 All right, what I want to talk to you guys about is how much our industry is changing. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this internet thing, but it involves quite rapidly. And so does this WordPress world that we're in. And so all we're going to do is reflect on a long list with the time that we have of some of the things that are no longer applicable in our lives and some of the things that also are on their way out. First, I sent out a tweet the other day asking people to give some suggestions on Twitter. Like, what do you include in this list? I'm working on a presentation. You guys have ideas? I can't remember everything. Suggest some things. So Adam, he jokingly said that Facebook maybe is on its way out. Chris, I'm going to change the privacy for sure. All right, I'll take Matt Trask chimed in and said, anybody remember MySpace, the good old days of social media? Megan, here, chimed in with GSCs. There are a lot of great developers of today, cut their teeth with web design. Kevin Hoffman chimed in with Blab, a very short-lived media platform. I never really got into it, but I'm kind of a late adopter of a lot of technologies. How many people used Blab? Nobody here used it even at all. Maybe it was a big deal. It's not anymore. It was a thing, I promise. Gave chimed in kind of wishing that clickbait was on its way out. It's not. Sorry. I wish. I said that anybody who figures out a way to make clickbait businesses not make money should have a statue built in their honor. Megan also chimed in the links feature. You guys remember links in WordPress? That was the thing. In the early days of WordPress, it was all about blogging. Sometimes you would want to list recommended other blogs or links to check out on your sidebar. Blog. Your blog role. That was a big deal in the early days. In WordPress, in your admin, maybe you would have posts and comments and pages and appearance and links. This is still one of the very few user-facing features that WordPress has ever gutted and taken out. WordPress isn't really in the practice very often of removing features. That's quite rare. The links was taken out a few years ago. Let's start with just a fun, quick reflection. We're just doing a drive-by stroll through the graveyard of the Internet and seeing what we see on a few headstones like Flash, for example. The glory days. When the Internet was at its peak when we had Flash websites, right? Nobody misses those. I do miss the passion that some of my clients had for websites back then because I had a few clients who I made Flash websites for. They just were over the moon for their websites. They thought they were so cool. All the little animations and the little sounds that everything makes and the little butterflies that fly and follow your cursor. Those were the customers who didn't want their website to change. It was just a weird time. Head counters were fun in the early days. Everybody had those in their corner, right? I had a client that asked me to put a picture. Really? Okay. I would love to hear them describe how they think it contributes, what use it plays. How do you make them seem more popular? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's not going to work out. Mobile sites were a thing for a little while, but they turned out to be kind of like the Betamax and responsive design as VHS or some other comparison where they were competing technologies and mobile sites lost. These were where you would be on a mobile device and go to a website and get redirected to the mobile version of the website and dot dominoes dot com or something. But now it's just better to create websites that look good on all devices and it's the same website. Marquis were super fun. Frost was really a big proponent of Marquis in the day. See, still it is. Remember when search engines were really easy to manipulate? Wasn't that so much fun? You kind of miss those days. You just need to know a few tricks and you can fool the search engines and get your site ranking whenever you want. And then the most insidious trend that ever took place on the Internet, one of the worst cultural experiments that I think we've ever been through. Top friends. I hated that. I think that was one of the worst things that our society has ever been through is just top friends. The idea of public new ranking are friends. That was so stupid and so terrible and I'm so glad that we've been through and passed it completely. Let's talk a little bit now about some of the things that have more recently become irrelevant. Post formats. Kind of like links is another thing that WordPress took out. WordPress kind of jumped on this bandwagon for a little while a few years ago and hopped on the trend of like that Tumblr was really driving. Tumblr was popular at the time and when you publish something on your Tumblr feed, you could designate what type of thing you were publishing like a video or a link or an article or whatever it was and that trend was really popular and Tumblr was rising in popularity and WordPress was like, okay, let's do that too. Except it was ever done really, really well and it was also kind of a phase and so it never really got much usage in WordPress and eventually they took it out. So, want one. Because it wasn't that popular. You're totally ostracized if anything plays audio automatically on your website, don't do that. XMLRPC kind of was a big deal and that was the way that you would connect remotely with a WordPress site. The WordPress app has existed for a long time and that was powered by XMLRPC and that's a protocol for connecting remotely to a WordPress site. So you never have an application like a mobile app or some third party app where it needs to connect to your WordPress site. Formerly that was driven always by XMLRPC that was the only thing available. Now we have a JSON REST API in WordPress as a year or two ago and that's much more elegant and easy to use and more comprehensive and so there's virtually no use for the XMLRPC future in WordPress anymore. Nobody really misses it either. In the early days of WordPress it was necessary for you to go to when you bought a commercial product like a plugin or a theme you would have to manually go and renew but now everybody uses subscriptions those are much more popular so you're auto renewing. Permissionless tracking is now not such an easy thing to get away with because we have legislation that has been passed which