Pods to WCEU + Google Analytics 4 readiness
4321. Hey, Gravity Formers. It's Monday, June 12. Some of you are probably coming back from WordCamp EU just like the Gravity Forms team. Dustin's back on the show.
Speaker 1:We're gonna talk about WordCamp EU. We're gonna talk about the updates coming to Gravity Forms and all things happening in the Gravity Forms ecosystem. Have you met the developer of the pods custom field plug in? If you haven't, here's your chance to meet Scott Kingsley Clark today. It's Breakdown, a Gravity Forms podcast.
Speaker 1:Hey, Dustin. Welcome back to the Gravity Forms podcast studio.
Speaker 2:Hey. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to dive into
Speaker 1:a lot of the fun stuff that we have lined up for you. The listener, if you haven't subscribed yet, follow us in your favorite podcasting app. Just search breakdown Gravity Forms. If you're catching this from a friend, a referral as it were, add us. And if you love WordPress and you love Gravity Forms, hopefully, you're gonna love this show.
Speaker 1:If you do, send me an email. If you don't, send me an email. Let me know what we can do to improve things here, mad@gravityforms.com. We're gonna jump into the most important updates for this week and the last couple of weeks. Yes.
Speaker 1:Or last week, Stripe five point o was supposed to be released. It did not get released. It is now scheduled for a few days from now, fingers crossed, for June 14 is what we're targeting for that Stripe five point o release. We talked about it in the conversational add ons webinar that we did. We talked about it in previous episodes that it was coming soon.
Speaker 1:It's still coming soon ish, all those great updates that you've been looking for. June 14. That's just in a few days from this recording. So fingers crossed. We know you're you're waiting for it, and we wanna deliver it to you.
Speaker 1:We just wanna deliver right. That's the goal here. I don't fully speak for the engineering team, but I I assume that that's what the objective is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I can second that. If you don't mind me asking, what does Stripe five point o bring to the table?
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a great question. Over 20 plus payment gateways now, this new Stripe link, this allows you to or allows the end user, your customer, to save their payment details within the Stripe realm, let's say, and they can easily check out from your store from the next purchase moving forward. Right? So, you know, the first purchase, they might have to do the laborious work of adding their name and their address and their credit card information, but they have a choice to save that. So if they're doing business with you again, it's just a faster, you know, means to check out.
Speaker 1:And I think that's what a lot of people are really interested in, conversions, optimization, all of that stuff. Did you did you see anything in the release that was interesting to you, or have you not had a chance to dive into it yet?
Speaker 2:I haven't had a chance, so I was, like, asking out of genuine curiosity. I will be making a video and doing a deep dive on it in the future, but, yeah, I haven't had a chance to yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's funny. You and I, we have this we share these these responsibilities where you'll do the video, and then eventually, I'll do a webinar, and we know we talk about it on the podcast. So we're all you and I are kind of, like, learning in public as we go here on this podcast, which is which is always fun. Don't tell our bosses that, though.
Speaker 1:No. Don't tell our bosses.
Speaker 2:They're not learning in public. I
Speaker 1:know how to develop the whole plugin, actually. I just I haven't told anybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Other notable topics, These are the things that are moving and shaking in the Gravity Forms world, things that you should be paying attention to, especially if you're a freelancer, an agency, or a developer around the Gravity Forms ecosystem. Google Analytics add on has been updated to now support Google Analytics four. I will tell you ahead of time before you ask me, I know nothing about Google Analytics four. It is a beast of a analytics app. I haven't really used Google Analytics since their current version.
Speaker 1:Use another app called Fathom, and it's just much more lightweight, and there's a lot of more lightweight alternatives. Of course, the trade off is you're just not getting this intense amount of data that Google is able to capture from the visits. But for those of you that and it's look. When you zoom out, it's the most popular. It is the industry standard for measuring stats and running your your your retargeting campaigns, your marketing campaigns.
Speaker 1:Google Analytics four is huge, and we've got you ready for that now with the Google Analytics add on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And just one thing to note too is that the if you're using Google's Universal Analytics, they are going to stop processing data on 07/01/2023, so you'll want to migrate over to some something else if you're still using that.
