 So hey guys, my name is Alonzo and my talk is about some of the opportunities that I see with Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0. And so I wanted to just let you know that some people kind of get anxious asking questions sort of in person. Feel free, if you have a question during the presentation, text that number and at the end I'll try and answer all the questions I get through text. Just a little bit about me. I'm the CEO of Eleven Online. We're an agency in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We do a lot of WordPress work but do a lot of other stuff too. We started Block Party this year. WP Block.Party, check it out. Been working with WordPress since 2015, it's not that long. And WordPress is still actually an important part of our business even though we do lots and lots of things these days. In New Mexico, when you're a software development shop and you want to scale, you've got to do lots of different things. Forty-eighth poorest state in the union, I think. You've got to do lots of things to get by. For those of you that don't know, but I assume you know at this stage because it was the 19th, I think, it's going to become part of your clients' realities and your realities. What's Gutenberg? It's a new WordPress editor as of November 19th of 5.0. Although I've learned to be somewhat skeptical of dates. It's the first sort of iteration of Block Party we built in April, which I think was the first kind of goal date. It would have been really nice if it would have come out then. But yeah, so what you see is what you get experience on the admin side. The paradigm is blocks, which is very different. Gutenberg comes with simple blocks, but you can use custom blocks or build custom blocks, use third-party blocks. And of course, there's a lot of implementation controversy. How may I just raise your hands if you know a little bit about that? Oh, okay, wow. That's interesting. I've done this talk a number of times or variations of it a number of times at other WordCamps this year and almost always no one raises it. This is interesting. In any case, so first thing we're going to do is do a little demo for you, Boston guys. This is typically what happens to me when I do demos. Sorry, Red Sox, man. Yeah. That was four World Sanities ago. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm a Met fan as you're about to find out, so maybe that's sort of doubly. But yeah, you guys are doing fine. Sue. Yeah. Okay, there we go. I know this wasn't going to be married. Okay, so I just put together a pretty simple demo post. And in fact, when you install Gutenberg as a plugin, there's a drop-down feature you'll see. It's right here, down here, and it says demo. You can access like a demo post, and it shows off the default blocks. And I think most people's understanding of what Gutenberg is, what the new editor is, is more that, and the simple sort of blocks that come with Gutenberg, right? This is like a cover block. There's a YouTube block. There's all this kind of stuff you might expect that would come along. But what I wanted to show you is a little bit more of some of the blocks that we've been building over the last year, and maybe what's possible, because I think probably most people haven't really seen what's possible with custom blocks and third-party blocks. So there's this, which is... One of the things we were thinking about is, okay, well, how can we use some of the possibilities of Gutenberg to build, just trying it out, testing it out to build like sort of common web UI, right? So you've seen this on a million websites, the pricing table, right? So this is actually a Gutenberg block. You can do a lot with it. Again, it's what you see is what you get. You can add details, add buttons, add links. And then there's block settings over here, again, like per month, per year, what kind of currency. There's a little bit of styling stuff. Again, we built some of these blocks just to see how it worked and test things out. I don't necessarily think you want to give, if you're an agency, you don't want to give your clients so many options, but it's possible in Gutenberg. And especially styling options. Oftentimes not designers. And they'll make really ugly stuff if you let them. But anyway, so this is kind of what it looks like. Pricing table, what it looks like on the back end. And if you see what it looks like here on the front end, it's almost identical. And it's truly, you're editing in the block and it's truly what you see is what you get. So again, that's more of a presentation block. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to show you guys, so this is my sample baseball nerd post. I'm a baseball guy, a sports guy in general. And I'm a big MEP fan that came to the States in 85, saw the MEPs win the World Series in 86 and then been disappointed for the next 32 years. But anyway, so one of the things, one of the sort of use cases we were thinking of is I read a lot of sports blogs. And one of the things I noticed in a lot of these sports blogs is that the data visualizations were really poor, simple, sort of screen-shotted or not very dynamic. And so I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if I would let people create dynamic data visualizations? And so we've made a bunch of these blocks with Google data charts. And so let me just show you what it kind of looks like in the editor. So you click on the block and then you have this, you can set the title. We actually set it up to where you can pull data from Google Sheets, which is pretty cool. So you can have a Google Sheet and then just... But this is just if you wanted to set up a pie chart right there in the block, you have