EP469 – Synching WordPress

Episode Transcription

Speakers:
Jason Tucker: 19.83%
Sé Reed: 58.52%
Jason Cosper: 21.65%
Jason Tucker:[00:00:00]
This is episode number 469 of WPwatercooler, Sinking WordPress,
Sé Reed:[00:00:16]
Or shinking.
Shinking.
Sé Reed:[00:00:19]
Shinking.
I’m Jason Tucker, go to my not running website of WordPress, JasonTucker. blog.
Sé Reed:[00:00:27]
I’m Sé Reed, I do stuff. I don’t know what it is anymore. What is life? That’s Sandra Median, whatever.
Jason Cosper:[00:00:33]
And y’all know who it is. It’s your boy, Jason Cosper, back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.
Speaking of podcasts, we got places for you to go find them. Go look around on the internet. You can find us. And while you’re on the internet, go hang out with us on our
Sé Reed:[00:00:49]
Coming to the discord, we don’t have cookies but we’re funny.
Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:00:56]
And it’s not a secret anymore, so after the show you can pop into our discord and have a little voice chat in the Aftercooler channel.
Yeah, that’s been fun. We’d had, we had a good time last time. It was a lot of fun.
Sé Reed:[00:01:10]
I
You were,
Sé Reed:[00:01:12]
But it was great.
yeah, I was going to say you
an hour.
yeah you were hanging out until almost one o’clock and they’re not guaranteed that we’ll do that again,
Sé Reed:[00:01:21]
No,
No.
Sé Reed:[00:01:22]
but I actually popped back on cause Indigo, my daughter was off of school and so I had to go mom, but then everyone was still on. And so I like popped on and she said hi to everybody. That was really fun. She’s who are these people? What are these little heads? Anyway the Discord’s fun, you should join us there, because I think the Discord is going to help us help us focus during the show on WordPress stuff that isn’t necessarily the inner workings of WordPress contribution, because we get to talk about that.
Yes. Speaking of sinking we’re gonna talk about WordPress sinking
Sé Reed:[00:03:14]
Yeah, I thought this was the funniest title. I really did. I was like, I love a good double entendre. But we, this actually was not intended from the title. We’re not being shady. This topic came about.
actually about WordPress,
Sé Reed:[00:03:28]
WordPress.
What?
collection of PHP files that makes a WordPress thing that has some JavaScripts. Yes. We’re actually going to be talking about the software again.
Sé Reed:[00:03:36]
a software. I think Jason Tucker was bored this week and texted us and was like, what are you guys doing? What’s happening? I’m bored. And I responded with what exactly I was doing, which was what was I doing? I was building out Airtable to WordPress maps. And so I was explaining the data mapping that I was doing at that particular moment.
Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:04:13]
you’re like, great, new show topic. So anyway, that’s what we’re talking about today.
So when you do this, do you typically use an outside place as the source of truth or are you using sometimes WordPress as a source of truth to go to someplace else?
Sé Reed:[00:04:52]
This is such a great question. Where’s your source of truth? This is actually why I was making a diagram because one of my favorite things to do when mapping data and trying to figure all this out is to literally make diagrams. I’m obsessed with making diagrams, like flows. And charts, because then everyone’s look, this is what is happening to your data.
Sé Reed:[00:05:19]
There’s color coding and shapes. People like that. Clients are like, oh, so the circle means I do it. And the diamond means the computer does it. Exactly. So it’s very helpful because honestly, it’s a lot to hold in your head.
A lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous, a lot of strands in old Dooter’s head. Thank
Sé Reed:[00:06:06]
to your point, Tucker Where the source of truth is crucial. For example, in one client, I actually have multiple sources of I’ve not, it cannot be that Airtable, for example, in this case, I also use a million different types of data, like all my, Clients have different, some use Salesforce, some use proprietary systems, some use HubSpot, some use whatever it happens to be.
I remember those talks.
Sé Reed:[00:09:27]
Yeah and that is what Airtable is now also, right? It’s really interesting that all of these new Airtable is not that new, but it really has all of these database SASSes, all these SASSy databases have really been adding features, and they’re all still proprietary, but you can get your data in and out.
Sure.
Sé Reed:[00:10:18]
and that cause that was the best choice.
Replacing all the data one way or the other. What’s, like, how do you determine what’s what, which one you’re going to end up doing when you start planning this out?
