WordPress in Your Browser? How my.WordPress.net Makes the CMS Personal

0:00This episode of the WP Minute is brought to you by Pressable. You know what the best hosting feels like? Nothing. No panic alerts. No mystery downtime. No, hey, is the site down? Slack messages. That's the Pressable Experience WordPress hosting so reliable you forget it's even there. We keep your site fast, secure, and up 100% of the time so you can get back to building, selling, blogging, or binging CAD videos. No judgment, whatever you want to do. Go to pressable.com slash WP Minute and try hosting that disappears in all the right ways. Pressable.com slash WP Minute, pressable.com slash WP Minute, thanks Pressable for supporting the show. Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute, I'm Eric Carcavac. Today's show is all about the recently released MyWordPress.net, an application that stores an entire WordPress install in your web browser.

1:01My guests are WordPress contributors Alex Kirk and Brandon Payton. They're here to fill us in on the project and its role in the ecosystem. Alex and Brandon, welcome to the WP Minute, thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So Alex, as far as I know, this is kind of your pet project, your passion. Yeah, I think that's appropriate. I've been kind of pushing this forward, coming from an angle where our team at Automatic was working on Playground or is working on Playground. So we know the technology pretty well and we've been working the whole past year on basically making sure that Playground works with all these different setups that plugin developers have, all the different PHP modules they need, working performance, things like that. And at that point, we figured that we are getting pretty stable and it would be good opportunity to take it to the next level, meaning that we've been catering the developer

2:06audience pretty well, but it has been a bit tricky to explain to some like non-developers, people who expect WordPress to operate in a certain way. And that brought my WordPress.net idea on the plan that is basically a refocus of the audience for how Playground, how people could interact with Playground. Yeah, so how do you guys think about the differences between Playground and My WordPress? Why the name change? It's not a name change, both will continue to exist in parallel, they cater to different audiences. So I got you. In theory, like even though we mentioned it in the announcement that My WordPress.net was powered by Playground, I believe that in practice, people don't need to care too much about it. It's basically an evolution from, you know, if you think about WordPress over the course

3:08of the years, initially it was server side software only. So you put it in a server, you had to decide on a domain name, you had to get hosting somewhere, you maybe had to design on a plan, decide on a plan, and then you could share it with people. And later on we built Playground, which is this interesting tool that runs in your browser. And every time you come back, it resets and you have a fresh WordPress, which is perfect for developers. But for a long time on Playground and My WordPress.net, we even had like a blank WordPress screen. So you would go there and you would have like, welcome to WordPress. This is your new WordPress, the hello world post and all of that. And that was confusing to people. So at some point we introduced this welcome screen where it explains what it is a bit better, but still like every time you would reload it or every time you would use a blueprint, it would start fresh. And now I see this is the third step where you've got a website that is private, that is hosted for free on your own browser.

4:08But that behaves like a normal WordPress. And as soon you go there, you change something, you come back, it's still there. So that's the big difference. And the big thing that you know, Matt had this brief monologue on how it's hard to understand why I'm my WordPress. And that you can have all of that with Playground. And that's true because it's based on Playground. It has all these technologies. And Playground WordPress net, you can have multiple saved Playgrounds. At some point we added the save button pretty prominent and at least so that you can know you can save them. But already that can be overwhelming to people who just want the WordPress. They come there, they expect the WordPress to behave like they know that a normal SAS works. You go there, you change something, you come back and it's the same. Brandon, do you have anything to add to that? I think the way I've been thinking about it is that in a Playground there's more like a toolkit, whereas my WordPress.net is more like a WordPress just to have for yourself

5:11in love and it's more of a personal experience versus like an excellent toolbox. That's kind of how I had been thinking about them together. Yeah, so it's really, from my sense is that this is really more for the end you are not necessarily the developer, I mean, a developer can certainly use it to experiment. But in this sense, it's like, okay, I can just create my own little WordPress blog. And I was saying, before we started recording as a freelancer, I worked with a lot of clients. I do a lot of training. I could see this being something very useful for training even because I know sometimes when I'm working with a client on a live site, they're afraid of breaking things which, you know, it's kind of hard to do, but it is possible. So I could see them, you know, maybe having like a training through my WordPress where they play around with things in private, they don't have to worry about the public seeing it.

