Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

[00:00:00] Matt: Dustin, if you can believe it, it's already been two weeks.

[00:00:02] Dustin: I know time flies.

[00:00:04] Matt: Time flies when you're having fun on this podcast.

[00:00:07] Dustin: Yeah.

[00:00:08] Matt: Speaking of this podcast, gravity forms.com/breakdown, that's where we want to go to follow this podcast. If you're the fir, if you're a first time listener, we'd love for you to follow us on your favorite podcasting app.

[00:00:21] Some changes coming to the podcast not right away, but in a little while, been wor working with my old producer friend, Stuart Barefoot's gonna help me. Emphasize some of the great creative points of the show. So look for some changes coming soon. But still all the same fun gravity forms and WordPress stuff you've come to you've come to love so far.

[00:00:46] And listen, we're nearing a thousand downloads across the show already. Really excited about that by the time this comes out. So, thanks everyone for following and listening. If you have any feedback, as always, Matt Gravity forms.com. Dustin doesn't wanna share his email address. He doesn't want to hear from, from you.

[00:01:06] Don't be sending your podcasting critiques to Dustin. Just send them to me. I'll, I'll be.

[00:01:15] Dustin: Do you have any sneak peeks on what's changing with the podcast that you wanna share, that you feel comfortable sharing?

[00:01:21] Matt: yeah, I mean, for, for me, What I really wanna dial in is sort of transitioning to some of our segments, right? Creating a podcast is already hard enough. The easiest route to go with a podcast is a typical interview show. It's what a lot of us do in the podcasting space. A lot of, maybe a lot of us in the WordPress space tune into and what I've.

[00:01:43] What we have been trying to develop here is more of a, a variety show of sorts where you and I get together, we chat about the really important things with gravity forms. We pull in these interviews and then we'll talk about some more for lack of a better phrase, global WordPress stuff that that you might be interested in as maybe not an insider to WordPress.

[00:02:03] You use gravity forms, but you're not all in on the WordPress world, and we're gonna try to pull some threads of that story in to help you out. So for me, having a producer come on to help me shape those segments a little bit, transition to those segments a little bit, and then be more on brand with some, like music beds stingers and transition sounds and stuff like that, just to, to help move things along.

[00:02:27] Dustin: Cool.

[00:02:29] Matt: Turnstile 1.0 is finally out. No more guessing the fire hydrant. How big is this crosswalk? What is this Jenga board of a CAPTCHA screen I'm dealing with?

[00:02:40] You could just go right to this CloudFlare thing and, and that's pretty exciting. I can't wait. To turn that over to all of my WordPress sites.

[00:02:48] Dustin: Oh, 100%. Not having to click a find the bus in all of these pictures type thing is great. I hate those types of

[00:02:56] Matt: that, not that this would ever happen, [00:03:00] but I mean, I certainly didn't have, and I don't have this in the show notes, so I'm gonna throw another curve ball at you.

[00:03:04] Dustin: Okay.

[00:03:04] Matt: Not that I would have this on my Bingo card that Google would ever get rid of captcha.

[00:03:10] Dustin: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:11] Matt: They just sold off their domain registration business to Squarespace or Wix.

[00:03:18] I'm gonna have to double check and put it in the show notes. It blows my mind. Google Cloud, Google email.

[00:03:27] Dustin: Yeah,

[00:03:27] Matt: Google. Google Analytics. And then you don't, you just yet another thing Google kills off in their suite of, of products.

[00:03:37] Dustin: I mean, that's the Google way though.

[00:03:39] Like, like that. I, I feel like Google will release stuff and it'll be like, exciting and then they'll just, a year from now, shut it down.

[00:03:46] Matt: who knows? You all, all of the capture sites, you might need to transition some, some point to turn style anyway. Do it now.

[00:03:53] Dustin: Yeah. Never

[00:03:55] Matt: it's working for you, it's working for you. Yeah. So that, that's the biggest thing. We had some minor updates to Gravity Forms to gravity flow. I'll link those up in the show notes.

[00:04:05] But turnstile 1.0 is the most notable of of add-on set that were released.

