If you're one of the roughly ten thousand
users of PublishPress,
you'll recognize my guest this week,
if for no other reason than because it's
his name that shows up in your inbox
periodically talking about what new stuff
his company is putting out.
PublishPress is a suite of WordPress
plugins for publishers, content teams,
and newsrooms.
But I didn't anticipate that the journey
that got Steve to where he is started
as an English teacher in the part of
rural Georgia where Deliverance was filmed
on a twenty-seven thousand dollar a year
salary with a wife, a mortgage,
and a quiet side hustle in web design
that started outpacing his day job within
a few months.
Unlike some of my previous guests,
Steve is not the person who grew up
taking apart computers at age ten.
He came to all of this sideways,
and that accidental path gave him a unique
perspective on open source, on customers,
on how software actually gets built in the
real world.
We talked about Drupal seven and the
backwards compatibility break that became
an off ramp for an entire generation of
CMS users about what it means to build
for publishers,
not just the enterprise ones,
but also the five person local newsroom is
trying to fill the hole left by a
shuttered legacy paper.
And we talked about Steve's method for
building software, no roadmap,
no grand vision,
just reading every single support ticket
that comes in.
Without further ado, Steve Burge.
Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
And today I am here with founder of
PublishPress, Steve Burge.
PublishPress is, I believe,
a WordPress publishing suite of tools for
publishing stuff on WordPress sites and
WordPress
likes to say that it's it democratizes
publishing and there's a lot of publishers
that use it so I think that that's
kind of a pretty cool thing to do
uh welcome to the show Steve tell us
about yourself oh thanks Chris um I live
in Florida um as you can tell from
my accent I was born and bred on
the um on the southeast corner of Florida
um
Well, I came from England originally,
and now just a few months ago,
I've ended up living in the United States
longer than...
I lived in England so I'm more American
I guess than anything else and actually um
became an American uh about a couple
months ago took the citizenship test I
know like uh who the first president was
who the second president was um how many
people sit in the House of Representatives
I had to study for all that stuff
Wow,
I don't know that many Americans have had
to study for most of those things in
many, many years.
Yeah,
I recently had a similar tipping point
where I believe I've lived,
I live in Salt Lake City, Utah,
but I'm originally from the San Francisco
Bay Area.
And I believe that, I don't know,
last year or the year before or something,
I crossed the border over to,
I've lived in Utah longer than I've lived
in California.
You make you a Utahan?
Utahan?
Utahan.
I don't know how to say that.
Yeah, Utahan.
And I've been in,
maybe lived a somewhat similar life to
you, I think.
We got started in the open source world,
did a lot of Drupal.
And just because of the way the market
has been over the last ten years or
so,
I've ended up more in the WordPress space.
But the through line connecting it all has
been open source.
Christopher McConkey- awesome yeah so yeah
let's let's let's just dive into that like
what what first got you involved in in
being interested in open source in
general.
Christopher McConkey- Oh well.
I'm not one of those people who you
hear those stories of someone who had like
ten years old,
had like an Atari on the living room
floor and was taking the computer apart,
rebuilding it,
writing their first program at the age of
eight.
None of that.
I think I've had some of those guests.
Yes.
I mean,
you've ended up in the right profession.
It's naturally for you,
my path was more accidental.
I was a teacher for a good number
of years, middle school, high school,
until I arrived in the United States and
got a wife and kids and also realized
how much they pay teachers in the United
States.
At that point,
I needed to do something else because
having a wife and kids and a mortgage
was more than I could afford on my
teacher's salary.
Yeah, it's – I mean,
I think that says more about how the
United States values or undervalues
teaching than it says about your
particular path because I don't think that
your particular path is unique necessarily
in seeing that stark – like having that
stark realization and being like, yeah,
no, I actually got bills to pay.
Yeah, we –
We ended up in a fairly good industry
for that.
You work in software,
you work in hosting in the United States.
You're going to have a fairly good living.
But I was in Georgia,
in the north part of Georgia,
in the United States, north of Atlanta,
up in the Appalachian Hills.
If you've ever seen the movie Deliverance,
um basically we were where the movie
deliverance was shot and i believe back
then this was like two thousand four two
thousand five the starting pay for a
teacher was something like twenty seven
twenty eight thousand dollars a year wow
um yeah and i i came in with
several years of teaching experience and
I took one year of teaching in the
States and basically started a web design
business in the evening.
