[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 366, entitled need a lightweight calendar, have a look at Pie calendar. It was published on Thursday, the 28th of March, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few moments by Jonathan Jernigan so we can have that chat.
But before then a few bits of housekeeping. The first thing I want to mention is if you are interested in WP Builds, the best way to stay in touch is on our subscribe page. Head to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe.
Whilst you're there, please feel free to share any of those bits and pieces. Join us on the socials and share the podcast episodes as you see fit. We're always very, very happy when people go into their podcast player of choice and give us a review that seems to help the podcast ratings rather a lot.
The other thing to mention is that if you would like to advertise on the WP Builds podcast and get your message out in front of a WordPress specific audience, you can certainly do that. Check out WP Builds.com forward slash advertise, and you will hear from a couple of companies in a moment that have done just that.
The other thing to mention is that we have a schedule page. Interestingly, it's using the plugin, which is in question today. You can find that at wpbuilds.com forward schedule, and we'll put our regular episodes, plus any ad hoc episodes that we do as well.
The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. You can find out more at go.me forward slash WP Builds. That's go.me forward slash WP builds.
And by Weglot. Weglot the easiest way to translate your WordPress website. The Weglot translation plugin gives you a reliable and easy way to make your WordPress website multi-lingual in minutes. No coding required and no developer time needed. You can find out more at weglot.com. Once more, weglot.com. And sincere, thanks go to GoDaddy Pro and Weglot for their support of the WP Builds podcast.
Right. What have we got for you today? Well I'm chatting today with Jonathan Jernigan.
Jonathan has a really interesting plugin called Pie calendar. He's hooked up with Elijah Mills and together they are developing a lightweight plugin. I was so fascinated by this, I actually went out and bought it, and I tried it. And then after having tried it, I got in touch with Jonathan because I thought it was really worth raising on the podcast.
It's very lightweight. It tries to do a minimal set of things really, really well. So we talked today about how they decided to develop the plugin. Why they've gone for this minimal approach, with fairly aggressive pricing. How they're planning their roadmap, and all sorts of other things. Really interesting chat.
I would say that we recorded this a little while ago. So it's probably worth your while heading over to the Pie Calendar website and checking out to see if any of the features have changed since then. And as always in the show notes, you will find all of the links to the things that we mentioned in this episode.
So I hope that you enjoy the podcast.
I am joined on the podcast today by Jonathan Jernigan. Hey, Jonathan.
[00:03:55] Jonathan Jernigan: hello.
[00:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: Very, nice to have you on the podcast today, we're gonna talk about a plugin. It seems like a long time since we talked about a specific plugin.
We're often talking about community and things like that, but the one plugin that we're gonna be talking about today is called PI Calendar. Let's get to that in a minute. whilst Jonathan does his introduction though. You could go and check out the PI calendar website and orientate yourself a little bit.
It is. pi calendar.com. How much more straightforward could it be, but Jonathan, little moment at the beginning. Just give us your, potted history, who you are, your bio in the WordPress space, I guess makes it more relevant.
[00:04:33] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, absolutely. So of course like many of us, I started building websites for clients, coming up on 10 years ago. It's crazy for me to say. I, left a, An IT company I used to work for and I tried to go sell IT services. That's what I went to school for. Everyone said, no, we have an IT guy, but do you build websites?
And I said, no, I don't. And so for months and months I was getting no business. And I thought, wait a second, what am I doing? I'm turning down these people who are asking for this. So of course. for the first few years it was just building, whatever I could with WP Bakery and, just very simple sites.
eventually I, found Oxygen Builder in 2016, and that really started to evolve my WordPress, usage into a new level. And then of course, also my kind of development skills. yeah, I think for, from that period on now, and now I'm into the, generate press and generate blocks personally at all of my websites, both, PI calendar, my agency site, and kind of personal projects all end up in the generate suite.
but yeah, I do a mix of, client work that's, becoming less and less in favor of some of these other projects like PI calendar and, courses. So in a 15 second elevator pitch, I think that's about me.
[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's perfect. Gotta say generate blocks is really remarkable if you haven't managed to check it out yet. it's a suite of a really, very, very. minimal number of blocks. I, dunno what the current number is, but it's, around seven, something like that. And it, you really can make a pixel perfect representation of literally any site that you've seen on the web with these little blocks, containers.