Sé Reed:[00:11:01]
I usually end up doing both, because the initial load is the one time everything goes in and then, but for the the ongoing stuff, it’s all trigger based. It’s all if someone comes in and updates this. For example, I’m updating a website that is for public art. And when these different projects go through different stages, right? First they’re in planning, and then they’re in the call to artist phase, and then they’re in whatever’s after that. And there’s different content for each of those things. But the really key thing here is that it is very useful for my client in this particular, actually many of my clients, but this particular client I’m talking about, to save those various iterations.
yeah
Sé Reed:[00:13:35]
It really shifts that. And I don’t know if that’s a great way to use Patterns, to store that content. Anyway, I various clients can have different phases of content push and pull, and then they have a record of what they’ve done. So you can put it into the website, and then have that pull into your database.
right.
Sé Reed:[00:14:59]
I know I get a lot of angry emails from WP Engine about certain points that has too much data and I’m like I’m gonna get them on AWS at some point. Cool, you’re jets. But I know that’s a problem from a server standpoint, so I don’t,
Sure.
Sé Reed:[00:15:17]
how does that factor in your mind?
So I it’s interesting that you brought this up because I was about to I was about to ask you. So once you import this data from the source of truth in is it just going into Posts and PostMeta is it going into its own custom table, which may be a little bit more forgiving, like how?
Sé Reed:[00:15:48]
It’s in my case, with all love and apologies to Scott Kingsley Clark, it’s going into ACF. That’s actually really interesting because when I told this to Tucker, he goes, Oh, so it’s from Airtable to ACF. And I was like, Airtable to ACF? No, it goes from Airtable to the website, to the WordPress.
destination,
Sé Reed:[00:16:11]
data. Yeah. I thought of the website as it, because ACF to me, advanced custom field, is just it is, I don’t build websites without them. So yeah, ACF is the front end for the custom field editor
Custom fields. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:16:29]
Is that still stored? I haven’t been tracking where it’s stored lately. I know everyone’s been moving stuff around. Is ACF data still stored in Postbeta? Hanging
think so.
Sé Reed:[00:16:39]
Yeah.
Yeah. Probably just serialized post
So in, in that case, from a performance perspective it is it’s not okay I don’t
Sé Reed:[00:16:55]
You don’t have to be nice. You can tell me I’m doing it wrong. That’s all right.
no you’re not doing it wrong. The thing that I would suggest in this scenario once, once you start to scale out to I have no idea how, and we don’t need to get into revealing client stuff, but once you scale out to a particular point where you have your hosts, like WP Engine, like coming back at you saying Hey.
Sé Reed:[00:18:22]
you’ve recommended me that one before.
I’ll yeah I’ll make sure
Sé Reed:[00:18:26]
to push any of those buttons. I actually have a site where, after we had this conversation, I loaded a bunch of it’s actually on a site not the same client I was talking about, but a different site that I was moving a bunch of data and using their old database, but which was a disaster and I really need I was like, I know there is bad stuff in this database I can see it but I’m not going to go through it manually.
you don’t. You don’t need to be scared. What index WP MySQL what index WP MySQL for speed does is it has a number of common indexes that basically make lookups for particular types of data faster. So
Sé Reed:[00:19:17]
of an index, next
yeah.
It’s an index for and it covers a lot more than just your post meta table, but in this scenario, that’s like really the one that you’d want to focus on, but it will go and create indexes that basically say okay, here is where everything that matches.
Sé Reed:[00:20:27]
That’s performance on the on the user side, right? That’s where it’s coming. Like, how does that, so I don’t let me, on the backend, let’s talk about the backend. So one, there’s the idea when I do have, for this client that is having overages on WP Engine, that shall remain unnamed, they keep saying, oh, this is going to affect your performance.
It mainly,
Sé Reed:[00:21:35]
annoying one that they don’t want to store it. They
it and in, in the case of WPengine, I don’t know how much they still push this or whatever, but they do have something that they, at least when I was working there. And at this point, that was like seven or eight years ago this thing called large FS where they will take large files.
Sé Reed:[00:22:02]
They still have it.
Yeah,
Sé Reed:[00:22:04]
But they also bought WP Media Pro, I believe it’s called, that does very similar things. And I was actually I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I was expressing my confusion to them actually at WordCamp US this year, to the, they’re like we don’t know what you’re talking about because it’s the people at the booth.
large FS is interesting because while I do the plugin and think it’s great I think that the large FS solution, as long as they still like actively support it is a more. Interesting thing because it works at the server level instead of worrying about WordPress and the PHP of it all.
