00:00 us a chance to chat everything up your audio is looking
00:06 good all right we're live welcome in there hey Ryan nice to see
00:12 you rain five days straight in Charlotte yeah we've had bits and pieces
00:19 of rain here not bad where part of the What part of the world you live in
00:26 uh Michigan so it's pretty decent weather here right now okay i'm all the
00:31 way out on the wet coast so Oh okay yeah i live rain every other day i live as
00:37 far west and south as you can get in Canada oh nice okay i live on Vancouver Island
00:44 down in down in Victoria right now so really nice plate all right everyone
00:52 so this is a minor pre-stream as I'm uh getting all the audios and making sure everything is working and uh we've sent
01:00 out some last minute tweets and other things to encourage people to show
01:05 up and we will uh just carry this forward i got to bring up a couple of things here that I
01:13 need is buried behind 2500 windows I have
01:19 open
01:26 there we go okay now just for a double check here and you hear this okay squirrel
01:34 squirrel yeah yep okay that means you can hear the sounds so you'll know the sound effects because I use the the
01:40 intros and the extras to help cue the show up and cue my brain for what I'm supposed to be doing perfect all right
01:48 let's uh prepare this up i believe that it is time
01:55 ladies and gentlemen it is time for WordPress plugins A to Zed not Z H
02:04 welcome to WP Plugins A to Zed episode 68 of the interviewed show code
02:10 controversy and community with Robert D'vour visions for WordPress past
02:16 present and future all coming up next on WordPress plugins from A to
02:23 Zed wordpress the king of content management systems powering the web with
02:29 over 80,000 plugins to choose from how do you sort the junk from the gems
02:35 welcome to WP Plugins A to Zed where we've been keeping the pulse of WordPress alive for over 16 incredible
02:42 years join us every week for an unrehearsed real talk breakdowns of the
02:47 latest and greatest plugins developer and community member interviews some weeks Amber and I team up to dig in
02:54 others I'm flying solo unpacking WordPress news demoing a standout plugin
02:60 or sharing tips to power up your site no scripts no fluff just the good stuff
03:05 from A to Z so plug in and let's get rolling
03:12 well good morning good afternoon or good evening wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today coming to you direct from the brewery overlooking
03:19 beautiful southern Vancouver Island i'm John Overall and in today's show we're deep
03:25 diving into the dynamic world of WordPress with a seasoned developer who's not afraid to shake things up
03:31 robert D'vor the founder of Plug-in Pow and a core contributor to the WordPress and Woo Commerce uh field joins us to
03:39 share his 20 plus years of experience in plug-in development security re research
03:44 and open-source innovation will explore his journey from cannabis related plugins to AI powered tools like plug-in
03:52 pal his controversial take on WordPress government governance and his vision for
03:57 decentralized publishing with static from rapid plug-in releases to sparking debates about leadership in the
04:03 community contributions this episode is brimming with insights for plug-in enthusiasts developers and WordPress
04:10 community members alike welcome to the show Robert thank you for having me oh I've been
04:17 I've been kind of excited about doing this interview it's uh so many places to
04:22 go with what you have um your your sites and um the thing is you
04:32 put out so much stuff it's like you put out a report card on what you did in May
04:38 and I just looked I had to just to keep up just to keep up
04:43 just to keep up with what I was doing and I I had to I had to look back and kind of review and go “Okay what did I actually do this month?” Because I I
04:50 work at such a fast pace sometimes I I build something cool and then I forget about it like a week later I totally forget it was even there
04:57 been there done that not nearly as uh prolific as I once was many years ago so
05:04 tell us a little bit um about can you you're all about the
05:10 open source community in WordPress you know and it shaped your career so tell us a bit about uh what brought you into
05:16 this uh it was like 2003 to 2005 i was had a
05:23 family computer I was working on and I found WordPress after just building basic HTML and CSS sites and realizing
05:30 after a bit of time I needed a CMS to manage all the content and I found WordPress and I loved it and I just I
05:37 didn't look much further i I tested some things and tried out a few things but I stuck with WordPress and now here we are
05:43 like 15 years later 20 years later now and I'm still building WordPress stuff and releasing new projects and just
05:49 having a blast to do it so did you hit WordPress at like version one
05:55 uh I don't remember the exact number it might have been 1.5 i I'm not exact sure of the number it was It was a long time
06:01 ago so I'm not sure i'd have to go back and look but it was very early before custom post types and you know all the
06:07 good stuff started rolling in so I was there to watch it all happen yeah I I recall it cuz I I discovered WordPress
06:13 about WordPress 2.3 and it was just before custom post types were introduced
06:18 and uh I know in version one I almost banned WordPress from my servers because
06:23 it was such a resource hog so all right it's come a long way it has
06:31 come a long way and it continues to come a long way and you know we've we've seen
06:37 a lot of changes occur in it and in particular like as I I've mentioned to
06:43 you before the show here that you know I I almost abandoned his career a few a couple of years ago but came back to it
06:49 and in those couple of years where I only peripherally paid attention to it a lot didn't change but in the last
06:57 year and a half I've noticed some reinvigoration back into the community what are your viewpoints on that
07:04 yeah I think I think AI has a lot to do with it just because everyone's so excited now there's people that couldn't
07:10 code before that are now able to so they can see firsthand experience of how it feels to get in there and see something
07:16 come to life just from an idea and then for developers if you've been in it for a while it's just it's like going from a
07:22 screwdriver to a power drill you know you don't want to go back to the screwdriver if you don't have to so once
07:28 you have that in your hand you just want to keep going with it so I think that's that for me anyways that's given me a lot of new excitement because I have so
07:34 many ideas and so many things I want to do but there's only so much time in a day well now I can have three separate
07:39 things moving at the same time and I can multitask until my brain fries out and then at the end of the day I can look
07:45 back and go I did some cool stuff today so I think that's what a lot of it for me anyways is and I feel like it happens
07:51 for a lot of other people too you're just you're seeing what what you're thinking coming to life and WordPress is
07:56 a great medium to be able to do that because it has so many different ways to extend it and if you're already using it
08:02 you want to actually do certain things that you might have had on your mind for a while and you don't have to reach out to anybody else to do it no more you can
08:09 just work on it and see what happens with the mention of AI there and the
08:15 building of plugins you've been promoting something a lot in the last several weeks called Plug-in Pal tell us
08:22 a bit about this i haven't had an opportunity yet to examine it myself to see what it can and can't do but tell us
08:30 about why you created this and how it advantages people working on WordPress
08:37 uh I I created it for a couple reasons one I wanted to work more with AI so I wanted to build a tool that I could
08:42 actually utilize myself while still working with AI and and getting a handle on that and building a custom app
