blocks will be a very powerful feature the only thing that scares me about dynamics blocks is the SEO perspective is that the content of a coast can change in any given time and without the SEO again knowing and you'll probably still need to jsapi to to do some of the rendering in the editor and to make that look good
35:54 and work well but um you don't necessarily have to do anything in JavaScript if I recall correctly but it's up to you mostly I'd asked him up next week how he went but I actually think that dynamic blocks are one of the powerful features of good emergence also any performance was one of the scary features of Gutenberg well we'll see how that goes as soon as we launch it cool we've hit the we're current on our
36:26 questions or a ma questions people keep bringing them in keep commenting well we have a few more minutes for more questions for Yoast I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you think the REST API is gonna be expanded because of Gutenberg well we've already seen some things where like you couldn't add up to post slug because it wasn't in the REST API yet so there's gonna be more pieces where people need to need to get stuff
36:58 from the REST API to be able to work with it in react and we're and it gets improved yeah I mean I think this goes part and parcel with also Matt Mullenweg a few years ago when people were pushing hard for the REST API to be adopted in core he said you know once we can have the whole admin experience with the REST API then it should be in core we've made incremental progress on that despite not being able to control the whole admin but it seems like the only way you can
37:29 really control the whole admin at that with the REST API is really having the admin be a lot more JavaScript based that's not yeah I mean we use the REST API on our configuration wizard as well we've been using it from was a date shipped we were friends and I like that it's getting expanded nice Justin Labadie has question what is your favorite part of Gutenberg and your least favorite part the least favorite is easy does the floating toolbars I
38:01 hate those there very weird in many ways all right what specify which ones do you mean oh the ones that are it says sometimes we select a block suddenly if toolbar appears somewhere so there's no toolbars eat once you click in there then you see the bald italic options and all that instead of them being at the top of the page where she who are expected them to be and where I'd like to to always be mmm that's a personal preference that we're still discussing
38:32 in the other thirty every once in a what's my favorite part I think my favorite part is actually walks and the the the basic premise of what a block is and how we've combined which is switch h and short codes and a couple of other weird things that we had and we're pressed into something that is actually something a user will be able to understand and use fairly easily mm-hmm
39:03 and you know it's on my AMA but like I want to piggyback on that that the block the combination of the block based editing with that it now has search and mark down supports I actually I really love I want to do this myself may or may be somebody's gonna steal this idea I want to see somebody just basically type a really media rich blog post article in real time with Guttenberg because it
39:34 honestly I you with tiny MCE you couldn't do that without the mouse essentially and we could but it depends on the plugin and how they implement their short code builders or lots of things but we with Guttenberg you should be able to just type you hit a slash command to bring up a block that you want to insert you hit enter you keep going you can keep your fingers on the screen the whole time like if somebody just did like a quick like live videocast of creating a dynamic layout with media
40:06 rich things like that would really to me would highlight how powerful Gutenberg can be you know hi yeah I think so too I and how important keyboard accessibility is we have andre on our team working hard on as well on accessibility due to work in general yeah we're gonna see Gutenberg blocks having to be prefixed all the time that's gonna be a pain so you don't have you know too many plugins that are like image block you know yes yes yeah it's gonna be searched in good
40:38 good merge for blocks instead of yard yeah and we have a question here from some random guy named Ben let's see what he has to say he how can plug in authors of less installed plugins learned from the experience of ghosts in terms of conflicts with other plugins themes and WordPress core when it comes to moving forward into things like JavaScript and new features add to the WordPress ecosystem that's actually a great question Ben good job well to be it to
41:10 be honest I think we should be doing some of that teaching and what we've learned is I'm making your own code contained within like and and and make it touch of the least amount of things that can break is very important stupid things like name spacing are very
41:41 important and um after that it really boils down to talking to a lot of users and figuring out where things break there will be integration issues we we probably have some of the most integration issues of most plugins because we basically exist on pretty much every screen so if something breaks it I mean our support team is very active on our github and creates tickets for everything that they see come up
42:13 more than once or twice and we try and look into those which is why we have a lot of open tickets as well and but yeah and it's it's a lot of talking a lot of going inside seeing what breaks trying to combine it but in the end it's mostly best practices of good namespacing documenting your own code very well so other plugin developers can find where were they are integrated worse things break and why things break and what they
42:45 could do about it I still see a lot of code in other plugins that is very poorly documented and that really isn't welcome helping anyone so if I if I could do one thing in in both core and in all the major plugins that would be document every single line of code mmm nice another question from this Dutch guy who I can't pronounce his name is a long time yeah you you're in says I
43:16 heard you say to give 5% of your time back to the WordPress community that was a initiative by Matt melon like five for the future that he was pushing a few years ago that a lot of companies have adopted actually so do you have any idea how much percent it is for team Yoast at this time probably about twenty twenty-five where you dedicate purely to WordPress core or I'm gonna find that so
43:47 there's there's currently four people working on Gutenberg there's some people working on we have a couple of full-time contributors like Sergey and a couple of others we're doing not workers core but a lot of other things where this are guys currently leading yeah four nine three my country keeps record of minor releases anymore it's a lot I also don't really
44:20 keep the books on it all that much we a while we want to give back we've just done an internal presentation a couple weeks ago with like what do we stand for what do we think is important and one of the most important slides to me there was just making more money is never a good reason to do anything so we're not here to do that we we're growing the company's healthy so we invest a lot of our time and effort back into the WordPress ecosystem and because of the
44:52 focus on Gutenberg that now means that a lot of our work goes into Gutenberg yep nice one more question I think this will be our last question today we're gonna wrap it up at 45 minutes I have released a plug in six months ago that is 90 percent custom meta boxes Oh sunny days now I'd read the fact that I have to rethink how I vision meta box is to think about blocks instead do you have any guidance that you can provide
45:27 yeah first of all it sucks to it um I mean you probably figure out a way to keep metal boxes working for a while but you'll see very soon that every plugin that has a proper integration with Gutenberg that needs to be on that screen will do better than any any plugin that maintains its old classic stuff so you have to do it there's no
45:58 way of getting around it I can totally see why it's a pain but yeah you should um in general most of the metal boxes ask for free user input and what blocks can do just that I would make sure that if you if you make those my turn those master boxes into blocks you can probably make them even better in context I think the most developers tend to underestimate how important the
46:29 context of where something will land in the column in the content on the page is tuned the average user and blocks will actually help that a lot I don't think it's hard I think it should just build one block of one of your metal boxes and see hey this is actually a much better interface and then do the rest yeah yeah I mean that's one thing that I'm personally excited about is is that so many plugins are our basically meta boxes that are saving
47:01 what is essentially content in the post meta table and that really it just doesn't make sense but that's the way the best way to extend WordPress as is currently for most plugins so going forward message tables that we have because there's a whole lot of problems there but yeah so going forward being able to just make sure that plugins that want to add content into the content actually gets saved as content that's actually really beneficial so yeah
47:32 absolutely yeah cool cool well man thanks so much for being on again and relationship time I think it went really well overall no you know you didn't make any bugs happen this time so that's nice so thanks so much everybody next week we're gonna be on Monday with a mod aways talking about ways to extend Gutenberg and he has two really great resources about that already that you should look up next week the time is different it's actually going to be 8 a.m. in the morning Ahmad
48:04 is in Pakistan so time difference is a bit different there so yeah so we're 8 a.m. Pacific time next Monday we'll see you are they all there thank