And there's all the settings, margins of. Padding and everything and it does everything. although this isn't the enterprise of the podcast hat tip to Tom Osborne for producing such a great sweet, go and check it out. Yeah. So have you been making content about that then recently as well?
'cause I know you have a YouTube
[00:06:36] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah.
[00:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:06:38] Jonathan Jernigan: Definitely I, I'm terrible at plugging some of this stuff. Self-promotion is often not my strong suit, but. The, the YouTube channel is, my name. It's under Jonathan Jernigan. It used to be called, I called myself Perma Slug, which was like a play on words of some, WordPress terminology.
and I have, plenty of generate blocks, content and, some things around, beginner CSS tutorials. There's a, I actually released a video recently on a beginner's guide to Gutenberg blocks, and that's done surprisingly well. That may be an area for me to explore as well.
[00:07:14] Nathan Wrigley: it's hotness. You'll, I think you'll, get a, lot of audience out of, that content that seems like the real, genuine way to grow your audience at the moment. Anyway, we're gonna talk today a little bit about, PI calendar. I know that you are building this in collaboration with at least one other person.
So this is Elijah Mills, Elijah. Just like Jonathan has actually been in the page world, the summit that we organize. so firstly, thank you for that. secondly, how is it that you, you fell into the development game with oxygen's developer Elijah, I say oxygen's developer. I got an email yesterday from Elijah from Oxygen Side.
I think he's still there. how, did that all happen? Was it because you were a big Oxygen fan at the time and got friendly with him and
[00:08:01] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. Yeah, it did. Elijah is, a wonderful person. He's a super nice guy, and we connected, a number of years ago, and it seems like we've, spoken at least in some capacity almost every day since then.
[00:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:08:14] Jonathan Jernigan: spoken of course. we would chat through, through, actually, funny enough, we used to chat through Skype and then of course transition to Discord like most people.
But, But we connected primarily just around the fact that, like you said, I created oxygen tutorials and had a course for many years. And so we just naturally stayed in touch. and then eventually we just started to get to know each other better and realized we share a lot of the same interests and have a lot of the same personal values.
And, late last year when this, plugin came to mind, I built a very rudimentary demo and showed a few people and, people loved it. So I went to Elijah and I said, Hey, if, you're interested in this, and you want to handle the development aspect, I'll do literally everything else then that would be a perfect partnership.
And it's, turned out to be, it turned out to be perfect, primarily because, like I said, him and I share the same goals. We have the same aspirations with our work and personal lives. So I think it's just a very, symbiotic balance of, needs and wants both of our
[00:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: So he's handling the development, you are doing all the other bits and pieces of the marketing and the, replying to support and all that kind of thing. That's nice. That's a nice way to go about it. Nice. Clear division of labor. That's lovely. I have to say, I, I'm not, I'm not an affiliate of the product or anything like that, but I did buy the product and I bought the product.
I can't remember. How it came across my radar, but it did. so yeah, so well done on the marketing there, it came across my radar and immediately it struck me as something that I could actually personally use. So I just wanna get that out there. We are using it on WP builds. There's a couple of places where it's in use.
it's on the homepage actually. Insider generate blocks, accordion block, so that it can be collapsed. And, it's also on. WP builds.com/schedule. And what you'll see over there is if you click on it, you'll just get, it's a calendar. It's like all the other calendars you've ever seen. I present it initially in a month view, but, what it's doing is it's consuming metadata from a post or any kind of custom post type, and you've got a couple of simple options to fill out.
You can pick a start date. And an end date. And then you get to color it in. So you could, for example, say, I want the text to be white and I want the background to be blue, which is actually how I do it. And then it just puts it in the calendar. so it's really bound to WordPress events. It's not syncing with a Google Calendar or an Apple calendar.
It's just WordPress content that you know you want to put out there. Why did you go for that? Approach. What was it? Just you wanted something simple? Were you scratching your own itch? Because you could have added in all the bells and the whistles and all the million features of cloud sync and all of this kind of thing.
But yeah, it exactly matched what I needed, but I just wondered how it, is. Is it because you needed it?
[00:11:12] Jonathan Jernigan: I hate that I don't have a fancier, funnier, more interesting story than, we needed it for a client project, but that's the case. So I, I had a client who, is an, I think as you call it, in the uk, an estate agent over here in estate. Real estate, yeah. Yeah. Real estate agent. They came to me wanting this kind of like quasi SaaS app, and it was, a way for them to track internal deadlines.
