 No, that's not exactly basket. So good morning. Welcome. Welcome everyone to work in Europe 2023 in Athens, Greece. We're excited to have you here with us. Well, last year in 2022, we were in Porto and enjoyed our first in-person World Camp event since the outbreak of COVID. Who was there? Thank you all for being there and thank you for being part of this amazing community. We have a blessed last year. Remember? Remember this? Well, fun times. Let's repeat that. So, Jose, Evgenia and I'm showed. And he managed to pronounce all the names correctly. Amazing, isn't it? Yeah. So we're very happy to be in Athens today. A little bit more. I'm happy, happier than these two, considering that I'm Greek. And we have been planning this event for a long while now, since I think it was the spring of 2022. So we're here at the Athens Concert Hall or otherwise Megaron. And while we're very happy that we're holding this event, we're also very thrilled that we're continuing the legacy of the online events. And that means that we are live streaming the whole World Camp Europe for all our friends that are connecting and watching from home worldwide. So we are welcoming all our friends and also our virtual friends to World Camp Europe 2023. And we are wishing you to have an amazing event. We would like you to be here in person, but since this is not an option, at least we will have you with us virtually. World Camps represent the very best of WordPress and they bring us together across borders, language barriers and time zones to celebrate the power of WordPress, community. It's not only about learning something, but also about sharing knowledge with each other. It's where community contributes to WordPress and gives back to the community. Well, this year we are very happy to welcome people from 100 different countries to World Camp Europe. This is an event for full inspiration to all of us, but most importantly, you. We want to thank you again for being here. Usually World Camp Europe is, when it is in early planning stages, we plan for around 3,000 people. Okay, so the number of registered attendees for this year's World Camp Europe is 2,862 people. Another figure, 1,332 of you are attending World Camp Europe for the very first time. That's almost half of you. Thank you for welcoming people from all backgrounds, no matter what their knowledge, their skillset, experience, religion, age, skin color, gender is. Safe and inclusive environment where everyone's voice is valued, heard, respected and inviting you all to get involved in all aspects of this wonderful event. We are really excited to set a full schedule of an awesome content this year and this is something that hasn't happened for a lot of time now. We have three tracks full of excellent talks on a variety of topics like artificial intelligence, for example, in WordPress and maybe also tomorrow's generation perspective on WordPress and several other things. The last topic that I just mentioned is presented, and that's also again our first time, by the youngest speaker we ever had in the States for World Camp Europe. And it's amazing to see a new generation, 16 years old. So we're having two tracks of workshops also on topics like automating WordPress with no code. That could be for me. All learning how to create good and bare blocks from scratch. That could also be for me. And we also have a lot of other activities because we had amazing content and community teams. So we are including to this year the WP Connect that used to be the WP Cafe previously, so now it's a different structure. We have sessions and topics like FIFO the future, which is very important for all of these people who want to get involved and contribute to WordPress. And also WordPress Playground, which is really interesting this year. We also have a wellness track for those who try to stay fit and calm because we're having yoga and we also have an evening hike with a view of the city. And a lot of raffles and quizzes and games in the sponsors area, so you are free to go and discover everything. One that's not on the monitor, the after party. Oh, the after party. We have an after party. More on that later on. Now always our code of conduct, which we present online. Code of conduct outlines how we expect our community to treat each other. It's in a way that is respectful, collaborative, considerate. And in a way that is fair, no matter what a person's gender, age, race, religion, sexuality or ability is. We're also committed to ensuring our event is friendly, it's safe and welcoming for everyone. And if you notice any behavior that does not meet these expectations, please contact one of the volunteers right away. And the volunteers, that's on the next slide. Volunteers, we have around 150 lovely volunteers. We have donated their time to help make this event possible. Many of them have been volunteering for multiple years in a row just because they love to be part of this great event. You can spot our volunteers pretty easily by looking at people with the light blue t-shirts like this one. They are all over the venue and able to answer the questions that you might have. Please be respectful and help our volunteers helping you. Thanks. So a few words about our venue. Megaron is a fantastic but also a very large location. So most of the areas are below ground level, which makes it comfy and also cool considering the hot Greek sun. You will find maps available on the website so you can navigate easier inside the venue. So yeah, about maps, talking about the website. During the event days we have replaced our home page of our website with a simplified page. It only holds easy to click buttons and links to all the necessary information. Use it for gaining quick access to all the World Camp Europe information. Well, join us at the outdoor plaza for the family photo of World Camp Europe 2023. After the shoot, the lunch will be open. The family photo, the community family photo will be done tomorrow at around 13. Around 10. Yeah, 13. And the outside foyer. We are enjoying outside photography since last year. So also because we enjoy sharing things on social media, especially our experience about World Camp Europe, our Wi-Fi is very easy to find. So the network main basically is WCU. And the password is WCU 2023. We didn't want to make it difficult for anyone. So every year we see a very vast growing number of devices connected to the Wi-Fi. So we plan bandwidth accordingly and we're trying to give to all the attendees and also sponsors, volunteers, organizers the best experience, the best wireless experience possible. However, we would like to kindly ask you not to stream anything while you're using the Wi-Fi. Just that we have the option to maintain the best wireless connection for everyone. And of course, if you have your connection set up, you can share all your World Camp Europe moments on social media. Use the hashtag WCU 2023. And for accessibility, please use capital letters when you type the hashtag. You can find us on Twitter, on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Telegram and Master Don. We are trendy. This event would not be possible without the generous support of our amazing sponsors. Thank you so for Super Admin Sponsors of Stinger and Jetpack. Without our sponsors, this event wouldn't be possible. This is the truth because we are funding the event mostly from the sponsorships and the ticket revenue. So we would like a big applause also for the admin sponsors. Bluehost, Elementor, Google, Ionoss, Siteground, Reglott, Google and WUP Engine. Thank you. And also, thank you very much for the editor sponsors. Cloudways, PayPal, WebPros and Yoast. And thank you all to our offer and small business sponsors. Well, microsponsors are not exactly sponsors, but are people of this community who want to give back and contribute a little bit more from their own pocket. And this year, another interesting number, we have 103 microsponsors. So we would like to thank these people and would like also to ask you to make sure you visit all the sponsors in the expo area when you're not in the sessions. Go blend with people, go networking, have some fun, meet new products, meet new people. I don't know, maybe search for a job, that's also an option. And keep in mind they also have brought all kinds of goodies for you because who doesn't love swag? Yeah. So now let's talk about the postcards game that the lovely community team has prepared for us. Everyone will receive four postcards in their swag bag. You can get your swag bag at the swag station, which opens around 10.30 or maybe just be open yet. It's on the round in the middle. You will see these cards are the same. The idea is that you mingle network with other people, exchange postcards. There are four different cards. These images were created by contributors and are part of the museum of the block art and were built using Gutenberg. To learn more about the museum go through the community booth located at the expo area 8. So for the other four postcards you will have to get them from the community booth. You will find the community booth very very easily in the expo area and you will only need to answer some very simple questions. So these postcards will be given at different times between talks today and tomorrow. And they were designed by the community and the design teams that wanted to celebrate the 20th anniversary of WordPress. Happy birthday WordPress. And also to celebrate WorldCom Europe 2023. So another thing we would like to mention is that we have two WAPUs this year because we really like these yellow creatures and we couldn't decide. That's a Greek problem usually. We had two that we wanted so much so we opted in keeping both of them. So our first WAPU is W. Wafina from our city's name. And it was designed by Ohio. So thank you very much Ohio. And the second WAPU. The second WAPU is a WAPU that most probably you have heard the name previously but not as a WAPU but as a Greek food. There is a reason we like food here in Greece because we have heroes. So we made a WAPU out of that. And we have the hero WAPU that was designed by Elon Orantini. This one actually makes me very hungry. So thank you. Thank you also for the big applause because I was about to ask for it. And thank you from the community team and thank you for the design team because they have done an amazing job this year. Thank you. Now, when you have your cards, why not just send them by old fashioned? Yes, old fashioned mail to your friends all around the world. You can do it right here in Athens. For mailboxes you can see them on screen, they're yellow. I hope you brought your own address book so you can just write them down. And if you're not fancy on sending the postcards by mail, just take them home, frame them and hang them on your own wall. Well, World Camp Europe after parties are always something to remember, right? This year we have planned another great opening. We hope you have planned some outfits for accompanying the theme of the after parties the 20 years of WordPress. We'll treat you with local food, a couple of drinks and a great cover band. So we can assure you that you will have a wonderful time. The after party will be held at the Lowen Athens Club tomorrow, Saturday, starting at around 20, 30 minutes past 20. Important, very, very important. Badge is mandatory, no exceptions. Taking consideration that for security reasons we have a limit capacity of 1,500 people. But you should prepare to dance a lot, right? Yep, of course. I mean, this is also mandatory? Some people might avoid it. And now let's get on with the event, because maybe we have tired you a little bit and it's early in the morning. So in case you didn't have some coffee to wake you up, we should just get off the stage. We will take a very short break in order to allow people to get to the first content, because we have three tracks and workshops, so maybe you shouldn't be in track one in a few minutes. And I hope that you're ready for this. So, track one. Track one, that's over here. We have after this session a panel with Miriam Schwab, Jerry Miller, Adam Silverstein and Rahul Ben Sal on work performance community perspectives. On track two, we have Viola Grunner. We'll talk about tests instead of guessing. We'll take more leads through growth hacking. Sounds good too. And for track three, David Ortiz will show us ten things that all world-class plugin developers should avoid. Carrie Dills will be hosting in Workshop 1 International Appeal, making your themes and plugins translatable. Jonathan Bossinger will be hosting Workshop 2 on developing WordPress blocks using plain JavaScript, and everything starts at 10, or a little bit after 10. And please, don't forget to visit the amazing sponsors area. Have fun. Enjoy. This is what Camp Europe holds. Welcome. See you. I think we should slowly go. Good morning, Athens. We are ready to start. It's very exciting to be here again, and we're starting with a bang. It's a panel on WordPress performance with four amazing people who are plugin developers, innovators, and just the best that our community has to offer. Now, you'll see me do this many times, so be prepared. This is going to happen now. And so, today we have, sorry, because I've really done this before, Adam Silverstein, Miriam Schwab, Thierry Mueller, and Raul Bansal, who... Here they are. Good morning. Please grab a bottle of water. Take a seat. The conversation is going to last about half an hour with 15 minutes for the Q&A. After that, there will be a quarter of an hour to stay in the room, go take a break, go to a different track, and do whatever you want. So, here we are. Adam, I believe you're moderating the panel, aren't you? Great. So, I'm going to leave you to it. Give them a big hand. Thank you. Is this working? Yes. Cool. Awesome. Thanks so much for coming, everyone. I'm really excited to host this panel, and we're talking about performance today. I'm really grateful to my panelists for agreeing to join. Just as a brief intro when I propose this panel, performance for me is about way more than the raw speed of a website. It's about how users experience your website and how it performs for you as a website owner or a website builder. So, we're going to sort of broaden the topic of performance to include anything that can affect the experience that people have on your website. So, just to get started, I'd like to go around and ask each of my panelists to just introduce themselves, say kind of where they come from, why they might be here on the stage to talk about performance. Okay. Hi. I'm Miam Schwab. I'm the co-founder and formerly the CEO of a company called Stratik. Stratik is a different approach to publishing and hosting WordPress websites, and we do that in static architecture. And by doing that, we remove the underlying server stack, and in that way, sites can be much more performance and scalable, et cetera, and secure. Stratik was acquired by Elementor exactly a year ago. I'm celebrating my one-year anniversary there. And, yeah, so now Stratik is part of Elementor and I'm happy to be here on this panel. Hi, everyone. I'm Thierry based in Switzerland. I'm a software engineering manager at Google and specifically in Google Chrome and Web Platform. Me and my team, we care a lot about raising user experience on the web, specifically for WordPress sites, trying to make a better web. Hi, I'm Rahul. I'm founder and CEO of RTGAM from India. So as part of my work, I work with clients who are worried about performance and all the metrics that surround it. Excellent. And just in full transparency, I have a bunch of questions I'm going to ask here and I have already shared those with the panelists. So we're just going to start out with something hopefully pretty easy. So what I'm going to ask is if you would tell me about some work that you're doing recently to help push performance forward in your product or service or work area, and I guess I'll start with you again, Miriam, and then I'll vary who gets to start. Okay, so as I'm sure you know, the world of performance is never ending in terms of how we approach it in different ways to try to optimize your sites for performance. That can start with the back end and it also obviously can apply to the front end. So in terms of Stratik, we're constantly taking strides to optimize the front end in different ways because in Stratik, the back end no longer it ceases to be a function or an aspect of performance just because it's not there. With a fully static site that's served up through CDN and available in hundreds of educations around the world, you kind of have checked that box, but then there's that last mile of performance. So there's aspects to that. It's actually a constant challenge because in the end, if someone builds a site in a certain way and not always a good way, then that HTML code, the JavaScript, CSS, it's going to be problematic and so how can we help that last mile be better even in a world where people can do whatever they want with their websites, including not great things. I'll just also represent the Elementor aspect. So Elementor is obviously the page builder plugin and also the hosting and also their performance has become, on both of those products, a very important focus and part of this strategy in terms of making the user experience like what you said. Performance is so much more than just fast. It's about a user experience and so we've seen really great improvements around that on the hosting and the plugin as well. So as part of helping with performance to our clients, the first thing like whenever new things come like there was HP, Lighthouse, NOS, there's a lot of buzz around core web vitals. We put a lot of stress on educating them about the right metrics. For example, with web vitals, there is a lab score and there is a crux report. So many client things that if it's working fast on my site, that's it like, oh, sorry, it's working fast on my computer then my site should do well for everyone and that's where we try to educate them like you need to use lab data as a reference but also work on the real world data and fix performance issue whatever you are not just for yourself. Yeah, for my part, and I guess I can speak a bit on behalf of the team but we really are on a mission to try to make every WordPress site faster and that we have multiple projects going on. One area is trying to see how we can improve WordPress core, make core faster, or bring new APIs to make core more capable from a performance perspective. And then also provide better tooling for all of you, developers for sites or plugins and stuff like this to really try to embed performance as part of the development workflow and have better tooling, like for example, better ways of checking plugins in terms of performance. And last but not least is working with the ecosystem. So we have Elementor with other plugin developers trying to really see if we can work together on whether it's adopting some of this tooling or actually making the product faster. So that's kind of like what we've been busy with lately. Excellent, thank you. Okay, so my next question is about artificial intelligence, the hot topic of the day. The artificial intelligence has been making amazing leaps and strides recently. So what role do you think artificial intelligence, AI could play in performance, in improving performance for WordPress? And how do you hold the start? So, I could stop on. So maybe AI can generate images that are already optimized to begin with. So like all the image optimizations we do, like the post-processing, lose list compressions and all, like if you tell AI that, hey, I'm going to upload this on a website or I'm generating this one for the website and I think it should take care of all those optimizations that are required for the web. Okay, so what would a panel be if we didn't talk about AI, right? Like it's required. I'm excited about AI because I mentioned that last mile of performance and it's really hard for humans to get that right. There's a lot of products and initiatives trying to hack away at that and improve that, but in the end, you've got render blocking JS, you've got render blocking JS, and trying to shift that around without breaking things is like a nearly impossible feat. And I hope that at some point, AI will be able to take the output of a site and just like it optimizes at this point, let's say the content that we write, you know, you can have it write a blog post and then tweets. I don't know if you do this, but I'm just saying you can. Tweets, et cetera. Then at some point, the output of a site will be optimized by AI in a way that also makes sure that the front end continues to function. So I can see that happening at some point. And actually on Stratik, that would be ideal because we output the static and then it could kind of like have AI go better and then you've got like the best site. So that's kind of my vision of how AI will help with performance. We'll take it, just like it takes a lot of things out of our hands that let's say we're not excellent at, but we're trying to do it anyways. So this could be something that it can help people with as well. Well, AI is an interesting space and I think that we are kind of in the tipping point. Ideally, you know, it would be magical, like AI solves all the performance problem and many more. But there's always a risk to do that automatically and so I think that we far away from that still. But the advantage of AI is really that, you know, we can train the model is based on data and there are a few areas which I think are quite promising. For example, on tooling, you know, at the moment we have great tools to identify performance problems and stuff like this, but not really helping to guide what we need to do next. There's a checklist of like, hey, you need to optimize your CSS, do your JavaScript and stuff like this. But it's not really contextual to any website and so I feel that with AI and more data and trained models it will get better and better at identifying the problems and then giving some guidance more contextually according to a given site. So, you know, in the context of WordPress it could be analyzing which plugins are installed or some setup and stuff like this and be much better at saying like, hey, here are the things that you need to do for your website and not just the checklist of things that, you know, we have documented essentially. So I see that as like a promising, promising future with AI. Yeah, great. Awesome. So my next question is just about the general performance of WordPress as a whole and we've seen other platforms like Wix and Shopify dramatically improve their performance in the last few years while at the same time WordPress has either stagnated or maybe even decreased slightly compared to the web as a whole. What do you attribute that to and what do you think we could do to improve the situation? Yeah, we have, I think, to look at the different nature of each CMS and you mentioned Wix and, you know, Shopify and there are kind of SaaS services and they control the stack base and stuff like this. So it's kind of easier to make changes. There are also newer CMSs and so they don't have kind of the legacy code base that WordPress has and WordPress is distributed. It's, you know, still a community still and hopefully forever a community open source project with a huge ecosystem that, you know, it's a beast to move. So I think that's one, you know, it's just slower moving but with that said, I'm very confident that we will catch up. So that's one problem and I think the other one is also maybe the lack of focus on performance until now which is, you know, I think good and a bad thing but we're really seeing that shifting a little bit or a lot hopefully. There's a core performance team and there's better tooling and there's a lot more focus on performance. We saw in 6.2 for the first time there was a performance release lead. So I think performance now is starting to be taken in consideration a lot more in WordPress and it will take some time for the entire ecosystem to actually do that as well but I think that will catch up. Can I, yeah, okay. So I think that like those types of platforms have an unfair advantage because they can fully control everything that's happening within them end to end. So they also control what happens within them end to end by telling their users that they are limited in what they can do, right? So if you're building a site with Wix or Squarespace at some point, many users will hit a wall because they're going to want to customize it in a way or do something with it that it just doesn't allow because it's not open source because it is that kind of walled garden platform. So they have those limitations that they have to be able to apply changes that they can just implement across the board on their sites with confidence because they know exactly what they allow and don't allow within them, right? So that's kind of an unfair advantage. I think Terry's right that there hasn't been a focus on improving performance necessarily in WordPress. I think a lot of the responsibility has been offloaded to the hosting companies. The attitude has kind of been, well, let's let the hosting companies try to solve this for us, but I think it's a bit omitted because in the end, the hosting companies are the platforms that are running WordPress and that attitude applies to security and other aspects of WordPress as well. However, in the end, if the underlying software there's only so much that the hosting companies can do and there's only so much that they should do. So I've been in touch with Terry and other people on the performance team and I see that now there is more support and focus on performance really, really amazing and really important for all of us. By the way, there's also an environmental aspect to this. If a site is using more resources and I just yell it's like the parties last night. We'll just yell at each other. So if it's using a lot of resources on every page load, then that actually has an environmental impact as well. And I think that general kind of ethos of WordPress is better for humanity type of thing. For the reason we should be taking responsibility for it. So those platforms have an advantage but I think that there's a lot of promising things that are happening within WordPress and it's becoming a focus which is really good for many reasons and hopefully already we see some amazing improvements made on the performance side and just one more thing that I want to mention is backwards compatibility. Also pros and cons to that but when you're still supporting, I don't know, PHP 5.3 or something like that then obviously it's kind of performance issues and we might want to as a community say well maybe we want to move away from that to a certain extent. So as I mentioned that WordPress is a big open source project and everything has to move taking the entire community into consideration. I think the web page we wanted to make it by default and that resulted in a lot of discussion in that the amount of energy we put in the discussion whether to make it default or not. In that amount of effort, Squarespace, VIX and all those appropriate platforms just end up doing it like releasing those changes. Likewise even if you make it by default or bring other changes, we rely on hosting companies user choose and for example all these appropriate platforms are built in CDN WordPress being self-hosted you download you host it whether they provide CDN or not. So there are a lot of variables like right from the decision making to the hosting companies the consultant agency you hire their technical capability if you are hiring a SEO marketing agency who specializes in that and asking them to give better recommendation for performance that also goes for TOS. If they don't know something how can they make good recommendation about that. So there's a lot of variables but 43% of the websites market share anything we do we have to be mindful not breaking because when we make mistakes a lot many sides break. Yeah, I'll just add something regarding like some of these other products as well, of course now you know with Gutenberg and some of the projects on improving the content creation and removing some of the friction making it better. It's really important, I think, for WordPress site owners to be able to create content in a better way and more appealing content. But once the site is published, you know, at the end of the day, it's about succeeding on the web, whatever the site owner's goal is, whether it's selling stuff and things like this. And then user experience is really important at this point. And I think some of these other CMSs have understood that because they have taken some case studies and they understand that, you know, if the site is, you know, that much faster, their own customers will actually succeed on the web. And that's really an important argument for other competitors. And it's actually a feature from my perspective, right? And so this is something that I think that we should all as a community try to do more is tie user experience improvements back to return on investment and business goals. If we want to succeed on the web, it is not only about like adding features and stuff like this, it's also about delightful experience for the people consuming the content across the world, not only in the US, not only in Europe, but everywhere, right? And I think that's a key, key thing to keep in mind. And for that specifically, some of the other CMSs have, you know, taken this specific topic at heart. And we've seen do that really like promoting this like we are offering a platform that's going to make you succeed because it's more performance and stuff like this. Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. You know, tying the business returns to performance is also helps decision makers decide to invest in performance. And also thank you, Miriam, for bringing up sustainability. At Contributor Day yesterday, we formed the official sustainability group in WordPress. It's pretty exciting. And sustainability is definitely tied to performance. But they're not a one to one. It's not always exactly the same thing. But I think it's an important thing to bring up because it motivates people. It's something that people already really value. And again, can help make the right decision. Back to my questions. So when you're building your site or service or product, there's often a tradeoff between adding features in and performance. How do you think about that? How do you find that balance between the two? Anyone who wants to go? Well, I guess I just spoke a little bit about this. I had this forever debate with many people. Is performance a feature? I feel that it is in many way. And I'll keep it really short. But I think that it's about finding the right balance. You have to offer the right capabilities for whatever your goal is for your website. But without forgetting user experience, if your users are not even seeing your features because they are dropping up before, then it's probably not a good thing. And maybe a good way to do that is just try to analyzing the drop off point of your users. And maybe do some maybe testing as well. It's like, okay, if I had this feature, obviously, it may affect my performance by this much. Is it really valuable? Is it translating to anything that's useful for the users? And that's probably the way to find the right balance. And like I said, if you have some fancy interaction and you see this is the time where all your users are dropping off, it's probably a feature you should remove. So having built a product for the last few years, basically when you're when you're building a product and planning it, everything that you're going to implement, you need to consider multiple aspects to it, not just what it does, but what it might impact and what it might not do. And so performance is one is actually just one of those things, meaning like, when we implement something, we have to consider security, we have to consider user experience, we have to consider, you know, does this detract from that? So from my perspective, performance should definitely be part of that. And as a product developer, if your product is is starting to be slow for your users, they're not going to care how amazing your features are. Seriously, I mean, if any of you not any of you, you all use products. And if it starts to feel slow and sluggish, you're going to lose patience. I was just using a platform for something recently, I won't say what it was, because I don't want to, you know, bad mouth it. And it's not from the WordPress space. I had to use it every day. I think it was probably targeted towards users in the US. So maybe there it was fast. But I'm in Israel. And it was so slow, that I probably would never use it again. Like, and that's, that's just an example. So you I, in my opinion, always consider performance on every part of your product, whether it's the WordPress site or if you're like a hosting company, or have some kind of platform around it, also your dashboard, you need to make sure that people are getting this kind of snappy experience, because none of us have patience. And we all have other things we want to do rather than wait five seconds for something to happen. So I think performance should always be part of the checks. Okay, we're implementing this, what will it do to performance? Will it make it worse? Will it make it better? We'll say the same. Super valuable for your user experience. And in the end, user experience is what it's all about. And what will keep your product sticky? So as agency, when we're building new feature, it's very easy to get the performance right for us, like definitely require some budget, some efforts. The trouble starts when the feature involves some integrating something like header bidding, or third party analytics tracking, some kind of service, which either puts blocking JavaScript, or some way affects the performance. And then there's no way you can make it better, like, without getting in touch with the third party. And that's where a lot of friction happens. Like, so the thing is that the client or the site owner wants a better core by vital, better scores, all those things. But it gets tough to tell them that make them understand that this is the site is combination of everything that loads on the page, including third parties. And if anybody has a blocking JavaScript or something like that, that is something we need to get to get them on board to fix it. And that's where it gets tough. Like, even if they have budget, even if they have desired to make things fast, we just end up being dependent on the third parties. Like, sometimes we just move some of the JavaScript to worker thread. So the main thread doesn't block, but it's not always possible to do that without breaking the very first reason they added that JavaScript in the page. I'll just add something very quickly that may be useful with these audience, especially those who are building sites for clients. I feel sometimes there's this kind of friction between developer or the agency and the client, you know, the client pushing for more features and the developer pushing for like more better performance. And it goes back to what I was saying about analyzing the cost of features. And I think that, you know, demonstrating to customers that a specific feature is actually hurting their goals. For example, you know, adding some fancy things on the product page, reducing the actual sales or checkouts raised is a great way to actually inform your clients like, okay, you want this fancy feature, but it's actually making you lose this amount of money. So with A.B. testing is kind of a good way to do that. So yeah, if you have this fight with your clients, maybe. All right, we've got time for like one or two more questions here, just sort of going to wrap up. I'm going to ask, let's see, optimization plugins are very popular in the WordPress space. They often add features and optimize kind of after the site has been built. I see them somewhat as a bandaid to performance problems that maybe you've already built into your site. How do you think about that? Is that a good thing? Should more features that are landing in optimization plugins be in core? And or is it okay that we have this system of optimization plugins? What's your take on that? Anyone? Yeah, we'll go. I think that they are definitely critical and will remain to be critical. There's a lot more that we can do in core. But you know, there's a huge difference between optimization on optin and optimization by default. And there's only so much we can do in WordPress core. We can be maybe a bit more opinionated, but not to the extent that plugin can be. And it also comes to integrating with external APIs, WordPress being distributed, there is no central really service that we can connect to. And so this really is plugin territory and for a good reason. So you know, I definitely think that there's a lot more that we can do in core, but I do feel that these plugins are in a really good place to offer more opinionated, bleeding edge features enabled by default. So to add to that, like, so as there is some part which is plugin territory, I feel like the WordPress itself run as a part of like LAMP stack or LAMP stack. And there are things that shouldn't be the WordPress territory also. Like for example, if you can add like a full page cache using nginx or something like radius or memcache, you should try that. Like if you have, you can have MySQL query caching or PHP op caching. So there are multiple levels or layers where you can optimize performance. And once you do that, then leave the remaining things to the WordPress. So I personally try to suggest that if you can move things like performance-related optimization at earlier level, like before things like that, I think it's going to be a great way to optimize the WordPress. That's even better. I just like to add, so I think that one of the great things about WordPress is that every site is super unique, right? Like, no two sites are going to be the same. They're kind of like snowflakes. And so to try to have in core optimization that applies to all of those snowflakes, I don't know if that's ever going to be achievable. So I think it's going to be a great way to do that. So I think that if you have a site in the WordPress admin, it could say something to the user, like be like an assistant like, hey, you know, maybe instead of that plug-in, which has these resource issues, use that one, or maybe, you know, you have this plug-in installed, click this setting and it will optimize your site. Like, maybe at some point, the user will get some kind of information, and if that happens, we'll continue to server all. Cool. Are we at time? We have one more question? One more question. Okay. I'm going to do one more question and then we'll wrap up here. So this is actually, this is going to, this is the question that I didn't give you guys ahead of time, so this is, but it's easy. So going beyond performance, what is your dream or vision for WordPress? We're at the 20-year birthday today, or right now. Imagine we're ten years old and we're celebrating its 30th birthday. What does WordPress look like to you? What is it doing? I've been in the WordPress space for about 15 years, and I brought my daughter, Sarah, to this conference. It's the first time I brought one of my kids, and she's 19, and it's been really interesting hearing her perspective as a young person, as opposed to me, an old-timer, and also when you're in the industry for a long time, you start to, like, not see things, you know, from a fresh perspective. And what I think I would love to see is a situation where WordPress becomes appealing to younger people. She's been actually giving really good ideas to me. Like, how do young people get influenced in terms of what they use, what products they use? So we don't do this. She's like, why do I know about Wix? You know, why do I know about Webflow, but I never hear about WordPress? She's like, this is, like, a whole big world here, but in my day-to-day life, it's not something that ever comes across my radar. So, you know, she threw out, like, TikTok influencers, whatever. I don't know if we're going that direction, so there's, and if we can, but I think we need more exposure to younger generation to get them in the door to start using it from one side and then the other side is they are used to a certain type of user experience with the apps that they use. On Instagram, you click a button, you have something online, and you can create amazing media, whatever. And it would, you know, that's the user experience that the younger generation expects and rightfully so. They don't want to think about servers or versions or upgrades or whatever. And I don't know how, but in ten years time, maybe we can get to a situation where that's kind of an experience that people can also get with WordPress. So, like, we have put a lot of effort on Gutenberg. I think a big amount of effort of that scale can go to media management where, so, like, image formats and optimizations in one part, but so today, like, a lot of content creation, especially collaborative happens outside WordPress, like, we build, we make, like, copy editing in Google Doc, then image editing in some other tools, then video editing, leaving feedback for videos. So, a lot of content creation happens outside WP Admin, probably that in coming years should move to the WP Admin. And I think performance will play a big role. Like, many people use these different tools because they have some performance trade-offs and also some feature trade-offs. So, I think that's a big opportunity for WordPress to try to be that content where, like, you take pictures and, by default, you upload it on WordPress, like, media library. And later on, you decide when you go back to your home, or these three pictures, I want to add to my blog post, but rest of, also, I can keep in my media library so that you're, like, all the things about you, your private nodes, your content. So, the WP Admin can be your home on the Internet. This question wasn't written, but I have many dreams, but I'll keep it really short. And, you know, one that I think is really important and that I hope we get to, it's not actually performance-related, but it's the onboarding flow to WordPress. And we've seen many hosting and plugins and stuff, stuff like this, trying to address this problem. But related to what you were saying about younger generation and bringing people to WordPress, you know, my dream is just that as a user you can easily capture what is your goal on the web. You know, why do you choose the web over other platforms and really to have your website, you know, created with the necessary tools and set up that you need to have a good starting point, you know. And I would love to see that by default, you know, in core, and so that would be a little dream, like, hey, I want to, you know, sell something, and in three clicks you are able to add your products, you know. So, that's my dream. Thank you. Thank you so much to the panel. Please give them a very, very big hand. Many interesting points came up, but before I say anything, anybody who has questions, please, there's two microphones, halfway up the stairs or down, depending where you're coming from. So if anyone would like to ask a question to the panel, please, get to the microphone and get asking. In the meantime, I'm just going to say, I'm delighted that we, that certain topics came up, such as sustainability and user experience as a designer, which is also connected to accessibility, of course, because that means that we include everyone when the user experience is great, and also something else. But we were, I will mention in a minute, because we've got questions. Have we? Yes, please. Hello, so Matthew here. You talk a lot about Wix and other hosted solutions, but I think what we have to work on with WordPress is the other hosted solution, like Ghost, like maybe, well, Strapi is another solution, kind of a little different, but there are a lot of other CMSs, like Ghost, that does the same thing with maybe less plugins, but more GS related, and I think it's, where is the performance, and if we want to do good thing, maybe WordPress has to go there a little, well, GS, JavaScript, the CMS, and so... Can I answer? Well, so, there's a reason that WordPress continues to have larger market shares, I think, than those platforms, and that's because in the end, the content management experience is so straight streamlined and just powerful in WordPress, and so flexible, but I don't know if you're aware, but there is the REST API in WordPress, so people can build a headless, decoupled implementation of WordPress, use a React front-end, or whatever they want to use, although in my opinion, I don't know why anyone would use a front-end for a website, really, just don't. Sometimes it's developers making decisions because it's cool and shiny, but don't let your developers make decisions because things are cool and shiny. Anyways, but you can if you want to because we have the REST API, so WordPress can give you that type of experience if that's what you want, and that's the beauty of WordPress, it's very flexible. You can use the standard version, it can be decoupled, it can be static, it's just, you no longer the interviewer now, you can also. I think we have a question on the right. Hi, thank you for the discussion. I wanted to ask about WP Admin, which is a massive performance Wild Wild West at the moment, that nobody seems to care about. Every screen loads about 160 resources of JavaScript and CSS, no regard to context. Do you think about that as a user experience problem for the WordPress platform because admins are people too? Thank you. Yeah, it is definitely a problem. The way I personally look at it is we have many challenges and which one do we pick first? There's a lot of investment that's going into improving the content creation on WP Admin. It's true that from a performance perspective it hasn't been that much of a priority, although it should always be taken into consideration. But like I mentioned earlier on, I think caring about performance is fairly new at the level that we are at now and it is true that for now the priority has been about trying to make WordPress websites in the front end, so for the consumers better and not so much in the WP Admin, although there has been some improvement in the WP Admin as well. I think it's a matter of priorities and how many resources or people and contributors can work on this. There's not so much about saying we shouldn't, it's more like when and against other priorities. So this actually just came up. I was looking for benchmark data comparing the WP Admin performance because the focus around performance tends to be on the front end or websites to succeed. And the success has a lot to or mostly to do with how people experience the website when they visit it. So most of the focus tends to go towards how the front end experience is in terms of performance. But if the back end is slow, then the user experience is bad and eventually that's going to impact also how and if people even use WordPress. I was not able to get any benchmarking data because it's not a focus. It's a focus of awareness even that it would be good to give some attention because it does create a poor user experience and in the end, like I said earlier, that's what creates a sticky product or just doesn't. We have one more question I think. Yeah, hi. Can you hear me? Okay, so I actually the conversation came up with the difference between Wix and everything. So for me as a user, they are actually really easy to use because there are not much plugins and a lot of other stuff. In WordPress, although it's good that we have multiple themes and multiple options, but the main problem which I have seen with people facing is that if they are, for example, working with Elementor, and they will move to maybe Gutenberg or some other platform, sorry, some other plugin editor, so they will actually they have to learn it from the start. So don't you think there is like a gap in that one, like maybe we need to strategize it so that like most people who are using it so that not only developers can use it, some people, like normal people can also use that. So yeah, that's my question. Thank you. I think it comes back to what we were saying about the user experience, maybe the younger generation. It's how you describe like one click and I've got a site that does X. It may be what WordPress needs is like this kind of very simple, straightforward like experience that everyone can get out of the gate and then if they want something more complex and they can do it themselves, but it's just I'm just picturing like almost like Instagram, not exactly, but something that's just like this is what it is. You can't do much to it. You can manage your content here, get it live. You know, add media, add video, add whatever you want and that's it. So I think there is a use case for that type of very, very simple almost like limited user experience in WordPress because like you said it can be very confusing. When people see the admin for the first time, I mean I think it's just like they don't even know where to look first and then they're like in the settings section, there's like what is a permalink? Who uses permalink in everyday language, right? Like, you know, and we're so used to it. So I think it's a good point. The fragmentation problem is definitely a problem and right now it is a problem that the burden is definitely put on the site owner. So when someone creates a site, it's overwhelming the amount of plugins and things like this and it's what it's very, very capable. There's a ton of extensions but it's also what puts the burden on new users and people who are not really used to work with WordPress and so it ties back to what I was saying about better onboarding, you know, how can we, you know, remove this burden from the site owners while keeping in mind that, you know, there's an entire ecosystem around WordPress like all of you plugin developers and stuff like this also, you know, we can't just really use these 10 plugins, right? We need to keep in consideration that everyone needs to have a chance to submit the plugin and offer extendability and so how do we make it easier for the site owners while still, you know, being fair to all plugin developers, it's a difficult challenge to address. I do think that there's a lot more we can do. Maybe, you know, this is also the thing that AI could help with like saying, hey, you know, these are the tools that you're using, these type of plugins and there's definitely a lot more guidance we can do. I think we've got time for one last question. May I ask one? Hello, my name is Boyan. I wanted to talk about images. We all know that images are a very important factor behind performance, not just for WordPress but for the web as a whole and at the moment we are at the point in time where we're sort of deciding the next generation image formats that we're going to use to replace the legacy formats that we have been using for a long time. I know Adam has been driving the efforts of including the next generation image formats in WordPress core so thank you for doing that. I wanted to ask you about JPEG Excel specifically. It has been a bit of a controversial format as of late if you all don't know the story. Basically Google decided to drop that format from Chrome late last year which was met by the community with a bit of controversy. One of the reasons that was cited was lack of interest by the community although there have been many companies that have supported JPEG Excel and the reason that I'm mentioning it now is that just earlier this week there has been another major development where Apple indicated support for JPEG Excel is coming in Safari 17 and they're operating systems as well. The web is around whether the advantages of JPEG Excel over Avif are significant enough to make it a viable additional format to support. There is sort of a limit to how many different formats browsers can support. There is some cost to doing that. The other thing about these formats that's very interesting is that they're not static like the Avif and JPEG Excel algorithms keep doing so when you look at studies to try to see to compare them it's difficult to look at them because you really have to look at the very current implementations and also there's a lot of nuance about what size image is it are you using it on the web JPEG Excel has some features that are not available in other formats but to those really help us on the web. I will say that the recent decision by Safari was kind of a surprise I think and it might change how things progress. There are some really cool things about JPEG Excel that other formats don't support but I'm not 100% sure that they're valuable to us especially in WordPress given that the way we generate images is in PHP at least right now and there's no support for JPEG Excel in PHP with Avif you have to get up to I think PHP 8.1 to get the support but at least we're moving in that direction so I think ultimately and we saw with WebP it was very we did not adopt that as the default because there's the other issue of besides can you see it on the web is what happens when you download the image to your computer and then you try to use it somewhere else so this is the challenge that all modern formats face so right now I'm a big fan of WebP because I think it buys us a lot of the improvements maybe not quite as much as Avif but also broadly compatible almost everywhere not you'll never catch up to the legacy formats but it is quite quite good in terms of compatibility so I'm creeping in to interrupt because I know that Adam you could carry on for another all day long talking about this but you'll be around won't you so and also I recommend to check out on WordPress TV work in Bangkok where there's a talk by Adam on images and also very interestingly a talk by Alberto Medina who I believe is your colleague at Google isn't he about exactly how do we turn WordPress into something that is as easy to use for younger generations as Instagram and TikTok and all the rest of it so I really recommend that you do that thank you very much to our panel please give them the biggest hand ever thank you thank you very much I don't have hands left thank you thank you thank you before you leave please sorry can I have my sheets again I have a few announcements don't leave yet I know so now I'm putting my glasses back on so first of all there's the first WP Connect session at 1130 at the Trianti balcony which is with our Miriam again it's on how to pitch your ideas to someone company, client, sponsor so this is a really helpful session go to it and then this is really important it's the game the first question of the day you can't miss this one so the rules are just in case you missed the opening remarks that every attendees that's each one of you you have a set of four postcards in your swag bag so if you don't have the swag bag go get it and you need to mingle network meet new people and trade your cards so that will help you meet new people and you will get the other four postcards from the community booth after you respond to this question is WordPress older than Facebook and Twitter is that is it true or false this is your first question you can go now I mean you've all gone already but that's alright for us I don't know that much because this is the first time that I'm experiencing the city without the actual islands the islands is where I usually like to hang out but even that when I go on a holiday so when I'm at events and when I'm at work I'm like when I'm at watch the ocean have some quiet and just enjoy and relax a little bit so the opposite of what I usually am when I'm on my time off so tell us the truth AFK when you're on holiday or do you still open up the laptop and check emails so I try very much not to but I own the business and so it's always this constant game of do you own the business or does the business own you so this is one of the challenges of running this but also from my side I think it's one of the exciting things about it because you take responsibility you're able to drive things forward for yourself or your team so I don't fear opening the laptop let's say but I try not to especially on the days off so I notice that when I have downtime I kind of want to do nothing like I just want to sit and just stare maybe meditate yes just kind of like a gratefulness kind of session just being in a source of water is my last ultimate relaxation you know just soaking and the water and the islands are beautiful right incredible and waking up seeing the ocean in front of you you know that's the dream isn't it aww I love so when it comes to work camps are you more hallway track or do you catch sessions so um I'm very much a hallway track type of person walking around we have our booth and even before we started sponsoring the sponsors area was my main place for getting to know people getting to know the community and I learned a lot from here while the sessions if there is something interesting it kind of comes to you and you can watch the replays after but I'm very much all about these things and now that we're growing um there's a lot of meetings and back to back meetings today right after this until 5pm everything is uh fully book solid so um and then we're gonna go to the parties right so it's very much hallway all the way I love it yeah I find that I'm definitely more hallway and unless I really want to support a good friend who's speaking or yeah I think last year I caught one and it was the panel on WordPress acquisitions and selling right after my talk so I saw them kind of like going on stage uh after yeah no I love it I'm so excited that you're here we just actually met very well we've known each other yes we just met like had our little meeting that's so crazy to me and I love that you're a musician I'm a musician too so you're actually still doing it right do you perform like live um I used to that was my main thing or my previous life let's say touring and staying on the stages more than 250 days a year and basically building websites while traveling that was how I got into WordPress in the last place but recently I've been mostly focusing on the business and I do play in a band it's called Lords of Uptime Lords of Uptime Uptime yes this is basically a band that was formed at CloudFest which is another event that happens here in Europe mostly and it's formed by other techniques techniques in the space and you play CloudFest over there so do you guys play cover songs? yes some cover songs and there's a few originals that are all talking about the crowd so it's awesome it's hilarious and awesome so we tried to make it happen for this year this year it didn't really pan out but hopefully next time what do you play? it's like hard rock and what instrument do you play? I'm a lead guitarist and you sing? I used to be a lead singer and guitarist in my band back in the day I want to hear I played the violin for 10 years but then I'm a performer and I still dance I miss music sometimes I get that feeling as you would know that you play guitar and your fingers and you're like I crave it I have a little memory still there and you're still using it but that's one of those things that even if you don't get to play for a little while you just pick it back up and it's still there I love learning this and the arts of wordpress is that we're so diverse we all love coming together because of wordpress but then we all have other lives whether we're parents whether we're musicians whether we're football I'm like where am I? I love that I love learning about everything I think that one of the cool things is that there's a bunch of musicians in the space there's such a creative and interesting transition there's two sides to being a musician one is the creative side making something out of nothing and that's very much like what we all do in wordpress we create something that is not really tangible but it's there it's really there for us and then on the other side being a musician is very much the startup kind of mentality and entrepreneurial type of spirit which feeds in really well being makers growing products running agencies and I see that a lot in space isn't it so interesting how it correlates with what we do in software it's the same sort of practice different but similar do you love it? I do so you also just had you have two little babies how old are they? two version 2.6 and the other one is 7 months okay we'll mine our version 21 19 and 17 that's already a mature product they're starting to need to be sunsetted you know what I mean? not yet yours is still fresh exactly every few hours you can really go with this we're sunsetting the children side of mine and they're going to become a new version into their adult life they'll reset and go back to it at one point that's awesome do you have a boy, a girl, a girl and a boy do you love them? definitely it's been an interesting transition as well for life running a business, juggling family making sure that there is time for the team and the family as well the second talk of the morning in track 1 and I am so happy to have the opportunity to present the next speaker she is very special this woman has so many achievements she is this chief marketing officer she is the CEO of WPdeveloper.com which powers 5 million WordPress websites that is a lot of WordPress websites Afsana is the community deputy for WordPress.org and she's a key organiser for Workamp Asia 2023 for which I am so grateful because it was a wonderful Workamp in 2021 and welcome Daka 2019 so she has an incredible track record in the community as well as in her industry I am very very much looking forward to her talk because Afsana is joining us all the way from Bangladesh give her the warmest welcome please Afsana Diya hi thank you good morning what can you do how are you guys doing so as you guys are not sleepy I was sleepy so I grabbed coffee to overcome my jet lag I flew around 14 hours so yeah today we are going to talk about changing landscape of WordPress marketing how we use to market our WordPress product and how we are doing it now so we are going to discuss that this is Afsana Diya and CMO at WP developer WP developer is a WordPress product company which is powering up around 5 million user for using their WordPress before I before I start the session I would like to talk about my WordPress journey a bit so for me I started using WordPress I started using WordPress back in 2009 when I was in high school so I started using WordPress I didn't know about the ecosystem I didn't know about the other plugins I didn't know about anything else right and then after a while I tried to make my own website for using WordPress I tried to make a home base that's back in 2012 so is there anyone who used WordPress back in 2012 I see few hands so if you remember there was no base builder back in that time there was no Gutenberg there was nothing like this at that time so the focus was theme you had to pick a theme and then you built your website with a lot of customization so at that time I don't even remember which theme I used after that I finished my undergrad back in 2016 I did my undergrad in business administration I had dual major in I had dual major in marketing and e-business so when I finished my undergrad I joined a WordPress product company I got involved in the WordPress product at that time I reformed my personal website since I am no code so for me it was hard to make the website back in 2012 and back in 2016 as well in 2016 there was base builder so there was already popular Elementor was starting at that point but if you remember there was no such customization like this at that time so I still had the struggle then I started working with WordPress product company I worked with a product company which was doing great accidentally how come a company can do great accidentally because they didn't know what's working and what's not they didn't have a marketing team so I tried to explore WordPress marketing