[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 453 entitled, does WordPress offer anything to a younger audience? With Taylor Drayson? It was published on Thursday, the 22nd of January, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'm going to try and keep this very short so that we can get straight into Taylor's stuff. Just a couple of things.
If you're interested in getting your product or service out in front of a WordPress specific audience, we have exactly that, wpbuilds.com/advertise to find out more. And you never know, you could have your product mentioned in this podcast right about here.
Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am talking to Taylor Drayson. Taylor Dresen is one of those rare things, a young person in the WordPress space. If you've attended WordPress events and things like that, you've probably noticed that the age demographic does tend to skew slightly older.
So we're talking about that, as well as a whole bunch of other things. So I get an introduction to Taylor. We talk about youth in the WordPress space. Why he has chosen the tech stack of WordPress. Where he's making his products or services available to you, and there's a fair amount of that going on. He's a very busy person indeed. We talk about the role of community in the WordPress space going forward, and so much more. And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Taylor Drayson. Hello Taylor.
[00:01:46] Taylor Drayson: Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:01:47] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Taylor is significantly younger than me, and that might be a point that we get to discuss in the podcast. He, has loads of things going on at the moment in the WordPress space, and so his age is not gonna be the main focus of anything.
At least I don't intend it to be. But, Taylor, just before we get into this whole thing, do you wanna just give us your little potted bio? Tell us a few things about yourself specifically related to WordPress, I guess.
[00:02:16] Taylor Drayson: Yeah, so I have been working in WordPress professionally since about 2019. I finished college and basically went self-employed the month after and have been doing that for six years now, or so. absolutely love it. It's great fun. I get to work with, a whole range of different clients, building WordPress sites.
recently started venturing out into other areas of WordPress. So I have a membership site that I, upload, and post kind of tutorials and code, for basically extending your website without having to add a plugin that does one, a million things, but you only need one of them. working with, other companies.
so I have, W Extended, which is a plugin that I'm a part partner with, Dan Barrett. And it's a kind of a, Swiss Army knife plugin that adds lots of little helpers that kind of should be in WordPress but aren't. and just adding the, use, quality of life. Features essentially. and then lastly, I help w Humanis Ninja with, all of their community, side of things.
just managing it and keeping everyone updated essentially.
[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice there. Boy. Do they have to keep people updated as well? Because there's a lot that they do. Let's get into that though. firstly, let's get it out the way. Let's get the, sort of age question out the way because, we were talking before I hit record. Although this sounds like a bit of a glib thing, I think there is a serious point in, this, and that is to say that I attend quite a lot of WordPress events and if I cast my eye around the room, I think I am somewhere in the middle of that aggregate age.
There are people that are older than me. There's quite a few people that are younger than me, but I don't see people a lot. Younger than me. that is to say, you are in your kind of twenties and I don't think that's typical for 20 year olds to be coming up into the WordPress space. So let's just talk a little bit about that.
So if we were to cast our minds about, rewind the clock, I dunno, let's say seven years or something like that. In the uk, 18 years old is typically when people are finishing these things called A Levels. And at that point they might choose to go to university or. Embark on a career path. How did that pan out for you?
How did you, decide to get into web Devon, WordPress?
[00:04:37] Taylor Drayson: Yeah, so my dad is self-employed, so my dad is a full-time magician. but he also runs a design agency himself, on the side when he is not doing shows and things. And so I always looked up to him 'cause he was always at home. He was always like working for himself. and I loved that idea and that's where I got the idea of going self-employed.
I worked part-time at an agency during college. building websites and realized I could do it, I could do it better. I didn't, there were a couple of things that I didn't like and I thought I could do this better. and so yeah, I think my, the kind of combination of the agency that I got the experience from where I was talking to clients, I was building sites, and learning as I was going really, and my dad being a big inspiration for kind of setting the path where I was living at home.
If this, this business didn't work out. I'm not gonna put on the street, I'm not gonna be homeless, I'm not gonna have, I'm, still gonna have somewhere to live. and so I didn't really have anything to lose. I wasn't gonna go into debt, because I just thought for the kind of the area that I wanted to go into.
People want results. People want to see that you can deliver something rather than what do you have on a piece of paper that, that tells me that you can do that? and I think the, kind of. Proving what you can do and showing what you can do, especially when you run a business, is far more important than having a degree, for example.
So I just jumped two feet into it, just started my business and, started finding clients essentially.
[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. When you, when you started this little bit just then you mentioned how much you respect your father. Gosh, there's not many people who openly say that. I think your father is a, hopefully he gets to listen to this kind of thing. he must be very proud when he, you say something like that.
Being a father of many children, I, would love to hear those words from time to time.
[00:06:41] Taylor Drayson: I, I was very close with him, and I think part of that has been to do with the fact that he was always at home. I, I saw him a lot. There's a lot of people that, don't see their parents because they're always at work and they're always come home tired and exhausted. all I saw from my dad was.
He gets paid. He does something he loves. And he, for the most part, had a, has a pretty, happy life where he's, doing something you love and gets paid for it. what more could you want?
