 So this community chat, well, I guess, first of all, thank you all for coming. I always have fun with these. I think the whole team here reclaim enjoys these. And this one we're calling, what do we talk about when we talk about WordPress? And the intention of it is to be pretty loose and just a discussion around what people's strategies for introducing others to WordPress are. And kind of hoping we can all share and learn from each other on what people like to do around that. I think, obviously WordPress is something I think most of you are probably have some experience with especially teaching it to others though, that it's in an efficient way. There's a lot right there that you can get into. So I'm kind of hoping that we can all share about what things do you like to focus out right away? What things do you like to say for later conversations? How do you help people in maybe not in more indirect ways through Domain of One's Own and versus the, all right, let's sit down together and work through this on a call or in person. I think I can kind of maybe just to kind of get things started, I can kind of talk a little bit about what I tend to like to do and we can go from there. But yeah, this is gonna be a pretty informal little chat. So I'm kind of excited to see what we can all come up with here. So yeah, when I'm getting people started with WordPress, obviously I think the main thing to keep in mind is exactly what they're trying to do. I know it sounds obvious, but I very often in my experience when people are looking for help on a tech tool, they will come to you with questions like how do I use X? I usually like to redirect those into what are you trying to do type questions? Just get them to take a little step back because it's always helpful to have that context. But I really like to start with the context of WordPress. So if it's on Domain of One's Own, I like to make sure that I at least mention where this fits in in terms of what is WordPress in the context of an account on shared hosting or Domain of One's Own. Like, hey, this is an application that you're installing. You can think of it kind of like an application on your computer. And in this case, your computer is the web server or your account. And I like to start with that just to give them that context because I'm often just interested in giving people that sort of web literacy base because they find later on when they need help because they probably will need help. There's a lot to learn that that often helps them form better questions, if that makes sense. And then from there, we'll get into it. I don't wanna start this off with me talking myself for 20 minutes. But then from there, there's a lot to cover, logging in and posts and pages and things like that. So I don't know, is anyone right off the bat have anything they kind of sort of like go to strategy when they're getting people started that they kind of wanna talk about and share? Yeah, and you can totally just unmute and start speaking in the chat is good too, if you can't do that. But Em? Yeah, so I do a little bit of synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning. We usually host workshops for classes if they're doing it for students. And like you said, Taylor, the context of the project is very important. So it really depends what I'm teaching if you are going to do a community project where you're showcasing some archives with just the rest of the world or if this is just an art portfolio that you're going to be using for a class. And something that I strive to do is talk about sustainability of the website. Is this something you're going to carry with you after you graduate or is this something that you plan to move outside of our reclaimed servers? And back to your point, Taylor, talking about where this lives in our domain of one's own space. And this is in our servers and if you want to take it outside, we can definitely support that. But just letting them know where everything lives at the time being. I love that. Yeah, thank you for mentioning that because talking about that, I always think of that as sort of the life cycle of the website. And starting with that, I think is great because otherwise people don't consider it until at the end, right? In many cases, that's fantastic. Yeah, and then not only at the beginning, but throughout the process, especially for students who are creating portfolios, at the beginning, they may feel overwhelmed. Like, I don't know if I want this site. I really don't know until I create my content if I hate it or love it. And if they end up hating it or they don't like, they just want to do it for the class, then they'll say I can, they can keep it with the department or you can delete it, I don't care. Or something along the lines of, I really, I put a lot of time and effort into this website and I would like to take it with me for resumes as a side. Fantastic. Yes, I saw someone ask if people can introduce you. Hello, everyone, I'm Em. I'm from Carleton College. Pilot is actually an alum from Carleton and I basically took over their position when they left. And you're growing it to new and even brighter places. So, it's really good to have you. And also, it's good to know the AT team is in good hands with you. So, hi, everybody, I'm Jim Luke. I'm with Lansing Community College. And we're obviously, we're a community college. That's why it's in the name. And we've been trying to do, you know, we started thinking while it was a domains account, you know, when we started this about five, six years ago. And so, I started out and a couple of things we found mismatched. I tended initially, we scheduled, there was some buzz and interests in it. We created what we called Open Learning Lab. And so, we scheduled some, which is in our Center for Teaching Excellence. So, we scheduled some workshops, oftentimes, you know, a couple of hours or an afternoon. And I called them word camps, which you're allowed to do as long as it's truly about WordPress. And I started out initially doing the kind of, you know, digital literacy like Taylor talked about and, you know, make sure they understood and placed this, partly because I am a very big picture guy and I don't understand any tech unless I understand, you know, how it fits in everything. And what I found was I was a horrible misfit for trying to get across to our folks. And in our experience as we evolved, we've had, we have relatively, we have very few students blogging or doing anything. And when they are doing stuff, they're not having a site themselves. This is partly a side effect of part-timers, one to two-year school, you know. And we just haven't gotten to that point in the momentum for the school. So when students are doing stuff, their instructions, their introduction is usually being done by the professor in class because what they're doing is they're posting to a site the professor owns and runs. So it's a lot easier for them, you know, it's like, oh, go here, do this, you know. And if it's a splot, it's even easier because it's like, click here. And, you know, fill in the blanks. But for faculty, what I kind of shifted to was a realization and again, you know, we're a community college, 