I tried to do multiple things some of the things worked and I got some good ROI marketing initiatives moved forward to 2018 I joined WP developer at their starting point at that time we had only few thousand user for our one plugin in 2019 we got our first 1,000 user for essential add-ons in 2019 I also got involved with other WordPress community we had our first WordPress Dhaka in Bangladesh I got involved in make WordPress and then moved forward to COVID all of the other pandemic stuffs and struggles and technology out there Gutenberg, REST API, React today right now we have 5 million user for WP developer with all of our products so that's kind of achievement so the things I have done for WP developer we have done for WP developer some of the thing works or maybe a lot of thing works the thing is that I have been in WordPress ecosystem for last 8 years doing WordPress marketing moving with the community I know what is going on and what we did and what not so I would like to talk about my experience I would like to share some insights before that how many of you are marketer here can you raise your hand I see few hands how many of you are WordPress developer thanks to you because for attending my session and how many of you are WordPress business owner or product owner interestingly that's the lowest thank you so much today we are going to I am going to request everyone to don't sell WordPress plugin like 2016 because why we are talking about that because if there was something that was working great that was great probably work back in 2018 2016 but that's not going to work now and if you keep doing that you are basically pissing your users off you are making your user frustrated with the same things that you keep doing for years the world has changed if you look at the CMS WordPress has grown so much over the time we are talking about WordPress and other solutions so if you look at those platform they are doing so many things and for WordPress in 2016 or 2018 there was very few WordPress product company there are many so if they find a solution which is better than yours if they find a solution that is more powerful than yours that would be the better thing they will go for previously people used to come to the customer support in your website they used a lot of time with pre-sell with the support rate and then made a purchase decision but right now this is the data from recent time there is only 5% customers who use who come to the website to talk with the support rate before making purchase decision but interestingly there are 27% people who actually spend more time on self-research before buying your WordPress plugin more interestingly there are 77% people who actually prefer who thinks that the buying process is complicated purchase journey is complicated for software product so without that things have changed so far if you look at the scenario what happened previously if you are a business owner or if you are an end user you own the company you would look for the solution that you need then you would request for a product demo but right now you are using your product so the team member will activate the free trial they will add more team member and then team member will actually fall in love with your product they will manage the higher authority to get this product for them previously it was done by the product owner or the company owners so why this happened there are some challenges what are the challenges we are facing so far I will talk a little bit about the challenges the first thing is technological advancement think about the Gutenberg React or REST API it has changed the way people used to think and perceive about what's the ecosystem so there are so many new technology there are new languages that we need to adapt for our company I can give one short example for our company when Gutenberg was getting available back in 2018-19 we tried to explore Gutenberg for our product so we were trying to look for React developer we are based in Dhaka Bangladesh in Bangladesh the WordPress community is very popular there are a large number of people active in the WordPress community so we look for React developer and interestingly there was no one so what we had to do is we tried to make our in-house team to learn about React we arranged in-house React course and right now we have a lot of React developer in our team so that's one problem we had to solve in a way but I know a lot of friends of mine who are struggling for the take in recent years which is changing the way they use to market their product and another big changes is the behavior of web creator if you remember previously we used to pick a theme and make the website but right now there are a lot of face builder like Elementor, Divi Beaver Builder and there is Gutenberg which is all alone very much ready to make the website so right now previously the same web creator the way they used to think their mindset has been changed and they tried to find a solution which is more relevant so previously there was very few WordPress plugin there was very few WordPress theme but right now there are around 60,000 WordPress free plugin in the repository which means you have 60,000 WordPress plugin ready for your next website as well as also 100,000 of individual who are selling from their own website or probably marketplace so you have ready solution and WordPress infrastructure also very much ready for the customization without more effort so the attention span of customers that's very limited another things that manipulate the landscape of marketing is the race and fall of social media marketing so do you remember about Clubhouse have anyone used Clubhouse two years back there was a whole hyped about Clubhouse it was an invitation only platform so the invitation was also limited for the user who were using the platform so it feels like superior if you can get a invitation to Clubhouse it seems like Clubhouse is going to be the next big thing but where is Clubhouse now are any of you using it now no, I don't see any hand so yes there are many changes over the social platform because that's one of the major thing we use for marketing right now there are few other social platform like TikTok and other stuffs which could be very interesting for some of the users some of the products but most of the products probably is not and then we also have another big problem about paid media marketing if you know I can remember back in 2018 when we were trying paid ad there was very few competitors so the ad cost was very low because a company is very serious about WordPress products they wouldn't use the paid ads but look at this now if you search about WordPress probably on fast pace of Google search you will see half pace of ads for different kind of products meaning there are a lot of competition in the paid ads but the reason is the cost of ads increase so high and part user acquisition through paid ads is very expensive and there are another challenges GDPR privacy concern I assume by this time everyone is pretty much concerned about the GDPR because it can get you sued for 20 million just for one case so that's another thing we need to keep in our mind before doing anything and there is another major problem with Google changing their algorithm every now and then so if you are using some sort of tools probably it will be easier to manage your SEO on your WordPress website thanks to the WordPress SEO plugins it got easier compared to 5 years or 10 years ago there is no doubt but when you figure out how to rank your landing pace on Google before you figure out that Google will change their algorithm again it happened to many of you I think so that's another thing Google algorithm is changing so much comparing with previous time and right now and the SEO become more harder since a lot of people are making a lot of effort to rank on the fast pace which is not good for Google specifically when you are trying to rank higher that makes it harder for your competitor as well and there is another talent and skills gaps in WordPress marketing personally when we try to hire the capable and talented people for our marketing team one common challenge is that if there is someone who is capable of taking the marketing things well then probably they don't have a take background if they have a take background they don't have marketing skills so you have to actually train people to know and understand the WordPress ecosystem and after all these challenges we need to start selling in a way that our empire wants to purchase so how can we do that one of the thing is you have to understand your user first you have to understand your target audience not the whole WordPress users are your target audience or not that anyone randomly use your target audience you have to be very specific about that you have to analyze your customer behavior track your user journey depending on where are your users are coming from where is they are which page of your website they are actually scrolling which button they are clicking you have to track to understand better and make your customer experience better for the next when you have to test your product with the real person most of the time a lot of WordPress owners or plugin developer do they build something they test it themselves and then they release the product and they expect the outcome but it doesn't happen right so if you have build something you have to try someone the third party to try your product to understand what it feels like for the end user and if I talk about the team members have you ever heard about a person with 10 hands 10 hands means WordPress developer who build the plugin do the UI and do the marketing all alone so that's not going to work anymore you need to have your solid team from design team development team, testing team marketing team and support team to ensure that your product is ready to meet the users real need so what we can do we need to focus on customers how they want how they want and the experience they are going to get through your product so here comes the PLG anyone heard about PLG so PLG is product-led growth it's a way that you can build your product in a way so it can be used it can sell itself focusing on leveraging the products to drive growth automatically I can give you some examples so you can understand so most of these tools are very well known from Slack to Dropbox to Figma these are SAS tools but if you can talk about the pattern all of this product they need to use by other party for example I can talk about Zoom if you sign up Zoom and want to have a video call you need another person so you are inviting another person they are signing up for the product so your product needs to sell itself and we also have chatGPT and AI which is another big thing I think we have a few sessions about chatGPT and AI today I just asked chatGPT about what they can do for marketing and this is the stuff they suggested so it's not like they can do it everything and they will do it better than but there's a good way to utilize your team's potential and probably spend less time on some tasks so I have few quick tips for WordPress marketer that I have learned from my own experience for all the products I have been marketing so dig deeper and we do competitors analysis a lot of people actually copied the feature from your competitor but don't do that look at the competitors features and websites and they are even customer review to understand what's working well for them what they are not doing well and what they are not doing well and what they are not doing well and what they are not doing well actually do bring those things from in your products and do NPS and reviews to measure your customer satisfaction I know in WordPress people actually don't use these things much people mostly rely on the product and you can put an email campaign to ask for NPS need promoter scores you can understand if your customers are satisfied with the product or not and again there is video if I look back a few years back there was no much videos but there are 100 videos of each and every topics and there are also web in-ear and live streaming podcasts that people are using to market their WordPress product and another tips is that you need to set up your pixel from the start when you launch a product and use those visitors when you are ready and then after a while you will try to re-target them for better campaign also make most out of your content marketing publish resourceful content why I say resourceful is because for each and every WordPress topic you need to publish 50 articles on the same topic so what's the point you have to make your content at least that gives some kind of help which others are not providing you also need to keep updating your content so if you have published something back in 2020 which was relevant at that time so you need to build you need to keep updating your content and also build guides which can be helpful for your users and also leverage influencer marketing if you talk about influencer marketing a lot of people think that it's only for the beauty blogs or probably other stuff but even for WordPress actually utilize influencer marketing if you are building a WooCommerce plugin we have BobWP attending WhatCam Europe if you can onboard Bob to promote your product that would be a great use and sponsor, contribute or attend WhatCam or community events you cannot measure the exact outcome from these things but the amount of exposure you will get the amount of experience you will gain from these events that's unbeatable so take a stand for a better future through sustainable and ethical marketing what I mean is like you need to keep the honesty and reliability and privacy of your user so you can make the marketing space better not clumsy so that you don't make your customer or potential customer frustrated about your product so we have few takeaways from this session understand your audience well in depth so what they want to do how they want to do and how you can help them build a passionate and dynamic team who really wants to do something with all their passion create a really really good product there is no alternative of that and you need to also add up the technology use tool for better performance and make most out of it stay updated about the take and the community and whatever is happening around make it sustainable and do it ethically thank you thank you so much Afsana for a fantastic talk I've got so many takeaways from it on top of what you have said and personally I am so delighted once again said something that is so important which is research and test and know exactly what your customer wants super interesting now as before if anyone has any questions the microphones are half way down or up the stairs so please gather and ask your questions to Afsana in the meantime well I have more than one actually it's a really incredible growth that you showed us of your WP developer I mean already 100,000 users is impressive but then you jumped from that to 5 million do you think that the pandemic helped or you were at the helm of the marketing so what did you do to get to such an amazing result well that's a secret very good answer we did actually a lot of things from our perspective it's not like just a pandemic we were actually growing before the pandemic as well but definitely pandemic held the whole ecosystem as well one of the major thing that I personally feel is very unique about my team is that all of them are passionate and we do whatever we do with all their passion and we do it constantly so there are also a lot of things that didn't work but the things that work those are the things that a lot of people probably didn't even try consistency and a great team we have a question please hello thank you so much for the talk I had a question if you could just get a little bit more specific about how you track the customer journey there are many tools to track customers journey for example if you are looking for WordPress have you installed Google Tag Manager and other stuff on your website I'm coming at it from more of a video angle on the back end of things I was just hoping to get a general idea Google Tag Manager and also Google Tracking System if those are perfectly set up for your website you will see already few things like which source your users are coming from your Google dashboard and there are also few other tools which is SAS tools you can use for more in-depth understanding I hope I have answered your question thank you very much thank you any other questions I'm going to just check if we have any questions from our online audience in the meantime I don't think so unless we have a question I have one question great presentation great numbers to see on the screen so I'm sure this question could be a lot of people are asking about this question like specifically for WordPress what source of channel you were using to generate those numbers like content marketing social media marketing or maybe Google ads I'm sure this is more like test and try thing based on your experience what you suggest actually there are many different platforms we have pride for our company we have around 10 products and we are using different platform for different products for example if you have a product which is relevant to end user who roam around in Facebook for that product Facebook would work for some of our product some of the platform work and other didn't but in general if you ask me for WordPress the best platform is Twitter you would agree and Google ads also re-targeting campaigns work well for WordPress Facebook and other platform is for very niche user but right now YouTube is also getting popular YouTube ads I hope that I have answered your questions thank you thank you I have got time for a couple more questions if anyone wants to ask but in the meantime I actually have quite a few but one thing that interests me a lot we are only like a couple of hours in and already AI has been mentioned many times and we have a panel coming up and various lightning talks about AI so you mentioned this as well you had earlier about what chat you can do for you there was also market research which obviously it can do but how do you feel about actual customer research because that's something that you pointed out as very important how do you feel about that can that ever be substituted for market research an actual user research so talking to real users can GPT do that yeah yeah so for customer research we did the computer we do the computer research in depth so we not just the WordPress repository but also for all of the relevant and probably not just full competitor even the partial competitors who are having similar type of product so we tried to check whatever they are doing from their website from their social media from their community which things they are doing and how they are doing we tried to see that for users experience we tried to talk with our users we tried to send different kind of customer feedback build one-to-one relationship with our customers so understand better even we were just talking about this yesterday that if you send a survey people will send you generic answer but how about you connect with those in some community in probably some group or forum so they will explain better about their experience using your product Thank you that was really interesting we've got a question I just had a question for say you're a small business and you've got limited resources to focus on marketing what would you consider to be the most vital channels or marketing angles to focus on social media platform you mean any aspect of marketing well the easier one to get started with Twitter and I really understand small business have limited budget so for them probably get started with the content marketing share those in Twitter and other platform but more important is get connected with your existing user even if they are small in amount I mean if you are connected with your users they are the one who can recommend to other people who might need your product so get started slow but get started at the first phase of your product so you can get some visibility from social media you can get started with Twitter that could be your personal forum but get connected with your users great thank you very much thank you any more questions anyone well Afsana this was great thank you so much so interesting and I'm sure that people if you've got more questions that you want to ask Afsana you'll be around whole day and I will be available tomorrow as well so basically for WordPress marketing it depends for WordPress marketing any kind of marketing it depends based on your product depending on how your audiences are so if we can talk in details with the background you have probably I could help or I could suggest few things for you so I'll be available or if I can get connected with me in my Twitter it's Afsana Dia I would love to have more talk thank you great thank you thank you great now are you playing the game for your leave there's a game that you need it's onions in your swag bag nobody did nobody did nobody what's going on there's a voice oh that's what it is okay sorry I was completely what's going on just reminding you to play the game you can find the cards in your swag bag and the first question that I gave you earlier is is WordPress older than Facebook or Twitter if you don't have the swag bag go get it I don't have it either so I haven't seen the postcards yet so it's a very interesting game so next at 12 the next panel is AI and WordPress so make sure not to miss it be back here at 12 everybody welcome again we're Champ Europe 2023 and I'm here with Matt Cromwell welcome Matt thanks for having me how are you doing today so far so good it's a great venue it's really full and busy and I love Athens Athens is amazing have you been here before what have you done so far I came with my family which I'm super excited about so we came this last Saturday and we went to the Acropolis and we just have been taking the metro to different spots went to the National Museum went to the food center yesterday and it's amazing city really really great wow you've done everything we went to the beach beach is nice jumped in the water was it cool and crisp or how is it I've never been in the Mediterranean I guess it's technically the Aegean Sea it's amazing I was expecting a little bit warmer I'm from California and the Pacific is ice cold all the time so I was expecting just a little bit warmer but once you're in it's gorgeous I love Nathost and you also celebrated a huge milestone thank you my wife and I celebrated 20 years of marriage this week congratulations we're super excited about it it's literally this week we thought I have an opportunity to go to Athens and merge them all together I love it now I've known you for a while we used to be sort of neighbors you were in California and I'm in Arizona and you made a huge move to Germany it's been great my wife is German and that's the big reason why we moved so we're close to her family now and the kids are adjusted really well we spoke German at home a lot so it wasn't such a huge transition for them still huge but we smoothed it out before we moved it's also a small town we lived in San Diego which is like the sixth largest city in America and now we're in a small town so it's a lot slower pace we have a little castle in the town and like sometimes I send pictures to my colleagues and they think I live in Disneyland it's very fantasy oriented how are the kids with the transition? they actually have come through really strong they do like it a lot they've made some really fast friends they're involved with sports and one big reason we want to come out here too is like in the states you travel for 8, 9, 10 hours and you're still in the states over here you travel a little bit and you see like three or four different cultures in a short amount of time so being able to go to new countries and new cities we went to Portugal last year for EU they all came out with me we came to Athens this year and hopefully going to wherever the secret place is next year as well is it secret for you? no it's okay we'll still keep it secret yeah exactly it's not in the US I can say that much well we can gather that much hopefully somewhere in Europe yes it's in Europe now what kind of sports do the kids do versus American is it all the same? my boy was already really into American soccer football and so he's still been doing that for sure and my oldest was into volleyball and there are tons of volleyball in Germany so the German volleyball teams are amazing they probably kill it soccer, football and volleyball still happening all the time I myself am a disc golfer not a lot of people, not everybody knows what disc golf is I just got exposed I love it it's also like one of the most accessible sports because it's just like just go out on a field and throw some discs and get it in the basket together and it's fun but the professionals are crazy it's crazy but disc golf is happening growing in Germany right now how often do you get out? the course is like an hour away so I really only get out once a week at the most but they're building a new course closer to me about 20 minutes away so I'm excited about that too hello what are your kids doing in your wife while you're here are they chilling now because you guys have done a lot they're going out today they're going out to one of the islands off of Greece off of Athens I forget which one they're going to my wife is an adventurer so I couldn't stop her from doing things at all she's taking all the kids and having more sites but after a while too the kids get tired they take a lot of breaks and get a nice coffee or juice there's lots of really good smoothie juices out here they're really good so they've been doing that will we get to meet them? that is the plan I think they're going to be here tomorrow they're flying out tomorrow and we've got to check out of our Airbnb I've got to find a hotel for tomorrow because I'm staying till Sunday they're going to come here after we check out oh I see and then do you go home very quickly after too I go home on Sunday I've got to be here all the way to the end I can't leave the organizer team alone we've got to finish the event so you became a work camp you're an organizer for the first time second time I was an organizer last year too last year I did volunteer helping managing the volunteers at the registration desk and this year PR it's been great we have a really awesome team Hossers back there Mike Johnson too Matt Ross we've got a great team we made sure all the content that went out was above bar we definitely helped in a lot of different ways we coordinated this whole thing and I was a backup so here I am good backup it's been fun do you think you'll still continue to organize? I think so I'll probably might pick another team again it's been fun to try to take different teams and try different things I've been in the WordPress community for forever and have a lot to give and offer I always like to see what else there is to do so we'll see it's a labor of love for sure when you get exposed to organizing for me I just want to do it every year as much as possible and you feel it because it's volunteer work but it's just worth it absolutely and it's fun to be around here and feel like I'm helping all these people have a great event how has it been with transition from living in San Diego West Coast time it's almost the end of the entire day moving ahead to Germany and still the same company how's that adjustment been? I have adjusted my work schedule I try to align a little bit with the East Coast schedule and it's not ideal it's really not I'll be honest because the kids come home from school at like one thirty and I'm often working all the way to like eight or nine o'clock and so what I try to do is I try to start earlier at like probably like ten and then I take a break at one thirty when they come home and I have about an hour with them and then I do the rest of the day and I can't really avoid it because that late afternoon early evening time is the prime time for meetings I've made it work and it does work and it's fine but as my role has been changing slowly I'm probably hoping to reduce my meetings and maybe get my schedule a little bit more into a normal routine so we'll see yeah I love that so I stopped tweets with you and um why can't I say them Adam, Adam Horner like okay so I gotta be honest I've known you both for a long time I never made that correlation people do it though it happens all the time I told Adam the other day I can't go to Florida without people calling me Adam he's from Florida every Florida work camp I've been to they're like hey Adam it's so funny I guess that's the privilege of being able to know you both separately for a very long time but when I saw the tweet how did I miss that the great thing is that I worked with Adam a long time ago and it really gave me my first like plug-in job in the WordPress oh my gosh what year was that that was 2012 wow I wonder if that's my first night because that was my first work camp even before work camp, Phoenix San Diego was the after party was it down to downtown Johnny down town downtown Johnny Brown wow that's a deep pull I have a very good memory some people would call it a curse but I don't remember a lot I think that was my very first work camp too oh wow San Diego 2012 oh wow that's awesome and that's also when you got your first plug-in gig yeah I was doing support with Foo Plugins oh my gosh and then I ended up Foo Plugins ended up doing the only premium support for what was then better WP security with the first Chris Wigman built WP security and I was doing the premium support for that plug-in and most people might not know but that became I-Them security better WP security was then I-Them security and now today I-Them is with Stellar WP and I actually oversee I-Them's now and we're doing I'm going to do a little thing we're rebranding into solid WP I don't know if any people have heard about that have you seen these I think I saw it tweeted that's like straight up vintage now old school like 90s 80s little hologram I didn't know what they were called I just told our guy we need those things that yeah no I was actually a friend of mine our colleague Lauren and I was like we need to do this it's a great idea and it's a changey thing we look at it different ways it changes he's like linticular stickers I was like how do you know all these things I never heard that word I hope I remember that I-Them's is becoming solid WP that's my idea this is actually wonderful it's perfect though I-Them's is becoming solid WP and I love that I mean it ensures right you guys it's solid WP how has nobody ever thought about that yet I think there have been a couple of them out there that just haven't really taken off but we're definitely taking off yeah so we skipped step two we talked about I-Them's security to like stellar like give and press yeah in between there so from working with food plugins and working on better WP security I partnered up with Devin Walker in San Diego and we said we want to tackle a really big problem in WordPress and both of us had a lot of experience building websites for non-profit organizations and we're like every non-profit wants to do online donations and it's always terrible it just is not a great experience so we're like what if we solve the online donations problems for WordPress and so we built Give WP and we launched that San Diego 2015 and and yeah that has definitely grown us a ton until we were, Give WP was acquired by Liquid Web in 2021, two years ago now already and Devin and I have been doing more and more at Stellar WP ever since then so that was a lot of terms and names it makes a lot of sense but yeah that's what we do we just got the signal that we're good so good Hello quite a few people ambling in I'll give you time to settle down in the meantime who's excited about AI good who's nervous about AI anyone nervous anyone sort of ambivalent both excited and nervous so I had my head firmly in the sand