 Good morning everybody. You've survived work camp. Congratulations. It's been a great weekend, hasn't it? Awesome. Can you guys hear me okay? Yes. This is about as good as I can do, but hopefully I can project well enough to get you guys into that. Yeah, so my name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host at iThemes Training. We do two or three live webinars a week on all sorts of WordPress topics from business development to code to blogging to SEO, all of those things. Kind of like being at work camp all year long. Most of those webinars are free, by the way. It's pretty awesome. I also have a small agency in Birmingham, Alabama where I'm from. I work with clients, small business nonprofit professional firm, and I also do coaching with WordPress freelancers. So what we're talking about today is the challenge of change. How to thrive in the new world of WordPress. Now, you know, they say it's your first slide really ought to get people's attention. I hate WordPress. Hate it. It's going to ruin my business. These are words that I said to a friend back in 2008. I was actually talking to that same friend as I was preparing this talk, and we were called that conversation. I started in web development in 1995. So when it comes to the web, I'm a geezer. Anybody been around that long? So really, the web was just taking off. I started out using a piece of software, and for you old timers in the room, it was called Hot Dog. You remember Hot Dog? Hot Dog. Wow. Okay, this is great. So Hot Dog was a glorified text editor that was created by a company in Australia called Sausage Software. It was awesome. It was the best thing around. And then, hey, we then got Netscape Composer, which was the visual. You remember this, right? You paid for Netscape in those days. You paid 50 bucks for a browser. Then I spent a very short time in Microsoft Front Page. I don't like to talk about that. It's a pain for me. Then moved into the macromedia world in later Adobe with DreamWorks and some fireworks and those sorts of things. So I've done it all, kind of took the whole trip on evolution of software. And over the years, I was able to build, gratefully, a pretty good business. I had a few excellent clients. My business was really based on fewer clients, large monthly retainers, $500 to $1,000 per client, typically. Because back in those days, if you wanted to change your website, what did you have to do? Call a web guy. We want to change our picture. We want to change one sentence on the About Us page when you change the business hours or the phone number. So you have to call the web guy, and the web guy has to update the website. Now, that work was awful. It was drudgery. I hated it, but it was good money, right? Then the CMS revolution happened. Content management systems. And all of a sudden, my clients started to want to edit their own website. How many of you are around back in those days? All right, so this caused a real problem for me. My response was suspicion and fear. WordPress is going to ruin my business. I'm not going to be able to charge these high-dollar retainers to clients anymore. But then I realized, you know what? I have to change. Or the web is going to leave me behind. So it was around 2009 or so that I found iThemes Training, which was then called webdesign.com. And I learned WordPress over a matter of the next few months from webdesign.com. It was late 2009 when I had the worst day of my business life. One of my largest clients was ironically a hair salon in Birmingham. And this client I was doing some IT work for. I was their web guide. I did some photography. And back in those days, I'd do anything to bring in money. So if you guys have lived through that, part of the work here, right? So I walk in. And how many of you remember what was happening in the business landscape in 2009? Those were bad years. I walked in to that client expecting just to fix a couple of problems and leave. And I left without the job anymore. In that one 10-minute conversation with the owner. It was sad about it, but had to let me go. I lost a third of my income and the health insurance for my family. That was a bad day. I walked out of there. And I remember I parked at the far end of the parking lot. It was a large parking lot. I tried a long walk back to my car. And I remember saying to myself these words, I will never let this happen again. Never let this happen again. So I was already kind of in motion for change. But I was afraid of it. This little push made me change. It was time for innovation. Over the next year, I changed to a new business model that was based on WordPress and website management contracts. Now WordPress is awesome. But it needs somebody to watch over it to keep it running well. We all know that. So what I realized was that if I took on more clients at a lesser dollar, I ultimately became more profitable. Because now clients could manage their own websites. And I get less support requests doing things that I hated to do anyway. And I'm starting to make as much money as I was before. Because more clients, same amount of money, less work. I mean, what's not to like about this, right? And also I'm no longer beholden to one single client anymore. I don't change well. I was forced to change. And sometimes that's the best change at all. Because my business started to grow faster than it ever had before. And this is sort of the big idea of the talk today. Change often begins with suspicion and fear. But it results, many times, in innovation and growth. Now I've been all WordPress since 2010. I've seen a lot of changes