404 – Alan Fuller is not found! Actually he is, and he’s been learning to develop blocks

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. Happy New Year. You have reached episode number 404 entitled, Alan Fuller is not found, actually he is, and he's been learning to develop blocks.

It was published on Thursday, the 9th of January, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin the podcast.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, I am joined by Alan Fuller, or am I? It's episode 404, and I think I lost the episode at some point.

Actually, speaking of that, it did take us a very long time to get Alan on the show. As we mentioned at the beginning, there were lots of stops and starts, gremlins, illness, all sorts going on, but we did finally get him on the show.

And he's here today to talk about his endeavors, turning his attention away from shortcode based products to blocks, and how it has been, well, let's just say a challenging experience.

We talk about some of the plugins that he's developed and how it has been interesting getting himself upskilled, and getting his team to work with blocks. And probably if you're a developer, this is a challenge that you have faced too. I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Alan Fuller. Hello, Alan.

[00:03:54] Alan Fuller: Hi. Hello.

[00:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to finally connect with Alan. Either I've been ill or Alan's been ill or somebody was, there was a terrible drama in one of our lives or the other of our lives.

We've tried this many times and finally we've managed to make it in December. I think you probably booked on in July or something like that but, here we are.

[00:04:15] Alan Fuller: Yeah, I, think it was the summer and then the autumn. I think everyone going back to school, grandkids at school and everything else. Bringing diseases into, into the house.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: We even started a call at one point, 'cause I remember seeing you and speaking to you and we had to stop it. I can't even remember why that was. Maybe there were audio gremlins or something.

[00:04:34] Alan Fuller: No, what? I'll tell you what it was. You just come back from WordCamp us and you had a terrible cough and you felt you couldn't edit those number of coughs

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I was coughing all the time. I'd forgotten that. Gosh.

[00:04:45] Alan Fuller: my mic had a little bit of a problem as well, so we decided to abandon it.

[00:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: I, thank you for staying the course and sticking with me. The, topic is gonna be the same as we were gonna chat about in the summer. before we get into that properly, Alan, do you just wanna just give us your bio, tell us who you are, where you live, who you work for, which I know is, yourself, but, just tell us about your background in WordPress and things as well, if that's okay.

[00:05:10] Alan Fuller: Yeah, sure. I live near Woking in the south of England, and, I've been a career technologist all my life and I'm quite old now, so I was 46 years since I started as a trainee programmer, in terms of WordPress. After I left the corporate world in. About 2010, I stopped doing work in that area and started working from home.

I was working with my son and, we stumbled across WordPress. 12 years ago, I. We started building WordPress websites. I started creating some plugins. My son went and did some other stuff and I carried on doing plugins. And and I have a small plugin business that, keeps me busy, earns a little bit of money, and and this is what I do.

It's at for works.

[00:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: I was just gonna say is the URL for that Full works plugins.com.

[00:06:13] Alan Fuller: For works plugins.com is the URL.

[00:06:16] Nathan Wrigley: I'll, put that in the show notes. You always seem to be around in the same sort of conversations that I am. I dunno if it's just that we collide on the same kind of topics, coincidentally, but do you, obsess about WordPress but it, 'cause it sounds like you've got more, ions in the fire, if It's not, it, maybe you are into just technology more broadly or programming more broadly, or is it basically become all about the WordPress stuff?

[00:06:41] Alan Fuller: It's, yeah, the last few years it became about the WordPress stuff and during Covid lockdown I started getting involved in, in keeping myself busy and focused. And I started volunteering a lot on the support forums on wordpress.org and helping out in the, The plugin reviews, not actually doing any plugin reviews, but just hanging out on their slack and answering questions and things like that.

so I've had a lot of experience with that side. I've even got a, core contributor badge and I, don't think I did very much. I think I. I did one comment or something. but, yes, since, I've been on my own without my son, I've been focusing on the plugins and focusing on the plugins is, makes you very, deep into the WordPress space.