And it took probably three or four months
before the evening job of running a small
web design agency was making more money
than my day job as a teacher.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely believe it,
especially if you're able to get a regular
stream of clients.
So in those early days of doing your
freelancing work,
of starting a web design company,
I imagine you were looking at open source
CMSs and tools like that to provide
value to make your work easier as a
developer.
What sorts of things were you gravitating
toward and what sorts of sites were you
building?
We started with some Joomla sites and some
Drupal sites for people.
And
I was fairly good as a designer,
but didn't quite have the strong
background of some of the people we were
working alongside.
So I ended up basically taking my teaching
background and applying it to open source
and trying to teach people how to use
it.
Um, we did videos, we did books,
we did in-person classes.
Um, and it's,
it's hard to think back now to before.
even things like lynda.com before things
like that.
But there was a huge market for getting
on an airplane and flying to some part
of the country,
standing in front of a classroom and
teaching people how to use Drupal,
how to use open source.
Yeah, long before my time at Pantheon,
that was a thing that DevRel and other
teams were doing,
was shipping folks off to have onsites
with clients.
One of my early gigs as a WordPress
developer,
I was approached by somebody from
Pluralsight,
which is an online developer training
platform.
very early days of Pearl site where they
were kind of like just trying to build
out their,
their video library and like branch out
beyond like Microsoft specific stack
technologies.
And so they,
they saw me speak at a word camp
but their history too,
like they started out as a company doing
onsite training for like.net and like
other sort of like ASP and like Microsoft
specific things.
And then they're like, Hey,
we could like record these things and then
distribute them and then not have to fly
people places and that's how like the the
web platform got built so yeah they're
definitely like right about that that time
is is i could yeah i've been around
long enough to have seen that that path
yeah the the demand was there particularly
um
This is not a knock on Drupal,
but this is maybe a knock on how
Drupal was seen in the marketplace was
that we could sell Drupal training all day
long, but we can never sell WordPress.
People are like, oh,
WordPress is too easy.
Our staff will get it.
We don't need to really teach our staff
WordPress.
It's all self-explanatory.
But Drupal, oh, come up here five days,
teach our team.
It's really complicated.
We could sell Drupal training today.
uh week after week of it for years
um because it had that reputation in the
marketplace that it was intimidating and
needed to be explained clearly to people
yeah well and there's something to be said
too of of of that perception that Drupal
had and also still has in in many
cases of um
Like, it's a toolkit, it's complex,
it can handle, and as such,
it can handle more complexity in your site
build.
So, like,
the budgets that you expect for a Drupal
site versus a WordPress site for a long
time,
maybe that's a little bit different now
as, like,
WordPress has kind of become more
dominant.
But for a long time,
you would expect a significantly higher
dollar value associated with a Drupal
build for a site than a WordPress build.
I mean,
I remember early days of freelancing,
like, hey,
can you build this WordPress site for five
hundred bucks?
Well, no,
I'm not going to build you a site
for five hundred bucks.
And also,
maybe Acquia and specifically,
and some of the agencies around them did
a good job of selling into the enterprise.
I have a clear memory of going to
one DrupalCon, I want to say maybe,
two thousand thirteen or so,
that I'd always gone to DrupalCons and it
had been
People look like me or you,
like you've got a flannel shirt on.
I've got a t-shirt on.
People that look like traditional
developers.
And I suddenly remember walking into a
DrupalCon and there were salespeople,
like slick suits.
One of the guys said he just moved
from Adobe,
didn't know anything about Drupal,
but he was here to sell Drupal for
Acquia.
There was a sudden transformation where
Some of the Drupal companies were staffing
up with real salespeople ready to sell
real enterprise projects.
And so they were able to get those,
the big government customers,
the big enterprise,
and projects like WordPress were behind at
that time.
They didn't have the infrastructure.
They didn't have the big companies to
complete the big RFPs.
So what facilitated your, uh,
transition away from,
from Joomla and Drupal into,
into WordPress?
Was it, uh,
was it ease of use or was it
something else?
Drupal seven.
Drupal seven, yes.
There we go.
That's it.
For people that may not know,
it was an enormous back,
basically a one hundred percent backwards
compatibility break and really compelled a
lot of the companies we were working with
to take a look outside of Drupal.