in the WordPress landscape since that time. But we are entering into a period of transition in the WordPress ecosystem unlike we've ever experienced before. Because Gutenberg is coming. How many of you know what Gutenberg is? How many of you knew what Gutenberg is before this conference? Okay. Gutenberg is a completely new approach to creating content in WordPress. And the question is, why? Why do they have to change WordPress? Isn't it good enough the way it is? We love WordPress. Why do they have to change? Now I have a confession to make. I'm something of a history nerd. Does anybody else share that proclivity? Okay. All right. So what I want to do, if you will indulge me, is to give you a brief history of WordPress. Because it's important to understand where we've been so that we know where we're going. How many of you have been using WordPress at least two years? Raise your hands. Keep them up for four, five, six, eight, 10, 12, 13. Give me 11. 14? When did you start using WordPress? 2004. 2004. You were in on the ground floor, my friend. You should get a T-shirt or something. I'll post it at a camp like this. Okay. So we're going to go back 14 years to the beginning of WordPress, which started with this blog post. A blog post on Matt Mullenweg's blog on January 24, 2003. This kid from Houston named Matt Mullenweg had a blog where he liked to share photos. He was using an open-source software back then that was called B2 Cafe Log, and he was frustrated about the lack of functionality. Now, if you look at this line right here, it says my logging software hasn't been updated for months. Logging is web-logged, which became blog. And the main developer has disappeared. I can only hope that he's okay. You can actually go there. If you Google this, it's all there. All the old comments, the whole thing, it's all there. So this was January 24, 2003. So Matt started coding himself. What should I do? And this article, by the way, wraps up with this incredible statement. Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of movable type, which is a big CMS back then, the parsing of text pattern, the hackability of B2, and the ease of setup of blogger. Some day, right? The comment popped in the next day from a developer named Mike Little. If you're serious about forking B2, I'd be interested in contributing. I'm sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. This reply is the beginning of what is now 30% of the internet. Isn't that amazing? So if you're a history nerd, go back and Google that article and just follow the trail. It's pretty interesting. Your WordPress 1.0 was released January 2004. Beautiful, isn't it? Yeah. That's WordPress 1.0. It had a new SEO-friendly URL structure in multiple categories. You could post pictures, you could post text. Very easy to use. A few months later, 1.2 added this new thing called plugins back in 2004. WordPress 1.5, came about a year later, added pages and posts to WordPress. Phenomenal. It's something that still confuses users to this day. What's the thing? What's the code? All right. 2005. WordPress 2.0. Complete overhaul to the interface. Lots faster. It's running on Ajax now to perform certain tasks. WordPress is starting to grow up. To WordPress 2.3 in 2007, WordPress is checking along. Not many. Huge improvements, but 2.3 adds tags. Which also confuses users to this day. Why categories? Why tags? There's a reason. WordPress 2.5, major upgrade. WordPress team collaborated with a design firm to totally overhaul the user interface. They added a beautiful dashboard. It's really the foundation of how we use WordPress today. Also, this introduced the one-click upgrade for plugins, which is just huge. The other big thing that 2.5 brought in was this. How many of you could use this today? We know exactly what it is. It's the Tiny NC editor that we used today in our blog and WordPress as it stands today. 4.9.5-ish of where we are now. That came back in 2008. Ten years ago was when TinyNCE was introduced into WordPress. This visual editor. Now, let's get forward 5.5 years. It's now 2013. A lot has changed with WordPress under the hood. But the editor interface is virtually the same. It's still TinyNCE. Now, 3.8 brought in this mobile-friendly stuff so you could now do your blog on your phone. It's fantastic. This is essentially the same design that we see today in WordPress. That was 2013. That's a geological epoch in web years. WordPress 4.9 dropped in November 2017. Four more years forward. The interface has cleaned up a little bit but it's virtually the same. But for 14 years since WordPress 1.0 there's one major thing that has never changed. You know what it is? You type your stuff in the box. WordPress 4.9 You type your stuff in the box. It's still the same thing we use today. It's not very hard to use but oftentimes what you type in the box doesn't really look like what you get on the front end of the website. The fonts aren't right. The sizes aren't right. You can't make columns without using an add-in of some sort. We got this quirky thing called a shortcode which we're using to this day. It's a necessary evil but it's clunky. It is what it is. WordPress 5.0 is coming at some point this year. And this is what it's going to look like. It's a big box but it's a lot different than what we're used to today. This is Gutenberg. It's a completely new approach to add-in content in WordPress. Everything is a block. Paragraphs are blocks. Headings are blocks. Images are blocks. Lists are blocks. Galleries are blocks. Photos are blocks. Embedded media is a block. How many of you have