for a long time and now I've taken it out but so today we have fantastic panel to talk about AI not for the first time in the course of the day it's come up quite a few times already and although I have a good memory I think I'm going to need this so Shane Perman is moderating hello and we have Gabriella Laster and I'm going to do this because it's easier than than your country and and and so I'll give it to you Shane yes you can yes you can indeed I was told I had to do hi everyone hi I'm going to get comfortable if you don't mind alright so I'm going to stand up I'm sorry camera people don't hate me I broke my leg and sitting hurts as a starting point this room is amazing we got to give it up for the Greek organizing team who put together a phenomenal venue and such a good place like mad props alright so as a starting point I kind of want to get a sense of where we're all at so we can have the right conversation alright so so limber up a little I'm going to ask you some questions I actually want you to move your body raise your hand if this is where you're at you've heard a lot of noise about AI but you've never actually used any of it and you're just like I'm here to figure out what's what that's you don't be shy it's okay alright cool what about if you've used like an AI generative chat tool like GPT or bar periodically here and there like you went in you're like where should I go in Greece chat GPT and it said oh you should go to Peloponnesia alright cool what about if you've assisted used in like AI assisted tool in your work maybe co-pilot to help code or image generation what if you've actually built AI into your end facing products your work you've created and trained models wow okay we've got really good spread which means this conversation is going to have to flow at all altitudes if you're not sure what's going on just like put it in social and somebody will shout it and we'll roll with that so why are we here let's start with that and then and then we'll go into a conversation this is not a theoretical high-flying conversation we're not going to talk about what what we are going to focus on is real and tangible examples how AI is being used in WordPress today things that we want to happen in AI now soon so that you can walk out of here and go to the next six AI sessions and be like cool I want to do this how do I do it and you can practically and tangibly start to execute this stuff so this this is like a product conversation not a technical conversation we're not going to get into the how we're going to talk about the what and look for concepts and ideas when we're talking about what AI just a frame because that's actually a real big catch all term that means lots and lots and lots and lots of things what we're really going to talk about today are generative language models these are like services like chat GPT that you can engage with they've captured a ton of data and can parse and create new ideas with it and we'll talk a little bit about specialized models that people are using to execute specific tasks is there any any other sort of things that fall under the AI that no good all right sweet so what we're going to do we're going to go and do some quick intros I've asked each of these folks these folks are here because they have stuff in the wild they've been actively using launching executing products for consumers for their internal teams using AI and we just want to talk about them so from that perspective Mike Sujay make the most of it if he goes over two minutes I'm going to start making weird sounds hey all this is Sujay Pawar I run a company called brainstorm force I'm a C1 co-founder we have a bunch of products the flagship one is ASTRA team which is the most used one of the most used now team in the WordPress repository about 2 million installations so one of the things people use ASTRA is for building their website launching their website we solve the onboarding problem for users where without a product like ours if people are going in a traditional route people have to install a theme install a bunch of plugins and start their website from scratch so we help people have the first version of their website ready so with AI our mission is to help people build their website in as little clicks and as little time as possible so that's what we are really focused on we have been working on this for like past one and a half year and AI has been evolving a lot so we have made multiple iterations of the product it's a pretty exciting time I believe and thanks Shen well you've got some actual AI products at like SureWriter and a handful of products that you can go out and use today and they are powered and facilitated by AI absolutely I wanted to focus on just one product so yeah and that's the biggest one but he's got lots of them hello I'm Constance I'm based out of Austin Texas and I work for e-commerce so we create e-commerce platforms we create a platform for people to create their websites their stores and I actually am the manager I manage the team that establishes relations with the developer we create all the documentation and we want to create an awesome developer experience so really I'm developer focused and our connection is to WordPress we offer WordPress plugin and most of the folks I talked with today they are oh yeah we know e-commerce AI for us in the beginning it was a bus word and as a company we've really been trying to narrow it down because it has huge potential for e-commerce in many different ways that we are trying to explore also for our developer communities we're actually just introduced an AI section our marketplace to enable developers to develop AI applications in addition our company also acquired Feedonomics through an M&A and Feedonomics they are pretty much autonomous but they have one important product called Feed AI that focuses on feed optimization which is a huge thing for product categorization and I'm super excited to be here with everybody just personally love to play around with code pilot and all these kind of things and really looking forward to this conversation. Hi I'm Shane I wear a number of hats I'm a VP at Liquid Web I'm president of Modern Tribe and we do a lot of R&D for a number of different brands so from an AI perspective we are going to be launching Cadence AI and this weekend next week really really really soon we've got brands like Learn Dash that just put out their first AI plugin which creates course outlines we've got one that's about to create quizzes it'll tear through your course and build out and there's an entire framework to allow a lot of our products weeks to leverage it and move forward so that's coming as well as support and we'll talk about a lot of the others soon Hi there my name is Daniel I'm director of development at Siteground and at Siteground we've been using AI for years now before the boom of AI we do incorporate AI into some of the products that we do and also internally in the company for development for pretty much cutting the costs of many things one of the things that we've been using AI for quite some time now is actually translating our website in many languages that we sell in different countries and also we do provide support through the help of AI so that helped us a lot in terms of other things which are not so WordPress specific because we're a web hosting company we do also use AI for content classification when you think of spam email messages that we want to block when you think of spam comments that people get on their websites so that's also something that we're doing right now and of course with the boom of generative AI we're now into that fast lane where we want to help people get started with a website and say hey I want a website there you go that's the topic and after that easily manage that through the help of AI but we'll cover all those topics later it's not picking her up here sorry about that hi so I am Gabriella Laster I am a product marketing manager at Elementor in the past few couple of months actually I have been responsible for launching our new AI products so at Elementor what we do is we make website building more accessible so we had the drag and drop builder and I think we're doing something similar with AI so we are making AI accessible within our builder we were actually the first ones I think to introduce AI into a page builder so we've already integrated the ability to generate text you can add a heading to your website you can change the tone you can translate as well to different languages but what I think was also really cool that we added was the ability to generate custom code, custom CSS html so we've seen people use it to even create their own widgets and what we're trying to do is make that accessible for people who don't necessarily know how to use AI so we are integrating it within our product and making it easier for other users we have engineered it also to make it any prompt you make it knows that it is operating within a website so it is already engineered to give you results that are more appropriate for your website and we're actually going to be launching a new product actually within the week I hope we're integrating AI for image generation as well so we are going to make it easier for users to just describe what they want to create they can edit images they can customize images we are thinking of the web creators so what we're doing is also enabling them to change the aspect ratio enlarge it giving them all the tools they need to create their websites at scale to create content at scale to improve their workflow and we've been doing that for the past couple of months our chief product officer has actually been working on AI for the past year behind the scenes so he's very knowledgeable when it comes to where AI can go in the website building space alright so we've got a mix here we've got hosting we've got sassy commerce businesses we've got wordpress plugin businesses and services there's a lot of place that we're actually seeing AI start to show up and I'm going to travel across the ecosystem given Gabby's comment why don't we start with themes like website setup that seems to be one of the most common places we see people going like well one of the biggest challenges in creating a website is the blank page users show up and they're like what do I do it's like having a giant bucket of Legos poured in front of you and so AI has this opportunity to start to bridge that gap and people are approaching it really differently so I'm curious if you talk about and what's on the roadmap ahead like what isn't being done where does this actual particular trend of website building go as AI evolves do you want my ticket I think we don't really know where it's going because it does change on a daily basis but I think we need to I think it's going to change experience it's going to change how people interact with websites it's going to change how people consume content how people generate content you said by people have it becomes overwhelming to start a website from a blank page you don't have to do that anymore when I started using AI before I learned anything about prompt engineering I would ask a question and I would get horrible results but that would even that helped me understand what direction I did want to go and so all of a sudden it became a little less overwhelming it focuses on what you want to achieve although I I'm going to be an attendee and a moderator although I would argue that right now we're in this really weird early stage not a critiqued element or I apologize I think what you guys are doing is awesome where people are just shoving prompt spaces in and then expecting users to figure out how to get the AI to do what it want which is weird and sort of a half step because the reality is most of us kind of already know what they want you ask any freelancer hey you need to build a church site, a community site, a small business site, the patterns and through a really good interview onboarding process you can get to the point where that structure, that site map the content can be laid out in a way that is 80-90% of the way there and then the person puts their own unique touch on it where we go from having more than just a prompt place where I can fill a block, you know I mean human made this really great block thing, automatic is doing the writer, you know there are a lot of products we're starting to show up but they're really just like how do I have chat gpt in my website, what's the next step beyond that? In terms of site building, I pretty much think that we have to get metadata from the users in terms of let's say getting started where you form or another way to get the metadata from the user and they say okay so I'm based in let's say San Diego and my target users are those target users and I like those colors and that's my brand identity so you go through that process and after that the AI pretty much helps you to get the layout you want, it gives you a couple of choices there, you pick one and after that it learns from what you have picked in order to design your other pages like the contact page for example so that's the information that they don't know specifically it's going to be useful for the site building process then you're going to cut the time in generating really nice websites for them or it could be at simple as not staring at a blank screen when you are trying to design a landing page for your business or a marketing campaign so it could be as simple as you know right now when you have to create a landing page you have to click many times to find out the exact block that you want or widget that you want or whatever of your page building tool so it could be as simple as there is a button, you click a button you tell AI what kind of landing page that you are building and out of the database or whatever it has the patterns it has it can put up a really nice landing page with the pillar content that you can improve upon and take it ahead of time. We are making this assumption at least I was until just recently we are making this assumption that this process starts in word press but I don't think we are all that far away from the process you know whether you are actually going to a generative AI I call it an agent or a tool that enacts things for you but I mean they are going to be built into ROS real soon they will be built into our browsers and so being it it will be built into our browsers and it will be built into ROS real soon. And Bar goes all right cool let me gather some quick information for you now let me generate I think one of the interesting challenges we have as an open source community is well what is Bar going to pick? What is chat GPT going to pick? How does it go about through the decision process? I mean last night I was like well you could use word press or I was like no I don't care just pick something and it came out and it's like well then you should just use word press which is unexpected and kind of interesting but what I really wonder is how do we continue to build our platforms such that if the decision maker is an AI not a freelancer not a consumer not somebody in this room does the project need to evolve in a particular way that it is a good solution for an AI to build a site. My stake on it is that those AI agents that you are talking about if they're in the browser or the operating sister doesn't really matter when you ask them something and they're connected to part of the internet or know about certain list of APIs they will require those APIs to be very well structured to have very good documentation so that the user will understand what you want and then it will pick word press instead of let's say Drupal or Joomla or Wix because it knows that with that specific API a word press I can achieve that and I can do it in a way that's going to fulfill the request of the user so for me that's a really interesting approach of things like how do we shape the APIs and documentation so that just GPT or BART or whatever understands that I mean that yeah I totally we have to you want to take mine yeah so we'll have to get to the point where we train our docs grabbing the mute button okay so yeah we have to train our documentation our content to be picked up by AI and we've seen this a lot because we managed a whole developer center for our platform and it's very actually hard for developers to discover what they need and we can train AI we can train the APIs to pick that up and that's how I see it at least in our business when it comes to developer experience we have to do exactly what you're saying I mean it's interesting because we've had a lot of people in WEG recently say learn AI deeply my first thought was you know probably the most important team in core is about to be the documentation team just thinking if you want to go and actually have influence they're fundamental to the future of the project alright so we got site building we've got awesome future robots we're going to spend outsites for us what else are you using it today what else we got we're using it internally basically to help our support teams both the developer support and also the customer support to right now basically get to the right documentation be able to answer support question, automate support queries and all that and that makes it very easy we're planning to also have it built into our support sites into our developer side so that our customers and also our engineers get to the right information more quickly and just really speed up the process and get targeted consumer information so you're wow that's intense you're an e-commerce business and when people come ask for support they're probably handing over money stuff data stuff, customer stuff sometimes when you're debugging if you're using AI how are you doing it in a way that doesn't give you like PII or security problems that's one of the tough issues for us definitely so first of all we're making sure that this information does not there is a way actually even to have a plugin that's not privately and it does not it's not used for any future queries so we're doing that we're also really not using it so much for customers directly but for our internal support teams that they have that information and that it does not get outside our internal teams I think that's super important we have to gate the information basically or otherwise we're not going to share to the customers but make sure no private data is shared it's challenging oh my gosh how many of you are using it to to bolster your support teams either helping them create better answers understand translation actively today how many of you yeah we're working on it I mean actually to be fair we're using it to consolidate and create a much better way to experience documentation so we've been using a doc spot little plug for Aaron Edwards plugin which is really really fascinating if you want to try getting your own model and putting your own plugin customer product documentation in it it'll create a chat bot it's your own system you got to train it but it's a great WordPress project that came out a couple months ago and I quote big in Japan I swear it blew up it's really interesting what about on the consumer facing side or any of you like direct interaction yeah so on the consumer facing side where people get where people get to go to our support so right now we do have that quick help thing which is inside their user area and when you go there people usually type just words or DNS problem or cannot log in something like that so what we do there is first of all we give clear indication to the user that they can select an AI model to answer their question because there could be something written in there which they don't want to share for example so the user has the option to opt out and go for traditional support so what we basically do first we have a small model which tries to match the query of the user to our whole knowledge base and all of our tutorials once we find those matches that we know are super targeting that question after that we get it as a context and we give it to an in-house model which is based on GPT-3 and after that we generate a reply which is kind of sort of generated as if by an operator and if the user gives a thumbs up or thumbs down we can train the model so it gets better next time and after that of course they can go to a real human if they don't want to this may be too technical and we can pause it but how do you train the model because like user thumbs up and thumbs down are complicated it could be like that's a weird answer it could be like I don't like that answer which doesn't mean it's wrong it just means it's not what they were hoping for yeah you need to get some more context after that so we tend to get part of that data and after that run surveys so it's not all the thumbs up or all the thumbs down like we're gonna contact you additionally but the percentage of those we do send them a survey so they can fill it out and give more information about why they ranked it up or why they did not like the answer so that's how we get more information I think also for those of you who are playing with it a lot of them tend to try just a smiley face, frowny face but that's gonna give you a fake answer we've been playing with did this answer make sense or you know like get way more targeted so that the answer you're getting is actually helpful as opposed to like well I'm frustrated and I'm still frustrated which is like that happens sometimes I think also that's where you have to test it internally because AI doesn't always give you the answers you expect it to or the right ones it gives you sometimes the very wrong answers in a very convincing way so it's important to test that to evaluate random samples and make sure that it's giving you the answer that it wants to and if it's not to train it to provide a better answer so relying on people's feedback at scale that's great because generally when you're working with larger numbers that will give you a better insight but also it's very important to review the answers occasionally yourself to really make sure that people aren't just filling out some random content just to close the conversation bubble they don't want to deal with it, they're lazy they just want out so there's also some manual work involved yeah so one thing that we're experimenting right now with in order to get to the next level is that we're putting something inside of the view that our support agent see on our end so how would AI reply to that question and how I reply so like newbies for example they can get the information from the knowledge base if they're not familiar with the topic or experienced operators they can see that the AI is pretty much talking nonsense so they can mark it as okay that's not fine so that's another way to train it internally that's a great idea it's like co-pilot for customer support exactly probably the first place that I personally used AI although I'm sure out here almost everybody you just probably thinking it was Google Translate and eventually DeepL and some of these others are any of you I know you mentioned it are any of you leveraging translation as part of creating products as part of interacting support and how is that evolving we haven't tried it for the translation because English is not my first language so I have the first hand experience with the translation so whenever I try to translate something at least for my language I speak four languages and still Google Translate itself is not as good with the translations it often times makes mistakes so I'm a bit doubtful about that like what kind of experience my customers would have so for example a simple what is a theme a theme can have different meanings theme in the WordPress concept is very different and it can mean something else so I'm a little bit conservative on that so I haven't tried AI for the translation but I'm very happy to see how it is working for SiteGround and that gives me some confidence to try it out for our teams as well you want to talk us through that yeah so we've been using AI for translating our websites which is not a tiny website so we do have a lot of things to translate and in the beginning it was a rough write I'm not gonna lie like it was generating things that do not sound correct in German or French or Spanish but with time we figure out ways how to improve that so for example when there are many technical terms in tutorials knowledge base or even on sales pages and it doesn't do good what we figure out that we can do is we can get the translations from Firefox so for example you can get ton of technical terms translated properly there like SSL certificate encryption yeah and stuff like that and that helped a lot to increase the accuracy of the translations and after that of course we have people that speak Spanish and Italian and German and French we had them give feedback about that so internally about not believing that you're gonna get the perfect translations but a year from now if you start you're gonna get very good translations how does that work so you're saying you've got like Google translate and then on top of it you feed it through like a small model you built yourselves so we are using Google translate but not the free version of it so we're using the paid version obviously and after that once we generate the pages we do have a small model which is used by our internal people that are translating so they're giving feedback for every string that we have in our lingua application and they're changing it so every time you're typing in that field we're sending feedback to that small model and after that we bring up tons of VMs with cards in order to train the model again so it takes time and it takes expertise but we're lucky to have an AI team of four PhDs so we're not an SMB here so to me where that gets interesting is are you using that as well to power customer conversations and support yeah so right now if we don't have operators on shift that speak for example Spanish and we have a Spanish speaking client because we do provide support in Spanish they come in there type their support ticket in Spanish we translate it through the models and after that the operator writes in English and we do translate the reply to the client Spanish the cool thing about it is that at any time in our internal systems you can see the two replies by each other so you can see if the context is right and if the feeling is right there and what you wanted to convey as an idea in the answer was actually done so we do have people after that reviewing some of those so I think I mean when we talk about what Suje said like hey I'm uncomfortable because I worry that I won't have the technical accuracy that I need but if you look at we are so global and the odds that somebody is providing you've got a support person the odds that they can work in their native language and then whoever is asking for support can also work in their native language and it's the same one is pretty low and so most often what I tend to see is two different people who may not be native English speakers attempting to figure out WPC Li commands in English between each other and like that's the target right the target isn't native language perfection the target is can we get the model to do a better job than two non-native English or two non-native speakers trying to work it out where it's literally more comfortable and more effective for them to work in their native language you know if he can be in Bulgarian and I can be in Spanish and the two of us can have a functional conversation without worrying about it and if something is weird we can be like I mean the staffing implications the comfort and customer success implications are huge yeah by the time people come to support they have wasted probably a couple of hours to fix something and they want their issue to be fixed they don't want perfect native English speaker on the other end they want their issue to be fixed and if it's fixed that's the most important thing for them so that model like do we think that whether it's deep L or Google do we think they're going to get there technically or do you think like the WordPress community needs to make you know as part of the documentation translation team can essentially build the linguistical layer we need for translate because WordPress is translated like it's got a huge translation team we're doing a lot is this a gap that is a community we can fill and train the model and then every SMB every small plug-in house every small freelancer can have access to a translation tool that actually works better I think that fine tuning a model similar as Google translate with the already translated core and all the plugins and teams and everything that's going to work out pretty well I think that could be interesting I don't know how that works yeah I mean it works but what I'm trying to say is the translations work great but it takes you to like 90% it takes you somewhere like that so even we internally translate our products so that they're accessible in multiple languages and we try to use the AI to translate them but after that we require a human touch so that we make sure that it is not translated in a very robotic or inaccurate way and AI is getting smarter and smarter so hopefully like that 80% or 90% we'll go to like 90% or 97% whatever but like 2% or 3% like some sort of a human touch is probably going to require so that we verify if the translations are done accurately and in a way that they will not rather confuse users rather than solving their problem yeah I tend to agree with you absolutely I used to when I was in college I used to make money translating like you guys speak four languages and I could never trust at first machine translation there's a huge potential as we have the multi-geo multi-regional website multi language websites you could really use AI to do that job to translate all the product descriptions and everything but of course there will always have to be the human touch I am hoping though for AI to do things like that you know convert like a pricing model or a shipping model there's more than just translation that to me would be a great thing if we could utilize AI because if you have a store in the US it differs from yeah a store in Germany with anything taxes shipping zones so that would be a cool aspect as well so we haven't talked about media yet so image, video sound I know you just announced that like media hoy yeah awesome what are the different ways that you're seeing even just image generation, image categorization being used that's effective, Bissons like three-armed babies and weird I think it's gotten a lot better from where it started and it's getting better every single day so you can even if you're trying a tool like mid-journey if you try it a month ago and you try it today the results you're going to get are very very different I see it helping us create more content, more variations of content at great speed so for example I think we spoke about it yesterday I'm not sure it was in one of the conversations for sure where we spoke of you can have an e-commerce website you're not, I think you mentioned about the photographer, you're not going to need a photographer anymore so that was your point photography yeah but also creating variations I don't need to take a picture of in five different colors I can just instantly create it in five different colors I don't need Photoshop, I don't need anyone else to take care of that for me but in addition to that I think that over time and this isn't I think over time our expectations of content, media and images is going to change we are going to expect more extravagant images, more extreme images because that's some of the capabilities that AI produces so over time we're going to expect that and want more of that so I think our styles are going to change also over time it's going to take time but I think our expectations and styles will also change that would be pretty sweet I have so many like half-assed photos that if I could just take my photo feed it to AI and it could be back and be like here's a great product photo