[00:07:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:07:11] Taylor Drayson: so yeah, I mean, I, very much look up to him. And we also have very similar interests. We both very kind of geeky.
We both love tech. We both love gadgets and things like that. We've, he's got 3D printers at home now, and things like that. So, we both bond over a lot of similar stuff, so. I also had that kind of fallback where if I had an email from a client, I'm like, I dunno how to handle this.
I could go down to him and say, Hey, can you, help me reply or what, what do I do in this situation? Which not a lot of people do have. They have to make the mistakes themselves or, whatever. But I had, that kind of safety in a way that, others,
[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's such a nice, that's such a nice sort of beginning story. I mean, obviously it sounds like from an early age you were surrounded by the sort of tech that he was providing that maybe inculcated an interest in you and now you're a self-proclaimed nerd as well. But how, come WordPress 'cause given, how young you are, we know that the tech landscape was broad and rich and deep by the time you were beginning to make decisions.
So, you could have gone off in all sorts of different directions, but you chose WordPress, which again, I'll make the point, doesn't seem like a typical choice these days. How, did that come about?
[00:08:34] Taylor Drayson: I think a lot of it came from the fact that my dad ha had one of the first websites when the internet was existed and he, had maybe one of the first, one of the very first kind of domains and things like that. And so he's always been building websites, things like that. And then obviously when WordPress came around, it was, pretty much revolutionary at the time back in, the two thousands.
And so he started using that, and was building websites and had been for, 20, 20 years or so with WordPress and I guess. Again, looking up to him. He used WordPress. He knew WordPress so he could help me and teach me and things like that. it's now actually the other way around. My dad comes to me and goes, Taylor, I've got this problem.
Can you, run it right Little script for me or whatever. but that, was, that, that was all I really knew. That was what web development looked like, web design looked like for me back in 2019. the kind of the proper coding I like to call it, which is. not, really, but people that had, degrees or had proper programming skills.
I was very much using, DVIA when I first started. And again, that was because he used it. So I just followed what he was doing. I've since then evolved and I've got lot, a lot more into the development side of things. I like building like little mini web apps and plugins and things like that.
but that's where I You know how I got to it, because that's what he did. I was just following where he went. Really?
[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. One of the things that's been really great for me, so I'm older than you, obviously, by a considerable margin, and when I began, there was no CMSs and things like that. It was just, you had to open up a text editor, basically. There weren't even like really much in the way of IDs. So you'd open, up a text editor, you'd write out the raw HDML, tables were the thing.
There was no CSS and then CSS came along and yada, yada, yada. And then CS. then, CMSs came along. So WordPress was one of those. But the, what I discovered quickly upon getting into the WordPress com space was that there was this whole like community of people. And so when I started attending events, I was surrounded by people very similar to me, not only in terms of interest, but also in terms of age.
And so when I talk about the WordPress community. That I, know that there's a familiarity there for me, but it, I dunno what it's like for you, I dunno if you've attended, well I know that you have, because you mentioned that you have, but I dunno if you attend regularly, these kind of events. But what is it like for you when you go, do you feel like a fish out of water like this youngster and is that kind of odd?
Kind of slightly off-putting. I, dunno, I'll open-ended question really?
[00:11:24] Taylor Drayson: yeah. I mean, when I first started, I was 19 when I first started my business, so that was a very. A very young age to, to be starting a business. I joined networking groups and things like that, and again, I was, probably 10, 15 years younger than probably the youngest person in the room. but because I've been, I'm, only child and so I was very I just got on with it. I got, I just, I looked after myself. I I would go to the cinema by myself, whatever. 'cause it didn't bother me. I was happy in my own company, but I also found that I grew up around a lot of adults. So I would, I was pretty mature for, I would say a 19-year-old where I was very ill.
I had, Crohn's disease and I was very ill during kind of the end of my school, school years and, in and out of hospital. So when I. Was doing my A levels and things like that. I was studying, working for the agency and kind of just trying to get through, the illness and things.
Whereas most other people were going out partying, drinking, which I never had an interest in, because I just saw it as a waste, a waste of money, a waste of time. They probably have had better experiences. But now I'm paying the dividends where I now have a re, a stable, career.
I do something I love and I get to wake up every day and do that, which, there're people that have degrees. I know my friend troops that don't even do anything with their degree, they're in. They're paying the, degree debt, but yet have a completely different job. and so that, that trade off that I never really understood, the drinking side and things like that, partying.
And again, my, neither of my parents really were big drinkers. My mum. I liked to drink and go out with her friends socially, but my dad, probably more the nerdy side of it would stay home and would prefer to, be on his computer tinkering away kind of thing. So, there, there's that. And again, it comes back to, having a lot of, respect and looking up to my dad a lot.
[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think, I think it'll be interesting to see how the, WordPress community goes in the next, let's say decade. So we're 22 years into the project. it feels like if it were to get another 22 years under its belt, so let's say the age of 44, it'd be interesting to see if that demographic.
if it fills up at the bottom, basically, if there's young people like yourself coming through, 'cause it, doesn't feel like it, it seems like out there in the wider world there are, more interesting things, react and all of these wonderful things and AI and all of that is, is making it possible.