So they have these case files and there's eight or 10 different deadlines and the, deadlines have to account for holidays and all kinds of other stuff. So it was really difficult for them to track on paper. so I, I built, that was, that's the rudimentary kind of version of, PI calendar that I built manually.
And I realized like this. This is the only way I could have gotten this done because the other events, plugins were just too big, too bulky, offered way too many things, and also didn't typically work with any other post type except whatever they created for you. So I wasn't actually working with events per se, but you install any other, calendar plugin and it creates an events post type for you.
But in, in my case, I, needed it to be more flexible. So to answer your question. when I shared this with Elijah, we started architecting. How could we build a calendar kind of events plugin that lives within the confines of WordPress, doesn't add a whole bunch of new custom fields or, custom post types and just lets you do whatever it is that you need to do, with, your calendar.
The idea was just like you said, it was scratching my own itch and client need at that time, but then also realizing like this may have some legs for, other people to use and it turns out they do.
[00:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, and I'm one of them, so I'll give you my use case and you'll see how it matches perfectly. I. I have got into doing quite a lot of live events on the WP Builds, channel and, I was, really struggling for a way to surface these, and so I ended up having this really manual system of, okay, I knew that I was doing this show at this date on this time, so I would then go in and on the homepage of the website, I would create a little card and I'd style it and make it out of.
Generate blocks and whatever blocks were around, and I'd have to do all that manually. And so if it got canceled, I would have to go in and, change it manually and blah, blah, blah. And it just got all a bit unwieldy. And as, as is normally the case with these kind of things, when things become unwieldy, you just stop updating it.
And so that homepage became stale. It was giving incorrect information. So I, then. thought what I need is some kind of calendar, and that must be the point at which, I did a Google search or something like that, and PI calendar popped up and it was exactly what I needed. Because as you say, if you, go into PI calendar, I might as well talk this through as, I'm going on about it, the, the settings.
But bravo, by the way, for putting the settings for PI calendar. In the settings area of the WP admin, not consuming up real estate, that is unneeded. So it's in settings, pi, calendar, you've got all your post types listed and it just, you just tick a box and say, yep, I want it associated with this post type or that post type.
So in the case of your real estate agent, I guess it would be properties or something like that. And then you just get a couple of those extra fields. You set a beginning date and an end date. There's probably more to it than that. And then you also got the option to surface, in the little card that pops up when somebody goes into the calendar and they want, they click on, we're all used to that.
We, you go in a calendar, you wanna click on the thing itself to see some more information. You do that and a little modal pops up and it helpfully brings in the title. Of the post or custom post up it brings in the excerpt as the sort of description shows the start time, the end time, start date, the end date, and then it'll nicely, I dunno if this is a pro feature or not.
I feel it might be, it will also provide, calendar links so that you can chuck it into your Google calendar, apple Calendar, whatever it may be, all the calendars that anybody's using you just click on that and it shoves it in there. Almost no settings whatsoever, but does exactly what I need.
Which begs the question, what else is there to do? what's needed apart from what you've got?
[00:15:38] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, so that's a, great question actually. And one thing I forgot to mention, which is that the other kind of, inspiration for developing this plugin was I really wanted to get a plugin in the WordPress repository. I wanted to put a plugin in the repo and just see what it's like, how does it work, understand like.
does this have any, impact? and, so that was part of the exploration. So the first iteration of PI calendar was what we call the very capable free version, which is almost everything that, that you just mentioned, minus the add to calendar and recurring events. So we do have a pro feature.
[00:16:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I forgot
[00:16:18] Jonathan Jernigan: so recurring events and the add to calendar are the primary thing that exists there now, among other nice like filters and stuff like that. But the, Let's see, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, you, said, what's next? so having the, free version be so capable, it's it does almost everything that you would need.
And then after that, we're finding that when people purchase pro, they're typically very happy. we have very little in the way of refunds. And it also is interesting because. It intentionally does so little that people come in knowing that philosophy that it doesn't do everything under the sun, which is really helpful I think from like a product perspective, but also from, the, customer standpoint.
It's like they, I love the phrase that, you guys use, does what it says on the
[00:17:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, exactly that.
[00:17:08] Jonathan Jernigan: that is exactly, I, have that in the back of my mind all the time. there's just, that's, what you get, that's the idea. So then it, in terms of what's next, we're, looking into more, more, flexible recurrence rules.