A lot of them were saying, well,
if we're going to rebuild our entire
platform,
this gives us an off ramp to look
at something else outside of Drupal.
And a lot of them exited.
I think I talked with Josh,
one of the founders of Pantheon,
and I think he'd done some research at
some point that more Drupal six sites
ended up on WordPress than on Drupal
seven.
It was just an enormous exit point.
because of the costs of moving to Drupal
seven.
Um, and,
and then they kind of did the same
thing between Drupal seven and eight when
like Drupal eight was,
was another major refactor, another major,
uh, shift in,
in how Drupal was built and it would
have required another sort of rebuild.
And again, like you're,
when you're facing that choice of do I
rebuild my site again,
or do I move to something where I
never have to worry about it?
A lot of people had jumped ship and
went to WordPress.
Yeah.
Oh, that's true.
Yeah,
Drupal H was perhaps an even bigger
backwards compatibility break.
That's where they introduced Composer as a
fundamental part of Drupal core, yep.
Yeah, and those two back-to-back.
And so, yeah,
that was a big change for us.
And it basically also...
Made a huge,
caused a huge business pivot for us
because a lot of our Drupal customers were
like government departments who had no
problem flying us up to Washington DC for
training,
but that didn't exist in the WordPress
space really.
So we pivoted hard to doing books and
videos instead.
Yeah.
Yeah, do you, like, from,
and we'll get into what you're working on
now,
but I'm interested in this idea that we've
hit on a couple times that the basic,
the theory that WordPress isn't or wasn't
ready for enterprise or this perception
that
that it wasn't.
And this sort of kind of aligns with
when I started getting into agency
WordPress development.
And that was back in, I don't know,
probably, I guess, for me.
My first agency gig was at Web Dev
Studios,
and they do a lot of enterprise stuff.
David Price- Like there is definitely it
felt like you know the the default
assumption for an enterprise company was
not I want to use wordpress we had
to like sell them on.
David Price- you're paying a lot of money
for like adobe experience manager,
you can do those things in wordpress for
cheaper,
you know or like you can or you
will you want to pay us great will
build.
know bespoke things for you like but there
had to be like there is like you
had to go into that conversation with like
a defense prepared you know like a pitch
to sell the software before you could even
have the conversation about what the
agency is going to do the sales process
was always more difficult yeah yeah and
that's something i is that something you
also uh saw at the time
Yeah,
we ran into quite a few sort of
government agencies and large companies
that were having trouble with Drupal.
They were having trouble with their
rollouts.
quite often I'd sit down with them and
say, hey, what was the decision process?
Why did you choose Drupal as opposed to
Adobe or WordPress?
And often it would just come down to
a lack of knowledge often.
They'd say things like, oh,
WordPress doesn't have the ability to do
role management, for example.
Oh,
so you can get this plugin over here.
And that's really an easy problem.
I guess it led me to realize just
how many of these RFPs are just...
One, on almost a random basis,
whoever is signing off on the RFP or
making a decision often is really just not
that well informed on the decision and
might just make a decision on which
platform to use based on hunch.
yeah for sure and i i i read
a book recently um recoding america that
specifically talked about um like uh
digital services in the us uh like the
formation of the digital services
department which i don't think exists
anymore um or has been absorbed into doge
um but used to exist um for a
while but like also like like
what existed before and the way the RFPs
were written before within government,
specifically, like, federal government,
and, like, the legacy systems and, like,
the level of, like, the requirements,
and they had to get approval from all
of these different people, but, like,
the different departments or the different
people signing off on things didn't
necessarily, like,
have the conversations with everybody
involved so like there'd be requirements
in there that didn't make sense or like
required a whole bunch of extra stuff like
there was a story in there that was
talking about um uh gps and like they
were gonna roll out a big massive update
to to the gps uh software that gets
put on satellites right um but
because of some old loophole or some old
requirement in some previous dock.
The only communication method that was
allowed for the RFP was like XML RPC
for communicating with the satellites,
which is I mean, you're laughing,
you know, like it's old,
it's slow and like the new stuff was
better and faster and would facilitate,
you know,
more accurate GPS coordinate coordinates
and it like
Because of delays,
because of that particular requirement,
the new stuff never rolled out,
and we never got the GPS update that
went out when the project was actually
signed off on, and it was still XMLRPC.
Or not XMLRPC, but it was... No,
it was SOAP.