Sé Reed:[00:23:34]
It is it was all through Gravity Forms, and so I’m like taking in all this data and it’s like completely not useful for that particular instance. And then right when I had found WP Media Pro, which I believe it was called they bought it. And then I was like, wait, what’s happening? Wait, should I buy it?
lots of them. And they all
Sé Reed:[00:25:01]
Okay, we need to do a way of storing stuff and the way of querying for that, those buckets.
I can I will just for the audience watching. And so we don’t leave them hanging. You can look at Wasabi, which isn’t as dependable,
Sé Reed:[00:25:25]
Wait, the whole point is we were hanging, so they come back. That was supposed to be a promo for DevBranch.
No. I’m gonna Why don’t you just tell them and get in the Discord, give them all the
Dang.
on.
Sé Reed:[00:26:05]
like that it’s a set price. A lot of my clients are like, so how much is AWS going to cost? I’m like, probably less than 10 a month, or like a couple pennies, depends. And they’re like, that’s not a number. I’m like, I know, I’m sorry.
I got it. I got digital ocean spaces up to a. About a terabyte of storage. And I think it was costing me like 47 a month. So
Sé Reed:[00:26:30]
I don’t even understand what a terabyte is. Like, how many Portraits of an artist is that, I do not,
Right,
Sé Reed:[00:26:38]
search. It’s like trying to understand the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars, and then you go to a trillion dollars and I’m like I don’t know what you’re saying anymore.
big difference.
Sé Reed:[00:26:47]
The scale has exceeded my capability of imagination.
This conversation is going very much whenever I tell Sarah that I upgraded our storage at the house and I’m like, Hey so on our NAS we have. 14, we have 14 terabytes of storage. Please start like backing up your new computer to the thing. And she goes, I don’t even know what a terabyte is I
even know how many gallons of gas go in my car, okay?
Sé Reed:[00:27:22]
me, it sounds like an earth, it’s an earth of data. What is I don’t know, like what is, it is, I have, I literally, if there wasn’t a little number on the dashboards of my hosting service, I’m like I don’t know. It says the number. What’s that? It’s probably I do that on my phone too.
WordPress has to make five copies of that file though, for all the different sizes that it needs. So it’s okay. Everything will be just fine.
Sé Reed:[00:28:02]
Yeah that’s why I’m asking about, originally, because you put these huge files on there, but I’m only using, on the front end the thumbnails that I’m calling, I’m not calling the whole thing, because that would be bonkers do I really care if I’m putting stuff on the server?
WP engine cares because they are using a cloud service provider that charges them through the nose for all the storage that their customers are using.
Sé Reed:[00:28:40]
so
So the last.
Sé Reed:[00:28:42]
by using it as a storage repo. Got it. Got
So any of these,
Sé Reed:[00:28:47]
conversion then.
yeah, any of these managed WordPress hosts that just are like, Oh, we run our stuff on AWS or Google cloud or whatever.
Sé Reed:[00:29:09]
hope so.
like I, I want. Yeah, exactly. So they’re making it up in in bulk or whatever by bringing that many customers, but they’re still paying more than if they had their own infrastructure, they own their own hard drives, everything else.
Yeah. Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:29:44]
It doesn’t matter how many plugins I install, somehow they find a way to upgrade. I’m like, how do you do this? I’ve been thinking about this. So I think what I’ve been building out for various clients is actually So there’s headless WordPress, and this is bodiless WordPress. It’s like the opposite, right?
yeah, we’ll try
Sé Reed:[00:30:14]
So what I’m doing instead is I’m pulling stuff so the head, it’s just a head. So this is like the suspended head of WordPress, which I don’t know, maybe that’s not the right way to go about it because everyone’s take the head off and it’s better.
Are you familiar, I’m pretty sure you will be, but with the concept of an exquisite corpse,
Sé Reed:[00:30:43]
Oh yeah. Like the poem.
Or like a drawing where you fold a sheet in thirds, and then someone draws the head part, the body part, and the legs
Yes.
Instead of headless WordPress, you are building an exquisite corpse
Sé Reed:[00:31:06]
ExquisiteCorps, wait, WPExquisiteCorps. com right now. Please someone buy it for me. It’s almost the holidays.
So are you saying that like the legs of this corpse or the whatever this corpse is actually being hosted through a, like a Wait, I know the legs.
Sé Reed:[00:31:26]
Yeah, like the legs are the legs are the S3 bucket?
yeah I’m pretty sure that there are a couple people in our discord who are twitching right now at
Yeah.
of Oh, man.
