 Thanks, thank you for that kind introduction and indeed we live and breathe and all that about WordPress at our company in New Mexico. What I want to talk to you guys a little bit about today is Gutenberg and what sort of my opinion and my read is on how it's going to change the WordPress ecosystem and make it better eventually, but eventually. I also put I Assure You and if you've ever watched the movie Clerks you may recognize that but I'm being serious. And so something I try to make sure to do to accommodate people that aren't especially super excited about asking questions right in public and you know sort of panic that comes with that is feel free to text me questions during the presentation and I'll do my best to answer them at the end of the presentation. So just a little bit about me, I'm CEO at Eleven Online. We build software, we offer digital marketing services and build websites. Currently in the last year we started something called Block Party. It's a Gutenberg block collection, a lot of data visualization blocks. I've been working with WordPress only since 2015. So I'm a newbie compared to a lot of you guys. I did some time as a really, really poor developer, software developer. And like I said, thankfully that's not something I do very much these days and it's probably good for everyone. That said, you know, there are actually 11 of us right now at Eleven Online, complete coincidence and I think seven of us are software developers. So we're definitely a software development heavy shop. So how many of you guys have played around with Gutenberg, know what it is, have any sense? Wow, not many of you. Okay, you got it on your schedule, good, cool. Okay, great. Well, just to give a brief overview, I don't want to kind of talk too much about probably what the other talks about. But just to kind of give you a brief overview, it's going to be the new WordPress editor. As of, I don't know, maybe August, maybe September, who knows, who could say. You know, and what it's really going to bring to WordPress is a true what you see is what you get experience admin in front of. The paradigm for creating content is blocks. So currently there are people that build and agencies that build websites and they use, you know, page builders that use kind of blocks of content or they may use something like Advanced Custom Fields or CMB2, we use CMB2 to create custom fields for content. But for the most part, really, it's not really what you see is what you get experience. So it's kind of different from those in that way. Gutenberg is going to ship with some simple blocks and developers can build custom blocks. And there has been a ton of controversy over the way it was conceived, the way it's developed. I don't know what the rating is for Gutenberg as a plugin on the plugin repo, it's probably still pretty low, I was probably hovering at like two or three or something, I don't know. But in any case, a lot of controversy in the community about Gutenberg and sort of the impending change. All right, now I'm going to try and do a demo. This is what happens when I do demos, metaphorically, but I'll give it a try. So I wanted to just give you a kind of a as quick as possible sort of glance at the Gutenberg editor. If you install Gutenberg on a WordPress site and let's say you go over to the menu where it says Gutenberg, here let me, that's a little bit better, and there's a submenu item says demo, you'll be able to find this demo post. And it kind of shows off sort of the basics of Gutenberg. So this is your title area, it's where you can edit your permalinks, you have a sidebar that has a lot of the same kind of things that you could edit in the old editor, but then this is where we get into blocks. So this is a cover image block, it's a block that comes default with Gutenberg. You can edit printing stresses, you can edit right in the block, right? You can edit the image itself, you can transform the block, you can make it widescreen, full width, I don't know, all sorts of stuff, sorts of things. There's a video block here, I'm going to keep scrolling just to show you. This is a paragraph block, another paragraph block, you can align it in different ways, you have access to all the kind of text editing that you want. This is a heading block, right? H2 is H3, et cetera. Here's an image block, you can edit the caption, and again you can set the alignments, you can make it wide if your theme supports it, see what else here. And then you have access to all the kind of typical stuff in your old editor, your unordered lists, your ordered lists, et cetera. This is a quote block, right? So if you want to insert a quote. And just by the way, how do you do it, hit this plus right here, and then you have access to all the blocks, right? So you can put a divider, you can put a gallery, et cetera. Oh. There's your live demo. Did the power go down? Yeah, power, power. All right. They got a thunderstorm in Tennessee. I did, I did, well, hey, this is a, okay, so I guess we got to wait for that to turn back on? Yeah. All right. Okay, I can improvise, this is fine. Now there's a couple, no, so the ones that were shown in the post there, they all come default with Gutenberg. But if you saw, there were a couple that in the select block section, there were a couple that said BP, whatever block. Those are custom blocks that we've built, which I was going to show afterwards. This is eventually going to come back on, right? Yeah, it'd be awesome. Can you say what you changed as a new thing? Hold on a second. Yeah. There's one on the floor already. Sorry. Oh, it's all good. Sorry, your question? So once you modify that and you change that new look as a new thing? I'm not sure I'm following exactly. Okay. Let's say you edit that. Can you save those settings as another plugin or another thing? So oh, if you're saying can you edit, so you can reuse blocks, yes. You can reuse blocks. You can duplicate