It was SOAP API, I believe.
So they needed a root and branch reform,
essentially,
of the way things were done from the
technology stack to the way the software
was purchased to the way it was,
the RFPs were written, a deep,
deep transformation was needed.
Exactly, exactly.
And there's like all sorts of stories
about like, you know,
so many systems within the U.S.
government are built on these old legacy
COBOL systems, which run really,
really well and efficiently because COBOL
was super efficient and it had to be
because it was back in the day when
you didn't have as much memory and
whatever.
But now there's like all this impetus to
like do a refresh or an update,
but nobody knows how to actually
fundamentally edit the COBOL systems.
And also the COBOL systems aren't broken.
So they just layer upon layer of new
UI on top of these old systems.
So like when you,
whenever you encounter anything
in like a government system that feels
inefficient or does a weird thing.
It's probably because there's like three
layers deep of like UI that has been
placed on top of this ancient COBOL system
that wasn't designed to do the thing that
you want to do like natively.
And nobody knows how to actually make the
COBOL system do that thing.
I've got to say, with our government work,
and we did probably at one point it
was like ninety percent plus government
work.
We noticed a real change when Pantheon
came along and had started to get its
fingers into some of the government
business.
But the development tools that were
provided made the government agencies
quite a lot more comfortable.
We did a lot.
Oh, sorry,
the whole thing went blank there.
I'll start again.
We did a lot of work with the
government of Arizona.
They moved lock, stock,
and barrel hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of sites over to the Pantheon
platform.
And you guys had a slick development
workflow and a standard workflow that made
them comfortable to basically commit the
entire future of the Arizona government
online to
being on Drupal and being on Pantheon.
Yeah.
Well, and I think that like, I mean,
that's obviously like,
that's the sales pitch that Pantheon is
going to give, right?
It's like that we build the tools that
make your development teams happier and
work faster and all that sort of stuff.
I mean, I remember again,
even before I was working here using
Pantheon as a developer,
And just the fact that like, again,
when I first started in agency work was
a long time ago.
And at the time, Pantheon, I believe,
was pretty much the only one that already
had like a native Git integration.
So just that, you know,
as opposed to other providers that we were
using.
Like that was made it super easy.
And then like, you know,
having multi devs,
you have the ability to like have a
whole environment spun off off of a branch
was like revolutionary,
like made my life so much.
And so I would like, I was like,
why can't,
can't we just put all of our uh
all of our projects on this well we
already have a a contract with so and
so so we can't do that but i
agree you know like um and you know
uh there's that that's there's no it
shouldn't be terribly surprising that i am
uh currently a pantheon employee because
of that experience because that as a
developer um but moving on to like um
you know obviously
You did some agency stuff and you're doing
some government stuff.
But you are the founder of this thing
called Publish Press.
What is the sort of origin story of
that?
Oh, well,
that came out of a pivot from our
training work, which was getting quieter.
You've seen most of the big training
companies now have kind of gone away.
Like Linda got sold and it's kind of
like a little tile in the corner of
LinkedIn now.
Yeah.
I was going to say LinkedIn just swallowed
everything.
It did.
There was Udemy,
which long past its heyday now,
it feels like it's going to become one
of those bending spoon acquisitions and
kind of left for dead.
And the whole training market...
got a lot quieter.
So we were looking for what was next.
And we were doing some software
development at the time,
started to look at WordPress as an
opportunity and really started to see a
lot of gaps in the publishing space in
WordPress.
But
That took a lot of trial and error.
We were very familiar with the Joomla
world and the Drupal world and even the
Magento world as well,
but less familiar with WordPress.
And I've got to tell you,
none of the lessons we learned in those
other platforms were worth a damn.
And moving to WordPress,
I was chatting with someone the other day
who's moving from WordPress or
WooCommerce, particularly to Shopify.
And they're like,
it's like starting from zero or less than
zero.
Like, yeah,
if you move to a new ecosystem like
that,
It might even be helpful not to have
any of your previous knowledge because it
ain't going to apply in the new world.
Yeah.
Do you think that that is fundamentally
like a symptom of replatforming or do you
think that there's something that is
distinct about WordPress that makes that
reset more felt?
The exception might be if you're getting
in very early.
For example,
if you were moving to WordPress in.
Twenty.
