Press This WordPress Community Podcast

For over 260 episodes PressThis host David Vogelpohl has interviewed countless guests from around the WordPress community about the latest advancements in WordPress, interesting projects people in the community are working on, and a countless list of optimizations, hacks, and techniques to make WordPress sites better. To honor David's years as host, in this episode we turn the tables and inter...

Are you a hard-core PHP developer who hasn’t quite “learned Javascript deeply” yet? Building headless WordPress sites can be a challenge to those new to the craft, but your bread and butter WordPress developer skills actually put you on better footing than you’d think. In this episode of PressThis, we interview Fran Agulto of WP Engine’s dev rel team about his thoughts on the best way to actually...

One of the primary benefits lauded with decoupled architecture (e.g. headless WordPress) is the improvement to the developer experience, but is the developer experience coming at the expense of the content creator experience? How can we have our cake and eat it too by providing our dev teams environments where they love to innovate and provide content creators the freedom to create? In this episod...

The buzzword of the year is the metaverse and rightfully so considering the drastic digital life changing innovations poised to permeate our lives with AR and VR, but what role will WordPress have if any in this strange and exciting new world? In this episode of PressThis we interview Anthony Burchell of WP Engine who is on the bleeding edge of connecting WordPress to the metaverse. Anthony’s acco...

The Formidable Forms plugin has always been a surprisingly useful tool for teams wanting to build everything from simple forms to full-on web applications with WordPress. This more-than-meets-the-eye nature of Formidable may leave you wondering, what else could I be building with Formidable? In this episode of PressThis, we interview Victor Font of Formidable Masterminds about his thoughts on why...

The WordPress world came alive with the introduction of Full Site Editing (FSE) in WordPress core earlier this year. While theme developers can keep creating classic themes in the ways they always have, this new method of building themes in the WordPress construct has introduced a lot of excitement, but also a lot of anxiety. The popular Genesis theme product suite has been a fan favorite for remo...

WooCommerce is often the developer’s choice for building custom eCommerce experiences quickly due to Woo’s ease of use for non-technical users and infinite customization through plugins and custom code. We build stores with important jobs to do and craft our builds to do those jobs well. But what can we do to make these stores with all these jobs do as fast as possible in order to optimize for pag...

Despite all the obvious work involved, being an owner/operator of your own business such as an agency can be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. Even if you don't "hit it big" with revenue, the skills and challenges you encounter in a CEO role can be life-changing and empowering all on their own. That said, are YOU really the best choice to lead your organization to gro...

As most folks already know, WordPress is soooo much more than a CMS and is used all over the world for complex web applications, headless architecture, and more. That said, one of WordPress' most overlooked benefits is digital and business automation. Automated business and digital processes can unlock powerful growth levers in the sites you build and save you valuable time and resources, but...

In every episode of PressThis, host David Vogelpohl asks guests for their WordPress origin story. In this episode of PressThis, enjoy some of the top origin stories including those from Rachel Gogos with BrandID, Chris Badgett of LifterLMS, Jon Henshaw of Coywolf (and founder of Raven Tools), Jason Cohen of WP Engine, Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains, Meryl K. Evans of Meryl.net Digital Marketin...

WordPress has been on a steady march of adoption in Enterprise organizations as they discover the power, ease of use, scale, performance, ease of hiring, and low cost of WordPress. While traditional WordPress builds play an outsized role in Enterprise WordPress adoption, headless WordPress builds are gaining pace by combining the best of WordPress and the best of decoupled architecture. In this ep...

Pricing is one of the most overlooked areas of running your business (especially as a WordPress freelancer or small agency owner). Hardly anyone likes to have that awkward conversation. Yet, it’s a discussion that needs to take place if a business is to grow and thrive. Are your discussions leading to being paid the amount you could get? In this episode of PressThis, we interview Brian Rotsztein,...