So right now you could say, I want my event to show up every Tuesday, or, every month on the first Monday. But, we're, we also want to be able to provide better, more powerful recurring controls so that somebody could say, I want it to repeat every Tuesday and Thursday, but not the Wednesday of Christmas.
Or, something like
[00:17:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So you exclude certain holiday periods for yourself or something. Got it.
[00:17:49] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, so you could pick a range of dates, like if you're, off all of December, you could exclude all of December. Or if you say, we're not gonna have a meeting next Tuesday, you could pick that one date. So that's probably the most likely thing to, to come next. but it's interesting because as it sits right now, it's so tied into the fundamentals of WordPress with posts and categories that.
There's a very simple way for people to, to build, let's say they need an exclusion or, a, Tuesday and Thursday kind of event, all you do is just create another post and, just set that one to show up on Thursdays. So it seems like most people are really happy with the flexibility as it sits because you're not so locked in.
[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think I did mention that, but I just want to, I just wanna say it again. The events are bound to posts, which is exactly what I wanted because every single thing that I do on the website is some variation. I. Of a post. If I do a show, I know that show is eventually gonna be published. I'm gonna put a YouTube video and some text and description.
but I know that's the, that's what's gonna happen. Now, in my case, I had to reach out to you because I wanted things which were not published to be available on the calendar. And the way the plugin works out of the box is that if, something is published. It will go into the calendar, which I guess is like most people want, right?
You wanna publish something and let the world know that it's out there. In my case, I want to keep that until I'm ready to publish. I've made all the content for it, and then it's ready to go. But you, fix that problem for me. You so even draft. Posts will be shown on the calendar, which is neat. So it's bound to the post, I create the post, and then if I wanna do another one in next week, that's exactly what I do.
I just duplicate the post with a, some kind of duplicate post plugin, like I think, are you using the Yoast one? duplicate the post update the dates, just quick inspection of the calendar to make sure everything's exactly where it should be, and you're off to the races. So it is. It is just that.
It's just posts. And you were, the description that you had, it sounds like it was like on an intranet side of things. It sounds like it. For the estate agent client, it wasn't public facing. It was something that they would be looking at on the back end or something like
[00:20:10] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah. Yeah. the original idea was that it would be an internal tool for them, but then that they would, provide it as a free resource to their clients. Was, the idea. And, we, I got the, prototype. Working. And, that one was a bit more complicated because every, event had, like I said, 6, 8, 9 different deadlines.
But once I shifted my thinking towards WordPress post, then it was like, oh, this is so much more simple. You can still use all of the features of a WordPress post with your, however you wanna build your, template. If your site looks a certain way, this calendar doesn't get in the way and force you to.
To, change that. so for them it was the perfect fit. It was like that from, they, weren't really in the website like I was, but I was still able to build everything exactly as they needed to their requirements and have the, calendar component too. I guess you've your own calendar, if you're using Google Calendar, you've probably done things to it to make it feel like it's home, and so that when you go into it, you immediately know, okay, I don't need to care about that because it's blue, or, I need to worry about that one because it's dark red.
[00:21:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh. Or that's a bill. Or, something like that. You've color coded it and, so let's get into those kind of features because it's not like you just. Turn on the plugin and you're off to the races. There are options to customize it. Very few of them, I say very few of them. There's, only a few that you do in the ui.
The other bits pieces, revolve around short codes and things like that. But just talk us what you can do in the ui, first of all. So I've logged in, I've written my post. I've set, let's leave it there. What, do we do?
[00:21:55] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, so, if you're using the free version that you can install from the WordPress plugin repository, there are no settings at all. you just. Upload it, activate it, and then go to any post. It could be pages, posts. If you have a custom post type like events or anything like that, you can go edit an existing post or add a new one.
And in the right sidebar you'll see a new option. It says calendar, and you can just tick the box. It says Show on calendar. and then there's, there's a start date and an end date. So you pick the, start date and there's a time slot in there as well for, both of those. You publish the post. And then, as of right now, we just are working with a short code.
We don't have a Gutenberg block yet, but that will hopefully be something we integrate in the future. so you would just go anywhere you want the calendar to show up on your website, just whether it's a page or a sidebar or whatever. You can just go drop the Pi cal short code on the page and viola, it'll be, right there.
So we have a, on the website, we have a video that we're, we call it like a four minute quick start guide. So you should be able to get the calendar functioning and operational in less than five minutes.
[00:23:08] Nathan Wrigley: easy. Oh, a minute. Yeah. I'm, gonna, I'm gonna truncate that amount of time. It's way less.