names, values, you can set colors, controls, you can slice, you can, you know, explode a slice, right, and so forth, and this is my pie chart of how you become a MEP fan, right? You know, 32% masochist. I don't know if that's accurate. That's just, you know, this is one of my favorites, is you hate your dad who loved the Yankees. So it's some sort of rebellion or something, right? And oddly attracted to Mr. Met. So anyway, you can kind of, you know, like you can kind of set settings here, set, you know, set them 3D. Again, this is using Google's charts API. So it's not actually the most sophisticated thing. Okay, we want to rebuild them using something like D3 and give people a little bit more options. But again, this was just sort of, you were like thinking, okay, well, what's possible? What can we do within here? And then, you know, like what you get on this side is you get a, you know, you get a really dynamic, cool-looking data visualization. And again, it's in the post in it, you get a great, you know, because of what Gutenberg can do, you get a preview on the admin side that actually matches what it looks like. I mean, have you guys ever done data visualizations in WordPress and the content? Those options you have are pretty limited. They're short code based, and certainly you're not getting previews and things like that. So again, this is a line chart block that we made charting Met's losses. As a Met fan, you focus on that, right? You know, someone was telling me that I'm a sports Catholic, right? There's a lot of guilt, sadness. But anyway, so yeah, so again, on the admin side, right, names, values, controls, you can title the axes, you get a preview. There's lots and lots of settings here. You can curve, you know, you do area. Again, and all this stuff is using Google charts. And yeah, like I said, this is what it looks like. So, and again, we were playing around just thinking about like, okay, what's different web UI, right? Different web UI that we could play around with. Sliders, carousels, whatever you want to call them. It's not our favorite stuff. Clients love them. But you know, I'm sort of dubious as to the effectiveness of these, maybe certain use cases, but you know, have you guys ever built a carousel or slider using a plug-in in WordPress? I mean, typically, what's the experience like? I mean, what kind of stuff do you guys use? I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there. Anyone? Yeah. Okay. Revolution Slider, right? Yeah. Well, so my experience with that plug-in is that there are a million settings, right? And also, you know, I don't know. Do search on Panama Papers and Revolution Sliders. It'll be interesting. But yeah, so my experience of using sliders and building sliders for clients is just the experience of putting together a slider, adding images to a slider, tweaking settings is complex, difficult, and not user-friendly. And so what we tried to do was we tried to build as simple as possible a slider block where you could just, you know, very simply add images, trash images, change settings, like in the block itself, right? And, you know, give some user options, right? Indicators, non-indicators, et cetera. Again, this is just sort of a kind of like proof of concept. You know, as you can see, I, of course, focus on all the grates that we're screwing up or messed up, right? You know, we traded Nolan Ryan, beautiful. But anyway, so, and then again, here's another one that's just a pop-up, a modal, that's a block, right? Just common, you know, common web UI, so this is what it looks like, you know, on this side you can title, you can title it. You can put in other blocks as content. This is kind of cool. You can change, like, animations, and it gives you a little preview, right? Anyway, let's see what else. Oh, yeah, this is the statistic. You've probably seen that one, right? Like, number of cups of coffee, you know, I don't know what people use this stuff for. I don't know. But, again, so on this side, actually, I think we did, we did, on this side we did, yeah. So you can do, we have like a, we have a count-up animation that you can set like when you slide down, when you, you know, scroll down. This is like under, this is like super, super under development. It's a scatter chart, again. So the reason I show you this is yes to brag, but also to kind of give you the understanding of what's possible. I think, frankly, from a communication standpoint, I don't think that that's been really communicated and, you know, what the possibilities are for, you know, users to actually be able to create rich content on their own in the editor. And, you know, the kind of the possibilities are endless, you know, and even right now there's lots and lots of stuff you can do and, you know, the product's still kind of in development and not even part of core yet. Okay. I think that's, I think that's it. So if I can get to my screen here. Oh, here we go. So, yeah, no, okay, no baseball through the legs. Some of the benefits for content creators, as I see them, you know, what you see is what you get for real, finally, in the editor. I mean, you know, tiny MCE people, or they often say it's what you see is what you get, but any of us that's actually ever used tiny MCE and WordPress knows that that's oftentimes not the case. You know, like it's, you can make custom blocks to, you know, create content that would, rich content that would either be very difficult or impossible or the user experience would be very kind of junky. You know, potentially down the line, and that's why I include a link here to the roadmap, potentially down the line, I think, you know, as a product sort of matures, as this feature matures, it