requires to get explicit permission from any user you decide to track most importantly this is coming from the European Union they passed the GDPR legislation. A lot of us are familiar with that right now so that's a really big deal and requires us to get explicit permission from users before we track anything before we save any person identifiable information regarding them but this does just apply to doing business with anybody that resides or is from or has ever been to or has even thought of the European Union it's very far-reaching legislation but we can't at this point unfortunately just limit ourselves to thinking about Europeans because other legislation is in the works in other places so they're really just the first to pass this so GDPR like laws are coming in other places as well and parallax was a fun phase that got a little bit out of hand probably used a little bit just a little bit too much kind of a cool effect when multiple things are scrolling on the page at different speeds and overlapping but as the case with a lot of design trends online they get started people start to use them just because they can just because it's popular trend because it actually contributes in any way now let's move into the more interesting stuff let's talk about some of the things which maybe they are a little bit relevant now but they've seen their peak and they're kind of like on the downside everybody knew that I was going to talk about homepage sliders because unfortunately this horrible trend this offense against all of us this terrible phase that the internet went through is not completely over and frankly I'm quite sick of talking about this topic I have been kind of a soapbox to try and kill the homepage slider for a couple of years now but they're not quite dead yet so I have to still encouraging people to strictly enforce a no homepage slider policy so now you guys are here with me I am ordering all of you commanding you pleading with all of you to enforce this policy I don't care who your clients are who your boss is you put your stake in the ground we're not doing a homepage slider end of discussion no it is not on the table no we're not going to talk about it we're not going to debate this it is not on the table are we understood you guys get what I'm saying here it's over in a couple of years they'll all be gone and we can laugh about this we'll be able to we'll be like oh I remember back in 2014 it was really cool to have a homepage slider I'm so glad those days are gone but they're not quite yet so we still have work to do to rid the internet of these horrible offenses as much as kind of sands yeah it's it's similar like it got used more than it ever should have and the fun thing is that there are so many other cool things that you can do with a homepage there's so many it's one of a hundred ways that you can present your primary call to action and information and I've had people say to me on multiple occasions like well if it's not a homepage slider then what I'm like anything anything there's like a hundred other ways that we can present things that would be more compelling look at the stripe homepage it's beautiful they're pioneers of design and it's just like simple call to actions on an image and it is in a static and it's not confusing and nothing moves okay that's totally unnecessary and National Delegraph a highly photography focused organization still doesn't have anything that moves okay it doesn't need to move that doesn't help anybody not SSL websites are definitely on their way out for a while this was kind of hard and we were only using an SSL certificate on specific websites like those that we had e-commerce on or we were like collecting sensitive information and we would go to the trouble of like purchasing an SSL certificate and installing it and figuring out how to apply it to certain parts of our website and it was kind of opinion about okay we're past all of that it's 2018 now SSL certificates are free because of let's encrypt they're included in almost every like modern hosts basic package they're very easy to install and you're in big trouble if you don't have them browsers are already starting to throw little messages to scarier users and say this website's not secure so right now if you go to a page that has like a login form that a browser thinks should be secured browsers are going to be throwing this in the URL bar they're going to be saying website not secure this is going to scarier users away and this is just one step that browsers are taking to push users to push you to get SSL everywhere alright there are other benefits to SSL but just take my word for it you have to have them on every website basically at this point and that's just the way it is zip files like back in the day it was necessary and it still kind of is when you want to install something from a third party on your site you have to go to their site and buy it obtained in some way then download the zip file to your computer and then go to your website and upload it and that's kind of lame so a lot of people are working on much better more elegant ways to install things remotely from third party sources we're working on this too for some of our plugins back in 2004 this is like the early wordpress.org homepage and a year or two later the plugins page was introduced this is the time when you had to go and download WordPress itself the zip file and you would go to your host and there was the famous 5 minute install which was neat at the time totally archaic it's a joke it's one click everywhere and then like I said a couple years after that there was a separate site for plugins super cool website and that was where you could navigate to all the plugins that existed in like a long unordered list and you could click on any of them and download the zip file for them and then you could go and manually install them but now we've got much better solutions like we have shiny updates and you can do this like this is coming from the official wordpress.org directory you could do this in line like look at that no page was reloaded no zip was ever seen like a connection was just made between your website and wordpress.org and the package was delivered and installed on your server and you didn't have to touch it so this is the direction that everything is going it's very elegant for the relationship between your site and wordpress.org right now but it's becoming much more elegant