EP470 – Goodbye, Hello Dolly

[00:00:00] Sé Reed: Needed those three minutes.

[00:00:09] Jason Tucker: What’s up, everyone. This is WPwatercooler episode number 470. Goodbye. Hello, Dolly.

[00:00:17] Sé Reed: Goodbye, hello, sorry.

[00:00:19] Jason Tucker: I’m Jason Tucker. Go to my website and you can figure out where I’m at on the internet.

[00:00:26] Sé Reed: I’m Sé Reed, and I don’t know where I’m at, but I’m usually at Sé Reed Media on all the things. Come say

[00:00:33] Jason Cosper: 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.

[00:00:41] Jason Tucker: And speaking of those podcasts, you can find us wherever it is that podcasts can be found on the internet and you can come hang out with us in our discord. We’ve been having a good time over there in our discord, both beginning and before and after the show.

[00:00:54] Sé Reed: hi. Afterkoola! Actually, I just want to give a little shout out to our Discord not that I was needing a reminder that the show was going to start in seven minutes, but I do think that was handy. A giant message from Mika coming across my screen that said, Seven minutes till showtime. I was like, oh, whoops.

[00:01:18] Jason Tucker: So it wasn’t the eight o’clock in the morning text message that I said, oh, okay.

[00:01:23] Sé Reed: No, remember with ADHD, you start to tune those things out and we’ve just known each other too long, friend.

[00:01:31] Jason Tucker: Look, just trying to make sure that someone’s saying something.

[00:01:35] Sé Reed: The key thing I think is it was in a different app.

[00:01:39] Jason Tucker: Oh,

[00:01:40] Sé Reed: I was like, Oh, I have to pay attention to

[00:01:42] Jason Tucker: Oh, I’ll send you a message on Friendster next time.

[00:01:46] Sé Reed: Yeah. Just switch apps each week. I’m getting great ADHD ideas for, or like ideas for apps for ADHD people and alarms.

[00:01:54] Jason Tucker: write a book. How to be friends with someone who has ADHD.

[00:01:58] Sé Reed: There’s a lot of content out there for that right now,

[00:02:00] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:02:01] Sé Reed: I think the, there’s a lot of relationship content, but less friend content. And honestly, that’s a niche. I might get into.

[00:02:09] Jason Cosper: I think that the book requires too much attention. So it maybe needs to be about 30 to 90 second tick talks and then

[00:02:23] Sé Reed: you know how long a 30 to second 90 TikTok takes me? Hey, wait, that’s a perfect segue. And that brings us into our topic for today. You didn’t

[00:02:30] Jason Cosper: well.

[00:02:31] Sé Reed: do that on purpose. I don’t even

[00:02:32] Jason Tucker: I was going to say something that’s totally unrelated. Hey,

[00:02:36] Sé Reed: It’s not totally unrelated. It’s related to my story. And I want y’all to know, anyone listening, that I’ve saved this story for this episode. I have not really told it to anyone. Including These two dudes, I told them a little bit, just because I was like live telling them what was happening when we were doing the show.

[00:03:01] But so you want to hear the story? Here’s my story.

[00:03:03] Jason Cosper: Please,

[00:03:04] Sé Reed: to hear mine? Okay. You

[00:03:07] Jason Cosper: we’ll have to fill 27 more minutes. And we,

[00:03:11] Sé Reed: idea how to do that.

[00:03:13] Just with random banter. Never. If you distract me during this story, it’s gonna take all 27 minutes.

[00:03:22] Jason Tucker: Oh, I can make that happen.

[00:03:23] Sé Reed: No, please, God, no. Yeah, thanks for noticing my new background. I had no,

[00:03:28] Jason Tucker: make things show up on the screen. I

[00:03:30] Distract you. We’ll never hear the story.

[00:03:32] Sé Reed: Block out the bottom third of the screen there but I did get a new background because I was so late and I just went in my office and the internet was jacked, so I was like, the living room it is.

[00:03:44] Actually, this is the dining room, but whatever. Anyway, let’s get to the story. I’m gonna try to focus and not interrupt myself 10, 000 times. I’m gonna try, okay? Alright some of you long time listeners of the show or friends may know that I used to own a bookstore. It was called Open. It opened in 2003, which was 20 years ago.

