 Hi That all makes me sound a lot more interesting than I probably am But thanks for having me here. This is my sixth word camp and it's the sixth word camp. I've spoken at because my Accountant told me I could only use it as a tax write-off if I spoke at them. So Thanks Every word camp I've spoken at I've got a little bit of a tradition It started at my first one in Cebu, and I know that there's at least two people here today that were in Cebu And I'm hoping that you all can help me keep this tradition going before we get started But I just need to check whether you're up for it. So I'm is everyone okay with helping me keep this tradition started Yeah, okay. I promise you you'll see it on Twitter later So can everyone who is able to put their hands in the air? Cool, that's most of you excellent. Can everyone who is able to stand up for me? Right, so I'm we're gonna try all of that together now So I want you to sit back down and I want you to stand up and put your hands in the air So ready on three. We're gonna go one two three stand up and put your hands in the air All right, so I we know that everyone can do that now So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a wave All right, and we're gonna start over here on the are you guys up for it over here? And it's a I need some positivity like shout. Yes. Yes Okay, so it's a competition in case you didn't know to see who does the best wave so far Cebu is still winning Brisbane came close can word camp us do a better wave Yes, all right, I'm gonna count you in I'm gonna have to step away from the microphone because I'm gonna video this from here So you're ready. Yeah, are we gonna go both ways or just one way? Both so we're gonna go back again when we get to this end. All right All right, you ready? I think that might be the best one. Yeah, what do you reckon Ross? Yeah Hi everyone, my name is Joe in case you didn't hear the intro I would a bit earlier and you just snuck it at the end and I like what is going on right now I do come from Australia There are three Australian speakers today, so I am the final in your lineup of Australian programming for this event Which is wild. I'm not sure why they thought that was a good idea. Have you met us? We're crazy My job is to create websites Mainly for organizations that have lots of different users of different types So I work primarily with non-profit organizations non-governmental organizations a lot of charities and stuff like that a lot of people who Have maybe 10 or 15 different avatars that are coming to their website And that's why information architecture is the thing that I'm super passionate about and really excited to share with you today I do speak on information architecture a lot outside of WordPress This is I think the first time I've done it inside of WordPress So I'm really excited to be able to share with you all some of the things from a user experience perspective that I've learned But before we get started, I want to get a bit of an idea now that you know who I am who you are So if you can let me know Are you mainly working content? So like creating or curating stuff people consume and it's okay if you put your hand up for more than one of these So who's our like content people? Yes. Love that. We need you. What about design and user interface? So making things people see? Yeah Perfect. All right, and then we've got a user experience Cool my people love it What about people who are developers who are building stuff that people use? Yeah Building stuff that people build with love that and anyone else. So like SEO hosting like yeah All right, there's always some right and I'm like you don't know where you fit. That's you congratulations You've got your own box so I'm gonna talk about some terms today that might not be familiar to everyone So I'm gonna try and explain them as I go But please do hold on to those questions and write them down if you've got them at the end And just a reminder if you do have questions at the end, please jump up to a microphone Because we had a session yesterday and there was no microphone And I'm really hard of hearing especially after the Pride party last night where it was really loud So I would really appreciate that. Thank you Hang on went too far What is information architecture well, I didn't come up with these definitions These would come up with by the Institute of Information Architecture that doesn't exist anymore But it's two things. It's the structural design of information and it's the art and the science and it is both of Organizing and labeling to support two main things usability and findability I'm gonna extend a little bit on these terms and also on some other terms Very soon so that we're all on the same page But I want to clarify if there's nothing else that you take away from today Information architecture is not just navigation menus. It's not just sitemaps This is what people think of when they think of information architecture. Oh, yeah information architecture is my navigation menu And maybe my sitemap that is part of information architecture absolutely, but it's Definitely not all of information architecture and it might not even be the most important part of information Architecture for your personal use case, especially for people like developers who are in the room So what are those key terms that we've got? Well language is important. Let's make sure that we all understand what I'm saying So the first one is findability right and findability in a nutshell is how easy is it? When people are looking for something and they know what they're looking for to find that thing pretty straightforward, right? So if I go to Google and I search for Pants with pockets because God knows we need to search for them women Then you know, that's if I find what I need easily. That's good findability pretty straightforward. Yeah, you're good with that one Cool. All right. The next one is discoverability Kind of similar but not right? So if we think back to findability that's all about finding things that we know we need But we don't always know what we need right and our users don't always know what they