could either replace page builders or just serve as a sort of built-in page builder, which I think is kind of cool. You know, no disrespect to page builders, I don't know, who are the sponsors? Yeah, Bold Grid is awesome. But, yeah, so, you know, that's another potential. Okay. You know, change is for software developers, right? It's React and it's, you know, it's very JavaScript-oriented. I think theme development for Gutenberg, you know, using and taking advantage of Gutenberg and Gutenberg blocks is going to change. The paradigm is, again, going to be block-centric and I'm excited to see how people kind of develop those workflows and those processes because that's going internally right now at my company. You know, I don't want to focus on the controversy and the reason I don't want to focus on it is not to dismiss, like, completely valid criticisms. We don't think it's perfect by any stretch and there's miles to go, I think, before it's, you know, it's mature, certainly. I just, I want to focus on the opportunities because I'm an entrepreneur, right? So, I want to kind of stick more to that stuff, you know? So, you know, I want, and I think, you know, okay, I think that in WordPress, if you look at the ecosystem, it's been a fairly stable ecosystem, right? You know, tons of waves are not made and a lot of that is purposeful. But if you look at what's happening with Gutenberg and the new editor, and by the way, eventually we're not even going to be talking about Gutenberg, it's just going to be the editor. I see it as the biggest disruption in the WordPress ecosystem in quite a long time, maybe custom post types, maybe more, maybe bigger than that. And so, as an entrepreneur, as somebody that's interested and continuing to grow and scale my company, I see disruptions in this ecosystem that we've been a part of for the last, you know, three, almost four years, and I get really excited. I get really, really excited because these are the sorts of opportunities that allow smaller, possibly more flexible agencies like us to start offering, you know, different kinds of products and services that maybe other companies can't or won't. So it creates disruption and it creates opportunities. And yes, there is controversy and yes, there are completely valid criticisms and, you know, again, we can go on and on about that. But I like it when people get mad. I just see that there's an opportunity. So let's brainstorm. I've talked a little bit about some of the things that I see, possibly for agencies, but I want to ask you guys to sort of contribute and think where you guys are. Let's say if you're freelancers or you maintain a lot of sites or, you know, kind of whatever your role or position is in the ecosystem, what are some opportunities, business opportunities with this disruption? Yes? We've been saying we should put some pages on our Office of Service around fixing so we can try to convert to Google Burge and the rest of their site is then back up when we need to make that change. Because it sounds like you can apply Google Burge and it makes a content editor block with your code and then you also have the next app like convert to blocks. Do you think that backs their site offering service? Yes, so I think there are going to be issues for lots of sites and I think there's definitely going to be opportunities there. I think everyone's scared of especially agencies with a bunch of sites as you try to log in and it's available with a buy-in and then also we get a phone ring and all that. Right, but I guess my whole thing with that is if you're maintaining sites as someone that's maintaining sites you have the responsibility of preparing for these kinds of things, right? It's just part of what you do. I think a lot of times people look at maintaining sites and the business of maintaining sites as free money like Update Core, Update Plugins and just the money rolls in. So you actually have to work, right? You have to plan for major upgrades and how things are going to change and you have to price accordingly. So people are worried about the... I think that's hilarious to me. People are worried about the phone ring off the hook. That's awesome. And if you're billing by the hour that's even more awesome. But yeah, certainly there are going to be great opportunities in helping people transition if their site has potential issues with the upgrade for sure. Yes? So premium blocks, right? Now with really advanced Gutenberg blocks and more to that grouping those blocks into a certain niche, right? So maybe it's copywriting or maybe it's design or maybe it's e-commerce. Huge opportunity there. And then from our perspective, related, I have a plug-in business but preparing our plug-ins to be Gutenberg ready is a huge opportunity for anybody with any plug-in product out there because when Gutenberg hits and your plug-in is ready you have some marketing fodder immediately, right? And if your competitors don't have it or they're not ready it's really an opportunity for the iceberg. Yeah, absolutely. And I think with the premium blocks again, I just showed you and that's really the tip of the iceberg. Actually those blocks aren't, you know, that sophisticated. I mean, for us, we do a lot of react stuff. We do a lot of business solution application stuff. I think that took one of our developers, the pie chart block. It took one of our developers a day more or less to do most of the work and that day was also, what is Gutenberg? How the hell does this thing work, et cetera? So, you know, these aren't actually tremendous. Like what I've shown you is actually not all that sophisticated. So I'm really excited to see how far you can take it. And I