So did you, did you plant them knowing about the the heat though or was that really the show

pop

I am glad to be here. Glad to be here.

So it’s treacherous, but I made it so it’s

Yeah, that helps.

Sure. Yeah, yeah. So I’ll go, uh not quite all the way back. Well, we will start at birth, but we’ll rewind a bit, a little bit to um, to my college days, I, I suppose. Um so in, in school I was very much into music. I was a musician, played a lot of guitar and drums and some bands and things. I really love that.

I never quite wanted to make a career out of it. I just pictured myself like endlessly touring the country in a bus or van or something like that. I don’t know that life doesn’t quite quite appeal to me and I’m not, some superstar is going to be, you know, uh whatever famous in play shows and whatever

Do they get some attention?

Nice. I like all three a lot. That was, that was my thing in high school. I was just like fly off the bus and like crank up the amplifier and wait for my, you know, friends to come play or whatever. So yeah, so really? Uh and I think that’s a common.

I think that’s a comment story, like a lot of developer people I think are just like have a creative side of them, that’s why they like building things, you know, so they, I think a lot of times are like, oh I’m also a novelist or musician or like other other creative pursuit pursuits or whatever I think is kind of common.

So yeah, I was very much into music, we didn’t quite want to do that as a career, so I had no idea what I um should major in in college. I ended up, I had this kind of pivotal day where I printed off like this sheet of all the majors and academic programs at my school offered and crossed out all those that I did not want to, I kid you not,

it was a process of elimination scenario for me. So I was like I crossed out all the ones I didn’t want to do and uh somehow I landed on um this this degree, my school had occupational safety and health management, uh huh.

So I thought it was like broad enough in one sense was narrow enough another sense, so I just, I went for that and after I got to school I kind of paired those two together, I took like my safety degree and then, you know, this foot in the door that I had in the form of um this hospital er job and I prepared the two together and I started doing health care safety.

Um So I did that for a number of years and uh part of something in me wasn’t satisfied and that’s like the creative you know part of me I view myself as a creative person. Somebody likes to to build things and tinker and so on into that job.

It’s very much like here’s what OSHA says we have to do for the E. P. A. Or whatever and I’m gonna train you to do exactly that nothing less, nothing more and do it on repeat for first shift, second shift third shift this month next month. And after a while it got a bit old for me. So I uh I wanted something new.

This was around around the time when uh some popular teacher self to code sites were springing up on the internet. Um So those you know listeners you might recognize like code academy or treehouse or uh code school were a few of the ones um in those days those were becoming popular online. And I was always I was always interested in tech.

I was always like an early adopter of new software and just you know into intertek. I saw that these you know teach yourself to code type sites were springing up online and I thought at some point I was like I wonder if I would like coding, you know like writing code.

I have a friend or two who do that and it seems to be interesting for them, like I’ll just try it, you know, just just to take care, whatever. So I did, I started going through some of the curriculum that those um services had, that those sites had and ended up really liking it, you know, I just, I just I thought…

I remember thinking like this is so cool that you can, if you just kind of figured commit to memory what the rules are and like how to write the syntax, you can do anything you want, right, you can say like I’m gonna take this data up from here and push it over there and save it here and extracted here and like anything you can dream up.

You know, there are very few limitations, it seemed like to what you can accomplish if you just kind of know the basic building blocks of variables and condition als and all that kind of stuff. So actually took one intro to computer science course through Harvard University’s Extension school, I believe that renamed it back back then. It was ed X dot org.

and that just furthered my like kind of love for for building things with with check in with code and stuff, so yeah, that was the final straw, I think so then I was all in after that. Um and thankfully for me, I have a good friend of mine brian richards, you know, you you might know if you’re in the WordPress space, anybody listening, he runs WP sessions dot com.

Which is like WordPress related training site. Um So brian, I have known each other for years like since college and he at the time, you know, was had a lead WordPress development role. Um so I’ve reached out to him and I was like, hey, I’m in, I’m into this coding staff like what can you teach me?

I want to, I want to learn more and building sites for next to no money, you know, I I would build like this, this pretty large, Pretty large site in charge, something like $200 and spend like spent like a month and a half, you know what I mean? But at that point I didn’t care, I was in it, I wasn’t in it for the money, I was in it for the learning.

