Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today, I’m excited to wrap up this series and continue to share more and more ways to contribute back to the WordPress project and how to get involved and how to join the community that is the WordPress community. So, let’s go ahead and get to that in just a few seconds. I’ve got three announcements and a plugin to share with you this week.

The first piece of news comes from a website called Alignable.com. It’s an article titled “Top 20 Most Trusted Brands in Small Business” and it was a Q3 report for 2017. And it was broken down by a lot of different brands. It has by category. It’s got different trust ratings and whatnot. But the most interesting part is the most trusted brand No. 1 is Amazon, No. 2 is Stripe, then Google, Apple, Authorize.net, FedEx, and No. 7 was WordPress. So, WordPress is No. 7 of the top 20 most trusted brands.

Rounding out that list are PayPal, UPS, LinkedIn, Vistaprint, MailChimp, 1and1, Square, Microsoft, Twitter, Dropbox, Intuit, Facebook, and OpenTable. So, it’s way – WordPress is way higher than Facebook, which is really surprising, and Twitter and MailChimp, LinkedIn, PayPal, all of these different services. So, I’ve got a link in the show notes for episode No. 360 to read the full article, but I just thought that was super interesting and wanted to point that out to you this week.

Today, I also want to tell you about Gutenberg 1.5 was released just a few hours ago as of this recording, and it includes long-awaited Meta Box supports. So, this was something that wasn’t in Gutenberg a few versions back. It definitely needs some testing. They’ve also added some improved writing flow with block navigation, so if you’ve got two blocks, you can add a block in between it pretty easily. And there are lots of other features that have been added in 1.5. You can now display inserter button between blocks. There’s more navigation. Performance is a lot better, lots of different things. And there are about two dozen other changes as well as long as features. So, we’re continuing to move forward and continue to learn more and more and see more and more cool features coming out of Gutenberg.

If you haven’t installed it yet, I do recommend doing this. This is one of the times where it is kind of the future that’s coming to WordPress, so it’s kind of – A few years ago when we started seeing the customizer and getting some new improvements in the customizer, that was a good time to do a little bit of testing before it actually came out. And this is another opportunity, especially if you’re running a website that has multiple users. This may be a good chance to get a look at it early so you know what the learning curve may be for your employees or other people that are managing your website. So, that’s Gutenberg. You can download that on the WordPress repository and you can find it if you search for plugins in the WordPress directory as well.

All right, the last thing that I wanna share with you today was a recap, a very short snippet from WooConf. It was the third annual WooConf held up in Seattle this past weekend, and the opening keynote was given by Todd Wilkens. He’s the head of WooCommerce and he provided some overview of some accomplishments and some information there.

But one of the most interesting pieces of his summary was he asked the crowd to guess how many sales WooCommerce stores would generate in 2017. And the guesses ranged anywhere from $10 million to $1 billion. According to Wilkens, WooCommerce stores will collectively generate more than $10 billion in sales, and he says the figure could be as high as $15 billion. I had no idea and I work on WooCommerce support and help customers every single day. But I had no idea that it was that big of an impact and that many transactions were running through self-hosted WordPress sites using WooCommerce.

He also thanked the 616 contributors working on the WooCommerce platform and he says that there are three distinct user segments that we’re focusing on as a company. There are the store builders, the store owners, and the extension developers. And these are causing the entire company to reorganize internally and provide focus for features going forward. And he says it’s used a lot by small- to medium-sized businesses, but it’s used by businesses that generate $1 million and more.

So, Wilkens profiled the H-E-B, which is a large grocery store in Texas, uses WooCommerce for its sister company, Central Market, and WebDevStudios built the site on WordPress and used WooCommerce to handle all the ecommerce needs. So, lots of cool things about that. In a few weeks or so, I’ll be able to share with you the recaps or the video streams where you can watch all of the replays of all of the sessions, but until then, let’s just hang tight and well learn more about WooCommerce in a few weeks.

All right. The plugin that I wanna share with you this week is called FastDev and this is a plugin that is kind of built for developers, but it allows you to inspect, debug, and analyze all kinds of information about a server. It gives you information about the current WordPress installation. You can get information about the server like what version of PHP or MySQL it’s using, any type of PHP server information, all of this good stuff. There’s lots and lots of information you can get there.

And this would be a great way to troubleshoot a theme or a plugin or maybe something that’s broken on your website. You could have the website owner install this plugin or you could do it as a website owner and just look through some of this information and say, oh, well, duh. It’s not working because it’s using an older version of MySQL or an older version of PHP. Or this may be working or whatever the case may be. So, this is a plugin called FastDev and you can find it in the WordPress repository. And it might just help you track down some very useful information in regards to debugging a WordPress website.