[00:04:07] So it was 20 years ago today. I ha kept the I didn’t sell the store, I didn’t get rid of the inventory. I saved it because I had always planned to reopen, and I did reopen in like 2015, and then had to close that again because someone else made bad choices. And then I got married and had a kid, and these books And then there was that COVID thing, you remember that, right?

[00:04:33] Yeah, and then also the economy has been like, why, in terms of do people have money, do people have money to buy books? Are books a thing? They weren’t a thing when I stopped doing the books in 2012, but they’re a thing again. Anyway, long story short, I have this giant storage unit full of books.

[00:04:54] I call it my bookstore in a box. And my, one of my goals for this year was to get this just start to process it out. So I did, I’m very proud of myself for this, it sounds like a very small thing, but I did a little pop up. Pop up bookstore booth at like my favorite coffee shop has like a parking lot and they did a little flea market, right?

[00:05:15] So I did a little booth and you can actually see the videos on TikTok because that’s where I am putting my videos of me unpacking this Storage unit of doom, as I like to call it. You can go check that out. It’s open the bookstore on TikTok. But so this weekend I did that and I was going through the stuff.

[00:05:33] I haven’t looked at these books in a long time. I haven’t looked at the inventory that I had in a long time and we had books and music and magazines and graphic graphics comic books. I was gonna call them graphics. Just stuff like that. all those things. Anyway I’ve never been as good at the records that I was as a student.

[00:05:54] The books were always my thing. Records are just they come with books a lot, and they’re cool. I just don’t know a lot about them, so I have to look them up and figure that out a lot. I was going through my boxes of books, and I also had these three boxes of records. And I had gone through them, and I was going through the boxes of records, and I found one.

[00:06:14] I came upon one, and it was You can show the picture. Can you show the picture? Take the picture of it. It was Hello Dolly by Louis Armstrong, right? Are you gonna put the picture up? No one’s putting the picture up.

[00:06:28] Jason Tucker: Now I’m on a totally different computer, but this computer doesn’t even know that picture exists.

[00:06:32] Sé Reed: Okay, my table is like rattling I don’t know if you guys can hear that or not. Really?

[00:06:37] Jason Cosper: it’s okay. Please tell us more. Hello, Dolly,

[00:06:40] Sé Reed: Okay. Sorry.

[00:06:41] Jason Cosper: stay on target.

[00:06:43] Jason Tucker: content. Let’s do

[00:06:44] Sé Reed: Yeah, I’m gonna get there. All right, so I found the record and I was like, oh, and I had just all of these wild emotions all at one time. I was like, Hello Dolly! And then I was like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know we had this. And I was like, wow, this is really cool. And then I was like, I wonder if Matt Mullenweg has one of these.

[00:07:03] It’s basically a first edition. I’m gonna die just saying this. Okay, it’s like a first printing of the Hello Dolly. Whatever. This great, clean, super nice edition. I felt so many feelings because I was like, oh, this would be so cool to have. And then I was like, basically I was triggered, right? Like I got triggered by just Hello Dolly existing.

[00:07:29] And then I started, I was like, I can’t look at this right now. I need to like, just whatever, because I needed to focus on what I was doing. And I just started getting really negative feeling about all the stuff that had happened recently All of the WordPress stuff that you all know about if you’ve been listening. I forgot about it. I put it out of my mind. I was like, don’t think about that. I don’t care about that. Just whatever. And I didn’t think about it anymore and I didn’t revisit it. And then in the middle of the day, I was super busy and there are people coming around. It was really fun. And I. Some people came up to me, they had been looking at the records, and they had a little stack, and I like went through them real quick, I was like, oh, okay, there’s five records here, whatever, and one of them in the middle, was the Hello Dolly record, and I was like, oh, and I hadn’t decided what I was gonna do with it yet, so I like had this like pang of Oh, I don’t really want to get rid of that yet, but I I had it out to sell.

[00:08:21] I can’t be like, sorry, I’m taking that one back. I could have. I actually did take a picture of it, which no one can show you apparently but we can put it in the discord or something. I was like, hold on, I actually pulled it, took a picture of it, and then said okay, and then sold it to them for five dollars. And then I I had this terrible sinking feeling in my stomach, and I looked at them as they walked away, and they were like, really stoked and excited, and I was like oh, that’s a lot of money, isn’t it? And then they they walked away with their 5 record, and I later talked to another record person who was there, and she was like, yeah, it’s probably around 300. Cool, cool. Cool.

