Episode 33: The Future of WordPress, Kadence and 100 Year Legacies
After checking out WordCamp US, Ben, Hannah and Kathy share some of their impressions on both the future of WordPress and Kadence, as well as what the legacy of Kadence might be. Ben shares his observations on the progression of full site editing (FSE) and the things he thinks need to happen before FSE becomes widely adopted. Ben also shares what’s dropping in Kadence updates this week. Kathy shares her thoughts about WordPress.com’s plans to offer 100-year domains and website hosting and puts Ben on the spot: what do you think the legacy of Kadence will be?
Timestamps
- 0:00 Intro
- 2:20 Missing WCUS
- 6:00 What’s coming this week for Kadence
- 7:55 Collaboration coming to WordPress
- 9:00 Full site editing
- 18:12 The 100-year domain name registration & hosting
- 23:03 The legacy of Kadence
- 26:01 The WordPress community
- 28:33 The Kadence community
Transcript
Kathy: Welcome to episode 34 (*actually 33) of The Kadence Beat. It is September 8th as we’re recording here. It’s Friday and can I just like glee a little bit that this is the last, I hope, 100 degree day in my part of Texas for this year. At least if I look at the 10 day, there’s a 78 for a high next week and I am….
Hannah: Wow. She’s ready.
Kathy: Rough. It has been a rough summer. I have escaped. I’ve escaped to places like Nashville, New Orleans, Washington, DC, where the weather has been more humid, but at least a little bit cooler. And I got to go hang out at WordCamp US. That was a good time, while you guys were at the beach. How was the beach?
Ben: Yeah, it was great. Yeah, it’s, it’s a real privilege to get to do it. We have a family vacation and my grandfather made that happen and that’s been, yeah, for our kids, for the family, it’s so huge and so much fun.
Kathy: Yeah. It’s so amazing.
Hannah: Yeah. There were 10 kids under the age of seven. So it was chaos, like a hundred percent, just like pure chaos. And like, you just kind of zone it out. But then whenever you tune into it, you’re like, wow, this is actually really wild. But it was super fun. You’re just constantly counting kids on the beach, like making sure everyone’s accounted for.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I spent most of my time on the beach making sure that my youngest son wasn’t getting swept away because he was completely fearless.
Kathy: But are the kids talking about when they went to the beach? Did they make good memories?
Ben: yeah. Yeah. Yep. They call it the yellow house cause it’s the yellow house of the beach and when do we get to go back to the yellow house and yeah, it’s, it’s a really fun time. And well, they already want to go back about a year.
Kathy: Wow. That’s great. That’s so awesome that makes those memories and connections with family. But I missed you guys. There were so many times I opened up Slack. “You should be here! You should be here!”
Ben: It’s the first WordCamp I’ve missed in three years, so it was… It’s definitely weird to like, follow the hashtags on Twitter and see the pictures and everything and just be like, Oh, this is a bummer that I’m not there. I haven’t heard any announcement for next year, but I’m really hoping they change the dates. Really hoping they change the dates.
Kathy: See the after party was at the Smithsonian, which was way more upscale and a little more formal than it was. In St. Louis where we were all together, but didn’t know each other, which is still so weird to me. So it wasn’t like crazy. It was very, but there was an elephant…
Hannah: In the city museum experience that had a grasshopper on this roof and the 10 story slide or something.
Kathy: Yeah. Yeah, it was very
Hannah: This Smithsonian sounds amazing. I would feel like I’d have to show up in a ball gown, but I know it’s WordPress, so everyone’s wearing, like, WordPress t-shirts and jeans. But it would be hard for me to do that. I would feel like I need to go all out.
Kathy: Yeah, seriously. I was really happy because like when I called the Lyft when I left, “it’s like, you get an upgrade.”
So I got like this very nice fancy car. It got me in like, look at me, going to the Smithsonian and being picked up in this fancy car. So it was like all fancy for me. I had my daughter with me. So she got to see like mom in her glory.
