 Alright, welcome. No worries. So welcome everyone to this workshop by learnowordpress.org. This workshop is called, I just got this WordPress and don't know how to use it. So this is meant for folks that have inherited a WordPress site and our beginners don't know what to do with it. So that's what we're here for. Next slide, please. And so what we'll be talking about today are the basic concepts of WordPress and web hosting, some important habits for keeping a WordPress site healthy, and how to identify and learn the specific editor that's in use on your WordPress site. That said, on the next slide, what we won't be covering today is editing content in WordPress or troubleshooting a broken site. If you have any questions about a site that you're working on yourself, if we have time, we can go over some specific questions at the end of this workshop. And so that said, I would like to introduce you to our guest today, Tiffany Bridge. She's been using WordPress for about 18 years, probably since the beginning, right? That's almost the very beginning. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, same here. I've been saying 16. I was just like, no, I never using WordPress pretty close to the beginning myself. So we are old school WordPress users here. She is the product manager for WordPress e-commerce at Nexus and a contributor to the hosting team on the WordPress source project. So take away, Tiffany. Thanks for joining us today. Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming in tonight. When Courtney and I started doing this workshop, I had really been thinking a lot about people who walk into WordCamps or walk into WordPress meetups that I've been part of. And they always have the same story, right? They're volunteering for a nonprofit and somebody just handed them the keys to the website. Now they're in charge of the website now and they've never used WordPress before or they've got to do job. And their job is now the WordPress website, but they've never used WordPress before. And they're doing their best. They're going to WordCamps and meetups. And they're not always finding that those workshops are at the level that they need. And so I really wanted to put something together for folks to just, here you go. Here's a WordPress that's already built. You didn't build it and maybe the person who built it before isn't there anymore. And now you're in charge of it. So with that in mind, what I'm wondering is, all right, come on now, has this ever happened to you? Have you logged into your WordPress and seen a mess like this, right? There's all these alerts. They all look important. You don't know what any of them mean. What's a foreign object cache drop in? Honestly, what is that? There's all these little red bubbles with numbers in them and that looks important. Otherwise, why would it be in red? But you don't know what any of that means or what it's for. That's kind of what I want to talk about today. You log into WordPress and you suddenly hit with all of this stuff that feels very overwhelming because it is overwhelming. And I want to talk about kind of how to sort of address those things. So the first thing is, don't panic. It's okay. If the website is working right now, we don't need to panic. It's fine. First though, we're going to get into some vocabulary just to make sure that we all know kind of what I'm talking about as we move through here. We're going to talk about like basic pieces of WordPress. There is WordPress, which is the software that runs your website. It's the software and a database and it exists to put content into the database and bring the content back out and displayed as a website. And inside that WordPress website, you have the theme, which is kind of the little bit of software that covers the look and feel. And then you also have plugins, which are the ways that you add additional functionality to WordPress. If you just installed WordPress fresh, you'd have a blog, basically. But with plugins, you can add all kinds of things. You can add an event calendar. You can add an e-commerce store. You can add an online learning management system. You can do all kinds of things with WordPress plugins. And so those really feature in, figure into a lot of what we talk about when we talk about managing a WordPress site. What we're really talking about is managing all the things you add to your WordPress site. I also frequently refer to plugins as the cause of and solution to most WordPress problems. It's always a good idea to dig into plugins if you're running into an issue. And then, of course, there's the content, right? The texts, the files, the pages, the posts, like all the stuff that makes your website your website, that's your content. And before I go any further, does anybody have questions on anything we've covered on this slide? There is a question if we could make the slides bigger, but I believe you already have a full screen. Is that right? Yeah, the slides are already about as big as my giant, as my big monitor can get. Okay. Yeah, there's a tip from another attendee to minimize the speaker view and should show the slides larger and zoom. So, yes, that's a good tip. Yeah, do that. But we will have, I think these will be downloadable afterwards, yeah? Great. Okay, so I'm going to move forward. All right, so there's your WordPress website. But that's not the only thing you need to know about. You also need to know about, and here I actually have made it