 Guess I'm fun today. It's cool, right? Belly's full. Yeah, y'all real lethargic So I'm gonna need you to pep it up. All right. This is about me not you I'm just joking. Um, so a show of hands here freelancers Hardcore devs Agencies that are actually freelancers because they have two or more employees. There we go All right, where were the hardcore devs? Love you guys. Thank you. You're my people How many people just getting into WordPress and want to know some more things about WordPress cool? That's a lot of you well This is going to apply to all of you in some way or another but this talk is mainly about Developers and how we train people How many of you have hired a developer before? How many of you are your own developer? Cool, how many of you have had to train somebody on how to use WordPress? How many of you that just had your hands up have left and then somebody called you really pissed off because something bad happened Don't lie I've been doing WordPress for about eight years my title slide here is Dwayne who is so cool from pantheon and I told him that this was gonna be my title slide because he was cheesing like he Stole something last night and that beer was good. It was magical. So thank you guys for hosting us and Having a little fun doing that But the real name of my talk is why it doesn't do that and all the things that WordPress actually does because I've been training people how to use WordPress retail and corporate websites for about five years now with the agency I'm with I'll tell you about them in a minute And one thing I learned my first year on the job was that I was actually a crappy trainer Every good developer has a skill set that they're very very good at something that they can do well Especially in the WordPress community you have to specialize in something right because if you try to do it all You're not gonna be great at it But one of the things I feel like as as developers that we have a hard time with is training so throughout this Talk you're gonna get training tips and tactics to keep your users from asking why doesn't it now if you are a WordPress user and you were just setting up your own website eight of these things are gonna be things that you should learn about WordPress so definitely hang around we're gonna talk about Gutenberg at the end too but Again, my name is John McCully. I'm senior web developer for Moxley Carmichael in Knoxville, Tennessee We are a full-service communications firm. We do graphic design. We do PR We do government relations if your business gets in trouble with the IRS. We will come help you out I won't but somebody smarter than me will But we've been heavy into WordPress web web design since 2010 before I came there and I've been doing it for about five years Throughout this presentation, you'll see my Twitter handle there Johnny Mac codes If you have any questions that I don't answer to this presentation or during the Q&A period I will answer them via Twitter or you can just get in touch with me in general if you just want to chat And that'll be fun for me So I'm gonna make an assumption about the developers in the room and this is an assumption that I had to make about myself I used to think that being a better geek would make me more successful Right Any of you out there? It's okay. You're in a you're in a place of comfort right now. I was that guy If you haven't noticed yet, I have a gigantic ego That's why there's a picture of myself in my presentation because you know if you can see me twice How much better is that? But had a huge ego when I started developing WordPress websites, right? I thought I'm a good corporate developer I'm doing intranets. I'm doing big stuff for big companies I can do this and I can be great at it But what it what I ended up doing a whole lot of times was throwing unneeded terminology nonsense tactics and A whole bunch of things people didn't need to know into my training. So I'd set with somebody for two hours I'd stand up bold chested and be like I have taught you to run the world And they'd look at me like I don't know what you've been talking about for the last two hours, man It and then they'd call later on and be upset This happened to me in the worst way in my first year at Moxley Carmichael We had just done a pretty big website for a law firm in town And I was excited it was a hundred plus attorneys It had all these neat features and I went in their office had on a suit and tie I was like I look snazzy and I'm gonna train these 50 attorneys on how to use this thing got through the training Get a phone call when I get back to the office and it's our CEO and she wants to talk to me And I'm like, oh, no, she never speaks to me So I go into her office and she's like what the hell have you done? And I'm like I don't know but I would like to any preamble to this would be great And she said they said that you came in there and just rattled off a bunch of crap and then left And I was like That sounds accurate That sounds like exactly what I just did But then sitting at my desk what I had to figure out for myself was What did I even say? Like how many have you ever been in that you're in there training you're like after it's over you're like I don't know if I covered anything useful, but I said a lot of words with my mouth That happens all the time, right? We leave a training and we're like So that's what I had to figure out because I was so focused