Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to WPInnovator podcast. The podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson. Hi and welcome to episode 47 of the WP Innovator podcast. This is your host, Lee and today we’re going to be talking to Josh Pollock. He is one of the guys behind the brilliant Caldera Forms and the suite of tools that they are selling over on Caldera wp. It’s so cool to find out the history of a plugin. So he’s got a great history in WordPress development, developing plugins and his story on how he got into Caldera and how it developed is really fascinating.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I know you’re going to enjoy this one. Now don’t forget we do have a Facebook group. Go on over to leejacksondev.com group where you will be redirected and let’s have a conversation in what are your favorite form builders? Are you using Caldera forms? Do you have some cool examples? Let’s take a look. Alright guys, I’m gonna shut up because you’re gonna enjoy the show. Hi, this is Lee at the WP Innovator podcast and I’m looking at Josh who is limbering up right now for the podcast. Mate, how are you doing?
Josh Pollock:
Very good. Feeling very good this morning. Thanks for having me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’ve just had a hilarious start to the interview with his wife clattering through and not realizing she was on camera. But we won’t go any further with that line of conversation. But anyway, it was a, it was a great start. I just wish I’d recorded that part of the interview. So, guys, you’ll already know I’ve been talking about Caldera Forms in the group and I’m really excited to get Josh on the, on the line, on the show, whichever you want to say. Um, he is the, the author, the creator of Caldera Forms. He’s also an educator and an entrepreneur and he has run Caldera Forms now for how long? How long you’ve been going with Caldera the company?
Josh Pollock:
Let’s say almost two years, A year and three quarters maybe.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yep. It doesn’t look old enough, thankfully, but yep, it’s just over two years. I’m joking with you, mate. Over two years. And you’re also the author as well behind Ingot, which is the ab testing solution for WordPress. So that’s the. That the this is your life introduction, mate. So how about you say hi to everyone and just give us a bit of background about yourself.
Josh Pollock:
Hi, I’m Josh.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hey, Josh.
Josh Pollock:
Thanks for having me on again. I am a WordPress developer. This is what I stumbled into because I was making a website as I wanted to write blog and I found it to be way more interesting to hack the blog and see what I can make it do and in general break it. But over time I really got in more into WordPress plugins in the WordPress community. That’s kind of become my life here. And so we just try and make WordPress plugins that are fun and do things a little bit differently. So that’s primarily Caldera Forms. It’s a drag and drop responsive form builder, but we do a lot of different things.
Josh Pollock:
And I also teach the WordPress that came back around the writing mainly about WordPress.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome. And was Caldera Forms the very first plugin you created or what was the journey from being a website tinkerer to being an actual plugin plugin developer?
Josh Pollock:
So I didn’t create Caldera Forms originally. I. My journey was being a tinkerer and messing with themes. And then I made some themes that were on WordPress.org and I’ve had them removed because they were embarrassingly bad. And I think my 2014 child theme still up there, a bit less in demand today than it used to be. But I went to work for Pods, which is a custom content framework that’s really great and really learned about plugin development there from people who knew their stuff and also from a lot of the people who were, you know, people would come in and work on a project, say, hey, this is cool, but this part could be better and find a way to improve it. And David Kramer was one of those people and who thought, you know, some of the templating stuff in PODS was not as great as it could be. And that was sort of where I was too.
Josh Pollock:
I. My first plugin that anybody really used was a plugin that made it easier for people who worked coders to add Pods templates to display their custom fields in their content. That was the first time I made a plugin. It was an add on for Pods that’s now actually a part of Pods. But it’s the first time I ever made a plugin anybody cared about. There are other plugins I made before that that either didn’t nobody wanted. That was the first one that worked and people wanted.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s so, so cool. Jealous. You got to work with Pods because I’m a massive fan of that framework.
Josh Pollock:
Yeah, well, get involved. It’s a, it’s a great community use go to Pods IO Chad and Get in the Slack channel. It’s really awesome. So anyway, I was working on this big project that I didn’t finish because it was over my head. And I was new in that I had done a lot of the backend stuff for already and I had built this really terrible interface for. And I said to David Kramer, who I had met through Pods, hey, can I use your form builder just as the interface? Because you’ve got. I looked like, hey, it’s this guy I met the open source project and he’s got this form builder plugin. Let me check that out.