small. There's hosting, which is kind of like the house your WordPress lives in, right? Like that's the hosting refers to like the server that is serving your website. That's like the people you pay money to to make sure your WordPress is on the internet. And then, of course, there's also the domain name, which is like the address of your house. It's, you know, example.com. It's your website.com. It's that it's the way it's the thing that you type into your browser's address bar to get to your website. Those things are all like those are all just terminology that you need to know in order to manage a website. So what do you do with all this? Okay, so you've logged into your website. You've seen all this stuff. You don't know what any of it is. We're going to assess it. First step, you got to figure out where your website is hosted. Now, sometimes when they hand you the keys to the website, they'll tell you this. They already know. Sometimes you could ask and they'll be like, I don't know. And if that's the case, there's a couple of things you can do. You can, you can go to whoishostingthis.com and try to figure it out. It'll look at the website. It'll look at the domain name servers. It'll make an educated guess about where the website is being hosted. Is it at GoDaddy? Is it at Bluehost? Is it at LiquidWeb? Is it at Nexus? But if that doesn't help you, if that isn't enlightening, or if it tells you something not terribly useful like Cloudflare, basically what you need to track down is kind of follow the money. Somebody's credit card is getting charged for that website. And you just need to know who's charging it. So figure out who's handling, who would handle the money for that. And that's probably your best bet for figuring that out. Let's just figure out who's paying the bill and then who's issuing the bill. So once you know where it's hosted, you can figure out other important things like are there regular backups being taken of your website? That's going to be really important for some of the stuff we're about to do because if you have a good backup, you can also, you can always recover from anything that you may have blundered into. And secondarily to that, is there a staging site? What's the staging site? A staging site is like a perfect copy of your WordPress website, but it's not your live website so you can break it and no one will notice or care. Like that's the most important thing to know about a staging site. It's the place where it's safe to break things. Something that I really firmly believe is that the best way to learn to use WordPress is to just get in there and start using WordPress. But when somebody hands you a website that's already built and that people are using, that can be really scary, right? Because you don't want to break it. What if you don't know how to fix it? That's what a staging site is for. You can break it over and over again. Break it so bad, you don't know how to fix it, delete it, and make another staging site. And ideally, if you're lucky, the website is being hosted in an environment where there's like a one-click staging feature. A lot of web hosts have these. Not everyone does. It's sort of a feature that is more common on like what's called like managed WordPress, which really just means it's a little bit more money, but there are more features like backups and staging and things like that. But if you're not hosted in an environment like that, there are plugins that you can use to create staging sites. You can take a backup and just restore it on another website that you host somewhere else. There's a lot of options here. It can be hard to know how to do that, but I definitely recommend like finding a way to have like a second copy of the website somewhere so that you can play on and feel free to break. Because like I said, I truly believe the most important way to learn WordPress is to just use it and don't be afraid of it. That's how I learned it. And to be fair, 18 years ago, there was a lot less of WordPress than there is now. And so having a staging site was less important. There were fewer things to break. I still broke them. I broke all of them. I broke a lot of WordPress sites in the first few years that I was using it. So I definitely want to encourage you to really dig in on this question of backups and staging sites because I think it will help you be brave. And that's what you need to be. You need to be brave. Why is my slide not advancing? Great. Are there software updates to be done? Okay. So when we were looking at that slide earlier with all the like the red dots on it, at least one of those red dots is about software updates that need to be done. Okay. Here I'll flip out into, this is one of my demo WordPress sites. You can see here on their plugins, I've got four that need to be updated. That's important. You can see that there are plugins here that need to be updated. The reason that that is important is because the number one cause of damage to WordPress sites from like hacks and malware and stuff like that, it's plugins that don't get updated. So you've got to keep those updated as much as possible. However, because plugins are written by lots of different people and updated at lots of different rates, sometimes it is possible that updating something will break it, which is another reason for the important for the staging site. And we'll talk about that again in a little bit. Do I have access to tech support? Now, some of that is, some