[00:04:11] Dustin: We'll also have a turnstile video on the ut on our Gravity Forms YouTube channel on the turnstile add-on and, and getting set up and how to get started using it. It's, it's all very easy, but we'll have a video watch you through all that

[00:04:24] Matt: You've slated that for the 4th of July

[00:04:27] Dustin: 4th of July. Yes.

[00:04:28] Matt: I'll be spreading ketchup and mustard on a hotdog and watching turnstile video by Dustin out on my barbie, out on my deck while I barbecue.

[00:04:38] Dustin: What better way to celebrate the 4th of July than with an anti-spam video?

[00:04:44] Matt: That's what we have to look forward to here. Hey, speaking of videos, last week I had put out a video on the YouTube channel about creating a donation form. And I'm actually, it was, it was kind of a, an interesting crossroads because not that this was the first time that I've. Use gravity forms for a donation form.

[00:05:04] But now I'm, I'm building out a site for a friend who's launching a nonprofit foundation. And we're setting up, we're setting up a donation form and I was really starting to take a look. More closely of what it's like to be the end user, right?

[00:05:18] Like we're talking soup to nuts here of like understanding what it's like to get a donation form set up really had me thinking about. How complex this is for the average person, the whole stack, not just the WordPress side of things. And it got me really thinking of, hey, if you're listening to this and, and you're building out payment forms with gravity forms donation forms, products selling products, I would love to hear. I'd love to hear anything from you, the listener, about that experience.

[00:05:52] Like if you're selling products with Gravity forms, I'd love to know what you're doing with that. Because I see a lot of [00:06:00] opportunity there for, for Gravity forms, and again, with the Stripe integration and, and all these other payment processors that we support. I'd love to hear that. If there's things that, that you think are missing from that experience, and I'll, be brutally honest.

[00:06:14] And, and I think the orbital theme stuff helps. The orbital theme, customization features really helps with this. But styled forms not form. Fields, not like, cuz with our templates, you have the form fields ready made for you, which is great. That's like the bones of the form are there. Now I need to make those bones look good.

[00:06:37] This, this is not a really good metaphor here, but, but the foundation is there. I need to paint it. I need to, stucco, I need to do all this stuff to make it look good. And from an end user's perspective, I look at it from like my friend who's starting this foundation. Hey, we're just gonna go use GoFundMe, and it's just like, Hey, it's got like this little, like these social cues that are next to the donation form. The form looks nice. There's like a badge on it. Dollar signs, like ev, these are small details, but when you look at it, you're like, oh, this is a thing I'm going to.

[00:07:10] I'm gonna click on this nice button and it's gonna have $50 already loaded into it. When I press the button, I'm gonna type my name in with a little message, and that's like all there encompassed in this experience. But then there's like the fees in the backend and all other stuff and, and not just GoFundMe, but any other sort of donation platform or payment platform.

[00:07:32] Is going to take some absorbent fees from this because they're making it all really easy for you. That's the tradeoff. Whereas with gravity forms and maybe WordPress, your fees are a lot less. You're just paying stripe, of course. You have to buy gravity forms and you have to build the house yourself.

[00:07:48] So all of this is, I've just been really critically thinking about that experience from the end user's perspective. So if you're listening to this and saying, Hey, yeah, we, we build this out for clients, I'd love to know how you make that experience. Smoother or easier, or if you're really struggling with it, I'd like to hear your side of it.

[00:08:06] So maybe I can bring that feedback back to the team because it's something that I've been closely working with in my, in my personal life. Have, have you ever had to do anything like that doesn't, aside from like the tutorial work that you've done here at Gravity Forms, or is there any opportunity you see there

[00:08:22] Dustin: yeah, I, I think, I think Orbital's a great start. I think I would love to see Orbital expanded with more options to bring it closer in line with something like Elementor. Just to have more options and make it prettier from the the user's perspective.

[00:08:39] And Orbital is, is not something that we are done with. Like, it's not just, it's going to be updated over time. Not, I, I think what I'd love to see the most is just more features, more customization added to orbital so that you can kind of get your forms looking the way you want them to look out of the box.

[00:08:56] Matt: Speaking of more feedback, we [00:09:00] chatted about this in the last episode. The conversational forums webinar went great. I won't belabor that point. Again, gravity forms.com/beta. If you want to join the beta group and get access to beta, beta things, I'm gonna say things because there's more, more than just plugins that are coming.