So I, wonder, do you get itchy feet given that you've still got, like the vast majority of your career ahead of you? Are you wetting yourself, binding yourself to WordPress? In perpetuity or do you cast your eye around and think about other opportunities in different tech spaces?
[00:14:28] Taylor Drayson: It, is an interesting one. So I've been, I, have one project at the moment that I'm building in Sta or sta I dunno how you say it. It's a Laravel based CMS by Jack McDade. and it's, absolutely amazing. Like there's, so the developer experience is absolutely hands down next to none. I absolutely love it.
I think with WordPress, the, issue we're gonna kind of face is this tech debt is, why would you go for something like WordPress when there's so much tech debt? From a, developer side point of view, I think this is probably the best way to look at it, is from someone who builds websites for a living, like an agency owner freelancer.
Why would you use something that has 20 something years of tech debt with code that is irrelevant now, but we can't remove it because? We risk breaking 40% of the internet, for example. there, there are so many better tools in, regards to if you're gonna start from scratch. I think where WordPress is heading these days is, the people that don't have the technical skills and that's where Matt and is.
And the WordPress Foundation heading with the block editor was trying to build something that could compete with likes of Squares place, the likes of, The, no code builders essentially. and it, just does come down to that. I think that the ecosystem is what drives WordPress.
And I, I felt strongly about that is that I think if WordPress didn't have the plugin ecosystem, the community, it probably wouldn't be where it was today. that's one of the main reasons people stick around with WordPress
[00:16:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting
[00:16:11] Taylor Drayson: the barrier to entry,
[00:16:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's, so, it's got a low barrier to entry. It's obviously got this no code option at the moment in Gutenberg, plus all the third party, Elementor and all of these other different things that bind into to WordPress. But also it's got that, that, so on the one hand it's heritage is a bad thing because it's got this tech debt and it has to, it has to support things.
Have this backwards compatibility built in, which is a kind of a noose around its neck, but, also it's got a heritage. So it's the exact same argument for a, as a pro and the exact same argument as a comm. And on the pro side it's got 40% of the web. And I guess at some point the, momentum that juggernaut has just keeps itself going.
It'd be interesting to see if it. If the brakes go on a little bit and then, should it decline? Does it decline slowly and then all at once? Or does it just keep going at 40% or, indeed does it rise? And I think you're right, there's a lot of, in a lot of endeavors at the moment to, to make it more future proof, let's say.
So a lot of, ideas around AI and building AI directly inside the block editor, not like there's an AI. Sort of client, but you've got some sort of MCP adapter or an API connection or something like that, so that it makes it a little bit more, I don't know, 20, 20, 25, let's put it that
[00:17:29] Taylor Drayson: I think it's the community that is gonna be the, biggest driving force for it is that if there isn't the younger generation, my generation and things like that, that are pushing it forward are. Contributing or using it, you know, whether or not we're, building WordPress clients, whatever, whether if you're not gonna use it, there, there's, no incentive to invest the amount of money it is to have full time, open source contributors because it's not gonna be making any more money because people aren't creating new sites.
and there are other tools for the.
[00:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm just gonna ask you about your peers, basically. And so I, don't know, how, widely, you, you, mix amongst people of, a similar age to you and talk about this kinda stuff, but just it's a really, I'm asking you to put your finger in the air a little bit. Do, does anybody of your age, do you know anybody who's even vaguely interested in, WordPress?
I mean, I'm presuming that anybody that's got a business needs a website. But amongst your age group and your peers, do you see. WordPress being used, or is it other stuff?
[00:18:36] Taylor Drayson: I think especially with the ai, it's changed a lot in the past couple of years. If you asked me this a few years ago, it would probably be a different answer. I think everyone knows what WordPress is, or at least they've heard of it, and they know that they're like, oh, is this a WordPress site? Or, I can build a site on WordPress or whatever.
But I would say that most people don't care. at the end of the day, people that are not. Website builders, developers, whatever you wanna call them, they just want a website, they don't care if it's accessible or not. 'cause for the most part, they have no idea. They even exist about regulations and things like that.
They didn't care. they'll, put a. yellow texts on a white background, for example, because they just don't know any better. Right. and until the standards of things like that where they block either block you from doing that or start adding in the accessibility warnings and say, look, you shouldn't use this color, which I think the block editors started to
[00:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. There are lots
[00:19:34] Taylor Drayson: with contrast.
But just things like that, they don't care what it's built with. there's no advantage or disadvantage. They're just gonna go to an AI and say, I need to build a website. And whoever's paid the most money to, appear in the AI results, is gonna get recommended. and I don't think, not, I have that many developer friends my age, most of the people that I hang around with, and, whether they're WordPress people or developer, proper developers as I call them, They're all, probably 10, 12 years older than me, minimum,
[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: Right.
[00:20:12] Taylor Drayson: even, and people are, all the way up to like 60 and stuff. And they're, original developers that did it with textbooks and, know,
[00:20:23] Nathan Wrigley: me.
[00:20:24] Taylor Drayson: notepad and things like that.