Bob Dunn from, Do the Woo, he was hanging out with all the dinosaurs. And he’s like, people keep telling me I need to move on from this. Otherwise I’m looking like I’m one of the exhibits. And he’s been cracking that joke on Twitter like ever since. So, tons of fun, of course, with every WordCamp because it’s people coming from all over the world.
They’re about, I think, Think about 2,000 people who were there. The venue was amazing. The food par for the course for every WordCamp US, was astoundingly awesome. Um, I made a big deal about trying to find cannolis. And so now people send me cannoli jokes. I’m like, am I the cannoli lady? No, I don’t want to be the cannoli lady.
Again, the food was exceptional. Everything was awesome. Very long walk from all of the talks down to a different country of the exhibits, which was like down three levels and off in the corner, but it was worth it. Some of the swag. I got the coolest swag from, from Jetpack. They, they gave me this cool little thing and they engraved it.
Ben: Wow, that’s cool. It’s so cool.
Hannah: It’s says Zantastic for those who are just listening. Which is so on par for Kathy.
Kathy: I just laughed the whole time. It’s a funny thing. I had so much fun! And getting to see everybody and having all those really important conversations. Did you guys see any of the talks? Cause those are online now.
You can go, there’s playlists of everybody’s talks and including Matt Mullenweg’s talk, which was really good and Josepha’s talk. Did you guys have a chance to look at those?
Hannah: Yeah, I did listen to those. I’ve been wanting to go through and like pick through some other ones. That sounded interesting, but I did listen to, um, Matt’s and Josepha’s.
And yeah, it’s fun to hear what’s going on, what’s happening.
Ben: I’ve not made it through both all the way, but I’ve started, getting back this week has been a bit of a whirlwind. I’m getting into it.
Kathy: Taking a week off and going to the beach and then coming back to a nice short week where everybody expects you to work like your normal 60 hour week. I feel for you. It’s got to be a rough one. You’ve got a lot going on though. Do we want to talk about, this will probably be published on Monday. Do we want to talk about what’s happening with Kadence?
Ben: Yeah, I mean, sure, we can just briefly say that there’s a couple updates coming out for Kadence Blocks and Kadence Blocks Pro, conditional fields inside the form block. We’re doing, The ability to do masked progress bar block. So we have a progress bar. You’ll be able to do masks on it, like custom masks or just like stars. So you could like animate in a certain star ranking. That’s going to go out next week. Jake was in our Facebook group posting about wanting a star block.
So I’m hoping this is going to cover all of his stuff. And he’s one I’m going to talk to you about it. And then we’re releasing our Pexels integration is the media library that allows you to search Pexels and drop images into your media library without having to go to their site and download it and then resize it. We go ahead and grab the right size and then save all the stuff, including the alt tag and stuff. So that’s like three pretty exciting updates that are going to go live next week. And then of course we’ve got a million other things happening. I we’re something like 25 percent done on the advanced query loop block, which is by far the most advanced block we’ll have built. It’s deals with custom database tables, multiple post types, because it’s creating advanced queries with templates and filters that are cached. So you can index filter results and then it’ll happen, you know, very, very quickly versus like, uh, needing to hit the database in an expensive, like high cost database query. So yeah, stuff that’s really fun and exciting.
Kathy: Very exciting. Very cool. We’ve got all these cool things happening with Kadence. There’s cool stuff happening with WordPress, too, that was talked about at WordCamp US.
Couple of things. First of all, there was some talk about the collaboration that’s coming to WordPress. I mean, I write a lot and I write a lot with other people. Ben, you and I write a lot together. Sometimes we’re like putting together a blog post or some discussion about new product features that are coming out.
And we both need to be in a document at the same time. Makes it really hard right now. Cause we are locked out. If you’re in, I’m locked out. If I’m in, you’re locked out. Collaboration coming. What do you think guys think about that? I am super geeked.
Ben: Yeah, it’s going to be a really cool game changer.