If you make, market, or work on products for the WordPress ecosystem, you may be struggling with tension in your business. Your product and engineering team often know your products intimately and likely even use them in their own WordPress builds, but how do you connect that in-depth specialized knowledge to the external messaging you create? In this episode, we interview Alex Panagis of ScaleMat...

If you build and optimize sites for business owners or marketers as part of an agency or in-house team, you may often find yourself asking "What the heck are they REALLY asking for?!?!". Clients often make specific requests that seem to be counter to the business objective they're trying to achieve. We feel this instinctually, but often have trouble understanding what the client is rea...

Women have made great strides in the last few decades when it comes to representation in technology, but much work is left to do. The WordPress community is incredibly welcoming to people from all genders and walks of life, but even in WordPress, there is much work to do. In this episode of PressThis, we interview Sam Munoz of WP Engine and her popular podcast Making Website Magic about her though...

In this episode of PressThis, we interview the founder of Delicious Brains Brad Touesnard, and the founder of WP Engine Jason Cohen about the sale of Delicious Brains' wildly popular plugins Advanced Custom Fields, WP Migrate (fka WP Migrate DB Pro), Better Search & Replace, WP Offload Media, and WP Offload SES to WP Engine. Brad and Jason share why they thought the transaction made sense,...

WordPress is a powerful platform that provides a near endless list of possibilities when building out a digital presence online, but poor performance can be a barrier to your success on the web if you're careless with your builds or hosting your site in the wrong environment. That said, what about WordPress core itself? What can be done to make WordPress even faster? In this episode of PressTh...

The web is always changing and we as WordPress developers and site builders need to continually adjust our strategy as the tactics for getting ranked on search engines over time change. In this episode of the interview Bhanu Ahuwalia of Rank Math about his thoughts on where he thinks SEO is going. what technologies & techniques are folks getting good at today in order to keep pace, and how you...

Building high-quality and functional websites is incredibly rewarding, but with dependencies left and right and an endless stream of things that could go wrong, having a solid QA practice is critical to making sure your WordPress build projects go right. In this episode of PressThis, we interview Jonny Allbut the Head of Product at Illustrate Digital about his thoughts on why having a solid QA pro...

WP-CLI was a game-changing addition to the WordPress universe when it was released and has since evolved to be a powerful toolkit for advanced dev teams seeking to speed up their workflows or introduce automation into their WordPress builds. As WP-CLI continues its march forward though, backwards compatibility presents challenges that need to be overcome. In this episode of PressThis, we interview...

WordPress has always provided a path for people with different levels of technical ability to make a great-looking and functional website, but you've always needed to know at least a little bit of code or at least be very technical in nature. Brands like the simplicity of platforms like Wix, but miss out on the ability to evolve their website as their digital presence grows. In this episode of...

WordPress 5.9 introduced a whole new paradigm to WordPress themes called “Full Site Editing”. WordPress 6.0 will expand FSE even further. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity to save time and build better sites for teams adopting FSE, but you might be left wondering how will your team successfully adopt FSE themes into how you build WordPress sites? In this episode of PressThis, WordPress 6...

WordPress provides a powerful platform for creating low/no-code site builds, thanks to a strong ecosystem of plugins and themes. What creates WordPress' potential teams is code in the form of custom plugins, themes, integrations, and more. If you're writing custom code to extend your own site in new and interesting ways or building plugins and themes to distribute, not using modern develop...

Creating web designs that please your stakeholders can be a challenge, especially with half-baked feedback like "Make it pop!". That said, creating designs that drive engagement and please your stakeholder's wallet is even harder. In this episode of PressThis, we interview Ross Johnson of 3.7 Designs about his thoughts on creating persuasive design patterns, why they're so helpful...

As the world transitioned to digital in the early 2,000's traditional newspapers, magazines, and other publishing businesses had to shift to a digital-first posture. Fast forward to 2022 and the technology and strategies for driving paid and other types of digital subscriptions for content publishers have advanced tremendously, but challenges for publishers still remain. In this episode of Pre...