85% of our faculty are adjuncts, part-timers, you know, press for time. I, to be honest with you, I was absolutely appalled at the degree of digital illiteracy, especially anything that came to web and mentioning the word server seemed to just totally freak people out and put them off. So I reversed course and what I started doing is we started going one-on-one. Usually we would get an inquiry from somebody or somebody would hear some buzz and they'd call us, we now have this set up as a form, they'd call us and generally what they say is, oh, I want a site. And that's about all they know is they want a website. They don't have anything much more than that. So then we'll have somebody from the CTE Open Learn Lab meet with them one-on-one. And generally my opener is, because they're coming from an experience of all LMS type stuff. So my opener is generally, I can't do it as easily remote, but I used to actually have a big giant box of Legos. And the first thing I would do is I'd sit in a little conference room with them and I'd put the box of Legos on the table and I'd go, first of all, you need to understand, this is ed tech unlike what you've experienced before. You're used to the ed technician, me or the instructional designer coming to you and telling you, this is how you use it. This is how you do it. I said, no, I have a giant box of digital Legos. We can build, Microsoft or WordPress is open source. I said, I've got access to that. Most of what we do is there. We've got all kinds of other applications. Even within WordPress, we've got 50,000 free plugins, you know, thousands and thousands of free themes. So together we can build this. Why don't you start telling me, what do you wish could happen with your class or for you on the web? And then start describing that to me. And you know, in most of the times nowadays, it just, you know, I said, well, we've nicknamed this process running errands for ideas. And most of the time it's, oh, then we find out, they'd seen this other site in a showcase or heard about it and said, I'd like something like that. And we realized, oh, okay, what you really need is this plot or what you really need is a straightforward blog or what you really need is blah, blah, blah. And we start tweaking and we start helping them build it. And then we teach them the WordPress, okay, there's posts and pages and then that stuff. And then it's only when, in my experience, they've done that and they've got a site for a while, then they come back and say, you know, I'd like to do something else, this or that. And at that point, we introduce and go, okay, here, you've actually got a domain. And you can install stuff. We'll show you how to install another WordPress and then we go from there. So that's kind of how we introduce. It's not, it was a big shift for me because that's definitely not how I learn or understand, but it seems to work pretty well. Awesome, thanks. Thanks for sharing. I like the digital Legos metaphor. I'm definitely gonna use that. Lee, you have your hand up. Yeah, hey everyone. Figured I'd go from the absolute opposite end of the spectrum from Jim at the Keeney College to Georgetown over here in DC. I'm the assistant director for digital learning at Georgetown University. And one of my responsibilities is the Georgetown Domains Project as well as the Georgetown Commons Logs. And one of the things, you know, and I do a lot of things, a lot of the times when I'm talking to students or faculty about domains, it is about a very specific project that they have in mind either it's for their research or for their students. And so I'm coming into the class and the students are, we're doing a class project, we're doing class blog, we're doing portfolios. Portfolios have picked up popularity a lot of cases, but one of the ways that I've found that has been really great for, I don't know if it's buy-in or just more added interest is talking about the longevity of WordPress and how it has been around as a platform since pre-web 2.0, right? And so talking about that longevity and contextualizing it for them and showing them that they are a part of something or using a tool that has continued to grow and evolve and that they are a part as a community, showing the community saying it is not for profit, saying that it's open source, saying it's freely available. It's in a lot of cases almost aligning with their, aligning the tool with their values. And that gets a lot more buy-in, it gets a lot more interest when they ask why WordPress and not something else. And this is something that I can say to them is that these are the values of WordPress. This is how long WordPress has been around. This is the community around WordPress that you can tap into and are now a part of. And that seems to really get students thinking differently about it. It's not just some other platform. There's something that distinguishes it from, well, why don't we just use Squarespace or why don't we just use whatever else they could use. And so really having that conversation around WordPress as a platform and what the history, a little bit of history of it and a little bit of the contextualizing it as a unique tool, not just because as, you know, Jimmy said with the main of one's own, you can do a lot of different tools and do a lot of different things, but that WordPress itself represents a really powerful and in terms of even just thinking of metaphor for what their values are, that they're a part of it. And I find that that really gets their, like I said, it really piques their interest and gets them more invested in learning the tool and understanding it rather than it just being yet another thing that they are being asked to do for their class. And I think that that's a really great distinguishing factor for them. That's awesome, thanks for sharing that. I like to do similar things when I am able to talk with students for a class project is I spend very little time talking about the, like how to's and I talk about more of the why of like, this is why we're gonna do this or why we suggest you do it a certain way. So integrating that community aspect and the longevity of WordPress is a really interesting way to sell that, I think. Christine. Yeah, hi everyone. My name is Christine. I'm an instructional designer for connected learning at Colgate University, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. We do not, we have domains at Colgate but we do not yet have like a domain of one's own initiatives or like we haven't like launched domains. So it's not really like publicly of, it's not really known in our community that it's a thing but as the instructional designer supporting domains for like five years now, I guess I've taken an approach of like, I'm gonna find a few people who do really good work in WordPress so that I can build sort of a collection of sites that then I can show other faculty members. So that's been the approach that I've been taking but I don't really know the secret sauce yet of like how I talk about WordPress because I guess like one faculty member emailed saying, she wanted to create a magazine online and I pitched WordPress and that happened to meet her needs for what she was