Kathy: Definitely, especially for teams that are using WordPress in order to get information out about products. I just see this as a huge game changer. And then I think full site editing, obviously, over the past like year and a half or so, it has been in sort of a minimum viable product. And we’ve, we’re starting to see some innovation, but we’re starting.
Ben, can you give us like your view on where we are with full site editing and maybe what’s coming and where does Kadence fit in with that? Cause we get that question so much from our users.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. It’s a, it’s a tricky one. I think there’s certainly a route we could have taken, which was to release a full site editing theme, and other competitors have done that.
I think right now I’m still comfortable with our decision to not, and I have a couple reasons that I feel like are really good reasons for why not. At this moment, I don’t recommend anyone uses full site editing. unless you’re on a very basic site. And I always caveat that with like, if you want to try it, go for it. Our products are going to work with it. Like Kadence Blocks work with full site editing. That’s all fine. I think the main thing is that if you’re building a site and you want to have, if you have a header that is beyond just a logo and a very simple nav, you really can’t do it well, you can’t do sticky headers, transparent headers, headers that have mega menus, conditional headers, like all of that gets really, really hard with full site editing.
And it’s not a great experience to manage your navigation right now in Gutenberg. And so as it’s gotten better, like it’s getting exciting, there’s a lot of good work going into a kind of a new, like it’s going to be a new way to learn how to build websites. I mean, on one hand, it’s still the block editor and people who are building pages are going to be like, yeah, this is familiar.
But on another hand, thinking about managing your global styles and settings. in a different way is, and not thinking about the customizer for a lot of the things that you traditionally go into the customizer for is going to be a learning curve. Like I set my global fonts in a different place, all that kind of stuff.
That’s exciting. And I think for us, as it’s come closer than the main thing that we are diving into focusing on is not actually trying to get a theme out right now, but trying to get the blocks out that will make a full site editing theme at least on par or like, you’ll be able to do the same thing.
So we need a header block that really allows you to dynamically set transparent, not transparent, sticky, and gives you the option to organize your header for mobile differently than for desktop. Cause that’s like one of the main things you need is like, Hey. I need this on desktop. It’s too cluttered on mobile.
I need different options for mobile and desktop. So that block and an advanced navigation block that lets you build mega menus and things like that. Those are the two things that we are working on, scoping out, getting designs figured out because that needs to be solved. And for us, it benefits anyone right now who’s using Kadence.
Cause you can always use the block editor to build a header. If you want to, you can use elements for that. and for the future, when we do release a full site editing. And I’m not sure that it’ll be a different theme. When Kadence allows for full site editing, or like has the toggle to turn it on, we have the blocks to actually say, hey, this is, this is comparable now.
There’s still some issues with full site editing that I think for, a long, long time. I don’t see an end to classic themes because the direction that full site editing takes, they don’t have it solved for some of the dynamic stuff that people traditionally want in WordPress. And so, for me, for the foreseeable future, it will be supporting both.
It’ll be supporting full site editing. It’ll be supporting what is being called the classic themes. and so, I would say for anyone, if you are building a very basic site and you want to experiment, you want to see how this works, go grab the default theme, have, have a go. But if you’re serious, you’re building a, a site in WooCommerce production site, anything like that, I would not recommend using full site theme right now.
it’s just, it’s come a long way. But just given how much progress has happened in the last eight months, just think like, wait another eight months, wait another year. We’re going to be so much further along and we’re going to start to see a lot more people building on top of it to fill in the gaps.
Core is never going to do all the advanced things that a lot of people need for their website. Like it’s going to get us most of the way there. And it’s going to suffice for like, remember the like blogger, the brochure site that they’re going to make it possible. But if you’re coming, cause you’re using Kadence Blocks, cause you need those extra settings, you need a more advanced tool.
Then we’re like core isn’t going to get you there with full site editing. You got to wait for people to build on top of it. And, and that’s coming and it’s coming first for us with blocks and then eventually the ability to enable the theme. If you wanted to use the Kadence theme, there’s a real talk and conversation that has happened for years now about whether or not when full site editing fully matures.