of this question is like, what kind of support is available from your web host? They can help a little bit. But the other thing is like, are you lucky enough to work for an organization that has an IT department that's helping support the website? That's very exciting. And that's very important for you to know. Who does your organization call if there is a website outage? Is there somebody who works on it either on a regular paid basis or an ad hoc basis? It's just important to know that. In a lot of cases, there won't be anyone and like, you are now that person. But if there is somebody who is more technical than you that's available, that's an important thing to know because then you know who to call. That's just a good situational thing to be aware of. And then finally, which editor is the site using? And I'm hitting this question here because the editor experience in WordPress can be a little bit fragmented, right? There can be kind of the default. Where did that go? Here we go. The default WordPress editor, the block editor, which is this is what it looks like on one of my demo sites, right? You've got your post information over here. If you clicked this, it would be block information. This is the default block editor. This is the major, this is the default WordPress editor experience currently in WordPress. But it wasn't always. We used to have something called the classic editor and a lot of older WordPress sites are still using it. And it will probably still be in use for a little while. So if your editing window looks like this, this is called the classic editor. And then sometimes because the classic editor lasted so long and WordPress did get that nice visual editing experience when people were ready for it to have it, there are lots of plugins that are also editors. And so you might have something else entirely. You might have something like this. This is an example of a third-party editing tool. And so it's really important to figure out which editor you're using because a lot of the experience of using WordPress is just like Googling up tutorials and figuring out how to do stuff. And you want to make sure that you're looking at the right set of documentation because the documentation of WordPress.org is going to focus on the block editor and occasionally the classic editor. But if you're using, for example, Elementor, you're going to want to make sure you're reading Elementor's documentation and seeking help from their help files because the other stuff isn't necessarily going to be as much use to you. And so that's just a really important thing you need to know. It's like, which editor even are you using? And there are more. There's Fever Builder and WP Bakery. And there's all kinds of editors. And but these are kind of the three big ones, I think. There are a few more, but that's an important question to have answered. Okay. So now that we know whether or not we have backups and we know whether or not we have a staging site and we know where our website is hosted and what editor we're using, it's time to get the house in order. And you'll notice as I'm going through these slides that I just, I love a list and I feel like I don't know about you lists make me feel very confident because I feel like I have all of my ducks in a row. And so that's what we're doing on this slide. First, take a backup. Just take a backup. Ideally, your host will do this for you. Like your host will have the tool available. Like for example, where I work, this is what our backups look like. If I get a backup every night, and if I want to take one that's like right before I get started doing something, I can just click this button here and create another one. Ideally, that's available to you. If not, you're going to want to install like a backup plugin and run a backup that way. And there are again, lots of those, but definitely do get a backup because that's going to be like if something goes wrong and you get worried that you've broken something, the backup is what is going to help you get it back to where it was before. Create a staging site if possible. I hope you have one through your host. If you don't, I believe there are even plugins that'll do that for you. The last one I was aware of was WP stagecoach. I don't know if that's the little thing, but there are ways to do this. You can take a backup and just restore the backup somewhere else. Like I said earlier, you can have a second WordPress. There are places to get to host WordPress very inexpensively if you need to. Like if you have to pay out of pocket in order to get one, in order to get a staging site, you can do that very cheaply if you have to. But please do give yourself a safe playground for this. It's important. And then you're going to start updating things. And when you are new to a site, I definitely recommend the practice of updating your plugins one at a time. And you literally are just going to go through your plugin menu like this. And you're just going to click update and wait for things to update. And then you're going to check the front end of the site to make sure nothing broke. So I've updated a plugin. Now that was a kismet. It's not going to change anything on my front end, but what I can do is just go look at my front end and click through and see if anything broke. I don't have a lot on this site, so there's not a whole lot for me to check, but you get the idea. And then you're going to go back and you're going to update the next