Speaker 1:I'm glad we're warning everyone now. In in fairness, we've, you know, we've been warning folks and so has has Google. Like, if this is if if we are if Matt and Dustin are your source of truth for Google Analytics, you might need to find a podcast that covers SEO because we're the ones we're not the ones for you. That's for sure. So that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Google Analytics now our add on now supports Google Analytics four. Check that out. Last week, I did a webinar with Adam and Morgan from the team talking all about conversational forms beta, and we showed that off to the beta user group, which is located currently right now in Facebook. Mhmm. You have to be a customer.
Speaker 1:Again, we've talked about this in the past, but I'll just I'll just rehash it. The call to action here is if you're a current customer and you want to explore sort of these workshops that we do and you want the beta releases and provide some feedback to the team, maybe some future goodies, gravityforms.com/beta. You have to be a customer and you have to apply there. That'll get you access to the Facebook group, and then put you on the email list for all these updates. The webinar was great.
Speaker 1:Had a load of questions from a handful of individuals, and the recording will be going out to the email list hopefully next week. We had a bit of a delay because of WordCamp EU, which we'll talk about later. But the webinar went great, and it was good for me to hear the stuff that Adam was showing off from a product perspective, cool things that I didn't know about, and then, of course, Morgan from the back end engineering side of it, how it's being developed, why it's being developed this way, and what the future is for conversational forms. I think this is exciting. So conversational forms beta six is going out the day that you and I are recording this.
Speaker 1:So it'll already be out by the time you are listening to this. Dear listener, you can go and download that in your dashboard.
Speaker 2:And do we do encourage signing up for the beta. I know I know Adam has been wanting to get as many people in on that beta as possible. So if you're interested, please check it out.
Speaker 1:I've seen some folks ask in the Facebook group, in the public Facebook group, not the beta Facebook group, as to why, like, this might be important. Like, you know, as all things on the Internet, when you post something, people always want more. Mhmm. And there was a lot of questions around, rightly so, like, what this like, what can a user expect from this program? The beta group is in has a beta label on it right now.
Speaker 1:Right? We are experimenting with this. This is not something that Gravity Forms has done in, like, official capacity before. So we're taking all feedback, but my goal from the marketing side of it is to communicate these updates, these changes, and help facilitate some feedback with the product and engineering team through the way of this podcast and and the live webinars that we do. Perhaps in the future, the product and engineering teams wanna sit down with one on ones with customers, which I know Adam does.
Speaker 1:And then maybe we'll have some kind of perk to steal a word from the Gravity Forms ecosystem. Maybe there'll be some kind of perk in the future. If you're giving us a lot of great feedback, maybe there's a way that that we can kind of supplement that that effort, you know, from from from the customer side. So we don't know yet, but we're we're enjoying the the process so far, and we're looking forward to to doing another webinar probably in July with another add on that we have coming down to get released.
Speaker 2:That's exciting.
Speaker 1:So, Dustin, I sat down with a gentleman named Scott Kingsley Clark. I've known him for quite some time. He is the developer, maintainer, or one of the maintainers of the Pods plugin. Have you heard of the Pods plugin before this interview?
Speaker 2:Not before this interview. No. So the so let getting a chance to listen to the interview was really insightful.
Speaker 1:Advanced custom fields, have you run across that before in your journeys?
Speaker 2:On the level that it was discussed in the interview.
Speaker 1:Two strikes so far. I'm gonna throw you another one. No, I'm just kidding. The Pods the Pods plugin has been around forever, probably just as long, maybe if not longer than ACF, advanced custom fields. If you've not heard of pods before, it's it's an alternative to advanced custom fields.
Speaker 1:It's got a different way of thinking.
Speaker 2:If you go to pods.io, they have a one click demo, and it's really easy to to try everything out. And it was just kind of crazy how much you can do for something that is totally free.
Speaker 1:Scott and I talk about that in this upcoming interview. Pods looks to remain wholly free and open source as much as they possibly can. If you're connecting Gravity Forms input data into custom fields to display on pages, you know, team pages, book archives. Those are just the basics. Pods is your custom fields plug in.
Speaker 1:Especially if you wanna try something that's free and open source, we're gonna jump into that interview right now.
Speaker 3:So, yes, GrattyForms just recently reapproached me to sponsor me again to work on the pods GrattyForms add on. And what that means for for me and for pods is this add on, which started out fifteen years ago or so as just a a couple of snippets that mapped a form submission over to a new pod item in a a custom table and things like that, it actually morphed over time through a number of different iterations, and now Gravity Forms is fully behind me towards this next major refactor. And what that means for anyone who's using the plugin is, first of all, it's gonna be completely compatible with all the latest code and classes and everything from the back end of Gravity Forms. We're talking about the newest filters and actions available. There's gonna be some really nice little tools in there, like being able to automatically set up a new pod or post type directly from your form.
