WPwatercooler

EP470 – Goodbye, Hello Dolly

December 1, 2023

On this episode of WPwatercooler, the panel discussed the history and impact of the “Hello Dolly” plugin in WordPress. Sé Reed shared a personal story about finding a first edition of the “Hello Dolly” record, tying it to recent experiences and changes within the WordPress community. The conversation delved into the significance of the plugin, its potential for teaching plugin development, and its role in the WordPress core. There was also a critical examination of the plugin’s lyrics and their cultural implications. The panel proposed ideas for updating Hello Dolly, suggesting it could evolve into a more educational tool or even integrate into the WordPress ecosystem in new ways.

Chapters

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:30 – Sé Reed’s Personal Story about “Hello Dolly”
00:10:11 – Reflections on WordPress and “Hello Dolly” Plugin
00:15:24 – Discussing the Lyrics and Cultural Implications
00:18:00 – Opinions on Jazz and Music in WordPress
00:24:13 – Potential Changes to “Hello Dolly” Plugin
00:30:10 – Ideas for Educational Use of the Plugin
00:36:16 – Broader Perspectives on Plugin Content
00:38:27 – Closing Thoughts and Future of “Hello Dolly”

Links

Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Open The Book Store – TikTok

Panel

Episode Transcription

Speakers:

Sé Reed: 60.96%
Jason Tucker: 17.39%
Jason Cosper: 21.65%
Sé Reed:[00:00:00]
Needed those three minutes.
Jason Tucker:[00:00:09]
What’s up, everyone. This is WPwatercooler episode number 470. Goodbye. Hello, Dolly.
Sé Reed:[00:00:17]
Goodbye, hello, sorry.
Jason Tucker:[00:00:19]
I’m Jason Tucker. Go to my website and you can figure out where I’m at on the internet.
Sé Reed:[00:00:26]
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
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:00:41]
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.
Sé Reed:[00:00:54]
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:01:18]
So it wasn’t the eight o’clock in the morning text message that I said, oh, okay.
Sé Reed:[00:01:23]
No, remember with ADHD, you start to tune those things out and we’ve just known each other too long, friend.
Jason Tucker:[00:01:31]
Look, just trying to make sure that someone’s saying something.
Sé Reed:[00:01:35]
The key thing I think is it was in a different app.
Jason Tucker:[00:01:39]
Oh,
Sé Reed:[00:01:40]
I was like, Oh, I have to pay attention to
Jason Tucker:[00:01:42]
Oh, I’ll send you a message on Friendster next time.
Sé Reed:[00:01:46]
Yeah. Just switch apps each week. I’m getting great ADHD ideas for, or like ideas for apps for ADHD people and alarms.
Jason Tucker:[00:01:54]
write a book. How to be friends with someone who has ADHD.
Sé Reed:[00:01:58]
There’s a lot of content out there for that right now,
Jason Tucker:[00:02:00]
Yeah.
Sé Reed:[00:02:01]
I think the, there’s a lot of relationship content, but less friend content. And honestly, that’s a niche. I might get into.
Jason Cosper:[00:02:09]
I think that the book requires too much attention. So it maybe needs to be about 30 to 90 second tick talks and then
Sé Reed:[00:02:23]
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
Jason Cosper:[00:02:30]
well.
Sé Reed:[00:02:31]
do that on purpose. I don’t even
Jason Tucker:[00:02:32]
I was going to say something that’s totally unrelated. Hey,
Sé Reed:[00:02:36]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:03:03]
Please,
Sé Reed:[00:03:04]
to hear mine? Okay. You
Jason Cosper:[00:03:07]
we’ll have to fill 27 more minutes. And we,
Sé Reed:[00:03:11]
idea how to do that.
Jason Tucker:[00:03:22]
Oh, I can make that happen.
Sé Reed:[00:03:23]
No, please, God, no. Yeah, thanks for noticing my new background. I had no,
Jason Tucker:[00:03:28]
make things show up on the screen. I
Sé Reed:[00:03:32]
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:06:28]
Now I’m on a totally different computer, but this computer doesn’t even know that picture exists.
Sé Reed:[00:06:32]
Okay, my table is like rattling I don’t know if you guys can hear that or not. Really?
Jason Cosper:[00:06:37]
it’s okay. Please tell us more. Hello, Dolly,
Sé Reed:[00:06:40]
Okay. Sorry.
Jason Cosper:[00:06:41]
stay on target.
Jason Tucker:[00:06:43]
content. Let’s do
Sé Reed:[00:06:44]
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:09:07]
great
Sé Reed:[00:09:18]
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:12:40]
day.
Jason Cosper:[00:12:42]
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?
Sé Reed:[00:13:00]
I do have that book, actually, yes.
Jason Cosper:[00:13:03]
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,
Sé Reed:[00:13:25]
Q4.
Jason Cosper:[00:13:26]
I, see I wanted to say quarter, but then I was like no.
Sé Reed:[00:13:32]
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,
Jason Cosper:[00:13:39]
Ter, yeah. The say wrapped for 2024. You had a terrible Q4,
Sé Reed:[00:13:46]
Exactly. I listened. Actually, I did. I listened to all the song Clementine, I don’t know if
Jason Cosper:[00:13:54]
the Elliot
Sé Reed:[00:13:55]
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
Jason Cosper:[00:14:05]
That does sound terrible.
Sé Reed:[00:14:06]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:14:31]
Send it to the group chat and I
Sé Reed:[00:14:33]
We’ll get it up there. Okay, cool. I was like, I don’t know. I
Jason Tucker:[00:14:37]
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
Jason Cosper:[00:14:45]
Maybe you should consider using texts to get your iMessages over onto Windows.
Sé Reed:[00:14:51]
Oh my god,
Jason Tucker:[00:14:53]
No
Sé Reed:[00:14:53]
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?
Jason Cosper:[00:16:03]
I was going to say, Mika,
Sé Reed:[00:16:06]
Heteronormative sexism. That’s what that is.
Jason Cosper:[00:16:08]