Two thousand eight,
maybe when something like Gravity Forms
was just launching or if you're moving to
Shopify ten years ago to become a Shopify
app developer.
But those markets are mature now.
So you've got to play within their rules.
You have to learn the network of people,
how they move,
how they interact with each other.
And just particularly with WordPress,
incredibly major differences,
like you're coming from a Drupal ecosystem
where no one sells any software.
In fact, it's objectively.
look down upon to sell code to WordPress,
where that's the entire business.
Yeah.
Well, I mean,
and that is changing the Drupal space.
I mean, they're trying to...
Dries wants to start a marketplace,
an official Drupal marketplace.
One of my recent guests is Mike Herschel
in the Drupal community,
who is a theme developer who created
basically a theme shop for Drupal themes,
for premium Drupal themes.
So, like, that...
that is shifting but it's interesting
having those conversations with people
like mike uh because it's it they're
having to figure out how to do from
scratch in drew it's it's the same thing
you just said it's like it's it's that
same sort of like re-platforming thing you
have to learn everything from scratch
because they're having to learn from
scratch how do we do business with code
for drupal
when there wasn't like there it's it's
wild west right so they're trying to like
like he had to learn read up on
licenses like and we've been dealing with
licenses like i mean we've been having the
licensing conversation since chris pearson
and uh and thesis like fifteen years ago
or something like we've we've this is well
tread territory for for us in the
wordpress ecosystem um and they're having
to figure that out from from scratch and
they're having to figure out like you know
like
Yeah,
he had to make the decision of like,
how do I license things?
How do I sell things?
How do I distribute things?
And all of that stuff basically has been
a solved problem in WordPress for a long
time now.
Yeah.
Oh, that's interesting,
because I remember seeing last week,
maybe the Dries had read a blog post
basically saying mea culpa on backwards
compatibility.
Which was fair play to him.
He said, I was wrong.
Backwards compatibility is more important
than I thought it was.
And it sounds like they've done the same
thing with allowing people to sell access
to modules too.
Not modules, not modules.
What I have heard from the conversations
that I've had with people in the Drupal
community is that probably modules won't
have that same sort of marketplace
ecosystem.
But themes, yes.
And what the official Drupal marketplace
is going to be focused around is the
idea of site templates,
which is basically like...
almost like like if you think about like
a linux distribution right like here's
here's the whole thing and then within
that you can customize stuff like here is
a distribution of drupal for a real estate
site that has everything that you need for
that real estate site including a theme
and like some like recipes for like these
modules are going to be installing for
this type of content or whatever um but
so it's it's basically like the
What I think the Drupal Association is
trying to get at is lowering the barrier
to entry because they realize there's this
history of Drupal sites are expensive and
that's actually like for a lot of agencies
and a lot of people that were doing
business in that space,
that was a good thing.
We want our stuff to be expensive because
we are skilled engineers and we want to
get paid.
But for users,
and especially with the decline of the
Drupal bar graph of usage of installs,
they want to lower the barrier to entry
to make it easier to get an entry
point into Drupal.
And the theory is that by creating these,
making it easy for me to get started
by saying I want this type of a
site,
then
then I, you know,
having a marketplace to buy a thing,
a package that's like, okay,
here's how you,
you'll get started in like five minutes
and then you can just customize the
content.
The idea is that that'll make it maybe
help, help with that,
with that bar graph and make number go
up.
Steve is now considering building
published press for Drupal now.
Well,
if they're not allowed to sell modules,
That's fair.
Yeah.
My initial feeling of that,
what you've described there is it's a
little bit of skepticism.
I mean...
I'm keeping an open mind.
I think that I see the good intention.
I see the value.
I don't know how it's going to play
out.
Honestly, I've used the new Drupal CMS.
I've used their new editor thing.
I've seen demos of things.
I've used AI.
They've got a whole AI project that's been
funded by the Drupal Association.
And seeing that and how that works inside
like natively like you can you can
Basically have a chat bot that you talk
to and it will do stuff for you
Like I want a content type that for
an event and it will build that thing
for you and that's that's pretty cool so
like there's a lot of really cool stuff
happening and
The question that I always ask is,
is this enough?
Is this the thing?
How are you going to get over that
hump?
And I guess that remains to be seen.
But competition is never a bad thing.
I don't know.
Maybe WordPress needs to be knocked down a
peg.