of nearly the same thing and now I don't have to worry about copyright infringement and I don't have to worry about is this really my content it's just elevating the quality of what I'm producing can you imagine in e-commerce you sell a shirt like this shirt and you sell it in five colors you don't have to take the pictures anymore I mean so many things also approaching different markets different countries like different kind of product presentations have different focuses if you could use AI to provide those kind of background images or settings and have basically I was called localized product pictures would be super also for websites we use a lot of banners and everything have that honestly banner generation would be so sweet yeah what about so on our side we produce as an agency our arm we do a lot of work with government we do a lot of work with education where accessibility is really important wordpress cares a lot about accessibility puts a huge amount of effort to making sure and it's an ongoing journey but we all know that the biggest challenge in accessibility isn't actually wordpress it's convincing the users of wordpress to fill out all tags and to have the correct color contrast and all the challenges that come to creating great products you know I think there's a lot of opportunity in AI to fill a lot of those gaps that humans have been spending the time on yeah we were discussing yesterday that when you need to write the alt tag for an image AI could do that automatically mid journey for example most of you have used it to generate images but you can also give it an image and it will describe the image for you so after that you can use that description and fill it automatically and that's been around for years it's not something new so in terms of accessibility there's also a revolution because it can give you a checklist of things that you haven't done and propose let me do those for you automatically do you want to change something here because it knows that they are not pretty much done I mean there's plugins out there that are already starting to do this with varying degrees of success I know the Yoast team is probably working on stuff like this I know the class of AI from 10 up a lot of this type of work and so I think we're getting to the point where there will be solutions out of the box I just like to see that in core I don't see why that has to be a third party solution that feels like some WordPress should do in terms of democratizing and making it really accessible is there what about I mean search and personalization one of my critiques of WordPress search is behind lots of other solutions that exist in the world where do we go in terms of just making it really easy to find and understand things do you have any active projects or work I know we've got stuff the thing that we've tried with search because our knowledge based on tutorials are based on WordPress and we're pretty much using it as a headless platform is that when you put AI in there it's very difficult to measure and the other thing is that it's kind of slow because we're not just trying to give you here is a link of your search like that post we're trying to correlate that information to the user to see if that's the best result and it gets sluggish at this time you know how if you're using right now it's much slower than 3.5 and I think that if it needs to be done properly it needs to be part of core as you said because if you're just thinking a third-party API for that it's going to be even slower so I don't have the vision to tell you how it's going to work to be honest because it can be obviously part of WordPress itself but the foundation needs to be laid there and I think that those language models the larger language models that we are querying right now years from now that will be a commodity like you won't have to go to OpenAI specifically or BART, there will be so many open source models that you can run on commodity hardware so on every single server which is running a WordPress website you will have a decent model which can do that for you and we're already seeing that with the release of Meta's latest model that had to be released slowly but it kind of leaked right now people are innovating super quickly and building things on top of it and I think that's going to be the future in a couple of years like you will have a language model running on every single server and it's going to be local for that server and it's going to work well for specific tasks I mean that's like if you think of something like WooCommerce or BigCommerce you know as a shop owner the ability to go in like hey what are my top selling products and I don't like have to query or find something hard to find and I don't remember what that brought like a natural language experience to get reports surface it right away that would be so awesome that would be amazing I want somebody build that for me oh yeah and then implement like really act on it too what is the best selling product do I need to like do inventory management you can use AI for that too just my inventory just my pricing all that that's really something super cool I think it gets interesting when you mix that and the first conversation we had around site building yes so if you can get to the point where you have a co-pilot AI an agent that can look at how your data is performing your shops performing and be like hey here are top three pages let's rejigger those let's run three you know the unit you were talking about feed AI that can do multi you know and some of that can do multi-variate tests and there's no reason you as a human need to figure these out like the if you've got you know like cadence will have the ability to build out full pages for you now and so if you could basically tie that into the take that I and say hey every period of time look at the performance try something experiment with it see if this has a better result and that result doesn't have to be financial although obviously that that's an easier thing to measure so last is a as a wrap up to respect our time we've we've talked about some things that are being built some some wishes what are you hoping over the next year that either people in this room that the community watching online that the community builds either in core or as independent products like what kind of solutions are you looking forward to seeing thanks one of the things that's really important is we're having a very in-depth conversation with a lot of you who understand AI and how it fits into our lives but I think the majority of the population has not adopted it yet so I think it's very important to help the community help everyone outside adopt AI better so making it more accessible for them making it more of a commodity so that we can become more innovative in society but I think and I can't say credit for this this is something our Chief Product Officer said is that currently we're looking at AI to replace functions that we are performing ourselves so we're looking for AI to make our lives easier to improve our workflow but I think the next step is understanding what does AI empower us to do that we could have never done before that we could have never even imagined before and I think that's where things become very very interesting and I would want to see more of that take yeah so we people usually overestimate what we can do for one hour for one year and underestimate what we can do for 10 years still waiting for my self-driving car yeah so I have two answers for that question first one is the professional one obviously we've discussed how AI will help the end users build their own websites with just requests like I want the church website to be in the exact form and it just picks it up for you and builds it the next step is actually using an agent to help you run your business like let's give an example with the e-commerce like give me a report of the best selling products that suggest three things that I can do to sell more or give me analysis of something and after that not just that but give it a go and it iterates in order to achieve that go so that's the professional thing and my personal wish is that the AI should be able to do my taxes for me and deal with the government because that's a whole shit of work WordPress is on it brother if it's powered by WordPress immediately you get 40% coverage of everyone on earth God you stole my answer so I'm gonna skip to you while I think I mean to be really honest for any of you who've worked with business intelligence tools they're painful you know and even like Google analytics like the average person to go in there and actually get any insight out of it is really hard it's pages and pages and numbers and queries and not I don't want to that I just want to have a conversation and so like honestly I would love to see our community start to build tools whether it's in the e-commerce space or whether it's in content space that looks at how my community is engaging looks at my content looks at my stuff and says hey try this or hey we've noticed that if you're a plugin owner all your sites that have WooCommerce and have your plugin at this have these characteristics you might want to put more focus on this part of your product and can create insights that allow you to create better solutions like that to me would be transformative. Oh totally you took part of my answer yeah with the community for me like there's two like looking in e-commerce at a shop yeah I would love to have that kind of AI that really optimizes my stores tells me from the beginning this is what I need does it analyzes improves optimize it maybe even have that automatic translation into different language so I have a store in English okay have AI launch the same one in you know Spain Greece that would be awesome for community because we work a lot with community development community feedback it is super hard to get the right sentiment get the right data and I so agree power bi not to say anything back but it's a difficult tool and so it would be super cool just to have a overall analyze the community sentiment community feedback aggregated and provides recommendations on improvement on and maybe even helps us yeah react to a lot of that and optimize love that for me as a business owner like we use so many tools in our business it starts with WordPress website contact form lms analytics CRM and the list can just go on right so for me it would be awesome if there is a just a slack bot or some sort of AI tool where I could just ask question and get insights for my business right now I have to open that page visit that website click 10 times and open 10 things and find that number right so wouldn't it be awesome if I could just say hey how many visitors did I get for my this website in last 24 hours or something like that I mean to realistically like even just to sit like we were talking about search if there was a native AI interaction with the content in a WordPress like I broke my leg three months ago I had to go through a whole conversation chart to just figure out how to navigate that and all the answers I didn't need a human to tell me they were all buried in a you know in a core of a manual it would have been great if I could have just gone to a chat bot and be like broke my leg what do I do oh well you're gonna we'll actually screw it we'll fill out the forms for you don't worry about it we'll get you how much PTO do you need doctor says three weeks okay filed for you all good like I think accessible which we all have in an internal wiki and act on it as a simple agent internally and make our lives better so with that there are a ton of sessions over the next day and a half today and tomorrow on on how to leverage for accessibility for block building for go mob them learn experiment get like real creative I think the biggest thing we don't know today is what's actually even possible yet we're we're in just your discovery phase within this but you're gonna get really surprised so that thank you just to be on the safe side here we are thank you so much for this incredibly interesting conversation people if people want to ask you questions they can grab you in the in the hallway track so here's your gifts thank you so much again in the meantime before you leave and just reminding you that lunch is served from more or less now until two o'clock and it's on three levels so it's on the skull coach us whole which is on level one they trained the balcony on level plus one and also at 230 there's another WP connect session which is in the Triante balcony and it's about coming back to in person events how the community lived this phase in 2022 and what to expect for 2023 so see you there and remember that the sessions start again at two o'clock bye bye enjoy your lunch I mean we've got Yo's here today and we're going to ask him some questions so I guess the big topic at the moment that everyone's talking about is AI there's a lot of chat there's a lot of chat and you're also an SEO guru so I guess broadly what's your have you been taken by surprise of how quickly this has hit us I guess well I've been mostly surprised by Google's response to it I it so chat GBT came and suddenly everyone was in panic and it was hilarious to see that and also a bit frightening in that they really seem to have been caught a bit by surprise yeah it's interesting I think it has many many implications of things that we can do with it that are awesome it also has many implications of things that we're going to do with it that are going to be fairly bad for everyone involved yeah so fake news was a problem already it's not going to get any smaller with this yeah and I think that's going to be hard to bustle for Google for a while because suddenly it's not just fake news it's fake everything so recipes reviews whatever you want suddenly all becoming a lot harder to realize like what's real what's not and I saw that Google are starting to experiment with generated changing the search interface so the top bits going to potentially start to use chat to VP like answers how do you I guess a few questions one is do you view that as a good thing to how do you how do you view that's going to affect content creators and actually three how do you think that will affect the SEO business community I think the answers are actually all connected because I view that not necessarily as a good thing okay mostly because these models are not built to generate truth they're built to generate text which is something totally different and I think that we we've been so trained to think that what we find on Google is true yeah and that is a very scary thought and those those large language models just generate the next word I mean they it's it's like what's the most logical word is next it's not like what is the right answer to this question yeah I hope that they all iterate and make it actually good but so far and what we're seeing from the early people that have access there's a lot of nonsense in the results and well I hope we get rid of that before it becomes really adopted mainstream then the problem is that once they start generating their text the question is how do they send traffic back to the websites that they based their answers on and so far the answers that I've seen to that question are not very positive so I think little features snippets maybe and some of them have some links etc but I think overall traffic will go down and so Google will become less of a referring source which is not good for anyone it's certainly not good for sites that rely on that traffic to make money to be able to generate more good content the problem then becomes if more of those models don't work then there's less new good content to train the AI on and it sort of becomes a self-defeating thing and do you think Google's business model is going to hold it back from for example the Google search page is being kind of broken for a while really I mean in terms of the I see a lot of searches where actually the page is almost like paid ads right, so it feels like it's kind of been broken for a while the thing is is that broken though I think it's actually working quite well in terms of their business okay but from the user sort of search intent experience so for a normal user if they get what they want from those paid ads they're perfectly happy right so if Google succeeds at actually giving results that are good and get paid for it then they're actually doing a quite good job I don't think they're always doing that and I think that if they struggle with that too much then they leave room for competition which I sort of like Bing was the first to have chat GBT in their interface that's also why Google is now trying to push it so hard because suddenly they get beaten and I love that because we've had Google dominance for far too long it's not good for a company to be that dominant that long I think that will bring improvements I think there's a lot that we could do with AI in all sorts of ways that can help all of us I think we have to realize also that we need to maybe train people and what they can believe and can't believe on the web and with that it also becomes more important who wrote a piece of content a generic post about SEO is worth a whole lot less than a post written about SEO by John O'Eldersen a colleague from Yoast in the past who had a SEO there I mean if he writes something and you want to read that, you're noted you're reading his opinion if you're reading a generic piece of content whose opinion is that and what is it based on is actually true so the author becomes more important and that in a way is very good for us in the WordPress ecosystem because suddenly blogging becomes a thing again do you have any discrete advice for content creators who are starting to leverage AI in terms of the content they're producing would you say go for it or would you say hold off and don't use it so I think it's a good tool if you make it generate too much text then you need to check every fact that's in there so that's a bit hard because the things that you won't check because they seem so logical will be false I mean the first time I had chat GPT generate a bio for me it said that I was an investor in rank math and while I appreciate that that is a plugin company as well I actually did not invest in rank math so it is like it's confidently wrong a lot yeah and it is very confident in how it works those things and that means you have to check everything but at the same time having it help you create summaries could be very worthwhile so if you were going to predict a year or two years out of what this all looks like for us what do you have a vision of what that might can you start to piece what that might look like I think that's hard actually it's moving so fast I think that what we're seeing so far in the general world the like generic text creation is only a tiny bit of what's to come if you look at the AI agent space a bit that is super exciting you can create an agent you can ask it to do something like research a topic and it will come back to you with stuff I think that using stuff like that will become a major driver of innovation but also of making people more productive it's already like there's large companies out there that have built their own coding models to make their developers more work faster and work better and you see people saying things like hey 30 to 40% faster more code being committed by the same amount of developers I think that can actually resolve some of our scarcity issues so I think there's a lot of good I was watching this Ted talk about the Khan Academy and he was talking about the fact that every kid could potentially have their own personalized tutor so I think there's great things that we will be able to do with it it'll take some time so just a couple of final questions this is a negative question there's been a lot of catastrophizing around AI and governments are getting involved in trying to put guardrails so do you worry about some of that stuff or do you think that's overblown I think the guardrails I need it and my worry is that governments are not moving fast enough okay the guardrails are needed we need to also train people a bit more in what is this actually and which things are they doing and which things are they which things are they are we telling people that that AI is good for and is not good for there's a bit of a a worry there it's interesting because it's just hit my kids at school because Snapchat introduced an AI so suddenly all the kids in all the schools in England now know there's this thing I don't know I think there's already quite a few Macbeth type reviews and stuff being written by chat GBT so I think organizationally it's interesting how schools are going to be forced to change really quickly same with government so they're going to try and stop it which I think is weird that's not how this works but use it right is also hard so yeah it's going to be an interesting thing I'm not necessarily very thinking that the world is going to blow but I do think it needs guardrails and do you think, final question the big worry for me is always being around this single like we're creating information systems used to be distributed and then we started to centralize them with things like Google this feels like a further consolidation of like we're creating this super brain that we go to for our single source of truth but then I kind of start to investigate the fact that we might have different LLMs I think we'll end up with lots and lots of different LLMs and that's actually better than having one bit Google I think well one of the things that I think should be regulated is like when you work with an LLM you need to know what's in it and that should be like public knowledge and if you know what's in it then you know what you can use it for and I think that that is something that there's no visibility on that at all no right now there's not and I desperately hope that we'll get laws very quickly they say okay if you're an open AI type company you have to tell us what's in your model and then some publishers will start complaining like hey but why are we not getting paid for this and that's the discussions we need to have brilliant thank you so much my pleasure was it good? yeah it was good for all the watching live stream audience went crazy when I asked this question just so you know so yeah welcome for all of you who are like here for the first time this is how we do it you know this is the size and the hey this is the size of the regular work in Europe I would say so yeah joker aside so we have in this afternoon session we have lightning talks two lightning talks and for you who are not we don't know what the lightning talks are those like 15 minute sessions with no questions but you can reach out to our amazing speakers after catching like in a hallway or outside or whatever so yeah our first speaker is actually a musician and a songwriter so with his band called helica which is now back from sabbatical thank you Dario for bringing that one in he comes from Slovenia and he's going to talk about AI using like translations but I'm not going to do it you're going to explain all of it so a big round of applause for Dario hello thank you so let's talk about translating your site WordPress site with AI let's see quickly about me that's me an old photo I work for an undergo systems company you probably know us by our plugin for translating your site and toolset as Milan said I live in Slovenia with my family my wife and my daughter Gloria hi Gloria if you're watching and what I do is I lead the content team so everything with writing like announcements technical documentation you know partnership articles everything that's content that's my team and obviously when we talk about AI today this is something that interests me right so let's start about AI translations today to tell you about what I think about AI translations today I need to go 3 years back when I was first really really kind of blown away by AI translations there's this site I often visit it's foobies.net it's about like art photography digital art so I came up with an article with great photos it's nice but it's French I don't speak French so Chrome tells me like do you want me to translate this page for you and I said sure and it does and it's just like great it's like talking about art which is not always an easy topic not always easy language and it was great and this was 3 years ago look this is not the text I saw that day but I just wanted to show you so this is in French or as they say it's all Greek to me so you know let me just read you one sentence the first sentence how to recreate in a scenographic exhibition the unique atmosphere that reigns in the masterpieces of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick pretty nice I don't know if I wrote that in English I would be kind of proud it's nice okay so that's my point that's kind of like that was 3 years ago that I was blown away and we've gone so far from there and with with chatGPT and everything going on you can only imagine where we are today so how does it work I wanted to tell you like all about it but it's really complex and it can get very technical and you could actually have a whole talk about how AI translations and AI works in general maybe even five talks so just very generally it's like neural networks learning from vast amount of language data and finding kind of statistical probabilities of like what comes next and that's how it works in essence there are tons of articles there so if you you're into this just google it you'll find tons of it but language is complex so you know it's hard to predict everything right so the thing is today for what we usually do like the sites we build at least in my experience and from my colleagues and friends like AI translations today are great they will cover you completely you know there are exceptions of course like science and medicine and you know law that's all that kind of has its own like intricacies so there you would probably want something human like a human review ok now my opinion is like I can talk to you about how AI translations are great for like whole two days and it doesn't matter unless there's a why ok and you need a why like why would you do it ok so here's me trying to kind of tell you why in my opinion ok the obvious why is like reach your larger audience ok so you know if you translate tools you're from a country that has like 10 million people maybe you can translate to a bigger audience 100 million people people are proven by like science research that they prefer buying and shelling out cash in their own language ok so conversions and sales are better you get better SEO because now you're not ranking only in like your language or the default language you're ranking in more languages so that's better for you of course and you boost your brand awareness because if you're present in a company sorry in a country that you know you're not translated to your it doesn't make sense like imagine here in Greece having like I don't know Microsoft without being translated to Greek it's kind of weird right it wouldn't work at all and of course user experience is better it's definitely better most of the people prefer doing stuff in their own native language so it makes sense but in practice ok the why in practice so this is where I live now in Slovenia so Slovenia is a beautiful country that has 2 million people ok so that's 1 million less than Athens the whole like city you know so it's it's a small country like with not too many people so how do we reach more people by translation ok so let's add Croatia I don't know if I mentioned I'm a region for Croatia so I translate my site to creation now I'm from 2 to 6 million Hungarian 16 million plus Austria they speak German so I put 25 millions but actually many more millions of people speak German so it's more and Italy it's 84 million so we went from 2 million in Slovenia to just neighboring countries to translate to and we can now reach 84 million people of course you don't reach them all like anything else but you have a much larger pool of people much larger audience to work with and finally it's not only about just translating so when you go to other markets for example I'll stick with my kind of example I'm from Croatia I now live for a long time in Slovenia and I know both countries I have my networks I have my friends but even with all of this if I want to expand my company to Croatia from Slovenia if I don't translate it to Croatian it doesn't make sense it won't work no matter my network no matter my reach and no matter that we used to be in the same country we used to be in Yugoslavia together and our languages are both Slavic similar but also pretty different and another part of this why that I would like to share is why AI translations because you can use human translation you can do it yourself but AI translations today are super fast super affordable and super accurate so that's that part of the why now how do we do it in WordPress because we're here all into WordPress right so how do we use AI to translate our WordPress sites you need two things first you need to decide which engine you want to use there are a lot of options there I mentioned them and then you need a plugin because as you know WordPress core doesn't have multilingual features yet I will touch upon that in my last slide so let's choose a translation engine first we won't choose I will just tell you about it Deepel, Google, Translate Microsoft Azure you have Amazon and a bunch of other options okay and the thing is they're all great really so there are tiny differences like between some language pairs and like you know but they're really good so you choose from what you need but in my experience in kind of our experience as a company who do stuff related to translations Deepel has the edge okay it's leading the pack a bit okay but it's not like by a big margin but I would choose Deepel and then you need to choose a multilingual plugin so you know what I would suggest there but so you have options I think that's great you have options you're not stuck with solutions there are multiple solutions there so you have WPML you have Wiglot, GTranslate TranslatePress Polylang you know there are a lot of options okay so how do you choose my suggestion is think about what you need okay I know pricing is important to everyone myself included but don't let it like kind of only that you guide you because look for what you need really so first does it support the engine you want to use be careful because not all the plugins support all of the engines you know so if you want a specific one be sure it's that translation management it sounds a bit abstract but it's actually very simple and very important what can you do with your translations can you send them to not just AI but to other people to your friends to reviewers like this is important you may not know it once you decide to start building a multilingual site but with a bit of kind of research online you will know what they mean and then we come to pricing which I mentioned and there are two prices of course plugin and AI translations so be careful because some options start free but if you want very basic kind of features it kind of adds up and then you are kind of in the very expensive area and finally do you need a human review it depends it depends but like many many people do want it so you know if that's important definitely look which plugins allow you to review and edit AI translations again not all of them do so how does it actually look like of course it depends on what plugin you use so this is from WPML as you can see it's very simple it's like a dashboard and this mode that is on the screenshot is actually where WPML takes care of everything it translates in the background all the posts all the pages whatever you tell it to and when you add, edit it just works okay but you don't need to use WPML or other plugins like that you can also tell it no I just want to translate this and this and this and this and be in charge of what goes on this is for example for