on this I was focused on being a better coder And not a better user of the system Because at the end of the day most people that buy wordpress websites Do not care how you built it as long as it works well and it's fast All right, these are two things that will always win clients over Works well, and it's fast as long as you code it right. It's secure. They're happy with it They don't care about how you coded your custom post types. They don't care about your Gutenberg blocks I do because I'm a nerd and I want to know about them, but your users don't care So I think a good wordpress developer if you're going to train clients has three essential skills One uses human words Because we think javascript is a human word. It's not nobody knows what that is And all they know is that internet explorer six used to tell them they had to turn it back on All right, so you got to use human words patience Any adhd developers in here? I think that's what makes us who we are right? Yeah, me too I don't have any patience. You start doing something stupid on the screen and I'm like, no I'm out Can't be that can't be that you've got to be good and you've got to have patience with people And then a little bit of esp goes a long way right read somebody's body language I took a class on public speaking a long time ago and they talked about body language on stage And then I watched myself do a presentation. It was like this The whole time and I was like everybody assumes I don't want to be there any more than they do But esp is about reading their body language when you're in the meeting when you're training them They will show you confusion They will show you fear And they will show you discomfort So make sure you have just a little bit of that going on Otherwise what's going to happen is you're going to leave training and they're going to look at that where wordpress website And they're going to do one of these numbers And that's going to be the end of it so I'm going to start out with 10 tips For developers that are training people and like I said if you just have a wordpress website These are things that are going to apply to you or that you can ask for help on To get done. Oh, let me start by following the rules too. If you have questions throughout You may ask those questions You don't have to wait until the end because it may not be relevant by the time we get there So definitely make sure you ask those questions tip number one Simplify the interface How many of you have ever seen one of these? And it makes you want to cry All right, you get up open the dashboard and you're like there's a lot of crap there that i'm never going to use So this is the same website. I'm going to show you twice With just a few things taken out. I did this in about 10 minutes earlier It's easy to do Decluttering and simplifying the interface Is the first thing you should do before you start to train somebody Because they don't need three quarters of what wordpress has in that dashboard They're never going to use it If you've worked with the user, you know that when it comes to plugin updates and appearance editing and all that crap There's a lot of stuff in there that they're just not going to use now We want to tell them what they are But we want to keep them from pressing buttons and worrying about how to use their website We want to keep them focused on what we need them to focus on So there's a couple ways you can do that There's plugins out there that allow you to customize the admin menu. There's a ton of really good ones You can do this through simple code in the functions php file though Throughout this if I say there's simple code for it, you can also hit me up on github There is a thing that says useful wordpress code snippets and it's for beginner developers And it's just this one repo that has a bunch of code that I reuse over and over again So that people don't ask me how I did it because I can't spit it out Standing in front of you. All right A few other things about decluttering the interface Move custom fields up a cf users in the room Big fan of a cf big problem with a cf Developers a lot of times those custom fields are buried at the bottom of the interface under the Gigantic visual editor, right? What's the problem with that? People are going to hit that update button or that publish button and they're going to see this is required This is required. This is required and they don't know where it is So bump those custom fields up if I have to fill it out or I need to fill it out Make it be the first thing I see before I get to that huge content block Choose your admin notices wisely Any of you guys ever been in the back end of somebody's wordpress website that you inherited And all the things that they haven't paid for are telling you that they haven't paid for them Happens to me all the time. I'm like, did you buy this plugin or this theme? Admin notices can clutter up the interface and make it really hard for people to understand What information it is they need to actually use, right? So there's a few easy ways to do this. Like I said, there's code snippets on my That you can go get that will help you hide these things But there's also ways to choose them. There are things they need to know So recently with wordpress's minimum php requirement They need to know that their wordpress website's not going to work anymore So you don't want to hide the notice that tells them