I'm also. A developer that is not very good at marketing. So I do try and I'm very small business, so I, can't go and employ a marketing firm and pay them thousands of dollars a month. So I have to force myself to be out there, even though I'm slightly socially anxious.

[00:08:01] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what? You are not the, only person who has that, and I'm gonna use air quotes. I'm doing it. problem because I speak to a lot of people who are developers. And they've got fabulous products in many cases, really polished, there's a lot of effort gone into it. But getting it out into the wider world is the, is just the piece of the puzzle that they cannot grapple with.

And I dunno how many times I've been contacted by people who've got products, like I said, that are seemingly excellent and they just can't do that jump. And and that must be a little bit. Oh, heartbreaking, for want of a better word, because you pour your blood, sweat and tears into something and then finally getting it in front of people does often I think, take a bit of luck in many cases, but also that ability to write good marketing content or employ somebody to do it, or just be the gregarious kind of person that's willing to go to events and put yourself in videos and podcasts and things like that.

So I do sympathize. Do you find that's, you're on a podcast now, so clearly you're getting over that hump a little bit. Do you find that something that you still find uncomfortable, or do you find that you get better at it as the years go by?

[00:09:14] Alan Fuller: I find it uncomfortable. I, yeah, I find it uncomfortable. there's no doubt about it. the first word camp I've ever been to was the last year, and given that I've been in, WordPress for 12 years, that's ridiculous, isn't it? I should have been going and making friends and things.

A lot earlier. but I just find it uncomfortable. I remember I went to, have you heard of Brighton? SEO?

[00:09:42] Nathan Wrigley: I have. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:45] Alan Fuller: many years ago, because when we started out, we weren't actually starting out as a WordPress agency. We were starting out as a PPC and an SEO agency, and I went to Brighton, SEO, and I had to queue to get in and, I was on my own and I didn't know anyone and.

After about two hours there, I just had to get out. I couldn't, it just didn't suit me. I'm not a sort of crowd sort of person, I find it hard.

[00:10:16] Nathan Wrigley: Hmm.

[00:10:17] Alan Fuller: yeah, I'm on a podcast. I'm know I have to start doing these things because I have plugins that are successful by accident and I have plugins that I've put work into and aren't successful, not because.

They're bad or anything else. They're good. Obviously I wouldn't put my heart into them, but no one knows about them.

[00:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think podcasting is a really good format for things like this because firstly, although you and I can see each other, 'cause there is a video that is, happening between Alan and I at the moment, but it's not being recorded. The platform that I use, you just toggle it off and it will not capture it.

But I think it's a really nice, it's a nice format because it's a halfway house in a way. Video, there's that whole thing about, how do I look? What does my background look like? How do, how will people perceive the way that, I am? and I think with the audio, there's something there.

I've just loved audio as a format forever, since I was a little kid listening to the radio in my kitchen when I was growing up. And, and so hopefully this conversation won't be, too uncomfortable. You look fairly relaxed at the moment, I have to say.

[00:11:31] Alan Fuller: Yeah. Yeah. I, feel fairly relaxed, but I've stopped looking at myself on the, video feed there and, most of the time I probably have my eyes closed while I'm thinking, because that's the way I am.

[00:11:42] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really good way I found of conducting, interviews. it was only fairly recently that the platform that I used to do the interviews, introduced video. I was using a platform that was entirely audio only and I found that it was very effective if I wanted to. Really concentrate on what the guest was saying to just shut my eyes.

shut your eyes as much as you like. It's a really good idea if you're trying to concentrate on what somebody's saying. Let's get into, let's get into the topic today. So one of the, one of the plugins that you do is an, event driven plugin. And in the, fairly recent past, I dunno exactly when you can set out the timeline for us, if you like, you've, you've taken this plugin over from being like old school, if you like, a, short code based, plugin.