That will need themes in the way that we’ve traditionally thought about themes. Cores can make a theme that has all the, the, the speed, basic settings and tools to allow you to extend on it with plugins to where it might make sense that we don’t develop. premium themes anymore, and we are just developing extensions on core and core has a default theme that is essentially the most stable, traditionally people start with a theme.
I think it could be different. I think people are going to start starting with AI generated starter templates and stuff like that.
Kathy: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting because I mean, themes evolved from, from this place where you chose what the look and feel of your site is going to be. And then that’s separated from your content. And so that, that was like the whole purpose of a theme, but with going towards full site editing with, or full page editing is really what it ends up being, right. So you have each page then becomes its own sort of thing. So there’s not this like global decision that’s being made in the same way anymore.
So thinking about it, it just ends up being a very different, just a different mindset, a different paradigm for thinking about how you’re building with WordPress. Doesn’t it?
Ben: Yeah, and we’ve already gotten a lot of that. Like the Kadence theme can be anything you want it to be. And that’s kind of what we promote. And that’s what’s become popular in WordPress is people don’t want to learn a system to then get stuck into a certain design to where every site they develop is like, that’s basically the same thing.
They want a lot of freedom. They want all the border controls and color styles and all the different things that make up what a Kadence or any kind of a multi purpose theme offers you. Now that core is introducing all of that into this full site editing framework. There’s a real, version of this where we stop thinking about themes as being this thing you install and think about a preset of global styles that, you know, I’m going to start with this preset and edit from there.
And in that scenario. Plugins could have hundreds of presets and we could use AI to pick the one that makes the most sense or present you with a bunch. And so, yeah, I think we’re in this place where like a lot of the way that we’re, that we think about building is changing. And at the same time, a lot of the same stuff is still there.
We need to decide on a font family, a color palette. The basic, header footer experience. That’s all still going to be the same. It’s just the tools that get us there are going to change.
Kathy: Right. Interesting. Okay. Well, that gives us a lot to think about, in terms of what’s coming with WordPress and full site editing and how, how Kadence is going to interface with all that.
And I think that is great because we get that question so much. I have questions that I need to answer on Twitter about if I was using full site editing and I wanted to put blocks in a header, how does that work with Kadence blocks? And I’m like, I don’t know, but I guess I’ll go find out.
Ben: Yeah, you can put, yeah, you can put Kadence blocks in the header. They can live anywhere in a full setting template.
Kathy: Good to know. See, now I don’t even need to play. I’m still going to go play with it, though, because I really need to. I mean, I think it’s just so important. Anybody in WordPress, if you are working on WordPress products, like, play with the new stuff. It’s so, it’s so cool. , it’s just a privilege to be working on a project that gives people so much power to publish online.
And I kind of like that, one of the other things that Mullenweg, Matt, Matt, can we be on first name basis? There’s so many Matts around, I just call you by your last name all the time. Matt Mullenweg talked about, um, this hundred year, the hundred year domain name, the hundred year website, hosted on WordPress.com for $38,000. that sounds like a lot of money and I’m like, Ooh, nice marketing gimmick. Look at everybody’s talking about that. And I thought, well, this is great marketing. And then I came home and then I wrote a blog post about WordCamp US and I wrote a blog post about something else. And I started thinking about a hundred years. And then I went on archive.org and looked at my very first website, and I’m not telling you, like Hannah, with your first website, I don’t talk about my first website.
Hannah: No, nobody will ever know what it’s called.
Kathy: Same. No one will ever know. It’s still there on archive.org. It’s never going to go away.
All of my, like, early web thoughts, like, I’m just, you know, so embarrassed that they even exist, right? And so then, now this blog post that I’ve been writing, I don’t want to publish it because I’m thinking about it surviving for another hundred years because there are going to be archiving tools and there are going to be people who like link to it and share it and, you know, Hannah, you and I were talking about how like we live in this TikTok world where everybody’s just like their phone and off-the-cuff thoughts, you know Oh, this is like changing it. It’s turning the tables on it, isn’t it?