[00:09:19] If you want access to the beta group, gravity forms.com/beta get get attached to that. One of the things that came up in that conversation was what is. What is the point of conversational forms? What is this concept of distraction free? Do you have a feeling or do you have an opinion on distract?

[00:09:42] What distraction free should mean, or what it means to you in the case of conversational forms? Or do you just see a certain particular piece of value in conversational forms that sticks out?

[00:09:52] Dustin: I think for me, where conversational forms, I, I think the biggest value for me personally is that they're more accessible and they make your forms less daunting to the user. I, I think that's kind of the, the, the big thing when The, in, in my opinion, when I, when I look at conversations like or conversational forms it is just kind of making the forms themselves less intimidating to fill out.

[00:10:17] Cuz we, we have things like multi-page forms already in gravity forms, but I think adding conversational forms will make, will add another layer of just accessibility to the form submission process.

[00:10:30] Matt: One of the questions that came up in that webinar from a user was, why can, can we embed these forms on a page, and. Sort of the knee-jerk reaction is like, well, why would you, because that would just be a multi-step or multi-page form, regular form that you would just embed. The intent behind conversational forms is to and let me just take a step back.

[00:10:54] If you've not looked at it yet, if you've not played with the beta you can, there's a direct link to a conversational form. So if you go and you make a gravity form, Form, you can't directly link to it without putting it on a page. So I have to say, slash contact, here's my contact page. I grabbed the contact form, I dragged the block in.

[00:11:13] I put it there, said, here's my contact form. In conversational forms, when you're actually setting up that form, like you're setting up a gravity form, you, you're creating a URL to access it directly, because. The idea is it overtakes the page, right? So you might have the most complex, most beautiful WordPress theme in the world.

[00:11:33] I'm sorry, but we're gonna load a form that that doesn't see any of that. For the whole purpose of not seeing any of that, right, because we don't want the user to get distracted by, your big call to action buttons, your login buttons. The idea is you're sending a person to this form, so they see nothing but the questions being asked to increase the conversion rate.

[00:11:57] Dustin: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:58] Matt: To make sure that the person is not [00:12:00] getting lost or getting confused or, trailing off. And all of this stuff might seem, well, why? Like, what's the big deal? Well, it matters a lot. If you're on mobile, for instance or if you have a high converting product or a valuable product that you're, you're selling or this data is very important to capture you.

[00:12:18] You're not sitting with that person is submitting that form at the same time. You wanna make sure they, they submit this stuff. And that's what the whole intent of conversational forms is about. And there's a lot of competitors out there traditionally that only have forms in that. In context, not afraid to say it.

[00:12:35] That's what we're going after, right.

[00:12:38] Dustin: I, I, I think the the, the thing that, that I think is very valuable in having conversational forms is that I. A user can go on there. And if you're just using traditional forms, maybe you're using multi-page forms and you see that like, oh, this is three, four, or five pages. That might be, I, I don't want to fill all that information out.

[00:12:58] I'm gonna leave the site. I think conversational forms help ho like, make that process less intimidating. And it's not just showing you upfront, oh, here's a ton of information you need to fill out. It's, it's much more welcoming and, and less daunting I'd say.

[00:13:15] Matt: And, and probably give some give some guide, not guidance, what's the word? Forced is another bad word, but like, it's gonna force form makers to not make excessively long forms if they don't have to. Like, you don't have to ask all these questions cuz my God, no one is going to sit through this.

[00:13:34] Right? So really focus in on the most valuable points, especially if you're surveying somebody. You're asking for things you wanna just make sure you're getting the stuff that's most valuable. And the throwaway stuff forget about it because people aren't gonna sit through it.

[00:13:47] next up I'm gonna sit down with Michelle Ette. Many of you in the WordPress world know her work from Stellar, WP Post status, WP Coffee Talk. She's pillar of the WordPress community. Here's Michelle for

[00:14:05] Michelle: Michelle Fette. I am one of the co-founders of underrepresented tech.com.

[00:14:11] So Allie Nimmons and I, uh, started underrepresented in tech.com a few years back and we're looking for tools that we knew well and that we would be able to, uh, use, not only to capture information from people like on a contact form, for example, but we really wanted to build a database that people could.