translate press you can see like translation the English original language on the left side and the translation on the right and most of the plugins allow you to edit translations but not all so be careful there and also if you need a full blown translation editor which I very much suggest that you kind of go with a solution that has it it will help you a lot because it saves time it's kind of like a translation tool for you it has glossary and stuff and this is the question so how do we get it reviewed be careful because not all of them allow you to do this like there are plugins that allow you like okay you can edit translation by yourself okay but like if we take that site for example I don't speak French so how can I review French language so obviously I need to invite someone it can be like a user a friend so this is what I would definitely keep in mind when going with like translating your site with AI and so here's the point it's not all about websites because we are WordPress community we do many more things so we build teams teams for clients teams for the ecosystem we build plugins also for clients we build plugins for for everyone you know free freemium premium whatever so how do we translate it and I can tell you from our experience we have been translating our own plugins for years and it's a pain in the behind and it's super expensive like we went the professional translation route and it's thousands of dollars it takes time it's you know it's just like complicated okay so what I want to just like mention here today is that we built a free tool for everyone on this site ptc.doubleclinl.org and it's free and it will stay free and this is the first iteration that we wanted to share with the community and please if you if you're into this if you need this to translate your team plugin you know use it and let us know you know your thoughts feature request whatever because this is the first iteration we are already working on better stuff like for it there will be like in premium later but this stays free and we are already starting to use it for ourselves and it's really nice so this is what I wholeheartedly suggest and let me know how it goes so in the end what's the future of multilingual WordPress I don't know that's the thing so Gutenberg phase 4 promises these multilingual features I don't know what's being discussed what's being decided probably not too much yet because we still have phase 3 you know so it's some time away so it will take a bit of time but by the fact that Jetpack just released an AI assistant in their own plugin I have a feeling that multilingual phase of WordPress will and should definitely include some sort of AI integration because it's the only logical thing and I'm sure that like people who will be working on it will you know they will they will know what to do so but it's for us to see how it goes and I'll be happy to if anyone knows more please let me know so that's it thank you very much thank you thank you Dario this is a small gift we have for you thanks a lot thank you Milan thank you so much for your time and thank you for the tool thank you for sharing so our next speaker is a huge horror fan we're gonna learn about how to harness AI to enhance the accessibility of our website and resulting in increased user engagement and better overall user experience that's it Sarah take it huge round of applause for Sarah please thank you can you hear me are we all tired of the AI yet or okay I promise this one is gonna be quite specific and it's light, short and I want to ask questions so please be ready okay that's my last one oh you got the spoilers okay sorry that's all yeah okay first thing I want to tell you that my slides they are with a little help of some AI tools and it's not relevant to talk about them but I put some notes on there can you read it yeah so if you want about any of them you can just ask me later okay so a little bit of background my name is Sarah he said I'm from Norway but I'm actually from Brazil and I'm 36 now and I've been coding since I'm 16 I'm a full stack senior developer and I'm a created coder on the side apparently I cannot make all the emojis work so I have I start working with WordPress 10 years ago when I moved from Brazil to Norway and I'm a partner in a company called Guinness Design and it's probably the northern most WordPress agents in the world we are in Tromsø really really really up so Tromsø is a very peculiar place there are three weird things I want to tell you about my place where I live the first one that we have northern lights all the time like in winter when it's dark and we have midnight sun right now like there's no night just sun 24 hours and the third weird thing is that the European web directive is such a strict way in Norway that it's literally illegal to have inaccessible websites any of the reasons here okay you know that right yeah so worst case scenarios you get you get 15,000 per day euros to pay and we saw it happen it's like it's like there is random controls but they only make them big companies so it's not like for everyone but it's pretty tough and even though the responsibilities of the companies is always fall upon us as agents and content creators so we at Guinness we had to like oh my god we need to step up our game normally accessibility was like our afterthought but then it became like it had to be part of every step of our process right so how do we do that and do you guys think Norway is exaggerating hold the thought okay let's talk about something fun for change yeah AI so specifically generating AI so there is like countless of AI tools popping up every day like AI can write and can write really good I heard from Yuvanova Harike that's his name like that's really on point that AI is hacking the operationing system of human civilization which is language so it's yeah AI can compose music AI can code and me as a developer I think we talk about this AI as well but like how many developers here have tried co-pilot yeah and co-pilot together in combination of chat it is like super cool right it's amazing but yeah AI can also illustrate that's like the most fun thing we can do for now can we really see the full picture now I don't think so right like we we still like for sure is changing our way of working as designers developers and coders and content creators actually but we cannot actually grasp the capabilities of AI even the developers they are like keeping surprise of what the outcomes and the speed of they are learning like even to keep up with AI I'm signed up for all the newsletters and then for papers and then like we cannot just read what's going on like every day there's news and there's something and then bad good no so it's it has this overwhelming feeling right it's like we cannot keep up do you guys have this feeling too about AI it's like who has it okay good we are on the same page so that is this frustrating feeling and then this I cannot keep up with things that's 60% of the global population they experience every day and they are people with advantage not advantage disabilities in the world so it's like 1.3 billion people can't be able to ask vital information on a website for example that frustration feeling that's like come on just because we as developers and content creators didn't think about them so I think that now that we are related with the frustration feeling can we agree that noro is actually not so wrong on making it really hard, really strict with accessibility so because we had to keep up with our game and as earlier doctor I'm obsessive with AI so I thought that I could save you guys some time because AI could help us to to automatize things and make it think faster and then maybe our next project can be a bit more accessible but first of all what should we be checking you know like you guys know like how the rules what can we check where to go and how the areas so for that I have a tip for you and I think they are here are they here it's just open source initiative called ALIY and there's the idea is to make accessibility easier and they have this check released with everything we need and it's like it's updated if it's needed and it's so well written and easy to understand so you guys should go check it out so it's like it's super cool and then I'm going to bring you three of my favorite tools powered by AI one for design, one for code and one for content but related to accessibility of course so the first one is design I want to know how many designers are here not so many do you guys use Figma Figma XD or Sketch so have you heard about Stark just my colleagues because they use so it's a plugin you can add on your design of choice and it's going to the sidekick one it's a plugin of the plugin it scans your design and gives you tips normal tips of general contrast and stuff for accessibility but with the AI it's going to read into your context because not one fits all especially with design and accessibility but there is just a whole conversation of accessibility and design it has to be boring so now it might not need because we because AI can help you into the context of your own design so the second one it's a code so after you made your design and you feel like it's good enough you can do a prototype you can write coders here okay, yeah so we normally have our way of working that's like you put the right tags I know you guys do it right but it's still good to test it out so apart from the tests that we guys know there is this audition here which is a website a service that can send your link and then they audit and they are very specific AI powered to give you some insights and also with the context of your project and give you a full report it's super good with test it out it's amazing and what I like most on this they come with WordPress plugin that a toolbar on your website accessibility menu kind of we call how we want that it comes with some specific user needs that we might not remember or of course the user could have it on its own browser but what if he doesn't so it would just change the UI of your web we don't have to do anything and it's just gonna fix it for them so I think it's pretty cool and now a content tip for you guys do you know that for your website to be accessible it needs to be 8th grade level of your content do you guys know that so how do you know that your content is 8th grade like or of course there are specific case but in general right but how can you check that you could use a plugin that can be your assistant while you're creating code or creating content and this is probably how guys heard about this plugin it's super cute but it's actually super useful on content creating on your website you get a content generator but you can also have a chatbot that you can just double check like is this a tone good or should I change this is my target should I change my text should I change the tone and one little thing of that one that I really like that you can add your own chatbot on your project and you can train a chatbot as a client you're going to need the API key of open AI but if you already use a chat you already have a login there so you just go and get it it's not like you have to do anything more than that and this is an example of that chatbot of the website of them and that example remind me something really important when it's about AI that's written I don't know if you can read don't believe everything Neo says so right now we are in a level of AI that we cannot trust 100% right so if we're creating content please always check the source and if you are don't be afraid of AI take your jobs for now just saying and if you are generating like music or art that it's you are referencing it to some style please check copyrights and if you are coding please always check documentation because AI is cool, can be awesome but it's not Oracle of Delphi you see the Greek joke so but yeah, AI is not out that yet but if there's something that I really believe AI can help us right now is to overcome this gap of accessibility we have on websites that's like come on like instead of making AI draw a super new marketplace why don't ask them to do useful things and be more inclusive you know because and I really believe our community WordPress it's so powerful so if you work together we can totally make the internet a more inclusive place one website at a time thank you applause thank you Sarah right on time wow thank you what a great introduction we have a great talk just after we are finished with the third lightning talk please don't leave the room just yet because I will ask you the second question that you're going to need for your cards so our next speaker an amazing guy he comes from Germany and he's going to talk about the chat GPT and all the amazing things that chat GPT can help us out with the SEO so a big round of applause for Silvio hello nice to be here thanks for invaded for the speaker here in Europe now content creation with help of IA that's me I'm a middle designer and front-end developer from Cron, Cologne from Germany all about me you can find on my website now unless the power of automation but how we can start it chit in, chit out this is important for the conversation of AI for slow ring complexing tasks official intelligence needs these three of information goals expectation infos and examples with these three pieces of information you create your own prompt but what is the prompt? it's the input sense which is intended to stimulate the AI to generate a certain type of output now you learn these three topics with when you use chat GPT you can take research content structure and content creation and if you have time my bonus slides my case study first one topic search this is one of the important parts in the content process to find relevant and interest topic for the target group now how you do it I call or I send to chat GPT the main goal the intentions to create numerous details and in-deep advanced articles on the topic dog and cat food and beyond so this is my example my acceptance I need to talk about topic suggestions example I give chat GPT the following instruction so the topic section into the following categories conversation conversion related topics product new topics close to the topic topics and future topics reference on the right side for example for conversion related comparing red and dry food brands and cons and the further topic maybe choosing the right food for your pet now we have found with this prompt many topics thought by the relevant categories so prompt you don't write down you can later on the website and now we want to create content for a relevant keyword maybe cat food without sugar and grains let's start with the content structure so better you formulate what you want said more likely what you want I ask can you please give me all all topic suggestions that I should describe in this detailed full guide article it's possible please structure the topics already as possible headline for advance article and write each heading information absolutely must be explained there in detail and response here's our topics headlines for example white sugar and cleanse are bad for cats or making or making your own sugar and grains free cat food you need more no problem ask for more and response more finally we want to create content now I give the following instruction write out the first headline for me I ask to address the following sub topics explanation of input importance for sugar and cleanse free diet and cat food possible head effects of sugar and grants on cats and future more I give to the instruction to all key words marked with brackets so I can found later to be following my instruction and response this article on the right side so he write me a headline a CEO friendly headline and content and all the the sub task he do it for me I have a tickle about cat food without sugar and cleanse we have time really good so my case study I make two domains one topic and two and over 100 different contents I analytics and and I make affiliate shop for cat and dog food and one is one to condensers created with chat ETP and another and another version is created by unique writers and the result is about two months and the index chat say AI version have more pages more impression more clicks better position and Google and more page views the duration time it's more the bounce rate it's smaller and action more visitors are higher more clicks on the button to the store and more sales it's critical what you do with this information so I'm finished really quickly yeah thank you can I take a picture this was really good so everybody wave thank you thank you this is a small gift for you so here it is thank you so before you leave you remember the game the postcard game we had but we discussed on the opening remarks so if you missed the first question go to the community built in the expo area so the second question is in how many languages is WordPress translated into that's the second question just say no but if you missed the first part it's in the community so yeah we take a quick break for 15 minutes and after that we continue with state of WordPress security insights from 2022 with Oliver Silt session with me I have a guest Viola Gruner she is from Germany now living in Austria this morning she had a session it's called test instead of guessing generates more leads through growth hacking hello thank you I love it it's amazing really it's so great I'm so fascinated it's my first word Camp Europe it's amazing it's your first word Camp Europe but I heard that this talk you had this morning it's not the first time on a work camp is that right? I had one in World Camp Lisbon but it was a lightning talk so it was my first big talk today yeah so now it was a big talk and it was a small talk in Lisbon yes you know why sorry okay that's so nice I thought it was worth having a larger session for that so can you share something on the information you gave on stage yes I just I can share some so thank you first that I got upgraded no not upgraded but that I had this chance to make a bigger talk out of it because yeah testing instead of guessing is a very important topic in my view because out of my experience I learned that you often think okay my God feeling says that's the right decision but if you test it you see hey wait no it's not the right decision so yeah I brought some examples and what and in these examples approved really how we are not having the results we thought so our God feeling sometimes plays a big trick you know so it's important to test and especially in marketing it's a lot of blah blah blah very often but if you are testing you can show things and it's great because you can celebrate also a not successful test because every test is a success can you give an example of how this would work yes I yes for example the sales team to add one more form field to the contact form and my God feeling said oh my God no we cannot do this one more form field will drop the conversion rate and yeah so we researched it and there are a lot of proofs that the conversion rate will drop and if you add more form fields and so yeah I said first no but then I said okay let's test this and the numbers showed something different so the conversion rate didn't drop and then what yeah then we implemented the new form field to the website so you already had the idea what to do because you did the testing yes so I had the idea because you know sometimes the sales team says hey we need this we need that and you're in a conflict but then you say okay we tested we test your idea we test your form field and then we tested it and then we saw we can implement it and we had the proof that the conversion rate is not dropping so everyone should test I think yeah so the manager was happy yeah I was the manager you were the manager of course sorry mother no no no but the founders were very happy the sales manager was very happy and the marketing team was happy no but it's not to make someone happy it's just to prove some things and the team was happy so it was not my work it was the work of this great team and it was us always together you know so do you have any other key points you shared or want to share with the people maybe something you just left out in your talk is something you want to make clear to the audience yes no I just believe for marketing you need to be creative and open-minded and yeah take decisions together with other people not alone always you should not think okay I need to do it's always good to be together you know that was also my learning and also often I saw some people told me no that will not work and then it's good to test and to prove things yeah because even when I started to test I was very unexperienced in marketing so I was 19 years old I studied and I worked in marketing and I needed to take important decisions yeah and I had no one to ask and then I just asked the numbers a little bit and that helped me out very often so you're eager in asking questions and asking yourself okay is this right yes and not just assume we should go and accept the results yes it's so not for every small thing you are doing you should make a test I think it should be if you have very important things to do and very big numbers then you should test yeah and then you can see also if it's significant and you're still young in career yes and you are able to ask the right questions yes but not just me it was always also the team that's it's always the group together so it's good to be able to ask questions even if you're still young in your career and you can learn from people because of course you have not the experience not the background experience so you're not you don't have an opinion shaped by your own experience you ask the right questions yes and this is also a great opportunity I see because I see that many people who worked for a long time in marketing they say we do this and you ask but why yeah my god feeling says it I know this I'm working very long in this segment I'm an expert and that's for me in terms of marketing a critical statement because I saw you have often so many proofs that it's still not that it's this test will not work and then you do it and you see for your target group it works so also for people who are not that experienced in marketing just ask questions sometimes ask hey is this really right and then just try it just test it be brave try and don't listen too much to someone who says always it's good to have experience I don't want to say something bad about this but for me it's I saw out of my experience it's important to test and often it was also sometimes that I said I think this test will work and my whole team said never never and when we tested it they were you know it's always right or the opposite so it was great so everyone had the same results the same results and we were voting as a team everyone is equal the manager deciding for the team everyone had the same power for rating for this different ideas and that was great that's great now you work for inside I can imagine there are people curious about you should they contact inside or should they contact you directly do you run your own company as well or are you available as a marketer at parties or is there something inside you should discuss with inside no I work for inside and I think it's a great company but of course you can reach out to me also on Twitter and LinkedIn so if you have any questions or if you're not sure or something just reach out just contact me we can book you for talks consultancy it's all free I think yes it's all free no we should share this knowledge that's so important so also if you would like to see my talk I also shared the tool I worked with we had our own created workflow so everyone can have it because I really think we should empower each other it should be not we should work together so if you have any questions I help you out and because it's a great community so what you do here volunteering and everything I want to give also something back and just reach out to me always what is the place people can reach out to you on LinkedIn yes LinkedIn Viola Gruner that's it Twitter Gruner Viola I'm on Twitter but I'm not long on Twitter I'm so new in this WordPress community just eight months so my Twitter account is very very small Twitter is a lot of people use Twitter in this community I know thank you very much I just want to share that I'm so glad being here thank you so much to this great community and thank you so much to all volunteers it's amazing really the organization and everything lovely that was a very kind word it's so great what you're doing and everyone is putting their free time in it a big thank you to you thank you very much enjoy welcome thank you longer version of our talk so this is basically 45 minutes long slot where speaker has 30 minutes for his talk and 50 minutes for questions just so we have the standing mics over there so queue up when you see that speaker is about to close up queue if you have any questions if for some reason you can't reach these microphones there will be handheld mics like this one going to be held out for you to give the questions so our next speaker comes from Estonia and the fun fact I learned about his last name is that it means bridge in Estonian so Oliver he's the CEO and co-founder of patch stack come on big round of applause for Oliver hello everyone I think that's actually the biggest crowd of people that I've seen being interested about security so thanks my name is Oliver I'm the co-founder and CEO of patch stack a little bit about my background I've been working in WordPress since 2014 when I was running a web development company which was focused on WordPress actually about web application security in general but we very much so focused on WordPress from the early days already I'm also an active community builder so in Estonia where I live I've also co-founded a co-working space which has turned into a startup center in our town and I've also been organizing hacking events which capture the flag competitions where hackers are challenging each other and competing against each other so we've been doing it for NATO and different kind of organizations today I'll mostly use your time to give you a little bit of an overview of what we've seen over the past couple of years in the WordPress security space I will dive into a little bit into numbers but I'm also going to talk a little bit about what are the biggest challenges that we've seen that need to be hopefully solved or improved I will then share what are the expectations for this year something that we've already seen this year but what we should expect in this year and beyond and then dive into what we as a community could do to make WordPress ecosystem even more secure than it is today so let's start with the very good news I think WordPress ecosystem is more secure than it has ever been before if we look at the data from the past years in 2020 there was 541 security vulnerabilities disclosed in the entire WordPress ecosystem that includes plugins, themes, WordPress core, everything is included in 2021 this number jumped to 1,382 and last year, in 2022 this number skyrocketed into 4,528 security vulnerabilities what's important to mention here is the fact that these vulnerabilities are not like they just popped up this year on those years and like they've never been existing there before you can expect it like a backlog of security vulnerabilities that are getting fixed from all these previous years because they have actually existed there for many, many years so now we're finally cleaning up the backlog of security issues within the plugins and themes and in the WordPress ecosystem in general so that's a really good thing because the bad actors the hackers who would otherwise exploit these issues have much less issues to find because the plugin developers have already fixed them and themes as well out of those 4,500 security bugs that were disclosed in 2022 99.7% were actually found in plugins and themes like most of these issues as you can see are from the plugins and themes and only 26 of those in total were actually from the WordPress core and the good thing about this is that those issues that were fixed in the WordPress core itself, we never seen any of them actually be actively exploited what it means is that the WordPress as a platform itself is very mature it has a very mature release cycle, it has a very good attention on security and the issues that are found in the core are mostly so low severity that they're not really useful for anyone to even exploit that's not the true unfortunately with the plugins and themes if we look into 2022 in terms of the data that we saw in all the vulnerabilities that were reported within this year actually we saw a little bit of a shift into vulnerabilities that were disclosed and there is a reason for it which is actually on the next slide but before I get to it I will give you a little bit of insight into what those vulnerabilities look like the first thing that you can do is to click on the page that is on the top of the list is something that you actually trick the admin user into clicking your link that directs them into the page where they are like tricked into clicking an option or changing some option on your website then there is cross-site scripting vulnerabilities where a malicious code can be injected into the website so the visitor loads it into the site and then we have actually one that is very important to mention is the broken access control where the plugins don't necessarily maybe use the WordPress hooks in the correct way I think many of you have heard about the ease admin function which a lot of people are actually confusing in terms of what it does but one of the issues with the broken access control is that the plugins maybe having unauthenticated access to a function that should only be available for authenticated users and in that case attackers can either turn on registration, make the registered users admins by default and all that kind of crazy stuff the reason why the cross-site request forgery which is actually the lowest ranking fruit you can find in the WordPress ecosystem was on the top one position is actually the issue in the software supply chain or the security of the software supply chain and think about that is like all our websites use some level of plugins and you know if a plugin has a vulnerability that releases a patch for example you will go there and get it patched and you update the plugin now what if the plugins themselves also use plugins and you know then what it means is that the plugin or the framework or library that was used within the plugin is getting a security issue fixed then all the plugins that actually use this framework also need to go and update and then eventually if they do then the end user needs to go and update the plugin on the website and like with each additional layer we are actually adding delay for the end users to get protected and that's a really big challenge in the space right now and the last year the number actually spiked because there was two big frameworks that were actually used within thousands of plugins and they shared then eventually the common security vulnerabilities it's actually also very hard to secure to report security issues to plugins to give you a little bit of context behind this chart that you're seeing on the screen what we do at patch tech is running a program called patch tech alliance it's a community of ethical hackers who report security vulnerabilities in any of the plugins in the ecosystem and they are getting rewarded for that they're getting rewarded because they are using ethical processes to make sure that the plugin developers have all the necessary information to fix a security vulnerability before it's being found by someone else with much worse motivations let's say so 1160 security vulnerabilities unique security vulnerabilities were reported last year into the patch tech alliance program out of those 1160 there were 748 that were accepted by us which we validated we made sure that there are correct issues that there was enough information