[00:09:07] Jason Tucker: great

[00:09:18] Sé Reed: lot of money, right? And I sold it for 5. I’m glad they’re very excited about it. But I always you always feel like I don’t know if you’ve ever lost a baseball card or like a valuable thing that you’re like, Oh, and I had so many just like feelings and negativity around it that it was like, it was literally like WordPress coming into this other part of my life and like having a negative impact on it.

[00:09:47] And I was just like, really struck by this that and HelloDolly, the plugin is in every single WordPress. And so in every single WordPress, it says, Hello, Dolly, by Matt Mullenweg. And there’s, it’s intricately tied to WordPress. And so I was really struck just by this feeling of I learned a lot of lessons all at once.

[00:10:11] One was yes, I was really affected by all the stuff that has gone down with WordPress in the past quarter. There it is. There’s the picture. That’s me taking a picture of it, not looking it up. I could have done another app very easily, but instead I took a picture of it to show people look, hey, hello, Dolly, it’s cool. I let my the negative emotions, the negative experience really does affect work. It affects our work in other ways. It affects my work within WordPress, but it affects my work at a book. Flea market on a Sunday when I’m not doing anything digital really at all, right? Just hanging out with some books and some coffee. And so it really has an impact there. And then I was thinking about, and I wasn’t paying attention, right? But I still wanted to control that. I had given it up, but, and let it do its thing. But then I also wanted it back. And that really struck me as similar. A little metaphor for the leadership in our project, which is like, Oh, I’m not going to worry about that or care about that at all until it like walks away or something’s happening.

[00:11:22] And then I’m going to try to control it and take it back. I thought that was really interesting. And then also just the idea that you don’t always, you don’t always know the value of what you have. I just have this stuff that you don’t necessarily appreciate for what value it does have for example, the WordPress community. So I just had all these really, I don’t know, just realizations around the story. And really, I wanted to come on and tell this story with everybody. I could. I don’t know, get it out, but also, I’m going to be thinking about this for so long, like I am, I’m never going to not think about this damn 300 record that I let walk away, and then that it’s tied to.

[00:12:09] Hello Dolly. Yeah, the value. People, Mika’s saying, exactly we don’t, the, our project does not value what it has, even though it has it and that’s something that I was struck with leadership in general, and there’s been actually a lot of conversations specifically around plugins in our Discord this week that have, I think it was this week or last week, really talking about that, and plugins and people anyway, I just wanted to bring that up.

[00:12:36] I have a few more points about Hello Dolly, but I’m gonna stop talking now. For a minute.

[00:12:40] Jason Tucker: day.

[00:12:42] Jason Cosper: I, I was thinking a little bit about this and say as somebody who used to own a bookstore in, in your library or in your bookstore in a box do you have a copy of, or have you read The Body Keeps the Score?

[00:13:00] Sé Reed: I do have that book, actually, yes.

[00:13:03] Jason Cosper: Yeah You should pull it out and reread it because the kind of unrealized drama that your body just retains and holds onto and what you have been through, like the, this past, like three or so months really,

[00:13:25] Sé Reed: Q4.

[00:13:26] Jason Cosper: I, see I wanted to say quarter, but then I was like no.

[00:13:31] Come on.

[00:13:32] Sé Reed: That’s how I feel about it. I was like, oh, the first three quarters of the year were great. And then the Q4 went, oh,

[00:13:39] Jason Cosper: Ter, yeah. The say wrapped for 2024. You had a terrible Q4,

[00:13:46] Sé Reed: Exactly. I listened. Actually, I did. I listened to all the song Clementine, I don’t know if

[00:13:54] Jason Cosper: the Elliot

[00:13:55] Sé Reed: it’s an American folk song and it’s really sad like she dies and then the guy’s oh, I couldn’t swim so I didn’t go get her and then I married her

[00:14:03] Awful.

[00:14:03] That’s just one of

[00:14:05] Jason Cosper: That does sound terrible.

[00:14:06] Sé Reed: rapped this year. Anyway but, okay, this really does, aside from my feelings, which we’ve been processing a lot on the show, this got me thinking a lot about Hello Dolly, the plugin. And there are I want to get another picture on the screen. I’m not really sure how to get it on here because it’s, it was from Slack.

[00:14:26] I don’t know if I send you a picture, I guess you can probably get it on.