need Sometimes we need to kind of shove it in front of them. So that's where discoverability comes in And it's about how easy it is for user to just kind of come across the thing that they need So think about contextual Navigation menus think about related products Maybe not quite to the level that Amazon throws them in our faces But like related products can be really helpful related posts can be really helpful So all of those things that allow us to sort of continue finding useful information. That's discoverability and then the last one is a term called information sent that I might use a little bit and Essentially information sent is how likely or how confident is the user that The link or the interaction that they're about to make is going to solve their problem if I click on this other items Link in the menu and we've all seen it. We've all seen the menu. That's got other or a non like miscellaneous or more, right? It's terrible It's got no information sent because people don't know what that is going to show them. So they're less likely to click on it So there's the three things we want to keep at the top of our minds while we're talking about information architecture. Cool I'm gonna assume cool so We're gonna talk about something called card sorting and for anyone who has done even a little bit of user experience Training or anything like that. You might be familiar with this process It is probably the one that is the most common and the thing that people are already doing whether they know it or not So I'm gonna give you like a super quick run-through of how This actually works, right? So if you haven't heard of card sorting before it pretty much is like a three-step process So the first step is to brainstorm and get all of your chunks on a page now I specifically use the term chunks and not content or pages or sections or whatever because at this point in time We don't know what they are. We don't know whether we're gonna have an entire page for team Or whether we're just going to have a section on an about page for team and that's fine It's okay, right? Our goal is to get all of our chunks on a page You might not know whether or not a chunk is required put it on the page anyway Because that's phase two and if you haven't played planned for phase two when you're doing phase one You are going to have a hard time later down the track So when we are doing our brainstorm the key thing here is there are no wrong answers get everything on the page Do you put it's a fine? Don't worry about it because our next step is going to be sanity checking everything so We're gonna get a little bit ruthless here, right? We're gonna audit all of that content that we've got on the page We're gonna remove duplicates or combine them together We're gonna make notes on things and say is this label the right label our news and posts and blog the same thing What are the people who are using this website? actually looking for because it's very common for people who work in WordPress to say tags or Posts and assume everyone knows what that means even the word blog is not something that's universally understood For example in older generations. Are they looking for news? They're not going to click on blog if they don't know what that means So this is where we get a little bit ruthless and we start to kind of sanity check and throw out things that don't belong Look for gaps. What are users looking for that's not already on there? Is it that we've called it something different and then the last step and this is the bit where the sorting and card sorting comes In so we've got the cards now We have to sort them is to put stuff into groups, right? And then I get asked two questions how many groups and How many things in a group and the answer is yes So they're in there are no rules at this point in time Okay, the goal is to understand how users Associate different terms in terms of information sent What are they gonna group it in to find the thing that they want? So you don't need to group it into a set number of things at the moment Your goal in this process is to understand how all of your information is related to each other Now there is actually another step on this that everyone should be doing and nobody is and it's called tree testing And it's where you actually take the data that you collect from card sorting and then you Kind of look at Statistically where are things gonna make the most sense and what is the overlap and that helps you decide how many groups? You should have there's no you should always have six or you know this many as too many or whatever like a lot of those things Have been debunked the idea of having everything has to be findable within three clicks is a myth There is absolutely no data to support it. So the answer to this is it depends on your use case There's no right or wrong answer here so Tree testing is a really interesting thing to do But I could do a whole session on that and we don't have time to get into it today So I'm gonna skip on to what that might look like and it's mess. It's a dog's breakfast as we like to say so This might not look very Organized or useful, but that was after ten people had gone through the card sorting process of what do those groups look like? we did at old school because this was pre-covid and Just grouped things and this is what we ended up with at the end of that as our actual groups So they make lots of sense, but all of those chunks fit really comfortably into one of those groups Here's another example of what it looks like so this is where we did one for a local government for a website specifically for people who wanted to invest in that local government area and It's the town of Victoria Park if anyone wants to stalker and look at my pretty map You'll notice that there's two navigation menus here They actually had less content than what the other side did but two navigation menus made a lot of sense because they had two key user avatars The main one that they were targeting which was people who are looking to invest in the town and then also people who already had invested in the town and just landed there because