6:12Yeah. I think, to be honest, I think I would suggest for those use cases to continue to use Playground of WordPress.net. The point being that part of the vision for my WordPress and also for this use case, it is kind of unorthodox for what you kind of know WordPress for. It's a publishing platform, its mission is to democratize publishing. And here we are in this environment which inherently doesn't allow publishing because everybody has it on the same URL and it's really private. And the vision goes in that direction that this actually creates a very unique space that WordPress hasn't entered yet, which is, I've been thinking about it a bit like there is this self-hosting community around the web. And there's websites that list like all these services that you can replace with self-hosted versions. But it's been really a power user thing and pretty tricky because it's really hard to like every tool has different stack. Like every developer is passionate about creating this clone or like this self-hosted version

7:14of something. But that also means that everyone has their own solution. And there are services that make it easier to host that. There's like often Docker setups to make that more easy. But it's still pretty tricky and pretty, you need to be pretty determined to do it. So an idea here is that WordPress with its plugin system is pretty uniquely positioned that it can really easily install more plugins. Just the problem is we don't have plugins that cater for this personal use case. Like all the plugins are set to work on, increase your reach, do publishing better, style your website better. But there is this whole part of the internet that's pretty big elsewhere, elsewhere. That is about creating an experience for one or more multiple people. That is more like their own community or that is like their own app. And that's also why we introduced this app name or let's say we're trying it. It's not something completely different, but it's the language that we think that people speak. They know I install something in this service and then I can use it.

8:17And while technically it's a blueprint and it's based on plugins and all of that, it's a bit easier for people to understand. This is how this is like a thing that does something, maybe just one thing, maybe a few things, but whatever. It's like it's like an app on a phone and you can install a new WordPress and then it does this thing for you in your WordPress. So what sort of use cases do you envision for this? I know that the announcement post talked about a CRM, for example, or even just going old school and blogging for yourself, you know, like a private journal. What other sorts of use cases do you see for it? I think that's open for exploration and that's exactly the chicken and egg thing that I think we're trying to encourage to kind of break through. So I have many more ideas and I've got some ideas baking that I might also share here because they will be coming. But I did start off with this personal CRM thing, being this idea of like, you know, if you

9:19just want to increase your either your, you know, single person network as in like solo developer and you want to increase your reach and want to kind of keep track of these people that you don't know, maybe don't know well enough to put in your phone address book, but you still want to have around. That's where such a CRM could be useful or another use case when you've got like friends that, you know, you like them, but you don't get in touch often enough and they don't do either. Maybe you can kind of get a little automation there, you know, and check in with them more regularly and get reminded of that. And especially with, with deeper, it's really interesting to have an integration there because it can actually check for you, did you, did you talk recently? So that's a, the CRM aspect, but there's other things, yeah, for example, the, the chat to blog is a, is an app that is after that, but it comes from my own use case, but I think it's really useful. So for private blogging, when you want to share something from a personal event, it can

10:22be really tricky to kind of gather the photos together or the videos from that event. Different people send it to you and you can save them to your own computer and then upload them again. And with the deeper integration, you can just collect them from different conversations and upload them to your blog and save them there. So we've been kind of going into this field of where is it useful to use it just for yourself? Yeah. Yes, it's kind of an all-encompassing thing when you can integrate with services like beeper. I, I guess the, the question I have then is we have this AI integration in it too and we're getting more AI and WordPress is 7.0 is about to come out as we record this. What sort of things should people be on the lookout for as far as AI with, with this app? So I think we can say it's a pretty good, it's a pretty good playground for AI because it's a safe environment, it's a sandbox. But it's also more of a more fundamental question is like, where do you put AI?