Josh Pollock:
I was really impressed and so I said, hey, can I use that as the interface? And so the first Caldera Forms add on the two of us worked on together is the Run Action one, which is a bit of a developer tool, but basically just lets you use the forms as a really cool interface and then you could do whatever you want within PHP world. And that was something we thought of together because I was that user who had the system working but really needed that really awesome interface. So it’s taken off from there. But yeah, I came in as a user who just thought like, hey, why aren’t other WordPress plugins this dynamic in the backend? Why am I clicking through so many damn screens? Why is it often so hard to make things responsive to get them to update without page refreshes? And that’s like, I was frustrated about that as somebody was like WordPress, awesome. But here’s the thing I don’t like, and I really love the way that Caldera Forms worked in terms of it was fixing all those things that I saw as systemic problems that we’re like now coming around to in terms of making things act more like a web app should.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, well, I love the fact that I can create forms just by dragging and drop it. Well, essentially I can create columns very, very quickly and then I can drag and drop the fields in, which is perfect. The problem I’ve got with things like Gravity Forms or with Formidable forms, for example, is that you’ve got to go in and start pasting in classes and remember that it’s like first col, second col, last. And trying to train a client to do that is just a complete nightmare. And then you end up having to build all the forms for them, et cetera. So it’s really frustrating. So that’s one of the things I love about Caldera Forms and it’s responsive, you can set the snap points, et cetera. It’s really cool.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So. So again, I’d recommend people Head on over if you don’t know what to talk about. Caldera is free. It’s a free WordPress plugin over at caldera. Com. The link will be in the show notes. Go and have a look at what I mean with regards to this responsivity. The form is responsive in the front end, which is freaking awesome, but in the back end, you know, like I said, what I love is the fact that you can just set up a few columns, drag in a few items and save.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s job done. Also, like you said, you can go into the tabs and change the email settings and all those stuff without reloading the page, which I again love because again, in Gravity Forms, I have to save the form, then go into notifications, wait for the notifications page to load, then add a type of processor, and then fill that in. And there’s just tons of saving and waiting. It’s just frustrating. So, again, that’s one of the things I love. So was it Dave that created. Was it called Caldera when Dave created originally and then you took it on, or did you fork it from his original product?
Josh Pollock:
Yeah, I mean, he was involved for a while in the project and, you know, we’ve made it work for him in terms of his life and his finances is what I want to say on that. But he, he’s really interested in creating things and so he’s, you know, working on some new stuff right now.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool.
Josh Pollock:
And we, you know, we’re friends, we. We talk about code and stuff, but so it was just something that he, you know, we built a bunch of other plugins. Like, we did the pods, add on, we did the easy queries together. And he’s, you know, he’s working on a bunch of stuff for like Facet WP right now. That’s really neat. Yeah, like the stacked facets add on that kind of stuff. He likes making new things. Yeah, he’s having fun making new things and, you know, but it’s definitely.
Josh Pollock:
Yeah, it was a company that. It was like, you know, a thousand users, 1Active installs or whatever. When we started on it, it was a thing nobody heard of that. I was like, hey, y’ all need to hear about this thing. Like, this is. I didn’t have a ton of experience. I sort of had this weird entry point of I got started directly into pot. So I never really learned acf, you know.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Josh Pollock:
And then when I was getting started, I was like, hey, I’m going to use David’s counter forms. And then it was like, I, you Know, I look at gravity forms a lot now, both in terms of like understanding the competition and obviously I’ve had site client sites, people have gravity force and I’m not going to rip it out right. Like, oh, I don’t like that. Oh, it’s fine, it works. You know, if I’m not going to do like complex work with it because I don’t really understand it. But if I go on a site and they’re like, yeah, we have it’s contact form, we need to add a field. I’m not going to like throw it out and start it over because it’s gravity forms. But I just don’t.
Josh Pollock:
My sort of background is expecting what something like other forms can do and also just, you know, seeing the potential. But hey, we worked on this thing for a year, it’d be really awesome, you know, and that’s what’s fun to me. I really love being in that place of like, man, we could work on that for a year and we could make it into something really special. Yeah, because software is never perfect, right. I mean, we have bugs. I fixed like six bugs last night. You know, that’s what’s fun. But also thinking about in the process saying, like, hey, there’s a place that is good, let’s make it great.
Josh Pollock:
That’s what’s exciting to me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I love that phrase, something that’s good and make it great. And when people like focus on making something great, then good kind of gets forgotten about. Something never actually gets launched, does it? If you’re too busy focusing on making something absolutely great before you launch it. So what you, what you’ve talked about is actually getting to that good stage, which it definitely is, and you’re moving into great. One of the things I love, which mean you’ve talked about offline is the custom fields as well. So I can create really good looking backend meta boxes. Again, just, you know, drag and drop. Make it look really easy if I’m going to use anything like ACF or anything like that, which is great and powerful.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I love ACF as well.