I was like if I complete this project, they don’t know how to do all of those things for the next project and I can eventually charge more and whatever. So I eventually got good enough at that to leave my health care jobs, I was very excited about that.

I went to go work for 10 up for first, which is a well known agency in the WordPress space um in the next several years. Yeah, I I work for for 10 up for another company luminary, web services um for web dev studios after that um by that point I had had some leadership responsibility. I was like in a in a lead engineer position by that point.

So I was like leading some of our development we did for big enterprise clients. Like Campbell soup was one of the um the clients that we that we had. So I was you know, leading the development team that built out many of the features for some Campbell’s sites and things like that in the agency world. Like I I really enjoy what I was doing and I learned a lot.

I was learning a lot but at a certain point I started like on the side I became enamored with these new job script, you know, frameworks that are coming out like um like react.

And I was living react and reduction graph QL and kind of you know tinkering with those technologies and and I really liked the just super snappy app like experience is that some of those, you know uh technology has brought to the table.

Um But I wasn’t able to do that in my day job, you know my day job is still uh you know traditional server rendered um pages. So I kinda wanted to bridge the gap there. I was like I have this by this point, I have a lot of knowledge of like WordPress and all of its a P. I. S.

And I have this separate knowledge of you know working with react and graphical and reduction these front technology like I wonder if I could pair those pair those together. You know it’s so you’re

it’s me, you can blame me. Yeah. And Gutenberg was another you know another reason to um to you know learn kind of the basics that react to you since it it uses that of course.

Um So anyways I was looking around a bit and I found a job at a startup called harness software and they had a WordPress back end and they wanted to decouple the front end from that and have a more applique experience with some more advanced features like um like fully like offline mode for example.

So they wanted folks to be able to load up the web app on their phone. Like if the network connection drops out you can continue, you know filling out forms and submitting data and saving things. And then when the network connection was reestablished later on then we would take any work that that that person had done off line and then sink you back to the server.

So stuff like that. You know, you can’t quite do if you’re if you’re doing the traditional server rendered web pages like the minute your network connection is gone, that’s kind of it right? The user just like going to hit a white screen or whatever.

So we that was part of the part of the motivation to decouple the front so we can have this application with its own logic. So it could, you know, continue um continue working for the user even if then our connection was, you know, flakier dropped out or whatever.

So I learned an absolute ton of that job and I was, I went head first into the headless WordPress world. So that was my, my intro there. So I’m, you know, while at the job I wrote an extension for WP Craft QL which is a plug in that provides a graphical aPI for WordPress.

I wrote an extension for that for to support gravity forms which is a common like form builder plug in. So I’m the author of like the topographical for gravity forms plug in. That was used by that, you know, start up and so on. So get a ton of experience there.

Um and um yeah, at a certain point I uh I ended that job, I worked shortly for a finder who you mentioned for for a few months and then switched again and finally landed at WP engine now. So don’t judge it is the first job where I am um in a developer relations role where I’m a developer advocate and uh it’s a lot of fun.

I I like this job. It’s different from my previous roles because they were all straight developer positions at dot PNG I feel like it’s a good mix for me where I’m able to like I still code on on projects all the example apps and repose and stuff that I put together to demonstrate certain attack or certain features.

Like I’m still still doing that coding work, but then I get to turn around and share it with the community and I get a lot of people saying like thanks so much for giving this, you know, problems free video, I’ve been stuck on this particular thing for you know, two weeks and now you just, you know something you did in the video.

I didn’t think to do the first time I tried, so thanks so much for that. You know, it’s, it’s very gratifying, it feels good to um to help the community like that. So yeah, that’s how I got where I am.

Sure. Yeah, so I would say to me like the word headless um that is being different differentiated from a monolith. That’s a common term that you’ll hear like in the software development space, you know, if uh if a tech stack is a monolith, that means it is a central code base that controls the front end and the back end.

So by back end, I mean actually like reading and writing things to the database and things like that and by front end, I mean the actual html and CSS and so on that that results in what the user views. So headless is Breaking the two apart.

yep, Exactly, yeah, so so ruby on rails, right? Very, very, very, very popular um powerful NBC framework, you know, laura vela is another like very popular one these days um and I’m not before we get too far, like I’m not one of these people who thinks that that the headless approaches like the only good one and should be used in all use cases, you know?