yes. Up in everybody’s dashboard.
Sé Reed:[00:16:46]
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?
Jason Tucker:[00:17:03]
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
Sé Reed:[00:17:35]
not a Spotify commercial at the beginning of this show, I will be disappointed.
Jason Tucker:[00:17:39]
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.
Sé Reed:[00:18:34]
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?
Jason Tucker:[00:19:23]
Like he does own a jazz club.
Sé Reed:[00:19:24]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:20:06]
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
Jason Tucker:[00:20:21]
derivative of it.
Jason Cosper:[00:20:23]
right. I don’t listen to the original. I listened to the derivative.
Sé Reed:[00:21:00]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:21:37]
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
Sé Reed:[00:21:52]
now Cosper’s trying to push jazz on you.
Jason Tucker:[00:21:57]
What’s funny though,
Jason Cosper:[00:21:58]
you have, but so there, there are playlists out there that are like here is the song that sampled the jazz song or whatever.
Jason Tucker:[00:22:09]
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
Jason Cosper:[00:22:28]
right.
Jason Tucker:[00:22:29]
like a house, it’s like house songs, but it’s people rapping over them.
Sé Reed:[00:22:46]
here’s the thing. Derivative.
Jason Tucker:[00:23:07]
Buy bands in town and only do jazz.
Sé Reed:[00:23:11]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:23:31]
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,
Sé Reed:[00:23:45]
you mean? Yeah.
Jason Cosper:[00:23:46]
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?
Jason Tucker:[00:24:33]
you
Sé Reed:[00:24:34]
100 percent true. But I was gonna say that if you have a plugin that is installed that does some random thing like lyrics
Jason Tucker:[00:24:42]
allow
Sé Reed:[00:24:43]
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?
Jason Cosper:[00:26:56]
yeah,
Sé Reed:[00:26:57]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:27:24]
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.
Sé Reed:[00:28:06]
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?
Jason Tucker:[00:28:43]
least a team of 30.
Sé Reed:[00:28:45]
Because we’re having the back end, the admin update, right?
Jason Tucker:[00:29:22]
don’t know.
Sé Reed:[00:29:23]
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
Jason Tucker:[00:29:42]
would at least show somebody how to make a block.
Sé Reed:[00:29:45]
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:30:46]
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.
Sé Reed:[00:31:02]
I don’t know.
Jason Cosper:[00:31:03]
Him and most of us, cause come on,
Sé Reed:[00:31:07]
I’m such an AZF.
Jason Tucker:[00:31:11]
That’s literally my goal here.
Sé Reed:[00:31:13]
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?
Jason Tucker:[00:31:50]
YouTube album of
Sé Reed:[00:31:52]
servers.
Jason Cosper:[00:31:53]
You need to,
Sé Reed:[00:31:55]
album! Oh my god! It’s like the
Jason Cosper:[00:31:59]
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
Sé Reed:[00:32:23]
80 20 like the other way, it’s probably like 5 10 percent of users of WordPress know what these things are.
Jason Cosper:[00:32:31]
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
Sé Reed:[00:32:46]
a day trip,
Jason Cosper:[00:32:48]
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.
Sé Reed:[00:33:01]
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,
Jason Cosper:[00:33:29]
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
Sé Reed:[00:33:42]
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:34:07]
know
Sé Reed:[00:34:07]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:35:10]
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?
Sé Reed:[00:35:40]
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.
Jason Tucker:[00:36:16]
And we didn’t have to change the name of the plugin.
Sé Reed:[00:36:19]
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?
Jason Tucker:[00:38:27]
Come back around,
Sé Reed:[00:38:28]
I’m back around, and I lost some money because of my negative experiences with our project leadership this quarter.
Jason Tucker:[00:38:46]
Yeah we got to do it and react, and we also have to add blocks to it.
Sé Reed:[00:38:52]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:39:24]
we’ll send you a Veto request for billing,
Sé Reed:[00:39:27]
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.
Jason Cosper:[00:39:37]
please audience don’t take her up on that. I she’s already out 300 apparently we don’t need her losing anymore.
Sé Reed:[00:39:48]
it was a good copy. Alright, I’m going to stop thinking about it now forever.
Jason Tucker:[00:39:53]
So what are we talking about on our aftercooler today?
Sé Reed:[00:39:57]
All the records we’ve sold for too
Jason Tucker:[00:39:59]
All the records we’ve sold.
Sé Reed:[00:40:02]
I don’t know, maybe we should talk about our plan of action for Hello Dolly. Oh,
Jason Cosper:[00:40:08]
All right.
Sé Reed:[00:40:09]
saying, just saying, okay. All right, we’ll see you over there. Love y’all. Voice
Jason Tucker:[00:40:14]
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.
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6 responses to “EP470 – Goodbye, Hello Dolly”

  1. jonathanbossenger Avatar

    @jasontucker @sereedmedia @boogah I’m not sure what the podcast content will be, but based on the title, as someone who not only learned the basics of plugin development, and has used Hello Dolly to teach plugin development, I’d be sad if it was removed, or of something like it wasn’t bundled with a default WordPress install.

  2. Amy ???? Avatar
  3. sé reed Avatar
  4. sé reed Avatar

    … reposted this!

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