thing. And this is a little bit of pain in the neck, especially if you have a lot of these updates to do. But I think it's very important while you're still getting used to what everything on the site does, that you don't do the bulk update at once. You will probably get to a point where you're just up here like bulk actions, update all. I love it. I call that the YOLO method. And I think it's great. I'm actually a big fan of it. But when you're updating plugins for the first time, especially if it hasn't been done in a while, you want to do that. You want to take a little bit more care and ideally do it on a staging site first. Once you've done all the updates on the staging site and they've proved to not be consequential, you can update things a little bit more quickly on live. Though, again, you do always want to make sure that you're checking up on things. You would hate to break something and then walk away from the computer for two days. But that's how you're going to go through that process. And then you're going to note anything to follow up on. For example, some plugins are what we call premium plugins. And that means that the developer of that plugin charges a fee for the ongoing updates to the plugin. And when that happens, there's a license key that you put in somewhere. And when the license expires, like if somebody hasn't paid for it recently, you stop getting updates. So those updates aren't going to run. Just take a note of that because the answer might be that you just need to go buy a license key or figure out who's responsible for updating that license key or buying that license key. The answer might be that you don't need that plugin. The answer might be that your web developer who built the site is supposed to take care of that for you. That's a question that you're going to have to answer. But anything else that you see, like anything else that alerts that you can't dismiss, things like that, just go through and start making changes. In here, I see I've got this WooCommerce database update required. I ran a WooCommerce update and then it gave me this message. And now I've got to make sure I actually follow through on this. And again, this is an area where we just, as you do it, you want to go through and just make sure that nothing on your site has changed. If it does change and you don't want to get it back, that's what your backup is for. And by the way, when you're using your backups, you don't have to restore the whole backup. A thing you can do is download your backup, open it up. And this is maybe a little bit advanced topics. But a thing you can do is just get the old version of the plugin out of the backup and put it up on the server and overwrite the plugin that updated and broke your site. That's a little bit advanced. You have to get comfortable with like FTP and stuff. But that's something that you can learn about in your web hosting portal. I don't want to get too deep into that because now I'm often a tangent about troubleshooting a broken site. And I said I wasn't going to do that tonight. But I find that topic irresistible because it's always where people panic and I hate to see people panic about WordPress. And then you can start exploring your content editing, which is where the fun is in WordPress. I really encourage you, even if you don't have a specific update that you're trying to do, if you've got a staging site, just get into the editor and start writing content. Start inserting things into pages just to see how it works. To me, this is the fun part because especially lately, and when I was first teaching myself WordPress, it was the most basic editor. It was just a text box. It wasn't even as rich as the classic editor was. But now, it's really fun. You get to do all kinds of fun things with it. You can drop in a whole photo gallery. You can drop in a whole block pattern library. It's cool. You can do fun things now that you couldn't always do, that you couldn't always do before. If I want this layout, I can just drop this whole layout in and then just start editing it. Just get in there and start doing it. It's fun. I hope that you find some excitement in learning how to do this. You know, as WordPress has started to change, and we're moving from a state of these classic things where the theme was very locked down and you just had a few options to customize, we're now to something called block themes where you can edit the whole theme in an editor. The last time I played with it, I just started giggling because it was so much fun and it was the most fun I've had in probably 16 years in WordPress. I really want to encourage that sense of exploration, but I want to pause here for a second and just check on questions from people in the chat here. I threw a lot of content at you, so how are we doing? Laura asked if we can use local as a staging area. I've only used local for demos, so I never tried using a staging. Here's the thing. I would not rely on local as a staging forever. You absolutely can't, especially if that's the easiest way for you to get a staging site quickly. Yes, do that. I don't think it is a long-term substitute for a server environment that is as close as possible to the server environment. Your actual site is hosted on. I mean, the idea of having a managed host that has one-click staging is that staging has pretty much the same environment that your existing website does, so it's going to be the most one-to-one correspondence. I don't