Speaker 3:So all you have to do is just click a button, and all of a sudden now you have a completely new custom post type with all of the fields from your Gravity Forms as custom fields and all of the mapping between the two automatically set. So things like that are now gonna be possible through this partnership, and I'm really super excited to get this stuff finished and out the door because I know we've had a number of people who have been very interested in in continuing to use the Gradleforms add on for pods, and some of the code in in our add on has forever been very backward compatible. However, a lot of things have happened since we first initially released it a few years back. And so I'd like to kind of update things and clean things up and get it ready for this next generation of feed mappings.
Speaker 1:There's maybe two types of WordPress users that start to advance their usage of WordPress. If they're a developer, they start on the surface. Back in the day when you and I started, it was probably just like HTML, CSS and PHP. Now there's JavaScript or more JavaScript. And you start to learn about, oh, what's this custom fields thing?
Speaker 1:What's this custom post types thing? And then end users who build out or have a an agency build them a a a more robust site, they start to experience, oh, custom post types, custom fields. I put my data in here. It's displayed on the front end. I'll say custom fields, but can you fill the fill in the the gaps?
Speaker 1:What can pods do for the average user? Custom fields, but it certainly goes beyond that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally. The the way that pods works is it allows you to create new content types for your WordPress site, and those content types can be a number of different things. Within WordPress, you get posts and pages and things like that, but it already has support for you to add new custom post types. So you can create something like books or authors or gyms or whatever you might wanna have on your site.
Speaker 3:Maybe for a band, you might have members or an agency, you might have developers and think all like, everything you could think of, you can create structures for inside of WordPress today. But a lot of those things are hidden behind PHP APIs, and sometimes most of the people using these plugins in WordPress itself don't want to get into the code, and they don't want to have to manage all of that stuff themselves. Maybe they don't understand PHP or maybe they're just people like everyday end users who who don't deal with development. They just wanna set up a site real fast. So pods allows them to create these content types.
Speaker 3:They can create custom post types. They can also create custom taxonomies such just like categories and post tags, but their own taxonomies. You can create or you can create pods that extend existing objects such as users. You could extend the posts and page post types already in WordPress and extend the categories of post tag taxonomies in WordPress. You can create custom options pages like settings, screen, and everything else.
Speaker 3:You can create all these different things. You could even extend the media library. So you can add custom fields to your media library items. When you upload an item, you can add extra metadata if you'd like. So there's lots of possibilities all wrapped up within this one plugin.
Speaker 3:And once you create these content type structures, all you have to do is click a few buttons and you have a number of fields at your disposal. You've got field types that are very comprehensive. You have relationships that are very deep and very awesome. Like you can do some really cool things with relationships that like, maybe a developer who does want to code may actually choose to use something like pods because it makes their job easier when they're dealing with databases and relational data. So there's lots of stuff you can do within pods, and that's why whenever I first started dealing with Gravity Forms many years ago, don't know how I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't remember what year it was. 2008, 2009 when it first came out. And one of the first things I thought in my head was, how do I map this over into my own content types and my own tables so that, yes, I have a contact form, but I may also want to use this form builder for not just a contact form. Like, think a lot of people are still stuck in that mindset. Let's use contact forms and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:And and I was already thinking about, well, I wanna create application forms, and I wanna create, like, whole screens powered by Gravity Forms that can then map data only if I need to into a custom table or into a post type or wherever I want. So that is is I think why this fusion of the pod the power of pods really works well with the power of a form builder like Gravity Forms. Just a complete knockout plug in.
Speaker 1:And if you're listening to this for the first time, you're hearing about pods, maybe you're you're hearing about custom post types and custom fields and and all of the fun stuff that Scott just mentioned. Gravity Forms access sort of that front end that will glue that data from, let's say, submission. Maybe you wanna build a business directory website. Maybe you wanna build a small, social media type site where there's profiles and user logins and data that's being accepted on the front end. Pause will help pass that data into, let's say, the database of WordPress so that you can display it when user logged in, logged out, all kinds of different things that you can do with that data.