[00:14:33] Create their own profile in that then could be searched with a search function. And so finding something that worked to be able to do that was super important. And Gravity Forms and Gravity Kit, which at the time was Gravity View, worked really well together to be able to let people enter their own profile in.

[00:14:54] So if you're interested, if you're an underrepresented person, you're interested in. Participating on a [00:15:00] project, being on a podcast looking for full-time or part-time work, uh, you are able to put yourself into that database, put your bio in there, your contact information, um, and, and tick the boxes of things that you are an expert at.

[00:15:12] So if you are a developer, you can click that box. If you are somebody who's in marketing, social media management, you can check more than one box and then, You would also check things that you want to be able to do. So you could check that you're interested in full-time work, or part-time work, or you wanna be on a podcast, for example.

[00:15:30] And so if somebody like yourself was going to search that database, you could click, I'm looking for a developer who wants to be on a podcast. And then you're gonna be shown, uh, people who fit that description because those are the things that they're looking to participate in. And so Gravity forms worked.

[00:15:47] Perfectly for that. And, uh, talking with Zack Katz over at Gravity Kit made meant that we could actually use both of those plugins together to be able to have people be able to put their information in and then also have it be searched and produce individual pages for people. So like I have a profile on there that I could send a link that went just to my profile, or I could.

[00:16:15] Um, just be part of a list of people that show up meeting any of those criteria.

[00:16:19] Matt: Do you remember the moment when you and Allie were talking about the project and kind of like concepted the idea of user submitted data, did displaying it on the front end. Was there ever a point where you said, oh, we'll code this and maybe find a developer to do that?

[00:16:37] No. Uh, or did you immediately say like, oh, let me go to Gravity Forms and just like

[00:16:41] Michelle: use this? Well, neither one of us are developers, so like the thought of coding anything from scratch was way more than I wanted to learn how to do, especially for something we don't get paid for. So like this is a passion project.

[00:16:54] This is a side, um, Project that we do to help the community in general and, you know, underrepresented people, um, in particular. And yeah, when neither one of us was gonna take a coding course to learn how to build, whatever that would be. And so we looked for tools that made sense and also tools that we didn't need to learn.

[00:17:14] So we did need to learn the gravity kit side of things cuz neither of us had used that. But we didn't need to learn gravity forms because gravity forms was something we both had in our arsenal and had the ability to kind of just roll into really quickly. So it was taking the gravity forms, figuring out how to display that with the gravity kit, um, which I did re rely on, uh, gravity kit, uh, support for one or two things that I wasn't sure how to make work.

[00:17:40] And then I did actually have a friend who is a developer help us tweak a few things on how things are displayed. Specifically the URL that appears when somebody is looking at their particular profile. So all of those things work together really nicely to get us to where we are with a searchable database.

[00:17:59] Matt: Do you have any [00:18:00] thoughts on how WordPress is? I don't wanna say becoming, because I feel like it's been there for a while, but I'm just curious your, take your thoughts on the whole no code movement that has happened, for a while. , WordPress not generally put into the bucket of no code.

[00:18:19] It's not like a bubble or heck even webflow for that, you know, in that degree.

[00:18:24] But these tools allow folks like you and I, non-developers to build pretty powerful applications. I'm just curious. Mm-hmm. Your take, how WordPress leans into us as a user segment in the future. Yeah. Do we start to develop more stuff? And what's your outlook on that?

[00:18:42] Michelle: So I love the fact that you can do, you can build a really robust site without.

[00:18:49] Coding at all. I think it does help a little bit if you know at least css, but you don't need CSS to be able to build a really nice website. Um, have I picked up a few coding things over the years? Yes. Do I need to use them? No. Do I want to use them sometimes? Right. Um, and I think it's great what I, what I, so in my previous life I was a freelancer.

[00:19:14] And in my freelance days, I would sometimes get hired to take over a site that somebody else had built, right? Who had either just dis discontinued their relationship with, with whoever the customer was. And I was like, I. Early on, like, oh, it's WordPress. I know WordPress. I could do anything with WordPress.

[00:19:32] And I took on this website that was completely cowboy coded from scratch. There was not a theme that was a theme I could go to for support cuz it was built in house and it was spaghetti code. Like there was literally almost the, I was in tears because I was like, sure I can do that. I had a deadline. And I'm like, I don't know how to do that.