Maybe we've gotten a little complacent.
uh talk about talk about uh what uh
yeah so how you built uh published press
and and what like led to the decision
that um like publishing specifically was
was uh an area that you felt was
maybe underrepresented or something that
had growth potential a lot of what we
A lot of the first principles we took
into our WordPress work came from Drupal
customers.
They were saying,
these are the things that are important to
us at the enterprise level.
We need good role management.
We need good permission systems.
And that was a reason for them to
choose Drupal.
And we looked at WordPress and said, hey,
if these big customers value this,
they're going to value this in WordPress
too.
Yep.
So we took a lot of those lessons
on what enterprise companies want and
tried to build those systems in.
And it has worked.
We get a lot of enterprise customers,
a lot of universities,
a lot of sort of high profile names
to put on our banner.
But a lot of small publishers have found
us as well.
Newspapers, startups, and...
No offense to universities and no offense
to enterprise customers,
but it's perhaps those smaller customers
maybe pay a little bit less that are
maybe, say, maybe twenty,
twenty five percent of our business that
have really been the most interesting to
me.
You see like a little five person shop
in Atlanta or Tampa starting a newspaper
for their area and really trying to dig
in and.
replace all the legacy newspapers that
have collapsed in their town.
And it's inspiring.
It reminds me a little bit of some
of the startup companies in the WordPress
space.
They're like, hey,
we know we're not going to make
ten million dollars,
but we're going to make a living and
we're going to try and do something good
and helpful to people.
I think there's a real kind of similar
sense of purpose and got to know some
of these publishers over the years,
working with them and seeing their success
and
They're all on WordPress.
You're in Utah.
I'm trying to think if we've come across
any new newspapers or magazines starting
up in Utah or in Tampa near us
or wherever it might be.
on wordpress wordpress has a market share
with these companies um and a lot of
the old newspapers
have their own legacy cms's but wordpress
is really dominating in this space um and
it's a good thing it's cheap um these
these journalists are paying themselves
thirty forty thousand dollars a year just
enough to pay rent and eat some ramen
um so wordpress is a good fit for
them
And do you think that it's really that
sort of low cost and lower barrier to
entry that has made WordPress distinct
within sort of the publishing space?
It is easy.
The UI is good.
I rarely hear any of these customers
complain about the UI.
They can log in.
They're in the block editor.
They can start writing.
They get it.
They're people who are...
who are used to writing on platforms that
are similar,
maybe a lot of these people may have
worked at, say,
USA Today or maybe a bigger,
more brand name newspaper.
They're used to working in a content
management system.
They move to WordPress.
They're good to go.
It makes sense to them.
Yeah,
did you see like one of a lesson
that I learned sort of in real time
as I was presenting at WordCamp Long Beach
a number of years ago.
At the time I was working at HumanMaid.
HumanMaid was a very early adopter of
building Gutenberg based like
functionality.
We were using Gutenberg and implementing
Gutenberg before it was merged into core.
And so we were very Gutenberg-yay and
early adopters.
And so obviously my talk that got approved
and I was speaking at WordCamp Long Beach
was...
was about like how the block editor is
going to make everything easier is going
to revolutionize content editing and what
i realized as i was giving this talk
especially during the q a section at the
end was that there was a lot of
people there were a lot of people who
um
were not just skeptical of the block
editor, but really, fundamentally,
it was going to increase the amount of
work because they had to learn a new
thing,
because the classic editor was fine,
because they were used to it.
Even at the time,
I believe there is data about the...
The bell graph for the learning curve for
Gutenberg was smaller.
It was easier to learn Gutenberg than it
was to learn to do things or similar
things in the classic editor.
It was really like the people who had
been used to the thing that was in
WordPress and now they're being forced to
learn a new thing,
there's a lot of resistance and a lot
of, like, I didn't ask for this.
Did you also feel that as you're building
this plugin or this suite of plugins that
are ostensibly for publishers in this sort
of space,
the same sort of resistance to the block
editor?
No, we get, I hear them.
If I go on social media,
I hear them.
In real life, in our work,
I don't hear them.
To say something controversial,
I think those people are like the cobalt
users of the WordPress space, hey,
you want to go and keep on using
technology that's that old?
Great.
It runs.
Like you say,
half the government still runs on it.
We still have a Joomla business that has
well over a thousand customers still.