To, the modern WordPress way, which is blocks and, as, as much I'm sure, as you would've liked that journey to have been. Click your fingers. Dead simple, no problems. it doesn't appear to have gone that way. So hopefully during the podcast today, you'll be able to, it'll be like, I'm asking you to lie down on the psychologist's bench and, tell me all about the problems and we'll air them and we'll see if we can, get to the bottom of it and work out what went wrong.

first of all, tell us about the plugin in question and, what was the, thing that hauled you over to modern WordPress from short codes?

[00:13:07] Alan Fuller: Yeah. Okay. So my, plugin is called Display Eventbrite Events, which it does that, it displays Eventbrite events. And it's, probably, I would say it is the most successful standalone Eventbrite event plugin. that it's not a associated with an event calendar or anything else, in WordPress. And the main reason for that is.

many years ago, whenever it was 2015, I was joined up with some business consultants who were running events via event Brighton. They had a, a WordPress website, and I had a look and there was no easy way of displaying Eventbrite event. So on WordPress. So one afternoon I sat down and I wrote the code for myself and, and it worked and I published it on the repo and.

It got a lot of traction and so I added some premium features and I started earning money from it, and then I got more feedback and then it added more features, and at that point it was short code 'cause blocks didn't exist. So over the time. We ended up with 90 odd options on the short code. it makes it very difficult to, to work out and configure.

again, blocks were just starting to happen, but I. Because it was so difficult to configure. I created a sort of a, an online demo, short code builder thing where you could select the different options. it's just basically it was gravity forms with 90 options on it, and you click on them and then it'll show you in real time what the, change, the different layouts and the different options, whether you're going gonna have the price on there, and all those sort of things that people had wanted over time.

So we ended up with 90 options, short code. and, that was fine and it was. The premium version was selling, it was my leading plugin. no real reason to change it. The price I pushed up from originally, I think I was charging $6 a year.

And,

[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Gosh.

[00:15:32] Alan Fuller: and I doubled that and I doubled my income and I doubled it again and doubled it again.

And we're now about $60 a year.

[00:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: That seems like such a, that's such an interesting amount of money, just such an arbitrary thing. $6. Yeah. I, genuinely can't think of anything. That, that cost that much. But, that was the thing back in the day, wasn't it? It the, it was really difficult to get into the whole commercialization of plugins because there was a part of the community back then that really thought that was weird.

And if you're in different CMSs like Drupal, that still is quite a. a step too far to charge for things in many ways. I, commend you for, for making it at least work for yourselves. So when you say short codes, forgive me. If you're listening to this podcast and you have no idea what a short code is, this was something in WordPress, which was deployed more or less everywhere it was became ubiquitous.

And it was a simple way contained in sort of square brackets of dumping something into, let's say a post or a page or something like that. And then it would render. Something. And in this case, I'm guessing it would render the, the details that you wanted out of Eventbrite, but you said that there were 90 different, options.

And I'm guessing that those options had to be added as parameters to the, to within the short code. So you'd have, I don't know, o open curly braces, Eventbrite, and then just one thing after another thing

[00:17:04] Alan Fuller: Y Yeah. So you would start off with basically, the, when the, plugin first came out, it was just like open square brackets, WFEA widget for Eventbrite. and I. Then there was only two options. There was like the number of events, which was five, and then whether you wanted to show private or not.

And that was the first premium option to allow you to hide private events. That's, that was the cheap, that one option. But then different layouts, so you have layout, then you have different, different texts on if it's sold out, do you wanna change the text, and then you end up with just a.

Hundreds, not 90, 90 different things with, filters. Do you want to filter out events by keywords? Do you wanna filter them by location? Do you wanna show the location? Do you want just goes on forever and ever

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. ascending, descending and Yeah. And so on and so forth. So the short code by the end of it was like an a four page full of font size 14. It was just massive. curious that you didn't take the option to build, maybe it was just more effort than it was worth to, to build the sort of, Short code generator, if you like, within the plugin, but I guess that's what you were doing on your website. On the website where you could demo what the output would look like. You could just build it over there and then copy and paste it.