[00:20:25] Nathan Wrigley: I've still got 'em, above my head. They're all, there are all the JavaScript Bible and things like that. Yeah. There's absolutely loads of them. Yeah. we learned the internet from a book because the internet wasn't good enough to learn from the internet at that point. Now you've got YouTube and, a mi a myriad of different courses.
So again. So coming back to that thing, it does sound like there is a, thing to worry about here. If you're in the WordPress community, it does feel like, we are at a bit of a tipping point in terms of demographics, age, demographics, that maybe that's something that we need to be mindful of.
I'm pretty sure that the, the, people who need to worry about this are worrying about it, whether or not they're going to be effective in changing that and making it of interest to younger people. I don't know, but. Not just the age demographics, I think the geo geographical demographics play a big part.
So for example, if you were to go to an event like Word Camp Asia, that it feels like that part of the world is really interested much more than, other parts of the world are or have been. so you go and the crowd, the crowd does look a lot younger. There are many young people walking about, they've seen it as a really, a, really solid way to make a living just like you.
they're,
[00:21:37] Taylor Drayson: the opportunity is so, much bigger when you have the internet. When you come from a, country where the, average salary is a lot less than a western country that is, well populated and, has good GDP, things like that, it's a great way. The internet itself is a great way to make money in that.
That's what they've realized is that if I wanna make money, it's gonna be building some sort of SAS tool that solves a problem. It's gonna be building, helping people with their website in, the western world because they can charge, more, but still less than what somebody in the western world can, afford to charge.
[00:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: it's really interesting that whole conversation is fascinating and all of the different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that need to be in place for that to happen. So, CMSs need to be available and free. That's one nice feature of WordPress. It's freely downloadable, there's lots of documentation out there so that you can learn it, but also the infrastructure on.
In each individual country needs to be robust so that there's a reliable internet connection that you can afford to pay for and pay those bills and that kind of thing. And all of that seems to be a more or less a global thing. Now, you go to any part of the world and there is predictably reliable fast internet, certainly fast enough to do the work of a web developer.
And, so yeah. So maybe, we have reason to not be quite as concerned maybe in the parts of the world where you and I live, the demographics are gonna. Get older and skew older, but maybe in different parts of the world that will not be the case and the project. We'll keep going. it's an interesting conversation.
Let's turn our attention though to, to some of the stuff that you have been doing. You mentioned, your work with WP Managed Ninja. Let's leave that till the very end. We'll, first of all, go to some of the projects that you are. Either doing yourself or you're doing in collaboration with somebody else.
The first one I'm gonna mention is WP Extend. you can find that at the easy to remember. URL WP Extended DO io I, sorry, I said WP Extend just then. I meant WP extended WP extended.io. And if you go there, you are going to find, well, it says WP extended the modular all in one WordPress plugin. What does this do and who are you doing it with?
[00:23:47] Taylor Drayson: So this was a, conversation that I had with, Dan Barrett, back in. In one of the Word Camp Europes, a couple of years ago, we, were sat in a, some dodgy cafe having a pint of beer, and he was telling me about, this plugin that he had been creating over the past couple of years. And I, just loved the idea because I could see it solved a problem that, that I'd been having in my own, business and running.
Maintaining clients and I was kinda like, oh, this would be a cool idea. have you thought about doing this? It was, he, we just hit it off, pretty much instantly. Both had the same vision of what the plugin should be and what we would want it to look like and things like that.
And so we decided to, to, join as a, partnership and both kind of work on it and, build it, as a solution for WordPress agency owners and, business owners. But the idea is that it adds lots of little plugins into a single modular plugin that, you only need to enable the features that you want.
So if you only. Need three of the modules from the 40 plus modules that we have, then you only enable them and only the three modules run. the idea behind it is that you have less plugins to maintain. a lot of people have the idea that, more code is, more bloat, but if the code's not running, then it's, not gonna be, slowing down your website and things like that.
But I think the biggest thing is the, conflicts, because we have control over the whole code base of every single module. If there's a conflict, we can fix that, whereas you're left to your own devices where if you have a, plugin conflict between two open source contributors of plugins.
That they only have a free version. There's no real incentive for them to fix it because, they're doing it for free or they may not want to do it, they may not be able to do it, or they may have just abandoned it. So the idea is that we can very much have control over all, integrations and modules, but also have cross module integration.
So if you enable one module, you get extra settings if you've got another
[00:26:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. That's neat. Yeah, That's the, I mean,
[00:26:06] Taylor Drayson: so.
[00:26:07] Nathan Wrigley: there's a boat load of functionality in here, so, really, it looks like it's aimed at, People like yourself who are building WordPress websites. 'cause a lot of it is taking place on the backend. It's about doing things in the, WP admin area mainly.
I think, there are over 40, it says, over 40 different. I'm gonna use the word modules. I think that's the word that you use and, but the ones that you highlight right at the top of the page are you enable admin columns. So the ability to, well, I'll read it, transform your WordPress admin with customizable columns that display exactly the information you need.
So in data views, you can. change the, way that they look, code snippets, the ability to have code snippets and I guess inject them in different parts of the site. You'll also enable SMTP email so that you don't have to have a third party plugin for that folder management as well, or, and it says, organize your post pages and media into folders with drag and drop functionality.