Josh Pollock:
Yeah, it’s cool.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Again, you know, I’m having to fill in boxes 50% this, 50% that. Whereas with Caldera it’s drag and drop. Obviously that’s something that you guys are still developing on. So not everything works in the backend, but it works a dream for the sorts of things that I’m starting to do with it. And I found the boilerplate the other day on GitHub for creating our own field types. So we’re already working on a, like a file uploader field type which would be perfect for us because the idea for us is that we want to be able to create backend interfaces a lot quicker and just being able to drag and drop things in place, make them responsive out of the box and have them in columns, et cetera. And it’s never quite so easy to having multiple stacked items in ACF or custom fields plugin or even pods.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I mean I love pods, I’m a massive advocate of pods. But again, that big kind of stacked list of fields and having to put in your own CSS, etc. To lay everything out to make it look pretty inside of the WordPress admin is just a massive frustration. So again, one of the things I love about your system.
Josh Pollock:
Thank you, I appreciate that. So what he’s talking about is we have this plugin caldera custom fields and it’s gone through a lot of iterations and one of the things it does and does really well is front end submissions. If you want to use front end, drop a form into the front end of your page and have that become a post, right? Including a custom post type. Could be a post, could be a page, could be whatever, custom post type, have things saved as custom fields. But you want to use a caldera form for that. That works really great. One of the other things that plugin does is acts kind of like ACF in the sense that you can have a form that shows up in the post editor in edits posts. And what’s great about that is that you can have condition logic, you can have multi multiple column views inside of the post editor, which is not an easy thing to do.
Josh Pollock:
Like I’ve been through a lot of different ways of doing that. It’s not an easy thing to do and it basically works. It doesn’t handle image uploads properly yet. It’s not, you know, our focus is definitely not, hey, we could be better than ACF at acf. Like there’s the thing about building a form builder is you’re like, man, I could have this do anything. And you can have an infinite combination of fields and that’s a what’s fun and that’s what’s insane about what I do, right?
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It must be hard to manage.
Josh Pollock:
Well, do the math. We have like 20 field types and then on a form of 10 sizes, right? Like now we’re going to get to like some sort of multiplication. I don’t feel like doing in terms of what the combinations are. And then there’s like different places, people could put them in different themes and it goes a little nuts, but it’s fun. That’s what’s cool about forms is that forms we think of in a certain way as like, oh, it’s a contact form, which is important, right? You got to have a contact form. You got to make sure that it works. Make sure that, you know, you’re getting those emails, you’re replying, that you have the right form layout that converts for you. It’s so important that you test that.
Josh Pollock:
But then forms are really the beginning of this system, right? And that’s how I came to it was I was building this really big system on WordPress and it needed a form that didn’t suck. And you know, they become these. They become event registration systems, they become mini e commerce systems. They become, you know, tell me your story. They become post editors. They become all these different things. And that’s what’s really kept me interested in it is that people come to me and say like, hey, doing a car race and we need people to like register their numbers. Or we’re, you know, with easy pods where it turns it into a search form based on pods.
Josh Pollock:
We have a guy who we helped who is built a site for his region of the Netherlands as a memorial to all the allied soldiers who died there in World War II. Liberating the information. You would search by like names and like, you know, are they Canadian, are they British, are they American, are they French? And you know, people who died there in this region that he’s from. It’s really amazing when you can see all these different possibilities and then, you know, that comes back to, well, you can’t, you know, sometimes you run into edge cases. That’s fun. That’s frustrating. And I think the in the Post editor is really exciting for us. And it’s just, you know, it’s on the long list of things that we really want to get right.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, like I said as well, for us it’s great because it’s perfect for like the prototyping especially because we’ll do. Part of our quoting process is we’ll be doing a paid discovery session with clients where we’re trying to evolve what they want. Exactly. So with something like Caldera forms, where we’re not messing around with complicated settings and we’re able to create interfaces, even if everything doesn’t work, that doesn’t matter to us. We can just show this is what it could look like, this is how it could work. So again, for prototyping that’s pretty cool.
Josh Pollock:
As I say. I think that’s what’s great about WordPress is you can get to that, like that first stage that you could show somebody how it works so quickly. And also sometimes that’s like, because you get that free editor, maybe you’re rebuild the whole thing in the front end. It’s that like cheating, like when your client’s like, hey, what about this edge case? You could say, well, I don’t know, let them email you and if it happens a hundred times then we can fix it. But if not, you can just fix it for them in the back end. I love that about wordpressive for client or for these types of systems.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I love that you’re very passionate about this, especially with forms. I get what you mean as well. Because there’s so many iterations of what a form can do. You will never have a boring question, I imagine.