blocks. You can save a block with certain content or certain styling and save it and then reuse it later. Okay. Yeah. That's one of the default features. All right. Do I have to unplug and plug in? Maybe? Yeah, I just did that. No, it's all good. Yeah, they're so cool. He's not even sweating. Not yet. I have to maybe unplug there, too. So it's not. Yeah. Sorry. Let's keep improvising. Any other questions? Okay. Well, in the interest of time and while this is going on, what I was going to show you was the default blocks, right? I think you saw most of those. There's a video block. And again, what I would encourage you guys to do is spin up a WordPress site, install Gutenberg, just start playing around. The other item I was going to show you once we can get that going is some custom blocks that we built, my company built probably in February and March, just trying to kind of play around with Gutenberg and see what we could actually do. And so one of the ideas that I had was who here likes sports? Sports? Anyone? So I read a lot of sports blogs. And I read a lot of blogs that have a lot of like tables and charts and all kinds of weird baseball statistics and statistical analysis because I don't know. I guess I don't have a lot of, I don't know, highbrow interests, I guess. But yeah. So anyway, so I enjoyed those. And so one of the things I thought about was most of the time you see those kinds of charts and stuff like that there, images, just sort of static images, right? So I thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could use Gutenberg to build out some of this data visualization as a block, right? So make your own pie chart. Make your own bar chart. Make your own line chart. So whenever we can get this going, I don't know. You think it's any closer? I know. Yeah, I know exactly. Yeah. Really? Okay. That's fine. I'll restart. Yeah, I'm restarting. So let's see what happens. All right. So forget the demo. Maybe if we get back to it, I'll see what I can do about that. I don't need the slides. And I'm happy. I'll put the slides up on Twitter and do what I can do about that. I'm happy. They're not super descriptive and all that much anyway. So what I was going to show you were these data visualization blocks and other blocks that we built to sort of demonstrate what the potential is. Because I think with Gutenberg, a lot of people, I'm not sure that they're seeing right now the potential because it's so novel. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But I'm not sure that they're seeing right now the potential because it's so novel and so new. And just right now, and the fact is that for right now, most people, Gutenberg's just a new editor. You have to do blocks, and it's just a little bit of a different way of thinking about things. But what I love about Gutenberg is the potential to create richer content with custom blocks that you could install on your site or through plugins. And so really what you see is when you're using Gutenberg and when you're building custom blocks, the potential for the editing experience is akin to almost like a square space or a Wix type of experience or a medium type of experience where you just have access to much richer tools to create richer content. And so kind of looking at that from that standpoint, looking at it from that standpoint, I think what's useful to think about, so how many of you guys know about the controversy? The Gutenberg controversy. I don't know if you guys follow or care much. There's a lot of controversy about a lot of people asking, OK, well, I maintain a bunch of old sites. How's that going to affect sites I maintain? Because Gutenberg is going to be the default editor in 5.0. At this stage, there are a number of interventions that you can take to basically punt the problem a little bit farther down the road. There are plugins that let you keep the classic editor default after 5.0. And so do your research, but at the end of the day, I think there are measures that you can take if you want to punt it down the road. But who cares about punting it down the road, right? Because this is the business track, and we have a bunch of entrepreneurs here, right? And so I've been in WordPress since 2015, not very long, but WordPress allowed me to create a business, right? So I take that pretty seriously. It's pretty awesome. It allowed me to get out of my crappy job at a nonprofit that was sucking my soul. I'm sure a lot of you guys have a similar experience, right? So when I heard about Gutenberg, I started researching, thinking about it. My perception was this is the biggest disruption to the WordPress ecosystem in a very long time. Certainly since I've been working WordPress and possibly since maybe custom post types or the customizer, this disruption is it is going to change WordPress in a very, very real way going forward. And so, you know, as entrepreneurs, right, as an entrepreneur for me, I see this disruption as an incredible opportunity. This is an incredible opportunity. That's what I was thinking, not to interrupt you. I mean, as entrepreneurs, I mean, it's all about attitude anyway. If we didn't want to change or wanted the status quo, we'd stay into 9 to 5 or 12 to 12 or whatever it may be. But as I think you were just about to say, with chaos from an entrepreneurial standpoint, with chaos comes innovation. And so we can seize this, as you said, as an opportunity to separate ourselves from people who are still doing what they did last week. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. No, very succinctly put. I would say this. It's not that I don't have empathy for people that create a business with a certain business model and it's going and then something comes and disrupts it. And they have a hard time anticipating it and then they have to pivot and it's not that I don't have empathy for that. And, you know, when we first started building WordPress sites, we were building pretty simple brochure sites, right? And, you know, we kind of moved in a different direction, but then also we saw that that market was starting to get eaten away by, you know, Squarespace, Wix and all this sort of stuff. So that wasn't really even a market anymore. We had to move it anyway. But definitely there were a lot of small shops and people like that I know that have been sort of, you know, cut down. But in any case, it's a tremendous, tremendous opportunity. And so what I want to talk about was, you know, how is this going to change the ecosystem as I see it? I think a big question everyone asks is, how is it going to affect page builders? Right? How many of you guys use page builders to build WordPress sites? Okay. Cool. How many, just shout out some names of page builders. Yeah. Beaver builder. Elementor. Elementor Divi. Anyone still use a visual composer? I'm still so new. I'm just going with things. Okay. There's another one that I've seen. I don't know. There's a million. Anyway, point is, so a lot of people say, oh, the page builder is dead. Well, I can tell you this, that when Goodwill comes out, it is not a product that is going to be robust enough to compete with modern page builders, like Beaver Builder, right away. So whoever says that, in my opinion, I'm not saying it won't, it might not, it might eventually happen. It's just that at this stage, Gutenberg, you can add blocks. There's going to be some good blocks that come default, but you can build columns and things like that, but it's not on the level of Beaver Builder. It's just, from a functionality standpoint, it's not going to make you ditch all those page builders and go with Gutenberg. Maybe later, maybe in a year, maybe in a few years, it's going to mature as a product within WordPress enough that it will allow certain users to be able to kind of transition away. So my shop, we don't use page builders. Like I said, we use CMB2 and we use other things and part of the reason we don't use page builders, and I know there's bold grids to sponsor, so I'm not trying to make waves, but we don't love page builders because we feel that page builders can add a lot of cruft and make sites harder to scale. I don't want to get into arguments about that necessarily, but that's just kind of our opinion. But the thing about page builders that I know is true, page builders exist for a reason. They exist because end users demanded them because the editor experience was subpar. Right? And so it is foolish as an entrepreneur to ignore that. It's foolish to ignore that. And so what really excites me about Gutenberg is that this is a really sort of forward-thinking product and it's going to be part of WordPress core. You're not going to need to install another plug-in. The way it stores post-content and the way it stores blocks themselves, I was a little bit frightened at first, but it's kind of ingenious now that I've sort of come to terms with it. HTML comments, kind of really interesting, but I don't think the page builder is dead anytime soon. And there are lots of page... I know people that work for companies that make page builders and they're thinking about ways to use Gutenberg in their products. So this isn't a page builder versus... forget all that noise. This is just a change in the market. They're going to be players and they're not going to adapt. Now, how many of you guys run small shops, boutique shops that sell WordPress sites to clients? That's probably a lot of you, I would guess. I'm going to ask you guys, what do you think the opportunities are for you guys with Gutenberg? Anyone have any thoughts, ideas? Yeah, so training for sure because it's definitely a different paradigm and so if you have a site that you help a client manage and they want to start using Gutenberg, there's going to be training opportunities for sure. Yeah, so my company just sold our first Gutenberg site. Site powered by Gutenberg. It's a brochure site. We decided that we were going to complicate life for ourselves and not only did we sell a Gutenberg site, we sold a Gutenberg accelerated mobile pages native site. So it's AMP native and it's Gutenberg. So I have to admit that in the process of selling it, we needed to actually see if that was doable. So once we kind of knew that it was doable, we sort of then proceeded but so we're actually in the process of building that right now and it's completely changed our workflow. How so? Yes, sorry. How so? Well, we had a certain way of building custom themes and that way is kind of out the door. So we had a way of building custom themes with CMB2 which is similar to ACF. I don't know if you guys use ACF or are familiar where we made templates and templates had content block areas basically and so with this brochure site we're making templates but we're making templates of blocks. Gutenberg blocks that are reusable and branded. So we're really it's just been the occasion for us to kind of completely revise and change our workflow and we're still figuring it out. You know, this was one of those where part of the project success is like R&D right? Because we want to be a shop that can when 5.0 comes out and yeah, we want that and so that brings me actually to probably towards the end of the presentation this is pretty cool, right? Blue Blue So towards the end of the presentation I was going to talk about you might have a question for me why am I here? Like it's Birmingham, Alabama I'm from New Mexico what am I doing here why did I apply to talk here and yeah my company build up product and you guys want to ask me about that I'm happy to talk about that later but the reason really I'm here is it's not bad yeah, it's not bad I lived out on the east coast for a long time so this like 85 90 with humidity you know I'd say it's even but now the reason I'm here is that so I grew up in so I'm Peruvian originally I lived up and down the east coast growing up I actually