as well for third parties where you can obtain themes and plugins and I think that they will come in the not so distant future where you will never have to see zip files and no one will miss that time short codes are on their way out we've got an editor in the works yeah nobody's got to actually miss short codes which is kind of funny because they're a big deal right now they're a huge part of what we do so much of the functionality of the most popular features in wordpress and in the most popular wordpress plugins are completely driven by short codes right now and 100% reliant some of the biggest wordpress plugins right now like loop commerce and gravity forms all of these they completely rely on short codes but in a very short period of time you will never be seeing short codes at all because we're moving towards blocks and this is great it's going to be a better experience than short codes short codes actually kind of suck the experience people have to understand the syntax and they look cryptic and confusing inside of the editor people don't inherently know what they do and there's no standardization all short codes everybody is like a wild west one person may use very convoluted series of parameters to feed their short code and another may just have like one single word and another may have a series of interconnected nested short codes because there's very little standardization that's almost too easy to create so they're quite abused by developers and they have this issue where like if you turn off whatever is powering that short code then just like the square bracket in text appears on your frontend showed to your users which is a frustrating experience people feel locked into a to a solution and this is why blocks are designed to function quite differently so blocks just like as a quick technical sidebar blocks are powered by html comments which means if something is powering a block on your site and that something gets turned off then nothing will show to your end users it will just be the content itself and so we won't have this issue of ever going to frontend pages like event calendar short code or a gravity form short code that was why that decision was made to use html comments instead and it has some logic to it so in WordPress version 5.0 which is coming before too long we would have a very different editor experience given to us and short codes will be almost irrelevant not completely quite yet so developers are the ones who get their acts together and kind of migrate to their functionality to blocks so users will be able to find and use them end users just using their site as a disclaimer don't really have to worry about much of anything another fun trend for a few years has been using background videos and that I think also got a little bit of use is really fun to just have this background video to make your company look cool and just like have us writing on a whiteboard in some tech office and then like chatting with each other in a conference room and pouring in espresso all of that was really cool and made you look awesome right? except everybody was kind of doing it and it didn't contribute anything to the experience for users and it was quite distracting so this was a trend that also got out of hand and thankfully is now not as popular as it once was updating software is kind of a sucky experience and nobody likes it thankfully WordPress is kind of moving slowly in a direction just about all software moving in a direction where manually having to update the software isn't or won't be necessary so this is the future that we're looking forward to exemplify by this one of my favorite tweets ever where Hilary says being an adult is good for this every day forever until you die because this is the case software updates are stupid, it's a horrible experience you are presented with the opportunity to like restart your device at the exact moment when you're using that device so you definitely don't want to do it no there's actually never a good time to restart your device and not be able to use it there's never a good time to like take your site temporarily offline for an update that is not a thing that exists so everybody's working hard to try and move to a time where updates are kind of done transparently in the background and safely and a few years ago we did successfully move in WordPress to introducing minor releases transparent, automatic in the background major releases still require you to push a button to accept the update and install it some day maybe you won't have to I think that would be the case and that would be great, there's a lot of other software like web browsers that you use those actually update in the background so none of you even know what version you're running you don't have to push a button to accept the update you don't have to restart anything every industry kind of follows the same trajectory as a gross every industry without exception WordPress is definitely no exception every industry starts highly consolidated because there are very few players every industry starts here and then goes down in the consolidation flow so in the beginning there are very few players in an industry if you want a product or a service there's only a few choices to go through because nobody's playing in this market yet it's very small but as the industry grows you begin to get a lot more choices so we go down in the fragmentation chart so the industry becomes highly fragmented there are many providers all providing essentially the same thing many people selling virtually the same plugins and virtually the same themes and virtually the same services the highly fragmented market many players, all small all doing essentially the same thing as the market matures every industry begins to gradually consolidate more because some of the more successful players in the industry start to grow and they start to become more competitive and stronger some of the smaller players begin to fail or slip out or join larger companies or find it harder to compete with the ones who are more successful and more established and then the industry continues to be further consolidated as those companies continue to get bigger and begin to buy or merge with other players in the market so the next thing you know your number of choices for providers would be product source services begins to go down it becomes a slightly smaller number WordPress is still going up in this