08:48 outside of I've built a lot of plugins i've you know dabbled in a little things here and there but this was my first
08:53 real foray into building an app so I wanted to test my skills with that while also building something that not only I
09:00 can find useful but others can use as well and it streamlines a lot of the work so I built in a lot of different
09:06 things for like the security aspects of it to make sure all the code's written securely there's proper doc blocks
09:11 included it's going to use the modern functionality that's built into WordPress rather than trying to come up
09:17 with its own solutions so you're not having to have something that feels really hacky and it puts the translation
09:23 files together packages the license and then once you're done it just zips it up for you and gives it to you so you can
09:29 just install it right on your site right away so it's it's been a fun project to work on and I got from where it's at now
09:34 I still have a lot more to build into it but I've been using it for pretty much every day over the last month or so and
09:42 it just it just it's streamlined a lot all the smaller things they'll just type a little bit in the code and stuff
09:49 that's I don't want to do myself need to need to hold you there for a sec something happened to your audio we just
09:54 said fuzzy oh and I forgot something really key in this thing are you there
09:59 still yep I'm here okay your audio seems to It just suddenly went really fuzzy it
10:05 was almost like being on a static old-fashioned uh long-distance telephone line it Okay it might be because it was
10:12 too close to my laptop i'm moving it back a little bit see if it just had interference there all right that would
10:18 uh that would definitely explain the uh explain the noise yeah that was what it was all right sorry didn't mean to
10:25 didn't mean to throw throw the flow off but anytime yeah if you can't hear me
10:30 there's no point yeah that makes sense okay so yeah so I was So with Plug-in
10:36 Pal it's really just to help streamline a lot of the more mundane tasks things that you have to put into a site or a
10:42 client request or you want to you know quickly put together and you don't want to have to scaffold it out and manually
10:50 add the readme file and do all that stuff it'll just go ahead and do all that for you and it just it's a really
10:55 good time saver a lot of the plugins that I build take under 10 seconds to generate and that would take me like 15
11:02 minutes or so to just manually do it myself so I'm cutting down time considerably with those types of things
11:08 so it does help with that really well
11:13 excellent now you mentioned real briefly in there the security aspects of what you've done with uh Plugin Pal now this
11:21 is a big one that a lot of people I'm starting to see more and more posts occasionally on it where people have
11:27 created this great thing and all of a sudden the security holes you could drive a fleet of semis through them
11:34 because AI doesn't think about the security yep you got it you got to enforce it you
11:40 got to tell it what you want and you have first you have to know what you want and know how to describe it get a really good prompt with the exact
11:46 details of you know mention certain functions or mention certain things that you want it to check for and double
11:52 check for and it follows those guidelines really well where if you just say “Hey build me a plug-in.” It's not
11:58 going to know what you're wanting it to really be how you want it to be structured it might try to throw
12:03 everything into one file where it should be separated out because it's such a big project that it needs to have different
12:10 functions so it it's really it's really something you have to be in control of or find a tool like Plug-and-Pal where
12:16 it's already you know kind of built in for you so you don't even have to think about those things but you should be thinking about them all the time
12:26 absolutely um sorry my brain is slipping all over the place right now you're good
12:33 well I know I'm good it's just that uh sometimes I just uh only miscellaneously
12:38 have things uh flowing in the way they should be good thing this is uh you know
12:44 all edited up later not live to tape all right
12:51 so where did my As we go worse than dead air kind of
12:57 rack when I on the radio when I was younger um dead air is the absolute worst thing
13:05 you can possibly have play the squirrel sound again uh yeah
13:12 that always works squirrel there you go we'll just pop it all up here we'll
13:17 we'll we'll find our flow and we'll get going again oh yeah it's all It's all uh
13:24 all really good and excellent and we only have you know two people
13:30 listening to us live so it's not like we're overwhelmed today two people that That's amazing i did a live once and I
13:37 had nobody two people is a great for me i I used to
13:42 do these in the beginning and I had nobody for a very long time and then I started you know one two three here
13:50 occasionally we pop up to 10 or 15 people but uh it I guess it depends on
13:55 how good I am at promoting it at what happens with our audience and why the
13:60 audience does or doesn't show up
14:08 and all here I am thinking I had everything
14:13 all organized up and it turns out not so much
14:21 one of those days all right well let's uh talk a little bit about uh we were talking about Plug-in Pow there let's
14:27 talk a little bit about some of your other um pet projects that you uh really like
14:32 going on pick one give us one uh go static talk about static okay that's a
14:38 fun one what is static i've heard I've heard that one promoted too what is that i'
14:43 I've sort of examined it it's creating is it it's using is it using
14:49 WordPress to create the base HTML site or is it how does it work uh nope nope
14:55 it's fully custom it's a Python base static site generator so the Python powers it and you have a folder for all
15:02 your content that are just markdown files they have the front matter at the top so you can put all your SEO in and
15:08 the custom URLs and change the title up and add categories and then you have a
15:14 template uh folder where you can customize the theme that it's using and when you run static and it builds your
15:20 site it takes all the content turns them into static HTML pages and you're good to go takes very very minimal time for
15:27 that too i I love making things go fast so that's one that I've been working on and just recently took it down for a
15:34 thousand page website it went from a few seconds down to half a second so based
15:39 on my test it's like the second fastest static site generator on the market right now and I'm just trying to
15:45 continue to make it better like I just put uh ll the llms.ext file that the AIS are now
15:52 looking for static builds that for you automatically so you don't even have to think about that either so you can feed
15:58 the AIS all your content in a streamlined and easy to understand way so I'm just trying that's the simplicity
16:04 of it all just thinking less about the website and more about what you're putting into the website the content and
16:10 the style itself because it gives you more control that way okay and then who benefits from having a site created with
16:18 static content like that what what what core sort of companies or organizations
16:24 or people would benefit most from that uh a lot of brochure sites if you have
16:30 uh if you're an agency that builds brochure sites for clients nine times out of 10 minus like a custom form or an
16:37 integration you might have with like HubSpot or something like that you're it's it's easier to set them up with a
16:43 static site the content doesn't change very often and when it does it's simply adding a file and running the rebuild of
16:50 the site and then there's nothing else there's no maintenance to it there's no upkeep to it so you can put it on like
16:55 GitHub pages or Cloudflare pages so there's no hosting costs because you can do that for free so anybody that's just
