Show Notes: Adam Warner: Currently I am in Scottsdale, Arizona, at SiteLock Headquarters. Mike Demo: Excellent. Do you make it out there often? Adam Warner: Not as often as I’d like. I make it out a couple times a year, but I think this year we’re going to be out at least four times a year. We have a very large team here, and it’s growing every day, so it’s always good to get some face time with my team and also with the SiteLock team as a whole. I look forward to coming back out at least a few more times this year. Mike Demo: Excellent. Well, it is that time. So for those of you joining us, welcome officially to the first episode of the Bold Life video series on Facebook Live. My name is Mike Demo, I am the evangelist of BoldGrid and I’m happy to be joined by my friend, Adam Warner from SiteLock. Hey, Adam. Adam Warner: Yes. Hey, Mike. I’m happy to be here again. Let’s make this a historic first episode. Mike Demo: So tell everyone a little bit about you and what you do and kind of your role at SiteLock, and also you own a WordPress business as well, right? Adam Warner: I do, yeah. I’ll give the short history. I found WordPress in 2005 when I was looking for an easier way to update some of my hand-coded HTML websites. Once I found WordPress, I basically fell in love with it. Started learning it inside and out, writing tutorials for it, getting involved in the community, all the while working day jobs and having these little entrepreneurial side businesses. One thing led to another, and I started a WordPress plugin business in 2011, 2012, right around the turn of the year, named FooPlugins. Did that for a number of years, and then I joined the SiteLock team in April of 2016 as their WordPress evangelist. Now my title has changed to open source community manager, and we just added an additional WordPress evangelist to our team. Mike Demo: Excellent. So we first met almost two years ago, now. About a year and a half. One of my first outings with BoldGrid, I believe it was Denver? Adam Warner: I believe it may have been San Antonio. Mike Demo: Oh, yeah, I think you’re right about … you are right about that, because we were talking about Logan. Adam Warner: That’s right. You threw me off by introducing yourself as Demo when your name tag said Mike, and I was wondering if that was your real name because it’s a pretty cool name to go by, Demo. Mike Demo: Yeah, I do go by Demo, because there’s too many Mikes in this world. There’s a great campaign out there called “No More Mikes.” There should be no more Mikes in this world, and the fact that we have multiple famous Michael … famous athletes and politicians, just shows there are too many Mikes in this world. And I’ll never be called Mike or [crosstalk 00:03:10]. Adam Warner: There you go. Understood. Makes sense. Yeah, so we met at WordCamp San Antonio. You had a BoldGrid table and I had never heard of BoldGrid before. So I learned a lot about what BoldGrid is, what it does, how it positions itself in the market of website builders. Ever since then, we ended up at quite a few different events together over the last year and a half. Mike Demo: Yeah, you’ve definitely heard a lot about BoldGrid since that time. I haven’t shut up about it. But yeah, so we hang out quite a bit, both at the WordPress events and other events out there in the web and hosting space. We kind of developed a friendship. So we kind of know what’s going on in the WordPress space with Gutenberg and some of those changes that are coming, but what are your personal goals for 2018? Adam Warner: My personal goals. Well, should we describe what Gutenberg is for those who don’t know? Mike Demo: Sure, yeah. Adam Warner: Okay, so Gutenberg, if you don’t know, is the project to revamp the WordPress editor and that eventually Gutenberg will be the thing that powers WordPress as a whole. Right now it’s focused on changing the editor to a blocks system to make content creation a little bit easier and more intuitive. That’s been going on just over a year now, the development of Gutenberg. In Matt’s last State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg, he was shooting for a release date into core around April of this year. So we’ll see if that sees the light of day. At the time, I mean. Mike Demo: Yeah. I heard it’s gonna be pushed back a few months from some of the core team members. For us at BoldGrid, we’re kind of excited about Gutenberg because it makes WordPress more user friendly and brings more people into the WordPress space, which is only good for plugin developers that can extend the functionality of WordPress, and that’s why we do things like sponsor the Gutenberg course that Zack’s doing and other things like that. So whatever can bring more people into the WordPress sphere, we’re team WordPress. Adam Warner: Sure, yeah. Gutenberg is … there was a lot of pushback initially because there just wasn’t a scope really defined, but now I believe that plugin developers, theme developers, general hardcore WordPress developers are seeing the benefits of Gutenberg. As the owner of a plugin business, we have paid very close attention to that, and also with