tried Gutenberg so far? Interesting. It's demo time. Somebody made a really great flat icon of Gutenberg, isn't it? We're going to do something that I hate to do which is flip out of PowerPoint and into a browser so the world may come crashing down but this is live so we'll let you our best. We're going to mirror our screens and hopefully everything is going to work. Okay, that's amazing. Now this is a really great website called TestGutenberg.com This is something that Automati put together. This is the back end of Gutenberg on the front end of the website. You can play with this by the way, you can also today on your WordPress site download and activate Gutenberg as a plugin just don't do it on your website because bad things might happen. Probably not but it could. It's still under development. So here's Gutenberg and let's go to the top here. Now notice as I'm hovering over things see things are highlighting. There's a block. Here's another block. A lot of text with an image. Here's a pull quote. It's a block. Each of these things operates independently. It's a nice clean interface. If anybody has used Medium or Squarespace or some of the other editing platforms out there they're a lot easier to use than WordPress. They just are. This is a step in the direction of making WordPress easier to use for the average person. Now click on the title you see the permalink up here which you can edit. You can change all these things around. Here's a cover image where you can drop in an image and type on it in WordPress. How about that? When you click on a block some context sensitive stuff appears over here in the margin. So you can change this to fixed or you can change the brightness of the background. You can move the text around. You can do all the stuff right from within the WordPress editor. Wouldn't it be nice just to change the size of text in one paragraph without having to dink around in CSS? We click on a paragraph. Look, we have the ability to change the size of just that paragraph. You have the ability to turn on and off a drop cap with a toggle. Change the color of this text with a click. You can change the background color. All this is in Gutenberg today. You can download it as a plugin. At some point later this year they will take the code in that plugin and merge it into WordPress core. Images work like blocks. This is a paragraph block with an image over here. We can make the image go left or right like today. Or we can pull it out of the paragraph and see what's worked the same way. Let's say we want to move this block quote down. Just click the arrow and now it's moved down one. The blocks simply stack on top of each other. Now, there's a lot more here. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. I want to encourage you to install Gutenberg or use testgutenberg.com to play around with it. There's a lot to learn here. The first time, I'll be deadly honest, the first time I played with Gutenberg was October of last year. It was awful. It has gotten so much better since then. The UI has improved dramatically. There's a lot of fussing about Gutenberg. But they're developing this revolutionary editor in the public. So you're seeing the sausage made. Sometimes good things happen. Sometimes bad things happen. How many of you develop sites for clients? How many of you would like your client watching you as you built their site? That's what the Gutenberg team is doing. So this is really great. Now, on the back end, again, you can install Gutenberg as a plug-in. And when you do, it's active. I'm going to add a new post. And we're in Gutenberg. Just like this. There's documentation here. And there's a fantastic little feedback form that takes you to a response system. So the WordPress team that's developing Gutenberg wants your feedback. But please give constructive criticism. It sucks is not constructive criticism. Let's talk about that. Right? They want you to be part of the process. So respect that. We're kind of a great community. They want our input. So let's give it to you. The gallery, by the way, is fantastic. Look at this. It does this automatically. It figures out how many images are there and is it going to be two columns or three columns or whatever? And it just works all this stuff out. So many fantastic features. I'm going to jump out of this now for the sake of time. But I encourage you to play with Gutenberg yourself because there's a lot to like about what's going on there. How many of you are excited about what you just saw? How many of you are terrified about what you just saw? The response of the WordPress community to Gutenberg has been about like this. What about my site? What about page builders? How many of you are using page builders? How many of you are wondering now what the heck is going to happen to my page builder with Gutenberg? What about this certain plugin or that certain theme? Suspicion and fear. Why are they doing this? What's going to happen to WordPress? Did they have to change everything? I hate WordPress. It's going to ruin my business. Change always begins with suspicion and fear. People typically don't like change. Gutenberg has certainly brought it to the WordPress community. But it's not the first time that a Gutenberg change has brought suspicion and fear to the world. And so if you indulge this history nerd a little bit longer, I think the perspective would be worth your time. Gutenberg sometime around 1400 in Germany. Gutenberg came from a middle class home. The middle class was just emerging out of the middle ages at this time. His father was a goldsmith. It would