And then there's just this whole laundry list of other ones. And I'll just honestly, at, random, I'm gonna pick some out. So export users, hide the WP version, hide admin notices. People love that. Limit login attempts, clean up the dashboard, disable or to up. Dates, debug mode, disabled comments, and X-M-L-R-R-P-C, menu editor.
Pixel Tag Manager 4 0 4 homepage. A different quick search it says, and rollback manager. I honestly, I'll just pick a random selection of about 10 there. There's, loads here. Do you keep it at that or do you keep extending it? Do you keep adding new ones in?
[00:27:44] Taylor Drayson: we just listened to what. the user's request. we are very picky about what modules we add because with anything, if you add something, you can't remove it really. so you have to support it and maintain it. so we're, we are careful about what modules we do add because. we wanna make sure that we maintain it and we, we have a level of kind of quality that we wanna maintain.
we want it to be something that we would be happy to put on our client's site. Something that looks good, works well, but also, is. It is not gonna cause issues. a lot, of the modules we added are stuff that we wanted ourselves and we were like, I can't, I don't wanna add another plugin for this, or something that doesn't even really exist in a plugin.
we had the, disc usage widget, which was something that. my friend and I, we, we built, and it was just showing you how, that, how big the folders are on the dash main dashboard
[00:28:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Right.
[00:28:50] Taylor Drayson: the uploads folder and your plugins folder and things like that. Very basic stuff, but it's nice to have it at glance and there's not really a widget for it.
so we just, built it and then added it into the plugin in the end. And it's just, yeah, making those tweaks that make WordPress nicer to use and, more qu quality of life stuff.
[00:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:29:12] Taylor Drayson: with things like you switching users. That's one of the main ones I used a lot because when you're doing any sort of login or any sort of membership site, having been able to switch between is so much nicer than having to log out every time and log in again.
[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there, there's some really curious ones in here as well for things that I've never really thought about. But then when. When I see it, I think, oh, that's an interesting idea. So this one immediately caught my attention. It's called post type Switcher, and it allows you to change the post type of any post or page instantly without losing that content.
So I guess, I dunno, you set up a custom post type or something like that and you realize that there's newer custom post type is actually where that content belongs. And of course you could go and copy and paste it. Yada, But wouldn't it be nice if you could just click some buttons and it, okay, it now belongs over there instead of in the original custom post app.
All of that kind of stuff. and things like you, I guess you've got it, things in the media library, you change that and you enable it so that you can view it in different ways. There's just an absolute boatload in here, and I confess I'd not actually heard of this one. So this is a bit of a revelation to me.
I think this is gonna be interesting, and I imagine it enables you when you deliver a client website to tidy things up a little bit so that the experience that they get is a little bit more bespoke, perhaps a little bit more fitting to what they need, as opposed to just the blunt user roles and permissions that WordPress has.
[00:30:32] Taylor Drayson: Yeah, exactly. It's just, adding those, things that really make, the stuff that are in a lot of newer CMSs that, that are just standard and most people would assume. Are there, for some reason WordPress doesn't have a lot of these, or if they do, they put them behind a filter and, not everybody knows how to, run a custom plugin or doesn't know how to add code snippets or whatever.
So having a toggle for it with an IS UI just makes it a lot easier. especially if you're managing multiple sites. the original reason Dan actually built this plugin was if for an internal tool for all of his, Agency client sites that he, maintained. he, spent about two or three days a week just updating plugins and then obviously having to check that every single plugin that he updated didn't conflict with another plugin.
and he said he just spent, so much time just checking and updating the sites that he just lost so much time and obviously money from that.
[00:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so the idea here is that it's just this modular approach. Lots of things that you might typically have a plugin for, dozens of them. In many cases it may be the case that this can handle quite a lot of that heavy lifting and you just switch on the bits that you need and switch off the bits that you don't need.
I'll draw people's attention 'cause I know if I don't mention it, people will complain. the pricing page is there. Really nice aggressive pricing you got here so you can get a single site license. You very rarely see anything beginning in a two. usually starts in a four or a nine or something like that.
So $29, for a single domain, and then it goes up 119 if you want 50 domains. And there's an unlimited license. This is on an annual basis, 1, 9 9, but there's also lifetime pricing, which is nice. $99. If you just want to grab it for good for your single domain, 2, 4, 9 for 50, and you can do the full Monty 4, 9, 9 4 9 9 for unlimited domains for life.
And also, one of the things that I, dunno, maybe it's the nerd in me, I always end up on the change log 'cause I wanna see that bit and, That's nice. you've, clearly got a lot going on with this plugin and it makes me, that, that sort of stuff, maybe it doesn't matter to everybody, but seeing regular updates and fixes, but not just fixes or features being added and improvements and things like that.
And so, yeah, Bravo last time it was updated was, not that long ago, a couple of weeks or something like that. and very frequently prior to that. So, yeah, this looks great. Thank you for mentioning that.