think local can necessarily provide you with that, but if you're just trying to get in and learn some WordPress and run some tests, sure, use local. Absolutely. Thank you. John had asked on that last slide if there was a problem with the update, what next? I thought you touched on that. Yeah, I touched on that. Ideally, what you're going to do there is restore your backup. There are a couple of ways you can do that. You can restore your whole backup. You could just restore the entire site back to the state that it was before you started doing anything. Now, the disadvantage of that is that you're going to lose anything that you did between the point where you took the backup and the point where you stopped doing things. If there were multiple successful updates in there, you will lose those as well. That's not necessarily the end of the world. It can be a problem if you have an active e-commerce store where there's orders coming in all the time. Another way you can do it is you can download the backup and it'll come in some zipped compressed format most of the time and you open it up and you'll see as you get through the directory tree in the folder, you'll get to where your plugins are stored. That plugin from that backup is the last version of the plugin from before you ran the update. As you get into your web hosting portal, and this is just like I said, this is our web hosting portal. This is just what ours is like. You can get the information you need to use like an FTP client to upload the old plugin to overwrite the new one. That means you have to get comfortable using an FTP client. An FTP client, FTP stands for file transfer protocol. That's just a fancy way of saying it shows you your website in a folder structure here and it shows the folder structure of your computer here and you can drag files in between. A good idea is to get comfortable using one of those before you need to so that you're not doing it like, oh my god, I broke my site and now I have to learn to use an FTP client. That's a thing that is helpful to do. That's another way you can try to restore things without having to restore your entire backup. This is another point about backups to be aware of. It's a good idea to know what kind of backups you have from your host. Like at Nexus where I work, our backups that we provide to clients are what are called block level backups, which means when we restore, we're restoring like literally the bit by bit so that the hard drive is exactly in the same condition. It's an amazing backup strategy in terms of restoring things accurately. It is not a great backup strategy if you just want to fix something you broke real quick because a block level backup can take hours to restore. I can't say that I recommend that for day to day use. In that case, you might want a more plugin-based backup solution. There are lots of plugins that you can use for backups. I know a lot of hosts will say, oh, don't tell people to use backup plugins because they consume a lot of resources and we do that for them. But my thing is, I would rather have the built-in suspenders of backups. My host has a backup. I have a backup that's stored somewhere else. Even if that means you're downloading a backup to Dropbox every night. I just like to have my own backups for anything that's important. I mean, I've got all these demo sites and I don't bother with that because they're just demo sites and I kind of throw them out. But for something that's important, have two backups. Have two backup strategies. That's a great idea. Your backups. We have actually quite a few questions flowing in. Do you want to go over them right now? Yeah, let me place. Let's see. If you have a site that you're no longer using that already has content, can you back up to it and will your new content overwrite the old content? Yes. If you restore a backup to any WordPress, even if that WordPress already has stuff in it, it'll overwrite the old stuff. So if you care about the old stuff, back it up too. But if you're ready to be done with it, yeah, you can restore right over the top of that. Now, how do you know if you have a staging site? That is a great question. Hopefully, your hosting plan has it. A thing that is, it kind of depends from one host to the next, how obvious they make it. But a host that has one click staging is going to show you. Here, I've got staging and dev here in my, and again, this is just our particular portal. I can see that there is a staging environment. On a different site in my portal, I would have a button to create one. You have to look for the feature. If you really are stuck with that, open a ticket with your host. That's what they're there for, right? Get them to tell you. Make them tell you. Where do you store the backups? So a lot of backup plugins will store the backup like literally in the web directory with your website. Don't do that. That sucks. Most decent backup plugins will have an option for you to store your backups off site, whether that's like in your Dropbox account, in your Google Drive, in an Amazon S3 bucket, which is a little bit advanced. There are a lot of options for storing the backups. Do not make a practice of storing your backups on the same web server where your website is, because what if something happens and you get hacked, now your backup is untrustworthy. Then what are you going to do? So store your backups somewhere else. There are lots of play. I mean, even if you download it to