[00:23:15] Jonathan Jernigan: I think if you're, a brand new WordPress user, you could still probably figure it out five minutes. But, Yeah. But then in terms of the pro version, it's a, it's, a separate plugin. So of course that was, that's our, premium offering. And that one functions in all the exact same ways that I just mentioned, except you do have, as you said, Nathan, a settings option in, WordPress settings, PI calendar, and there's a couple options.
You can set the controls to only appear on specific post types. you already mentioned the ability to, in your popover for adding the events to your own calendar. You can control what, people will see. So if you only want Apple and Google, you could turn that on. and then, I'm trying to think of what else off the top of my head.
There's one other setting in
[00:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, the other one the, is the license key that's,
[00:24:03] Jonathan Jernigan: ah, yes.
[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: paste your license key in at the top. Yeah. Yeah. So there's three things. License key allowed post types and the, yeah. surfacing one of the five calendar options. You've got Google Office 3, 6, 5, outlook, web, apple Outlook. so yeah, I think that's the lot in the settings.
Yeah.
[00:24:21] Jonathan Jernigan: Yeah, and we have a bunch of, a bunch of short code options as well. So it's a little cumbersome to be honest right now. It's something that, that we definitely want to improve on, either with some sort of little widget to help you understand all the options or long term. Of course, we want a real Gutenberg block that hopefully will render the calendar, but also allow you to pick all of the, short code options from, a visual setup.
Because you can do things like, you can set, the theme of the calendar. So by default it's gonna be in kind of light mode, but it inherits all of your theme styles. So the way we, have an internal thing that Elijah and I joke about called the Simplicity Gun. And we want the calendar to be as simple as possible in every way.
So the, styles are not, There, there are very few CSS styles outta the box. So it picks up on your fonts, your colors, your backgrounds, your link colors, all of those kinds of things that you've already set in your website. It will just inherit. So that's a big part of why you can get up and running in, less than five minutes.
and so, back to the short code options. You, can turn on dark mode or you can turn on adaptive. So it detects the user's preference. There's, filters in the pro version. There's a bunch of other really nice, options. And of course the ability for the calendar to be translated. So if you want it to show up in French or German or whatever language, there's a tiny little short code attribute and it will just translate the whole thing for you.
[00:25:55] Nathan Wrigley: If you're not familiar with short codes, and I'm imagining that the longer I do this podcast, the less likely people are to know what short codes are, so inter Yeah, that's interesting. But, so a, short code basically is a piece of text. It's got square break, square brackets around the edges and youth.
It was the way that we got things into WordPress content, that plugins and what have you had to offer. So in this case, you are gonna go to an HTML block inside Gutenberg, and you're gonna just write square bracket, open Pi Cal Square bracket close. And that will throw in the default calendar. But it, but in the pro version, you can add parameters to that.
So you could say, for example, view. And then list month, and it will just show it in that classic month view that you've seen where you know you've got the whole week on a row, and then the week below it and the week below it, but then you've got the other options. Now you could have a list or what have you, and then there's a whole bunch of other ones.
You can limit it so that it only shows certain. Custom post types. So in my it might be, I don't know, podcast or something like that. And they'll only show those on that calendar. But then you could put another calendar on another page or somewhere else on your website and choose, I dunno, something else, events or whatever it might be.
and there's loads and loads of short code options in there. And actually. Probably the best way to get a grip on that is to go to the URL provided, which is docs dot pi calendar.com. So if you're on the PI calendar website, just sub put docs at the beginning and then dot, and then you'll be able to see all of them.
And that enables you to, really Switch the, way it looks. And it honestly, in my case, I've just got the Pi cal one. I didn't add any of the attributes, but I did go a bit berserk with the CSS. and there isn't a point click interface for altering that as yet is though, if you wanna change the default light, I don't know, heading color, you've gotta go and work that out.
But luckily in your help document article, you've found, you've surfaced most of the likely CSS that people would want, Yeah, exactly. So that's another thing is, we considered at one point to have like a, styling engine, if you will, but again, it's so simple and the CSS. That you need is so simple that even me, eight years ago when I just basically tried and tried to get the right selector then made my heading blue, you can definitely do it.
[00:28:19] Jonathan Jernigan: So, that's, the idea, is that it's super simple. Really everything just needs two classes and that's about it. And, like you said, it's all, there in the docs to try to make it easy for you.