SiteLock we have a WordPress plugin. We’re also paying attention to Gutenberg and how we can utilize the new blocks system to make a better user experience for our users as they use our plugins. So it’s gonna be exciting to see how it all pans out. Mike Demo: Yeah. We’re looking at our plugins to see how we can extend the Gutenberg functionality and how it can work in the work flow and things like that. Similar to what we currently do with TinyMCE, which is the current editor you think of when you think of the editor in WordPress that’s out today. Adam Warner: Yeah. And now to get back to your question about my goals for 2018. If you don’t know, you know, but if our listeners don’t know, viewers don’t know, that a … what a WordPress evangelist is, what an open source community manager does … so it’s basically our job to go into the community that we all know and love and are already a part of and listen. Listen to the needs of end users, listen to the needs of developers, of freelancers, of agencies, and make sure that our products and services are aligned and giving them the best chance to succeed both for themselves and for their clients. So my goal with 2018 has already started to happen, and that is to build out a larger team of SiteLock evangelists, starting with the smart and talented Jamie Schmidt. We could probably link that in the show notes, i guess, to learn more about her. But we will basically be splitting up our travel schedule between West coast and East coast events, and we will be submitting as many speaking proposals as possible and hopefully getting accepted to many of them in order to share what we know about WordPress and website security as a whole, and also to up our chances of getting feedback from individual users. Mike Demo: Cool, sounds great. I also wanted to let our viewers know that we’ve been having some technical issues with Adam’s video, so his audio’s still coming through so we’re going to keep going as best as we can. It is the first episode. Apologize for any technical difficulties. But we’re gonna keep going, so you might see a Skype logo, you might see Adam’s smiling face, it just kind of depends. But we don’t want to stop the show and figure out what’s going on with that. So apologize for that. Hopefully we’ll have it fixed by the next episode. Adam Warner: Sounds good. I’m still here. Mike Demo: So that being said, tell everyone a little bit about SiteLock and what SiteLock does. Adam Warner: So SiteLock is the global leader in website security. We are a cloud-based website security service. We offer malware scanning daily; automatic malware removal if we find it; a web application firewall which is basically a hardware and software solution that sits between your user’s browser and web server to help automatically block bad bot traffic to your site, malicious scripts and the sort; and we also have a product now called Smart Plus. Our scanner is called Smart, but we have a product called Smart Plus which integrates the ability to back port security patches to core CMS versions. Not just WordPress, but WordPress for sure, but also Joomla, Drupal, Magento, and very soon it will include WooCommerce in that. So the way it works is once you have a SiteLock account, you can enter account via SSH FTP or SFTP. We scan those files on your server daily looking for known malware, and we have a large database of known malware of our own and we utilize others. We scan 12 million websites a day, and 4 million of those are WordPress. So we have a large data set to pull from to match malicious scripts and automatically remove those. Mike Demo: Excellent. A lot of people maybe confuse services like SiteLock and some of the other security plugins that happen to be out there, with SSL or the little lock in the browser, and I hear from a lot of users saying, “Well, I’m secure because I got the little lock. I got the SSL certificate.” There’s a huge push with things like Let’s Encrypt, they give out free SSL certificates for security, and I think it’s kind of confusing the end user. Can you kind of explain the difference? Adam Warner: Sure. So SSL is really important, everyone should have SSL. Not only is it a ranking factor not in Google, if your site has an SSL certificate attached to it, but it also does provide some form of security. However, it does not provide security for your actual website files or the application. What SSL does is it encrypts the data that goes back and forth between a visitor’s browser and your website. So in terms of protecting the core files of your website, your database, everything else, SSL doesn’t really have anything to do with that. It’s more about protecting and encrypting the traffic between the browser and the web server. Mike Demo: Okay, so really if someone wants to have a secure website, it’s a multifaceted approach. You can’t just get one thing, be it just SiteLock or just SSL or just a security plugin on the WordPress application, and think you’re all the way secure. It’s a multifaceted, layered approach. Adam Warner: Yes, I agree with that statement. It’s basically a 360 degree approach in order to