envisioning. So I guess it sort of has been people come to me with these ideas they already have and WordPress just happens to kind of fit some of the ideas that they have but I wanted to share a quick story about a WordPress assignment I've been supporting this semester because I just feel like I hear all of you talking about digital literacy and identity and all of these issues but this faculty member said something to me that feels like at the total opposite end of the spectrum so we're just gonna share this story because maybe this is the secret sauce or will be the secret sauce but we were creating this WordPress site where students just make one post to the site that's it, like it's just, it's very simple. And she said to me, she's like, well now that I have this website, like I can share it and that to her was like this huge aha moment and part of me was like, you mean like on the internet? Like, yes, you can share this, please do share it widely. So it feels like to me that I just feel like this sort of gets that people just forget that we can share things that we make online and that then has opened up opportunities for her students to see what each other has posted to the site. She's plans to share it with her department colleagues. So I just, I sort of just feel like I'm navigating this like people at least at Colgate are sort of stuck at like the hyperlink and that WordPress enables them to share and make things online with others. So I just wonder if anybody else has experienced that because I still just feel like that's where we're at here. I'm glad that's happened to you too, Tom. You have a pretty unique set up at Colgate too where you're trying not to give it to the students, right? You're really working on faculty. Yeah, we're just now moving into thinking about what it means to open it up to students. And this stems from a former CIO that did not want students having their own websites, which he's not here anymore. So I can say that that was a little ridiculous, but we are now trying to open it up to make it available to students and what that might look like. I'm just kind of catching up with the chat here. And there's a lot of, there's an interesting kind of discussion around sort of selling WordPress in contrast with other tools that students may encounter. And I think about that a lot actually. So my former coworker Nick actually linked a slide deck that I used a lot when I worked at St. Albert. And that does kind of, you can probably get the gist of it by paging through it, but it does kind of go into that. And that was materials that I would use in front of a classroom about to do a course blogging or something like that. And yeah, so that's kind of, I think an interesting thing to think about. Like I do think it makes sense to contrast these tools because that's ultimately what it comes down to is like, how do you want to publish this stuff? But I also am not a big fan of being like, well, these tools are no good for this reason. I like to usually like to put this in front of students as these are the trade-offs you're making. The trade-off with WordPress is that you do have to be aware of some of these foundations that it's running on, be it you need to see panel account or some other hosting service. But the trade-off is you can bring it with you to a lot of different places. I'll just say what I just said in the chat, which is I feel like the block editor has changed the way I talk about WordPress and for the better, because I feel like you can rapidly prototype and put things up, especially using the block patterns, maybe adding an extension that adds even more block patterns that are even better and nicer to look at. And so you're teaching them about creating the visual look they want. You've taught them how to pull a plug in. And so you're teaching them all of the fundamentals as you build a page so that they have some degree of success by the time they walk out of the room. Yeah, I think I'll double down on Taylor's comment too about trade-offs. And I feel like that's between the tools and also within WordPress, because it's like, do you want a block editor? Do you want to do fancy visual things or are you just trying to get it to the text part, you know? And trying to walk them through those choices with complexity and be like, all right, you want all the bells and whistles, there's a path to that. You want to keep it bare bones. Here's the way you do that. The thing that I struggle with a little bit now is like, I feel like the visual editor, the Gutenberg stuff and the blocks are kind of re-knitting display and data as in twine in a way that frustrates me because that was like one of the reasons that I liked WordPress was that it separated that content and display a little bit better. And now it's kind of not re-melding exactly, but it's a trickier thing. It's more of a continuum than it once was. But one of the conversations I'm having with the students as I'm doing these things is how to present themselves and go back to what we started with. I do try to weave in that discussion of digital identity and putting yourself out there on the internet and how do you do that? And sometimes what's nice to be able to, when you're trying to present a digital identity is can you articulate who you are in one sentence and two sentences? Can you create that into a headline? So it pops out and it's very visual at the same time. I often invite students to look at my own portfolio as we do that to say like, okay, I wanted to introduce myself in one sentence and I wanted to introduce myself in two paragraphs. And so I put those in columns so you can see both at the same time. I wanted to say four things I care about so that you can see those visually displayed as blocks. And this is part of what we're trying to teach as we do this is how to present ourselves and to do that in a way that other people can pick up very easily. So let's now go out on the internet and look at other people's portfolios and other people's websites and what do they display and what about people in your field and try to have that conversation a little bit. Yeah, having examples definitely helps contextualize what the project is. And something that I do when I'm doing workshops especially for students is invite them to bring examples like any pictures they want to embed, any texts that they have ready for their site. So that way when we're running through the workshop and I'm showing the tools, they can have something in mind to actually implement what I'm teaching versus just watching me do things. And I find that that's easier for students to grasp context of WordPress and using the tools. Within the dashboard. But I think I cut someone else off. Oh, no, you didn't cut off, that was fine. I was just wondering. So Ed, you know, I'm with Groom. I'm in the private classic editor for my cold dead hands cam. But, because in our experience, we've had very few. I mean, of course we haven't tried to push and expose it. But it's been my experience that a lot of folks when presented with the block editor, it overwhelms. And then they go down this, they go down a whole of thinking their graphic designers and getting really picky about placing