Speaker 1:And Gravity Forms acts as that front end conduit to get that data in. I'm curious. Let's go a little bit deeper under the hood of WordPress. Why hasn't WordPress built this stuff in? I'm sure you don't want WordPress to build this core component of custom fields, and I'm thinking of WordPress' sort of CMS cousin of the web, is Drupal with like CCK and views where it's they're modules, but they're like core components to Drupal to a degree.
Speaker 1:Why hasn't WordPress itself built upon the concept of custom post types and custom fields in a more user friendly fashion?
Speaker 3:That's a really strong question right there. Like, this is something that's plagued everyone. So WordPress back in WordPress version three point o, I wanna say, they introduced custom post types and custom taxonomies, and everyone was excited about that. And now all of a sudden, plugins and themes could start using these these really cool features. And I don't think it's very much a secret that I've I've actually always been a proponent for getting some sort of UI into WordPress itself.
Speaker 3:Personally, I have also been trying to push along a fields API project for WordPress to get more APIs built in for custom fields and for interacting with forms within WordPress across all the different areas and screens. So pods itself is a free plugin, so it would very much we're all doing work on pods with all the contributors and and and people helping out with support. We're all doing this because we believe in in the project and make helping people do awesome things. But I've made it, like, very clear to everyone involved that it's not about getting people to use our solution. It's getting them to use the right solution.
Speaker 3:So sometimes that might be using a different plugin like advanced custom fields or some other different solutions out there. And I've always, for the last number of years since custom post types came out, I I deeply think it does need to be represented in the admin screen inside of WordPress itself. And whether or not someone actually says, well, not everyone needs that. I think not everyone realizes they need it. Because when you have that capability, you can do so much more.
Speaker 3:And so just merely putting it in there, I think you would find that it would become very useful. You've seen millions and millions of active installs for plugins like custom post type UI. And advanced custom fields, they now have custom post types and custom taxonomies feature inside of their plugin that's it's as part of the everything that they can do with custom fields. Now you can add content types there too like pods. And I think just seeing the user bases for these types of plugins grow exponentially over time is, like, validation for that idea.
Speaker 3:These things are wanted. We need to build better tooling for every plug in and and and theme developer and for end users to utilize. APIs for these developers to build better solutions that are more unified and and uniform, and they feel like they're part of WordPress, but still allowing for customizations. And then interfaces for end users to be able to do those sorts of things without having to install a plug in. Something as simple as just adding a new content type would be more than enough for a lot of people.
Speaker 3:Some people don't even need custom fields, and they don't have to take a thing like ACF or whatever and just wholesale merge it into WordPress core. All they would have to do is expose content types, and I think you get halfway there. And then at that point, maybe down the road, we add interfaces for custom fields, but I I feel like the the real big sell there is getting content types represented in the interfaces because that would be a very easy lift. It's very simple and it could all be powered by custom post types themselves. So there's so much things you can be able to do there.
Speaker 1:This stuff makes people feel really powerful and I suspect that if we ever saw a core solution around something like this, it would probably be pretty limited because there's just so much work to be done with WordPress itself that you'll get add a custom post type and you'll get a text field, a drop down field, multi select, and radio buttons, and that's it. And I and I think the wonderful thing about WordPress and open source is the fact that you would come along and be like, okay. This is great. This is a great start, but there's thousands of other users and use cases that want more stuff. And if WordPress isn't gonna build it, we can build it here at Pods.
Speaker 1:Years ago you might have said, hey, want a team page and somebody said, use Pods with a custom post type and all the different custom fields you might need to build a team page then query the database, display it on the front end. Now people can say, I'll just use a team pattern. Can you give me the the other side of that argument of why somebody might want to build out a custom post type with some custom fields instead of what I'll call the easy route, which might
Speaker 3:be just a pattern that you use once on a single page and that's it. Yeah. So like maybe a good example of this is before blocks, whenever you had content and you had pages and you had, like, I wanna have a members list. Okay. Let me create a table.
Speaker 3:Let me do these things. And you could you could create a members list on a page before blocks. And I think the use case is improved. Like like, you can use blocks to do those things, and it looks easier and it's easier to work with. I think that is not the wrong decision.
Speaker 3:I think it's a matter of figuring out what you need for your team page. Let's say that an agency has a list of developers, and they want to just create an about page with all their people in there. That's cool. And then now they have a new developer come in, and the person that built the site was like, hey. I don't have time.