consolidation space in this consolidation flow where it's still a very highly fragmented market but we are seeing a lot of signs of it beginning to consolidate and every industry always will follow this every industry will eventually get to a point where it's very highly consolidated you can think of probably some industries where no matter what you're going to be working with one of only a handful of providers maybe like wireless your cell phone providers or soft drinks and so on highly consolidated because they're very mature markets you only have a few choices in the end WordPress is a long way from being like that but consolidation is occurring because some of the big companies are beginning to get much bigger and now it is much harder than it was years ago for new entrants to the market to be competitive and disrupt so if you enter as a small agency or you enter as a new like e-commerce plugin or a new forms plugin or a new theme shop right now it's a lot harder for you to compete because a few years ago when the industry was highly fragmented now you are playing against big boys and girls very established companies who have much deeper pockets huge teams, investment backing and strong partners so you're competing against really difficult competition so this is something that the point is we are not going to be seeing a fragmented market as much as we were kind of the early easy days where you could throw up something and it would be successful without much effort or a little bit behind us for this space what? yeah PHP I guess feel about that it's not as popular as it once was I'm not actually thrilled about this because PHP I think is easy PHP is an easy language to learn as far as programming languages go I think JavaScript as hard as it can be I think it's super hard it makes no sense to me PHP is really easy but PHP is losing it's definitely losing the battle but it's not going down fast PHP is continuing to evolve and continuing to even get better but the web is changing fundamentally because PHP just won't work it's changing in ways that PHP can't solve only JavaScript can't solve this is just because the web itself is changing the demands of the web the websites that are needed in 2018 and beyond are websites that just can't be built with PHP no matter how good it gets because we're looking for websites that are more like web applications in browser applications with views instead of pages we can look at stats and see that obviously PHP is going down, that's the blue line in terms of Google search trends which isn't the strongest indicator for the point that I'm making but we do see a little bit of change over time this is the last five years and interest from the public we see things like these are job postings so we see 16, 17, 18 continuing to decrease in rank job citing PHP the number decreasing so the market is asking for fewer PHP developers as each year passes it's still very useful if you want to learn PHP do it, it's still going to be useful for quite some time because so much of the web is powered by PHP it's the only programming language designed specifically to power websites and work online and a huge swath of the web is driven by it, more than really any other language but it's going down because what the web needs now and in the future can only be done with JavaScript I think the hosting industry is changing quite a lot and I've heard this directly from hosting companies you're going to see much and much less of the hosting that we've been used to like traditional if you go and you buy a slice of a server and you do whatever you want on that maybe you have Cpanel or WHM and maybe you use SSH to manage your server like that's going to be pretty niche but what people are looking for is not hosting they're looking for a website so hosts are evolving a little bit to become more like platforms on which you can get a website and to do this hosts are rapidly iterating and developing kind of their own solutions so instead of like getting a piece of a web server and some credentials and have fun you're getting buttons to like add your site and what's your site called and get started very friendly experience this is what we used to see like when I was getting started with Cpanel on every single host because they were all just running this but now we go to like some modern hosts like this for just one example GoDaddy has an experience like this when you sign up for the hosting account you see not that crazy Cpanel with like a million and one options that you don't understand you see just like a button that says add site there you go I think I can manage this I'm not too confused or overwhelmed by this and very custom experiences this is the WP engines dashboard experience which looks nothing like Cpanel it's completely bespoke and has a lot of features which are tailored towards this specific use case like some one ready high performance WordPress and this is a very highly customized dashboard that Peter probably contributes to in some way for A2 hosting which is very different than the traditional Cpanel hosts that we've seen in the past so web hosts are migrating a little bit gradually towards more like a SaaS model more like where you're with a few clicks setting up a website as opposed to like getting a piece of property on the internet with which to build whatever you want that's what the market wants and that's what hosts are beginning to deliver practices kind of going away I don't know but here's the thing privacy is going to lose because consumers always choose convenience it's an unfair competition historically we the consumer always choose convenience when it's against any other value proposition we always will we'll choose convenience over quality we'll choose convenience over cost and we'll choose it over privacy too and the thing is convenience and privacy are a direct odds against each other online right now because we as website providers or builders or what experience providers whatever you want to call us we want to provide hopefully good experiences to our end users and in order for us to provide good experiences we absolutely have to have some data about them we have to know something we have to know what they want and who they are and what their preferences are so we have to collect some sort of information in order to provide that good experience and then if you want to have one click checkout like Amazon provides you have