their main website was pretty mediocre and Everything that they searched for to do with investment on Google came to that website as well So all of the stuff for them is sort of in that secondary navigation bar at the top there As well as things that maybe aren't part of the primary user flow for the primary avatar So, yeah, we've got a site map. We've got a navigation. We've done it all job done. Yeah Yeah, not not quiet. All right, so There's a really awesome article by a lady named Jen Cardello. I probably am saying that wrong Sorry, Jen. I've never met you, but I love your article She works at the Nelson Norman group And if you haven't ever heard of them or read anything that they write and you're interested in information architecture Skip the rest of my talk. Just go sit outside and look through their blog It's the the article that she wrote is titled the difference between information architecture and navigation and She posited that information architecture involves five activities and we've only done three of those So we've done the content inventory. Yeah, we've we've looked at what all of our chunks are. We've done the auditing We've got a little bit ruthless. We've gone through and worked out where the gaps are what things maybe we don't need How whether our labels are correct and we've done the information grouping What we haven't done are these two things taxonomy development and descriptive information creation and these are the things that if they're not done are going to cause every single software engineer every single database analyst every researcher every wordpress developer and even every wordpress administrator to Cry if they're not done correctly, right? Because we've all been there where we've given a custom Well, maybe we haven't all been there, but I've definitely been there We've given a customer a website and then I've come back a year later And I don't think I even need to tell you what they've done with it but They've they had eight pages when I gave it to them and some Some they were like, oh, we might do some other stuff in the future and I get it back And they've got a hundred pages and they're all top level and there's no hierarchy And there's no grouping and they've got a more item in their menu That has 11 other things in it because they ran out of space on the page Right, so how do we avoid that? Because I think we can all agree that that is not an ideal situation to be in So I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about this term taxonomy because it's used a lot in user experience and information architecture in that space and it doesn't mean what wordpress Developers use taxonomy for which can be very confusing So We're gonna talk a little bit about taxonomies and why they're important and how they fit into the greater story of information architecture in wordpress and in a nutshell This is what taxonomy means. It's the scientific process Of of classifying things. It's a it's a system of ordering stuff which makes sense in the way that we use it, right? But a lot of things that information architects and user experience specialists refer to as a taxonomy Aren't what we think what we think of a taxonomy is a thing, but a taxonomy is a system right, so That can be really confusing for wordpress users and wordpress developers when they go and start researching information architecture So it's something I wanted to just point out here So in practice Particularly in wordpress. We kind of have two ways of creating a taxonomy We have types of content and we have groups of content So does anyone know what I mean by types of content to shout out like if you've got some ideas of what a type of content might be Custom post type. Yeah, absolutely Static pages are a type of content like articles, right? Events forms users are a type of content downloadable resources. These things are types of content In wordpress Generally speaking types of content are going to be custom post types Or post types in general not always but generally speaking this is going to be the case And then we have groups of content, which is what we call taxonomies And the two that you most familiar with if you use wordpress at all is categories and tags They're the two built-in taxonomies into wordpress One of them is a hierarchical taxonomy. So that means that it can have parents And typically a hierarchical taxonomy like that you have a limited number of them And you'll try not to let them get too out of hand And then you'll have something that's an unhierarchical taxonomy in wordpress like tags and go nuts You can you can use more tags. It's fine Won't be mad But in short what these two things Are our relationships all of this stuff is relationships about how does my content relate to my other content and relationships are Really what we're after here because remember the goal of information architecture and user experience is Good usability good findability good discoverability. And if we don't have good relationships, how are we going to achieve that? So a resource library Let's take that as an example, right? Do users need to be able to filter by resource type? Like is it a article or is it a checklist, right? Do they need to be able to filter by date? Maybe they want to see how recent it is I know That's something we're challenged with in the learn team at the moment It's like how do we make sure that we're presenting the most recent information to people because it's often going to be the most useful Um, who uploaded it? Maybe you want to only read stuff by certain people that you know have the expertise that you're looking for All of that stuff seems handy, right So you can use these things on maybe a resource library But potentially you also want to use those same things across Your posts in your blog, right? So then we start to think about how do our taxonomies apply outside of where we originally created them And in in this case we're talking about the wordpress taxonomies so that we can have cross linking of things So this is where we're going to start to look into how this actually works And how we can level up our processes so that we