Sé Reed:[00:31:51]
like, you are doing this backwards.
no, okay. So say we’ve laid out that you’re doing. Airtable and pulling stuff into WordPress that way. What are you using to actually pull stuff and sync?
Sé Reed:[00:32:04]
to that part of this thing. I’m using multiple things in different, for different clients. Cause you know, why use one thing when you can use all of them. In some cases, I’m using Zapier, right? Good ol Zapier. In another case, I’m using WP AirSync, which is Has been a very pos like, they were like, a very startup y plugin, and they’ve been adding features like, wild, so they’re like, refining your pricing and adding pro versions, it’s like, it’s these automations are like, the wild west, because these plugins are like, popping up, and then, you watch them develop, because they launch with the the MVP of their stuff, so you have to pick a horse, and go with it, you’re like, I hope this one works.
like you could build a race condition as well, where you are essentially sending and receiving at the same time, and it just becomes an infinite loop.
Sé Reed:[00:34:43]
God, it hasn’t happened yet, but thank you. I’m glad that you pointed that out.
Now you know the term race condition.
Sé Reed:[00:34:49]
Excellent. Exciting, waiting for that to happen. But this is why it’s been really interesting, too, because this is, I guess it’s not, it doesn’t feel that new to me, but I think it’s just everyone’s like it’s finally getting into the more commercial where the solutions are proliferating out there.
Where did it break in this chain of, yeah
To make it holiday appropriate the Chris, the Christmas classic a Christmas story when Ralphie’s dad is getting ready to light up the Christmas tree the collection of plugs, extension cords cables on cables and then what happens, he blows a fuse.
right.
Sé Reed:[00:36:32]
Yeah, that has happened. Luckily, it’s not as dramatic. Things just go brrrt. Someone gets an error message, and then someone does or does not tell me, necessarily.
That fuses the web host in this instance, because if you have all these, if you have a, IFTTT with a Zapier, with an automate, with a blah, blah, blah, and they’re all talking to the same endpoint.
Sé Reed:[00:36:54]
well, there are different endpoints, actually. WPHooks, WPWebHooks, this is one of the updates that they did. They used to have one one… Like webhook per function and now you create a unique one for every single thing. So you’re like, woo, let me just add some numbers and letters here.
What I will tell you that’s good about the way that you’re going about this is because of the fact that you’re syncing it, you’re, it fails, it fails gracefully.
Sé Reed:[00:39:19]
It does fail very gracefully, yeah. All of my things, but I am a graceful fail failer.
if you were embedding this, pulling it directly, like an embedded as an embedded thing, it would not fail gracefully.
Sé Reed:[00:39:43]
server that is, yeah.
Yeah, so that’s
Sé Reed:[00:39:45]
your source of
much better.
Sé Reed:[00:39:47]
It’s not bad, it just, it’s really interesting, and I think that it’s it does point to this sort of, like I said, philosophical question about… What is a website? Is it just something you access through a URL? Because that can be apps too, right?
Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:40:05]
it’s, it just such interesting times we’re living in. And this actually goes to the what is WordPress conversation as well, right? Because if what is WordPress is defined as a CMS, then we’re competing with Airtable or we’re competing with Salesforce, but it’s not really. The best CMS anymore, like the best place to maybe it’s a good place to manage your content, but store your content, maybe not.
But just think if if Airtable supported blocks, then you could build all that stuff in Airtable and hit sync. And then all of those comments get copied over to the website as a post.
Sé Reed:[00:40:57]
No you have these interfaces that essentially are websites like, and they are
as your front end.
Sé Reed:[00:41:03]
data. You can have a little dashboard essentially that you can share publicly. They don’t have pretty addresses they don’t have that comes down to does any, Google took all the domains off of all the local the specific URLs out of the browser does that even matter if the URL is pretty anymore? it has a redirect, you can click a pretty URL that then redirects to whatever Airtable interface it is. Does that matter? don’t know. I just, I think it’s so interesting. I wish we would have more. We have these conversations, but I wish we would have more of these conversations across the industry, or even across WordPress, because I feel like we’re so myopic, and we’re just like, oh, this is the way we’ve done things, and this is what we’re building, and this is what we’re focusing on, and it’s like a five year old plan, that we’re like.
Sé Reed:[00:42:01]
Things are changing, and solutions are changing, and we should be more nimble than we are. And,
Sé Reed:[00:42:09]
We should be able to adapt to all of these different ways of managing data in order to stay on top of it, really, in order to stay if we were working on being a better front end.