[00:14:31] Jason Cosper: Send it to the group chat and I

[00:14:33] Sé Reed: We’ll get it up there. Okay, cool. I was like, I don’t know. I

[00:14:37] Jason Tucker: It’s so weird, Windows just doesn’t have a messaging system. So I have no way of, I have no way of pulling that

[00:14:45] Jason Cosper: Maybe you should consider using texts to get your iMessages over onto Windows.

[00:14:51] Sé Reed: Oh my god,

[00:14:53] Jason Tucker: No

[00:14:53] Sé Reed: I’m really odd right now, especially considering the picture I just sent you, that’s funny. So Hello Dolly is really interesting as a concept, it, the, what I wanted to talk about also was the lyrics of Hello Dolly, which is not the image that I sent you but the lyrics to Hello Dolly are fairly misogynistic in gender role I don’t know how to say it just, they’re just, they’re very They’re just sexist, right?

[00:15:24] I won’t even go, I won’t even say they’re like misogynistic. It’s just they’re like, very much dolly. Go get in the kitchen or whatever. I don’t think it actually says that. I can look them up. But I actually did look them up this week as well. But I I think it’s really interesting that we, it’s along the same lines, that we just accept this, right?

[00:15:45] This is just in there no one really explains why it’s in there. It’s appearing in the dashboards of these random lyrics. Oh, now you’ve got the graphic up. Alright, so I’m gonna read this. Or do you want to read it? Can you read it, Cosper?

[00:16:03] Jason Cosper: I was going to say, Mika,

[00:16:06] Sé Reed: Heteronormative sexism. That’s what that is.

[00:16:08] Jason Cosper: yes. Up in everybody’s dashboard.

[00:16:13] this is this is from the core committers channel, February 27th. Matt said, maybe this is not the right channel for this, but I’ve been thinking about upgrading Hello Dolly. What if there was a link to find a live jazz near you? We need some sort of open GeoDB where people could register gigs and times.

[00:16:34] This is not dissimilar to what we want to do connecting people to local WordPress meetups and events. So perhaps we could repurpose similar code.

[00:16:46] Sé Reed: Yeah Hello Dolly’s on everybody’s mind this year. This is this was February, the beginning of the year. Now I’m having this experience here in November at the end of the year. What do you all think about that before I talk more?

[00:17:03] Jason Tucker: We, we always talk about having things be opinionative, having an opinion. I think that that WordPress is very opinionative of people that they believe that people like jazz. No I don’t think I’ve ever went on I’m just going to say Spotify, but whatever the, whatever it would be for me to be Spotify and went and

[00:17:35] Sé Reed: not a Spotify commercial at the beginning of this show, I will be disappointed.

[00:17:39] Jason Tucker: but I’ve never went and said I want to listen to jazz and then push play. I don’t think I’ve ever have done that. I think WordPress has pushed that to me. As someone who uses WordPress, but I don’t think I’ve ever went like, Oh man, I got to listen to some jazz right now.

[00:18:00] That’s just not me. So there’s an opinion there that people like jazz. And it’s also weird because it’s I don’t know, I didn’t grow up in a household where I had parents that really tried to push their music on me, but it almost feels like that, where it’s you have to listen to this music because you’re in the house.

[00:18:22] And so they’re playing it all the time. And so I. I have this feeling that having something like that, where it’s going to be this like database of things that are going to tell me about whatever. That’s the first thing I’m going to turn off.

[00:18:34] Sé Reed: Yeah we’re really, the ethos or the philosophy of WordPress is that we’re only supposed to put things in core that are useful for 80%. of the users, and I’ve wanted to talk about that in a bigger way for a long time, because hello, Gutenberg! But we’re all past that now, but in terms of HelloDolly as an education plugin, right?

[00:18:57] As opposed to going off into the live jazz, which is I don’t even know where to start with that, there are so many problems with the idea of that, and the key problem being that Matt Mullenweg owns a jazz club. There’s just no way to get around that, in terms of conflict of interest, that you would put jazz listings in everyone’s word everyone’s WordPress install.

[00:19:20] That’s just yeah, Mika here is saying

[00:19:23] Jason Tucker: Like he does own a jazz club.

[00:19:24] Sé Reed: yeah, it’s called King’s Bistro, I think. It’s in San Francisco. It’s at a historical, and yeah, it’s great, except for it doesn’t need to be in 80 percent of the I don’t know if that idea went anywhere. As Mika is saying in the chat geotracking is not simple.