Josh Pollock:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now where did the pivot to. Or not pivot? Because you’re still focused on Caldera forms as well. But where did. How was EasyPods born? So first of all, if you could explain what EasyPods is. I know, but I’ll let you explain in much better words than I can. But also kind of where did that come from? Kind of the idea to push on with that as well as managing something as big as Caldera forms.
Josh Pollock:
So Easy Pods and then Easy Queries, which followed up. Easy Pods is a. Is an add on for pods that does two things. One, it gives you this visual query builder so you can say, you know, hey, I want from this pod, let’s say it’s an event pod. So I want events that are podcasts that are scheduled, have a schedule, then they have a right. You have like a type of event and one’s podcast. So let’s get those. And then if you have a scheduled custom field that says the date that are in the future, you build those types of queries out of it.
Josh Pollock:
That’s sort of like Drupal CCK or Drupal Views. Pods is like. So the next stage to that was hey, we could make those search forms. We have this really cool form builder built in. This is where it started to get really interesting was that we could have. You could build a form that would fill into that query so you could use it just to like have this cool list of stuff that you click through and it’s paginated through Ajax and it happens that magically it looks great and you could do these sort of complex things without writing any code, which in pods can get Very code heavy, very quickly. But turning it into a search form is what got really interesting because people use pods to manage tons of data. Right? That’s what’s cool about bots.
Josh Pollock:
Yes. You can have tons of custom fields, tons custom post types and custom tables and all this stuff. And then how do you make that accessible to your end users? Right. There’s no point in having that data, nobody can see it. So it became this really cool tool to do search that isn’t just keyword search. Right. If you need keyword search, search, WP done. But if you need to say when, this is this and this is that, those sorts of things.
Josh Pollock:
Easy Pods, if you’re using pods, really lets you customize what people are searching as binding multiple, multiple, you know, make that advanced search. And so that’s a great plugin. Part of the reason we did it is because it’s a thing pods needed that was only going to get done that way.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Josh Pollock:
And we like pods. Part of why we did it was because we wanted people to use it and be like, oh, I have to install Caldera Forms for free and be like, ah, Caldera Forms is cool, right? Yep. And then we built Easy Queries, which is a similar plugin that doesn’t require pods. So they, they’re, they have their strengths and weaknesses. Right. One’s based on pods and is limited and enhanced by what pods can do and the other one just uses standard WordPress queries and that creates some limitations of what it can do. But you know, we sell them together to Caldera Search Bundle because I use both, depends on the use case. But again, it’s that ability to say like, hey, I want to build this sort of template and query.
Josh Pollock:
That’s cool. But the real power is search, that you can do a search in by taxonomy, by custom field, by post date, by post author. These sorts of things and have multiple inputs and you define that search form using our drag and drop responsive builder. That’s actually not really a pivot. That’s how we started. Like on day one, we had Caldera Forms and a handful of Caldera Forms add ons. We had easy pods and I feel like we had one or two other things which we walked away from slowly.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What, slowly backed away back to Caldera Forms.
Josh Pollock:
I mean we keep sort of going, hey, what about this? Because you know, it’s fun to be like, what about this? Caldera Forms is really cool and it’s growing and you know, it makes us decent money and it’s fascinating. Like for me it continues to Be fascinating to work on. So I think we’re really focused on like, what else can we do with Calera forms? Like, that’s what I realized early on was so awesome about EasyPods. It’s not just it solved the problem and it was cool, but it was another thing you can do with Cal aeroforms.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So with regards to two Easy Pods and Easy Queries, does this also allow you to output the actual query code as well if you wanted to use that in a theme to save a developer time?
Josh Pollock:
Oh yeah. So both of them have in their admin a screen where you can see the. In the case of Easy Pods, how you would enter parameters into Pods, their query. Right. The Pods function that lets you do Pods queries. So you can just cut and paste those out and then in Easy Queries, because it uses WP query, WordPress’s out query, it does also show you what the query arguments is generated are. And so I use it sometimes just for that, where I’m like, this is a really tricky query that, you know, on a project, I’m not using Easy Queries. I sometimes will use it just to remind myself how the hell you do a multiple taxonomy term query.