things all over a canvas. And they totally lose sight of, you have to have content and you have to say something and you have to speak to somebody. Let's get that straight first. So in our, and what I'm wondering is, if maybe this is the different experiences between you and I, because classic editor works so great for us because, you know, I can get them started on WordPress and go, okay, so you pick a theme. It gets you basically the layout that you want. Here, go look at a bunch. This is a starter. And generally they'll, oh, okay, that's great. I kind of like this. And then I can go, so this gives you this box. So, you know, every page or every post, you got this thing and here's where the main content go. And at that point, I can just go fill in the box. And of course with classic editor, everybody knows how to work a classic editor when presented with it because it is that close to, I mean, you know, it looks like word or whatever. That stuff, it's only later on. So I'm wondering if part of the difference is if you're getting a lot more portfolio or usage. We have so far, I've got plans to change this next year, virtually nothing happening that's portfolio type stuff and where it does, it's already somebody that I don't need to worry about. Cause, you know, they're often running and figuring this stuff out by themselves. Ours is much more people exchanging writings and posting things, you know, so that's, and so I wonder if that's part of it. I don't know. It might be really into the idea of portfolio. One thing I would challenge you on just a little bit in a friendly way is that if you do not, use blocks or if you do not use the left-hand menu of the block editor and you just start writing down the page and write a paragraph and hit return and then write down the page and hit return, you can make content very easily and you don't have to get into, here are the 100 different blocks that are on this left-hand column and that maybe just, you know, I understand the aversion to new things, but like just starting right from there, you can cut and paste in it into it from Microsoft Word. It works fine. In fact, it works better than the old WordPress editor because you don't bring over as much junk HTML, it cleans it better for you. And then we can start to say like, oh, I want a piece of big text, I want a heading. And we can find that, we can drag and drop it in or we can write it first and then convert that block to adding. I think that it works well for our students and I'm seeing the difference between the sites on getting back from the classic editor from when we were doing it with the classic editor versus the Gutenberg editor, I think it's a positive step forward. I think they're enjoying it. I actually think that I kind of agree on the starting with the text part with the block editor, like when I show people that, I typically don't mention there's another editor for people that are new to WordPress, but that's just a personal preference for me, I think. But I do like that, even if you are just using text, and unfortunately this is a theme thing because not every theme does this properly, but if you're using a theme that does it well, it will look on the page in the block editor how it will look when they hit publish. It's not true of every theme, unfortunately. And that's to me the biggest problem. But I think in my experience, people get frustrated with the whichever editor, when you write something a certain way and you hit publish and it doesn't look the way you expect, or you have a hard time getting it to look the way you expect. And I think that's what they're trying to go for with the block editor. I don't think they've done a perfect job at all. I don't think the classic editor was irredeemable though. Like I think there's a world where they would have just improved on that and made that look like it does on the page in a certain, in better, but it's tricky. I see a lot of people when they find out about Elementor, if they need that or want that, kind of using the block editor for blog posts and Elementor for essentially everything else. And that to me is sort of illustrative of the problem that all three of those things have. They're for different things and maybe they shouldn't be, like maybe we should have the classic editor only for blog posts, but that would complicate things further I think. I don't know. Well, so there's two thoughts that are hitting me hearing you. One is it might make a difference, like I say, again, most of our student stuff is not actually them putting together a site or dealing with a site. Most of our student stuff is essentially create a post on the professor site for a class or something like that or a lot of discussions. And oftentimes it's in SPLOT, which a lot of their SPLOTs we use classic editor. So I wonder if part of that isn't a faculty or, and again, we're heavy on part-time faculty and everybody's about the only thing they really know how to do is word in the LMS. And I'm not sure they're really competent, that far competent on either one, but we've gotten them on word. So they know how to do now headings and all that stuff with word because we had a big accessibility push. So it translates to classic editor pretty well. And most LMS is text editors are very much more similar to the classic editor too. Yeah, I mean, well. It's actually a good thing for familiarity. A whole bunch of them actually, I think are using TinyMCE or, you know, for that. Right, so it's very familiar. But the other thing that's driving me crazy right now with block is I'm having, and I'm open to anybody with ideas here, is I struggle myself with it. And so obviously I can't explain it. It's now muddled things. I used to be able to explain, okay, here's content. Here's what a theme does. Here's where content lives, main content lives. On your design of a page, you're gonna have some fringe areas, header and footer and, you know, widgets. Your theme determines where those are, as well as things like font and, you know, background colors and stuff. And there's functional changes you can get by adding plugins. And I had that nice little division of labor and people related to that. And now it's like, oh my God, especially as blocks moved into page editing and patterns. And even without Elementor, I mean, we have Elementor, very few people use it. That's kind of for a couple of specialized people. But oh my God, it's like, so what the heck is a theme? What's a blah, you know, where are all these layout things, blah, blah, the pattern. And like, I can't really explain where the difference between all this stuff is anymore. I don't know. I guess I'm, you know, I guess I am getting too old. Well, I will also say, I mean, I've been kind of focused on the chat here for the last few minutes, but I think the drag and drop editors and depend, you know, it really does depend on the theme that you're using, kind of like you were saying, Taylor, like there are some elements where you're using the block editor and it will look exactly like it does when you press publish. And for those themes, you know, it's awesome. And I have worked with some WordPress themes where the block editor is just, you