your local hard drive, that is better than storing it next to your website. That brings up a question that came earlier of someone said, or Desta says, my website got deleted. How do I get it back? Hopefully your host has backups. If it was more than 30 days ago, your host probably does not still have backups. But if it was recently, your host hopefully has backups. If they don't have backups, then I'm very sorry that you may be out of luck. Whether or not your host has backups for you will depend a lot on what level of plan you have. Like there's budget hosts where you're paying like $3 or $4 a month for hosting. They're not doing anything for you. They're not backing you up. They're literally just putting you on the internet and everything else is on you. Whereas if you're paying for something that's a little bit higher end, they may very well be taking backups for you. So definitely do check in your hosting portal for that. If you use the staging site to try out something and you like it, how do you make that the main site? This is such a great question. So smart. There's a couple of different situations. Some hosts have the ability to just push from staging to live. And what that usually means is they will just copy the entire staging site to live to your main site. You want to be really careful with that, right? You want to be really careful with that, especially if you have e-commerce because you might lose orders that way. You want to be really careful with that because if you did any of that like sandboxy stuff we were talking about earlier and like you junked up a couple of pages and then you push staging to live, it's going to push the whole thing, including the junk. So I would say if you did something on your staging site and your staging site wasn't like really fresh when you did it, your best bet is to just do it again on the live site. Does a staging site have to have its own URL and hosting? If you are working with a host that has staging included as part of the plan, that will all be handled for you. It'll have like a temp URL, like these URLs on my site here, this D2DB9. That's what a URL looks like at Nexus before you've put a domain on it. And so this would be what the staging URL would look like for us. And so no matter where you're hosting, there will be something like that. If you are working with a host that does not give you a staging site, you've got to figure out where to host it, right? And you might be able to do it just right there next year or website in your hosting and that's fine. Or you might have to have, you might have to upgrade a plan or you might have to have, like somebody said, use local, which is like a local as a tool that helps you run WordPress like on your desktop computer. That's an option. But they don't typically need their own domain name, if that's what you're asking. Like you don't have to go buy like mystagingwebsite.com or whatever. Do I know if Hostgator provides staging? I don't know. I don't know. I haven't looked into what Hostgator offers recently. But if they do, like that'll be like when you click down and like look at like what the features of their plans are, like they'll tell you if they have staging sites because nobody is hiding that information because it's an important feature. If they don't say that they have it, they probably don't. If they say that they do, then they do. But I don't have them to know. I would probably also depend on like the level of plan you purchased from them. Some plans may not have them. Some of the higher end plans may come with that. Look at that. Somebody has posted a link. That's very helpful. Thank you. Oh, that was you, Courtney. All right. We're good on questions for the moment. Cool. So, okay. So, step three, we're just, this is now just, we're going to move forward, right? Regularly manage the site. Make sure that there's a regular cadence of backups and updates. If you've got a host that's backing up for you, they're probably backing up nightly. If you have used, if you have purchased a backup plugin, make sure that you have it configured to backup regularly. Nightly is great. But if, for whatever reason, like storage for that becomes a problem or like performance becomes a problem, weekly is probably okay if it's not a super busy site. And then also make sure that you are regularly doing updates. I like to do updates on sites that are important at least weekly. Some people only do it monthly, but make sure that you are doing it on a regular basis. Don't let your site, your plugins, your themes and stuff get too far out of date. Don't let WordPress itself get too far out of date. What WordPress releases updates regularly that are important to apply, because that's where all your security fixes and stuff are going to be. And you want to make sure that you're keeping up with those to keep your site safe. Okay. And then once you've got that done, you're going to find some tutorials for WordPress in general and for your editor in specific. The reason that we aren't getting too far into, you know, editing tonight, like I said, is because there are so many different editors, but also like the internet is full of information about how to do this. And like, I can't cover like every possible permutation of how you would want to like edit your content, right? But I guarantee you, whatever weird specific thing you want to do in WordPress, somebody out there has written an article for it. And the internet is full