[00:28:29] Nathan Wrigley: How does it, 'cause this was one of the things that I, would like, if I can make some feature requests, one of mine would be the, I'd like to be able to see the, the month view. I dunno how realistic it is ever to see the month view on a mobile device. So that would be nice, but I, just don't know.
'cause you end up with seven little boxes next to each other, which. All in all, they're probably like five or six millimeters wide. I dunno how you, how do you do that? I don't know, but that would be
[00:28:59] Jonathan Jernigan: So I, I definitely agree that's, probably the biggest, thing that Elijah and I both are, not proud of, is the full calendar view on mobile doesn't look that great. luckily, like you said, there's a bunch of other options like list view and timelines and stuff like that. but we are, I. That, that's in terms of our personal, internal priority, it's it that fixing the mobile, layout for the full calendar is, top of the list.
We're working right now. We have a, basic prototype of what we're calling like a widget mode, so it's really small. And the idea is that it would fit like either in your sidebar or it could be your default mobile view. So it'll have, the, month name, the toggles to go back and forth between the months as it does now.
And then it has exactly what you're talking about, like how Google Calendar functions, on your mobile phone, if you have the app where I hadn't really thought about that. Yeah. What does it do? Yeah, I'm yeah, you see the whole month, but you only get a tiny little preview of each event and you click the day and it takes you to a day view.
We're, not sure if that's the way that we'll end up going, but something like that where you see that there's dots to indicate something is happening that day, and then you'll, click and, get more information about
[00:30:10] Nathan Wrigley: So the color coding would be some sort of giveaway that Yeah, I get it. a key would be nice actually thinking about that. A, key in the calendar would be a nice, so blue is, I dunno, in my case, podcasts and red is live events or whatever it may be. That'd be, so there you go. I'm That's another one is I know for a fact on our list is, is like better global color controls. So the ability to set a color per post type or per, category for instance. That way, like you said, I'd never even considered a key, but I'm definitely gonna write that down. So if, you had that global, maybe you could just have the color value and a, key next to it.
[00:30:50] Jonathan Jernigan: that's a brilliant idea. I'm writing that down right I don't wanna
[00:30:53] Nathan Wrigley: I've always thought that, if in the case of me where I've got a bunch of different events, I can, obviously say, because every single post you ha oh, there's another one. default colors. So so every time I go into a post at the moment, I have to write the hex value down for the blue.
That's the WP builds blue, and then I have to, find it and I've, me, I've memorized it so it doesn't matter, but I have to enter it in. But it would be nice to stash those away somewhere. But, blue is live, red is pod, podcast, whatever, five or six. And then if you could surface those in the calendar or all, or even like you do in your own Google Calendar, if you uncheck that box next to the collar or those events go away, don't they?
If you know what I mean. Listen to me giving you work to do.
[00:31:41] Jonathan Jernigan: I think there's three feature requests. I have all in my list here, and they, say plus one, Nathan.
[00:31:48] Nathan Wrigley: So, there you go. what's the future though? what I mean by that is do you intend, so obviously I'm feeding you with ideas and really just, you don't need those. It is exactly what it says it does, and that's why I got it. But what's your intuition? Do you, want it to become more complicated or is there, is it really just a.
Question of keeping it as simple as possible, even though some of these would be nice to have. It might be better to, I don't know, surface. Surface as a knowledge base article where you could put something in your functions dot php file instead of bloating out the plugin. What's your there?
[00:32:26] Jonathan Jernigan: I, think, if you had asked me this question when we first launched, at the beginning of 2023, then I would've said, we'll probably just do what you said, functions, do PHP, custom code, that kind of thing, but. I'm, noticing that the, types of people that are purchasing this are, they manage a couple of sites or they're the type of, freelancer or, internal developer for a company.
They manage one site. So typically their, development skills are, not necessarily, terrible, but they're, on the lower end of the spectrum and. these people are just building sites. there's, they're not doing anything horribly complicated. to answer your question, I think that it does make sense to add these kinds of just what, I would consider quality of life features.
The ability to set a default global color, honestly should just be there. but the, other thing is for both myself and Elijah, this plugin is not at all. not even close to providing, a full-time income for both of us, which is actually a blessing because we don't need it to succeed.
it, more is like it. It's the ability for us to do something fun and different with the expectation that it will grow over time. we're both investing, lots of time in this. Now we see a trajectory and it's sold very well so far. We're, about to cross, a hundred pro sales, and we only launched that in basically the beginning of, June 1st.