17:02 looking for a low friction site that they don't tend to manage on a high level you don't have like an editorial
17:08 team trying to get in and do a bunch of content and changes on the site or you're not looking to already work with
17:13 like a predefined like oh I I love the block editor so I need to have the block editor if you're not some a person like
17:19 that or you you know I don't want to do anything except web flow you know I'm so used to web flow it might be harder to
17:25 switch over at first but I think I think everybody could benefit from it unless you have a high level like uh website
17:32 with like memberships and things that you have to manage like that if it's not something that complex you should just
17:38 think think once or twice about going to a static site so so not so it's
17:44 basically for the content kind of back in the early days of the internet where
17:49 everything was mostly static and we didn't have all the interaction we have now
17:55 yep okay but but streamlined and faster because the build process takes one
18:01 template you don't have to change the header in a hundred different files now you can just do it once and it still changes it for you everywhere so there
18:07 is there is a lot of benefits now compared to how it used to be i remember those days yes horrible days i wake up
18:14 sometimes crying at night because of those days yeah well the interesting thing was is I had left I started out in
18:23 98 doing website development and stuff and I left it in
18:29 200 four give or take to I bought a computer store and ran a computer store
18:34 for four years and then I sold the computer store and came back to the internet and previous to going to the
18:42 computer store I was putting together websites with all of the PHP calls different PHP programs calling them all
18:49 up onto a page doing basically what WordPress does but I was doing it with
18:55 multiple programs and then juryrigging them all together to make it into a a functional website and when I came back
19:01 and discovered the WordPress I went “Oh my god this is what I was trying to do before I left the
19:07 industry.” So yeah there's there there are some there are some advantages to uh
19:13 having leave things for a little while and come back you get a new new excitement for it or new tools as you
19:20 said the AI tools back to those back to the AI tools because I'm really enjoying them myself
19:26 um the AI tools have made my ability to code way easier it's not that I can't
19:34 code well I can't i can and I can't i'm not known enough to be dangerous but I
19:39 know enough having done coding for years my problem lies in my typing skills
19:45 which pretty much suck and uh you can't be a bad typist
19:51 and be a coder yep yeah you're going to miss mess up a lot of stuff with a random semicolon
19:57 them are the worst oh that was uh always my challenge in life but with AI what I
20:03 find it does for me is it'll write the code and I can guide it through to get it all right and I can read it and make
20:09 sure but it'll write it nice and smooth and clean for me with almost no typos
20:14 i've had the occasional time it throws in a typo and I think it does it on purpose yeah just to see if you're
20:20 watching mhm just to make sure yeah I could see that yeah sometimes I wonder
20:25 about the AI really it's like you know it seems to do things randomly it's like
20:31 really why yeah at this point in time why are you doing that yep mhm i gave you directions
20:38 to do this and you did this all right so that's why I burn it I burn
20:45 it down and start over at that point i close the chat out i start a whole new one and just start fresh i I've had to
20:51 do that a couple of times i've had to I've had to burn it down and say “You know what this one ain't working let's
20:57 here go away okay here's all the code one more time from where we were where it was working let's do that.” And then
21:05 from that point I actually end up getting something really nice
21:12 let's see here where else have we got going here well let's talk a little bit about
21:20 um somewhere along the line we saw somewhere that you've release software every 5 days on
21:28 average pretty impressive pace what does this rapid development uh
21:34 give you as far as you know time for security checks ensuring they meet the
21:40 high standards quality while while maintaining this kind of crazy pace uh I would say a lot of the stuff
21:47 I'm building now is smaller like the the in between pieces they're more uh things
21:52 like the database version control I built it was an idea I'd seen someone talk about online i went “Okay I'm going
21:57 to go ahead and build this see what I can do.” Three and a half hours later me and the AI figured it out then afterwards I realized okay I could
22:03 tighten up the security a little bit more so I released an update so just keeping that pace so that way I don't
22:08 even if I do miss one or two things I'm so fast getting back to it that it doesn't linger and stay a problem and
22:15 again I have a lot of different custom prompts that I use that I start out all my projects with so I'm maintaining a
22:21 lot of uh control over what we're doing and guidance it's not just the AI giving me the ideas i'm forcing it to follow
22:28 what I want so it it tends to do a lot better in that regard when you do it that
22:36 way good all right
22:42 um yeah this is a rough day for me
22:48 it's Monday it happens it happens occasionally where everything
22:55 goes okay now I'm just bouncing everywhere here my
23:00 flow is
23:17 All
23:24 right all right you've created a plugin called block AI crawlers
23:30 yeah and yet you just recently talked about in a couple minutes ago where you talked about creating the LLM text file
23:36 for AIS how does that go against uh each other
23:44 well I like to be a walking contradiction let's do one thing then do another thing you know you just do stuff
23:50 but with this I think it was more along the lines of not everybody does want their websites to be crawled by AI they
23:56 don't want to share the data they don't want the crawlers you know bombarding their sites and maybe making them a
24:02 little slower when they don't want them to be there so I'm all about people being able to choose what they want or
24:07 don't want so if I can give you options for everything then you're not pigeonholed into only being able to feed
24:13 the AIS you can now tell them I don't want you here go away so it's really up to personal choice and I don't want to
24:18 be the person that's going to force someone else to make that personal choice so I'll just give you all the options plus again it's just it was
24:24 another idea for another plug-in and I I like to build stuff so if I if I see an idea or I come up with an idea I want to
24:31 see how fast I can put it together and see what it'll do and then that's really how most of this comes about people will
24:37 say something online and I'll see it and go “That's a great idea let me see if I can do that.” Or I have a laundry list of you know a backlog of stuff that I
24:44 want to do sometimes I'll just go in and I point sometimes I'll close my eyes and just point at the paper say “This is the
24:49 one I'm going to do now.” And then I end up doing that one because if not I will never be able to choose because there's so much to go over so just giving
24:56 everybody the choice i want them to be able to choose you can either allow the AIS or you can block them it's your choice that's an excellent point to have
25:04 is to allow them or block them now you just mentioned something about building ideas and as fast as you can grab them
25:09 off online recently on Twitter I think it was a few days ago or whatnot somebody had suggested a speic a
25:15 particular plugin i don't recall what it was now and you came back three and a half hours later with it for him
25:23 you know what was it the database version control the database version control so you can now with this plugin
25:30 it takes all the data from your site all the post meta and all the post table and then now it has we've got some audio we