[00:19:41] As someone who has made multiple accounts event calendars pulling in that data from any sort of standardized place is just not even possible. Make calls out to some

[00:19:54] It would be this one jazz club that has the right setup for their event listings that would be in the dashboard. I wonder which one it would be.

[00:20:05] I don’t know.

[00:20:06] Jason Cosper: Tucker I’m a little surprised that you aren’t much of a jazz head cause I do know that you like hip hop and so many like hip hop samples come from a lot of like classic jazz. So that, that was

[00:20:21] Jason Tucker: derivative of it.

[00:20:23] Jason Cosper: right. I don’t listen to the original. I listened to the derivative.

[00:20:27] Yeah, that was my gateway into jazz.

[00:20:31] And it’s something that like, I have to be in the right head frame to listen to it. I have a real I guess you might say basic bitch taste in jazz. Which is just like last week on the turntable behind me I was playing blue which Miles Davis, which even if you aren’t into jazz, there’s, it’s,

[00:21:00] Sé Reed: you oh. It was a little cloudy out, but I just wanted something that I could put on and no lyrics, no anything else. Put on and just that’s the sort of jazz I gravitate. And what’s funny is a lot of things that I end up listening to outside of that lo fi hip hop, things like that also dig really heavy on those jazz samples the old jazz, the old soul stuff like that.

[00:21:37] Jason Cosper: But yeah, that, that actually strikes me as interesting that but I get it. There are a bunch of different playlists out there on Apple Music, Spotify, like those other services

[00:21:52] Sé Reed: now Cosper’s trying to push jazz on you.

[00:21:56]

[00:21:57] Jason Tucker: What’s funny though,

[00:21:58] Jason Cosper: you have, but so there, there are playlists out there that are like here is the song that sampled the jazz song or whatever.

[00:22:09] Jason Tucker: that are exactly like that. So the thing is it’s not that I don’t like jazz, it’s just that I don’t listen to jazz. Get

[00:22:20] I have a bunch of hip hop playlists. Like I have one that’s I’m a rap fan, but I like these house songs.

[00:22:28] Jason Cosper: right.

[00:22:29] Jason Tucker: like a house, it’s like house songs, but it’s people rapping over them.

[00:22:34] But I also have a lot of jazz stuff that has. Stuff to it as well. So it’s just I don’t know Yeah.

[00:22:43] it’s just not my thing

[00:22:45] I don’t mind

[00:22:46] Sé Reed: here’s the thing. Derivative.

[00:22:48] This is the thing. First of all, making a complicated plugin with geotracking and getting listings from whatever database might exist, which it doesn’t, by the way. Eventbrite, I don’t know, anything called Tag Jazz shows up. I can’t even begin to imagine the nightmares of that on so many levels.

[00:23:07] Jason Tucker: Buy bands in town and only do jazz.

[00:23:11] Sé Reed: Yeah, bands in town doesn’t even none of them even work, because no one puts the stuff in. It just doesn’t happen. You can’t display data that is not inputted into a system. It’s just, this is this fundamental break there that music, the music industry has not really gotten there, that’s not really their thing. I’m generalizing.

[00:23:31] Jason Cosper: think to, I don’t want to interrupt, say, but I think one of the interesting things about this is the idea for this this like kind of evolving,

[00:23:45] Sé Reed: you mean? Yeah.

[00:23:46] Jason Cosper: This evolution of hello, Dolly I don’t like it. And it’s not because I I’m taking any sort of like standoffish approach to this, but I really think that HelloDolly is there much to the chagrin of so many people who are like, why the hell is this even installed on my WordPress site?

[00:24:13] But it’s there to get people into plugin development. It is, this is an. Easy plugin. This is a, an easy thing for people to use and tear apart. The second you start adding geocoding and everything else, it no longer becomes Yeah, that

[00:24:33] Jason Tucker: you

[00:24:34] Sé Reed: 100 percent true. But I was gonna say that if you have a plugin that is installed that does some random thing like lyrics

[00:24:42] Jason Tucker: allow

[00:24:43] Sé Reed: knows that is what that plugin is there for, unless you are a dev head who’s, and especially now in the time of managed WordPress it’s not even really there anymore, right?