So in, in six months, I feel like we've done a really good job. so, anyway, all of that is to say like we, we are intentionally keeping it very simple, moving very slowly. And, and so I think in the future we. We probably will explore other things, maybe more complicated features, but they'll probably end up as add-ons.
One thing we've had requested quite times is the ability to do event tickets, and that is a, beast unto itself, but that will very likely end up as a, pie calendar, pro ticketing, add-on and not be in the core
[00:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: I, love that model. I love the model where the core thing, and in your case, the free thing just handles just this real simple use case and then everything else that you want on top of that. So if you wanna be able to. I don't know, customize the kind of post types that's, you've gotta pay for that. And then beyond that, anything else like ticketing, that's a totally other animal.
Most people will not need that. And so it, it doesn't ship with the plugin. That's a thing. You add a plugin to the plugin, if So it's an add-on, and then the sky's the limit. But the nice thing about that is so long as. So long as the, pro, the basic pro model, if you like, so long as that keeps ticking over all of these things, can just be added over time.
And, you swell the business. Let's say that in a few years time you're up to 3, 4, 5, 600 paying customers. You have an intuition. There's something in this. We've now got an to speak to. There's people paying. We can, we can expand and start to do some of the other things, which were out of scope a couple of years ago.
I feel we should talk about the pricing. 'cause the price, the pricing is on the generous side from you, let's put it that way. I, there's two pricing options and I've never seen $39 as a pricing for a plugin before. It always, begins with a four, or ends with a seven or begins with a nine.
Ends in a nine ends in a seven. firstly, I, have to say the sale of that for me, the purchase of that was a total no brainer. I bought the, it's called the Pro five Site License. And ladies and gentlemen, $39 for a year. total Bargain. You can use that on five sites. the other, the only other license that I can see at the moment, maybe that'll change is, unlimited.
And, that's $99. I was. Honestly, Jonathan, I'd have paid $99 for the five site license. So you want to go and give that some thought? I don't know, but
[00:36:39] Jonathan Jernigan: we're ramping it
[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah, that's But, really, interesting affordable pricing. Now I know it only does one thing and it does it well. Did you, was there a lot of heartrending about that?
Did you sit there ages or just come up with Right. 39. We're just doing that. That'll do it.
[00:36:54] Jonathan Jernigan: yeah, definitely, Elijah and I had many, conversations about that. and funny enough, I have a, distinct memory of. Speaking to him one day for so long that I drove from my house to a city 45 minutes away, ran an errand, sat in the, parking lot of this big hardware store called Lowe's, then went in, Lowe's, came back out and drove all the way home and was still on the phone with him.
we talking only about pricing and at one point I had to pull over and look at notes on my phone and we were talking about the, the competitors and all these other things. To, put it bluntly, we spent a, massive amount just debating this, which is probably, in, in one sense, silly, but we knew, that it would be easier to raise our prices than it would be for us to lower them should we have flopped and, nobody purchased it.
so we started Low and the other very intentional decision that was a, was really a no-brainer for us, was not offering a lifetime deal. We never have, and we probably never will. and, that's really because it goes back to. The sustainability perspective that, Elijah and I have set for ourselves.
From the beginning, it was just like this, isn't something that we need to pull cash out of, and we want this to grow long term. So of course, like you said, the licenses are on a yearly model, but the idea is that over the course of maybe two or three years, then maybe we can start pulling, some, actual su substantial money out of it for ourselves.
And so, that's really like the, idea is that of course, like you said, it doesn't do everything under the sun. So the pricing factors that in. But also, like I, we understand a lot of plugins are horrendously expensive and many of them are horrendously expensive and they're a yearly license.
So I know I personally suffer from subscription fatigue for a lot products where I'm like, The, other, facet of it is the psychological perspective of this thing is so expensive that I really need to justify it to keep it. So there's an element of keeping it affordable enough so that it, like you said, it's a no brainer price.
ah, yeah, that's worth 39 bucks to me. if, our subscription was coming up and it was 150 or, some of these unlimited licenses are $450 a year, it's like. That's a lot, harder to justify. So there's a facet of that too.
[00:39:28] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. honestly, it was when I saw the price, I was genuinely like, wow, that's a great deal. And I'm not just saying that because you're on the podcast. I honestly thought that is a real bargain. it's completely changed the way that I work. With my site actually, because everything that I do is largely based around the next week.