of those tutorials, learn.wordpress.org, of course, is a great source for learning all kinds of things about your WordPress site. But there are also plenty of other websites. There's plenty of like bloggers about WordPress out there. So definitely do like get out there and find the tutorials. And now that you have all of this vocabulary, and you kind of know what they're talking about, you'll find them a lot easier to follow than you might have before this session. And then finally, like leverage leverage that staging site to get brave and experiment. Start or start your own site, set up a WordPress blog, get in there and play with WordPress. It's the only way in my opinion to learn it. Like you can read tutorials till you're blue in the face, but until you're in there, like clicking on the buttons and developing the muscle memory for how you want to use the editor. That's really where you start to become like a competent user, a confident user of WordPress. And also, I just want to want you to know that like, you've totally got this, you can you can do this, you are already well on your way. And I believe in you and I hope you believe in you too. And that is the end of the content I have prepared for you. So if there's more questions, more discussion, would love to open up for that. Yeah, I always like to hear if there's something new that you learned in today's session, feel free to drop that in the chat. And yeah, the floor is yours, folks. Linda, what kind of problems you're having with with customizing your site? Let's talk about it. Oh, that was the best way to find someone to help you. Oh, yeah, that's a great question. The best way. Gosh. Well, it kind of depends on what sort of help you need. Because if you are, if you're looking for help solving a particular problem with a plugin, plugins will have their own kind of support, the kind of means of support. Any plugin that you download from the WordPress.org plug of repository, developers are supposed to support their plugins there, whether or not they do, can be a little bit hit or miss. If it's a premium plugin, you are paying for that support. So definitely chase them for that. If it's problem with WordPress, generally, I've had really good luck just kind of making WordPress friends at my local meetups and word camps. And, you know, even like using Twitter, I know Twitter's kind of having a moment right now, but getting into like social media where WordPress people gather is a great way to do that. If you are on a deadline and you need help, you can always, you can, you can contract for help, right? There's everything from like folks on Fiverr and Upwork. There's also an outfit called Codable that has like developers that you can work with almost like in a like a temp agency kind of format. There are, there are a lot of different service providers for that. And so you can, you can kind of all the way from the like free, let's puzzle it out together up to like, I don't have time for this, let me just pay someone to fix this. You can do that as well. And hey, look at that learn WP even has a quick tutorial on finding help. Thanks Courtney. I think we have folks also chiming in with what they learned today with, you know, questions to you. So staging site sense. Yeah, the developer, the developer for the theme is a good, like if you have a, if you can work with your theme developer, that's even, even better if they're available to support you. How easy is it to change or update your WordPress theme? Yes, you can absolutely use a different theme on a staging site to try it out. And I think you should. A thing that is a little bit challenging about swapping themes on a WordPress site. And this is something that I think they are working on improving, but it has been a little bit of a gotcha with the platform for a while is if you, so you've got your existing theme and you've done all of this configuration on it and it you've got it just the way you want it. And then you swap to a different theme and you play around with it and you don't like it. So you try to swap back all of the settings that you set in the theme before are not preserved. So if you're going to start swapping themes around again, take a back up, take a back up because then you'll have a much easier time getting back to the state you were previously in. Any other questions? SEO and security, are they always covered by a plugin? Such a good question. So there's kind of a few schools of thought on this. In my opinion, a lot of security plugins are meant to be used on that kind of budget hosting where they're not doing a lot for you on security, right? If you are using a managed host where you're paying a little bit more money, ideally what they are doing is they are already monitoring for threats to WordPress and they are already configuring a web application firewall and they are already scanning your site from malware and quarantining things if they find it. However, not every host does that. And so you want to make sure that you know what your host is doing to help with that before you go putting a security plugin on your website because security plugins, like I'm not trying to complain about them, but they can be quite like resource intensive, right? So you don't want to use one if you don't need one. SEO, an SEO plugin is going to give you some settings to kind of help you identify like focus keywords and things like that. But I think the most important SEO is just writing really