11:23So either you've got your WordPress site, like in reference to WordPress, either you've got your WordPress site somewhere and you've got the AI outside talking to it, modifying it and all of that. And this is trying to put it actually into WordPress and basically from inside out have the AI use it. So this AI system works in a way that similar as cloud code, for example, works. The AI is provided with certain tools that allows it to modify your WordPress and interact with your WordPress. And especially with 6.9 and the ability API that opens up so many interesting opportunities. So for example, coming back to the personal CRM example, what I was just recently on a trip and I met five people and it was quite interesting to be able to basically open up the AI assistant and just tell it, you know, I've met these list names people, please add a note for each of them and create them if they don't exist in the personal CRM right now. And it would interact with the other plugin because of the ability API knew how to do it

12:27and would create the context and add a note. And that's a pretty powerful way of putting it inside WordPress and making it aware of what's available in this small environment. Yeah, I can see that being a way even as a developer playing around with that in this kind of environment. Before you start adding AI to your plugins or whatever, you can actually kind of see the different use cases for yourself in a very private area and it just experimented. She said, just let it kind of inspire you to do something creative with it. Totally. I could also see it as a place where, you know, I conversations where they can draw the context from that you want to give it to them, you know, like as soon as you add your notes, that's the place where your notes are and you can tell it like make use of these documents inside my WordPress. It's kind of this environment that you have more control over, whereas with, you know, the clouds and open AIs and so on, you kind of are in their ecosystem, the conversations

13:31you had there, they can use it for their context and for their memory functions. But here you can have more control, you can like maybe upload more documents first and then talk to the AI and it's already there. So I think that opens up some opportunities that are currently even hard to grasp. Awesome. Brandon, I'll ask you about this one. What about portability? You know, I know it lives in the browser and it can be reset. What's going to happen eventually, like, are we going to be able to push this to other devices if I want to use this on my phone and then I want to use the same install on my desktop? It's funny you ask about that because it's just going to try to just talk about that. We have, we're working on sort of WordPress to WordPress sync right now. So the idea would be that we could actually be able to sync entities or content between WordPress's, that's just for my WordPress, that's just for WordPress.

14:33So that impacts that, impact WordPress core, playground, mywordpress.net and then it just starts to get really cool because if your content is portable, maybe you want to pull some content from a more public facing website into my WordPress to work on or play with you could and then you could maybe even explore pushing it back, you know, all the sudden playground, even the disability we've talked about, this is like WordPress anywhere or WordPress everywhere. But you really then can start to do that because your content can be more portable. And so that's a space that I think we won't even fully realize the power of until those tools are, you know, really in place. But I know we want and are interested in doing sort of even like peer-to-peer syncing with mywordpress.net and that sort of thing. So that's something that we're working on and looking forward to as well. I think that's exciting. Just for WordPress in general to be able to do that, we talk to, you know, we have hosts have staging environments, so they're all kind of bespoke, right?

15:34And we're pushing certain things from staging to production. An ability to sync something that's built into WordPress core that could be like massively useful for so many people, in this case and for agencies, professionals as well. It really opens up, I really like even the playfulness that you can have with something like mywordpress.net, but it really being able to have content and data portability really opens it up to, I don't know, you can even have fun with things that are serious on another site, but you can pull them down, you can explore, experiment whatever you want and push it or don't. I think that's almost really exciting. Yeah, I mean, WordPress, but we always talk about data portability with WordPress, whereas other systems don't necessarily give you that. So I think that's kind of the ultimate example of it. I can have a WordPress site here in my browser. I can push that content to my live site if I want to and, you know, sync back and forth, which I think is incredibly cool. So I can't wait to see what that looks like.