to give Amazon your information it's as simple as that if you want when you log into a website for them to present it just in the language you speak and read you have to provide them with information about you so that when you log in that's already saved and already presented and you don't have to do this every time if you want to just have a record of your past purchases so you can refer back to them or the things that you've listened to and the things that you watched so you can refer back to that or you want to get good recommendations for the things you might like based on what you've done before which we do want we do appreciate that convenience imagine if you sat down to like watch Netflix and you had to just like log in every time on the stupid remote and like type in your credentials every time and it didn't save anything like your favorites or your recently watched or what episode of Orange is the New Black you're watching right now what if it didn't save any of that that would be the worst that would be stupid we love it we live by that but it's in direct odds against privacy they have to collect information in order for them to provide a good convenience experience and historically convenience always wins it always does physical media has value it's fun and cool there are like real benefits to like owning your media your DVDs, your CDs your cassettes but that's also in direct odds and convenience wins every time so we're always going to pick the more convenient option and that's why for music, Spotify, Pandora Apple Music, Amazon iTunes and so forth and for movies we're now going to be, is that a question or a time? I just want to say yes we'll have very nice oh you agree, okay thank you, someone agrees with me that's good, thank you we're watching Hulu and Netflix and Amazon brand and whatever at HBO and all that it's infinitely more convenient to just pay one time instead of a bunch of times and to have one place instead of a bunch of places and to be able to access everything with a couple clicks of a button instead of shuffling through shelves and boxes and playing with discs there's value to those physical things you get to own it and you never have to pay again and you can do whatever you want with it it's yours, it's your thing there are real benefits to having physical media but it loses, it's going to lose it's already losing subscription based media wins in this battle commutes are on their way out nobody's going to miss commutes, commutes are dumb waste of time so a lot of companies are now kind of catching on to this thing that like, hey you know what so many people don't actually need to be here to get their work done they're kind of catching on, the market's a little slow there's a lot of old school industries who haven't caught up yet but they are and remote work is becoming a really big deal and we're going towards this time where the majority of the work community will be getting to work wherever they need to be in order to be as productive as they can be and if that's in an office or at a cash register or at a coffee shop or a co-working station or at their own home it doesn't matter, wherever you need to be to be productive is where you're going to end up working, this is like where a lot of industries are slowly going, some of them are really really slowly getting there some of them may never really change very much because it's truly necessary for someone to be present but a lot of other industries have a huge percentage of their staff on site when they technically don't need to be and they're slowly catching up on this web pages are kind of a concept that we will not be thinking about as much anymore in the future when we started building websites some of us who have been selling websites for a long time remember the days when we charged by the page that's fun didn't anybody ever do this back in the day charge by the page just Ross I mean I did too and we were charging like really cheap like a hundred bucks a page or something silly you want that extra contact page about your services well it's a little more money and that was pretty silly we're past that at least but the very concept of web pages online is evolving a little bit because we're moving up in a direction towards views now when you're using very popular websites online like a social media site when you go to post a new tweet you don't go to the new tweet page you don't navigate to that you click the new tweet button and and you get this compose new tweet it's like in line and then you don't even think about the page that you're on it never crosses your mind what the URL might be to this you're interacting with this application and this is the view for composing and submitting a new tweet and so eventually WordPress will be very similar to this you know they're like right now you go to the add new post page but eventually that won't be as applicable you will be working in the editor but you will not be as concerned about what the URL is we migrated this similarly like there used to be this used to be the only way to manage your menus in WordPress for a long time so you could navigate to this URL and you would get this page and you would think I'm on the menus page but now this isn't actually the best way to manage your menus now it's done it's not easy to see but on this side of the page it's done in the customizer alright so over here on the right you are on the front end of your website and you open the customizer and you can view the front end of your site and you can view in real time the changes that you may be reflected on your site so you click through and you rearrange these items and you see a rearrange on the front end of your website and you're not thinking ever at any point what page you're on and if you had to get here you would follow the clicks to get there to interact with this application to do the thing so we're thinking more about interacting with web applications and the views and we are about the pages that we're on just like if you're using Google Docs for example you never think about the pages you think about the views if you want to open up a modal to interact with something like find new fonts you just do that within the application and follow the defined experience but you don't navigate to like the add new font page so pages are kind of a concept that is diminishing and significant and I'm out of time let's be friends my name's Kyle, that's all