to update php So wordpress has several levels of admin notices Learn which ones that they need to see and keep the important ones in there So they get the warnings and they know to either work on it themselves or call someone to help And get rid all the other crap. Like, you know, if they're using free plugins, we want them to donate But let's not keep that persistent there forever, right? Actually use the dashboard widgets Um, this is my favorite thing to say to developers Any of you have all the dashboard widgets turned off in every single wordpress installation you have me too because I hate them But for clients, they're very valuable, right? What's the first thing a client's going to ask you for one month into their new launch? Google analytics, right? They're gonna be like, do you have any analytics or how many people are hitting my brand new website? It must be thousands If I don't give them that I got to go tell them how to log in somewhere They're probably it's probably also another system. They're uncomfortable with this is something That's easy to put in the dashboard and put it in their face when they log in So go ahead and do that There's other things if they have custom post types and they're managing data sets You can actually put access to those data sets right there in front of their face And make sure that they see those things constantly use the dashboard wisely We all love dashboards and the software we use. Let's make it work for them tip to avoid jargon CSS html j s cpt ui Custom post time Do not make any of these things the first thing you say to a client Because they don't understand it You lost them the minute you said log in to the word press back end All right So we got to get them there avoid jargon or you're gonna see a whole lot of this And it's going to look like that face and once you get there You're never going to get them back If you start a two-hour training with a group and you get one that looks like that You're going to spend the rest of the time you're there winning the audience back. You don't want to be that so don't use jargon Anytime i've done training in the past three years I've always practiced the training on somebody else in my office That is not a bad thing to do if you don't have somebody else in your office pick out your mom your grandma Your aunt your uncle somebody down the street that doesn't even have a television because they're going to be confused Try all the words and everything that confuses them replace it replace that word in your vocabulary Tip three. This is the hardest one Do it in their space Everybody in here tests on all browsers i'm assuming Liars Yeah, who has a copy of opera? Yeah Jerks, I told you this guy No, do it You know what happens is you develop a word press website and they work so beautifully in chrome that you're like Why would I ever need another browser? I mean everybody's using chrome, right? No, no my boss has a version of safari that I call the devil's safari Because every time I go in there after making a change. He's like, I don't see anything and I'm like What are you using for caching? What does it it will cache for days and days and I'm like we work across from each other There's nothing going on. I have to clear the cache manually every single time But this is why you want to do it in their space, right? Because we're developers when the site's done. It's not done, right? Right, we showed it to them. They approved it. It's out the door three days later We're still making changes because there's crap that's got to be done, right? And what happens we get into training? And they pull up their antiquated internet explorer And a gentle tear rolls down my cheek. I'm like, oh you're confused, honey And that's the end of my day because then nothing works after that, right? They looked at that website. I changed one thing And it's like no because I don't know what sort of pit of hell that internet explorer caches in but I can't find it And it's in some registry key on somebody else's machine using windows 7 from 1997 or some crap like that No, do it in their space a few things about that not only is it going to eliminate disasters From happening in their browser It's going to be a place where they're comfortable So basically you just hacked the comfort level by putting them in their own chair Now a couple things about doing it in their space and these are just personal tips not really dev tips don't stand behind them We as developers forget that when somebody walks in our office or walks up behind us We jump like cats that see you know brown things on the ground We're developers we should get that They don't like people behind them either don't touch Touch is a bad thing when you're teaching people tech stuff because that just completely changes everything And don't ask to drive Never ask to drive make sure their hand is on the mouse at all times because If you don't you're going to see them do not see them do some quirky thing that they do That you're not going to be able to account for in your training and you need to be able to Maneuver those things on the fly tip for Highlight the screen options menu Every time I go into somebody's office after taking over a WordPress site and they say how do I see more posts? I want their developer's name and number You're like we're gonna have conversation, buddy Ah, so the screen option menu if you're not familiar with what