can take advantage of wordpress so that instead of having this We can go to something a little bit more orderly So I mentioned that we did this project pre covid When we were back still using sticky notes, which is a great way to get people to interact with you And I still recommend it for brainstorms with large groups But if you haven't found it before mirror is a great tool that lets you do the same thing online And then you don't have to type out all the sticky notes afterwards Um, so here is actually all of the sticky notes. It's actually not all of the sticky notes They were about three times as many of this Just imagine that this is a real example It's a cut down real example and this whole process took over a day to do Um of the first one before we tested it But essentially what we're going to do is we're going to use something like the if you are using mirror or another tool like that There's usually a bulk mode where you can do your brainstorming and then you go through all of your regular processes those three that we started with right Getting your stuff on the page Auditing your content and then grouping it and once we've done that we're going to start looking at How many of those bits of content are we going to have? And how related are they to other things? So some examples that I've got on here is team members is about 50 Right, they had about 50 team members in this organization But they changed almost weekly. They had huge turnover because a lot of them were volunteer Or they were on contract So that's something where immediately we want to start thinking about how is that going to impact how we create that type of content In wordpress because I certainly don't want to be going in and editing a page Every single time I need to update a team member and we've all Probably seen that where you go into someone's back end and they've got a page Called about and they've got a list of 50 team members, but it's not in a post type or anything It's just like a block on the page And that's really limiting because it means that only people who can access pages can update that It's hard to give them access just to one page and not all of the pages So if I've got my hr people Updating the team members. I also don't want them updating the about page. That's not their job So by separating out our content, we can start to make better decisions and make things more maintainable We also want to think about what direction the The relationship goes in for stuff that is linked So the key things that you're looking for here are how often does it change? How many of those types of content do I have? Will that number grow? And if the answer is yes, then you probably want a custom post type for it And more importantly, how is it connected to all of the other content if at all? Right, so how do we do that? tip two We color code things because I don't know if you've noticed or not. I quite like color So here is the color coding that we use now. I'm not sure if it's obvious on the screen there. They're actually two different oranges Um, but and that's not actually the colors that we use in mirror, but it looks pretty on my slides So we use the same color for standard pages and child pages So child pages just being you know something that has a parent page in wordpress We use a different color for custom post types or custom content types, right? We use one color for hierarchical taxonomies like categories And a different color for non hierarchical taxonomies like tags We also have sections on there because we don't want to forget about that content that doesn't quite have its own page you know, maybe we just want to display this on The about page or on a services page or something like that So we're going to color code that as well. So we don't lose it And then we're going to have um two things that we're going to treat a little bit differently We're going to have our archive pages and this is something that is A term a term that's thrown around in wordpress that I've found when I've been teaching wordpress to people who are beginners Isn't well understood. So if there are any beginners in the room An archive page is essentially a page on wordpress that displays a group of content based on some kind of condition Right. So an example of that is your blog page. Your blog page displays all of the posts in the post post type, right, but a A tag page might also be an example of an archive page So a page where you're showing all of the items that have been associated with a specific tag Right. So that's what we mean by Dynamic page or archive page. It's something that the content doesn't actually live on that page The content lives somewhere else and it's essentially just grouping and displaying a bunch of that content And then lastly we have landing pages And Landing pages are great Until you go and start cleaning up all of the landing pages that have been created without your knowledge And you realize that's why you've now got a hundred instead of eight pages on your website They haven't been accounted for they're not being maintained We deal with landing pages separately. We actually put them in their own custom post type That's exactly the same as pages But just called landing pages so that we don't have to deal with them within our regular pages And then you've also got external links because there's going to be some content. You don't have control over That you're going to want to link out and we want to make sure that we're also working out how that links in with our own content So what does that look like when we apply it? It looks something like this very colorful Not super useful yet, but it's going to be because if we take our site map for example And we apply that color scheme then we start to get something that is a little bit more useful than what we had before So what we've done here is we've looked for pages that have content that is similar to other pages So for example a service offering, right might have a description Eligibility criteria to use that service because this was a non-profit organization And information on how to access it and every single service