know, almost unusable, you know, and same thing with Elementor. So, you know, it really just depends on the theme that you're using. And I think there are some use cases where Elementor can be a great starting point, the idea of dragging and dropping and using the templates that are available to get up and running. It reminds me of splots in a lot of ways. And I like that piece because I can create pretty good-looking sites with very minimal effort. And I'm able to template the work that I'm doing and push it out to other pages. And there are some cool elements that I think are really helpful for folks that can't, you know, custom code from scratch. But I also recognize that it's very heavy and can be bulky. And if you're already using a pretty heavy theme with a lot of plugins, it doesn't make sense. You know, I wouldn't install Elementor on a full WordPress instance for a single page or for a single blog post, you know? So I think that's kind of where that we get back to digital literacy and thinking, okay, what are you ultimately trying to do? And could this be achieved with a, you know, a simpler theme or a cleaner, you know, set of plugins or something like that before we just think that, you know, a plugin is going to solve all of our issues. It's kind of my take. Boy, I think you get into some interesting things. It's like, what are you defining as digital literacy? It's like a big thing. Like, is it, you know, kind of the visual aspect? Are you trying to get people to understand the HTML or CSS behind it? Do you want them to understand conceptual things around categories and tags? And, you know, MySQL as a database, is that an aspect of the digital literacy you care about? And for me, like, you know, you're going to make very different choices based on those ideas. I will say that on the longevity side of things, every visual builder, if you're later down the road a year or two later, people want a very different look or a different concept. You are in an endless series of hellish experiences if you're trying to do that. Cause most of them, including I'd say, you know, kind of Gutenberg on this, they're not really using the pieces of WordPress as isolated components. It's just like a big HTML page. And so the migrations and things like that are very different long-term. Yeah, I will say, you know, I just was speaking element or praises, but it does, you know, almost weekly, I feel like there are, they're rolling out updates. And, you know, it becomes quite a burden to test those and make sure that they're still compatible with the latest version of everything we've got running on our site. So I agree, you know, it does require a level of maintenance and upkeep upkeep that, you know, you might not see in standard HTML or something. I do think that maintenance conversation does, is also context-dependent though too. So like for a lot of people, they're maintaining a website or two and like a handful of pages. So for them, you know, that's a different manageability time story. I tend to not use Elementor myself because I just, I haven't really dug enough into it. Like I know it's possible, I've made a couple of things in it, but I don't tend to use it just because I'm stubborn and want to try to see if I can do it from scratch. But I do like showing people the power it enables them when they want it, when they have something very specific in mind because that's to me, that's this whole conversation is why I'm suggesting that usually suggesting this individual use WordPress is right. Like is you can go from classic editor to like one of the most feature rich page builder tools I've ever used and kind of everything in between, which is really cool. Do people have, I'm kind of curious to hear from where, where they put themes into the, I'm introducing someone to WordPress conversation or whatever structure, like do, I will say it when I do my stuff with folks, my kind of standard rundown is after getting installed, I take them to log in. I like to show them how to log in manually, not through C panel, just so they know how that works, especially if students are also or other people are also gonna use it. And then I have them make a post in a page, show them how to add it to a menu. And then the very last thing I show them is themes and how that like you can change themes, but that doesn't change the content. But I'm curious to see if other people have strategies or if they like to point people to a list of specific themes. I normally don't, but maybe I should. Taylor, I try to look, I try to give them a list of themes that are lightweight themes, themes that don't heavily rely on the customizer menu to create like a very detailed front page because I've found that those are just frustrating. Those are a lot, especially for new people, not even. I think they're a lot for me, usually. One of the things that I've done and I find this, I explained it to students, I said WordPress is a content management system and it's hard to demonstrate when there isn't a lot of content for which WordPress to manage. And so I'll often use my own personal blog because it has a lot of content in it to sort of show how different themes render content and to show also, because one of the frustrating parts about themes as well is that they go into themes, they see the demo of the theme, then they install it and it doesn't look anything like the demo at all. And so it's like, yes, because they've already customized it. And so they, even with content, sometimes that's frustrating, but it at least gives them an idea because I have pages, I have posts, I have categories, I have tags, and so I can show all of that organization and how a theme would change how it's presented. But then the other thing that I asked students to do, once they get a basics of WordPress and an understanding is that I asked them to draw their website. So draw what it is you want your website to look like because it's a really, it's rapid prototyping, very low barrier to entry. They can just scramble it up, throw it out, they can play with color and all that. But then I say, it's also a lot easier to navigate through the themes when you know what you want your site to basically look like. Do you want three columns? Do you want a grid? Do you want dominant header image? Because they already know what they're looking for and they can use the filters, but it's also easier for them not to get lost in that, ooh, that's a pretty theme, wonder what that theme does because they can sort of zero in on, these are the things that I absolutely want my site to look like but also asking them the questions, all right, well, what do you want your site to do? And then they can also look at features that way. So it's a way to try and help them visualize their site but also have a more targeted search within that realm, particularly if they're working on their own project or portfolios and those kinds of things. And then with faculty, it's a little bit different but that's basically is find a place with a lot of content so you can show them exactly how they work and then ask them to draw it themselves. So when you asked them to draw it because I've done that before and I've had sort of two