[00:19:52] Right. And I actually had to turn to friends to be like, Point me in the right direction, show me tutorial. And it was one of the biggest learning experiences and least enjoyable experiences of my career in WordPress. Um, hats off to the people who can do those things, but I love the fact that you don't have to be a coder.

[00:20:13] To be really involved in WordPress to make a good living, um, in WordPress and even to be involved in the open source project. You don't have to be a developer, you don't have to be a coder. Um, certainly you can, and we need those people to continue to move things like plugins and themes, um, and, and, uh, core forward.

[00:20:32] But to be involved and make a good living off of WordPress, you do not have to be a developer. And I think that that's a good thing.

[00:20:39] Matt: Michelle Forhe, underrepresented in tech. Where can folks go to say thanks?

[00:20:44] Michelle: Uh, you can find me on Meet michelle.online, and certainly you can find, uh, Allie and me and the project@underrepresentedintech.com.

[00:20:52] Matt: all right. That was a fantastic conversation with Michelle. All the links will be, In the show notes, let's talk about the [00:21:00] video of the week videos. We got a lot of stuff to talk about on about YouTube.

[00:21:04] We already hinted that you'll be enjoying your American hotdog while watching fighting spam at the same time on our YouTube channel. But you've got another video that you're start, you're editing, you're, you're all over the editing room floor right now. What, what is it?

[00:21:18] Dustin: Yes. So if you, we were a sponsor for Word Camp Europe 2023. And we did this with Word Camp Asia did like a nice little recap that kind of shows, what we did at the event as well as, some of the landscapes that we, we got to see while there. So there's gonna be another video that shows off kind of our highlights from WordCamp eu.

[00:21:41] It's just a very. Lighthearted. Just way to kind of see what we did while at the event.

[00:21:48] Matt: I love Izzy's tos that are like all hands on, boots on the ground, and judges just have this massive amount of fomo. It's not even fear of it. It, it's something that passed and I'm watching it and I'm like, man, I wish, I wish I was there enjoying that delicious plate of food. Or, that the word after parties.

[00:22:07] But we will, I will be at WordCamp us will, the team will be at WordCamp us. This year sponsored booth again. So if you are headed there check us out. We always have the best t-shirts.

[00:22:22] I could definitely see our booth having the first ever Apple vision, I'm gonna call it right now. We'll probably have the first Apple vision, so,

[00:22:32] Dustin: I, I com. Yeah. I, I think Carl is way on board with it, and so I, I would not challenge that assumption.

[00:22:40] Matt: If, if you wanna hear some Apple vision, hot takes go back to last week's or two weeks ago, our last previous episode Dustin and I broke down some of the VR stuff that we have coming our way. It was quite fascinating.

[00:22:53] Dustin: Oh, and if you got your own hot takes, feel free to send them our way.

[00:22:56] Matt: Oh yeah. Yes, those you can send to Dustin. You have another, you uploaded another.

[00:23:02] Dustin: com. Send me all your hot takes.

[00:23:07] Matt: VR hot takes@rocketgenius.com.

[00:23:09] Dustin: Yeah, there we go.

[00:23:10] Matt: elite license plan video, something you've, you've uploaded recently.

[00:23:15] Dustin: Yeah. So, that's the final video in our sort of updated 2023 license plans. So, if, if you wanna check those out, those are all be found on our YouTube channel. And the grabby forms.com website just gives you an overview of the elite, the pro, the basic, and the nonprofit plans.

[00:23:35] Matt: Everything you wanted to know about purchasing gravity forms all in one nice handy playlist.

[00:23:41] Speaking of all things, gravity forms. Gravity forms one-on-one. Live stream kicks off June 29th, 11:00 AM Eastern. If you already follow our YouTube channel, you probably already see the placeholder there. Make sure you click on notify me so you get alerted when it goes live. Myself and Jim from the support team will be covering some of the basics [00:24:00] of gravity forms.

[00:24:01] Of course, getting it set up, where to find things like. The add-ons, the certified add-ons. How do you get the other add-ons from gravity forms.com? We'll show you how to set up some forms and then maybe dive into time permitting some of the Stripe payment and donation stuff that we've been working on for the last month or so.