had that stuff So that's a good way of identifying your custom post types Do I have lots of pages that have the exact same content on them? Great create some custom page at custom post types and custom fields there Another thing that we might look for is Are things going to be grouped so we have team members and our team members are our people page There's going to be a headshot of each team member their position a link to their LinkedIn profile and a short bio But we're also going to want to categorize them as employees or volunteers or board members Right, so that's where we start to look at our taxonomies and how are we going to group those things easy We create a custom taxonomy and we call it team So this is the The easiest way I've found to identify custom post types and custom taxonomies is to look for pages with similar layouts and content That's tip one and then pages that list multiples of a thing Right, so if pages list multiples of a thing, that's an archive page An archive page means you've got a post type of some sort or a taxonomy of some sort to make that happen So they're a good way of identifying this color coding as you're going So What we do then is we take Those things that were not standard pages or even the worst standard pages and we create like a little map of okay These are the post types that we're going to need. These are the taxonomies. We're going to need these are the pages we're going to need And we ignore the pages for now because pages are a pretty standard kind of Structure and they're fairly easy to deal with The ones that are tricky tend to be the custom post types so Let's take for example Programs in this situation Programs have a two-way relationship with case studies events locations the blog and advisors They have a one-way relationship with pricing Um with partners and with frequently asked questions And then um, they also have a one-way relationship in the other direction with teams So what that means is that um on the program page There's going to be a link to the partners that are involved with that program the pricing structure the frequently asked questions But on the partner page, it doesn't actually link back to that program Right and on the flip side on the team page if a team member works on a program They wanted to Show the program that they work on On the team members page, but they didn't want to show the team members on the program page because it's not about the team members It's about the people that are using the program So we start to look at these that here's another example. So we've got advisors here Um, and it looks like a pretty simple kind of structure. Okay. We've got some relationships there Let's put the two of them on the page together Remember this page was full of sticky notes before and they were much smaller So we're still only dealing with a very small portion And if we then start adding on all of the relationships that we haven't already talked about You can see it gets real messy real fast. Yeah. Does this look helpful to you? No Yeah, so we realized very quickly when we started doing this process that we needed a better way of Describing what our relationships were we still use this process for each of our post apps We go through and we map out what it's related to but then we record it in a table which seems much more sensible, right? So this is an example of what that might look like And you'll note here that there are two kinds of relationships. There's taxonomies Which are used to group content and then there's relationship fields or like fields required information required And so this is one of the most common questions I get asked when I talk about this in a wordpress context is how do I show relationships between different post types? And i'm like, don't worry about what it's called Just stick it in the table as a bit of information because it is right what Um What frequently asked questions are linked to services is just a bit of information So how you implement that in the wordpress end might be different depending on your use case It might be a relationship field or something like that that you're using It could be that taxonomies are actually the best way to achieve achieve that but for now Just get it in the table, all right Tools that we use to implement this from a wordpress perspective We only use two things to create our custom post types custom fields custom taxonomies all that kind of stuff We use either pods or acf pro We don't hard code them because we find that from a maintainability perspective when you're working primarily with nonprofits who have a zero budget Not ideal We might not be there in two years time So someone being able to step in who doesn't know how to develop and just edit those things Using a plugin is really useful um But both pods and acf pro allow you to create custom post types taxonomies and fields We really like the customized ability of roles and capabilities inside pods. I think they've done that excellently I don't know if um if our pods peeps around still but Thank you And they also have the ability to really easily create custom settings pages Which is another thing that we find super useful um And you can maintain them all with that editing code But you can't go past acf for really complex custom field rules and relationships and things like that like If I want to add a custom field just on one specific Page it's a lot easier to do that and manage that using acf than it is to use pods So from a wordpress perspective because I often get asked what do you use for that? That's what we use So that kind of leads me to my third and final tip of today, which is to learn the basics And by basics, I mean everyone's favorite database table um so If you haven't worked outside of wordpress before You might not realize that the wordpress database is weird Like I don't really have a better way of describing it The idea of a relational database is that things have different Tables and you connect them together, but we decided not to go that route and instead we have one table That stores everything um Which is super It's super. We love that But If