[00:18:35] Alan Fuller: Exactly, and that's exactly, what I did. And had a link from within the plugin to, the demo page. And then people click on it and then they copy and paste it. and that suited people. But as, just on a technical front, short codes are really easy to code. They're very easy to code.

They're just literally, as you say, a parameter and you just take that parameter and you can build a short code plugin in five minutes. And with a AI now you can do it in zero minutes. it literally is the simplest thing in the world, which is not blocks, which is, the most complicated thing in the world. So. that, that was good. And, the plugin was fine, but WordPress user base over time, I don't want to say this in a, derogatory way, but it'll sound, it, as, dumbed down, people are building websites without wanting to write code, and now people are thinking that just writing a list of arguments in a short code is code.

To a technical person, it's that's, crazy. But the people don't want to do that. They want to click on buttons and widgets. And that's where, Gutenberg starts to come in to play and the block editor and Elementor and everything else. And that's why they're so popular, because people just don't want to touch code

[00:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's curious. I, it really hadn't occurred to me that people would find creating a short code adjacent. It's a coding, but I guess it has that feel in a way, doesn't it? you're setting up some sort of text-based thing, which is not really, if you know what you're doing, it's human readable and after you've pause it a few times, it probably, the short code is entirely human.

Oh, that does that. And that one does that, and that one does that. But it, has that feeling of it, doesn't it? It's not a point click drag, if you wanna change the color, you're gonna do that with. Some sort of color picker and slide around until you get your desire as opposed to dropping the hex value into some parameter in a shortcut.

I hadn't really thought about that. And the idea that that, the, adjacent ness for want of a better word of that to code is enough to make it so that's no longer feasible in, in WordPress. It would be a little bit, I suppose in a sense it would be a bit like me giving my child a Nokia phone and saying, there you go.

Use that. it's fine. It makes phone calls and you can do text messaging. It's just great. Off you go, no problem. And of course, my son would look at it and go, you, that's weird. it's not a rectangle for a start. and, so it's a bit like that. We've got a user base now, which has become very, and you, use the word, what did you say?

de-skilled or dumbed down. That was it.

[00:21:34] Alan Fuller: I could, it dumbed down and it might be a bit derogatory,

[00:21:37] Nathan Wrigley: No, but I get it. the, desire to do things within an interface without having to interact with code. And that's definitely the direction of travel for WordPress, isn't it? if you look back over the last eight years, that is where we've been going.

The idea of democratizing publishing and obviously to somebody that's like really familiar with code like you, it just seems But to, the majority of people who are interacting with WordPress, and by the majority, I really do mean that I, would imagine that we're into the high 90 percents of people who use WordPress on a daily basis, who haven't the faintest idea what's going on behind the scenes.

They just know that there's a login, URL, and that the UI looks like this. And if you wanna change something, you do it over here and then click publish and you're done. You log out again. Okay, so you bit the bullet and you decided, okay, this plugin is going over to blocks, which sounded, I bet it sounded really easy when you said it,

[00:22:35] Alan Fuller: it sounded really easy when I said, I knew it was gonna be difficult, and that was about two years ago that I started that, that journey. And, I started off by writing some sort of demo blocks for myself to understand how blocks worked and. Never really got it. and this was just a little bit before AI coding assistance came in.

so I, I was having to work from what was very scratchy documentation. People will, will, tell you that the documentation on how to build blocks is not

great. and, also moving target in the. even two years ago things were moving in, the way that you're building.

So I started building it and I got about halfway through, I created some of the basic principles and I got about halfway through and there was, I. Oh, there's so much work to do with all those options. Every single option has to be coded, and it was like, and you're duplicating everything in Gutenberg because you've got the front end and you've got the back end and and the front end.