[00:24:54] Are we talking about the core installation, or the quick install, or what version, which package of WordPress are we talking about that still has it bundled? And second of all, there’s no indicator whatsoever in the plugin that, hey, you should go check out the back end of this code, and you can’t do it from the front end.

[00:25:16] It’s not in any way an invitation to explore the code, it is just here’s a thing, and if you happen to be inclined to go take things apart, Which some people are. A lot of devs are. They’re like, what is this? I’m going to unpack this. Oh, I can do this with it. Great. That is such a small subset of people, and a small subset of people who would use it if it maybe said, hey, this is a sample plugin.

[00:25:41] You should check it out. Here’s how to do that. Which doesn’t exist at all.

[00:25:46] Uploading the Hello Dolly plugin, To be some promo for jazz events, which is an actual nightmare, like 12 nightmares stacked on top of each other. Something I, and I’m just going to attribute it because Courtney, friend of the show in the chat, is very adamantly has said it like six times.

[00:26:05] It would make a lot of sense to create a teaching plugin. That is just a simple plugin, and it could still pop lyrics up in the maybe you could select the lyric type, the genre you wanted, and it would put it up there, or whatever it is. So you could have an interaction, an experience that said here’s what this is here for, not just random, because right now it’s literally, there’s no clue of why it’s there.

[00:26:35] And. As Mika is saying people who are even doing anything with Hello Dolly is not even there. But we are missing an opportunity in so much of our installs to communicate with our users. And we’ve really bridged that gap in a big way, I think, this year with the Get Involved tab. But

[00:26:56] Jason Cosper: yeah,

[00:26:57] Sé Reed: install plugin set, if it was something neutral that was valuable that can contribute to a user’s understanding of WordPress, I think hosts would still include it in their basic installs instead of being like, this is a random thing that’s going to confuse all of my customers.

[00:27:13] Let’s take it out. That was

[00:27:16] Posting companies, but that’s, I feel like everyone would be like, sure, just leave it in there. It’s clear what it’s for.

[00:27:24] Jason Cosper: exactly when I worked at WP Engine there in 2011 WP Engine was one of the first ones to break with tradition and actively uninstall Hello Dolly when it was installed and do.

[00:27:43] to the point where for a minute. And I, I know that particular people inside the WordPress project weren’t happy about this.

[00:27:51] Hello, Dolly was on the disallowed plugins list, which meant on WP Engine that if it got installed, it would be automatically uninstalled after seven days, if it was still like active or not even active, just installed on the site.

[00:28:06] Sé Reed: Is it just because it’s completely useless code, really? Essentially it is, right? And It’s like a friend of the show, old co host of the show Suzette made one that turned your dashboard, your admin bar pink, right? That was just a fun little thing, but it does still create the potential for what is that?

[00:28:28] Like security breaches in theory, because it’s right, it’s software. And if it’s not being updated, if it’s not being paid attention to obviously Hello Dolly, I don’t know who works on Hello Dolly. Who is keeping Matt, it says it’s his name, but I don’t is

[00:28:43] Jason Tucker: least a team of 30.

[00:28:45] Sé Reed: Because we’re having the back end, the admin update, right?

[00:28:49] So it’s going to have to update. Even if it’s just the baseline of what it is, just straight up, hello, Dolly, it will still have to display differently because we’re moving all of those things around. So there’s not going to be like the admin bar where it can display in the dashboard. I

[00:29:08] I have a funny thought.

[00:29:10] I wonder if Matt Mullenweg, still has HelloDolly installed on his main WordPress install. What do you think? Anybody?

[00:29:22] Jason Tucker: don’t know.

[00:29:23] Sé Reed: I don’t know. I think that’s an interesting thought. Anyway, so circled around it, but what if HelloDolly, donated a block that shows up on your that you can actually have HelloDolly show up on the front end of the site

[00:29:41] As like

[00:29:42] Jason Tucker: would at least show somebody how to make a block.

[00:29:45] Sé Reed: It could be turned into a block building plugin, it could be turned into a, there’s a new tool that was just showcased actually in meta. I don’t think it’s being, it hasn’t been really I think it has a post, but I’m not sure. It’s called a tour plugin and it was created by the Polyglot team in order to facilitate understanding where things were in different languages.

[00:30:10] And now they’re mainstreaming that into something that any of the make WordPress sites can use to like, have people tooltip around. That’s just being installed on the make sites. But something like that. That was installed. It was like, Hey, this is what the block editor is. And you could walk through a little you could have a block on the front page and the samples page or whatever it is that, that walks you through that.