went to junior high and high school in West Virginia and then went to college in Philly outside of Philly lived in Philly for a long time but then moved to New Mexico my wife got a job in New Mexico and so I spent time in some pretty underdog states in this country specifically West Virginia and New Mexico I you know just the sad fact there's nothing to joke about the sad fact is when you see a lot of those top 50 state lists right West Virginia and New Mexico sometimes Alabama they kind of tend to be at the bottom I'm sorry right so one of the things I talk about in my presentation is that I'm a MET fan I like baseball and I'm a MET fan I don't know if you guys follow baseball right now but METs are probably one of the five worst teams in baseball right now we had a couple nice years a couple years ago but you know if you spend time in New York and you root for the underdog you're going to be a MET fan you know so I'm a big root for the underdog guy and myself and my partners we were able to build a business in New Mexico which frankly is Mexico is a desert and more than one I love New Mexico it's a beautiful place awesome people amazing scenery but it's just not a lot of money in New Mexico and so I'm very proud of the fact we were able to build a real business with clients all over the country in New Mexico I see Gutenberg as an opportunity for agencies and businesses that aspire to be more than just a local provider some of you guys are going to be content being local providers and there's nothing wrong with that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that you're going to have a boutique business and it's going to be small but you're going to know all of your clients really well and you're going to serve them really well and that is cool my DNA it just it doesn't work that way I'm always pushing I'm always constantly trying to look for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and maybe that will change as I get older but I see Gutenberg as a disrupting element in this ecosystem and I see it as a way for my company to go take the next level and position ourselves in such a way that we're at cutting edge we're building WordPress sites at Gutenberg way we have Gutenberg products we're building custom blocks with high functionality we're not just building paragraph blocks we're building data visualization blocks we're building complex user interaction blocks high functionality blocks that interact with third party APIs etc and we're building them because for the user so I'm here in Alabama because you guys there is an opportunity here I'm telling you right now and it could be simple opportunities like training I think that's awesome it could be other opportunities like consulting with other firms you know it could be it could be building products it could be revising your workflow to accommodate and white label to other businesses or other agencies I mean I'll give you guys one I'm waiting for someone and by waiting I mean figuring out if we have the time somehow to do it ourselves but who's going to build the site builder for a niche industry that's powered by Gutenberg because there are a lot of niche industry site builders out there that are powered by WordPress but they're powered by the WordPress experience right so who's going to do the one that's powered by Gutenberg and is going to give users a much better much easier experience building their sites it could be that it could be that's just one thought that's just one thought I've had recently these are tremendous opportunities for entrepreneurs and the underdogs that are here in this room they're in New Mexico they're in West Virginia all over the country when there's disruption there are going to be people at the top that are going to stay static and comfortable right and eventually that's going to affect their bottom line and they're going to start fading away and there's going to be people at the bottom that are going to see that opportunity that are going to go and take that and push and grow their companies and get a little bit of that market share so that's my evangelization to you guys this is a tremendous opportunity I don't have the answer I have some ideas I have some thoughts but this is a tremendous opportunity and lastly the last thing I want to say is this who is WordPress 4 our keynote speaker talked a lot about it right who's WordPress 4 it is not for developers sorry guys I love you guys I love the developers I had a short terrible stint as one but I love the designers I love the business people the entrepreneurs the marketers but WordPress is the people's platform for the users the only thing I can say is that WordPress for the last three years and then using Gutenberg there's a gulf in terms of what it's like to create content especially if you have some custom blocks doing some really cool things so with that said go for it go after that opportunity if that's something that interests you and that's pretty much it I have time for questions probably what like 10 minutes for questions okay sorry about the technical difficulties and and yes you thank you yes my experience with WordPress is a lot closer to weeks than years so if you're just thinking out now I'm new to WordPress new obviously to Gutenberg so I've got a simple Q-Page site as you say for example I have a WooCommerce on the second page and there's a grid of 20 products they're thumbnails actually a video template just thinking out loud what difference will or what will be the benefits to me of using Gutenberg in this application I know that WooCommerce so WooCommerce was acquired by Automatic Automatic has engineers working on WordPress core and they have engineers working on Gutenberg full time and so I know that they are working on making WooCommerce Gutenberg friendly right so so imagine right having Gutenberg blocks available to you when you're building pages that have a product grid right and so