[00:33:08] Taylor Drayson: Yeah, it's been, good fun. We actually spent, a whole year. without really a release because we basically refactored the entire plugin. we have now a framework, so it means that if we ever want to add a new setting, it's like three lines of code
[00:33:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.
[00:33:26] Taylor Drayson: is automatically like handled by adding the fields on the front end and the settings page and all of that stuff.
So it allowed, allows us now to basically build a new module in kind of minutes rather than days,
[00:33:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:33:39] Taylor Drayson: a lot nicer.
[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: Well, the links for that will be in the show notes, but I want to draw everybody's attention to something else that you do something entirely different, but I guess it's got the sort of same flavor to it. This is, this is Snippet Club. This is a.com snippet club. Ugh. Say that again.
Snippets club.com. Go check that out and then come back to the podcast. it probably is exactly what you'd imagine it is, but, tell us anyway. There's probably no mystery here. It's a membership site for snippets, I guess.
[00:34:09] Taylor Drayson: So Snippet Club was a, so, so I used to just write snippets for anything. 'cause I was very against having to add a plugin for something. because we are adding a plugin. It's just not adding a plugin. It's having to maintain it, having to keep it updated. Potentially somebody may remove the feature that I actually installed the plugin for.
And sometimes when a small feature or small integration only is 20 lines of code, it is much easier to just put that into a snippet and just keep it in the child theme or whatever. or coach snippet, plugin, whatever. And I used to just write them. I used to be like, I'll just write this myself. and I, built up a massive collection of code snippets that I wrote for myself that just solved my own problems.
that was all, the, was originally is I was just writing snippets, but then. I was using them on multiple sites and then trying to remember where I'd put the code snippet and I'd go
like a site I'd built three, three months ago,
[00:35:14] Nathan Wrigley: pain is real.
[00:35:15] Taylor Drayson: three years ago. so I was like, let me put it in one place.
and I, would share the code snippets with friends and stuff like that, and people were saying, why didn't you sell a, membership to it so people can get access to it? a lot of the tutorials were just me. Solving my own issue and just sharing it with people that, and they can have access to it.
because yeah, adding a, snippet is so much easier than adding a whole plugin.
[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: So this is, this was a kind of scratch your own itch curiosity project that then you thought, actually, you know what? I've got enough of these now that there's some value in it. And so that's, I guess, what you're gonna get if you go to snippet club. sorry, I'm so butchering the URLs today, snippet club.com.
Let's get it right. then you'll be able to see there's a menu at the top with home and then tutorials and membership and so on. I dunno what the number is at the moment of different things and pieces of, content you've got on there. But it certainly seems it's a lot. I think you've got 28 pages of, of snippets, something along those lines.
So do you, have any recollection of how much content you've got in there?
[00:36:24] Taylor Drayson: let's have a look. What is it? Same in the back end it says. A hundred and, 21 published and six in draft.
[00:36:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And do they bind well with your, so if, I was back to the WP extended side of things, obviously one of the things that you tout is your code snippets manager. Is there, any sort of integration there between those two things? Or, is it more a case that you go to your snippet
[00:36:50] Taylor Drayson: So, yeah, so I mean, I, started Snippet Club in 2021. that was the first, post that I
[00:36:57] Nathan Wrigley: Uhhuh.
[00:36:58] Taylor Drayson: And WV Extended's only been about the last year or so, so 2024. so there's no integration and I don't think I would want to add it because it just adds, unnecessary adding the licensing
the way that snippet club is built in the back and in terms of the membership is.
A nightmare. 'cause I did it all custom when there wasn't really that many good solutions out there.
[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh no. Sounds like you need some snippets.
[00:37:27] Taylor Drayson: yeah, so, so I, kind, I need to update it for, to, to a better licensing system. but a lot of them are just, some of them just like one or two lines of code. but they're not all just copy and paste.
Sometimes there are solutions that require you to use the ui, whether it's like adding a CF fields and it says, go to the a CF. field group page, add these fields and then add the snippet. There's some bigger mod, tutorials and stuff. yeah, so some of the tutorials and are literally just copy and paste snippets. You just copy the, snippet and play, paste it into your child theme, whatever. Whereas some of them are more in depth integrations and, for example, I. I built an integration where you could connect the O-M-D-B-A-P-I, which is like a open source version of IMDB with WordPress and a CF.
So you could type in the name of a film and it would automatically populate all your a CF fields for you with the information from the API. and so things like that where there's more than just one step to, to integrate it, creating custom blocks and all
[00:38:37] Nathan Wrigley: I just find this really curious, and obviously I don't want you to give away anything that you don't want to give away, but I'm curious as to how popular it is. Like, is this like a significant bit of what you do? Does it represent, you've got enough members to keep the thing going?
I'm, it's just fascinating to me that WordPress is so. Rich Broad that some, a project like this that, I'd never thought of doing. So it's curious from the outside looking in that's a thing. And I'm amazed it's brilliant.
[00:39:07] Taylor Drayson: Yeah. I mean, it ticks over. It's one of the things that I do alongside all the other
[00:39:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:39:13] Taylor Drayson: and it as in when I write snippets, I upload and post them really. so I just trying to keep it in the background. It's, it doesn't, it's not the main thing that I focus on, but it's, enough that it just ticks over.
