This week on WPwatercooler we went back in time and talked about ActionScript, Shockwave, Director, Server Side Includes and all the technologies that we learned leading up to WordPress.
Panel: Ross Gile, Leo Postovoit, Manny Costa, Steve Zehngut and Jason Tucker
Whittier CA representing on the show today
More information on WordCamp Long Beach coming soon!
WordCamp Las Vegas is later in the year.
Jason mentions this week’s WPblab EP126 – Marketing Yourself as a WordPress Developer
Steve talked ActionScript, Shockwave, JavaScript, and jQuery.
Manny wrote some e-commerce stuff in ActionScript
Leo talked about how he learned about AMP from WPwatercooler and got his job at XWP from that knowledge.
Ross was the first web developer in Whittier back in 1997 at DigiCal.
Steve talks about the times he was mentioned in old articles like Ross was in. Steve’s dad did picture framing and he has a bunch of places where he was mentioned online. Heaven’s Gate was mentioned in the same page of the article that Ross was mentioned in.
SHTML and Server Side Includes
Steve talks about this being a circular business.
Jason asked if Steve was featured in Webmonkey and he said that the Shockwave Site of the Day was where most of his stuff showed up. Steve won a SXSW Award for Big Pussies Poker Heaven.
Leo missed the Flash days but has been building and working with making simpler tools to build things much like Flash was back in the day.
Steve was a film major and ended up doing web development.
Leo has had to take about 6 months to learn web pack and is “looking forward tomorrows problems but at the same time celebrates yesterdays victories.”
Manny asked the question if everyone works from home making the point that going to WordCamps and WordPress meetups are important. He spoke about Prestige Conf and meeting Pippin of Pippin’s Plugins.
Ross talks about taking home “golden nuggets” from meetups and events he goes to.
Jason “ruins” Ross’ workflow when showing him things like Beaver Builder as a way of changing his workflow of building a website.
Leo talks about how open source works and how documentation is important. Technologies change quickly.
Manny talks on using Canvas and how they had to change to something new.
Steve was “all in” on Director and Shockwave and overnight that technology disappeared. The same can happen to WordPress, don’t put all your eggs in one technology basket.
Steve is observing that you don’t need to use WordPress for everything and WordPress isn’t made for everything.
Manny interjects that backward compatibility and is it important?
Leo talks about Drupal and their backward compatibility issues.
Steve mentions Shopify and working with scaling issues with it. Not every tool is the same.
Jason compares this to Windows and Apple and how they ditch their backward compatibility issues.
00:00 Introduction
02:15 What’s New in WordPress 5.9
06:30 The Importance of Website Security
10:45 How to Optimize Page Speed
15:20 The Rise of Headless WordPress
19:40 Gutenberg vs Classic Editor
24:05 eCommerce Solutions for WordPress
28:30 SEO Best Practices
32:50 Community Questions
37:15 Must-Have Plugins
41:40 Accessibility Concerns
45:55 Remote Work Tools for WP Developers
50:20 Upcoming WordPress Events
54:45 Wrap-up and Goodbyes
Join us on this episode of WPwatercooler by visiting our Participant guidelines page.
WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com
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