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WP20 & Audrey Scholars

WordPress

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on. There will be celebrations in cities around the world, please join if there’s one happening near you.

Twenty years later, I am proud and humbled by what the community around WordPress has created, and jazzed about what we will create in the coming decades.

I’m also excited to mark this milestone by publicly launching the Audrey Scholars program. It is, like all things, an experiment, but I’m curious to see how it unfolds and perhaps one day an Audrey Scholar could even take the responsibility of leading WordPress, when my capacity to do so has passed.

2021 Streaming Kit

Future of Work

My streaming setup post last year got an amazing reception — there are similar setups being used by executives across the board, from companies fundraising to several I know of with 100B+ valuations. Since that original setup, I’ve updated my own usage of hardware and software combinations to achieve similar or better results for about a quarter of the cost. So here’s the latest and greatest, and below I’ll talk about why the changes.

Elgato Cam Link 4K

Micro HDMI Cable

Glide Gear TMP100 Teleprompter

Sony α7C Camera & kit lens

Reticam mini tripod

Elgato Key Light Air LED panel (2x)

Video: Camlink, cable, and tripod are still the same, but the camera goes from an A7R IV and a separate lens to an A7C with a kit lens, which saves about $3,000. You also don’t need the dummy battery because the A7C runs great off USB-C.

Lighting: More is more, so I usually use two Key Light Airs (linked above) instead of one. If I’m on the road I’ll pair two Aputure RGB lights with two Lume Cube monopods.

Audio: My best audio advice is to upgrade to an M1 Macbook Pro so your computer is fast and the fan is never on, and position the laptop out of camera view but close to you so the built-in three-mic array picks up pretty good audio from you with no cables or earpieces. (Here’s a singer recording a song on the pre-M1 16-inch version, and note she has to remove fan noise in post-processing.) For bonus points add Krisp.ai ($60/yr) so you get background noise and room echo magically eliminated in real-time.

Teleprompter: The Glide Gear is much easier to set up and way cheaper than my old recommendation. Instead of an external monitor, I use an iPad and the MacOS Sidecar feature. I still don’t have a great way to reverse the screen; in the comments, I’ll share some of what folks have recommended to me.

The above setup removes 75% of the cost without sacrificing any quality.

I’ve gone through every permutation on audio, including using a MixPre-3, NoiseAssist plugin, and a MKH416 shotgun mic ($2k+ total), but I never use that setup unless I’m recording a fancy audio-only podcast.

Why am I using the Sennheiser SC30 in the above photo? Well it was an unusual situation…I was on the side of the road, next to an RV, with logging trucks rumbling by. Sometimes you don’t always know where you need to do a broadcast. 😄

Behind the scenes! We were recording what became this panel.

2024 Update: Everything still stands but if you can find an Elgato Prompter it really helps. I’m using these RGB lights for lighting more now. And BetterDisplay is a great MacOS utility for rotating screens and such. I’ve dropped Krisp.ai because the built-in “Voice Isolation” feature on MacOS is pretty good.

4.8 and What’s Coming

Asides

Last week we released version 4.8 “Evans” of WordPress, as I write this it has had about 4.8 million downloads already. The release was stable and has been received well, and we were able do the merge and beta a bit faster than we have before.

When I originally wrote about the three focuses for the year (and in the State of the Word) I said releases would be driven by improvements in those three areas, and people in particular are anticipating the new Gutenberg editor, so I wanted to talk a bit about what’s changed and what I’ve learned in the past few months that caused us to course correct and do an intermediate 4.8 release, and why there will likely be a 4.9 before Gutenberg comes in.

Right now the vast majority of effort is going into the new editing experience, and the progress has been great, but because we’re going to use the new editor as the basis for our new customization experience it means that the leads for the customization focus have to wait for Gutenberg to get a bit further along before we can build on that foundation. Mel and Weston took this as an opportunity to think about not just the “Customizer”, which is a screen and code base within WP, but really thinking in a user-centric way about what it means to customize a site and they identified a number of low-hanging fruits, areas like widgets where we could have a big user impact with relatively little effort.

WordPress is littered with little inconsistencies and gaps in the user experience that aren’t hard to fix, but are hard to notice the 500th time you’re looking at a screen.

I didn’t think we’d be able to sustain the effort on the editor and still do a meaningful user release in the meantime, but we did, and I think we can do it again.

4.8 also brought in a number of developer and accessibility improvements, including dropping support for old IE versions, but as I mentioned (too harshly) in my first quarter check-in there hasn’t been as much happening on the REST API side of things, but after talking to some folks at WordCamp EU and the community summit before I’m optimistic about that improving. Something else I didn’t anticipate was wp-cli coming under the wing of WP.org as an official project, which is huge for developers and people building on WP. (It’s worth mentioning wp-cli and REST API work great together.)

To summarize: The main focus of the editor is going great, customization has been getting improvements shipped to users, the wp-cli has become like the third focus, and I’m optimistic about REST-based development the remainder of the year.

I’ll be on stage at WordCamp Europe in Paris tomorrow afternoon doing a Q&A with Om Malik and taking audience questions, will also have a few announcements. You can get to the livestream tomorrow on the WordCamp EU homepage.