reactions depending on how I've done it. I've had a group of people that focused them and got them to have a goal and I had a different, not as common but I did have some people get frustrated because they're like, this is what I want and I can't find it in a theme. And then they spent like, usually they would come to something because you can revise your drawing, right? But I feel like a lot of times those people spent way too long picking a theme which is, I don't know if you, like it's a hard thing, right? It's fun sometimes but it can be hard. And usually what had happened in a couple instances was they were like, all right, I landed on this one and it's pretty much what I want and that's fine but I was always worried am I setting that up expectation wise in a bad way where I'm setting them up to be almost too specific but I don't know. No, and again, depending on how in depth I'm working with them, I also tell them that this isn't magic, right? It's not magic, there are limitations and so that's why I'll often ask them to prioritize, right? What are the things you absolutely want to have or must have? What are the things that would be nice to have and what are the things that you can give up on and that way it helps them decide, right? Like, okay, well, this site doesn't exactly look like I want but it has this specific feature that I really want my site to do. Well, and that's not even that dissimilar from if you had, if I was drawing this and paying someone to write something custom for me, it's the same conversation, right? They may be like, well, you can do that but... Yeah, it's conversational to the faculty. Why can't the, just make the website do this and you're like, well, that's not how it works. So, but I think that the drawing does help them at least start concretely thinking about, you know, not about themes but about design, right? And that's where sometimes, you know, I'm old and crotchety apparently now because I hate block editor as well. But that's where block editor can kind of come in handy too. But I still, you know, yeah, and I still like getting in paper to pen because that way even the ones that are, oh, I don't understand technology or I'm really intimidated by it. And it's like, well, you can draw boxes, right? So let's draw some boxes on a page and see what we can come up with. I mentioned this in the chat but I also really like that as just a tool for reflecting on your own tastes to say, hey, if I could have an ideal website, what design elements would I wanna pull in? And there's always an experience where the faculty member goes, and this is perfect. And which theme will do this for me? And the answer is nothing. You built that out of your brain, it doesn't exist. But now you know and you know what you can look for. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Well, and also they're like, well, you know on that thing that they did at the New York Times where it's scrolled and there were videos in between and all of that. And is there a theme that does that? I'm like, no, there are a hundred developers though working behind the scenes to make it to that. I like the idea of linking, Shannon put in the chat earlier, a post talking about a working with WordPress workshop. And it kind of has some visuals of like the elements of the page and sort of what belongs where in the block editor. And I liked the idea of somehow linking leaves, drawing and diagramming with that and saying like, all right, so you've got this concept. Here's where it would be controlled. This is the thing, because that was a conversation I found myself having a lot is you wanna do this, you're actually not talking about the theme right now. You're talking about content on the page and that can be done in this way in the classic editor and this way in the block editor and this way in Elementor and this way, custom CSS or code or whatever. But knowing that is not intuitive for people new to WordPress. And I do think that I think in an ideal world, like the lead developers of WordPress would be like, oh, they shouldn't have to worry about that. That's why I cited it as a thing. It's not there yet for everyone, obviously. But I like that way of getting people to understand that relationship potentially. So I have a suggestion here for reclaim and this is very self-serving, I'm sure. I was thinking if there were the WordPress.org repository, in my opinion, yes, it's still fantastic, but it has become, it's an incredible time sink and particularly on themes I found, but also on plugins and it's become very, very hard to separate wheat from chaff and there's so much upsell. You can nowadays so easily pick something and then you find out, oh, this is not really gonna do what you want because you need the pro version. If you're like us, we don't have any budget. I had to move heaven and earth to get gravity forms in Elementor. That's about all we're paying for in terms of themes and plugins. I would love if Reclaim had a 4DOO accounts, if we had a shared space that was just kind of a list of, I don't know, kind of a Yelp type thing or our own thing of listing. So what are your go-to plugins? And maybe we could all, I don't know, tick off our rating on it or we could all just add comments and go, yeah, I always use this or, this is a go-to for that kind of thing and maybe, I don't know, I realize this is probably a lot of work to set up. But similarly on themes, like right now, I'm looking at, I got a task, we wanna build a major knowledge-based thing and I can conceptually structure it in terms of who, multiple levels, but God, there's multiple, yeah, there's document or light, which I think is how the default one documentation that Reclaim helped us install. But there's like, I can go plugin, I can go theme and I've been searching and oh my God, there's like, I've narrowed it down to like seven, six or seven and I would just love to have an endorsement from somebody. I would trust other DOO folks over most of the stuff there on the repository. I don't know if that makes any sense. I think that would be useful for a lot of people but I also think there's some easier ways to manage that too, right? Like you could use literally like the forum, I think wouldn't be bad, like maybe it would make sense to have a specific spot for that. One of the things that we're really excited about when we're launching really soon is a Discord community and this is connected with a Reclaim EdTech thing that we're launching. And so if you don't know about that, y'all should check it out on the website in our products spot. But, and that's a whole series of trainings and workshops and community stuff that we're trying to build. But one of the parts of it is Discord community and that anyone can join once we launch it here pretty soon. And that I think is probably going to be a really good place for that too because obviously the forum is a good place to have these conversations but the pace is probably different than when you need something faster, right? So we're kind of hoping that this could be sort of a flip side of that community coin, right? We've got these chats that happen on a regular basis. We've got the forum and that's a