it is for those that are running WordPress websites Tucked into the top right corner of the screen. There's a little thing that says screen options Why is that important to you? That controls all the fields that you see on the screen when you go to edit something inside a WordPress It shows your menu editing. How many of you knew you could add CSS classes and targets to your menus in WordPress? Yeah, the WordPress people did Lots of other people didn't that's because it's hidden under screen options. You have to check some boxes to see those things So what happens when we as developers customize their menu system? And they've got to add some sort of class to get an icon on it Then they're like I don't understand why this doesn't work. I copied the menu item It should do the same thing right? That's not the way it works. There's a field missing because I can't see it So make sure that they know those things This is also when you've got somebody's got a big blog our CEO has a blog that's been running since 2009 That has a little over 500 posts sometimes She needs to scroll back to a post that she doesn't know the title of or the date that she wrote it So I gave her the screen options menu so I could stop doing it for her This will keep you from doing that as well Giving them that menu and it'll help This uh screen grab is from an older presentation because I can't let go of WordPress 4 9 Because you know 5.0 is so friendly now tip 5 Provide short screen casts. This is an easy win with training We do this with all our clients. We build in about 12 hours of training time just to do this part because basically If we try to do give them one of the systems that sells screen casts Or we give them some other proprietary training system. What's the difference right? It's not their site So they get into the back end and although as a WordPress dev I understand what most WordPress backends look like and I feel comfortable in that Most WordPress users don't so Short screen casts are a great way to not have to go back for training later Because they retain about 2 of what you say in your trainings So if I can give them these screen casts on the back end of their websites I give them a place where they can go back and look in the future This is actually as I die This is one of our places one of our websites for a local boutique called estate They have this neat little thing on their website that called trends That puts these pictures to the right hand side of their events posts What's the problem when you tell somebody to put a picture in a pre-designed space? They always want to put something that doesn't fit, right? I don't know what it is when we look at some design that has a tall image. We always want to put a wide one in it Let's try it out. Let's trick this thing out. Let's do it but So what we did was we actually built a plugin for them that warns them on these posts that they have to crop the image And then it offers them to crop the image Part of that that's really hard is they have to select coordinates to do that, right? So after about three times of teaching them how to do this, this is how our training libraries were born Because I just created these videos under the education tab on the back of their website That they can go in and they can look at this anytime And they can understand how to do these croppings inside of their website My computer says it's going to go to sleep, but I promise it's plugged in So if the presentation dies, it wasn't my fault I'm going to move outlets real quick stand by This isn't awkward Hey, there we go All right back in business. Sorry for that brief delay Tip number six Prepare prepare Preparing is so important for training, but lots of people fly by to see their pants when they do this Um, I don't know why as developers we think that we can leave our terminal and just be experts Just because we built it. It's not how it works You should know that anytime that you've ever tried to log into your own email account when you were on somebody else's computer Because it's always some weird. Oh, I forgot my password. I don't know. Oh crap. My password thing's not working. I don't know I don't know what's going on here It happens and you'll get in there and you'll feel like you're doing really good. Then all of a sudden one of these We're like, oh crap. That was working yesterday. Oh, let me debug this for a few minutes and help you out here So What's the problem with that right? We're setting in their office now during their training time debugging something that's broken on their website that we just told them was awesome How many of you is that ever happened to you? Yeah, oh, yeah Yeah, first year at moxley corner michael as well We built the retail and uh forward facing websites for all of their medical practices 62 websites Seven hospital systems. It was a big deal So I'm very excited about this me and one of their it guys launched them in my living room with six pizzas and a Bunch of red bull. It was fantastic. I'm feeling like king of the castle. It's the first website. They've had in 10 years feeling really good about it We're two weeks in We go to their office for training and I'm standing up in front of people again suit and tie And I'm like, all right guys. We're gonna do a live training demonstration on how to address this hospital's website Turn around I go to log in and it won't log in every time I put in my