[00:30:41] I’d be happy calling it Hello Dolly it’d be like, instead of Hello World

[00:30:46] Jason Tucker: Maybe what it is that we’re waiting for Matt to learn how to do, how to make a block, and then also waiting for Matt to learn how to write and react. So that way, once we redo the dashboard in React, it could be done in React. Maybe that’s what’s happening.

[00:31:02] Sé Reed: I don’t know.

[00:31:03] Jason Cosper: Him and most of us, cause come on,

[00:31:07] Sé Reed: I’m such an AZF.

[00:31:11] Jason Tucker: That’s literally my goal here.

[00:31:13] Sé Reed: You’re succeeding. I think that it’s. And what really comes down to, this is to circle back to our story to circle back to my story, is that we don’t really get to decide, as a community, what happens to Hello Dolly that’s not up to us Matt is going to make that decision, and it doesn’t say WordPress, It says Matt Mullenweg, that’s who makes it, right?

[00:31:40] His name is in every install. His name is at the footer of all the WordPress. org. He owns WordPress. org. He’s moving all of the Slack chats to Matrix. We’ll talk about that in another episode

[00:31:50] Jason Tucker: YouTube album of

[00:31:52] Sé Reed: servers.

[00:31:53] Jason Cosper: You need to,

[00:31:55] Sé Reed: album! Oh my god! It’s like the

[00:31:57] Album!

[00:31:59] Jason Cosper: so much inside baseball to know, like most end users do not know that Matt Mullenweg is the main developer of WordPress Most end users don’t know that HelloDolly is supposed to be a plugin that exists so you can learn how to build a plugin. Most people like there, there are all of

[00:32:23] Sé Reed: 80 20 like the other way, it’s probably like 5 10 percent of users of WordPress know what these things are.

[00:32:31] Jason Cosper: I just personally have always been fond of JTRIP made a fork of HelloDolly called HelloDonnie. It hasn’t been updated in a few years

[00:32:46] Sé Reed: a day trip,

[00:32:48] Jason Cosper: yeah but it throws big Lebowski quotes into your dashboard and honestly I feel like that more than jazz is the thing that we can all get behind.

[00:33:01] Sé Reed: I think that having a switcher like a lorem ipsum generator that would be cool, right? I like the Hello Dolly, Hello World parallel. I think that makes sense. But, if you could say, hey, show me lyrics from a different genre, show me lyrics from an opera, show me lyrics from pop music, show me lyrics from whatever it happens to be we could get an open source, I’m not sure there’s an open source lyric,

[00:33:29] Jason Cosper: and it would get, and it would get people into working with APIs, doing something a little more advanced than just necessarily inserting a line from a song into the

[00:33:42] Sé Reed: right, those lyrics are just written in the code. That’s not it’s not by the way, I sent you the lyrics. You want to pop those up for a second, because the lyrics are just going to be a static thing in the code. They’re not being pulled from anywhere, right? So that’s not dynamic in that sense.

[00:33:57] It’s dynamic in the sense that it is random, but it is not people love lorem ipsum generators. If you could have that

[00:34:07] Jason Tucker: know

[00:34:07] Sé Reed: built in, And choose to have it on your front end even, like people would probably use that, people love lyrics and quotes, like that would be a way to get people into, I don’t know, like that tinkering with the site that is really what you need in order to understand That there is more to WordPress than that’s just the surface.

[00:34:30] I think that would really help people to do that. If they’re like, oh, I want to change this and use this just cause, just for fun. We have to make that broader because fun for everybody is not saying go sit on this guy’s lap. I just want to bring up the lyrics here. So take her rap fellas, find her an empty lap fellas.

[00:34:50] Dolly will never go away again. You’re looking swell, Dolly. What? It’s so sexist. It’s really. I understand it’s meant to be wholesome, but so are a lot of things, friends didn’t used to be a phenomenon. This I

[00:35:10] Jason Cosper: Huh? This is the baby. It’s cold outside of WordPress. It is the baby, that’s exactly what it is. I it’s just, the thing is, I haven’t actually looked into the back, what this actually means, because a lot of the lyrics to songs like this back in the day had a lot of innuendo. There’s actually, especially in jazz. What that means, you’re still glowing, you’re still crowing what are we talking about?