[00:24:19] Talking about it here on the podcast and, and doing things on the YouTube channel. So, showing folks the basics. Come with your questions cuz we want to give you our answers. Fingers crossed. And we'll have that. Live live in the chat at, at our YouTube channel.

[00:24:32] Dustin: Yeah, that's exciting.

[00:24:33] Matt: All right, time for my favorite segment of the week. What's new with WordPress? Only two. Say only, but they're two pretty heavy topics that we can chat about today. If you haven't been following along with everyone's favorite page, everyone's favorite page building experience, Gutenberg Stein Point Oh was released.

[00:24:55] That quite a major milestone for Gutenberg. If you don't know this pro tip, by the way, Gutenberg is built into WordPress core, but you also can run. Gutenberg, the independent plugin, which will get these updates like the 16.0 well before WordPress. Core Gutenberg experience will get these updates.

[00:25:17] So if you, if you wanna stay ahead of the curve to kind of see what's coming to Gutenberg and full site editing have that plugin installed. It's called Gutenberg. You can find it in WordPress. Do org and add that to your site. Iterative updates coming to a version 16.0, which is always a head scratcher, but hey.

[00:25:34] We know what it's like to build software here. It's getting an add new page button from the full site editing experience. Who would've thunk it? You could add a new page in the full site editing experience. Better late than never, some say, but that's always a nice change.

[00:25:51] The other big update if you don't spend a lot of time in the weeds of the WordPress community is the com the upcoming feature called, Kind of almost being called the command center. I think it's up for debate. I'll have the link in the show notes, so you can go to that.

[00:26:05] The command center is a bit of a hot topic here. This is your what does Apple call it now? I'm gonna forget. It's command space bar, but then it's spotlight search. So Apple calls it Spotlight Search, where you know if you're, listen, here's another hot take. You ready for a inject the hot take sound bite. I'm not a big keyboard shortcut guy.

[00:26:28] Dustin: No.

[00:26:29] Matt: No. Spotlight is about as far as I go.

[00:26:33] Dustin: Interesting. I, I, I like keyboard shortcuts.

[00:26:37] Matt: text expander. None of that stuff. I'm not, I'm not a huge fan. What about you command? You're a keyboard shortcut guy?

[00:26:43] Dustin: Well, especially for like, I mean, I do a lot of video editing for my job, but so keyboard shortcuts are like a lifesaver there, but I, I, when I'm talking about like my normal web browsing experience, prob probably not very much.

[00:26:55] Matt: I mean, I know people who like are exp maybe it's just like this text [00:27:00] expander thing. People are always like, I can just text expander. Text expander. Everything's text expander. Not me. Not into it,

[00:27:06] Dustin: No,

[00:27:07] Matt: no.

[00:27:08] Dustin: you've got the hot take this week.

[00:27:10] Matt: Yeah. Okay. Keyboard shortcuts. I literally have to write, like when I'm editing videos in, I use da Vinci Resolve.

[00:27:18] Dustin: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:19] Matt: I, I have five, five of them, which are basically like trimming, clearing, and syncing waveforms. Syncing audio to waveform is like the only thing. I just like use shortcuts

[00:27:31] Dustin: One time years ago I saw a job listing for a, a video producer editing job. And like on the job posting, it was like, only apply if you use keyboard shortcuts, keyboard editing only. I'm like, that's such a specific thing to ask for a job.

[00:27:51] But anyways, sorry.

[00:27:53] Matt: Keep chat. G p t is the new keyboard shortcuts

[00:27:58] Dustin: absolutely.

[00:27:59] What's your take on this? Do you think Command center conveys what it actually is?

[00:28:06] Matt: No.

[00:28:07] Dustin: Yeah, I don't either.

[00:28:09] Matt: No. When I hear command center, it's action only. Like to me it's like it's action only. Like only create new page, new post.

[00:28:18] Dustin: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:18] Matt: Like in my opinion, like that's what I feel command center means. Like it doesn't mean, because I suspect we'll, we'll be able to pull up the. The media gallery, let's say you want you, you need to go to the media gallery to like find something. Like, if I need to do that, like I don't feel like I'm sending out a command to do that. I feel like I'm saying please bring me, or please open up the gallery for me. So that's where you knows spotlight search, which is Apple's phrase obviously kind of makes sense.