Speaker 3:I'm working on this new project. Because as an agency, usually, they have their own team working on their own site, so they have to have someone come in. So someone's gotta come in and edit and find those this the information and add it to the table. And, well, now they broke the table or now they kinda messed up the screen or maybe maybe more importantly, they want to be able to add a form that lets someone submit their own information to add themselves to the the members list after some approval process or something like that. So once you get into more complicated use cases, those things like blocks are much less useful for creating and managing data because blocks, I think, are best used for managing content.
Speaker 3:But there's a difference between content and data because data itself is meant to be utilized in ways you can query against it and in ways that you can interact with it outside of the original input. So if you put it into the blocks and you place everything inside of your your team page, then all of a sudden you're kind of locked. Now you cannot have someone come to the site and just be able to edit members. Now they have to have editor access to your or author access or whatever to the the the site itself. And and so you lose the granularity of control there that you would gain with separating things out.
Speaker 3:So you could maybe only give them access to a post type for instance, or maybe a settings page that just has a list or repeatable field or whatever with the member's information in it. So there's there's so much you could do to separate things out, and there's not necessarily a right or wrong way to do it. It just depends on that use case. That use case informs where where you need to be. And I think for me, with pods, like we built blocks inside of pods that allow you to embed dynamic content in ways that let you just kind of output your HTML how you want, and then you just place your your fields into the content and it will just output.
Speaker 3:And there's tools like that that are really useful. There's a blocks API inside of pods as well as ACF has its own blocks API. You can build your own custom blocks so you could have more complicated solutions in there so you can embed team members or things like you like that and what you might wanna do. There's all sorts of things that you can leverage within the block editor nowadays as opposed to when it first started or even before that you you you could not really do back then. And I think that from all of this, the approach to embedding content is has never really been better than it is today.
Speaker 3:I think if you were to manually curate it in a page, the use case for that is starting to kind of dwindle because the use case is available to be able to be covered by these dynamic embeds. There's lots of plugins and block editor blocks themselves that you can utilize. There's things like Divi or whatever that that have their own builders that you can embed content in. There's just so many different options out there now that you don't necessarily have to maintain your own HTML and markup and your own mark blocks. You can just build the data and do all this stuff way more easily without having to have a developer background.
Speaker 1:You can get pods for free by searching for pods at wordpress.org in the repo or go to pods.io. There's also a pro version. What's the elevator pitch for that? Why should people fork over some money to get the pro version?
Speaker 3:Well, pods itself is free, and we survive on donations and sponsorships. And then I went and built a separate thing called the the pods pro add ons, which are professional add ons that give you unique features. These are not like features like like you might use ACF and you might say, want a repeatable field and all of a sudden now you need to buy ACF Pro to get repeatable fields. But a lot of the features that are in the Pods Pro add ons are unique. They're not necessarily, like, must haves for every site.
Speaker 3:So these features are kind of funded on their own, and they're separate from Pods. And so they're separated. So if you become a friend of pods, you can actually get discounts towards pods pro license if you want. But the money you spend on pods pro does not stop the focus of the main pods pro the main pods project itself. They're completely separate separate entities, separate companies, separate finances.
Speaker 3:Although pods pro, a lot of the profit goes back into pods anyways because it's my thing. So a lot of times, I think if you want a project that can do lots of different things with page builders, the Pods Pro add ons offer you some very unique features that are not available for any other custom field plugin. So that might be probably the best thing I could recommend is is that right there because that's a very popular need for a lot of different people.
Speaker 1:You can become a friend of pods at friends.pods.io. Scott Kingsley Clark, where can folks go to say thanks? On the Internet, tell us Twitter if you still use it, website. Where do you want folks to go to say thanks? Well, you can
Speaker 3:always hit me up on my site. It's s k c dot d e v.
Speaker 1:Okay. Once again, interview with Scott Kingsley Clark. Pods, you can become a friend of Pods. I'll link up everything in the show notes if you wanna support his work. If you wanna check it out, pods.io.
Speaker 1:That one click installer, like Dustin mentioned, get your hands dirty quite literally with some custom field button.
Speaker 2:It literally is one click. You just press the button and you're good.