16:36I know Alex, you had some videos that you had recorded with my wordpress. Would you like to share anything? Yeah, I've got one video that I could share. The tricky thing about it is that because it's kind of inherently private in that what you're working with. So I've got a video that shows the personal CRM and how the importing from my BPR would work. Yeah, I can show it up. Okay, great. So here we go. All right, so this is the infamous welcome screen that can use a little design touch up. And this is the app screen. And I think it has been talked about the apps that are there. In this case, we'll talk about the personal CRM one. As I said, for a developer standpoint, it's just a blueprint and it will actually install

17:37multiple plugins. As you can see, as it's pushing it, it actually has, this is comprised of multiple plugins that have been activated in sequence. And as I said, it's pretty interesting for people to get started, like get quick started if they have BPR. Because BPR connects to all these different services and it provides a local API that basically the communication is over local host so that the data never leaves your system. So it talks HTTP to your BPR and you need to get an API token from BPR. And with that token, then it can communicate to your locally running BPR. So in this case, here are my previous conversations. I've haphazardly blurred them out, but we're going to move to my brother, his Christopher

18:39and it will unblur in a second. I create this group, the family group. And yeah, then this is the profile that's created just from BPR. And as you can see, there's two services connected. And you can see when the last contact was, as you see, it has been in January. And I just copy and paste it as birthday. So with some small nuggets like that, like paste detection, it can show the next event just based on the birthday. And the thing that I spoke about before, it could be interesting to keep in touch every now and then and you can set a schedule on which you want to keep in touch. So this will remind you that in five days, you should get talking again. And one interesting, small kind of, just for fun thing is that it can do this relationship

19:41analysis based on your previous messages that you exchanged. And for any of your contacts you can then see, like, how's the balance who's initiating the conversation more? Not that it really needs to mean anything, but it can be an interesting way to see, like, if there's a one-sided relationship or not, which is kind of fun and hard to get otherwise. But here we have it just through this API integration. So if everything works well, I think the next thing that I show was the chat to blog thing where I'm going to actually go into a conversation, my daughter had a ski day, some days before. So let's skip ahead a little, does it show it? So this installs the chat to blog. I paste the beeper key and now I'm creating a post, it will actually list all the conversations.

20:42And then if I go into a previous conversation, it will pull the photos from that conversation. And then I can go ahead and select those photos that should be created, put it to a new post. So this is from a different conversation now. And it will actually take the date from the pictures to make it easier to backdate something to the event when it happened. Yeah, then you create publish and it actually creates the post from that. Very cool. And now these posts, they are in your media library. So they're really uploaded and stored there. So I think I'll keep it at this for now from the video. But this gives you kind of an impression of what the beeper integration can do as in making it super interesting to get content into your WordPress with very little to type, so to speak.

21:42And beeper, just for those that don't know, is an automatic product. And what exactly does that do? It's really a messaging app, right? It's, well, it's a multi-messenger kind of in the old style that many older folks might know from ICQ days and so on, where there were different protocols and different apps that could kind of collect them all on the one hood. And in today's world, we've got the WhatsApp and Signal and I-Message and Telegram and so on. And it can talk to those protocols also like with a privacy angle over your local connection. So it doesn't go to a server, I think, for most of them. There has been some transition, but like most of those services right now worked like that. And the interesting part for my WordPress is that it can then expose one unified API that you can talk to and it doesn't really matter which protocol was there when the message was received. Okay, so it's really just pulling that data, it doesn't care whether it came from Facebook

22:44or WhatsApp or any of that. Exactly that. So from this use case, it can be really interesting to receive event pictures or videos from all those different sources where typically you would have to care like who messaged me on that platform or how can they send me something from there. And that's kind of a nice way to collect that. And my personal use case is that we have a blog for our children to keep memories and everything. And it's a really nice way to keep up to date and reduces a lot of hassle to download them and collect them after the fact. And my recommendation is if you've got a family, it's really a nice idea to do like some family blogging and you could do it privately even with WordPress. I see that and it just hit me like the pain it is to use social media for those types of things, especially if you have multiple accounts. And you know, we all get into this habit of doom scrolling and seeing all the awful things online. And if you just want to connect with family, if you just want to keep track of those