you haven't worked with databases before and you don't really know what i'm talking about Or if you have and you've never really thought to dig into the wordpress database tables I highly recommend that you do it because it will make you a better Wordpress builder a better creator if you are planning out a navigation or you're planning out a site map Even if you're not the one building it even if your job is ux if you understand the limitations of wordpress And how that database is actually built you're gonna do it better. You're gonna be better at it So how do you do that if you're not a developer and you don't already know how to go and interrogate a database Because that's pretty scary for people that aren't developers Well, here's a fun tool that we like to use It's called local wp. So if you aren't a developer and you don't regularly work with a local environment on your computer You might not have come across this tool before but anyone can use it Um, I've had people say to me. Oh, I'm not techie enough. I can't I can't have a local environment on my computer You literally click download on the website and then you click create site like it could not be easier Um, you can create a test site. It doesn't need to do anything. It's just gonna spin up a completely blank wordpress site Right you can log into it in your browser. So it's not actually putting it on a computer on the internet It's just on your computer But you can go in there and you can add whatever it is that you want you can download plugins You can do all of that stuff And then you can go and you can inspect the database and see what the things that you have done look like So how do you do that? Well We have this now. I don't know how you're meant to say it But in my head it's add minor because I'm mining the data in there So I don't know if it's meant to be admin or add minor, but I'm gonna say add minor We're gonna click this little button here when we're running the site And it's going to bring up this scary looking page if you work regularly with like creating websites You might notice that it looks quite similar to php my admin Same same concept, right? It's allowing you to navigate around the database tables So when you get here and if you have not done this before and you want to take screenshots go right ahead But also don't forget that this will be on the internet forever and you can just go back and rewatch it So we're going to go first to the wp posts table, which is where you would expect to see a lot of information And then we're going to go to select data And that's going to show you the data that's in that table And then once you've done that and you're feeling less overwhelmed Then you can click on the one above it that says wp post meta And then call me and I'll give you a hug right But I I do really think everyone who isn't familiar with the database should at least go and try and learn a little bit about how it works It's free It's not going to take you that long And at least when people say like if you're talking to a developer and you're not a developer and they're like The problem is that we can't do this because this and this don't talk to each other You'd be like all right. I've seen the dog's breakfast. That is the database and I understand the how can we work together To to make it like come up with something that's going to be sustainable for both of us That's going to look the way I want it to look and interact with stuff the way I want it to interact But also not make my development team cry So a reminder For everyone that you are not the user So I did mention about Tree testing being something that I really strongly encourage you to do when you were doing this Like this process and here's the thing we do all of that in wordpress We don't use any expensive ux tools. We actually take our navigation menus. For example We come up. We do a survey Of what are the like top 10 top 15 top three depending on the size of the customer Things that you that people want to accomplish and we try and get them to actually ask users Not ask them directly because you are not the user And we get that list of things we put what we've come up with into just a blank wordpress site Right, um, you can even do it on local wp And then we send them the link and we say okay find the things that you need And we don't even put the content in there at that point We just put like a little we've just got a button block that when you click it it's got like little fireworks that go off Um, and it's like congratulations You found step nine or something like that And it's a quick and easy way of testing that what you've done actually works So if you don't have the resources to do full ux Tree testing in-house that is a great way that you can do testing using the tools that you already have at your disposal So I think we're just about out of time uh, but Thank you for listening to me ramble Um, I appreciate it. I also really appreciate that I got to be here today And that wouldn't have happened without the support of the folks who are Contributing to the wc us travel partners fund. Um, I don't know if you've realized But there's not as many women in tech as there are men Um, and wordpress is doing an excellent job of improving diversity Um, this particular program is doing an even better job of helping to make sure that people who are in areas that don't have Stuff themselves can get in front of the rest of the wordpress community Um, they did give me some sponsorship to get here today So thank you and if you are interested in helping other underrepresented folks get on stage Please scan the qr code and go and have a look at the travel partners program For future flagship conferences. Thanks everyone and um So I think we've got time for a few questions. Is there do I have like a timekeeper somewhere that can tell me do we have time for questions? Yes, we've got five minutes. Is that yes, so there's some um microphones around If if anyone has a question, please step up and hit me and I'll try and answer it Hello, it's a song. Okay. Yes Hello, thank you so much for the talk. Um, so I don't have a ton of