All right. Let’s go on to the main part of the show and wrap this series up. When we’re talking about ways to contribute to WordPress and I think I could go for many more weeks. There are hundreds and hundreds of different ways to contribute to WordPress, and all of the ones that we talked about last week still apply. I mean, some of them don’t. As a website owner, you may or may not have the developer skills or the designer skills or may not be a prolific writer or a blogger, so maybe you don’t wanna do all of those types of things. So, I tried to come up with a few more unique or different ways that you can contribute back to WordPress, make WordPress better, and make the plugins and other features within WordPress a lot better as well.

And as I said in the previous episodes, you don’t have to contribute to code. None of these things that we’re gonna talk about today have anything to do with writing an ounce of code, but these are all ways that you can give back to the WordPress space. So, let’s go ahead and dive right in.

The first one is – and again, these are in no order whatsoever. It’s just the way that I thought of them up as I was writing the notes for this podcast. So, the first one is, ask a plugin developer for features their plugin may be missing. This is one that gets overlooked a whole lot of times. So, you might install a plugin and it’s got 90 percent of the functionality that you need, but it doesn’t have all of the functionality. So, maybe you go out and you try to find another plugin that does the same type of thing or maybe you try to hire somebody to add that extra functionality or maybe you just scrap that plugin altogether. And then, you get this bigger plugin that has way more than you need and not nearly as – It has a lot more than you need and you’re barely using any of it except for the one additional feature that you need.

The great way to make the plugins better is to just reach out to the WordPress developer and say, “Hey, do you think this would make sense to have this as part of the plugin?” And I mean, the worst-case scenario is the developer says no or that’s not on the roadmap or maybe it can come in a future release. You can have all those answers. And other times, they may say, “Hey, I’ve never thought about that.”

We get that a lot with WooCommerce support. I see it probably at least once a day. They’re saying I really have this special need for this additional information for this plugin that I’ve purchased from WooCommerce. Can you add this functionality? And you really have to think about it. Is it a feature that a lot of people would enjoy? Is it something that’s gonna make hundreds of people’s lives easier with this small little feature? And if so, it makes a good case to be added as an enhancement for the plugin.

If it’s some one-off thing that probably you are the only one that’s ever gonna need that, then most likely, it won’t be added to the plugin. But that is something to think about. If there is a plugin that is – even if it’s a free plugin on the WordPress repository – if it’s just missing one little key feature, go ahead and ask. Open up support right there on the WordPress repository and say, “Hey, is it possible to do this?” That’s a great way that a WordPress store owner can contribute back to WordPress.

Another thing that you can do – and this kind of regards to support as well – is write in when things are broken. Or I expected the plugin to do this and it actually does this. That is a great way to help the WordPress community. We think about contributing and fixing code or updating documentation, but making a plugin better or giving suggestions to make a WordPress plugin better, that is another way to contribute. And that’s gonna make everybody’s experience with WordPress that much easier.

Going kind of along those same lines is I also came up with an idea that you should tell a plugin owner or a theme developer or a WordPress developer if something is unnecessarily complex or hard or broken or just it doesn’t make sense why it’s like this. This can be a great way for the developer to take a step back and say, oh, yeah. That kind of makes sense. And most of the time, developers have been looking at the same type of code for years and years and years, and it’s like this is the only way to do it. But with a new, fresh set of eyes, it is something that could be fixed very, very easily.

One example of this is at our grand meetup this year, I was teaching a class on WooCommerce shipping and just all the different extensions and how they work with the APIs and whatnot. And I was explaining and demoing the USPS extension. And with USPS, there are two different options for shipping. You can either pay to ship each item based on the size of the box or you can do the recommended way, which is to pack things in boxes and then take the dimensions and the weights of the specific box and then send those to the API and get the rates back.

Well, inside that session, somebody was there who was very new to WooCommerce. He was very new to automatic, and he’s like, “Well, if this is the recommended way, why don’t we set that as the default?” I’m like, I had no idea. I’d never thought of it that way. Why not? So, that was a way that we can contribute back to WooCommerce. We opened up a bug request and, hopefully, one day that will be fixed or that enhancement will be added to the plugin. So, that’s just something to think about.

Another thing that you could do as a WordPress site owner is to teach a coworker or an employee how to use WordPress. This is especially good if you have a business and you have multiple people that are running your website. Or if you want somebody else to manage your website, then, this is definitely what you’ll need to do. You’ll have to teach somebody else how to use WordPress. And if you tell one person how to use WordPress, they might find out how easy it is or they might be excited about it and they may go start a WordPress.com site and start blogging. Maybe they’ll start to contribute in some other way, shape, or form. But that’s just another way to grow the community.

You could also join the WordPress Slack group, and this is one that’s probably a little bit on the edge if you’d wanna do this as a WordPress website owner. But this is a way to kind of stay connected with the community, see what people are talking about, and just go there for questions. You could ask people questions. Maybe you’ve made friends at a WordCamp and you have contact information. You can message them instantly via Slack, so that’s another example. And of course, Slack is free, so you can go in and you can spend some time there and you can get to know people and just build that community all from wherever you live in the world.