[00:35:40] Sé Reed: What is she glowing and crowing from? It’s it has some implication, and you don’t have to look into it that deeply, right? It could just be lyrics on a page, but. Why are we just putting random things in at this point? Let’s not be random. It was random 20 years ago, or like 15 years ago, or whatever.

[00:35:58] But now, we have the ability to be intentional, and broaden our scope, and say, what if we brought in lyrics from, I don’t know African folk songs? Or I suggested earlier Dolly Parton lyrics. We could just have Jolene show

[00:36:15]

[00:36:16] Jason Tucker: And we didn’t have to change the name of the plugin.

[00:36:19] Sé Reed: The Dolly Parton all of that is very US centric, right? That is very English centric. This is like very male centric. It’s from a male perspective. We’re, not to bring the techno manifest, techno optimist manifest into things, but Oh, do we have time?

[00:36:37] Yeah the project claims sustainability, the project claims inclusiveness, the project claims autonomy like the ability to like make our own thing, like the community, it’s doing its own thing.

[00:36:50] And honestly the kibosh on sustainability that was in the Techno Optimist Manifesto, like that is hugely discouraging from my perspective for the new sustainability team. And there have been different choices made by people to follow people on different social medias, that give me some pause in terms of heteronormativity and gender roles, and HelloDolly, an example of that. So we’re like, we’re not living up to the ethos and what we are saying that we’re doing. Like half of us are, and half of us aren’t. Or the right brain and the left brain, I’m not sure. But I think this is a really good example of us not really having control of the project.

[00:37:42] The project we can’t go have this discussion somewhere I don’t know where the discussion for what should we do with Hello Dolly Matt didn’t even know where the discussion should be, he brought it up in the core committers channel, which is a weird channel for that you have to get someone to agree to core commit it I’m not sure, but, Okay. We can’t have this conversation openly as a community, and it’s just one person’s decision for what goes into it. We’re talking about core code. I don’t know what that says, but I do know that I sold a record for really cheap.

[00:38:27] Jason Tucker: Come back around,

[00:38:28] Sé Reed: I’m back around, and I lost some money because of my negative experiences with our project leadership this quarter.

[00:38:36] What should we do? I feel like Hello Dolly is a good place to to start. That’s what I

[00:38:46] Jason Tucker: Yeah we got to do it and react, and we also have to add blocks to it.

[00:38:52] Sé Reed: We could also just say, hey, maybe this plugin by this one person shouldn’t be part of Core. And maybe we should have a community plugin be part of Core. Or maybe they could donate it to the community and then we could have some say over it. know. Anyway, them’s my thought. If anyone wants to send me a first printing first pressing of the, I did remove a trigger.

[00:39:16] I removed it. Thank you all for being part of my therapy process and getting this out,

[00:39:24] Jason Cosper: we’ll send you a Veto request for billing,

[00:39:27] Sé Reed: you can all individually Venmo me, request me for 5 and collectively that will be, I think, the therapy bill, so that’s fine, I love you all, you’re the best therapists there ever were.

[00:39:37] Jason Cosper: please audience don’t take her up on that. I she’s already out 300 apparently we don’t need her losing anymore.

[00:39:48] Sé Reed: it was a good copy. Alright, I’m going to stop thinking about it now forever.

[00:39:53] Jason Tucker: So what are we talking about on our aftercooler today?

[00:39:57] Sé Reed: All the records we’ve sold for too

[00:39:59] Jason Tucker: All the records we’ve sold.

[00:40:02] Sé Reed: I don’t know, maybe we should talk about our plan of action for Hello Dolly. Oh,

[00:40:08] Jason Cosper: All right.

[00:40:09] Sé Reed: saying, just saying, okay. All right, we’ll see you over there. Love y’all. Voice

[00:40:14] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Go over to wpwatercooler. com slash aftercooler. And that’s where you can find how to join us over there in our audio section of our discord. Yeah. Audio only. Talk to y’all later. Here’s our outro. Hey, go over to our website at wpwatercooler. com slash subscribe. Subscribe to this content over there, we appreciate it.

[00:40:39] We’re available wherever it is that you can listen to audio podcasts and you can watch us pretty much wherever it is that you can watch video podcasts as well on YouTube and all those other places. So go hang out over there. We’d really appreciate it. Talk to y’all later. Have a good one. Bye.