Josh Pollock:
Like, I could look that up. It’s sometimes just faster to see it in there. They also also they show you effective SQL that it’s generating, which is neat. Yeah, as well. A little bit less useful than seeing WP query or PODS arguments. But yeah, I think it’s a great teaching tool as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve not actually had the benefit of checking either of them out. The concept of them though I have read up on them. They sound fascinating for us especially, I know how difficult it is. And the limited documentation for say Pods goes to Pod Search and we’re using table structure a lot of the time instead of the default WordPress meta because we’re dealing with massive databases. And I love the fact that Pods allows you to do that table thing. But for the looks of it, Easy Pods would make the search forms that we have to create a hell of a lot easier to do. Like I said, limited documentation out there on the actual Pods website, at least in our experience. And then for queries like you, I’m constantly forgetting, you know, how do I bind a couple of taxonomies together to do it or do some sort of meta compare and I don’t have the time to write it and check my code.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that sounds like a really cool tool to go check out. You’re selling them as a bundle. That’s Caldera Search. If you Go again to Caldera WP and you go check out the bundles. You can see more information on those plugins at reasonable prices, which is good. Go check those out.
Josh Pollock:
We know that that’s, you know, you should be getting your clients to pay for it, but like your clients have, you know, they have a limited amount of money they’re willing to spend. So it’s, you know, we’ve got to keep, we’ve got to, you know, pay for lunch and stuff. But yeah, keep. Feed families and such. But want to make sure everybody can. I mean, that’s the point of a business like this is making it easier for people to make websites for their businesses. Right. Make a business out of that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, I think that’s a great question as well, actually. And not for you, but actually for the community as a whole. So people who are listening, if you head on over to the Facebook group, Lee JacksonDev.com group, let’s talk about the licensing, because what do you do? Do you buy an unlimited license and then, you know, pay that and your clients just get the benefit of your license or do you end up getting your client to pay the license direct to the plugin developers? So that’s not really a question for you, Josh, but it’s actually just sparked something in my mind, you know, what do other WordPress developers do with regards to the licensing? So I know for one, you know, I use Beaver Builders and if I’m looking after the site as well, then I just keep the agency license that I pay for with them and look after the site for the client. But if a client’s going to go off elsewhere, then I’ll make that client become responsible for their own licensing, etc. But it would be definitely fascinating to see what else people are doing. So what’s been your biggest challenge over the last couple of years of essentially being a online software provider?
Josh Pollock:
I mean, it’s always challenging. Like making software is not easy. That gets missed. To that question, I think my gut reaction is I think it’s really hard to differentiate yourself in the space and I think it’s hard to sometimes communicate your uniqueness. Those are valid answers. I find writing software to be really challenging, but it’s fine. We forget that we act as if that’s the easy part. And yeah, it’s not the whole thing.
Josh Pollock:
Making really cool software doesn’t matter. You have to sell it. Yes, and that’s the same for any of this. I think having a product that people would buy and delivers on, what its promise is, is not the whole Thing, right. You have to convince people that that value is true and get them to see it and get them to try it. But it is sort of fundamental, rudimentary. If you want to have a good business that isn’t full of it to start with, like, you have a thing that is worthwhile and that’s really hard. We talked about this in the beginning, is like, you kind of start with something that’s good and you try and make it great, but you have to get it out there and let it fail a little bit to figure out why it’s not great.
Josh Pollock:
Right? Why, like, this is a good idea that isn’t there yet and what there is. So that’s always a challenge. I think staying disciplined around one thing while also being true to the needs of, like, hey, we should be about more things. Right? And like, for diversity’s sake, for fun’s sake. I think that’s a real balance, is that I get into this because I think it’s fun and I’m way more interested in having fun than making a ton of money. But I need to make a certain. I need to make money, pay people and myself. And also I’d like to make more money so I can pay more people.
Josh Pollock:
Right? Like, it’s that weird balance of I don’t really care about money, but at the same time, I want more money so I can hire more people, fun with more people, and do more fun stuff. I think that’s honestly the biggest challenge is figuring out what that balance is.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s true. Walt Disney said the same thing as well, very similar thing. You know, he wasn’t about the money. He just wanted to be. He just realized he needed the money to be able to do more and more cool stuff and get more and more people involved. And I think that’s pretty much what you’re saying, isn’t it? You know, you’re not about the money, but you want to be able to continue to work out how to grow the business so that you can add even more value and. And affect more people.
Josh Pollock:
Yeah. I mean, I met Jason Cohen from WP Engine working POS this year. So I think, like, they created a business around the idea of, like, hey, what if we had a company that treated itself well, its employees well, treated its customers well, had a higher value, and we could charge more for it. Right. Like, they were one of the early end WordPress managed. But he said to me, he said, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money. Right. If you don’t make more money than you spend at some point, you don’t have a business anymore.