[00:39:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, what is it? People say, you've gotta have multiple revenue streams, that kind of thing. So it's a nice thing to have. The, the, advent of AI, I guess is where seem, people seem to be finding this kind of stuff now, and, the idea of going and writing snippets for yourself.
I wonder if, I wonder if that's gonna become a much more popular. Kind of habit in the future. And, yeah, we'll, I guess time will tell. Anyway. I will bury the links, in the show notes to that as well. So we've got two covered so far. And the last thing that you mentioned that you wanted to cover was, well, I mentioned Bangladesh, by coincidence a minute ago was work with, WP Manage Ninja.
What kind of things are they drinking over there? I have no idea. It's like, whoa. Five years ago, I had not really heard of that company. Now it feels like they've got a finger in every single possible pie in the WordPress space. So they've got a really credible offering, CRM, tables, plug in forms, plug in.
They've just launched an entire, like WooCommerce rival in fluent cart. They're on a right clip and you, your job then is over there to what? To help them market that and make it so that people know what's going on.
[00:40:39] Taylor Drayson: So I don't do marketing per se. I manage the, so they have Facebook communities and they have their own communities inside a fluent community, which is one of their own
[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: another one.
Yeah.
[00:40:49] Taylor Drayson: and it's basically just managing, answering questions. So people have comments saying, how do I do X in fluent forms, whatever, or, people that have.
posted about bugs. So there's, if there's issues or whatever, and they post them, I actually talk directly to the, all of the developers and relay the information. and I also just gauge what the community is asking. So if there's a feature that I'm seeing, okay, there's been like three, four posts this week of the same feature request, I will put it to them and say, look, I think this is where we should be focusing the, the, product, or at least the next release or whatever.
[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: You are the secret source of their success
[00:41:32] Taylor Drayson: Yeah.
[00:41:33] Nathan Wrigley: coming up with the
[00:41:34] Taylor Drayson: so it just, it is just managing it and keeping the communication between what users want and what the development developers and stuff are. I think the biggest thing that, well, I mean the reason why I work with them was because I used to write code snippets on snippet club.
Four fluent forms and a couple of other of their other products. and I used to be in the, Facebook groups every day pretty much just answering people's questions because. I had done so much research and 'cause I had been extending, fluent forms and all the other products, so much for my own client work, I had a deep knowledge of how the actual underlying, code base actually worked.
So whenever someone was like, can we do this? I'd be like, just look in the code base and see if there's a hook in there or whatever. And so I was just answering people's questions, because I wanted to be helpful. And, a lot of it came from when I was first starting out in WordPress. There were so, I had a.
Probably a very stupid, dumb question, of like, how do I do X? And there were some absolutely lovely people and it goes with the whole community
[00:42:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.
[00:42:44] Taylor Drayson: that would spend time to help answer my question and, give me in depth and their time and knowledge. they've been in the, the WordPress space for 20 plus years probably at that time.
and so it was my way of giving back and going, look, I know a lot about these tools. Let me try and help people. And, they basically said, look, do you want to do what you're doing, but get paid for it? And I was like, sure. So that's how I got to, to, working with them. and they're, they're an incredible bunch of people.
[00:43:19] Nathan Wrigley: they
[00:43:19] Taylor Drayson: they are very talented.
[00:43:21] Nathan Wrigley: talented, but al also, there are some, how to describe this. There are some companies for whom the, intuitions seem to be like really great. You look at that company and you look at their history and the background and the way that they do things, and you have good.
Thoughts about it, you get the warm and fuzzy feeling about it. they are one of those companies for me, in that they seem to do things very much in the open, obviously, at the end of the day, they're a for-profit company. They're trying to make money. So, there's all of that.
But at the same time, the ethical alignment of what they're doing. Seems to be really remarkable. a lot of really credible, free offerings. and obviously, doing things like picking up people in the community who have been helpful and then giving them work and all of that. That's really, interesting.
Yeah, that's amazing. I'm, glad you are doing that. That's lovely.
[00:44:13] Taylor Drayson: yeah, I mean, one of the things I really enjoy doing is converting what a user wants. And converting that to what that looks like for the, roadmap and things. Because from my point of view, I run a business, I run an agency, I work with clients, I use the tools, pretty much daily, at least for the fluent products.
And when you are just developers, most of the team. And the fluent people, they are just building products. They're just building the
[00:44:46] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Not using
[00:44:47] Taylor Drayson: have their own clients. Right. And so sometimes, I, would get a a, beta version of the plugin and they'd be like, we got this, feature.
And I'm like. But why, this is a feature that nobody's asked for. Yes, it is. It is. Is it is cool. It's a cool feature. Yes, some people may like it, but there are so many other features that we should be shipping that have been requested 3, 4, 5 years ago that still haven't been implemented. and so being able to have that.
Kind of flip side to them and say, look, this is where I think, and again, I've always been of the mindset of, look, I'll give my suggestion and give my opinions, but it's their business at the end of the day. but they do really respect me. and pretty much all of the feedback I give them, they're yeah, I think you're right.