Is in the editor and the backend is in your plugin, but the front end of a WordPress website is not using Gutenberg. It's using the result from your, and it's less like this is all, a bit of a headache. So I got, I did spend a, a, month or so on it. Created some scaffolding if you like.

and then, parked that branch and, and ignored it for a while and, A, year ago I started Elemental was, has started becoming so massive in the, in the user base and I was getting a lot of support queries about how to actually put short codes into Elemental and, could see all my users were using Elementor.

I decided that I would bite the bullet with Elementor and take my online demo form concept because, As you say, the idea is you could put that directly inside, the plugin, and the best way to do that would to be build a element or widget. But I thought, I'm gonna be, I'm earning a little bit of money from this plugin, and I'm getting stressed about creating all these things.

I'll employ a, a contract developer to do the

[00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I can, imagine how this conversation's gonna go now. but carry on. This is fascinating. I'm loving this.

[00:25:21] Alan Fuller: so, round about this time last year, I reached out to some of the specialist companies that provide part-time, developers because I knew I couldn't afford a full-time developer and, and found a, very good, competent developer. And took him on for two hours a day on a ongoing rolling contract.

The idea to, first of all, to crack out the element of widget, which he started doing. and it, that was, an interesting learning curve in its own right because. In my corporate life as a developer was a long time ago and working within teams and things wasn't remote. We were all in an office and we shared ideas and we knew what we were doing, by going to each other's desk.

And the now we're communicating by Slack, we're communicating by pull requests from. GitHub and it's, it's quite a learning curve, just getting a process in place for that. I've always had a very bad memory anyway, in terms of, I remember principles and concepts, but I don't remember very specific things.

and that's just my nature. I'm always having to reference documents or go back. So I've always had a, like an issue tracking, project management process because, when I was working corporate life, people would joke with me on a Monday morning. I had to completely reboot 'cause I had no idea what we were doing that week.

that, that was just, that's just the way I am. so. I was used to working with issue track logs and things like that. So that was, that transferred fairly well to having a developer because he could update statuses and that as, as well. and the element a bit actually went relatively smoothly and probably within a month and a half of two hours a day.

We got that pretty much nailed and so I thought, okay. That's good. We created the element a bit. We won't put that out into production yet because I've just got this canned Gutenberg block that I created the previous year and I'd put on ice, and then that just took so long.

It's just so many. Nuances and difficulties, and the concepts are just so hard compared to creating a, widget in elemental or a short code to a Gutenberg block. But we did get there, but we took another four months to actually get to the final result.

[00:28:33] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask you, can I just pause you there? And I, you said, you labored the point that it was so hard. There were just so many options. Do you want to, for those people who've never built a block. Maybe some of them have a, have an intuition now that they're never going to, build a block. Or maybe the opposite.

What, makes it so much more, difficult at the outset to achieve the transition from the short code version over to the, block based version as opposed to the elemental widget version. What were the stumbling blocks that you recall?

[00:29:05] Alan Fuller: okay. yeah. Recall this. Heck, okay. You can test my memory now. so some of the stumbling blocks are right. The, basic principle is that the, within the editor you need to render things using react,

[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:29:27] Alan Fuller: which is fine. and it's a fairly straightforward. System, but you then have to render them from the backend and you've gotta make decisions.

Is are you gonna build the output from the server side or are you gonna build the output from the react side, on the front end side of it? And so you go round in little circles where you start off thinking, actually it's probably best if I build it on the. Editor side in React, and then you realize you hit a barrier and then you think, hang on a minute, we've gotta go back and we've got to render that on the server side.

So we render that on the server side and then you come back and you go, oh, hang on a minute. We've got a JavaScript library that we're using for the calendar display and that won't, we can't generate that from the backend side, so we now gotta go back. It's just that voyage of discovery of. Chunks of technology that now I've done it, now we've been through the process.

Then, yeah, it was easy.

[00:30:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:36] Alan Fuller: everything, in coding.

[00:30:38] Nathan Wrigley: thing. Yeah.