People,
even though Joomla's kind of been
sidelined from the mainstream of open
source, still people there to love it.
If people want to stick on the classic
editor,
they can be our COBOL users and let
the rest of us keep moving ahead.
But they can stick with the classic editor
if they want.
The real normal people using WordPress
that at least in my experience,
I'm sure perhaps people doing more
complicated things with the editor may
have bigger complaints about it.
But our publishers who are getting there,
they have maybe two or three big stories
to write each week.
They get on with the block editor and
they like it and use it and not
had any complaints.
Since you work with a lot of publishers
and specifically newspapers and things of
that nature,
I wonder if you have seen effects of
how the decline of print media has
affected maybe the adoption of WordPress
or the adoption of digital tools or just
what sorts of things you maybe have picked
up from just being in this space?
Oh, for sure.
The vast majority of these journalists
have had prior careers.
They've worked at a big brand name
newspaper.
maybe the original, say you're in Orlando,
there was the Orlando Sentinel, Tampa,
Tampa Bay Times, whichever city you're in,
there was a leading newspaper,
often two or three.
And as those newspapers went away,
these journalists went and often started
something for themselves and they would go
digital only.
They would not even consider a print
edition.
And
Often they pick one or two social
channels.
The teams are not big enough perhaps to
carry across five or six different
platforms, but they will pick YouTube.
There's one big new publisher in
Mississippi.
Mississippi Today that does a lot of
YouTube work.
We've worked with some...
some publishers in Texas that use WhatsApp
a lot because they have a big Hispanic
audience and WhatsApp use is massive there
so they have a WhatsApp channel a couple
on Instagram they will use these digital
tools to move more quickly than some of
the big legacy newspapers but
the heart of it,
where the original stories and the
original reporting lives is WordPress.
Do you see like I see a lot
of particularly like, you know,
individual journalists or individual sort
of content creators that maybe have been
orphaned by the closure or the downsizing
of a larger paper or a publication moving
to platforms like, you know,
at one point it was medium.
I think a lot of people are moving
to Substack.
And in a lot of ways,
this fundamentally gets into the argument
of owning your own content.
Because if you're using a tool like that,
like Substack, which is very popular,
and you can build in subscriptions and
stuff like that where you get paid for
your work,
The downside of that is obviously your
content lives on Substack.
Substack could go out of business,
they could sell your content,
they could do whatever.
You don't necessarily own that.
Do you see that sort of tension or
that sort of like competition with
publishing on something that you own,
like an open source tool like WordPress?
Yeah,
the people that go to Substack tend to
be the one person teams.
Maybe they start that way and they add
a couple of support people.
But it does tend to be the personalities,
the bloggers who go to Substack.
We see quite a few newspapers using Ghost,
another open source platform.
Yeah.
People who lean more on the newsletter
side often go to Beehive.
So there's definitely some alternatives
out there.
But when it comes to actually building a
brand where you have four, five, six,
seven, and hopefully in a couple of years,
ten or twenty people on staff,
then WordPress is the place people go.
I see we're getting towards the end.
I want to at least give some opportunity
for you to talk about the thing that
PublishPress is, what it's there for,
what people would want to use it for.
I feel like it would
it would be a disservice if I did
not give you an opportunity to like,
at least talk a little bit about the
thing that, that, that you,
that you built.
Oh, well we, I guess, let me,
let me take ownership of this and say,
I, as the person that got this started,
have never really had a,
a big roadmap.
Never sat down and said PublishPress is
going to be this.
We started with one plugin and just
listened
to our customers like crazy.
And that's probably led to slightly
haphazard development.
I know some people have the ability to
sit down and visualize the awesome product
they want to build and then just go
ahead and start building it.
I don't have that ability.
We have ten plugins now and I sent
a newsletter recently saying we're going
to be about fifteen plugins by the end
of twenty twenty six.
And it's always been build feature X.
Talk to the customers.
The customers say that's great.
What we need is now feature Y.
And we build feature Y.
Customers come back to us.
yeah, that's pretty good,
but I wish Y worked like this and
maybe how about feature Z?
It's always been iterative.
And the focus has been on making WordPress
a really good publishing platform.
So a lot of it is just filling
in the gaps with what's missing.
Like both of us come from Joomla and
Drupal backgrounds.
Both of those content management systems
by default have a expiry date.
for content.
