 Thank you Hi everyone What a presentation. Thank you very much So good afternoon. We are we want you to chill out a little bit So it's not going to be a technical talk with we are here to tell you a short story This is a story of a plug-in our plug-in, but it's also the story of the two of us the plug-in we are talking about is called black studio tiny mca and it's a free plug-in and It is simply a Widget that allows you to use a visual editor inside the widget areas Perhaps you have heard about the butterfly effect and The beating of a butterfly swings can turn into an hurricane in our story our beating of wings was the development of this plug-in The first version was built in alpha day, but over the years it had an unpredictable evolution over our personal and professional life and after a few years it literally Brought us to the other side of the Atlantic and by the way It's also the reason for which we are here today at work on bureau As you can see Marco and I were friends since high school in the early 90s We were born in a small town in Italy in the northern part of Italy We get graduated together, but we separated and went to study in different city very far away and University and we could met me. We could not met us again At that time the web was still in their infancy Google did not exist and then for social network. We had to wait some a decade maybe and we want to But I discovered by chance Marco personal homepage we which is recently created So I discovered that we both had a passion in common was there the new creature the web Despite these commitments in the in the in the university and study we we started to collaborate together to building website for for clients. Yes, of course and When we finished that university and we graduated in 2002 we founded our web agency. So we started working together Marco took care of the development phase and and they took care of the design and the customers At the beginning of our activity. We tried several different approaches for a website building either Developing everything from scratch or using existing CMSs at that time workers did not exist yet But we were not satisfied with any of those solutions. So in 2007 We created our own CMS That was called black ray and that we used it for a few years to build lots of websites and by the way That CMS was already embedding the tiny mce editor. So we Were used to it way before moving to WordPress but unfortunately in 2009 at the PHP framework that we were using for bill this The CMS was discontinued. So we were forced to look for a for alternative better prospects Over the years we kept an eye on the evolution of the open source is CMSs and in the end our choice went to WordPress, of course What we appreciated the most about WordPress What is it was for the of the content management system for for clients and The fact that it that there was a huge availability of teams and plugins, but more over Thanks to our previous knowledge. We were able to extend the system to meet our specific needs Developing plugins for our internal use After realizing in few sites that we identified that for us was a big limitation the lack of Availability of a taxi widget with with visual editor Because client you don't understand how to do things with html So we looked for a plugin to solve the problem, but we discovered that very few existed But none of them was really working So we decided to develop a new one and within a half of a day This is an email mark wrote me On one afternoon where he says okay, so I buy I built a plugin that does that and Okay looking online. We saw that many other people were looking for something working So we we had so much from WordPress that we decided to publish for free this plugin in the in the in the repo But was not so so easy for us as what not so easy journey because for first We took a wrong step giving the plug in the name one of the most simple things But we wanted to incorporate our brand in the name But we wanted also to include the word tiny mca as a tribute to the editor that we greatly appreciated But unfortunately the average users of WordPress didn't know what tiny mca is for her So the widget was often Overlooked in the in the widget list the ones installed So after sometimes we decided to change the widget name and we are naming it the visual editor Why keeping the name of the the plug-in because in the repo you you cannot change the the URL but That caused us further problems because people that were used to use our plug-in now They were not able to find it anymore in the widget list in there in their website So we had a lot of support requests of us that by the way Few years later we met the real tiny mca guys they were from Sweden They are really nice guys and and we shall some beers in World Camp Vienna in 2016. Yeah And with increasing number of users of the plug-in we had to face several challenges starting from the Support for all the different ways WordPress has for managing widget apart from the standard way There's also the customizer and the accessibility mode and also we have all always Ensured the maximum compatibility With other plugins and with all the different version of our press Basically, we had to face scenarios that we did not consider it at the beginning and by the way during the Development of the plug-in. We also found some bugs in WordPress core So it was a good opportunity to provide some patches our focus on compatibility As led us to create synergies with the other plugins and it allowed us to further improve the popularity of the plug-in But it's not just coding We put a lot of effort also on other aspects of the plug-in such as providing Technical support for the users Writing documentation for both users and developers Get the plug-in ready for translations That we got a lot of people translating and providing translation in their languages we also focused on Providing an ideal and smooth user experience Avoiding banners ads or other annoying stuff another important aspect is the Responsibility that the author of a popular plug-in has towards the users A simple mistake on our side could potentially break Hundreds of thousands of websites, so it's really important to be careful and same thing if our Account on WordPress.org was stolen By the way, we also add some offers to buy the plug-in, but we have a whole waste refuse them and Here's a few figures In almost seven years of life of the plug-in there were There were more than seven million downloads of the plug-in but So it became pretty popular But it also required a lot of effort as you can see from the Number of support requests and releases that we made Yeah, and Something more happened because in 2014 thanks to the popularity gaining with the plug in we decided to receive requests from various parts of the world from people that needed development of custom plugins, so And a real brick through went into in 2015 when we started working with our quality outsourcing platform specialized in WordPress and We built a strong relationships with client all over the world in 2017 we flew in the United States to work on an important project but Beyond the conquest of new markets. We start also to participate more in the community Attending some work camps and meeting some nice people and But as in every story Also in this one there was a ton of events last year WordPress introduced the WordPress text widget inside the core The first version was very limited but the following version Introduced some improvements in example the ability to use the short codes and insert images and videos At the moment, however our plug-in still offers more features than the native one and As you can see in this slide to Recap We tried to imagine The possible future scenarios for our plug-in if the native widget Doesn't get improved we plan to maintain our plug-in active and by the way, we are also working on a new version if the native widget will get better and Could be a full replacement of our widget. We probably dismiss our plug-in, but we will provide a way to Migrate the existing widget and finally the last scenario which is more a long-term Future is where all the widgets will be replaced by Gutenberg blocks Yeah, so thank you We hope that this short story will let you to be embarked in in contributing work in WordPress because your bit of Of like a butterfly can change your life. So for us WordPress was a life changer. Yeah, thank you. Thank you Again, we have time for just a couple of questions I'm going to ask the first one and I've not heard Gutenberg described as an asteroid before that's an interesting way to look at things having had the experience of core Taking over the role of your plug-in How would you describe that experience to someone who is worried about Gutenberg doing the same to their plug-in? Well, it's something that I've read Yeah, I know it's not official, but I think that the plan of the developers in the long term Is to use Gutenberg for everything not just for post content. So this is a Possibility, I don't know But it sounds like you've been quite Optimistic quite pragmatic about it, you know, this is this is the evolution of the platform and and if your plug-in Has served its purpose and you move on that's okay. Yeah, I Think that people Get benefits for six and more years in using our plug-ins. So if the time is come to And it that's it. I think they it's the natural evolution so And of course, I'm a bit sad if the plug-in dies, but yeah, you know, all things must pass as they say Yeah, do you think that? There's any clash between Open source as a as a as a community thing and business I was very interested there about how you how you showed Your business had been improved by doing the open source work Oh, yeah, I think that the core of the there of the of the talk is That that one so you can benefit in your business from the open source So we all we all know but we wanted to demonstrate with this short story So I don't think there is a clash. You have to be smart and you have to be not only smart But you have to enjoy what you do and when you do something good for you Maybe it's good also for other people and you you should share Do you have any more questions? I Don't believe we do guys. You're off the hook. Thank you very much. Thank you. Let's go on. Thank you Cheers guys. Thank you