password and Hit the button to log in it just keeps reloading the login page over and over again Ever happen to you guys? Yeah, me too Problem which I couldn't determine right there on the spot in front of 38 regional marketing managers The problem was We were using domain mapping WordPress multi-site. Anybody ever do this domain? Domain. I know I know it hurts me to think about too. It kind of makes my back hurt Oh Domain mapping was this fantastic piece of technology that allowed you to map domain straight to any wp mu installation What inherently is the problem with that? You know what we'd also done a few days before that installed ssl certificates You know what domain mapping won't do Update to https automatically So you know what happens? Redirect loop on the login screen. You know how I figured that out Sweating my hind end off in the floor of a training center in front of 38 people going. I'm so sorry guys. This was just working But I didn't prepare I didn't prepare. I did all that work on the site. I came in and I thought I just built these sites They ought to work That was not the case. I was totally naive sitting there in front of these people another bad phone call and a letter You get those things and you don't feel comfortable at work anymore for a while. Trust me. I didn't eat lunch for days People are like you going out? No, I'm gonna be in the office so I can hear I need to know right now But it was my own fault, right? If I had just logged in I could have called them up days earlier and said no We screwed something up. We got to fix it, but I didn't prepare What's another problem with debugging on site? What's another problem? Come on guys If I set debug to true then they've got to look at a bunch of admin notices on their site, right? And they assume that I've broken something right That's really hard to deal with so I'm going to give you a couple of code snippets that I use I'm going to put them up on the screen For this very thing because debugging on site is going to happen It's going to happen. It shouldn't but it's going to happen at some point You're going to have to fix something and what you want to be able to do is do it incognito Behind their back. So you're like, oh, yeah, just keep on working on that right now And I'm just I'm just having a few things making a few notes so One of the first things is this easy thing that you've seen a thousand times is changing the debug profile inside of wp-config to where it only Shows those admin notices with your ip address Why is that important? I can leave it on all the time and it won't matter I could debug on the fly all the time just to my ip address and nobody's going to be hurt by that A second one is this one I like to use especially when I'm doing api stuff One of the things that I have such a hard time with is I'm a javascript developer So I want things to debug in the console. It's when I'm debugging php I don't want an extra step and I really don't want an extra step when I'm already hot sweaty and tired So this piece of code is one that I put into all of our installations It's basically just a php snippet that will debug data to the console In any form fashion in an array anything like that This is great. Like I said, if you're doing api calls if they've got a big set of custom data custom post types Stuff like that and some field isn't showing up some array isn't working the right way You've assumed that you can just cast this data out and it's going to work the way you assume it's going to work You know, even though php will let us make a lot of mistakes. This will keep us from making mistakes Yes, yes All this stuff we've talked about snippets wise are on my github and it's in A thing called useful wordpress code How clever right Tip seven create an agenda. I also learned this one the hard way I had a training group come in I scheduled them for an hour that are only three people This is plenty of time. Their site doesn't do much Five and a half hours later I was hungry and mad And they were still asking questions Create an agenda It's as easy as this and you can even pick out my typo in this email because this is a real email Because I'm not going to bs you Um in prep for our training We're going to learn about wordpress basic information adding removing post and page pages page design and structure Cornerstone basics. This is a page editor that they were using on their website for a while, which was garbage Section reordering publishing version control design basics going to take two hours. We're going to have generous faq portion The only thing that's blaked out and there's the pricing information But if you have any specific training needs, let me know and I'll get those added in I did a few things in this email That saved me when I do a training First thing I told them exactly what I was prepared to talk about Up front. This is what I am prepared 100 to talk about Number two, I gave him a time frame You got to get in and you got to get out in two hours This makes sure that I don't get scope creep because I have a set price on training So when I brought him in there, I can't go to my ceo and tell her Hey, I had a $300 budget for training I may or may not have wasted $1,800 worth of hours after but that's fine, right? Work in agencies. We live and die by billable time. We build by the quarter hour All right, people would be real mad if I gave away $1,800 more on