Hi Dario, you’ve worked with WordPress for such a long time, since 2007. What does steal your heart? When you look back, what are the most important milestones that made you stay devoted to the WordPress?
Hello! Well, it’s simple. Two things. Like everyone, I started as a complete newbie. WordPress was the simplest CMS that allowed me to create a custom site, with a custom theme, easily. This won me over. Then the second part was when I joined OnTheGoSystems and the company encouraged and helped me to start attending WordCamps and contributing to the community. I instantly loved the people and the atmosphere from the very first WordCamp I attended and even spoke at (WCEU Sofia 2014).
How do you feel about Gutenberg being merged into the core? Is it really such a breaking change? Will ClassicPress be a serious fork living along WordPress?
I believe I feel like most of the people in the community. The 5.0 release was a bit rushed and they could have easily waited until February to polish it. But now it’s out, and I think we should embrace it. While everyone is free to fork anything they want, I would personally suggest contributing to making Gutenberg better, rather than doing forks. I am sure projects like ClassicPress can have a smaller group of passionate users but I don’t think it will become big or massive. And then there’s also the thing about maintaining such a huge fork.
You work in the OnTheGoSystems, the company behind Toolset and WPML plugins, as a Documentation Manager. Besides that, you run a usability testing. How do such sessions look like?
Oh, usability testing is one of my favorite topics! It’s super simple actually. We do this using Zoom calls, but you could also use Skype or any video calling app. Users join the call and share the screen with us. They log into a test site which was set up for that specific test. This means it has the right development version of our plugins and the needed test content. Then, users do some simple tasks we prepared for them. And we watch them do this. Simple as that. But you would be surprised at how important and eye-opening this can be. Really, whatever you produce, even websites, just try it! There are situations where you have something like a huge red button and all they need to do is to click it – but they don’t. Then you watch and understand why they are not clicking it. And this is how you learn
How do you choose the participants among customers? Could one join you and see under the hood of your company’s plugins?
We send invitations to our clients and those who are interested apply to join the particular sessions. And different tests require different types of users. Sometimes, we need complete beginners and other times more advanced users. We talk to all that apply beforehand to make sure they are the right fit for the specific test.
Now, for the other part of the question… Actually, time is limited so I don’t think they get to take a look „under the hood“, but most of the time, they get to be the first to test our new features, new services, even new documentation. But they definitely meet the team behind it and I think it allows them to see it’s just regular folks trying to make something good and useful. When people are relaxed (both us and users), these sessions are really fun.
You are an experienced WordCamp speaker, the last time you gave a speech at WordCamp Paris in 2017. What have you prepared for the Czech audience?
I will talk about connecting different types of content in WordPress, through so-called post relationships. This feature can help you create truly advanced WordPress sites where your types of content are connected, reusable, and organized. This advanced so much in recent years that there are plugins today that allow you to do this from the admin. Programming this on your own would be a huge project otherwise. I believe the talk will be interesting for both the more and less advanced developers in the audience