[00:30:38] Alan Fuller: Everything in coding only takes two minutes when you know how to do it. It's the 15 hours of trying to work out which the best option is. that's a hard bit. The other bit I discovered is, that my developer, I think he just lost track.

I, there were bits that were missing from it, so eventually be before it was going to. it was close to going live, close to being ready. and so I was testing various elements and I said, because it was on this rolling contract, I said, okay, fine. Let's close the contract off. I haven't got money to burn with.

People sitting there doing nothing particularly apart from me testing it and then I start testing it and I just find there's holes in it

[00:31:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.

[00:31:28] Alan Fuller: and there's, a hole there and there's a hole there. And so then I have to go back and then I have to re-look at that code, and then, and I'm starting to think eventually.

Maybe I just shouldn't have used the developer in the first place, and I should have just spent the time doing it myself. But, that's a, sort of tricky rabbit hole to go down, is you start saying you're gonna do everything yourself,

[00:31:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. Good point. So was it really a question that the, developer in this case was learning on the job or because they didn't know? How to do this? Or is it, was there something unique about the, plugin that you've got that meant that No, no, developer coming to it would've been able to know this offhand.

in other words, was there learning that was required and maybe two hours a day didn't quite make the, cup muster for that?

[00:32:26] Alan Fuller: I think so. I think a, lot of that, you bear in mind, you know that I know. My plugin inside out. it's actually, I say it's all my code. It's actually not all my code, because the very first version of the plugin used a, a another plugin as a as scaffolding, which was actually built by automatic, but they abandoned it after they had an official relationship with Eventbrite.

But in about 2016, they actually abandoned their own, the plugin lefty, everyone, which was very good for me.

[00:33:00] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, but not

everybody

[00:33:02] Alan Fuller: but once they, when they actually abandoned the 'cause I was scaffolding off the back of it. And so it was a dependent plugin and I actually just incorporated their code with proper attribution, of course in, in my plugin.

But so most of the code I know inside out, and I've been working on that code for years and years I have a massive unfair advantage over any other developer in understanding how it operates and also not just how it operates from a code point of view, but how it operates from a business point of view and from a user point of view.

I'm a product manager as well as a developer, so I understand the product.

[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: Would you, would you say that you would have done things. Differently. I, know that you said with a bit of hindsight, you, may have thought, okay, I'll just do it myself, be being fairly hard-nosed about it. Do you think e, even though the developer that you had, it may not have worked out perfectly with them, what, do you think, if you had this time again, do you think you would've benefited from learning it yourself and then therefore having the knowledge of how all that worked and what have you?

Or would you probably just go the developer route again?

[00:34:13] Alan Fuller: Okay. the world has changed since last year. we now have a massive selection of AI assistant tools that a year ago we had a very basic AI capability to help you with coding. now we've got some very, powerful tools, I today don't need a two hour, two hour a day developer because I've got AI tools.

That's simple. If I could afford a permanent full-time developer, then yeah, I would go that route. But I wouldn't go a part-time developer. I don't a part-time developer. Is substituted as, an AI tool because AI tools make lots of mistakes and I review the code and that's fine. And, a part-time developer will not know the product, just like an AI tool doesn't know the product.

And it's, the same thing that's my current thinking.

[00:35:26] Nathan Wrigley: Would you, a again, if you had your time again, do you, think you would even bother with this?

it been like something that your user base has gone? Oh yeah. we just hate the short codes. We really want the blocks and the element or widget and what have you. Or is it that everybody's still stuck on the short code?

[00:35:47] Alan Fuller: Yeah. Okay. So commercially, right? So, when I launched it just before WordCamp Europe, last year. And I, I launched it and I thought, okay, I'm going to try another price increase on this product because. I've spent a lot of money. it's two hours a day. Sounds not a lot, but to me that does add up to a lot of money investment in, the product.