Yeah, yeah, I think it’s easy to get stuck in those kinds of traps, I think if you’re earlier in your development career, but but in my experience, you know, the longer you’re in it you realize the truth is the answer to almost everything is well, it depends what are the needs and these are the project.

You know, what talents do the people on the team have, what’s the hosting situation, how to deploy the work, all of these things, you know, influence like what the right framework is. So

I wasn’t coached

Yeah, I think there can be a few of them. Um so, you know, traditional monolithic WordPress works great for many applications and has for for years now. But yeah, there are a few, a few things that Headless WordPress brings to the table that are difficult or in some cases, you know, not possible to you with a traditional monolithic architecture.

So one common one these days is to have multiple sources of data for for your website, I’ll break that down a bit more. So like one common thing these days is uh this buzzword of Jam stack, you know, you hear that a lot of these days on on the web was popularized by uh Billman and Phil Hawksworth of notify, they wrote a book introducing that term or whatever.

most most regrets I like it. I’m going to create a new piece attack on most grants most cats

So yeah, and in the jam stack cases the M is supposed to refer to pre rendered markup. So the idea is like you you build, you build, you know, as much of the page as you can, ahead of time at build time, you build out that html and then anything else you would fetch on the client and so on.

But anyways, yeah, not to get too derailed too much in the like the jam stack architecture, the idea there is you have one site that might have multiple sources. So it could pull in data from your CMS, like to display your blog blog posts.

It pulls in data from your Shopify store, maybe display your e commerce portion of your site, you’re pulling data from Salesforce from the Youtube, api whatever it may be, you know, you have these multiple sources. So if you’re building this decoupled architecture that, in my experience that becomes more easy to manage.

You know, you can you can at build time. Query all of these different data sources and then kind of, you know, stitch that data together and render the html. That ultimately makes up the page. Another one would be just if you want a single page app experience, you know.

So if somebody, if a client came to me and said, um yeah, we have, we run a great podcast is called the drunken UX podcast and our particular site or whatever podcast.

And they said, and they said for our particular site, we would like a an audio player that’s sticky that sticks to the bottom of the of the site and we want listeners to be able to play an episode and then an uninterrupted streaming audio as they browse the rest of the site, right As their route transitions happen, we want the audio to be uninterrupted.

So if you’re asking yourself like, well how would I do that on a traditional WordPress site? Right. Like it’s possible. Right? You but you you have a lot of probably pretty awkward job script where you have to say like every time user hits hits the link, you have to prevent the default behavior.

Then do an Ajax request to get the new content and replace what’s on the page and then you push the duct at the oil, all the stuff that you kind of get for free with a paid app frameworks that are out there. I actually

Um felt so dirty

I was

Um No, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say that. I think that I think decoupling um like that kind of kind of turns NBC on its head, you know, you can’t say that you can’t say that the french off script app is only the view and then everything out like the controllers in the model are still all in the back end because I don’t think that’s quite true, you know.

Because when you have like a front end apprehend and reactor view or spelt or something like that. It’s it’s doing a lot of the decision making like like routing, routing and data fetching and and then and template ng, things like that. It’s it’s doing all of those things. I think that extends more than two, more than just the view.

You know, it’s like doing some decision making there. It’s like what’s the route is the user logged in and their their permissions to fetch it if so fetch the data and then do the template ng or you’re taking it and injecting it into some markup and then render that to the page.

So yeah, I think it um you know dips into more than just the the view layer if you want to think of it that way.

So with WordPress, with like traditional monolithic WordPress, it gives you a lot of things for free that you don’t have to think twice about. So one example would be um if somebody is a content creator, you know, they’ve created a new blog post, they’ve typed up a part of it, you know.

Maybe half of it and they think I want to see what this looks like on the front and I want to preview this post. So they hit the preview link, you know what WordPress will do is send you to the front end of the site with a U. R. L. Parameter with the post ID. And then I realized, oh this this logged in person.

I’m able to authenticate and authorize this person, I know that they’re the author of this post and now I’ll display it for them, you know, as a preview of the post. So things like that you kind of take for granted if you’ve been in the WordPress world for for a bit.