about that so that the plugin developer could fix it and then you know big portion of them got patched even though it takes a lot of effort to actually reach out to the plugin developers because very often you can't find any information on the website you can't find information on their forms even if they do have a form then very often you just get like an error message saying that whoops that form is not working so you have you basically have like a black hole where you're putting your security reports and you never get the reply on the other hand you have those security researchers and ethical hackers who are waiting for you know hearing back when are those vulnerabilities getting resolved so here who is actually helping us out a lot and I think we should give a big applause to the WordPress.org plugin review team because they are being done like amazing job in terms of how much they have actually dealt with those issues so really come on guys it's so the plugin review team is helping us when we need to escalate security issues to them to make sure that the end users will eventually get the information that they need to patch to update the plugins that are vulnerable and from those 748 issues 148 cases were actually escalated to the plugins team and what they've done is then they try to reach out to those plugins again as well and if they can't do so then they are going to close the plugin now what is a scary part here is that over 10% of those you know cases they actually remain closed which means that the plugins are still to this state actually closed down if you go to the WordPress.org repo you can see that the plugin is closed for security reasons or you know in some level of that in that kind of message now if 10% of these vulnerabilities that are getting escalated how many plugins actually are there that are abandoned that the developer doesn't respond to and how many websites there are that are running those plugins that are not maintained by anyone anymore and you know are basically vulnerable but without having without the website owner having any information about that so this is a big issue actually so way too many security bugs are not getting patched actually last year 26% of critical security bugs were not receiving a timely patch at all that means that these critical security issues are usually the ones that are unauthenticated that attackers can you know run mass exploitation campaigns to take over a website, inject malware and do pretty much whatever they want right so 26% is a big number so even if you have like auto updates enabled you know you're not really you know protected in any way because you just don't get an update so even though those plugins get removed from WordPress.org they still stay on websites and even worse so close plugins have no indicator of active security issues on the WordPress admin panel that's a big issue because if you look at the WordPress.org repository you actually see that the plugin is closed for security issues but now who is actually you know who should know about this issue the most is the site owners the ones that are actually running the WordPress website where they see the list of plugins that they have installed but to this date WordPress core itself doesn't have an indicator within the admin panel that will tell you that hey you're running this you know plugin on your website but this isn't this is closed by the WordPress.org repository and it's not you know actively maintained anymore that brings me to something that just happened very recently I was speaking at CloudFest last year sorry earlier this year and I was talking about this issue as well so we actually found an eight year old ticket in the WordPress basically a feature request to add an alert into the WordPress admin panel to show the user that the plugin is removed from the WordPress repository for the security reasons so there's a keyword code link to that entry so if anyone wants to kind of share their ideas or kind of like add additional information to that please do so because I think this is a very big thing that we should look into and have maybe a bit more of a deeper conversation around to make the WordPress ecosystem much more secure so let's look into what else we could do as a whole community to make WordPress more secure I think we need to accept that it's okay for projects to come to an end I think it's okay when we build plugins and we build projects in general and we eventually come to a conclusion that maybe it's not maybe it wasn't used by anyone that much that you were expecting or maybe it didn't go as well as you expected as well but if you built a plugin then you need to kind of keep in mind that other people might still be using it so I think it's very important to communicate very transparently and let the users know whenever you are planning to maybe you know drop the project or like move on to additional things what you could also do for example is you know reach out to the community talk to people on post status for example ask maybe someone wants to take this plugin over maybe someone else wants to maintain it in the future and I think another thing that we might want to think about is maybe it's okay to send an end of life date until the users receive security patches let them know that hey I'm planning to move to other things so here's a date until I'm actually you know getting the security patches if there's anything you know needing to get patched but I'm not planning additional secure additional features to the plugin so I'm not you know then the users will get some level of kind of time when they can find alternatives and figure out how to move forward and please don't reject security reports because you're moved on on the top corner you are actually seeing an interaction by our security team with the plugin developer I think it happened last month where we reported the security issue to them was a serious issue which actually needed to patch and the only response we got from there is that sorry we no longer maintain this plugin this plugin currently has over 100,000 active installations so again this is a problem and we don't know how many of these situations actually are there even more in the ecosystem and I think we need as a whole community to talk about that a little bit more to make the entire ecosystem more secure another thing that what we and it kind of like applies to the previous talk where we the previous slide where we reach out to developer and saying hey there's a security issue you know we could help you fix it is then please don't avoid security research at all what we've seen over the past years is that in many cases where security report or security researchers report the vulnerability to a plugin they are kind of like you know reacted with negativity you know why you are like looking into our stuff and you know who asked you to check and you know that kind of stuff so one thing that we should I think look into is considering security researchers as equal contributors as our developers when a developer is submitting nice code into your plugin into your open source project you are actually happy right so why shouldn't you be super happy and thankful to security researchers who point out in your code base to a places where you can improve your customers so plugins actually thanks to the security researchers in this space plugins that haven't fixed vulnerabilities before bad actors can exploit those zero days so from the past years we see this increasing number of security vulnerabilities being fixed and reported these are all the vulnerabilities less for the bad guys right so it's good so it's good for everyone it's good for the community it's good for the open source project maintainers and really think of researchers on your side I think if anyone gives you an option do you want the hackers to be on your side or do you want the hackers to be on the other side which one would you pick I think it's a pretty simple option to choose and I think we need to think about that in the sense of incentivizing the security researcher and the good hackers to be on our side and not on the other side so I've talked a lot about plugins ecosystem and teams ecosystem and the projects in general but I imagine in this room there's also people who just maybe build websites or have their own website built so what should you do in the light of all this information I think it's more and more important to choose your stack wisely and keep plugins to minimum it's a very common security recommendation but it's very important and I think it's still not praised enough I think it's very much easier to choose a stack or you know a selection of tools that you like to use like select your favorite page builder select your favorite you know forms plugin select your favorite you know tools that you in general built the websites with and if you're a developer building websites to a lot of different customers try to stick to that stack because when a security vulnerability is being found then you actually have much smaller attack surface like if you use like hundreds or 200 different plugins across all your websites you would probably need to deal with security vulnerabilities every single day that's a fact so another thing to look into is the word for specific firewall something that is actually being able to detect whether there are vulnerabilities on your website and to actually provide you a very targeted protection for those vulnerabilities something that is called nowadays as a virtual patching which means that the vulnerability is being found on your website and it receives a security rule exactly for that vulnerability I think it's very important because what you what you receive then is to actually keep in mind that I mentioned just 26% of the security or like the critical issues from 2022 were not patched so what virtual patching actually gives you is the time to stay protected until the developer releases a patch or it gives you a little bit more time to go there and update your website so it's definitely an essential thing looking into the light of how much of those security vulnerabilities are out there and how big is the chance that you might end up with one as well and really choose a good hosting service that lets you know about vulnerabilities as well because there's a lot of hosting companies who actually do that so we have managed hosting providers who have like a panel where you see all plugins that you have installed and everything a lot of the hosting providers nowadays actually also include the information whether any of those plugins include security vulnerability so ask this from your hosting company or choose a hosting company that already does security out of the box and helps you to at least be aware of those security issues so what to expect from 2023 so a lot more ethical hackers will get interested in WordPress that's for a fact because WordPress has a huge impact and there's so many different plugins and themes and so many different projects to look for security issues so nowadays we have also bug bounty programs and different programs which incentivize ethical hackers to report security vulnerabilities more ethically and obviously if we have more ethical hackers get interested in WordPress we will see a lot more vulnerabilities to be reported and patched as well not only because if we have more ethical hackers on board and we get more vulnerabilities reported and patched but also plugin developers themselves and team developers and project owners they actually put much more effort into security as well last year we saw an optic actually of projects getting security audits setting up security programs for their plugins and so forth I won't even start mentioning AI here because everyone is doing that so but you know you can kind of also think about that line of things because we do have a lot of tools available that would help ethical hackers to also find vulnerabilities more easily in the plugins and all that taking into consideration what we need to again keep in mind is that if 10% from the last year there was 10% of the plugins that remain closed after security reports being reported to them we're probably going to see that number increase as well as a final note here I actually want to also mention something that is upcoming over the upcoming years is that governments start to regulate open source security and supply chain security as well so if public sector and enterprises need to stay compliant they need to understand what kind of open source you know tools they rely on you know what kind of open source projects they actually even use what kind of you know plugins they are running on their you know infrastructure what is the security status of those then developers and agencies who provide services to them need also to kind of you know provide that kind of overview insight and security services so this is something that you know developers and agencies in the space already need to think about is that a lot of those you know larger enterprises and public sector customers will start asking hey why did you you why did you choose tat stack when you know starting to build our application and what does that you know what kind of risk might come with that if we rely on that kind of open source software and this also brings higher security expectations toward plugin developers because if if developers and agencies need to start choosing the stack more wisely and making sure that they have like a good overview of like how well it's maintained what are the previous security issues how well they are how fast are they actually fixing security issues if they're reported how well is it communicated and so forth then what we are going to see is that you know plugin developers will have higher expectations as well and to be honest I think plugin developers have the most to win from here I think what they can do is set up more security programs maybe even incentivize the ethical hackers to report vulnerabilities to them to make sure that they are more actively looking for vulnerabilities in their software set up a bounty program I think this is all in benefit for the plugin developers right now because the developers who will use your product they will trust you more so I think the key takeaways here really is that right now the WordPress ecosystem is more secure than ever I'm looking forward to say the exact same thing next year and then year again and then year again I think plugin developers have a lot to win here and as a community I think plugin developers have also the most to do in terms of making the WordPress space more secure and yeah if you want to see the data from which I actually used on the talk from the last year and a little bit even more data than the QR code actually sends you there and thank you all for making the WordPress space so much secure and thank you and thank you Oliver for sharing while we so just you know we have the standing mics there if you have questions we have time for questions while we're waiting people to queue there I have a question for like what we as the plugin developers you know can actually do to make those we're talking about the security like how to make but what can we actually do to make those plugins while developing it more secure yes definitely one of the things that can be done well is to kind of follow the code of conduct for example or like you know the documentation of how to use the maybe hooks in a correct way definitely sanitize the inputs you know wherever you can to do so and I think one of the things that can be done well that will improve not only the security of the plugin but also how the features of your plugin will see kind of your professionalities to have like some third party security audits done once in a while maybe once a year or so or maybe after like every like a larger release there is service providers in the space different ones that are actually providing code review code review services so this is something that you know should probably be done more often especially if you have a lot of active installations and the other thing is like if you don't have you know a lot of security services and you don't have a lot of operating revenue then obviously you know you can't have like a large sum of money to pay for those security research services then what you can still do is set up a security program like a managed vulnerability disclosure program where you just tell the ethical hackers that hey if you have security issues to report them here and make sure you know that these issues are then going back to that so I think in general if we kind of like put them into context then it's all about communication right so communicate well to your users how the security of your plugin is covered what you are doing as a plugin developer to make that code much more secure and also like if something is found in something is patched how well you are communicating is much more important than the fact that there was something found in the first place. Hi Oliver, great talk. Thank you. So has there been any discussion with the plugin review team about maybe not immediately closing plugins when they have a significant active installed base but maybe taking it on and patching it and treating it more like a core security issue and perhaps force pushing an update and then closing it. Yeah I think it always happens based on a situation so it's not always the way how it's not always that they are closing it down right away I think what they are also doing is trying to reach out to the plugin developer receiving some level of answer whether and when they are going to do that so it's not the case that they are just like close it down immediately in most of the cases but obviously like if there's no reaction whatsoever then closing the plugin probably will get the reaction which will eventually get to fixing the plugin or fixing the issue that is affecting users but I think there's still a lot of work to do right because we are still you know this growth that we are seeing in terms of the vulnerabilities being fixed from the past two or three years I mean we are still in a very much of a baby shoes like we are still I think there's so much more security issues to still iron out and I think as we are moving forward in this process and if the volume grows I think we also need to have even more worked out processes in terms of dealing with those security issues so yeah there's definitely work on there. Nice and then the second question. Hi I recently started experimenting with WordPress blocks and downloaded a lot of blocks plugins and they tend to lean into the JavaScript ecosystem a lot more and what I noticed is that some of these plugins have like a node modules directory with 30 to 50 dependencies aren't we opening up ourselves to even more dependencies by adopting these JavaScript types of working? Absolutely the answer is correct yeah I mean it is happening because and that's why I mentioned the supply chain thing right it's going to piggyback on top of the other things so and the rabbit hole goes deeper with you know each level of each layer so like even if we see already plugins using also a lot of JavaScript libraries like even WordPress core itself used like jQuery right and there was an issue in jQuery so like these things actually go deeper and deeper and I think JavaScript as we introduce more and more JavaScript into the WordPress core I think the problem also you know is going to get deeper and I mean there's just more work to be done We'll take the question from that side Hi yeah you talked about the way the metrics are climbing so we went from 541 in 2020 1382 year before last 4528 99% of those are from plugins but there's 60,000 or more plugins in the plugin repository like that still seems like there's a very small number compared to the amount of code out there and then there's obviously plugins beyond the plugin repository am I right to still be alarmed that there's a lot of surface area in the plugins to still be examined or are you seeing a slowdown in historical vulnerabilities and now it's newly introduced vulnerabilities can you reassure me or should I remain alert? I think you should definitely stay alert because what we don't see any slowdown we're definitely seeing increase even right now in this year and I think there's absolutely right there's 60,000 plugins in the ecosystem and right now the vulnerabilities that are getting reported to us and to the other vendors in the ecosystem these are done by ethical hackers who actually look for these issues but they select in most cases plugins with higher installation numbers or they are looking for easier security vulnerabilities that you can scan the entire REPL for for example cross-site request forgery and stuff like that so I think there's a lot more of those serious security issues still hidden in those lower installed count plugins and I think that's why I was also saying that we're still in a baby shoes like all these numbers are still like the tip of the iceberg in a way and another thing to mention here is that we have almost no visibility into the premium plugins the ones that are not hosted in the WordPress.org and these are most often much less in general so this is another kind of thing that we need to look into in the future as well Thank you Your question please Okay, greetings from the other side of Gulf of Finland Go Estonia Are you aware of a solution or even an initiative to set up a kind of a harness perhaps like a DevSecOps harness for plugin developers that would contain like basic sanity things like vulnerability scanning static analysis things that are pretty standard on most of the other runtimes or if not standards at least there's a toolkit that you can just take into use for supply chain management NPM audit and things like that so are you aware of something that would help plugin developers and if not should there be something like that Thanks for your asking Our own product does kind of something like that This was a paid advertisement Thanks for the question I mean yes we actually do something like that as well so we do vulnerability management and virtual patching so we identify those vulnerabilities in your application and provide you an understanding when should you patch something, what needs to be patched first before something else what are the criticality levels how fast should you react kind of like a protection before you go there and maybe update or maybe there's no update available so it covers your back until you can do so I'm sure there's other services as well but I'm obviously not going to mention them Okay actually just kidding Thank you Thank you for your presentation and for the ethical hacking you all are doing I find that example of the plugin developer who has 100,000 installs from this from your team quite distressing because I also suspect they have other plugins out there in the environment so I wonder what other things can we be doing to put more pressure on that kind of plugin developer including naming and shaming putting pressure on their other plugins like what are the ethical things that you can do in your role but that we as a community can do as well I think instead of naming and shaming we should just kind of focus on those who are doing better so if we are talking about for example we have something called a VDP directory so we have a directory of all the plugins in the WordPress ecosystem who have kind of opened up a security program where they kind of very well say like hey here's how you should report security vulnerabilities to us here so fast we are dealing with those issues it's all about communication and in terms of this specific example as well I think what is needed is to have an understanding of how this issue should be communicated I never kind of believe in naming and shaming because I feel that this is making people eventually hide from a lot of facts not to get named and shamed and I think naming and shaming is also kind of like the problem here why they are even like in many cases reacting negatively if they are receiving a security report because they don't want that attention on their project that oh my god security vulnerability I think what we can do is kind of just collectively talk about security issues more in a positive matter we should talk more about that's great we got another security issue fixed in the ecosystem there's again like hundreds of thousands more websites more secured thanks to that and we should praise the plugin developers for fixing issues transparently and openly I think that's kind of the only way to go one more question this side hello thank you great talk so I have a question lately I've seen this a lot in some especially premium plugins that under the pressure of the marketing teams these they just hide or even bury these vulnerabilities that are reported in the change logs they have so it's pretty difficult to find what actually happened and to learn from this so how do you find these practices and also is this only like a WordPress thing or you find this also in another ecosystems I find it more prevalent in the WordPress ecosystem not that much in the other ones where maybe the development practices are a little bit more mature and you know where a little bit more enterprise customers are using the frameworks but the good point that actually you brought out is that a lot of developers in or like not many but in still like we see a lot of cases where yeah the information is like hidden from change log or it's like hidden under like something like minor fix or something super vague right there's no point of doing that to be honest because what hackers do and what other security companies also do is that they monitor the SVN we also monitor the SVN on a daily basis so we see actually the code change diffs we see if you have escaped something we see if you sanitize something new on the plugin we see if you added nonces we actually see this information and so do hackers so even if you find even if you hide it from the users actually the only ones who are going to benefit are the bad hackers so there's really no point of doing that that's why I'm like I said like the communication is the key and instead of kind of like trying to hide it from it or like try to kind of like you know stay away from the maybe bad publicity of you know there was a security phone issue found I would say that security issues in my mind are much more secure than those that haven't fixed any at all because I have no idea if someone has even checked you know these plugins at all so yeah hiding information in the changelog should not be done really and I think yeah the only people you are going to eventually hide information from are those who need it the most thank you nice nice just stating the obvious this side is killing it guys to be the question just say no they're killing it so if you have more questions there's a mic there your question hi great talk so basically I was just wondering although it's like against the community or something like that but still there can be a possibility that someone like WordPress can have a place where like before uploading a plugin they can actually access like there's a certain level of security being maintained over there like that can be a good option that will actually check like it should not be that kind of plugin which is easily hacked or something like that so can it be a good thing like if a community come together or either WordPress itself come together and develop something like that actually WordPress does that they do it on the first submission of the plugin if you upload a new plugin to the system or to the repo then they're actually checking the plugin for those security issues they use I'm not actually 100% sure now but they use one of those like static code analyzing tools to actually check for unknown issues so they check if there's like maybe potential SQL injection, vulnerabilities and stuff like that but the thing is that after that like after plugins start to like release updates these checks are not done anymore so you know a lot of plugins that are actually applied into the repository are not at all anything similar to what they are today right so I think there is I think we need more tools that help plugin developers in general and I think we need different kinds of ones we need the ones that are for helping out with the communication but we also need to have access tools that they can run their plugin code through before they push a next update for example so you're completely right yeah we definitely need that kind of tools more thank you nice and this side is working up so we have the question there I had the slide with the main vulnerabilities like CSRF, XSS SQL injections and like most of it is handled with sanitizing, escaping and using nonsense is there like any other category of vulnerability that we should look out for I feel like it's too easy or is there anything more to hacking because I don't know how those sites are attacked I think a lot of like more complex ones that need more attention are definitely the ones with involved broken authentication or like misuse of like WordPress existing hooks obviously we have a solution that you could just read the codex and use the hooks in the right way but unfortunately not everyone does so another thing to look out for is when code is actually reused because what we've also seen is that some developers in WordPress we build plugins in PHP and you can find a lot of PHP in stack overflow but that doesn't necessarily mean that the code on stack overflow is also secure so we can see a lot of vulnerabilities being introduced in these kind of ways as well into the plugins but I think the more complex ones that I think need more attention are the logic issues are surrounding authentication and like how the kind of like WordPress core and APIs are being kind of interacted with I think these are the ones to kind of like look more closely Wow and this concludes probably the longest session that I ever attended just so many questions that's good do we have any more questions I have one just to make the prepared so you mentioned cloudfest or work in Europe which audience do you prefer and big round of applause Oliver thank you so much before you leave the stage we have a gift for you thank you so I haven't heard that so Mr. Rich thank you so much so our next session actually is at four so it's going to be second round of the lightning talks about Gutenberg static websites and future generations you heard about that speaker and the opening remarks so also you have the DLP connect at four with Hari Kourtney Afshana and Emmanuel happening just so yeah see you in 18 minutes here thank you welcome everybody this is Rick Hell and I was about to say Phoenix we're work in Europe I'm from Phoenix and today on day one of work camp Europe we have with us Martin Bellman Martin welcome how are you doing? I'm good enjoying work camp so far yay how many work camp Europe have you attended this is my third one I did a portal last year and then before COVID hit Berlin as well oh nice so okay yes making this the third exactly exactly how has it been great coming back to work camps since the lockdown yes I mean when I went to the first one which was Berlin I didn't expect that it would be so nice that there was this feeling of community and you know you would just meet people but you've never spoken to in real life and you come here and you hit it off right away and you talk about you know work press or life and it felt really good and so I think this is going to be a yearly thing now where I return to work camp because yeah it feels good it feels it feels really good and I was bummed that you know everybody was bummed that COVID hit and then there was no work camp or at least not in real life so was that your first work camp ever yes yes wow I love that never did a smaller work camp in Belgium or the Netherlands no it was like the first the first one and it was a big one yeah yeah it's been really good it's good experience so I can recommend it to everybody if