That is not my time. It's my, cash. I will, add a at, add a price hike because obviously there's more features. People are gonna love it because it's linked to Elementor and people are gonna, more people are gonna adopt it and, 1st of December this year, I put the price back down again because the price increase reduced sales, simply reduced sales.

and my sales were down eight, 10%. so revenue, total revenue includes sales was down more than that. total revenue was down 8% since on that plugin from the price increase.

[00:36:57] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, and there's, you can't at attribute that to something else. I don't know, a rival commercial product came into the marketplace or anything like that. It is very much related to the price increase. Okay.

[00:37:09] Alan Fuller: yeah, I mean it, the price increase did push me above, a competitor, which I possibly meant. Some things went to that competitor. it's difficult to say, but anyway, so I've had my non-Black Friday price reduction from the beginning of December permanent.

[00:37:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. But would, you, do you think that, regarding, I know that you put a lot of work in, so you wanted to remunerate yourself for that, so the price went up. But let's imagine a scenario where you had never put the price up in it. It stayed the same, is the feedback, oh, this is great.

We're all using the block editor now. This is exactly what we wanted. Or is it just. It is all the short codes. Still, everybody's stuck on the short codes, and it was probably a, road that you never needed to go down in the first place.

[00:37:57] Alan Fuller: yeah, no one said block editor. a few people use the Elementor, most people use the short code. And some people say, I wish you did this with Divvy.

[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay.

[00:38:15] Alan Fuller: And I think, no, I'm not gonna bother.

[00:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: The lesson here is that everybody wants exactly what they've got as their setup, right? So if I'm familiar with short codes, give me that. I'm familiar with the block editor. Give me that. I use divvy. Give me that. Elementor is my thing. Give me that. That's just the way it's gonna be.

okay. It's a salutary tale, right? You've, obviously. Decided to go the, away from the short code into the block editor and what have you. It's been difficult. You've had interesting learning curves about how to manage another person, whether or not that was worthwhile. what's the future then?

Where's the, where's the, it's gonna be abandoned in mid-December. Where's the plugin going?

[00:38:58] Alan Fuller: Oh, the, plugin earns good money. It is got, very good recurring revenue on it. it, the plugin is complete. there are. I haven't had any enhancement requests on the plugin for quite a while. It's got some very sophisticated features in it. so the plugin will continue to be supported. I do actually have a, support person, who works for me, so I'm not a complete.

Solopreneur if you like. And, and he handles the support things, but the most, the support things are like billings and I forgot to cancel and, that sort of stuff. They're

[00:39:38] Nathan Wrigley: We all know. We

[00:39:39] Alan Fuller: but the, one of the interesting things is quite often we'll get, Oh, it's not showing my events sold out or something like this.

when I've set the sold out text on, the, and now the support question, instead of it says please cut and paste your short code so we can see what settings you've got. We've now got, if you're using Element, or please let us know what, if you're using the block, please let us know.

[00:40:06] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:40:07] Alan Fuller: because, and, most of the time, of course, it's always cash, it's oh we know, we noticed that you've got a cache, a caching plugin. Have you tried clearing your cache?

[00:40:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting though because of the nature of the WordPress ecosystem and the fact that you are building something which people wanna deploy on the front end, and there's parameters that need to be set. You've got to worry about what's popular, haven't you? ignoring something like Elemental, which is just a.

Gorilla in terms of its, market share. It's absolutely massive. I dunno what the proportion of WordPress websites that are on Elemental, but it's not nothing. It's a fairly hefty number. And then you've got the block editor, which some people seem to rave about and other people don't want anything to do with still.

even though I think the adoption is becoming more and more widespread, and then you obviously, you get the, odd thing, I want a divvy, option please. and so on. Yeah. It strikes me that this, this plugin whilst profitable, hopefully has, settled down. Now that you've achieved the block edit of things, hopefully you can put that behind you and for the next decade at least, that's gonna be, that's gonna be something which you can rely on.