WordPress is the best publishing platform
in the world,
but it doesn't have an expiry date.
So one of our plugins got started that
way by just providing an expiry date.
Or WordPress has a revisions feature,
which allows you to see all of the
changes that have been made to a
particular post you're writing,
but
It's kind of tucked away in a very
small corner of the screen and really hard
to navigate and actually browse through
all those changes.
So we have a plugin that makes it
easier.
So we try and work with the WordPress
core and basically fill in gaps as our
customers find them and tell us where they
are.
So WordPress's aim is to democratize
publishing.
we kind of try and piggyback on that
and um the core can't do everything we
try and fill in all the important gaps
that the core is missing to help
publishers yeah i i definitely like one of
the or the most rewarding times for me
as a developer have been when i was
building a specific thing um could call it
a product but like a particular
plug in or whatever,
and really being able to take the feedback
of the people that were using it and
use that feedback to iterate on the thing
that I was building.
So it may feel haphazard,
it may look haphazard,
But, like, I really, like,
that feels like a good approach even if
it's not the approach that, like,
a product manager would approve of, of,
like, having the whole thing.
Because a lot of times, like,
the grand plan, like, is, like,
what if one thing on that roadmap is
not something, like, you didn't...
for that roadmap to be appropriate,
you'd need to user research all of those
points, right?
And by the time you do all the
user research,
and then you build all those features in,
and then you release the thing,
it's entirely possible that your users
have moved on to something else uh so
i i i believe that the the iterative
approach is is um like i i think
that's a really good approach so so don't
don't don't like downplay that i think
that that's a really valuable part of the
of the process yeah there are um there's
a guy uh kevin geary who is a
a character on wordpress social media and
He has that ability, I think,
that he basically fundraised maybe a
million bucks or so,
an enormous amount of money,
to build his Edge site builder platform.
He basically laid it out,
this is what we're going to build.
I do not have that ability at all.
It's always been step by step and...
Some days it feels exhausting because I
read every single customer support ticket
that comes in.
Which is exhausting.
But I think by the time, I mean,
if we scaled up to Pantheon's size,
that's not going to happen.
It's going to break at some point.
But we're at about a dozen staff members
and say, ten thousand customers total.
So it's still feasible.
And you read every customer support
ticket,
you kind of
through osmosis you kind of understand
what your customers want yeah you pick up
on the patterns yep yeah but you would
never read that in a project management
book um project management for dummies um
they'd say that's a terrible way to work
yeah they probably would but at the same
time i know product i know product
managers that like
feel like they don't talk to customers
enough and like want to have more of
that.
So like there's like, yeah,
at either end of the spectrum,
I think you can't win.
Yeah.
I mean, once you get to something,
maybe perhaps a Pantheon size,
then talking to the customers is much more
of a formal exercise often.
Like, hey,
do you have twenty minutes on your
calendar where you can sit down and give
me formal feedback?
A lot of the feedback you're listening to
in customer support is,
oh beep this isn't working right or like
much more visceral yeah yeah yeah yeah
well thank you so much Steve for coming
on uh before we go I'd like to
give you an opportunity to to let people
know where they could find you on the
internet uh and what things you're working
on and and any links that you might
want to share for for our our audio
listeners or video viewers or whatever
I would say these days that are mostly
on LinkedIn.
It's the most high value platform.
You can find me as Steve Burge on
LinkedIn.
Awesome.
Well, thank you again, Steve,
for coming on the show.
Steve is, again,
available on LinkedIn and PublishPress is
publishpress.com, I believe.
And yeah, go check it.
Go ahead.
There is a funny story there.
Oh?
Oh,
that some enormous YouTube social
influencers also decided to call their
company Publish Press.
Oh, cool.
Are you getting a lot of free traffic?
Well, entirely the wrong free traffic.
And I get lots of their emails now.
like i get like ndas contracts offers um
and um uh recently they opened uh the
youtube word is merch right merch selling
merch they opened a merch store and put
publishpress.com instead of their
different um tld on the or the emails
so i got all the customers all this
merch store complaints coming through as
well
Well, we are publishedpress.com.
The YouTube guys are Published Press and
some other TLD.
Well,
you are the real Published Press in my
mind, not those other Published Presses.
Thank you again for joining.
Thank everyone else who's watching or
listening to this in the future.
And we will see you on the internet.
Thanks, Chris.