Um but when you, you know decouple the friend from the back end, you have to think about like oh wait a minute now when that person goes to preview the post and see what it would look like on the front end, our friend lives over there now it’s it’s decoupled.

So I actually have to put some thought into into, I need to authenticate and authorize the person over there are decoupled app and then once I know they have access then I can get this draft post that only that person has access to and show it in my front and app.

And you have to rewrite the preview link so that when it’s clicked it would send these are to the right place to that app to view the preview. So things like that. And as I described it, you might hear this and think Headless sounds like a bad idea if I have to if I have to re rewrite some of the features I get for free with WordPress.

Um And uh and there are those, those trade offs at this point but I think I think it’s getting easier and easier and there’s a lot of interest in like Headless CMS is in general, a lot of companies out there like content fel in prismatic insanity and so on are um, you know, kind of uh, popularizing the Headless CMS as well and were impressive, of course, can’t be overlooked.

Like it’s 40-plus% of the web at this point. So even if fraction of those sites, you know, are interested in headless architecture, we’re talking about huge numbers here. Right? So, so it can be advantageous depending on the project and worth those pain points that you might hit along the road. So, so that we can segue into this Content Mahler specifically, if you

Mm uh it does compete pretty directly with a cf but it’s specific to Headless WordPress. So I would say, you know, if you’re somebody who’s in the WordPress space out there listening and you have a system in place already for creating your custom post types for reading custom fields to those, like, like a C. F, you know, and any taxonomy is maybe that you would want to add already.

Uh and that suits your needs, you know, all the data, your data storage issues are taken care of by those, you know, that I wouldn’t change a thing like that works well for you. Um once you decide on a headless architecture though, some of those things become more difficult.

Um so, so for example, like, you know, to create um what we’re referring to a moment ago as a content model, you need a few pieces, you need like a custom post type, right? Some some custom meta fields for that. This type, you may also choose to have like a taxonomy for that post type so that you’re able to group together or categorize your post together.

And And even beyond that, sometimes for some project that’s necessary to have relationships that you can efficiently query.

So if you’ve been in the WordPress space for a while, you might have heard of like posts, two posts, it was very popular plugging for a while for like maintaining very efficiently querying based on like posts that are related to one another for doing like many too many queries, things like that.

You need, you know, each of those those things um you might need to create your full data model for the kind of data that you want to store and doing that for a headless WordPress project. Um you know, up until Alice content, Mueller was on the scene doing that uh for how this project was kind of cumbersome.

So it would look like this. So your for your custom post type, you could use a plug in like custom post type ui So you can install that plug in and use that to register your post type and register your tax economies or hard code, all that if you wanted to. But one of those two options.

And then for custom fields that in that case you might reach for a cf and use that for your custom fields for relationships. Then you need to reach for something like I mentioned, poster, poster, and the relationships. And if you have all of those, then you think, well, wait a minute, I’m doing this site with a headless architecture.

So that means I need a way to I need a way to extract all of that data and have it exposed in either the rest api or the graphical schema. So it’s available to my friend and app because you don’t get that for free, out of the box. Right?

So the custom post type ui plugging it recently added support for um exposing post types in the graphical schema for a cf. Advanced custom fields, there is a W. P. A graphical extension that explore ex um that exposes that in the graphical schemes, you could use that for customs for relationships. I’ve never seen anything.

I don’t think that that exists. So right now it’s possible to get all that wired up. But you know, you you here as I’m talking to you as you hear all the moving pieces, it’s like, well you need these 44 plug ins and they need several more plug ins just to add those 1st 42 of the graphical scheme, and then finally, you end up with, okay.

Now I’m able to save all of my data that I need for my miles as well as expose all my data to the front and applications. So, so that’s what, that’s kind of the primary value proposition for atlas, content model or it comes along and says, if you have a cm running on your site, you can create a new model, let’s say it’s uh called project.

You know, I can create a new model called project and say this project is going to have um like the person’s uh the street address, let’s say it’s like a construction company doing work on, you know, business and residential addresses or whatever. They want to keep track of their projects.

So they can say, I’m creating a new project model, it’s gonna have a number of fields, is going to have street address, client name, client, contact, phone number. Whatever you can register your meta fields enable relationship Set it up between two models.