great content and a plugin can't do that for you. You've got to do that for yourself. So I mean, I think that there's value to them, but it's not as like SEO is never going to be as simple as like just install this plugin and whoops, SEO is done. Like that's not how that works. So we have a session on the block editor. I'm sure I think that's a question for Courtney on the block editor. So specifically about creating content, I believe because this question came up earlier, there is one on Learn WordPress. It might be slightly out of date, but I will find that link for you. Yeah, the block editor does change quite a bit. It is one of the fastest moving parts of WordPress right now. But it's in my opinion, it's one of the most exciting. So mostly, and I don't know if that's maybe because I remember like the bad old days of like, you had to like put in a short code any time you wanted to do something the least bit interesting in the website, and like it never made any sense. And so the block editor, like being able to build my website out like Legos is very exciting to me. I just dropped the link in the chat. Cool. Yeah. Right. I think I'm not seeing any additional questions at this point. What was the name of the group of coders you said were for hire? There is a company called Codable. That is, that like specializes in WordPress. There may be others as well. That's the one I happen to be aware of. Will a chat be available to read later? Yeah, we usually don't save the chat, but I can compile these links and share these with all the attendees via the penip.com event or through an email through Meetup and on the discussion board. Gutenberg. What is Gutenberg? So Gutenberg is, so Gutenberg was the kind of codename for the block editor project. And so sometimes you will hear it used just to refer to the block editor as opposed to the classic editor. But since the block editor is now the core default editing experience and WordPress, if you were to install the Gutenberg plugin, what you would be getting is like the beta of all the new stuff in the block editor. And just as a note on that, if you are working on like a production site that actually has to be like working in a very predictable fashion all the time, I would not do that. It is super fun to run on like a personal blog or staging site because you get all the new stuff as soon as it's ready. But it does, it can and does occasionally like change things on the front end of your site unexpectedly. So I wouldn't necessarily run it on a site where you're going to be like frantically having to go back and figure how to fix those things unless you have the skills to do that. It's not necessarily a great plug in to run on like what we call like a production site, but it's super fun for like a personal site where you're doing a lot of tapering. All right. I think I love the painting. Thank you. I love this painting as well. He comes to all my meetings with me. Linda did ask if we're available for consultation. I personally don't do that, do any consultation, but I do recommend, as Tiffany said, going to your local WordPress meetup, even if it's online event or just ask questions on their discussion board. Yeah, even like hanging around on like WordPress hashtags on Twitter has been really valuable for me and like meeting WordPress professionals. I also don't really take on a lot of outside consultation mostly because my job keeps me pretty busy with that. And when I'm done, I'm like, I would like to think about something other than WordPress. Much as we love WordPress. I love WordPress. I love WordPress, but I do need a few hours a day to think about other stuff. Yeah. Thank you for asking. That's very flattering. I think that's it for questions. All right. I have a couple of things to share on the next slide. So something I'd like to ask folks that attend these workshops, if you could fill out this quick survey that I see a link to in the chat. We are constantly trying to improve the resources that we provide to the WordPress community. And we'd like to know how you like to learn. Do you like these workshops? Do you like these video tutorials? Are you a text based learner? Having your answers here will help us like shape what WordPress comes in the years to come. So it would be appreciated if you can fill out the survey. It'll just take you a few minutes. And then on the next slide, just to point you towards learn.wordpress.word again, we have more tutorials and online workshops. You can search for whatever subject you're looking for. If you're not finding the subject you're looking for, please reach out and let us know. You can join our conversations on the Making WordPress Slack, which is where we chat. Contributors to WordPress are all available, not available, but around. Over at chat.wordpress.org. Note that this is not a support forum or anything. This is where we work on the WordPress project. But if you join the training team channel at the chat, this is where we develop the content for Learn WordPress. That is it for me, too. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. If you have any more questions, just reach out via all the different avenues we have here online, which is either Slack or you can find us on Twitter. There is also an email address. I think it's learn.wordpress.org for anything regarding Learn WordPress. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, Tiffany, for presenting. Thank you, Courtney. All right, folks.