And, they listen. because, and because I'm. A one originally a user and, now moved over to the other side a bit, but I still do client work, so I still use the tool on a regular basis for the actual reason. Right.
[00:45:50] Nathan Wrigley: that's the secret sauce, isn't it? You need people that are actually using it. They, and, also the bit that amazes me about what they're doing is that they seem to release like a gigantic product. Like it feels like every seven months or something like that.
Something totally enormous comes out and in the case of, well, we've just had the release of Fluent car and I saw. Jewel, the CEO of WP managed Ninja, I think it was him saying that. I think there's well over 2000 stores that are now, flipped over to that and are using that as the e-commerce solution of choice for them.
Lots of new emails come in on a fresh basis advising of updates and different payment gateways and all of this, and you think, okay, that's one thing, and yet they've got all these other things. And no doubt, I'm sure you could speak
[00:46:37] Taylor Drayson: They have, yeah, I mean, they've got a hun they've got about a hundred plus in the, company. and they have like dedicated teams for each product. So each product has their own development team. I think they share some of the marketing team. they have a, an in-house, motion graphics person.
obviously graphic designers, they have 24 7 support. So they actually have nighttime support just because they get that.
[00:47:05] Nathan Wrigley: That level.
[00:47:06] Taylor Drayson: tickets that they have. basically a night team that's working around the clock, to answer all the questions. and they offer support no matter if you're free or a paid customer.
So if you only have the free version of a. Product that is pro, you still get the same level of support. You still get the access to the support portal. if you're just using one of the free products that they've released, like Fluence, SMTP, fluent Orth, anything like that, again, you get the same level of, support and access.
which I think is amazing and is probably very expensive to do. But again, goes back to the morals that they have where. the customers are really at the, heart of what they do. and they, do care. a I think one of the, biggest things that's always stood out for me is there was a feature request for fluent CRM that had been requested for four years or so.
and everyone was saying, why is this not here? Why is this not here? And he said he, he turned around and basically said, look, we could add this feature in 10 minutes. The reason we don't do it is because of the performance impact that it will have. And, I think that's something that a lot of companies and a lot of, plugin owners don't take into account is when you are running, a product or a plugin on probably thousands of different server types installations, setups.
of all scales, it needs to work. it needs to be robust and so they. Purposefully don't add certain features because they know the impact Where yes, a small fraction of people may have a 64 gigabyte server, which is the sole website and 3000 of pounds at it a year. But then you've got people that on shared hosting and you need to make sure that it balanced.
and I think that there is the integrity that they have.
[00:49:02] Nathan Wrigley: It is
[00:49:02] Taylor Drayson: one of the reason why I love working
with
[00:49:05] Nathan Wrigley: amazing to me as well, that there, there's enough, like I said earlier, breadth and depth inside. So you've got the internet and then if you shrink that down, you've got CRMs. Sorry. you've got CMSs and then if you shrink that down, you've got WordPress as one of those.
And then if you shrink that down, you've got plugins and like there's a hundred person company that are doing a plugin for a CMS. It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts that there's that scale, and miraculous. And so all of the things that we've talked about today, the. The community and whether or not that community is skewing older, and, it seems to come full circle.
It'll be so interesting to see how WordPress performs. I know a lot of people like to be bullish about it and talk in very confident terms about, oh, it'll be here in another 20 years. That's not entirely obvious to everybody, but it'll be interesting to see if the, well the weight of these products and the fact that they're so powerful and so interesting and affordable.
Let's be honest, they're really affordable compared to, SaaS solutions where you'll pay probably quite a lot per month. be interesting to see how the, the community evolves and develops over time. We've reached a. 50 minute mark. So I think we should probably think about knocking it on the head.
But before we do that, an opportunity for you to just say where we can find you. I will put the links to the properties of yours that we've mentioned already. I won't try and butcher the URLs another time, but is there anywhere else do you hang out on, any of the social platforms and do you wanna drop a
[00:50:36] Taylor Drayson: I mean most of the social platforms are my personal. stuff. I'm on Facebook. I hang out a lot of, in the, a lot of the Facebook groups that are on there for WordPress. Things like the admin bar, dynamic WordPress, a bunch of those. I'm always, open for chat if people want to message me or whatever.
I love talking nerdy WordPress stuff and
[00:51:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yay.
[00:51:02] Taylor Drayson: all that jazz. but yeah, and then, also just building. Building our different, products.
[00:51:11] Nathan Wrigley: Well, very nice. I'm so glad that there is at least one person who is of your age in the WordPress community, and I hope that, there are many more in the future. Taylor, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.
[00:51:23] Taylor Drayson: Thank you for having me.
[00:51:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all we've got for you today. Just a quick mention, if you are interested in getting your product or service out in front of a WordPress specific audience, wpbuilds.com/advertise, to find out more, or just send me an email, [email protected] will do the trick.
All right. We'll be back on Monday for This Week in WordPress. I'll push that out as a podcast episode the following day, but also back next week for an interview. See you then. Here comes some cheesy music. Take care. Bye-bye for now.