Josh Pollock:
Anymore. But that’s not the point. Like, don’t confuse that base requirement with the point. Right. If the point of it’s just making money, there are better ways to make money. And that was, I think, really refreshing to me to hear and sort of reframe me of, like, it is important. Like, money does matter.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Josh Pollock:
Because you don’t have a business. You can only lose so much money until you’re not a business, and then. Well, that’s boring. What I have to do. Get a job.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No.
Josh Pollock:
I mean, I could. I could.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
You could, but then you’d be bored, I guess.
Josh Pollock:
I don’t know. It’s an attractive option sometimes, but I love what I do, and I love the potential. I love the idea of, like, you know, we’re. We’re in that. And I think anybody who works for themselves or is a freelancer, owns a small business, can imagine that it can relate that you get into this thing where you’re. You’re. You are constrained by your responsibilities. No matter what you do, you work for a company, you work for yourself.
Josh Pollock:
But that’s okay. You know, you have more control over them. And it’s fun, you know, like, that’s the thing. Like, we get to. We get to make work the Internet all day, and it’s just fun, you
Lee Matthew Jackson:
know, I like that you’re getting paid to do something you love. Basically. It is fun. I find being on the Internet, building WordPress websites fun. It sounds geeky to other people, but I do this. Not only 9 to 5, but you’ll find me with a laptop at night when I’m meant to be relaxing, coding. And my wife’s like, are you working? I’m like, no, I’m actually. I’m not doing anything to do with work.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m just teaching myself some WordPress stuff. And this is the way I relax. And she’s like, you’re weird.
Josh Pollock:
Yeah, I was. I was reading a lot about reversible encryption last night. Like, I quit and I watched. We watched a new episode of Atlanta. I took an episode in on my not getting in the middle of a Game of Thrones rewatch. And then I sat down on the couch and read a lot about reversible encryption.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Josh Pollock:
Like, it’s fascinating. Yeah, it really is. And, like, that’s part of why I do this. Like, that’s obsolete.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think one of those. The good things about that, though, is if, you know, if people do do that, teach themselves outside of their set business hours, as well. The advantage is there is you’re going to be on the cutting edge. So when you’re in a conversation in the future with a client, you’ve got some background experience or some background knowledge on reversible encryption, and they’re going to be like, this guy knows he’s a onions. We want to employ this guy on this project. So you just need to work out how to include reversible encryption in a conversation now.
Josh Pollock:
Well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be shocked. You shouldn’t be shocked if you see a torque article about encrypting like the WordPress database or parts of it using PHP. Right? Like, because I was reading that last night, like, that could happen. Maybe there’s a plug in there. Maybe it’s just something neat. Right. Like, I’m a little security obsessed. I think it’s an important thing in our space.
Josh Pollock:
Not just, you know, I want to make sure that my code is secure. Caldera forms isn’t used to disclose people sensitive information that people send in. Right. Like that’s a concern when you’re building form builders. People put in information thinking only the site owner is going to read it. Yeah. You want to make sure that stays the case. But also somebody who writes a lot about how to code.
Josh Pollock:
Right. That’s something I think about a lot. It’s like, is, what are the examples that I’m doing secure? Am I teaching proper security? Can I do more to educate people about why common WordPress security vulnerabilities happen? Right. Like, what steps are people missing in their education? Can I do more to teach about that? Because, you know, it’s important, like it’s bad for all of us when a big plugin has a security vulnerability.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, I hate that.
Josh Pollock:
Yes, it happens. The fact of the matter is it’s always going to happen because it’s super. I mean, it’s so hard sometimes to think about where these things come from and how technical, like how technically savvy they are. And I mean, one thing that everybody needs to concern themselves right now if they’re a site builder is TLS 1.2 support. In terms of a lot of the ways, like when you communicate with payment processor, with PayPal, with Stripe. The older ways of doing it used to be secure. Now computers got faster and now they’re not secure. Right?
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Josh Pollock:
This idea that encryption is unbreakable unless you spend a billion hours, all of a sudden became two hours or one hour, 30 minutes. Right. So they’ve introduced more secure encryption and a lot of people are sitting on servers that are out of date and don’t support these new encryption standards or plugins that are out of date. Right. We went through this with the Caleriform strike where right now we’re at one point whatever. But if you go back point releases, it doesn’t work because it’s using an older version of Stripe’s SDK that no longer is supported. It uses the older, less secure version. So you’ve got to stay on top of your plugins to make sure that you’ve got the latest version of whatever payment processor you use, because everybody’s making these updates.