Hannah: It totally is even like this stuff I posted on Instagram when I downloaded Instagram It was that like 10 years ago and this filters are like so thick and the borders, you know And like it’s got the like oh pack whatever It’s hilarious.
And like, that was only 10 years ago. Now we’re thinking a hundred years down the road. Like, what are we going to, or even, you know, 50 years when our, like, grandkids are looking at our content and we’re like, who even were these people? But it does make you think differently about it. Like, cause we do, we just like, we live in a culture where it’s just like you post and you like, we want this like fast food.
We want it now, whatever you’re thinking, this is what I do. Like, this is the feature I want. This is, you know, now not at all thinking. 10, 20, a hundred years down the road. Very interesting. It’s a different way of thinking. When I listened to Matt Mullenweg’s talk, I was like, Whoa, I, I haven’t actually sat down and talked, like, thought about the future of WordPress, meaning a hundred year future ever.
Kathy: It’s very interesting. Yeah. It’s gonna, and well, first of all, it’s open source. So even if, like, everything fell apart, which I don’t think it will, but if everything did fall apart, There’s still going to be people who fork it and turn it into something else, and it’s just going to, the, the paradigm of publishing online, owning your own tools that do that publishing, separating design from content, all of the things that we’ve learned.
That’s going to continue and it’s going to continue to evolve and our sites are going to continue to exist and hopefully don’t get hacked and, maintain their integrity and everything, but my, my words are going to last. Forever online, your words, your pictures.
Hannah: even this very podcast.
Ben: Yeah,
Kathy: We won’t publish it.
Ben: We’ll just not publish this or any more. We’ll just do this for us.
Hannah: Yeah, we’re actually done.
Kathy: It’s been nice knowing you. Well, we made it to episode 34.
Ben: It’s a lot further than I thought we’d make it. I wasn’t convinced when we started that this was going to be a thing.
Hannah: Well, yeah, I laughed at Ben when he told me.
Kathy: I like it. I think it’s fun. And you know, I get to edit it. So I have to listen to it and listen to everything that we say and take out all of our likes.
We say like a lot, all of all three of us. We say like a lot, but I, I think it’s great and I, I love to hear the stories and the fun and I love the interaction. I’ve done a number of different podcasts. This one gets audience participation, our community, they resonate with what we’re doing here. So as long as you guys are listening and giving us thumbs up and watching on YouTube and listening on your podcasting apps or whatever, we will continue to do it, but, yeah.
It’s, it’s gonna stick around. It’s got a life of its own. But Ben, I want to ask you about Kadence and the legacy of Kadence. When you look to a hundred years and you think about a hundred years from now, if somebody looks back and says, Oh, look at, Look at this thing kinda changed how people build on WordPress.
What do you want your legacy to be? There’s a question for you.
Ben: Thanks for telling me this beforehand so I can think about it. Not, Um, yeah, no. I mean, I think the mission for the Kadence team has been, how do we help the average person compete with the Fortune 500 companies online? Like at the core of it, it’s been, how do we give them the tools to allow them to create a website that is as compelling and as engaging as the companies that can spend millions of dollars to develop a website?
Like how do we give them that opportunity to have a voice, to sell a product, to create, an audience. And so that to me would still be the legacy of like, we were able to create tools that allowed people to compete in real way without a budget that was astronomical and a ton of designers and developers and all of that.
I think if we do a lot of that now, I see a lot of really amazing sites built with stuff and it’s always very… yes, this is like, this is what we’re going for. And there’s a piece of that, that from the beginning support’s been a huge key of like, we want to be able to help the people along that journey.
Even if, you know, there’s something you’re trying to do and, how do we get you there? If we can’t, how do we get you the custom CSS? I mean, it’s, it’s really amazing. A lot of the extra. Duff we do on support for people to try to get exactly what they want. So, um, yeah, I don’t know.
Is that a fair answer?