a website Then at the end I did the magic thing that is going to help me out with training I asked them if they have any questions or specific training needs Not that they're going to tell me. Don't assume that they're going to email you back and tell you That is fallacy and it's not going to happen But what it does is it makes them think about it so that they're not thinking about it while you're training them Because we need them to retain more information. The way we get them to retain more information Is explain to them what they're going to get And then make them think about what they need before they even get there Tip number eight Do I use a page post or custom post type? Anybody ever had this question? Some really smart trainee Two weeks later came back to you and said So when i'm in the back end of the website, uh, and i'm on my about page Is that a page post or custom post type? I'm like, what blog did you read today? Who's twitter are you following? It was probably mysners But These are terms that at the end of the training right before you need to explain what they are very clearly Pages or static information posts Are information that we're going to update all the time custom posts or data sets This is basically the way I explain these things to people So that they understand what the difference is Because what I don't want them to do is get in the back end and start creating posts for their attorney profiles Or start creating pages for their attorney profiles I want them to use the custom post type I set up and if I educate them on what that is They'll understand that they have to do it to make it display Otherwise you'll get a lot of people saying Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth right now? And you won't get any further and then they'll say I made eight pages for attorneys You ever see an attorney's bio It's like nine miles long and it's all credentials and like at the end of it. You're like, but what do you do? Like we do a attorney in law firm websites all the time and I see these bios They come in word documents that are 5 000 words. They're like, yeah, trim that up. It's no big deal And then you go to put it in there and you're like I don't care that you want sat upon a skyscraper and wrote a poem That's what they talk about then they want to put in everywhere. They've ever spoken They want to put in every single case. They've won They're long You know when this becomes a problem is when they're editing their own website They make a page and they spend all the time crafting and editing and customizing this information And they do this 10 times because they don't test They don't your users don't know where that preview button is They don't know what to do with that They don't test that they get 10 deep three hours in they call you and say It's not displaying Then you're like cool. Let me look at it. Then you're like, oh, I've got to let you down hard right now You're gonna have to do that twice Sorry That's never fun. So if we just explain those things up front Tell them what those terms mean Then we're gonna get a lot better result in the end tip nine recap at the end of the training Developers are just like when we write good code and it works the first time We're like boom done. I'm out. We got the bag on before that person has logged out of the website We're sitting with the satchel at the door like But what haven't we done? We don't know if they got trained We're developers. We have attention spans so short That whole meeting we were looking at the website going, please don't break Lord when they click that button if it could just work The whole time At the end of it the best thing you can do is run back over everything that was in your training agenda Look at it. All right. So we talked about custom pages and post types We talked about how to publish how we talked about version control. We talked about design basics Look for confusion Look for confusion because they'll be like this I don't know if I got that or not Go back over it. That's going to give you an opportunity to do one of two things One re-educate two Charge them more money I work for an agency. Everything we do is about billing you more So at the end of the day, I want to look at you and if you're confused about something I want to make an opportunity where you don't have to do it yourself Hey, I understand. That's really hard. Let me help you out here. Let me show you again If you don't get it, I'm happy to support you at $225 an hour. It'll be fine Tell your accountant. She'll love me Tip 10 Another adhd trait that's really hard. Sit still and be quiet This is not just for training This is when you do design reviews code reviews When you're pitching selling when you're in the meeting to learn about features Sit still and be quiet Because if you talk a whole lot at the end Which is what we're prone to do because we feel really good about it We're high as a guy on all the things that have happened We want to talk their ear off Sit still and be quiet This is going to give you two very good opportunities Number one, they're going to ask a question that they didn't think about before Or they're going to tell you something you need to know Number two, they're going to buy something else from you End of the website training is the best time for them to realize Their website doesn't do something that they didn't think it should do And this is the