25:36 got the audio feed on you again it's my voice loud it just peaks out
25:45 it's beyond peeking out it's static we're picking up static somewhere there
25:50 we go it's gone no okay right try again see there's better okay
25:60 yeah it's like It was like picking up It was like picking up static from a cable okay yeah it my power cord was plugged
26:06 in i just unplugged it i don't know why it would have done that but Oh laptops are like that sometimes all they do is
26:12 Monday well this is definitely a Monday for me beginning of June you know we're
26:18 hard to believe we're halfway through the year so anyway back to this database version control i saw I saw that appear
26:25 and I went wait that might be something very useful i haven't had a chance to test it i'm looking forward to it i'm in
26:31 the process is like one of the things I do when we take on a site for a rebuild
26:37 we automatically we go create a dev site uh we duplicate the site create a dev site sometimes the site that we're do
26:44 that we're recreating is still actively live active content being published to it and so we have to make sure we get
26:52 that active content still over onto what we're developing without interfering
26:57 with the customizations we're making so how is this going to help
27:03 someone that's having that kind of issue yeah so what it does is it automatically
27:09 creates JSON files for every plug-in post or every post page you can select
27:15 which custom post types you want to include it'll grab all the full site editing content so if you have patterns
27:21 uh your custom templates for your actual full-sight editing theme all that data gets saved to JSON files then you can in
27:28 turn save that JSON all those files into your git flow you know however you want
27:34 to do it or if you're using s the SVN or whatever you're using you can then take that and then start version controlling
27:40 it so that way when you're pulling down data from the live site you can see what's changed in your local version and
27:46 it gives you a little more granular control instead of just looking at a a backup plugin and saying “Okay give me
27:52 the full site backup okay let's upload it here and hope for the best.” It it
27:57 allows you to look at all that beforehand it gives you a little bit more insight into what you're actually doing so I think that it'll allow you to
28:04 catch those little pieces where if new content was added to a page and you have it on your your staging server you can
28:10 look and see oh here's where the change happened you know the time that that that change happened you can just verify
28:15 things a little bit easier that way okay now you mentioned JSON files i only
28:22 have a vague notion myself of what JSON files do can you explain what JSON files are for people that don't know because
28:28 believe it or not a ton of people have no clue what a JSON file is they understand it's a chunk of data
28:35 formatted out but that's that's basically it it's structured data for you to be able to
28:41 read through in a more formatted way that's how that's how I look at it how I approach it and how I talk about it i
28:47 don't dive into the the nitty-gritties of it i guess I'm more like like you i've built a lot of stuff i do a lot of
28:53 stuff but I don't I'm not a a lecturer that's going to jump up at a college and be able to teach a class on all of it
28:59 but that's what it is it's it's going to get your structured data and allow you to be able to play with that and work
29:04 with that in a bunch of different formats and with that moving it moving
29:12 it through JSON files how I understand from a basic standpoint
29:18 that's that's different than say trying to pull it out of the database file so
29:25 what it's doing is it's how is it is it separating out that content out of the
29:31 database file and then helping you reintegrate it i'm not even sure I'm
29:36 explaining it correctly yeah so when it exports the data it'll take every piece of like metadata from a
29:43 post and each of those gets the key and the value so you're able to loop through that and grab that directly from the
29:49 JSON file or edit directly in the JSON file and then when you import it back through the import process of the
29:55 plug-in it takes that and maps it directly to the post or the post meta or wherever it's supposed to go and it
30:00 updates it with whatever you put into the file and whatever the file has now so if you change the post title or you
30:07 change some content in it it'll take that and it's pretty instantaneous you click a button you watch it go through
30:12 real quick and then it's all there for you okay and this does it go down to a
30:17 granular Well you mentioned it's on a post basis uh so it goes down to a granular basis on a post or a product or
30:25 Yep i'm trying to think of all the different pieces in WordPress that are there but it helps you go down to the
30:31 granular basis and it won't so it won't say okay let's say say for example I'
30:37 I've duplicated my my dev site my live site to dev site we've started making
30:42 all the changes to the new theme the new layout new design the we've moved the
30:48 content around the page which shouldn't have impact but on the live site they've added two three new posts you know
30:54 they've added new product they've changed a headline here or there so to
30:59 reexport that data from the live site into that and then you go to put it into
31:05 the dev site is it only going to put in like can you pick
31:12 specific specific posts or content or say this post doesn't exist on the dev
31:17 site so insert it yep yep that's exactly what it'll do it'll take everything and
31:23 based on the post so the file name will be post dash and then the ID number of whatever the post is so you're able to
31:30 file by file you get all the post data all the post metadata so anything that's been attached to that before now or if
31:37 it's been left behind by an old rogue plugin that's in there too so you could even use this time to just go ahead and
31:43 clean all that throw it up in your IDE and then search through all the folders for a certain string and say delete that
31:49 now all that stuff's been cleaned up so you can do that quickly and easily this way then you save your changes in the
31:55 repo the way you're working on them there then you can pull the export from the live site and see what based on what
32:01 you have now in the staging site you can see what new stuff is coming in and be able to same way you do with any other
32:07 plugin or any other code change that you're doing in a repo you can look file by file line by line and you can approve
32:13 or disapprove of certain things so it's really all about again all about just massive control the ability to see
32:20 everything and not have to jump through a lot of hoops to get to it that is very
32:26 useful because something that I fought with for years when redeveloping a site
32:32 is how to bring in the newer content on a live site into this dev site that
32:40 we've been working on for two or three months and in that process they've added 10 15 20 pieces of content you
32:48 know post pages products whatever to it and now we needed to come in and we need
32:54 to map that content into all of these new layouts and designs without doing one of the big ways to do
33:02 it was try to bring in the database but sometimes you bring in the database you end up overwriting your custom changes
33:09 you've made yep and then you pull your hair out and cry a little bit
33:15 and then start over thank god I made a backup before I did this right yes because of all the times you didn't
33:22 make the backups before now you're wise enough yeah exactly in the early days no I I I learned I learned the headache of
33:29 backup of the backup of the backup years ago when when I had my computer store was when I learned that one
33:36 and that's a that's a skill I think you have to you have to learn the hard way people can tell you all the time but until you feel that you'll never get
33:43 that same urgency to back everything up until it hits you once