and having kind of all these different pieces of WooCommerce as blocks that you could put on any page or any post so it's going to give the people building sites more flexibility and the people using sites more flexibility right imagine you have a client and they want to put a blog post and they want to feature a product right so and WooCommerce has Gutenberg blocks that allow them to just drag and drop and put in a product or a grid of products it's going to make their lives a lot easier it's going to help you deliver more value to them right what's the process now for that to happen yeah yeah yeah it's not an ideal experience right now and so that's just one way that experience can change for the end user but also for the professional I think it's going to the paradigm is going to be blocks it's going to be about building developers are going to be oriented towards building branded reusable blocks high functionality blocks and organizing their sites in that way yes sorry I think it is yeah well yeah I can see it very clearly and there's even I think I can't remember if it was 10 up one of those big agencies did a usability study on Gutenberg as it stood maybe a month or two ago and it's certainly not perfect and it's far from mature but even just my own experience of building content with WordPress there's just no comparison and so putting yourself in a position to deliver that kind of value to clients it has to create a competitive advantage and I'm sure as entrepreneurs we can figure out how that means that we can elevate our positions as entrepreneurs taking advantage of that there's no doubt in my mind yes I don't know we're seeing I guess the smaller users some of the smaller bloggers who may want some customized features do you anticipate companies selling it block by block or yeah they don't come in the default yeah awesome great question it remains to be seen what I will say is that there are a number of efforts now in terms of you buy a plugin you install the plugin and all of a sudden you have these additional these additional blocks so maybe the way it plays out is that it's a pay membership maybe it's you pay something every year and then you get these awesome blocks that make your experience so much better and make your blogging and the content you create so much richer right maybe it's that or maybe it's some sort of freemium model or maybe let me think here maybe it's a maybe it's more maybe the default experience becomes a little bit better and so then maybe it's specialized by industry or niche so maybe you're like I said you're a sports blogger and you might need X kind of blocks to make your content writing experience a lot better so maybe that's how it plays out you know there's that's the beauty of this it's so new there is a lot of there's a lot to be sort of decided and a lot to be found out and so you know again like I said the entrepreneurs they have the chance to sort of mine that new territory and see what happens it's exciting to me it's really exciting yes yes yeah so I know that part of the development of Gutenberg is taking accessibility concerns to heart are the default blocks completely 100% accessible ADA compliant I don't believe so but again from an entrepreneurial standpoint where's the opportunity there ADA compliant blocks that can be used on sites that need to remain ADA compliant there's some variables there ADA compliance is a really complicated thing and so there's some variables there that you may not be able to control but imagine that hey blocks are all ADA compliant right I think that could be a tremendous that could be a tremendous business opportunity so so yeah you know if you have a site that needs to be ADA compliant you're probably better off hiring a developer to build blocks or build you know build the theme of build blocks that are contracted to be ADA compliant and you'll need to do a custom but maybe there's at some point a product type solution that will let you you know be able to take advantage of that we are building amp blocks we're building accelerated mobile pages blocks right so all the elements of the blocks are accelerated mobile pages native we're building it for a project but believe you me we're going to be reusing that stuff and so there's potentially an opportunity there to anyone else yes yeah that's okay good question so it's not going to replace plugins per se because plugins are kind of the way that at least the vehicle right now for getting more blocks into your editing experience you can also set them up through the theme I think from the technical side theme development it's going to have to change and so again there's lots of different people that build themes in different ways there's so many different methods but with Gutenberg you know what we did is we have a header and we have a footer and everything else are templates of blocks so it's a different paradigm for sure I don't when you're talking about widget areas that's another interesting thing I don't know because widget areas used to be places where people could edit content and you would hook them into a certain area it was an area maybe that was repeated or not a lot of times in the early days we built sites where the home pages the content was dictated by widget areas so users would edit the widget areas and then it would edit the content on the home page so we're not doing that anymore right we pretty much abandoned widget areas so how that's going to change I don't know 100% yet anyone else yes yeah, yeah this is the first accelerated mobile pages native site we've ever done and it's also the first Gutenberg I told you we like to make our lives complicated so it's also the first Gutenberg site that we've built for a client so I'll let you know but the idea is obviously under 3 seconds are obviously close to instant that's the whole idea right anyone else again, apologize for the technical difficulties thank you guys