I was doing some digging around cause I was like, there’s gotta be some way to do ACF, like not into like from what I’ve seen, like in their documentation they’ll put stuff in term meta, they’ll put it in post meta. It, it all depends. But there is it looks like it’s what, like 149.
Sé Reed:[00:43:42]
Oh wow, it like makes its own little database tables for it.
right,
Yeah, you’ll have to build something that queries those database tables directly that circumvents ACF entirely and then displays it on some app or
Sé Reed:[00:44:10]
Yeah, I was like, now how do you display that data on the front end? I’m interested. Is it just the same ACF data in a different table? And does that…
Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:44:18]
That’s so interesting. There’s so many ways to build things, y’all.
I know. It’s funny. Cause like the way I was envisioning this topic was very like software focused. And the thing was is that I think we would be doing a disservice by having it be a software focus. Like here’s all the plugins you should go download. No. It’s your job to go test this stuff out.
Sé Reed:[00:44:46]
I think that is, that’s the job security. Everyone’s so worried about oh, it’s all going to take up. No, because this stuff requires understanding. It requires understanding of the software, requires understanding of the processes. It requires understanding of automations and data. And that is where the specialized knowledge comes in.
this is why, and it might surprise you to learn that for for 10 plus years now, there’s been that discussion about is somebody who just implements stuff in WordPress, a developer, and
Sé Reed:[00:45:33]
matter? Are they valid?
But okay. They may not have like hands on code.
Sé Reed:[00:46:01]
And sometimes it is shit, by the way. Just because sometimes developers are like, I’m just going to shove stuff in the meta post, post meta table. And then you’re like, thanks. Now I have to figure out how to extract it and use it. Like practitioner, by the way, I do like to point out that I do also code.
Yeah, but you don’t want to build the whole, you said this earlier. You don’t want to build the entire product that you are going to be the only customer of, and you’re definitely not trying to go and build a thing to make it be a whole new business because you already have a business that you’re doing other stuff
Sé Reed:[00:46:35]
no, I do not want to support
Yeah. Let this be somebody else’s thing.
Sé Reed:[00:46:40]
That’s the interesting thing about WordPress and developer, right? You can be a developer, but use all these tools because you can’t support all of it. And supporting the constant updating of all the tools. Is it’s not just about updating, clicking an update or enabling auto updates, right?
Yeah. If I had a
Sé Reed:[00:47:26]
No
I would definitely be calling it a practice. I don’t think I’d call it an agency. I would steal from the medical industry and call it a practice. And then you can just get away with it.
Sé Reed:[00:47:35]
I do a lot of counseling, so that actually works. I’m
Right.
Sé Reed:[00:47:40]
I’m a great practitioner, I love that
I would say to go even simpler than what Tom suggested is just say that we’re all WordPress workers. Maybe that’s a little socialist or communist of me
Sé Reed:[00:47:57]
Oh yeah. But
yeah, we’re all workers. We all do work with WordPress.
So it was like a WP and then there’s like a sickle.
Okay.
And then a hammer on the other side
I’m gonna see if I can get the the internationalized domain name.
Sé Reed:[00:48:18]
Please do. Can we be like the ICWP or something like that? That would be awesome.
With us the clock running out here. We wanted to invite you folks over to our discord and come hang out with us on our aftercooler.
Sé Reed:[00:48:34]
Tell me how I’m doing it wrong, or
How do you get to it? You can go to wpwatercooler. com slash aftercooler and you’ll be able to find us over there and then come and hang out with us in our audio chat and discord.
Sé Reed:[00:48:47]
Although my
have your phone, you can actually drive to your destination with it playing and you don’t have to look at the phone or anything. You just talk. I did it for an hour and it worked out great. So if you need to get someplace right after this show. That’s the way to do
Sé Reed:[00:49:00]
company while he drives around. Love y’all!
Depot with me, that’s where I’m going next.
Sé Reed:[00:49:08]
Take your listeners to Home Depot Day.
yep. Yep. That’s it.
Sé Reed:[00:49:15]
Alright, we love you all. Thanks for being here and listening to us jabber.
We do. We do love you all. Talk to you later. Here’s our outro. Go over to our website at wpwatercooler. com slash subscribe. We’d really appreciate it. If you like this content, leave us a comment. We’d love that. And find us over in our discord. That’s where we’re hanging out right after this. Talk to y’all later.
Sé Reed:[00:49:44]
Have a good day!

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