33:49 nobody if if they've never experienced the pain of the loss of data they never
33:54 think about backups until it happens to them nope yep and then and then they're
34:00 then they're like “Well I wish I You've been warned why don't you back up?” There's automated ways to do it if you
34:06 really need to yeah yeah so let me ask you another couple oddball
34:13 questions here and see where we go sure
34:18 um let's see where this one what sort of advice would you give
34:25 developers wanting to contribute to open source projects such as any other open
34:33 do it as often as you can in any way that you can you could write a tutorial
34:40 about a plugin that you've used and show other people how to use it or you can build your own stuff if you know how to
34:45 code or you want to code or you can schedule and set up a meetup in your area if that's something that you're
34:51 you're inclined to do there's tons of different ways to contribute and I think that in order for it to work everybody
34:57 that's utilizing it should be contributing in some way or another because that's how everything grows and
35:02 stays sustainable that way if everybody's just kind of picking and choosing what they want and then they don't come back and give back it it kind
35:09 of slows the process down and it it could just be a personal thing with me but I've always felt that way since I
35:14 was younger if I never had people before me teaching me the stuff by leaving tutorials and Stack Overflow comments
35:21 and all the things that I learned from I wouldn't be here talking about this today doing this type of work so I
35:27 always want to give back so someone else can maybe pick it up one day and be able to learn from it too so however you're
35:33 able to do that or if you're able to do that I think that you should there should be no limitation on what you
35:38 allow yourself or or say you can do just do it have fun as long as you're having
35:43 fun and you're you feel like you're helping somebody I feel like everything else is just interchangeable that should
35:50 be the core of it all oh absolutely and always trying to give back i I've been doing it myself since the beginning of
35:56 WordPress aside from this podcast that I've been doing for the longest time i
36:01 used to create uh training videos on how to use plugins how to set them up properly you know and people don't
36:08 realize oh yeah it's a plugin go in you install it you activate it everything works wonderful yeah not so much nope
36:15 you know there's times when it does but times when it doesn't
36:20 and there's often times in many of them there's little hidden tweaks or features that are not there and those were some
36:28 of the best things I did now you are getting ready to uh do a live streaming
36:35 you mentioned it uh on Twitter a couple of days ago and tell us a little bit
36:40 about that i'm I'm actually if you pick a good time I'll be there to watch it friday night it Well 10:00 p.m your time
36:47 is is right in zone for me cuz you're on the East Coast so that puts it at 7 that was the one thing I was I wanted to
36:53 respond to your thing but it's like 10 p.m well 10 p.m my time that's almost bedtime for me you know I'm an old man i
36:60 I I go to I go to bed early i get up early i'm up at 5:00 a.m start my day
37:05 but I also I also go to bed early so I can get my sleep but um if you if you
37:11 manage to pick a good time for that I think you will get the audience you need tell us a bit about what you're planning
37:17 to do here because it looked interesting to me yeah think at first uh I don't
37:22 necessarily have a full-on set plan i just I want to get on here and show off some of the ways that I use AI some of
37:28 the workflows that I'm doing some of the ways I generate content or I'll create custom images and then if we get good
37:35 feedback and there's people there we can just shoot out ideas over the stream and then I'll just build that stuff or work
37:41 on that stuff and we'll just kind of work through it together it's more about just interacting with people and in the
37:46 community itself and showcasing some of the AI stuff that I'm finding and then maybe someone brings something to the
37:52 table that I haven't seen before and then we can just all see it together for the first time it'll just be a fun way
37:58 to hang out just people that want to get more integrated with the AI the tooling and and the functionality that you can
38:04 get out of it and I figured that would be a nice way to do that while also instead of just creating videos of how
38:10 I'm building things I can just get on there live and do it and takes a lot of the pressure off so I don't have to restart the video 20 times trying to get
38:16 there and get just the right shot i just I'm going live with it well the joys
38:21 about going live with stuff live to taped it means that uh they get to see you and all your flaws even when you're
38:28 stumbling across trying to figure out how it's going and either they like you or they don't and this is something I
38:35 learned years ago it's like I learned my podcast not my podcasting skills I
38:40 learned back in college but I learned how to run a podcast by listening to the
38:45 No Agenda show because that's what they do it's a live to tape show and it just people either show up and
38:54 they or they don't and that's the way it works now thinking of what you're going to be doing is you're building the AI
39:01 you have a website prompts.robertdore.com which has some
39:06 really interesting prompts i went and played with a couple of them myself not fully understanding how they worked
39:13 which was the one that got me it was like I I'm looking at okay well it's JSON file well do I dump the whole thing
39:19 in how do I make customizations to it little things like that just I didn't
39:25 understand but I did play with it i ended up playing with the one that creates your top secret military patch
39:31 and I can't remember can't remember which one it created me it created me a very entertaining
39:37 one but it created me Oh it created me a um a shooting star I think is what it
39:43 created me nice so but these are that's a fun one but how these prompts that I
39:50 know that is the biggest thing is I've been playing with AI my biggest problem has been wrapping my head around the
39:56 prompts because while I can be a creative writer it's not always the
40:02 easiest thing to pull out of my brain tell us a bit about how AI prompts work
40:07 and what gets it moving forward in the right direction yeah I think the the JSON structure it
40:15 allows the AI to see what exactly you want you're giving it again the very granular details you're going to have a
40:22 section that talks about the lighting so if you're doing something where it looks like the sun's to the left you're going
40:27 to give it the right angle you're going to you're going to give it the colors that you want you can give them hex codes or you can describe like tailwind
40:34 classes you can tell them for so this way you don't even have to have the hex codes for it but it gives you that
40:39 ability to then go real real deep with it where instead of saying for instance you say give me a military patch a top
40:46 secret military patch design with this image it's not going to know exactly how it wants you or you want it to give the
40:53 the threading and the colors for the borders or what kind of background you know icons you might want the fonts the
40:59 way they're laid out the JSON gives it all that so that way you're going in and saying hey I don't want just this basic
41:06 thing or a glowing neon icon i don't want just to say “Give me a glowing icon
41:11 that's blue and it's a lock.” Well it might not design it the way you want it might make a cartoony style it could
41:17 make something that feels a little bit more like it should be on a kid's website but you're looking for something more like high-end
41:22 technologydriven so by giving it the Jason prompt with all of those details it's structuring the data and forcing
41:29 again the AI to just do what you want it's not letting it go off and what they call they they call it hallucinations