You could come up with an idea for a plugin. This is a great one. You could come up with an idea for a plugin, pay to have it developed by somebody, and then give it back to the WordPress community and open-source it. What does that look like? So, you would go and you’d hire a company to make this plugin or maybe you add an extension to WooCommerce or you do something that’s really a benefit to your specific website. Then, what you do is once you pay the developer, make sure that when they’re writing it, it’s all open source and it can be used freely. And then, add it to the WordPress repository. And then from there, you can freely – other people can download it and use it on their websites as well and make it a – just make it open and give that away to other people.

Just a couple more here on my list. The next one is help to translate WordPress. This one has got the caveat of you have to know another language of WordPress, of course. But that is something that you wanna do as well. If you are operating in a foreign country or you do speak multiple languages or a different language, recommend change that language inside of WordPress. You’re just changing the backend. You can change the user profile, what the user sees. Change that to a different language and see what plugins need translated. Do you see English text where there should be Spanish text? Then, that is an opportunity for you to translate those into another language and just make that experience for other Spanish users who may not know any English, make that just a much better experience for them as well. So, help to translate WordPress.

I also recommend, as a WordPress user and a WordPress website owner, to attend and volunteer at local meetups or WordCamps. Spend time in your local community meeting other people that do websites. This is a great way to build connections with WordPress developers, that they can go in and maybe they can help you with your website at some point. So, that’s a great opportunity if you meet other people that are local inside your business or inside your community, I guess, you could have multiple people that have the same type of business and you could talk about business ideas. It doesn’t just have to be about WordPress. It can be talking about how to grow their business.

Or maybe it’s a couple plumbing companies go to a WordPress Meetup because they’re interested in building a WordPress site. And then, they find that, oh, maybe it’s not best for them to build the site, but they could hire somebody to build the site and then they can manage it and continue to build that community inside of their local community.

I think that’s one of the strongest things that we overlook quite a bit. WordPress is this global platform with hundreds and hundreds of people that contribute to it every single month and build this software. And we go to WordCamps. We travel hundreds of miles to go to these WordCamps that are regional events. And we forget about our local market. We forget about hanging out with WordPress users in the local market.

Just tomorrow, as I – or I guess today as the podcast is coming out, I’m meeting up with the local WordCamp, the WordPress community here in Dayton. And we’re just gonna co-work for a couple hours from a local coffee shop. And that’s a point where I’ll have to do some work, but I also get to network and meet other WordPress users and see their pain points and figure out how we can make WordPress better for all types of users whether they’re brand new to WordPress or they’ve been using WordPress for many years. So, that’s another thing. Attend and volunteer at local Meetups and WordCamps.

And this one is kind of an off-the-cuff one that I thought about, and I can explain just a little bit. But my idea was, as a WordPress website owner, you want to run a duplicate version of your site. And I say this and how does this build community? Well, I don’t know if it really builds community or not, but it helps you to contribute to WordPress. But my idea is to try out some of those plugins that are out there that are the ones like WP Staging and there are a few other ones out there that allow you to create a duplicate of your site very, very easily.

It’s a great way to find any bugs or find any issues that may happen, but running on a duplicate version of your site gives you that ability to run some testing, try some things out, be a little bit more ambitious with updating things. It just gives you that peace and sense of hey, I’m working on my website. I know that I can’t break it or I’ll break the Dev site, but I won’t actually break the real site. And it just gives you an opportunity to be more adventurous and try new plugins, even maybe try Gutenberg on a version of your website and things like that. So, that is another opportunity to contribute back to WordPress.

So, those were the ideas that I came up with this week. I hope that you can spend a little bit of time this week picking one or picking a couple from the past few weeks of ways that you can contribute back to WordPress and get involved and plugged in with your local WordPress community.

I’ve got just a couple weeks left before WordCamp Cincinnati. I’ll be heading down to Cincinnati. It’s just a 45-minute trip down the road, but I will be opening the event with the opening keynote, talking about how to build a community and how to contribute back to WordPress. So, some of these ideas we’ve talked about in the past four weeks, that’s gonna be part of my keynote, but I’m really excited to deliver an inspirational message instead of a – I guess every other WordCamp talk that I’ve ever done in the past has been a very informational, here’s this, a very technical-type talk. And this is gonna be my first inspirational one, so I’ve got a lot of work to do to prepare for it and pull it off. But I’m excited for that.

And then, just a few weeks after that, I’ll be in Nashville for WordCamp US, so any of those – If you’re planning on heading to any of those events, let me know. Send me an email at dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com or you can use the contact form on yourwebsiteengineer.com. Or you can find me on Twitter or message me some way, shape, or form. And I’ll be happy to meet up and say hello and spend some time building the community and contributing back to WordPress.

So, that’s what I wanted to share with you this week. Next week, we have more great WordPress information. Until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye bye.