forum. Everyone kind of knows what that's about. And Discord could be a little bit, fill a niche that we're not filling right now. But I could even see some kind of like page that has like upvoting and downvoting would be really helpful, public submissions for plugins and themes. Mo also linked a recent Twitter conversation that we had with lots of people about the, not so much plugins, but about their favorite themes. And it's Twitter so it's not as centralized and if you're not on Twitter then it, and so that's something that we're hoping to accomplish with the Discord is a more centralized and easy to navigate space with that. But if you missed that conversation that could be a really good place to at least start looking at what other people recommend. Incidentally, I'd also love to have that conversation around plugins at some point if we haven't already, which maybe I missed because I'm not great with Twitter. But aren't you worried that with crowd sourcing advice on plugins that Edbeck's gonna pop it and say, Jim, you can't use that plugin, it's stupid. And if you use it, you're stupid because this is the plugin that I learned in 2003 and it's the only plugin that could ever be, I'm being, I'm joking here, but you know, like- I feel like arguing about the pros and cons and what the alternatives are actually gives you better information. At some point you are going to say, oh gosh, there's so many options and maybe I'm a bit overwhelmed, but at the same time saying, oh, I'm not locked into this and people are talking about what they like and dislike can also give you a better sense of not only the options but what about them might work better or worse for you. Yeah, I would expect that that stuff, you know, the, hey, here's a plugin for this and someone go, well, I don't like that one, I use this one. That's great, honestly, because I mean, there's going to be that in any size of group and they, I think that arises from people have different needs for these things, right? The only thing I would say is like, well, it has to be valuable in a way that it is more manageable to browse through the suggestions anyway than the actual official list of repository of themes and plugins, but I don't think we would ever get to that problem, right? But, you know, but we also, it probably will be harder to categorize something like that. Like I'm thinking in my head, of course, I think these things happening on Twitter or in the Discord or on the forums will be really helpful but I'm thinking ahead is like, what if this had a home of some kind? What would that look like? What would we want? That's because that's where my brain goes. And, you know, now I'm already thinking like, how do we categorize that? Do we need to moderate it to categorize it? Well, I'm imagining a modification of your community site that has upvotes and downvotes because then you can really crowdsource things. The other thing I was gonna say is that I also like the idea of people being able to talk about different things because I'm deeply suspicious of any plugin that I can't find an alternative to. If there's only one option, I go, like, what's wrong with it? Why is no one else doing this? Why is no one else doing this? What's wrong with it that nobody is talking about? I think that's a good instinct though, but not one that everyone will have, especially when they're getting started with WordPress, right? Because to know that this, hey, this might just be really hard to do on a CMS, on a LAMP stack, in PHP, and maybe it shouldn't be done or isn't doable reliably or something. Yeah, and what I would kind of use it for and how I would kind of imagine like, to Ed's comment is kind of a just, what I would feel is kind of a trustworthy filter. Not necessarily, I wouldn't be looking to it to make decisions for me, but more like, you know, I'd still use a repository, for example, if I've got a new, like looking for a plugin or theme for a whole different purpose and stuff and I might narrow them down, but I would love to look at something and just know I'm kind of looking for other DOO folks to either give, yeah, we've done this or and the occasional, yeah, we did this and man, it blew up, you know, we ran into X, because I would just dearly love to have that tip off. It's like, okay, okay, yeah, I don't like that stuff either. So that kind of thing, because I think that would be an enormous for small folks like us, that would be enormous time saver and really facilitate things and get us through. So, and I, Tom made a comment in the chat. I would think this would be about, we can disagree without slinging insults. And I think we can generally do that, at least as this community, which is why, you know, it probably needs to be closed to this community. Because otherwise, you know, that's part of what's happened to the repository. I was slinging insults, but what I met more met was like the conversation we were having around Gutenberg versus the classic editor. And there are some people that just like, the classic editor is the only way to go. And here's why. And some people are like, you know, okay, Boomer, you know, but I mean. Well, I'd push back on that though, because I feel like in this, we've been talking a lot about the editors. And I don't know that I've heard anyone say, anything other than I like this one and tend to use this one, right? Most people are kind of like, this is what I like. I haven't really heard a lot of people say, oh, the classic editor is objectively bad. Cause it's not, right? Like it's just not a true thing. So I, yeah, I mean, that's definitely something that could happen, but I guess we have to take that as it comes and maybe judiciously. So let me rephrase them to better clarify what I meant then, is sometimes in our web development we get stuck with what we are comfortable with and familiar with. And so without having kind of a centralized hand that is really looking at all the suggestions and really, you know, organizing it in some way, it would be really easy for a crowd sourced thing to really just focus on the things that we're already comfortable with. And maybe, you know, me saying insults got people off the wrong track, but that's more what I meant is I have five plugins that I use on every site and those are the ones that I know and those are the ones I can talk intelligently about. But without one person going, oh, let's go ahead and look at the plugin Ed chose and the plugin that Jim chose and try to sum that up in some way, which I think would be like Taylor or Tyler, you know, without somebody like really looking at those, it could be less useful is what I really meant. I'm sorry if I didn't- No, no, that makes a lot more sense. Sort of just saying like, hey, wisdom of the crowd alone isn't necessarily always gonna be the most useful thing here. Yeah, you know, and that kind of turns me, turns us back around for me into like, you know, yeah, obviously. I mean, I'd be spending time there because I would want to. And I think a lot of us at Reclaim would, but you know, I think there is something to be said for like having some context there, right? Like what I wouldn't want is literally just a form where you put the URL to