think, yeah, there's no doubt there's tremendous opportunities in that. Yes. I think there's also a great opportunity with Gutenberg to help people build best practice content around web accessibility and search optimization, data visualization especially. The correct solution that most people go to is you take your wonderful visualized data, make the PNG file and pop it on your page. Exactly. And then give some alt text saying, here's a pie chart. So, like the pie chart example where on the back end you've got all the data points. It's just, it's not that abstract to code that Gutenberg block with accessibility controls in it so that somebody that's approaching it with a screen reader has the opportunity to go to that Google Sheet and look at the data in a way, digest the data in a way that makes sense for them. I think that's an awesome point. I mean, that, there's something I've thought a ton about but I think it's an awesome point. Especially in light of the sort of, there's this kind of accessibility controversy around Gutenberg which I think is there are many, many valid points there. There's many valid points. I'm not trying to dismiss that at all but in that use case, right? The possibility is there. Yes. Right? And I, you know, I have a cousin who's blind internet and, and yeah, you know, that's, it definitely makes you sensitive to the fact that, yeah, if you're, yeah, exactly, you're putting a PNG that says pie chart. Okay, well what good does that serve? You know, my cousin, for example. So I think, yeah, no, certainly in that use case it's a great, great example of being able to have the ability to empower users to have a more accessible web and create more accessible content, for sure. Yes. So the previous themes as an example will be a lot of searching under the sun. They tend to, you know, might only need one or two features of that community. It seems to me like Gutenberg is more, has a more modular idea behind it. So I think themes that can be built in a way to allow for public cases to kind of, most seamlessly integrate without impacting the site performance I think could be an opportunity. Yeah, I agree. One of the things that, you know, I think about a lot is, you know, with page builders, right? It gives, one of the, so, you know, people, especially in WordPress development, you know, complain about page builders a lot, right? One of the things that's interesting to me is I completely understand why they exist. Right? They exist for a reason. And users sort of demanded a better experience building pages. Then WordPress kind of offers them out of the gate. And, you know, one of the things I know a lot of agencies that use page builders and, you know, they create these custom elements, right, that are branded styled consistently, right? And reusable. And I think that paradigm, I get it. It makes sense, right? So you want to empower content managers to stay within branding guidelines, right? So I think that the again, I don't know if it's there yet, but the possibilities are there for sure. Yeah. I think it doesn't get enough conversation lately with all of the drama going around which is valid, is that the editor is first. And Gutenberg, the long-term vision, gets to have me a non-developer and non-designer be able to use blocks to create an entire website from scratch. So what's going to happen to themes? Are themes going to still be a necessary part? Or are themes going to be Gutenberg and are we ready to start with a blank canvas? And I'm excited for that. Well, and so I mean, I don't know if you guys know about this, but so WP Engine recently acquired array themes. Do you guys know array themes? And array themes, actually they created this product called Atomic Blocks. They were one of the first collection of blocks came out in April or around that. They were really, really smart those guys. They made they made a Gutenberg news site, right? Where they aggregated all of this Gutenberg stuff and then and then came out with their product that, you know, they featured on the Gutenberg news site and you know, their blocks are really they're really kind of designed forward and but primarily presentation blocks and yeah, so WP Engine acquired array themes, Atomic Blocks and Gutenberg news. And, you know, you see a lot of these hosting companies that they're starting to think about what how they're going to approach this and what are the solutions that they're going to be offering their clients. So, you know, I've definitely looked at that and thought, you know, to myself there's tremendous, tremendous opportunity in some of these bigger companies taking making bets and how, you know, because at the end of the day who's WordPress for, right? Who's WordPress for, right? At the end of the day, who's WordPress for? End users, right? So, as long as we get to a place where the end user experience is better and people are more empowered as far as I'm concerned, that's all I care about. And if you know, if there are sort of entrepreneurial opportunities to create those better user experiences easier and sort of empowering user experiences then I'm all about that. And frankly, we don't, as an agency, we don't need to do WordPress work anymore. But I, there's something about this ecosystem where I think it's an enormous ecosystem with an enormous user base and, you know, there are tremendous, tremendous opportunities in there. And again, disruption, disruption to me is awesome for an entrepreneur. And I just, if you take anything away from this talk, it's just it's fine to be sort of outraged, it's fine to have like, you know, criticisms, it's fine to be skeptical, all those things are great. But if you're an entrepreneur, be