41:34 where it's just coming whatever whatever it's not it's not doing we're having the audio the audio crackling again
41:46 okay okay some some sort of some sort of wiring or sending out some sort of
41:53 uh some sort of sound there you got a you got a strange sound being picked up
41:58 by your by your mic i think I'm going to have to buy a new one i've been told once or twice that
42:04 this is not a good mic so I think it's on its way out now they they do do that after a while what's funny is the mic
42:10 I'm using now is one I started this show with i I've gone up to high-end mics and
42:17 the last one I had was I can't remember it was a very expensive mic it lasted me like four years and then it started
42:23 creating problems and I needed a mic and I was like “Oh I still have this one.” Plugged it in it's like “Oh it works perfect we'll go with this
42:31 sometimes the cheap ones work very well you never know what you're going to get with a mic
42:39 all right sorry see you continue for Sorry to broke that up okay oh I'm sorry that the that the mic keeps messing up
42:45 so the JSON prompt essentially is just structuring the data so the AI doesn't just go off and do its own thing and
42:51 start coming up with its own ideas and thinking it's the creative director you're giving it the full details like
42:58 the way I create these I don't even really write them all myself i force AI to write them for me so I'll go tell the
43:04 AI what I want or show it an example image and say “Hey I need a JSON prompt similar to this other one I've done.” I
43:10 share it with it but I need it to force you to design an image or an icon or whatever in this specific style it'll
43:17 give it to me and nine times out of 10 that it'll be like 30 or 40 lines and it won't be detailed enough so you just say
43:22 “Okay now I need you to make that over a 100 lines because I need like fine detail to this and make it modular.” So
43:30 I can just add a sentence along with the JSON and customize it however I want so
43:35 essentially by the time I'm done with it I'll test a few of them and see which what one works right once I get it to a
43:41 a repeatable uh output like the military patches once it is consistent with that
43:46 then I say “Okay now this one's done.” Then I can create the blog post and share some of the images and that one's
43:52 complete so it's really just about working with the AI you know what you want it to give you and then it spits
43:59 out something like this to where you get something that looks like it was taken right off someone's shirt yeah uh it's
44:04 it's looking as good as the ones I had a client years ago that that made these
44:09 embroidered patches and it looks just like that you could actually you could actually take
44:15 that send it to the embroiderer and he would run it through his computer and come back with something to embroider
44:21 those patches for you now read I popped in here i wanted to look at the code block on here and just curiosity on it
44:27 trying to understand if you wanted to customize it up you where do you you go
44:33 in here hunting for oh there's the keywords globe world planet
44:39 global so you go in and you modify these different keywords in here is what you do I take it so yep so that was like the
44:46 support graphic so if you ask for like I asked for the wolf it'll use the support graphics like stars or a world like a
44:53 globe that maybe it stands on and it puts those in as like the defaults so that way it works with those to kind of
44:59 fill in the space if you don't give it enough detail but even if you uh copy
45:04 this and put like a really detailed sentence above it you put the the words you want and you tell it what image you
45:10 want it'll work with this but if it finds that the globe or the the stars
45:15 don't really fit the theme it won't put those in they're just there as kind of like backup defaults so you don't
45:20 necessarily need to edit the JSON in order to edit the actual output oh so what you need to do is you need to give
45:27 it a very specific descriptive one to five sentence
45:32 statement um what you want it to create and then say use this as the map yeah
45:38 and sometimes it's even easier where you can just write top words and then and you put the words in quotes this way it
45:45 knows what words you want for the top part then you write bottom words it'll put those in and write object and then
45:50 you tell it what the object is you don't even need to write like a super detailed prompt it'll grab the pieces from what
45:56 you wrote and put them right directly in the JSON when it's creating the image for you oh okay then I used it
46:02 incorrectly but I was just I was just goofing around you can edit them too yeah that's that's
46:08 the beauty of it you can make it yours you take it and customize it and now you have your own version okay yeah so this
46:15 is this is this is just kind of a cool thing here but you have lots of different prompts even on your uh GitHub
46:20 you have a whole repo of prompts you know is that
46:25 these prompts here or even more prompts yeah that that's these ones i've also shared some on social media that aren't
46:33 on here yet uh I got a free AI tools page on my site where I'm trying to like organize it all now because I put out so
46:38 much I could and keep track of it also now making it easier for me to keep up to date with it but with these ones I'm
46:44 trying to do more like icons and different things not only that are like custom like this but stuff that you can
46:49 actually use when you're building websites like the plug-and pal mascot i have a prompt that I used to create like
46:55 a cartoon character right that's like a hero character so I I made him the same way i used the AI prompt for that same
47:02 thing with these ones you you get the prompt good enough for the styling and then it'll just you give it make me a
47:08 wolf make me a lion and then you put the prompt in and it's done does it for you
47:13 takes all that data for you very nice yeah I was I was having a little bit of fun with it and just sort of goofing
47:19 around but I just I wasn't really getting much out of it so I understood I wasn't using it correctly and I just
47:25 didn't quite understand how to use it correctly yep that's what I'm going to try to talk about more about that on my
47:31 live stream too just to kind of show the process of these types of things so you can see from point A to point Z where I
47:37 go you can see okay he starts with this nothing and then in 10 minutes he has a prompt that you know brings out stuff
47:43 like this and we'll live test some of the images and some will be good some won't but that's the that's the process
47:49 that you have to go through in order to get what you're really looking for it's not just always going to work straight out of the box for you yeah well it's
47:56 also it's also trying to wrap your head around um what you need to tell the AI and get
48:04 the get the AI to actually produce something of value for it i mean as far as I've gone with coding it understands
48:11 it because it's thinking in the same brain that I'm thinking when I'm doing code but when I'm trying to do the more
48:18 creative stuff the interesting point on it when I first started using Grock back
48:24 when it was Grock 2 just before they gave Grock his first
48:29 labbotomy he started producing these amazing images for me out of nowhere
48:35 with almost no prompt for me it was like I need this and it's like boom it's like oh that's exactly what I wanted and then
48:42 they gave his labbotomy and I' I'd get the same prompt and I'd get a blob
48:49 yeah so yeah oh go ahead oh no no no you were
48:54 You had a thought i was Yeah i was just gonna say I think I think they do that on purpose i think they put it out they
48:60 let you get used to it you get addicted to it and then you go “We're going to mess this up a little bit so that way
49:05 you get mad and then you want to keep using it i'm going to keep trying i'm going to keep trying to make it better.”