23:47fun things even at your child's schoolable or things like that, you could create a little integration like this locally and you can avoid all the doom scrolling and just have the fun stuff that you can smile at instead of, you know, despairing on your phone. That's one of- That's a really cool use case. That's one of my main motivations in kind of making it more attractive to blog again. And one really important aspect I think that we've been also kind of omitting so far is that my WordPress is kind of, it could be a stepping stone towards a hosted WordPress. So I've been working in the space of personal WordPress for quite a while now. I have this plugin that's called Friends that integrates with ActivityPub and it's really, it makes your own blog like the backend or your friends page in that matter. Interesting to visit because before or like for everybody else who's not using WordPress for private reasons, you only go there to do action and you never, you hardly go there to read because it doesn't connect things.

24:49And I think it could be really interesting to foster this use case more of like making WordPress more useful to yourself. And honestly, I've had some trouble kind of convincing people to try it out because the problem is that most people don't have a WordPress ready to be used for private reasons. You have to find a new, you have to create a new account or add it to an existing account, find a new domain or subdomain or whatever. And that is for just a private use case. That's a pretty high burden to take. It's an uphill battle to kind of convince people, you know, for trying this, just create this new blog and just do those four steps and then you can try it. And with my WordPress, it's kind of one click away and we kind of make it more easy or easier for people to try those use cases that might not have publishing or self promotion in mind, but just your space for yourself. And that's one big thing for my WordPress, plus my personal timeline, really.

25:49Yeah, it can, of course, it's, I think we've got many more applications that we could build and that I'm hoping to inspire people to implement in WordPress because I'm hoping that we now have a really easy way for people to try it out and to use it for themselves. And I think there's many audiences around the world who can really benefit from a kind of free WordPress that's easy to use because you don't have to, yeah, find the place where to host it or burden the cost for hosting it. Yeah, I could definitely see that vision. It's interesting. I mean, we always talk about it as hosting and I know Matt Mullinwig had mentioned in his blog post about this that he wanted to see a WordPress, you know, this might take it into the billions of installs instead of millions. I could, I could see that down the road when you have, you know, everybody is tired of necessarily going to those 20 social network accounts that we have and all these other third party apps that we're using, if you want to bring all that into your own personal space

26:53and own it, my WordPress could be a way to do that. In the future, we could even have certain kinds of links where, you know, friends could invite their other friends to my WordPress to experience some of these things like if it's the social networking, we're talking about private social networking, you could, it's so cool to be able to share these possibilities with friends in a way that doesn't even require them to install software at all. Like they have a browser, they already had a browser and so it's such a, such a great way to get started and then one thing I wanted to mention also is that, I think that's one thing I would have liked to have added to the post that I posted on the WordPress dot org news is kind of an invitation to imagine what kinds of apps you would like, you know, build from WordPress and please, please make them, you know, make them have fun playing with what you might like and maybe if you find something worth sharing, share it and yeah, that's the idea.

27:54We've seen this so many times over the years, there's a call for the WordPress community to go out there and be creative and they've done some amazing things, so maybe this is that next step where they can go and do something that none of us sitting here right now have even thought of for that personal use case and then as you said, the syncing is coming, you know, at some point, which again, I think is just a really cool feature to be able to go back and forth between, you know, a live site and a local site. Just as a developer, I love that, have it built right into WordPress. Is there anything else that we should know about this project, anything else that's coming down in the pipeline here? I think for the moment, it's more, you know, there's a certain amount of mind shifting that needs to happen or that this tool is trying to encourage and I think that's something that maybe the WordPress.org news post didn't convey enough as in like, it is power by playground, but there's a mind shift there.