Speaker 3:We do sponsor his work
Speaker 1:as a developer. You can too become a friend of pods at friends.pods.io. So, Dustin, you worked on a new video. You published a new video, fight spam with Akismet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Akismet's really cool. We actually have several different spam prevention tools with Gravity Forms. Kismet is one of them. So when you submit a form, it'll send the data from that form over to a Kismet and check it with their global database to see if it, like, you know, triggers anything as spam and helps prevent spam form entries on your end.
Speaker 2:And I thought it might just be nice to kind of give a quick overview of, like, the different spam tools that we do have because, you know, you might not know just how much how many tools we do have at that you could use to keep spam off your site because spam is awful. And with Gravity Forms core, without any add ons, you have Google reCAPTCHA v two and Honeypot, And those are both spam prevention measures that don't send the data off to another company such as Akismet or Google v three. So if you're if you wanna keep all the data protect your customer's data. Not not that sending it out is putting it in jeopardy or anything like that. But if you don't wanna send that data out, Honeypot and Google Recapture v two are great ways to help fight spam without doing that.
Speaker 2:And then Recapture v three and Akismet, Those are both spam prevention type softwares or spam prevention tools, I should say, that take the data from the form submission, check it against either Google or Akismet's database, and will automatically filter things that are marked that are considered spam, so you don't even have to see it unless you go specifically looking for your spam form entries.
Speaker 1:It's Mhmm. It's malicious. It's annoying. You know, it could be a vector of of attack, right, too on Absolutely. You know, somebody's WordPress website in security terms.
Speaker 1:You have to deal with it. Right? The junk mail that I get in my mailbox every day still blows my mind that it's legal to waste that much paper sent to my mailbox that I just take and put in the recycle bin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and it's you can start up, like, a brand new email address today, and by tomorrow, somehow, you'll be getting spam. Like, they find you.
Speaker 1:Alright, Dustin. One of my favorite segments of the week, it's the what's new with WordPress. Maybe I'll have a little song introduction in the background happening right now to to really prime us for some of the hot stuff happening in the WordPress world. Hottest thing right now is WordCamp EU. As we are recording this moments ago, the team from Gravity Forms has posted our photos of the booth that's being set up at WordCamp EU, and it looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:And there's, of course, some of our amazing t shirts that won't last long, and what looks to be a VR headset. Have you ever played with that VR headset before?
Speaker 2:Yes. I have. So it's a Meta Quest two, which is no wires or anything. You can it all runs in the headset. So it's a completely wireless experience, ton of fun.
Speaker 2:And we actually have at WordCamp right now, we have a demo or we have a VR setup where you can build a form with Gravity Forms in a VR environment. So it's it's really cool.
Speaker 1:And you're using the what are those, like, Joy Cons in your hands to do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they're the controllers for for the if you've ever yeah. If you've never played with VR, they they come with these, like, really cool controllers that, like, can sense when when you put your finger over a button and stuff like that, they give you a lot of granular control. And so you can use those to actually, like, build a form in this VR environment. So it's it's a cool little incentive to check out our booth.
Speaker 2:And we also run a giveaway for the Meta Quest two that you can enter if
Speaker 1:you're Oh. If you're at the WordCamp EU, too bad too bad anyone listening to this has already missed that. Well But we will be telling it to them at the at the booth.
Speaker 2:I can't make any promises, because I don't know the future, but we have done a giveaway like this at WordCamp Asia, and I think this is going to be something we continue to do, but don't quote me on that.
Speaker 1:Let's do a segment within a segment. We're gonna get real inception on you. What's your what's your hot take? This is the hot take segment of our podcast Okay. What's your hot take on those on the Apple vision?
Speaker 2:Apple does things really well. I think it's going to be hard to beat what Oculus is doing or not Oculus, what Meta is doing with the VR. I'll be interested to see the Apple Vision because, again, like, Apple is really good at taking something that exists and, like, refining it and and innovating on it really cool ways. They just announced the the Quest three that's gonna have oh gosh. I can't think of the word.
Speaker 2:Mixed reality or is it mixed reality? There's there's VR, and then there's, like, things like Google Glass that bring in that let you see, like, your environments, and they add on top of your environment. And it's like augmented reality or something like that. But medical the Meta Quest three is gonna have features like that. So I'm curious to see what Apple will do.