moment where we say, hey, that's simple to do Let's talk more about that But we can't do that if we've already dismissed the training through our preamble out You know, we're trying to, hey, I've got the set text that I've got to say to you before I leave And here's my contact info and I'm off to the office. It's lunchtime We can't do that. We got to sit still and be quiet, you know, just throw the shh on yourself It's really hard at the end of the training. I know you're amped up after it's over Your adrenaline's running. You're just happy that the WordPress website worked the whole time And that no weird plugin updates came up right in the middle of it And they're like, I thought this was new. You guys ever get that? Some plugin needs to be updated eight minutes before training And they're like, I thought this website was new. What do we need updates already? I'm like, because it's WordPress Because developers don't have anything to do with their time So we're just adding stuff All right, that's all my tips. Any questions before I move on to Gutenberg? Gutenberg? Yes, sir? Posts, I always tell people this is anything you're going to update So basically if you got news, feed, a blog, you know, these are things you're going to update A lot of people have kitschy names for their blogs now Because we can't call them blogs anymore Too much Pinterest for that But posts are things that are updating Custom post types are data sets This is anything that I've got a spreadsheet on our intranet Stored in that I need to display on the website You know, this happens in the way of Attorney profiles, physician profiles, you know, the locations This is a great thing to use a custom post type for Because we don't want them to choose how locations display Especially if they have maps involved You know, because if you've used Google Maps in the last year You know, they keep trying to trick you into doing different API stuff We don't want them to control that We want to control that, we want to be standardized So those are data sets Other questions before I move on And we'll have plenty of time for other questions, I think Gutenberg, Gutenberg fans? Bueller, Gutenberg, nobody? Yes, I'm like, yeah, when you first put this slide in as a developer You're like, who am I about to piss off In the development community But thank you So Anna, the reason it says am I never ending struggle with page builders and editors I love to hate things like this I love to love Gutenberg for what it could be I love to hate Gutenberg for what we don't know it is yet You know, it's hard to use, right Because the default for people that have a WordPress website Existing right now is to say, here's a new thing Let me go do it What's the problem with that? How many of you have been like me and in the last year You've dealt with clients, that self-host That came to you and said, well, I installed the new WordPress And it seems that none of my pages are working anymore Well, yeah Yeah, did you go rip the engine out of your car this morning Just jam a new one in it and think it was going to start up No, that'd be stupid But we do this with websites, right Why? Because they're fickle And we think that they're going to be fine But I think Gutenberg is going to get better And I think that developers who support the community And users that want to start testing for the community And doing the right thing With helping us out with what to know Are going to make Gutenberg a great thing So a couple of things I want to say about Gutenberg There's basically three things you need to think about And I'm so glad there's somebody from Pantheon in here right now Because I totally ripped these off of you And I did because they're so true And it's what a lot of developers are saying But first thing you need to do if you're going to use Gutenberg Or want to use Gutenberg and you already have a website Now this is not for people that are booting up a fresh website WordPress install, this is not for you This is for people that have had a website For a couple, three, five years And you want to decide to use Gutenberg Number one, prepare All right, don't hit the button yet Because you got to think about what Gutenberg's going to do There are a lot of hosting companies now That have staging websites built into your hosting Learn how to use that Or find a developer that can help you with it Staging website will save your life when it comes to Gutenberg And possibly rebuilding your entire website Or having to find some sort of backup to restore what you've done Design, I'm not a designer So when I first saw Gutenberg I'm like this could be really good and it could be really pretty And it could do functional great things But not without design Right, because if you use it by default How many of you have tried to jam it into your template And then you had a bunch of funky margins everywhere Right, Gutenberg is actually out of the box designed very beautifully You know what your template and your theme is not Designed around Gutenberg's beauty It's not, it's designed for the old visual editor So there's a lot of gutter There's a lot of margin There's a lot of things you don't need inside there So make sure you're designing And this is the most important one Extend Anybody who tells you that what I'm saying is not true is crazy Gutenberg is painfully easy to extend Painfully easy to extend It's basic JavaScript, right? It's