entrepreneurial. You know, turn that around. You know, even kind of coming from the other side, right? Like you see, like the, you know, classic press fork, right? There's nothing wrong with a fork. It probably wouldn't have existed if this project wouldn't have gone the way it did. Right? So there's always, there's always opportunities out there. So, I'll open it up for questions. Here's some links to three of the blocks I demoed, they're free. So if you want to download them, play them, play around with them, they're all on GitHub. And if there's a problem or an issue, please put in a pull request. Or send me an email. I don't know. But yeah, so anyway, and there's my information. That's a link to the slides, but you probably don't need the slides. There's not a ton there. Yeah, that's it. Any questions? Thoughts, ideas? Yes? Mm-hmm. Like, are you talking about like, are you talking about custom like block development? Yeah. I mean, it depends what your training is. Are you talking about like, 888? You shouldn't find that to be a problem. It's pretty, it's pretty straightforward. I mean, this whole blocks concept is kind of taking over where I work. We use SharePoint on the word, migrating an internet, our internet to SharePoint online. Exact same concept. By the page FI, you want to divide it up. You drop a block, it does a specific thing. The different parts of the page you want, what are the options if the page is done? I think there is a learning curve from the standpoint of like, you know, there is a certain way that people are accustomed to working with a classic editor that, you know, you're going to have to learn new sort of workflows, and there's something there. If you're talking about like, if you're talking about custom block development, you're going to have to be really, really comfortable with JavaScript, React, so there's a lot of stuff there. But if you're just talking about like trying to build rich content in posts, it should be, you know, it should be something where I just try it out, experiment, figure it out. I don't think it's that bad. I'm biased. I've been using it for quite a while now, and so I've started to kind of allow the things, allow the sort of quirks of it or, you know, sort of automatic at the stage, but no pun intended. Yes. Whatever your host is, if they provide a staging site opportunity, make a copy of those client sites you have on the live site, install and activate the classic editor plugin, so when Gutenberg drops, they're not going to be as excited, it'll just be business as usual. But if you create a copy on the staging site, and then start playing around with those copies of those sites, your learning curve is going to be shortened quite a bit, and then when Gutenberg is ready and you're ready, then you can just activate Gutenberg on those other sites. Yeah. Don't be, create your sandbox and don't be afraid. It's all good. Yes. It just seems like Gutenberg's just a lot quicker-weighted abilities than the classic editor was. The classic editor was very static. This is very fluid. I think people are going to find if you're building pages much more quickly and much more interesting-looking pages not much quicker. That's my impression of Gutenberg. I mean, classic editor as a page builder is awesome. And that's why page builders exist. Right? I think to me, where there's a lot of debate about what Gutenberg better than the classic editor is in creating post-content. But again, I think what people don't, they're not seeing the possibilities. It's like when you're in a small, you're in the paradigm of WordPress and the classic editor, you just start constraining what you think you can do. And also, to be fair, I just haven't seen a lot of blocks out there. People are waiting or whatever it is. I haven't seen a lot of blocks out there that push it and challenge sort of the limits and are creative and introduce more advanced functionalities and have more dynamic sort of outcomes. Maybe part of it for me is that my company, we've built a lot of just business solutions stuff where we're having to make it up. The constraint is time and budget, right? Yeah, this is like honestly, this is our company fun side project for the last nine months. Yes. That's a great question. It's on our block party site and we've built a bunch of custom blocks there. There's a block that I didn't show, there's an accordion, I think it's the FAQ and stuff like that. From a performance standpoint, it really is going to depend on what page, what content you're going to do with it. The fact that it's just a lot of HTML you know, it's bloated. I'm happy to talk to you about that afterwards. I know what you're saying. I think there are advantages and disadvantages but I can go into it more detail afterwards. That's cool. That means for some businesses that's just I think, so what I would tell your guys, your developers is just that might be the right strategy for right now but you're just delay. Honestly, from my standpoint the great, the tremendous, talented software developers that I've met they're excited by new tech and new challenges. This whole fear thing is it's a little bit weird for me in tech because I don't know. We're a generalist shop and we're in New Mexico so we end up doing stuff like building wearable applications and random things and in tech we don't have a ton of experience in but it's just like, hey we're developers we'll figure it out. So I don't know, maybe it's more our paradigm and what we do. Anybody else? Like I said, oh wait did anyone text me? Okay. Yeah, if you have questions, feel free to email me text me or whatever or come talk to me afterwards. I appreciate your guys' attention and time. Thanks.