experiences developer with databases and backends and all that Um, but I did learn about the relational database model and all of that and then I came over to wordpress land and saw exactly what you described Um, what are the limitations to the wordpress database to you to you recommend implementing your own relational database In relation to I don't know. I'm just looking for guidance or some ideas that you have. Yeah, that's a great question um, I think the biggest limitation in In the wordpress database is that it doesn't store things in separate tables but I also don't recommend storing things in separate tables in a lot of cases because It's going to make wordpress do things you didn't expect it to do Uh, and it's going to take away a lot of the reasons we use it in the first place Um, and like I still use wordpress on a daily basis pods does have a function for being able to separate out your custom post types and store them in their own tables Rather than storing them in post meta. It's one of the reasons that we love it so much And particularly for sites that have a lot of content or we're doing complex queries um, I don't know if you've ever looked at the the Efficiency of the of the post meta table, but it's infinitely slower Than if you have stuff stored in its own tables So if you have content where you've got a lot of it or a lot of complex relationships It's worth considering storing it outside in its own tables Just make sure you have a strategy for how you do that and understand the best practices of database design Does that answer your question? um, yeah, I think so you said pods has a Uh functionality if you're lying to store it in the separate tables And you should examine the use case to make sure that it makes sense for you, right? Yeah. Yeah, like try and stick with vanilla wordpress if you can because you're gonna get all of the benefits of everything that wordpress does um, but if you're not make sure that you Are taking that into account and understand the limitations and the flexibilities on that aspect of it as well Thank you. Thank you. Do you have any other questions? Yes Hi, yeah, my name is jonathan. I wear Many different hats under the wordpress umbrella But I was wondering if you've got any tips on how to wrangle the back end of wordpress particularly the pages and all pages directories How to organize those pages on the back end? It's a great question So as you might have figured out we're firm believers and if you can put it in a custom post type or a custom taxonomy you should So we try and separate out our content as much as possible to allow us to sort of like cross Share information between different things And it gives you the flexibility of having like archive pages instead of a million pages so That's one thing we do we We heavily customize our dashboards In the wordpress back end So that they are easier to find the things so all custom post types That are for a specific user type Go together we use we use admin menu editor is the plugin that we use for it for like ease of because we've got a person whose job is just to make sure everyone can always use stuff and her One of the things she does is she goes through as each user type and checks like Can I find the things that I need? Are they labeled in a way that I can understand because if your users are calling something news, but your Creators are calling up posts. That's fine. Just call it posts on the back end Call it news on the front end. It doesn't matter. You can relabel what it's called in the admin dashboard um, but we definitely try and um Group our content and create sort of our own groups as it goes and keep all of the setting stuff Down the bottom so it's content first And all of the scary admin things at the bottom In terms of pages we create our own custom taxonomies for pages as well So we have we have one that is on every website that we create Which is page type And that is kind of designed to be a way of us easily identifying pages that are say Going to require regular updating or maybe are like the customers going in and using the block editor and Just they have complete 100 control over that page versus the home page, which is often Sort of custom designed and so uses some kind of like custom field Almost formed to to create the content. So we use custom custom taxonomies in that way To be able to easily navigate through our pages. So when we do have 100 we can just click like you know Like design pages or something and then that will bring us up a list of those ones that use that particular Type does that make sense? Yes, thank you. Yep. Also admin columns pro is your friend It's a great little plug-in that allows you to kind of extend on the the default Way of navigating through pages and posts and stuff like that inside WordPress Any other questions? I think everyone's bailed to get lunch Is it a short question? Is it a short question? Maybe You can ask it and if it's going to take a long time We can just talk about it at the front. Yeah, it's good. So I also work for a nonprofit We're about to underbreed to our entire website How do you get people in our information architecture to stop thinking about an organization as an org chart? And actually think about it in information groups and how do you kind of just keep beating them down until they get that? Don't let those people in the room They're usually the stakeholders No, I'm serious though. When we run with nonprofits, we ask them like, what's your mission? Because every nonprofit has a mission. What's your mission? Who are the people that your mission is serving? Let's get them in a room We facilitate not them So they are participating just like everyone else But they get to hear That what other people are thinking and hearing and saying is very different from the way they think about their organization It's 100% one of the biggest challenges that we have and it really comes down to education And communication and I'm I wish I had a better answer for you than that, but I don't sorry I appreciate that. Thank you And I promise thanks everyone for coming along and sticking around for the questions