49:10 At first you think it's your fault because you're like “Maybe I'm not writing it right maybe I need to adjust my style for But in reality they're just
49:17 kind of nerfing the quality a little bit maybe to save cost maybe they realized too many people were using it so they
49:23 had to drop it to slow people down i don't know i don't run a business that big so I couldn't say you're right they
49:29 definitely do it yeah they could do it could be something along that line i hadn't thought about those aspects of it
49:36 but yeah then and then they it's starting to get back to what it was with the latest version of Garac although now
49:43 a lot of my AI art comes from the Adobe uh Firefly that's where I get most of my
49:48 AR AI art because it seems to be doing a great job on it i haven't experimented
49:55 with your with your JSON prompts in it yet to see how it does that'd be cool let me know when you do i
50:01 haven't played with Firefly yet so I'm curious to see how it works well the joy of Firefly I pay for an Adobe uh suite
50:09 to run all the stuff that I do and I get 4,000 credits a month to do whatever I want to do in there firefly so nice so I
50:17 go in there and go “Yeah well let's see what I can do.” And I use it for creating my show art because uh it I
50:24 don't have time to go create art for many years I created the art myself but uh now I just don't have the time and
50:30 I'd rather let the AI create it it comes up some with some good stuff
50:35 too so some something you might not even think to try it'll do and you'll be like “Wow that's good.” Yeah I've seen it do
50:42 some amazing things from time to time in the AI it's like sometimes I'll just ask for something and all a sudden like
50:48 “Yeah that's exactly what I want.” Perfect other times I'll give it specific
50:53 instructions and I may as well have told it to go plow a field yeah yeah yeah i
50:59 think that also speaks to like that like for uh 40 from Chad GBT it memorizes a
51:06 lot of stuff for you so if you can cultivate the memories that it's using it can make it a lot smarter and gear it
51:11 a lot more towards what you're asking for and you don't even have to ask for a really detailed thing no more so I'm at
51:17 this point now where if I can just say “Hey in the style and tone I normally write in give me a blog post outline
51:22 that talks about this topic.” and it typically gets it really really close to what it would do when I was giving it
51:29 hyperdetail just because we've done it so many times it's kind of memorized my specific flow so if you're bouncing
51:34 around from to different AIs it might be a little harder to catch that but if you can find one and and kind of train it on
51:40 what you like and what you actually use it will get better with you over time
51:45 yes and I'm finding that one with using Grock because well I paid for Grock
51:51 and and um chat GPT I didn't like it in the beginning so I ended up just
51:57 sticking with Grock and I get most everything I need from there with no problem
52:02 i'm not I'm not I'm not a I'm not a big one to jump from one platform to another i'll settle in one place and get to know
52:08 that platform yeah I think it's the smartest play especially now there's so many new
52:13 things it's everything is moving at hyper speed so you have to kind of lock in and say “I want to learn this tool
52:19 really well.” And then all them skills will apply to all the others you'll be able to take the stuff you've learned here and put it there and it makes it
52:26 easier to use all that because you weren't checking out different UIs every other day and they're always changing
52:32 them on you so you never know where a button is makes it a lot easier just to stick to one for a while i think that's
52:38 what I've done with Chad GBT i've went really deep with this one now I'm kind of exploring out of that and doing other
52:43 things besides just chatbt but I feel like because I took the time to study it
52:49 and work with it and kind of get really good with what it's its limitations are and what I can get out of it I feel like
52:55 that's helped me to use the other tools now in in a much more streamlined fashion because I don't have to guess so
53:00 much yeah that helps a lot now you mentioned hypers speed that everything's moving on hypers speed and it is and
53:08 part of it and I've heard it bantered around here and there is everyone's all
53:14 crazy about AI and for those of us that have been around the internet since the mid to late 90s and even in the original
53:23 creation of the internet as we know it now of the early 2000s it's like AI we
53:29 don't even truly know where it's going to go or what it's going to do for everything or where it's going to land
53:36 in the market or how it's fully going to change things do you have any insights or thoughts on where it might lead us
53:43 and what it might do to change things out yeah I think I think uh the people's
53:50 health your ability to live longer them to catch diseases quicker you're already seeing it where AI is finding things 5
53:56 months in advance before actual old school testing is finding it so you're seeing things like that happen they're
54:02 finding ways to they made Ompic with AI they made a another version that was
54:08 healthy and didn't have none of the side effects and it was like way cheaper but AI did it just by someone sitting down with it and giving it the data so I
54:15 think there's so many other applications beyond just can I make my stove an electric stove and will the AI know when
54:21 to turn the heat down that's that's basic but for the things that it can actually do I think it's I think it's be
54:26 world changing beyond just it can write good code it's doing so much more than that already so I'm excited for that
54:34 type of stuff i want I want them to be able to figure out how to put my brain in a robot and let me live forever if
54:39 they can do that I'm good i'm good that's my hope for the future anyways well I wish you luck on that one because
54:47 uh I think by the time I hit to be 90 years old I think I'm going to be like you know what i'm done time to move on
54:52 to the next adventure yeah hey yeah it's always an adventure
54:57 around the corner somewhere it's always another one to move it along to wherever it's going to go all right well with all
55:04 that we've been at this for almost an hour now so give this point here for everyone for you to tell everyone where
55:11 they can find you and uh what sort of things you can offer and uh what your
55:16 primary business is uh robert devour.com for all things
55:22 custom development uh website builds custom tooling AI tools you can see all the projects I'm working on listed uh
55:30 I'm heavy in the blog i blog almost every day now just sharing all the different stuff that I'm building uh and
55:36 if you're on social media I'm mostly on X at Deio Robert that's the one I'm most active on i use other ones but I'm on X