28:57How, like, this way, how we can open up WordPress to people, you know, who might be outside of the WordPress community, who just want to use a certain app and right now, the options are mostly some hosted version of some app somewhere or maybe you can download some app to your phone or whatever, but this could be something where we can leverage the power of WordPress, even though I said, like, you have to choose hosting, that's also benefit because you have such a wide choice of where to host your WordPress, where you know, like, this might be hosted inside my country, they apply to the local rules that I want. I don't have to go with a foreign service because they provide that and I think that's pretty powerful for people to just have options, whereas today there's some sort of limits in the market as to who's providing which service. And I think we as the WordPress community can provide this place for people, this place,

30:01I call the digital sovereignty, where you have a bit more control over where you hosted and how you hosted and with the AI tool, I think maybe it's actually worth, if you still have time to, I can do share a bit more of the video where I can show how you can use the AI assistant to actually modify software and set WordPress, which is also pretty powerful. Maybe a bit too far for today's audience of like somebody who just wants to do something, but I think it can be a preview of what we can do with the AI and empower people to change things. So I've installed the AI assistant and in this case, so it's bring your own API key, but you can actually also run it with a local LM and in this demo, I'm using that. And so I've got a local LM running and it also will connect over localhost with that. And now I'm basically asking it, I've got this plugin, please modify it, it's the Helodolli plugin.

31:11So, you know, this AI agent doesn't know a whole lot except for these are the tools available. And it basically evaluates them for what, how to achieve the task. And that's inside the current WordPress. So it looks for the file and uses the file editing tool and proceeds through this task of changing it to what the user wants. And I think this is something where if we can provide this environment where people can dream up their tools that they want and the AI can build it for them inside this sandbox and they can use it right there. It's a really interesting way to see how the software that you use can be even more at your own service.

32:11So here, it tries to activate, I think there was a bit of a problem. So there was a syntax error and it takes the syntax error and activates the plugin again. Yeah, we still get the syntax errors with AI sometimes. I think that's it too. It's been also a local LLM, so it's not as powerful. You can also use it with the other ones. But yeah, so I think that's pretty powerful in that you can modify the software. So I think a cut off the part where it can be visible, but like there was the WordPress tips on the top. So yeah, the goal is to empower people, I think, and to kind of try to think outside of the WordPress box and how WordPress can empower people who have been not in the WordPress community so far too. Yeah, I think we also get, you know, those of us who have been in this community a long time, we kind of see things a certain way and it's hard to shift that thinking, but maybe this is one of

33:15those like could serve as a catalyst for that. It kind of gets to look at other ways to use WordPress other than the ways we've just been using them for, you know, 20 plus years. I think that's important for the future. Well, guys, I really appreciate you coming on and talking to us. We'll certainly post all the links in the show notes. Where can folks connect with you online? If you want them to connect with you online. One easy way to reach us is in the WordPress.org Slack and the Playground channel. And in the WordPress Playground GitHub repo, you know, as far as free issues and discussion there as well. Yeah, it's also make WordPress.org slash Playground where we post chat recaps there by weekly chat where you can also reach us. Yeah. Thank you guys. I appreciate your time and for showing us around my WordPress. For those of you watching and listening, thank you for supporting the WP Minute.

34:17Go ahead and visit thewpminute.com slash subscribe, grab our newsletter, become a member and support the work that we do. And for Alex and Brandon, I will see you again next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the WP Minute, part of the Matt Report Media Network. This episode wouldn't be possible without our amazing pillar sponsors, Pressible, Kinsta, GoDaddy, 20i and Elementor. These brands are supporting WordPress media and helping us invest in your future as a WordPress professional. Our foundation plus sponsors like Hostinger, Big Scoots, Stellar WP, Personalized WP, WeGlock and PatchStack help us keep the lights on. Thanks to all of our members in the WP Minute Slack channel, which you can join too, head on over to thewpminute.com slash support to get access. Thanks for listening and don't forget to hit the share button or tell a friend about this podcast. See you in the next one.