So as an example, we're recording this, and then it'll go into a weekly schedule of a podcast. So one of the things that I'm, that my workflow has now become is as soon as we finish this recording, I'm gonna go and create a draft podcast, call it. Jonathan Jernigan, and I probably won't put a date on it just yet, but it, there, it will be.
And it'll just be sitting there and it won't appear on the calendar. But the moment I figure out where Jonathan and the PI Calendar podcast is gonna go, I'll go into WordPress and I'll put in the dates and keep it as draft. and then obviously that then is my workflow. So it's, really taken me from doing everything in things like Google Docs and various other places.
It's made. WordPress, more of the center and, I would never, ever have created a post prior to it being needed before. But now I've got a reason to do that. And it's been nice going in and doing all that. And obviously with the, advent of, Phase three of Gutenberg collaborative editing.
That's gonna be really interesting for me as a content creator as well, because I'll be able to, so we could have shared the show notes, for example, and we could have done that in Gutenberg and all of those kind of things. So it's, I just wanted you to know really that it's, transformed the way that I, it interact with my website.
It's, open five times more than it ever used to be. 'cause now I need to go and, schedule those posts. So, there you go. You are responsible.
[00:41:13] Jonathan Jernigan: I am sorry for causing a lot
[00:41:16] Nathan Wrigley: It's great. I absolutely love it. I've just thought of one other thing, by the way. It's feature request. could we have the date, beginning date and end date of the thing in the list?
View of the post type? So that where so got, it's got post name and it's got post matter and description. You know what I mean? So it could say what date it's on. That would be handy if you could just do that. in which view are
when you go into posts and you look at the list of all the posts,
[00:41:46] Jonathan Jernigan: Oh, like an admin column.
[00:41:48] Nathan Wrigley: for start, for the date, it's actually on, because obviously when I said it as draft, it doesn't have a date.
There's nothing, there's no date there at all. So there you go. They're giving, you some homework. I feel bad.
[00:42:00] Jonathan Jernigan: no, I, our, feature request list is, fairly concise. we, like I said, we, we have our internal simplicity gun and, sometimes people ask for stuff and I'm just like. Thank you, but no, you. And, this, the, admin columns one and, our iterations of the, global colors one is really good.
I'm actually surprised when I hear things like an admin column request and nobody else has, asked for that. I'm like, it's because I'm weird. That's what's going on there. But it, but also I'm really using it. I'm really, using it. And so I'm co coming up with these things all the time. And I told you, I think in the previous email, I. About another one, which is putting the time into the sele, surfacing the time.
[00:42:45] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, we'll do that off, do that another time off the call. okay. The PI calendar, it's just pi calendar.com. P-I-E-C-A-L-E-N-D-A-R. Dot com. Go check it out. it's well worth it. You can obviously hear that I'm, delighted with all the bits and pieces that it can do. So I'd like to thank you, Jonathan, and obviously Elijah for throwing it together.
I really appreciate it. Is there anything you'd like to add? Did we miss anything before we knock it on the head?
[00:43:13] Jonathan Jernigan: I don't think so. I really appreciate you, exploring this with me and the, having me on.
[00:43:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's great. Go and check it out pi calendar.com and yeah, very nice to have you on the podcast. Thanks, Jonathan.
[00:43:24] Jonathan Jernigan: You as well. Bye-Bye.
[00:43:26] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very pleasant chatting to Jonathan today about Pie Calendar. If you have any commentary about that head over to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 366, and leave us a comment there.
Alternatively find us on one of the social channels. We are on X, we're on Facebook and a bunch of other places. Leave us a comment there, and hopefully we will get back to you.
The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. You can find out more at go.me forward slash WP Builds. That's go.me forward slash WP builds.
And by Weglot. Weglot the easiest way to translate your WordPress website. The Weglot translation plugin gives you a reliable and easy way to make your WordPress website multi-lingual in minutes. No coding required and no developer time needed. You can find out more at weglot.com. Once more, weglot.com. And sincere, thanks go to GoDaddy Pro and Weglot for their support of the WP Builds podcast.
Well, that's basically all I've got for you this week. Just a couple of things to mention. Firstly, if you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can find an implementation of the Pi Calendar at our schedule page. WP builds.com forward slash schedule.
If you'd like to get your message out in front of a WordPress specific audience, WP builds.com forward slash advertise will help you with that.
I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and bid you adieu.
Have a good week. Stay safe. Bye-bye for now.