Josh Pollock:
But it gets more complicated than that because you have to make sure that your server is compatible with the more advanced encryption. Right. And this is just a matter of keeping you and your customer safe. You never, I always tell people we’re doing any type of E commerce, get the good SSL certificate, get the, you know, make sure that you’re doing things right. Because you don’t want to be blamed for somebody’s credit card getting stolen.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No. And insurance companies aren’t going to look nicely on it either if you’ve not gone to all your due diligence.
Josh Pollock:
Exactly. Like it’s bad for your bottom line, it’s bad for your reputation. And these are things that affect all of us. Right. Like I can, I can nerd out like security side stuff and code and. But we’re not going to do that. But I think if you’re a site builder and you ever accept money on your website, PayPal, Stripe credit cards, whatever, Bitcoin, take a second to look over this stuff. Get the TLS checker plugin from.org, wordPress.org, make sure your site’s up to go up to snuff and make sure all your payment add ons are up to date.
Josh Pollock:
Right. All these companies are doing updates to make things more secure, which is great, but that means you have to update to make sure you can work with their new systems.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s a good point as well. And when people are taking on contracts like ecommerce websites, it’s always worth explaining that to the client as well. So if you’ve got a client who’s approaching you about ecommerce, explain to them that whatever software or plugin that you’re going to be using to do that payment processing does need to be kept up to date. So they need to be aware of some sort of ongoing support package. Especially when we are talking about E commerce, you are dealing with private data, credit cards, etc. That is so important and it’s a great, obviously it’s a great upsell as well for developers. You know, it’s some sort of ongoing revenue as well, but it’s definitely essential to keep those up to date. Now, speaking of kind of teaching yourself, obviously you were talking about teaching yourself things, training yourself, what sort of websites or would you recommend or online resources would you recommend people go and check out for, you know, WordPress news, et cetera.
Josh Pollock:
So I’m a big fan of Torque, right. I write for them. I write a lot there. I also read WPTAvern, I read, you know, Facebook and Twitter are great sources, obviously. Make.WordPress.org I get frustrated at people saying, oh, they made this change and how are we supposed to know and why did they do that? And it’s like, well, first off, it’s an open source project that you can get involved with. And also if you want to know, go to make WordPress.org where it was discussed, right? Like all major changes have proposals that are, hey, this is the thing. And not all of them happen, right? There’s a lot of make WordPress.org posts that are like, we’re going to do this big change. Shortcodes got a proposed massive change six months ago, massive change.
Josh Pollock:
And there was a lot of pushback to say like, hey, that’s going to break this, that’s going to break this, that’s going to break this. What about this? And the answer was, okay, no, this is a bad idea.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Josh Pollock:
And right. There was a whole new syntax for it for post. So I think if, if you’re, if WordPress is your life, you need to be in informed, you need to be informed of what’s happening. You know, there’s a beta Tester plugin on WordPress.org that lets you run your development sites against the latest version. And that’s hugely important because you want to make sure that when release day comes around, you’re not like, oh crap, I didn’t know that, or that you can be one of the people, you know. 4.6 had a major update to how WordPress communicates with other sites. The first revision of that broke all the things, all sorts of stuff. And there was a ton of feedback that said, like, hey, why didn’t you do this? This, it breaks this.
Josh Pollock:
When you do this, it breaks this. And it got sorted out because people were involved. And I think it’s not just about learning what’s the new cool plugin? What’s the new cool theme? Which is good to know. I Think it’s about getting involved in being a tester, going to word camps and you know, use, use what you’re good at. You know, what you develop lots of websites. Check your websites in a staging environment or local environment against what’s new. Find out what’s new on make.WordPress.org it gets you more involved in the community, gives you an opportunity to be like, hey, hey, don’t do that or hey, it’d be really cool if you did that. Or hey, what if this was that? And that makes you not just a passive consumer.
Josh Pollock:
It makes you a part of something. And for me, that’s been super rewarding to be a part of the community.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is so cool. I’ll get all of these links in the show notes. Guys, if you’ve not been checking these websites, these are our bible as well, all of them. It’s like the many books of the Bible, the many books of the WordPress Bible. These are all great resources to go and learn from, find out what’s coming up in the future. That’s such a great suggestion as well. If you are developing a website, you can be running the bleeding edge version, the beta, the version of WordPress, you know, so you’re ahead of the game. You can already see what features are coming up.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Nothing’s worse than developing a website I don’t know for two months on like the latest stable release of WordPress and then suddenly boom, you know, WordPress 5 comes out and you’re like, oh my gosh, I was not prepared for all of this. And you’re about to make your site live at WordPress 4.6, you know, so yeah, go check those out. Keep, keep educated. I’ll get all these, all of these links in there. Mate, you’ve been fantastic. It’s been really cool learning about Caldera, getting the benefit of your wisdom with regards to, you know, managing, managing these sort of services. Your excitement is obviously evident about, you know, what you’re doing. I’ve got two important questions.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Number one, which Star wars was your favorite?