a plugin and it appears on the page and you can hit like on it. Like I would want some like, why do you use this kind of stuff? Wouldn't have to be elaborate, but you need some context. I think you need comments in this, whatever it is. Like if it's a, if it's splat, we would leave commenting on it's discord. You can use threads and replies and stuff like that. I do think you need that context. And then, yeah, I mean, I think there would be, it would be kind of cool to see people. I certainly would probably do this once in a while is kind of go digging through that and be like, these are three things I haven't used before. What can we do with it? I think that could be kind of cool too. Yeah, I think too, to a Tom said, like I think conceptually, like when I, you know, watch Tom Woodard's model of like, here's the thing you did. I think I could carry that out, but I'm not going to turn around and say, hey, faculty member build your site doing the same thing. So it depends on like what context I'm doing. I'm working with students. I want the, that easy basic stuff. How can they easily do a couple of things versus, okay, we're building up this elaborate site. Then I want recommendations that might be a little bit more robust because I know I'm going to be in there and could help manage those things. Or if this is something I'm passing off to somebody, what level of stuff. So I think always that context around like what, yeah, what was the project like, you know, you know, scalable, like you're doing a lot of support like around students that just like, here are the things that we just tell students like that they can start with, that I would not tell like, you know, somebody else or another developer, right? Like the, you know, I think context would be really important. Yeah, that would, it would be really useful too. Cause actually what I'm kind of getting back to something Ed said, there's actually, I'm trying to think of this as one of the things I'm struggling with as, you know, perhaps dinosaur is, yeah, I know that block editor, and especially once it goes full site, which it's getting closer and all that other stuff as, you know, five years from now, I don't even know if classic editor is going to be here. But I'm finding it's overwhelming in the meantime, particularly by the way WordPress has a tendency to keep updating and roll out just bits and pieces of concepts. And so the, what are really these new concepts, block editor, block editor applied to widgets, block editor, you know, it's, it's hard to find the on ramp. So like Ed, you talked about some simple themes that you found, I think I had you to say, found very useful for block editor and stuff like that. It's like, oh wow, you know, maybe that's my problem is I need non-ramp, you know, where I can just find, I can just do this, focus on that. And yeah, I can keep adding on. So maybe, unlike what Shannon just said, maybe something in the descriptor, or it's not just a, you know, kind of a thumb. Yeah, we use it or don't go near this or whatever, but also a comment about, so what's, if you've used it, you know, what level of user or, you know, what are the prerequisites or admission requirements for using this? Is it, you know, average, you know, student, is it, you know, designer? So, no big deal. Anyway, I've dominated too much here. I'm just putting in the full site editing call for, call for feedback and communicating with Ann at WordPress.com who runs those and brings that feedback and puts it back into WordPress's, you know, GitHub or their track area. And that's one of the conversations that I had with her recently is, I'm excited for where the block editor is heading and where full site editor is heading, but right now we are in an in-between stage where things are a little more difficult. And so like I am like a fanboy for where it's going, but like there are things that like we talk about and it's like, this is not working. Well, and I also think that being someone who has never developed a WordPress theme, just take that right off the bat, but I have to imagine making a feature rich theme that supports full site editing is probably significantly more difficult than having sort of like a, here's a theme that looks a certain way, there's no editing functionality built into it, right? So I don't know, like we are in a between stage and there probably will be a time when there's a lot of good full site editing themes that exist, but it's probably never going to be, oh, all of the themes support file or maybe not never, I shouldn't say that, but like it is probably going to be a long tail at the very least. I don't, I actually disagree with that because if you think about what a theme does in general and the themes that I've gravitated towards in the past are ones that have good blog displays, nice looking headers, and maybe have some customers be able to be customized on how those look. What they've done is they've started to create what they call template parts and you could actually like when you click on the header there's a replace button that pops up and what it shows is, oh, this theme designer made these four templates that you could just pop up and use there and once it's in there you still can edit it using the block editor. Yeah, I guess I don't mean usable for the end user that I'm saying like I would be curious to know from like a third party theme developer is like, is this an easy thing to support? Or not? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. It probably is, but I have no idea. I shouldn't say easy, but like is it comparable to supporting customization that lived in the customizer before or is it a significant challenge increase? I bet they feel hamstrung. Potentially, yeah. But at the same time what they're doing is they just have to write some JSON files. You know, here's the JSON file with what this pattern looks like with what this header looks like. So I think that it's like both a huge lift because they have to reconceptualize how they're doing things, but then like a small lift technologically. I think there's also a whole lot of while we're in this period of uncertainty, I think there's a ton of people out there outside academia that theme developers, your insight developers that have made a business for themselves doing themes and full site editor when it fully comes and gets a little more polished, particularly with patterns and stuff is a huge threat to their business. And so, you know, I don't know that those folks really know what they're gonna do. And there's a lot of the creating stuff, I don't know, it's all adding into confusion. So anyway, great stuff, Taylor, everybody pilot. Thanks. Yeah, obviously we're almost, I think we're almost 15 minutes over. So, and most people have trickled out, but I really appreciate everyone who was able to show up. And this is obviously, this is a cool discussion. I found, I got a lot of notes of things that I wanna circle back on myself and we'll have the recording posted soon and some of the things that were mentioned in the chat posted soon as well. And yeah. Yeah, thank you all for coming. This has been awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you all.