you can make it to try and make it to one of the work camps near your area so we have been to a local camp or not yet no no like the first work camp I ever did was the big work camp Europe I have never been to a local one yeah yeah I should I should really but and you're located in Belgium yes that's correct has there been any local camps there I think there used to be a couple of years ago one in Antwerp but not anymore but we live very close by to the Netherlands which has a camp so a lot of us Belgians we would travel to the Netherlands to go there so well word on the street is word camp Netherlands is happening it's September okay maybe you can attend that one yeah I mean if I'm in the country I like to travel a lot so I don't know if I'll be there but yeah I'm a traveler so if I'm in the country I would definitely make it to the Netherlands yeah so I heard a rumor that you actually traveled here like was it a road trip yes how long ago did that start so we started on the 19th of May which is a good three weeks ago and we took the car over we crossed five four countries and then we took the ferry from Italy to here and just taking it slow me and my partner just traveling we went to a few Greek islands it's a working holiday thing where we have our laptops with us and we can do the work and we did this last year too when we went to Porto just stopping in Spain taking it slow making a road trip a lot of word camp Europe and maybe this will become a yearly thing depending on the location that it will be at but I really enjoy it it's just a nice way to see some of the of Europe some of the countries around us where did you go what countries did you head up so we start in Belgium then we pass France then we pass Switzerland then we are in Italy we have to drive through all of Italy then we take a ferry then we are in Greece we have the option to do some islands or you travel inland and now we are here at the other side of Greece that's so amazing it's quite a few countries now do you still drive this is a very American question but I'm assuming you drive a stick shift really? because the idea was because electric cars are coming and they're all automatic so when we bought the car three years ago I really wanted a manual a stick shift but then the thing was we're all going to be driving automatic soon anyway so let's already buy an automatic and then we can practice so it is an automatic but it's against it feels a bit weird I like a manual gearbox do you feel like you're a lazy driver now a little bit a little bit there's nothing to do anymore you have to pay attention obviously but yeah it takes some getting used to but I think now going back to manual might be harder it's a luxury so I actually had a Jetta that was a manual stick shift in the early 2000s and went away for years and just recently bought an Audi that's a stick shift in America it took me three months to find it and it took a little maybe just a little bit riding a bike again if you haven't rode in 10 years so you'd be fine would you go back to an automatic I mean eventually with an electric car oh my god electric car yes but there are times when I have to go back to driving an automatic and I'm like oh my gosh I have so much time and so much like I could just chill yeah that's exactly it so there must be lovely on a road trip yeah it is very comfortable yeah what kind of car is it it's a Volkswagen T-Roc a bright blue one oh my goodness I'm very partial to V-Dubs and Audis sorry I'm probably acting like the biggest American right now but tell me about your plugin you're a product owner right several WooCommerce plugins yeah I started with this around 2017 all the stories that I tell usually involve traveling and the story of my WordPress career let's say also involves traveling I quit my cozy IT job in Belgium and traveled to Australia with my partner for a year we bought a four-wheel drive vehicle and we just slept in it and traveled through the whole country and yeah that was also my impression after it this is amazing and the question is how can I do this again and that's by becoming a freelancer or a product owner and so I started looking into WordPress looking into WooCommerce and I saw a few gaps in the market where I might launch a plugin that is beneficial to the WooCommerce community and that's basically how it all started around 2017 wow have you been loving it yeah yeah it's absolutely amazing it's definitely the right choice for me because it combines freedom I can have a bit my own agenda there's no customer deadlines I mean I love customers it's not that but I'm not as good with deadlines as I should be so like owning products is a good fit for me and yeah I mean there's a lot to learn in this journey because there's a lot more to owning products than just developing the products you have to market the products you have to the website has to be there it has to work, you have to service a lot of customers there's a whole support area that I've never had to deal with so it's a lot of work but it's definitely very rewarding and I'm very happy that I made that step so it all led to this point and it's been good for me do you have a team? are you still solo? I have a team but we are just three people so it's me, my partner is doing everything content wise and then I have a support agent who is helping me handle the support load so we're a very small team it still feels very indie I love it but that's how it starts right it's so easy I'm sure it's so difficult at times like anything if you start something new it's not always easy or not as easy as it looks but the end result is very rewarding so I'm very happy with this journey but it's not always easy there's a lot that goes with it marketing, talking to people customer experience, customer support I'm a very typical developer so these are things that I had to learn it sounds so simple but how do you talk to a customer so that they don't run away they understand what you're trying to say because I might want to approach everything very technical the average WordPress user is not technical at all so you have to learn how to deal with those customers how to talk to them on a level that everybody understands there's learning curves everywhere but so far it's working I love that how about in Australia tell us any sort of what was the craziest story or animal or creature you encountered or anything there are a few so everything in Australia tries to kill you it's a bit of an exaggeration but there are a lot of animals that can kill you but the upside is that in the last 40-50 years no animal has killed a human so it's it's fine but the most dangerous spider in Australia is very small and I remember we came across it once and we were at a campground and it was in the communal kitchen and it was just sitting there very open and if children were playing there the spider might have bitten any of the children so I went to the staff of the place and I said there's a deadly spider there can you take it away and there were very Australian about it I said yeah, no worries, we'll handle it no problem, after an hour the spider was still there so I decided to capture it myself so we took boxes like that we had with us and I was very scared and trying to capture that spider in the box and just make sure to put it somewhere so that was like I mean it puts things in perspective because I'm very tall and the spider is very small but it can hurt me any second and I try to get it away so that the area was safer for children to play at so there are a few stories like that but I mean it's not as bad as you make it because these are the stories that you tell it's a nice place it's a very nice place if I get a chance I will go back because it's very nice and we have scorpions everyone's like oh my god you have a scorpion what do you do? and I'm like dude scorpions are annoying and they hurt they're just creepy looking but the deadly spider will kill you though if not treated and depending on your weight and your height it can kill you but those are fun things to say at parties but the chances of it killing you is still low there are no worries but you do have to take it out of sight so that people don't accidentally trip on it and it gets angry that would not be a good plan it's too funny so when did you get into Athens? we got in here a couple of days ago actually so we already had some time to explore just wander around the city yeah awesome and are you going to be heading up parties right? yes there is a party organized by Freemius for several product people so people that create teams or plugins so they're kind of my peers and colleagues so that's a very nice thing to do of Freemius to organize that party because there will be a lot of people with the same interests in the same place so I'll definitely be going to that earlier you said you're a bit on the introverted side so you stick to one party tonight? two but the problem is word camp is too short it's only two days and so a lot of parties are at the same time so you have to make it work to go from one place to the other so it's kind of depend on how one party goes if I can go to another one but maybe I have my eye on a few I don't want to rush it just for the sake of going everywhere and just see how it goes I've done that before in word camp US 2019 I went to eight you went to eight parties on two days one night I did eight and was that still fun? I wouldn't recommend and I've not done it ever since there's a bit of a competitive spirit in me where I want to see everybody because I love everybody so then I go to all of it tonight is that the goal? okay so are you speaking or volunteering this? no I'm a bit of an introvert to speak in one of the tracks I think it's a bit daunting this is as far as I'll go an interview so I'm not speaking also not volunteering although I might do that but this year I'm really looking into sponsoring because that seems fun a lot of the experiences of word camp actually happens in the main square where all the booths are and everyone's talking that's where the networking and everything happens so I might want to see what it's like to be part of it from a sponsoring point of view something to think about absolutely so what's your plan for tomorrow? plan for tomorrow is probably just to hang around here try and do some networking in the hallway track see some people visit the WooCommerce booth just to talk to them about product updates just to see what they have on the roadmap because this is the only time I get to speak to people in real life they have a Slack channel and WordPress has a Slack channel to be here and to talk to people so I think I'll be doing more of that just talking but yeah that's really what it's all about and that's what I love about it just connecting with the community seeing who's here and seeing who I know or from Twitter mostly and then talking to them and getting to know them in real life that's what it's all about do you ever catch any sessions? but I'm not planning in advance I want to go to this session it depends on where I'm at during the day because for me the hallway track is the main thing of the event and then I will fill it up with sessions here and there but there's nothing that I plan I don't have an agenda like I want to go to this session or that session I'm not a planning person per se I don't plan anything and we'll see where it goes I'm very similar actually so we share that I'm almost always in the hallway track talking with people throwing my voice away but it's so much fun do you have any kids? no good for you no kids are great I have kids are your kids with you here? yeah no I love that they brought some babysitting that's awesome thank you so much for being on you've been wonderful and I'm glad you were good thank you very much that was awesome that was perfect oh nice thank you welcome to the second round of the lighting talks once again 15 minutes long there are no time for questions but you can ask our speakers all the questions after so we're opening up with Ivan my brother from Bulgaria and he will talk about how can any website benefit from WordPress anything experienced thanks to Gutenberg Ivan big round of applause please hello thank you everyone for coming thank you Milan for the introduction it's my gratitude to be here a year later after being here in Porto so thank you very much for again attending today I will try to put some light on how can any website benefit from WordPress editing experience thanks to Gutenberg so let's start and let's take my remote because I'll definitely need it so quick presentation about myself I'm CEO of Vibe Studio it's a WordPress agency for enterprise development and custom coding I have been doing web development since 2003 and my first touch to WordPress was six years later in 2009 through the years I have worked on roughly thousands and many more websites and the clients of our companies company is from four different continents despite it's a lightning session I would like to spare a moment to thank my team because without them this topic and this presentation won't be possible in general so let's take a moment to recognize the team efforts to my best thanks you can meet them in the hall and let's say hi we will quickly do a topic overview so we can be all aware what are we going to talk about we will take a look at the WordPress and how it is superior than any other online we will take a brief look at the WordPress builders and also the power and importance of Gutenberg also we will see the challenges for non CMS websites or any online app and online application in general and their inflexibility compared to WordPress also how they can still benefit from WordPress all of the enterprises mobile apps third part web apps everyone we will see how Gutenberg comes to the rescue and makes this all possible and finally take a look of the life cycle of such process so we are all familiar with WordPress editing experience and it is unparalleled to any other editor there we all know that we use WordPress super user friendly back in the days when Vibe Studio got its first clients the one of my selling points was that using WordPress for editing your website is no harder than just managing a text document and this is all the skills you need to maintain the content I still believe this is one of the main advantages of using WordPress the other advantages we are all familiar it is that WordPress is super and it is loved by these sort of changes and in the last years I think a lot of efforts have been added to make WordPress also to improve the accessibility of how the WordPress products are used which is super important nowadays and finally last but not least is the community and support we all know that the reason WordPress is great is the community itself so if you have a question how to use it you can find the answer easily by the community to expand the topic in order to make the WordPress editing experience even greater there are a lot of what you see is what you get builders we all know them, they are super famous you can see most of them outside the house and they all provide great editing experience we can't argue that they are improving with the time we are talking about I'm pretty sure there are a lot of Star Wars fans here we all know that Darth Vader is the strongest but he can't basically live without his mask and I think he's the same with most of the builders which are acting as third party builders they can't live without WordPress however Gutenberg who is in a real part of WordPress is fully it can provide content to any other system because it is generating HTML it relies on full independence from the additional post metadata tables of the post storage in the traditional WordPress architecture and also Gutenberg as a system is working natively it is not so required to install an additional plugin in order to have Gutenberg it just works it even can be disabled when it comes to managing WordPress website content in general not just WordPress we need to take a look at for the non-CMS websites or any online based application in general there are a lot of challenges for example those non-CMS online applications lacks the ability to do layout changes quickly they lack the ability to manage the admin area they lack the ability to create new landing pages quickly and whenever the marketing team needs to react quickly and efficiently they are not able to do it without the help of a developer who can help them to make even the smallest changes in my career I have even seen that some enterprise websites who are custom built in order to make marketing campaign they are building a subdomain webpage that is connected with some CNAME records to third-part services that are allowing full website editing which I think is not that it's not making the results that needs to be achieved it's not working natively you are disconnected with your website structure it basically creates more issues rather than solutions however enterprises and non-CMS WordPress non-CMS websites in general sorry or online applications in general they can still benefit from WordPress and this is thankfully to Gutenberg Gutenberg comes to the rescue for all of those websites and online apps we all know the motto for the 20th anniversary of WordPress it is called from blocks to blocks I can't agree more we all know that Gutenberg allows us to divide the content to individual blocks and each of these blocks can represent any different type of content like text, image, video or whatever visual representation of how our websites monetizes and communicates with the clients who are in the website on the top of that blocks can be easily moved edited they can be styled they can be basically reused and even repeated on the same page so this is all possible through Gutenberg what is the biggest advantage of Gutenberg is not the flexibility of editing because this is something that is presented by other web builders as well it is how it actually saves and generates the content and the data it comes to the development side of the things and we can separate this into 5 different points it is that Gutenberg provides simplified data management it is the portability and compatibility of Gutenberg it is a factor that benefits with search engine optimization it is that Gutenberg provides future-proof content and last but not least is the performance and speed so when it comes to data management Gutenberg stores the data in the database in the form of html which is a universal language and it is understood by all web browsers and no web applications it is universal across no matter if you are using wordpress, a non-wordpress website online app or whatever they all can read html this contrasts with certain plugins you can use your data as metadata and basically it only makes sense if you are using the plugin and if you want to use it outside of the concept of this plugin you need to quote a lot more because it is not universal when it comes to portability and compatibility as we mentioned the usage of html basically allows this provided content everywhere and on the top of that when it comes to search engine optimization html is super easy to read it is what the search engines requires and this allows the website to be read also it is super future-proof and durable because html is likely to remain it's even likely to improve but the skeleton in the base will be basically unchanged on the other hand metadata can become absolute last but not least html is typically quicker to load than metadata tables and it can lead to improved site performance generating the content with Gutenberg basically requires a technology to pass this content to the third-party application to the non-CMS website happily we have different options to do that when it comes to WordPress those different options can be separated two of them can be REST API and GraphQL in order to compare them REST API it's biggest advantage is that it is supported by default in WordPress it provides all of the data regarding single-poster page into universal JSON format it is super well documented and if we can find this which is that it relies on many endpoints on the other hand GraphQL it is supported but with an additional plugin it outputs the data in an SQL-like format it is also well documented but it requires a lot more digging and the biggest advantage that is way in front of REST API is that it relies on a single endpoint which is important for your development path in order to see in fact how such a setup can look we can take a look at the lifecycle of such structure so most importantly we need first when let's say we have a non-CMS website it is let's say for a highly enterprise and we can't afford to use non-custom websites but our marketing team still needs the ability to change the data so we need to use non-cms websites so we need to use non-cms websites so this is what a possibility lifecycle of the app can look using WordPress first we need to create the predefined blocks which for the process let's say the UI in the UX team they are designing the different set of blocks we are going to use in our websites and then the developers are coding every page that is on the non-CMS website is presented on WordPress and they can basically change the content, reuse those blocks and just call a block that they need, reorder the design add the content, text in images and just saves it they can choose their colors, their text, whatever finally the developers using the technologies that we showed in the previous slide REST API or Open Graph they use those to pass the data to the third party site or app and they code it in a way whenever a new content is made this to be immediately represented on the third party application in order to conclude all of this I believe that the flexibility of WordPress editing eventually and also the evolution of other technologies and other coding languages it is possible that ultimately the main product of what WordPress is about is not itself the WordPress as a core tool but the editing experience that is provided by the Gutenberg has a solid tool I believe this is what WordPress can still benefit rocking in front of other technologies that are available on the market and not only keep its percentage of usage but also increase it at some point of course this is just a suggestion I'm sure that whatever happens in future the community that is in front of us and the WordPress community we will just face it and we will benefit in the ultimate way possible that's it from me, thank you very much for your attention thank you thank you Ivan we have a small gift for you thank you another round of applause for Ivan, thank you our second speaker is the first time work-end speaker and he comes from Germany and I need to read this fun fact so whenever someone reaches out to the simply static team I think about adding my dog to the website as the company CEO sometimes we even have strategic meetings together but he's pretty picky about adding new features so a huge round of applause for Patrick Patrick, please grab the remote yours as well that's a pretty big stage hello everyone perfect so welcome everyone I want to give you a quick introduction into running a static WordPress website let me quickly introduce myself a little bit further and there are not that many bullet points here but I'm a WordPress developer since 2010 and I'm also the developer behind simply static which is a static site generator plugin for WordPress we will see a quick view into it in a minute I'm also a solopreneur which means I'm running plugin business full-time selling, maintaining, building, plugins and so on so let's get started with static WordPress so the start is pretty obviously so we have to make our WordPress website static what means static we take our dynamic WordPress website and make converted back into HTML, CSS, JavaScript and obviously your image files pretty much like 1999 but in a good way I built this little plugin called simply static you can see a screenshot on the right-hand side of the screen and the generation process is pretty much straightforward so you can install it for free from the WordPress repository activate it go to simply static generate and there's a big purple button label generate static files and you can click on it and the process starts running depending on the size of the websites it might take a while it might take a little bit a simpler website to get started once the process is finished you will get the download link where you can click on and it will download the zip file containing all the static files so next step let's talk about hosting it's a little bit different compared to what you might be used to when it comes to traditional WordPress hosting you don't need an actual database and you probably don't even need to have WordPress hosted somewhere and it's that use like something like local WP so where do you host my static website well that depends a little bit on how familiar you are with certain concepts for example github so if you are familiar with github and you know the basics to upload your files if you are familiar with github and you're looking for the quickest way to get started I would suggest starting with Netlify Netlify provides a little drag and drop zip uploader where you can simply drag and drop zip uploader where you can simply drag and drop zip uploader where you can simply drag and drop zip uploader where you can just uploader where you can simply drag and drop the zip file you got from simply static and uploader to Netlify and you immediately get your static website running on a temporary domain that you can use you can always switch on your preferred domain later if you're a fan of traditional deployment which means using SFTP and copying over your files you can do that as well the two most popular options here are DigitalOceanSpaces and obviously Amazon S3 so now that we have a static version of our website and we have probably already deployed it to a hosting provider let's take a quick look at some dynamic features and how we can make them work on a static WordPress website so yeah pretty much every website these days has some kind of form newsletter sign up and you still want to use like a contact form on your static website sure so there are different ways you can handle that there are external tools you can use but in my talk I'd like to say to WordPress as close as possible so we use in contact form 7 there's a free plugin available for contact form 7 which is called CF7 to webhook that you can use to download the submitted data from the form the user has submitted on the front end to an external webhook a pretty popular service you might already know is Zapier Zapier is like a no-code automation tool and you can send off the data from the contact form to Zapier and in Zapier you can configure get all the data converted to an email and send it to me so this way your traditional WordPress website isn't involved anymore in the steps and you can still use and style and modify your form based on contact form 7 as you already used to the next popular thing is search so the traditional WordPress search works with PHP and URL parameters and both will not work on a static website so we need some kind of replacement while there are a lot of different tools for the use case and some of them are pretty powerful and some of them are simpler I chose the simplest one which is Google custom search engine Google custom search engine is like a little external tool you can sign up for free and you get like a little API key that you can use and in combination with the plug and mention WP Google search the only thing you have to do is copy in the API key and save the settings and you get a short code and return and you can place anywhere on your website and it will render a little search box already available without a suggest so once a user types something in search results will pop up if it hits enter or clicks on the little search icon provided it will open a pop up which contains search results from Google but limited to your own domain which is important because you don't want your competitors in your own search results so that's pretty much the second important part now we have covered the basics and you probably have a question in your mind why the hell should I use the static website why the extra effort and what are the benefits let's quickly cover them one thing that a lot of people already know is that static WordPress websites are pretty fast because there is no database interaction there is no dynamic processing everything is already generated and we just deliver the static fire and optimized assets to the user or to the user's browser so speed is obvious but the impact on the performance is even higher if you compare to a bigger website let's say you have traditional business website but translated into seven languages depending on the plugin or on the framework you have used to do that that might take some time for the user to get the translated page so to speed that up we can pre generate and pre-convert the HTML files for each language and once the user switch the language he automatically gets the translated HTML page back and that is a lot faster than compared to a traditional multilingual website even with a powerful caching and some kind of premium hosting another important benefit for me even more important than speed but I know everyone is kind of hyped about performance is security so a static website is almost unhackable because a hacker doesn't have any export vectors that he can use to inject malicious code into your website or try to inject some additional styles or whatsoever so because your website is static and your database and WordPress is either offline or protected behind basic end or firewall a hacker will have a pretty hard time to do anything relevant to your website as long as it's static it's not a hard point and I'm sure you agree with me is maintenance so updating a WordPress website can be a pretty daunting task especially if it's not your main business let's say the average business with a website how often do people take care of updates there are several plug-in security updates each week there are multiple WordPress updates each year maybe your themes updated each month so it's cool if everything works as expected if you click update but that's not always the case so if you have a static website you have like a snapshot in time so you have your static website running no matter what happens it will remain unchanged on the other side you have your WordPress website which is now practically a free staging environment for you to update to test to do whatever you want only if you're happy with the results and you have tested everything you will update the static website and get the updated changes to your official website so to say there are a couple of other benefits I tried to keep it short one I like to mention is cost reduction so I'm sure we can argue about that but I would say premium WordPress hosting is kind of expensive especially if you want something secure reliable automated backups done for you so compared to that static hosting is insanely cheap so we're talking about depending on the website site and service about one euro or dollar per month or even per year depending on the traffic the size of the websites the amount of pages of the website and now a thing it's not really a benefit but a question I often get is the difference between headless and static WordPress headless WordPress often use Jamstack which requires to rebuild your existing website or build a new design based on a modern JavaScript framework like React or Vue.js static WordPress is a static replication of your existing website so you will still use your existing tools your existing theme your existing plugins you may have to adjust one or the or another but all in all it's your WordPress website replicated as a static one that you can use right away without any technical requirements involved so that's all for me thanks for your attention and have a good day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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