[00:41:16] Alan Fuller: Yeah, I just have to resist the urge to build a, divvy specific, widget, or, I just, because I, there's no real value in it because they can use the short codes, people can use the short codes in whatever bricks builder or whatever builder they want to use, and, and we've got a, good short code builder thing.

So commercially it won't add any value, I don't think. I'm not gonna sell

[00:41:44] Nathan Wrigley: If you were to add in some more options, so I think you said there were like 90 possible permutations of things that you could drop into the short code. So presumably you've had to port all of those 90 over to the UI in the block in some way. I think you said it was like it ended up being multiple blocks rather than this one, Goliath of a block. are you happy now that if you introduce new features into the plugin, let's say you had, I dunno, some other thing which Eventbrite bring along in the year 2025. Do, you now feel that you are in a position to add that functionality into, obviously the plugin originally yes.

'cause you built that yourself. But the, block version, you would be familiar with doing that yourself now?

[00:42:24] Alan Fuller: Oh, absolutely, because not only I, fully tested it, but I had to fix a lot of issues with it, so, absolutely would know. And also my developer followed my instructions, which was to make the underlying code, effectively configurable. So there are tables in there so that. with rules based tables so that we can just add, one rule and it'll apply to the Elementor and the block.

It itself. So pretty much, straightforward to add new features, but nevertheless, it is still at least three times the work than if it was just a short code because you have to add it to the short code, and then you have to go and add it to the configuration and then test it, And testing is one of the, one of the big issues that you have.

it's, more work, but I don't see, there, yes, there are, Eventbrite keep adding new

[00:43:27] Nathan Wrigley: I was gonna say, they're not gonna

[00:43:29] Alan Fuller: and there, and is really annoying as well because they added a feature called collections, which is really nice. You can put events in collections and they haven't added it to the API, so.

I, can't get collection data from them. I've looked at the underlying calls that are made from their front end, and I can, I know what the calls are, but they won't let you access it. There's a third party and it's just it's so annoying because everyone's saying, can I, just display everything in the collection?

I said, no, unfortunately, you've gotta fill, you got, you've gotta add some tags, which are supported by their API that match their collections.

[00:44:07] Nathan Wrigley: great. So here's some more, here's some more documentation for the workarounds that we've got.

[00:44:12] Alan Fuller: Yeah.

[00:44:13] Nathan Wrigley: honestly, sounds like the sort of story that I bet you if we were to persuade you to come to a WordPress event and we put you in a room full of developers who had been through a similar experience, I'm sure there'd be lots of commonality.

tearing hair out and things that went well, things that didn't go well. What an interesting story though. And perfect for the time that we're at. I feel that most of the things in the future are gonna be built with blocks. I, just feel like short codes are kinda gonna go away at some point.

I doubt that the, that the new things are being built in that way. I could be wrong of course, but, really interesting. Interesting tale. where do we find you, Alan, if we want to just reach out, I mentioned the website earlier, full works plugins.com, so F-U-L-L-W-O-R-K-S, and then plugins plural.com.

Apart from that, where did we find you? I know you're on some social stuff.

[00:45:09] Alan Fuller: Yeah, I'm on post status Slack there. I'm on X or Twitter as they call it. I'm, around, follow me on X I've only got 450 followers.

[00:45:24] Nathan Wrigley: and you can find Alan on Alan E. Fuller dot, no, it's not.com. It's on X. It's x.com/ Alan E. Fuller. Go and check it out. Alan, what a pleasure to chat to you today. I hope that the year 2025, is. I think both of us, it's fair to say, hopefully you won't mind. We already have the gray hair, so there's nothing, that's gonna, change that, but I hope it's a, an easier ride in 2025 than it was over the last couple of years.

Thanks for speaking to me today.

[00:45:54] Alan Fuller: It's a pleasure. It is great to talk to you.

[00:45:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all I've got for you today. Thank you for listening. I really appreciate it.

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