not very hard You can learn it If you want to do something really crazy with it You're going to need to do some serious tinkering But if you want to do something simple It's pretty easy Case in point This is the default way to do it Way you would put your plugin in if you want to add your own blocks to some theme Now this is very rudimentary This is not the way I do it for our themes But this is the way you could add it to your own And then this is JavaScript that just creates a little simple box That you can change the color background on All right, this is very simple code This is stuff you can learn in an afternoon Gutenberg is painfully simple to learn You just have to spend time with it And you have to understand That by way of extending it You can break things So unit tests, staging websites And making sure that you've designed this well Are going to be pertinent to making it work Like I said, I don't think Gutenberg is a bad thing I think that if you want to use Gutenberg You should definitely try it out Boot it up on some test site Some staging site Somewhere and play with it If you haven't played with Gutenberg And you are a WordPress developer Time's a waste It's coming around Visual composer people in here Beaver builder Hey, we got a couple of beavers Page builders are great WordPress's evolutionary scheme And the future of WordPress Is not going to support a lot of out-of-the-box things Like that You're going to have to get things that update Gutenberg is a good way to go It's a good way to go Because the community is working on it And people that care about WordPress are working on it We're not selling it to you So at the end of the day We want to develop for you We want to extend it But we also just want to make it good Just to make it good So if you haven't thought about it And developers, if you're not contributing to it Now's a good time I am uncomfortably stepping into the waters To learn about it And deal with it right now We had a long talk about this Over a few beers last night Because I love to hate Gutenberg Because I started using it in its beta format And I was like, what the hell What are you guys trying to do to me right now? This isn't okay But it can be a great thing If we make it a great thing Questions For a good reason Yes, yes, you are correct I would also argue that ThemeCo's X theme cornerstone page builder is pretty close And however Page builders that force you to do things That are semantically incorrect Hurt my feelings So there's a couple of things with those page builders When you drag and drop an element into it At pre-borders, pre-origins, and pre-box shadows things I don't think those are things you need to do However, for if you are building your own website These are great tools to use There are syntactically and semantic things that they do wrong That can cause you load speed issues As WordPress updates And as your theme updates Can cause you major page layout issues So, no, I didn't mention it Not that I don't know Yes, sir This question's gonna suck We're about to fight in the street Yeah, definitely So the question was around decluttering the admin interface And making it simpler Are there any simple recommendations for that? Now I also do that a very custom way But there's actually a plugin called WP Admin Menu Customizer That basically writes all the code that I would write anyway Just a little less functional There's some things in it that semantically I don't love But it doesn't matter, it's the admin screen I'm not worried about load time here But WP Admin Menu Customizer Allows you to drag and drop and hide things in the back end It also allows you to give functional names to things So if you've got a user that really doesn't get it You can change the name of pretty much any item in the back end So if they don't know what a post is You could actually write it out to say This is the place where you put the things that update the website It's like oh But yeah that's what I would use if I wasn't doing it by code Good question Other questions? I'm going to answer that in a very broad way Yeah backups I would recommend daily backups But I do not hesitate to give clients admin access Because anytime you try to control somebody's access They will try to do more Anytime you give them full access they will do less You notice people don't steal stuff from open gates They hop fences Right So you give people a bunch of access and it terrifies them It's You know it's kind of the way of the world It's the way we socially act So yeah give them access Give them wide open access And force them into a hosting plan Or recommend a great hosting plan that has daily backups Because it's not likely that they're editing the website every two hours anyway And what we want to do is give them a way to go back all the time We do daily backups to the cloud It's it's cheap It's cheap There's storage space is not what it was in the late 90s Other questions Perfect Well someone else has been applauded So it must be my time to leave A couple of things There are some great talks going on this afternoon and tomorrow Definitely go check them out If you are interested in Gutenberg Definitely go check out Myzener's talk About Gutenberg I'm going to go check it out because I'm super interested And also heckling him while he's doing his talk But we're going to have a lot of fun And I thank you guys so much for hanging out with me