have been hard to get your mind around the fact that this little kid growing up in a very typical home in a very typical town in Germany would make the impact that he did. But if you Google Gutenberg, you'll read something like this. Johannes Gutenberg's printing press is perhaps the most important invention of the last thousand years. Likely without the printing press there would have been no renaissance, no industrial revolution, no technological revolution, no modern western democracy. In other words, no modern world. Now what you may not know is that Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press. The Chinese did. A thousand years before. Gutenberg didn't even invent movable type. The Chinese beat into that a few hundred years before he was born. Now here's the problem. Chinese has over 10,000 characters. Can you imagine making 10,000 little blocks? English on the other hand, in many of the European languages with 20-something characters fit the idea of movable type and made it a lot easier. So 15th century Europe that Gutenberg was born into was emerging from medieval times. There was this growing literacy in the middle class. They were frustrated because books were incredibly expensive. They had very limited access to written materials. And up until then, books had to be copied by hand by scribes. Many of whom were monks who considered the copying of literature not only a trade to be mastered but a sacred responsibility. Now Gutenberg was born the son of a goldsmith. He grew up mastering the trades of engraving and smithing and he became something of a successful businessman. So with the growing demand for books, little Johnny Gutenberg realized that there's money to be made here. So he sets out to solve this problem and experiment with a bunch of different printing methods. Now Gutenberg started with the proven methods of the Chinese that come up with. He used an oil-based ink that had been perfected in China but then he incorporated a screw press that had been created by farmers in Europe for pressing grapes and olives. Now what came out of that was a press that would actually work but the biggest innovation that Gutenberg brought were these letter blocks. Letter blocks that were precisely engraved and cast and they could be fit together with these little grooves. You could stack a bunch of letters together and slide a pin in and they would stay. Now letters were placed in a type case like this. Here's a bit of trivia. The capital letters were placed in the upper case and the smaller letters were placed in the lower case. Exactly right. So it took a while to assemble a page letter by letter but once it was done you could take that block of text and print many pages with it and once you were finished you could pull the pin out and empty your letters back and you haven't wasted anything. It was brilliant. A page of type could be emptied and reset for the next page without really any waste whatsoever. So words spread quickly from Germany across the continent about Gutenberg's remarkable machine. Now unfortunately Gutenberg's story does not end well. Gutenberg dies penniless having lost all of his savings in a legal battle with his partner. There's a whole other talk there. But his printing system became a commercial success. It changed the world. Historians say the printing press again one of the key factors in the explosion of the renaissance. At least half a million books had intercirculation by 1500 from classical Greek texts to Columbus' account of discovering the new world. And all this access to all this literature and standard works of science really sparked creativity across the western world. Now 500 years later we look back on Gutenberg's press as an amazing, amazing advancement. But not everybody in Gutenberg's time was as impressed. As a matter of fact, the response was mixed. In 1501 Pope Alexander VI threatened to excommunicate anyone who printed anything without clearing it with the authorities. And he was right to feel threatened because during that time books published by Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 1530s sparked the Protestant Reformation. In 1540 Copernicus published his theory that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa which challenged everything. It's definitely not the view of the established powers. Now there was also another outrage in the religious community and to some degree the community at large because the acceptance of the Gutenberg Bible meant the replacement of an entire cottage industry of monk scribes who had, you know, this whole industry had grown up supporting their work. The efficiency of the printing press meant that roomfuls of monks were put out of work and what maybe was the first technological layoffs. And there's also this story about a group of French monks going on strike and taking to the streets of Paris because of the Gutenberg press. It's amazing. Even the general public to some degree was skeptical of the new technology. Apparently the uniformity of the columns and copy of the Gutenberg Bible was so mind blowing to people that they concluded that there had to be some kind of magic involved. It's recorded that the printer's apprentice of the day was called the printer's devil. This actually became the prevalent thought in France during that time and Gutenberg's business partner the one that sued him and took all his money his partner is actually the one that published the Bible and he was actually tried for witchcraft in Paris. Change often begins with suspicion and fear. Even though the Gutenberg press was greedy