And then the moment you’ve done all this, you’ve defined you’re your model, which is your post type, your fields, your taxonomy is relationships and you hit save now it’s in the graphical scheme. All rest api and you can head over your front and app and start querying for that. So it’s already available to you.

Right. Yeah, that’s a good question. Um and it doesn’t it’s geared specifically to headless architectures um that was an early decision, you know, they they looked at what the goal was for the project and decided um instead of trying to support traditional lithwick WordPress and Headless, you know.

At the same time and uh and maintain both going forward, there is more advantageous to only focus on on how this WordPress sites see it only supports that. So if you don’t plan to pull your data out via the rest api or graphical schema, then then yeah, you would want to use other solutions like, you know, the custom post, Wi plus a cf, those solutions,

Right? Yeah, that’s a good question. Under the hood, it doesn’t do many custom custom things like it adheres pretty tightly to to the way WordPress does things. So when you create a model behind the scenes, that’s a post type, when you add custom fields, you know, it’s ultimately saving those at to the post meta table in the database.

Just like a cf would when you create taxonomy, it’s saving those in the same way that that you would if you’re using a different plug in to create those. So, So yeah, to answer your question, if you’re somebody who has registered your post type and uses a cf, maybe to add some custom fields to that and you wanted to move to a C. M.

Um what you need to do is create a model and then make sure the name of it matches the post type you, you know, you had already created and then for your fields, you get to specify the medic ease.

So you could, if you had like a single line text field that a cf was targeting, you know, named Hello, underscore world in your in your model your new model that you’re creating if you create a single line text field and you tell it to use you know that same hello underscore world for the medic e you know all those two points we just do the same thing essentially.

they get they rewrite the data from the same exact, you know, row in the post meta table. So yeah, that’s definitely doable. So post types taxonomy is and custom fields would all map map very easily I think if you make sure the names match up like I said

he’s starting to hallucinate from the ghost peppers.

Yeah, great question. Um, it is available, it’s not on the WordPress dot org, plug in directory at this point. Um, but there is a public github repo so anybody can use it right now, at the moment, only a um, a subset of the fields that will eventually exist do exist, you know.

So if you uh, install right now you’ll see there’s there’s like single line text, text area with the wig number bullying and maybe one or two other field types, you know, which is um quite a few less than you’re used to. Something like advanced custom fields, of course, it has a whole list of things to choose from.

So, so this, this project will get their their their their team is working on adding uh, field types um, as we go, so right now it’s in um, it’s in an alpha beat uh,

Yeah, I don’t know if it’s technically

it is,

so I would say if you, if you want to try it out definitely do it but not on a client, you know production client project maybe do it on your own on your own sites and um I know the team would love like any feedback that you have as well.

So when you read me for that report there are instructions there about like if you find a bug or some, you know, confusing parts um in the UI or whatever, like please reach out here, you know, and there’s some instructions about how to inform the decision making.

Yeah, I yeah, so we did we touched on this briefly with a few of those use cases like pulling from multiple sources or the persistent audio player example across pages. Yeah, those would be good ones. Um but there are some more big ones as well, the folks out there might want to consider as well.

Another one is having a back end um that serves up ah agnostic, you know, data um to any type of client. So if that’s necessary. So what I mean by that is if you’re choosing a decoupled architecture, what you end up with is either the rest api or the graph QL scheme on your WordPress back end.

You can ask it for things and it gives you back very un opinionated, Jason data, you can do anything you want with that. So that means if you are and I’ve, you know, talked with folks out there in the community who work with clients who say, yeah, we want to manage all of our content in WordPress.

Then we plan to query for that data and render it on our website on our iphone app, on our android app on maybe there’s a desktop application that that they’re building or wherever else on the web, you know? So if you ask yourself, well, how would I do that in a traditional WordPress site where your WordPress back and you know, generally speaking, it just serves up html like the fully rendered html pages.

It’s making the assumption that like the one and only place this is used is on the web because I’m serving up the html. So what would you do if you needed a um an IOS or android application, You know, if your if your web server only sort of html, you know, you might be able to use some of that like inside of a web view or or some something on those devices.

But at that point you’re kind of turning it into a website. It’s not a, not a true native app at that point. So I’ve met folks in the community out there who opt for something like WP graphic.