Speaker 2:I'm curious if
Speaker 1:they can bring that level of polish to the the VR space. What about you? I hear that they have spent a bazillion dollars on refining, moving around the UI, the interface with your eyes. That's cool. And selecting things with your eyes.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine trying to drag a Gutenberg block with my eyes. Trying to select a Gutenberg block between three columns is nearly impossible now with three mice at your desk and a Never touch mind trying to do it with your eyeballs. So I'm skeptical. I think that yeah. I think it's still just a beta product that's very expensive for most folks.
Speaker 1:I think it'll wear off after a while if if there's no apps that are really built for it out of the gate. It's like the iPad. Why can't I have a laptop experience, a Mac OS experience on on my iPad yet. Yeah. I mean, it's kinda there, but it's not, and you're just like, it's not a complete replacement for my laptop.
Speaker 1:And I feel like that's gonna be just the same with vision, and of course, it's gonna change, you know. In three years, it's gonna be freaking amazing.
Speaker 2:So, you know,
Speaker 1:we just have to wait.
Speaker 2:And this I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but I don't think I'd wanna move stuff with my eyes. That just seems weird. Like, I'd rather use my hands. Like, I I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, how do you like, how would you grab something? So I can understand, like, hovering with your eyes, but how do you grab it? Do you just, like, give this intense stare, and then it and it, picks it up, and then you have to, like, move it around with your head?
Speaker 2:Like Gotta give it Is
Speaker 1:that what we're gonna be doing?
Speaker 2:The thousand yard stare of what you wanna be Yeah.
Speaker 1:People are gonna be looking at you swinging your head around with this, and you're just like, I'm just dragging an icon from one desktop to the next. Slow news week, as you can tell, because we're spending a lot of time talking about this. Last bit of information here is, you know, speaking of these things that are pushing the boundaries of technology, my gosh, we've heard about AI a lot. AI actually came up in the Conversational Forms add on webinar that we did. You know, can we have a will there be a world where you can actually have a conversation with the form, you know, vis a vis AI and all this stuff?
Speaker 1:Possibly, maybe anything's possible. But Automattic is getting into the AI game at wordpress.com and Jetpack with what they're dubbing the Jetpack, or just the AI assistant in Jetpack, and I'm sure it's just called AI assistant on wordpress.com. Right now, it's a tool that augments your writing experience, you know, as as best it it can do. I haven't tested it yet. I do wanna test it just to get some experience on it.
Speaker 1:It looks interesting. These all look interesting. I still haven't found a great use for AI. Like, everyone's saying, the copywriting world is ending, and I just haven't done it yet. I haven't felt the power of this chat GPT stuff.
Speaker 1:I I feel like I'm missing out.
Speaker 2:I think AI can be a a really helpful tool when it's when you have a base that you can feed it through or or that you can, like, send something and get ideas back from it. But if you're using but if you're not submitting your own content, you're using just AI. Don't think it's at the level where you can reliably trust the information it gives you.
Speaker 1:I keep hearing about, like, ChatGPT plug ins. I think that's what they were how they refer to them as. I think maybe once they unlock that stuff to the average user or, you know, whatever, even if it's a paid account. Right? Whatever.
Speaker 1:$20 a month. And if you can do these things that actually save you time, it might be worth that trade off. Alright, Dustin. We're gonna close it out with something a little bit more light hearted, a little bit safer, a little bit more human friendly. Okay.
Speaker 1:There is a 30% off sale happening now at gravityforms.com. You have today and tomorrow to purchase this. It ends on June 13, 11:59PM eastern. Save 30%. No coupon code required.
Speaker 1:It's just the prices strike right at pricing page. You can get elite licenses for $181 a year, pro licenses for $111 per year, and a basic license for $41 a year, 30% off. Check it out if you wanna pick up Gravity Forms. Or if you want your customers to buy Gravity Forms, you have until tomorrow.
Speaker 2:This sale was not generated by AI? This sale was
Speaker 1:not generated by AI. And I told you, Dustin and I shouldn't be your source of breaking news. So we warned you at the top of the podcast. Dustin, it's been a great episode. Thanks for hanging out today.
Speaker 1:And everybody gravityforms.com/breakdown. If you love WordPress, if you love Gravity Forms, if you know somebody who does, just tell them that to subscribe to the breakdown. Search for breakdown in your favorite podcast listening app. That's all you gotta do. Tune in every every two weeks with bonus episodes thrown in here and there.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening, everybody.