[00:28:49] I use that a lot to find things on my computer. So search is, really what comes to mind for me. So,

[00:28:57] Dustin: Command Center was the name of the place the Power Rangers would go to with Zordon. So that's what I think of.

[00:29:04] Matt: Yeah. Yes. Well, that's a, that's a pretty good superhero for WordPress,

[00:29:10] Dustin: Yeah.

[00:29:10] Matt: The last topic is WordPress confirms eight pilot events to launch the next generation of Word camps in 2023. Here's the gist. Smaller events, less swag, more accessible, and potentially less money.

[00:29:26] When you check out some of the proposals of these events, they really just look like meetups, right? Like they, they just look like smaller meetups. I'm cool with that. I think the first one kicking off. That they have in the books is about 90 people. No swag, no lunch just one track. And that's cool.

[00:29:48] Like, I, I think that's great. And maybe it's, we're moving into this space where Word camps are Yeah. They're going to be the, the, the big [00:30:00] ones. WordCamp eu, WordCamp Asia and WordCamp us. Because I think the whole Covid thing and. Heck, the costs of, of travel these days. I, I tweeted this out the other day, asking folks like how much they spent specifically, a lot of my followers in in the us how much they spent to go to WordCamp Europe.

[00:30:20] I mean, if you're a freelancer, you're dropping like 3000, $5,000 to go from the US to Greece. And to me that's. Pretty darn expensive. For a word camp, where really you're not getting any, if you're a freelancer, you're not getting any customers out of it. If you're, even if you're an agency, you're not getting customers out of it because they're all your peers.

[00:30:45] For the most part. So you're either like coupling that as a vacation for yourself because the entry fee is cheap, 50 bucks. But compared to the, the, the cost to get there and, and, and. Have accommodations is, is quite higher. Carl Hancock, I, I've never really heard of him, but he says in a Twitter thread, he says at the city and town level, stop doing them.

[00:31:09] These should be, those should be meetups. I agree. Allow WordCamp events at the country level WordCamp Spain, for instance, for larger countries with states and regions that can support them. Example Florida, California, and allow WordCamp events at the state level and then have larger regional global events like Word Camp Europe, Asia which already exist.

[00:31:27] WordCamp US should either be WordCamp US slash Canada and then introduce WordCamp Latin America or simply have WordCamp Americas. I kind of agree. One of the things I I, I'm curious of, and you, you might, I dunno if you have an opinion on this, Dustin, but it kind of makes me think of how does that shape the, like, how does that shape the decisions coming out of these big events?

[00:31:52] The, the decisions for WordPress, like, I'm curious to see how the, the differences of WordCamps begins to shape. WordPress, the software, cuz I think a lot of great meetings of the minds come together. But then when you're talking, 4,000, $5,000 to go to an event and you're not being sponsored by anybody, now those folks aren't really going and you're not making those same connections.

[00:32:19] And is it just reserved for. Brands that have teams that are going to these bigger events, does that bring in more corporate sponsorship? I, I think these things start to shape what these events look like and because it's open source software eventually impacts maybe just a little bit a fraction of how the software is developed.

[00:32:39] That's what's kicking around in my head. I don't know if you have any opinions on that.

[00:32:43] Dustin: I think I. I agree with what Carl says. Not just saying that cuz he's, runs Gravity Forms, but No, I, I, I,

[00:32:54] Matt: that that, that's where I know him from. That's right.

[00:32:56] Dustin: oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He, he's our boss. No I, [00:33:00] I don't have much to add other than to say that I agree.

[00:33:03] Matt: Yeah. Interesting times for WordCamp's, interesting times for WordPress. I, I know one thing you can't lose out on subscribing to the podcast. Keeping us in your podcast players. Give us a like on Apple Podcasts if that's where you listen. If you have any other questions, comments, concerns for the show, you know where to find me, matt@gravityforums.com.

[00:33:26] Drop me a line. And if you have those VR Hot takes, well

[00:33:31] Dustin: dustin@rockygenius.com. I'll take 'em all.

[00:33:34] Matt: VR Hot Takes. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you in the next episode.