Kathy: I think it’s a great answer. If you can hit the target of your mission, which that’s your mission is to everyone be able to publish, If you can hit that target of your mission, I think that’s a pretty darn fine legacy to leave and I think we’re doing it. I think that if the community growth is any indication of the success that the product is having in the hands of people who are building with WordPress, then You’re hitting it because this community has grown exponentially since I’ve started working with you guys.
and one of the things that just really hits me about Kadence and, and that mission is just how close, no matter what is going on, Dev stays close with the customer. And I think Hannah, you and I like. That’s like our mission. is to facilitate those kinds of conversations to like make sure that we’re paying attention enough that issues come to Dev and Dev can address those types of things and just keeping that conversation and that those lines of communication open so that we are helping people create more effective sites with the Latest and the greatest tools that are available in WordPress.
So I’m here for it. Yeah. Cool. For sure. Josepha had a good talk. I did not make it to her talk, but Hannah, you said you watched part of it?
Hannah: Yeah, I just love listening to Josepha cause she just, she’s excited about the community and that’s kind of what I feel like she talked about. Cause I, that’s how I feel.
I think that’s the best part of WordPress is. Just the community and that’s why it’s so sad to miss WordCamp because everyone’s together and everyone I remember the first WordCamp I went to I was like I had no idea that WordPress was such a culture and it so is. And it’s just really beautiful and really sweet and, and rich.
And so I feel like she’s kind of gleaned on that and she talked about other things, but, um, but yeah,
Kathy: She’s fun to listen to. Yeah. I think the community is just. And I had zero expectation, I didn’t even know, when I first started working with WordPress, I didn’t even know that the, well, I was hiding in the mountains.
So I’ll use that as my excuse, but as soon as I found that WordPress community was a thing and WordCamps were a thing, I was like, I think I want to do this. This sounds fun. And now. Yeah. Totally.
Ben: Yeah. And for everyone out there, like there’s a lot of local meetups and they’re really fun time. Like it’s literally just, you’re getting together with random people in your community who are using the same tools as you.
And all the local meetups that I go to is just ends up being a lot of like, we just help each other. Like, what are you working on? What are you, what’s, what issues are you having? And yeah. It’s like a community of like, let’s just help each other. And it’s, it’s really fun. So definitely check out a local community if you haven’t before.
Kathy: You’ll be surprised how much you think, Oh, I’m going to go to this and all of these WordPress people are going to know so much more than me. And I’m going to be the person that doesn’t know anything. You will be surprised if you do use WordPress and you’re using Kadence, you’ll be surprised how much you can go be of service to someone else.
And there’s nothing more rewarding than sitting next to somebody who doesn’t know how to do something and helping them do it. There’s nothing more rewarding than to be of service in that way, at least to me, that is something that really warms my heart is to be able to take all of the times that I’ve banged my head against the wall trying to figure something out and learn something to the point that now I can give back.
It’s, it’s really cool. Meetup.com, go look at WordPress. I’m sure there’s one close to you and you’ll make friends because WordPress people are cool.
Hannah: Look at us.
Kathy: We’re a lot of fun. And we are so grateful that you join us for The Kadence Beat. We’re so grateful that you’re in the Facebook group if you’re there. We’re over like 12,000 people in the Facebook group now. Did you think it was going to get that big when you guys started?
Ben: No, I was not convinced when we started.
Hannah: I saw that like 300 people for like months and months and months until we started actually paying attention to it. We just didn’t know.
Kathy: It is hopping. This morning. I woke up and there, or was it last night? It was one of the times I’d go on Facebook. I wonder what my friends from college… Oh no. Like there’s nine people who want in at the, like, what happened?
Did somebody like give a talk about Kadence somewhere? I don’t know why, like this mad rush is coming. I should know as the director of marketing, but I’m just glad you’re here. We’re here to help. So if you, if there’s anything we can do for you in that group, if there’s anything that we can do for you to help you be more successful with Kadence.
We’re here for it. So thank you for being here to learn and build a better web for the next hundred years with Kadence. Yeah. And we will talk to you next time.