55:44 like every day pretty consistently throughout the day so if you're looking for me or want to get a quick quick chat
55:50 in or ask a question about something that'd probably be the best place to do it excellent well all those links will be
55:56 in the show notes for everyone to find out and uh with that being said don't run off on me i'm just going to play the
56:03 uh outro here and I'll be right back for a minor um minor post stream so little girl take
56:10 us on out of here reminders for the show all show notes can be found at
56:16 wpplugins.com and while you're there subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to
56:22 your inbox wp Plugins A Toz is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews
56:28 of plugins created by developers because you support the show help keep the show
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57:02 remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications of all new videos follow the show on Twitter at wpplugins
57:10 az john can also be reached at his website johnoverall.com or email him directly
57:17 john wpro.ca thanks for joining us and have a
57:22 great
57:27 day thanks for listening to the show this show is copyright by johnoverall.com so until next time have
57:34 yourselves a good morning good afternoon or good evening wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today
57:57 all right that laugh is my 18-year-old boy who graduates today permanently
58:04 preserved at three years old that's awesome uh I know I've told the story a
58:11 dozen times but I always enjoy it um when I was first creating the WP Plugins
58:16 podcast I was setting up all of my equipment for testing my microphone everything else i plugged into my
58:23 computer set up the recording software and I just set the microphone up i just
58:29 hit play to record a test uh sound he came wandering over grabbed the
58:34 microphone and did that that's awesome that is awesome you got to preserve that
58:40 then that's great and it's like I went “Did I get that?” And I looked I said “I did.” I immediately immediately captured
58:49 it recorded it copied it a dozen times and um made sure I didn't lose it and
58:54 then it just got stuck in at the end of every show that's cool it's been at the
58:60 end of every show since the beginning and now he's graduating and now he's
59:05 graduating high school and getting ready to start as an apprentice electrician
59:11 that's awesome actually he's already started he's been working as an apprentice for over a year
59:17 he's he's got to do his first year class uh apprentice class and then he goes
59:22 into full-time work in uh September as a full-time apprentice but he's been doing
59:27 part-time work for electrical company here for the last year and a half that's cool hands-on experience is going to get
59:34 him really far that's awesome yeah well that's the whole point it's It's been really great for him so yeah so that was
59:40 a great show thank you very much i appreciate you appreciate you coming we had a little rough spots here and there in it yeah sorry about the audio i'm I'm
59:48 going to get this thing fixed i'm chucking it as soon as I get off here audio is audio and you know it wasn't
59:55 that bad through most of the shows the occasional glitch here and there we caught it fast enough to where we we got
60:01 it repaired so people will forgive the occasional glitch it's when they It's when you listen to a podcast and the
60:08 entire show is full of that and you go I can't listen to that you can't listen to it yep yep yeah and I don't want that i
60:14 don't ever want to be that guy that make make something unlistenable like that so
60:20 yeah i've done that a couple of times in the past years where it's like I was just too tired to try and clean it up
60:25 and it's like whatever I don't care and I I regretted it and I probably lost audience over it
60:31 but many times the people will come back to you they'll they'll forgive there's a
60:37 thing about video and audio they'll forgive a lower video quality but they'll never forgive low audio quality
60:44 quality yeah yeah because you can listen to it without even looking at it but you can't look at it without listening to it
60:50 yeah that's right so that's why you always got to do your best for audio so everyone thanks we capped out at five
60:56 viewers for a little while there so nice so thanks appreciate all of you showing
61:01 up thanks for showing up those that have showed up we greatly appreciate it a few of you are still hanging around right now
61:08 so other than that it's been a really great show it's been great meeting you and uh Thank you likewise hopefully we
61:14 can connect up another time and uh maybe get you back on another another time where we can uh shoot in some different
61:21 directions have a little bit more prepared for what I need to do i mean
61:26 you have so much going on and I I went I went into your GitHub repo and I was
61:32 like “Wow there's like over 250 repos in here.” Yeah it's getting up there well
61:41 you know when you try to cultivate them well you do what you can with it the nice thing about open- source code and I
61:48 do it regularly is like I've saved in the last month or two I've
61:53 managed to save three plugins from the uh WordPress uh uh environment where
61:58 they were yanked from the WordPress repo but they're still viable useful plugins and I happen to have a copy of them so I
62:05 threw them up on my GitHub to fork them out that's nice and I think there's one
62:10 there's one or two of them that I that I actually have actively used on actively in use on clients websites it's like I
62:18 have to fork them so I need I need those that's the beauty of open source that's the best part about it it's never ending
62:25 if you don't let it no no and you can you can keep going and going going even
62:31 even to the point I don't know you've been around long enough you'll remember the sharewware days right yes yep
62:37 napster just turned 20 something 26 I think yesterday or the day before that i
62:42 know that was that was over the over over on X for a while there i was making I made a comment like my music
62:47 collection got so huge during those two years yes yep and my virus collection
62:52 yep yeah i guess they were sharing viruses on it too i wasn't that big into
62:58 I wasn't that big into viruses no oh yeah i wasn't looking for them they they'd find me oh yeah i managed to
63:05 not collect them that way I was I I had I had scans coming as they
63:11 were coming down but yeah I was so new to it then i I was clicking
63:16 every button imaginable skinny all of it it was a It was a crazy good world for me at the time i want all this stuff the
63:22 the golden era of the internet yes yep absolutely
63:27 all right well that'll take us up um I'm going to cut us off here so thanks everyone for showing up on the stream
63:34 and uh we greatly appreciate you all showing up take care bye-bye all
63:41 right that's the