Well, knowing that now my content creators can go into WordPress and, you know, make all their um do all their authoring and editing of content there and then that the web web back end will serve up this raw Jason data and that would be consumed by my next gas or Gatsby or knocks or whatever front and on the web and also consumed by my IOS app and also consumed by my android app, which is cool.

It’s a nice idea that it’s this un opinionated source of data that can be used by any any client.

Right. Yeah, I would say there are two, you know, big decisions to make if you have a web project and you’ve already settled on WordPress for the back end, at least if you’re going to use it as a CMS, you at least, you know, decided that much.

I think the next decision you have to make is, you know, the traditional monolithic architecture versus a headless or decoupled architecture and um I would just weigh the pros and cons there. Hopefully this podcast episode is helpful.

Some of the things we’ve talked about, you know, some of the examples of how this might be advantageous um you know, might be helpful for you making that decision. As I mentioned. It’s not without its pain points though, like the preview links and other things like form submissions and things like get more complex if you choose that.

So I would I would do some research there and figure out if it’s a good uh set up for the project. If it is, then the other decision is how are you going to create those content models? Um So in my opinion, you know, Ellis Content Mylar is going to be a very uh convenient and powerful way to do that right at this moment, it doesn’t have all the fields baked in relationships.

Is um is it fully supported yet and so on. It’s still early days. So if you have to get a sight out the door, like right now, maybe it’s a headless architecture, maybe, you know, opt for a cf and other things, but definitely keep your eye on Ellis Content model or for as a tool.

It’s going to make it easier for you to create those data models as opposed to, you know, cobbling together multiple plug ins to do the same thing.

Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. There’s a lot to be said for minimizing those dependencies like you said right as soon as one version number isn’t quite compatible with the rest now there’s trouble but but yeah, if it’s unified then you’re in a better spot there. So it’s a big benefit. Anybody

reference. I take it.

love it. I love it.

like problems to solve

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, you know, you’re welcome for coming out. It was my pleasure. Um, it’s always fun getting out and talking about, uh, this stuff with, with other like minded folks, so thank you for having me on.

Um, yeah, in terms of what I’m working on, as mentioned, my day job is that WP engine doing developer relations, develop advocacy type stuff. So if you’re out there listening and you’re interested in this Headless WordPress world, may want to learn more about how to do that.

How to develop sites in that way, definitely check out developers dot WP engine dot com. Um that’s the site where we, that’s kind of the hub for all of our contents. We have blog posts linked from there are Youtube channel is linked from there, the decode podcast that we mentioned earlier. You’ll find links to it there as well. Another

Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So, um, we have linked to all of those things, including documentation as well. So Alice content model we’ve been talking about for the episode here, um, very shortly we’re going to have our documentation is gonna go live for that project and will be linked from that developers W PNG dot com site as well.

So, yeah, that’s where to find um, all the stuff that we’re working on. Um, me personally, I have a little side side project I’m working on just to learn some new tech. Um, I don’t know if anyone remotely interested in this, but I’m building something that I think is cool.

So I’ll just, I’ll just mention that it’s video mentions dot com is this new little app I’m building, I’m working in spelt kit and I’m using a super super bass for, which is kind of a back end as a service. It’s kind of similar to firebase only. It’s an open source alternative to that. So using that and trying out tailwind CSS as well.

I feel like I’m late to the party there so many developers are gaga about taylor and I’ve never done a, you know, actual project with it. So yeah, I’m having fun trying out the new tech and I’m, uh, this new app, video mentions dot com.

That’s um, the idea there is, you can type in a certain word and tell it what youtube channels you want it to monitor and then it will email you any time any of those youtubers say the words that you told it to listen for. If you have a certain phrase that you care about.

If that’s anywhere in their spoken words that they say somewhere in the episode, it’ll email you say, hey, this episode at the three minute 42nd mark. The phrase you care about was sad. You know, so, so many fun with that.

I’ve had a little app idea I had, I want for myself and maybe other people don’t care, but, but I’m building it anyway, so I can use it.

All right. Yes, but yeah, or or hey, you guys right. It’s another like, like every other every other video someone saying, yeah,

click the bell. Exactly. Yeah. Your email in box b pretty quick.