with deep skepticism by many looking back we know the impact that it had and even just a hundred years later the British philosopher Francis Bacon wrote that printing gunpowder in the compass were three inventions that changed the appearance and state of the whole world. Our own Mark Twain said what the world is today good and bad it owes to Gutenberg everything can be traced to that source so not only did the press foster the spread of new ideas but new skill sets and new markets were developed it became this growing need for writing and content creation for typography type setting editing, whole new distribution channels were created for printed material a whole new industry based on the trade of information was begun because change often begins with suspicion and fear but it usually results in innovation and growth. Now what does this mean to WordPress? What's going to happen with WordPress Gutenberg? I have no idea only time will tell but my suspicion is that Gutenberg might just spark a Cambrian explosion of innovation in the WordPress space it's going to be much easier for the average person to create rich content in WordPress Gutenberg is going to bring a whole new set of tools to WordPress developers we're finally going to get much closer to that Lizzy Wig editing experience where what you see really is what you get not in Georgia font no more need for short codes easier access to advanced features renaissance for WordPress I mean we're already at 30% market share how much bigger could it get what we may see is an explosion of new websites and new content as a result of the WordPress mission to democratize publishing I'm excited because we get to be a part of it you get to be a part of it as a WordPress user so let's spend the last couple of minutes here on what do you do what do you do to thrive WordPress the first thing I would say is get to know Gutenberg again testgutenberg.com play around with it put it on your test site if you don't know how to set up a test site ask your host they can help you Gutenberg isn't bad it's different it's different and it's not finished yet so again add your two cents with helpful critique it will be coming at some point later this year now if you are a website owner or you're a do-it-yourselfer here's my advice to you make sure you're going to be compatible with Gutenberg the way you do that is look at the theme that you're using talk to your theme provider look at their website read their blog reach out to support and just ask them if they're going to be ready for Gutenberg now you can expect a lot of Gutenberg compatible themes to be rolling out very soon if you have a developer talk to them about it if they don't know what Gutenberg is find another developer and if you don't have a developer look around here that's what this event is about if you are a WordPress freelancer or WordPress business owner look at your theme and plugin stack make sure you're going to be compatible if you're using older if you have older sites that are using older things and plugins make sure you're following the theme and plugin developers on social media their blog if they have one just look at everything you're using and see what those developers are doing to prepare for Gutenberg especially any plugin that uses a short code or puts a meta box in your page or post you want to look at that because all that's going to change make sure those themes and plugin developers have a plan for that my current plan about half my time is still spent doing client work my current plan is to use a plugin called Classic Editor for my two cents the biggest issue for me as a person supporting clients is not technology it's training because that's going to scare the daylights out of some of my clients that are editing their own WordPress sites so what Classic Editor does once Gutenberg rolls out back to that Classic Editor you can hide the entire Gutenberg everything with a single setting again it's called Classic Editor Gutenberg is still there it's just not on it will be on by default most likely when WordPress 5.0 comes out so I'm going to do that for a few months we're going to let the dust settle and then slowly client by client we'll sort onboard people into Gutenberg that's my approach you take your own the last thing I'll say is look connect to the WordPress community events like this are awesome they go on all the time Atlanta is next week work camps happen all the time you want to know people in the community so that if you're freaked out about Gutenberg or if you're wondering how to handle X, Y, or Z you have other people to talk to why is it that WordPress has grown so dramatically why is it that it's bigger than Joomla bigger than Drupal bigger than everything else why is that because of things like this happening all across the world every weekend because we have a fabulous community fabulous community of people who support not only the software but each other how many of you made a friend talk to somebody who knew this weekend that's what it's about right so join the meetup go to other word camps talk to other people about what they're doing and what they're experiencing join me on I think it's training two to three live webinars a week several upcoming on Gutenberg by the way so we'll wrap up change often begins with suspicion and fear don't stay there because change usually results in innovation and growth and I for one am really excited about what this year holds for the innovation and growth of WordPress my name is Nathan Ingram you can find me at training.ifings.com we're on Twitter at Nathan Ingram