Josh Pollock:
Honestly, that’s a tough one. I’m gonna go with no hope just because it’s self contained. Yes, it’s hard not to say Jedi. I mean, I like all four of them. All four of them are very good movies. And you know, like the Force Awakens I really loved. I mean, can you see Chewbacca back there? There are multiple Chewbacca.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s exactly why I asked you. I can see the entire cast behind you. I knew hopes that’s a good call
Josh Pollock:
because it’s just like, yeah, Jedi and Empire are great. And the, you know, the fourth one was really great. But you know, there’s. It was self contained and it was the first time. Right. Like that was the first one I saw. Yeah. And sort of the thing is, is like the Hobbit is a great book, but it’s not as great as the Lord of the Rings.
Josh Pollock:
Like that. Like when they got bigger. The other two movies made it bigger and better. Like that. Get lost. It’s not diminished. And that’s what I think is really special about it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s really good. And I don’t ask that of everyone, but it was just because I could see the cast of Star wars behind you.
Josh Pollock:
That’s why I got me this really giant Chewbacca.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
This is epic.
Josh Pollock:
Yeah, you can’t really see. There’s a couple Vaders back there. Smaller Chewbaccas. Yeah, that’s a really epic Chewbacca.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No worries. And then the next one was going to be what are the best ways of people to connect with you?
Josh Pollock:
That is an excellent question. It’s not a Star wars question. Question. They can tweet about Star wars at me at Josh412 or about WordPress. That’s fine. Yeah. Preferably Star wars or WordPress if you have to. Caldera is caldera wp.com Caldera Labs.org is sort of a roundup because we’re all over the place in terms of we’ve got, you know, the A B testing plugin, we’ve got the form analytics plugin.
Josh Pollock:
You know, I, I teach some courses. It’s all sort of linked there. Calderolabs and. But you know, hey, I’m on Twitter, Josh412 if you want to get in touch and talk about Star Wars.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome. And if you grossly disagree with his phrase earlier that he actually quite liked the Force Awakens, then also please feel free to tweet him. But be nice because I wasn’t so much of a fan of it, but I’ll leave that for Twitter.
Josh Pollock:
Okay.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
As I said, otherwise we’ll be starting on a massive fight.
Josh Pollock:
Sorry.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Finishing. Sorry. On a massive fight.
Josh Pollock:
It. Yeah, great. I had this great time on your podcast. We talked about. It was great. And then, you know, he said he liked Attack of the Clones. It got ugly.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I wouldn’t say that. Although I would say Return the Jedi is probably up there for me because that was like the, the teenage awakening for me. You know, Princess Leia and all that. So. But we’ll leave.
Josh Pollock:
But I appreciate you having me on here to talk about WordPress and Star wars and, you know, anybody’s to. To follow up with that. I do really appreciate you having me on. We have a lot of fun with calera forms and, you know, we, as you know, we’re not exactly the standard. We’re the new guy. So it’s. It’s. It means a lot to me when people are willing to go out publicly and be like, no, no, no, check out this new thing.
Josh Pollock:
It’s awesome.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
We love it. I showed it to the entire team. Everybody loves it. So that was unanimous throughout the entire company.
Josh Pollock:
So awesome. I love hear that. It’s huge for us. So thank you. I really appreciate you having me.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, thanks for being on, buddy. And I’ll get all of those links in the show notes, including the caldera labs.org website. And don’t forget to go tweet about Star Wars. So, mate, thanks. Have a freaking awesome day and thanks again for being on.
Josh Pollock:
Thank you. Take care. Bye. Bye.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And there you have it. The end of the show. But it’s not the end, because next week we’re gonna have Dan Connors on the show. You guys may remember I’ve talked about him a few times. He’s essentially a knight in shining armor that came into Lee Jackson Dev and just showed us the way when it comes to project management. And he’s going to be sharing his story, his skills, his expertise with us on the show next week. So that’ll be episode 48 with Dan Connors. And don’t forget, throughout all of October, we’re doing an episode a day with tons of top tips to try before you die.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So don’t forget to work your way through those. There are some fantastic tips in there. All right, have a brilliant week and see you tomorrow.