reduce the attack surface of your website or your web property or, in other words, your web business or your income. So SSL is important kind of as a baseline. You should have some kind of daily scan that’s looking for malicious scripts, both from the outside in as a user sees your website and as Google sees your website, but also from the inside out, that can look for malicious code that may have been injected into your site. Now, they could’ve gotten into your site through a weak username and password, it could’ve been from another website on a shared hosting server, it could’ve been from anywhere. Another really important part of securing your website is to get a web application firewall of some sort. Our WAF, as it’s known, is called TruShield. As I mentioned earlier, what that is is it’s a hardware and software solution that sits between your visitor’s browser and your actual web server. So before a visitor can get to the files on your website or load your website, they’re going through this web application firewall, which is designed to detect malicious traffic and automated bots and stop it right there at the web application firewall level and let the good traffic through. The obvious benefit is that malicious scripts aren’t even getting to your site files or to your site in order to try and get in and do their thing, but also it reduces the load on your web server so you can reduce some bandwidth costs with your hosting as well. Mike Demo: Excellent. Now, kind of shifting gears a little bit. As a WordPress evangelist, or now the open source community manager at SiteLock, you definitely have connected with all sorts of different types of people, as have I, at a lot of these events. End users, hosts, developers, people that make templates. What are your thoughts of kind of the WordPress community as a whole, and what have you kind of learned with able to connect with all these end users and developers and core volunteers, kind of where they are by traveling around? Because I think we’re pretty privileged to be able to meet all these awesome people when a lot of users maybe go to their local even and that’s kind of it. Adam Warner: Yeah, we sure are privileged and we’re really lucky to be able to do what we do, especially, and I know you feel the same, with both of us loving open source software so much and WordPress specifically. So to answer your question … and I don’t know if this is in a direct way, but the WordPress community as a whole is such an interesting community to be in, because before I started traveling to WordCamps, I was fairly isolated in the breadth and knowledge of the community as a whole. I knew my local meetup groups, I knew kind of my regional WordCamps, I had been to a few of those. Then, of course, the WordPress.org forums and all the different WordPress Facebook groups and things, you meet people and you learn things. But once you start traveling to different camps around the US and around the world, you … me, I was surprised at just how far people are pushing the WordPress platform into doing things that I never imagined it could do. Again, I’ve been with the platform since 2005, so I’ve seen the progression of plugins, of custom post types, of the WordPress REST API and now Gutenberg and the more things change the more they stay the same, and the things that stay the same is the passion for the people who work with the software. So I guess that’s what excites me most is seeing everyone from a brand new user in 2018 who heard that they could make money from their blog and they heard WordPress was the way to go and they’re attending their very first WordCamp, and what I often hear from them is, “Oh my gosh, everybody is so inviting and so helpful.” And that’s what this community is all about, right? It’s about, what is the saying … “a rising tide lifts all ships.” And that’s what this community is all about. I don’t know if that answers your question, but I hope it does. Mike Demo: Yeah, definitely. One of the personas that we thought about when we developed BoldGrid was multiple personas. Everything from advanced web developers and agencies, but for that first time person, the DIY, the do it yourself market. And I always find it interesting how people are using platforms in so many different ways. Like when you and I went to the Snap conference, which is a DIY bloggers conference, I met so many people that didn’t really care about their platform. WordPress was certainly used, but so was Blogger. They were just there to create content and make sure that their readership had the best reading experience possible. I find it interesting how even inside the WordPress community, we get these little echo chambers, and then you go out to a different event like a hosting event or a domain event, and you find these different use cases for WordPress or just the web in general that, “Oh, I never thought about that. Everyone I talked to last year uses it this way.” But it doesn’t mean that’s the only way to use the application, and that’s the cool part about open source is that you can extend and adapt it and you have those freedoms. Adam Warner: Yeah, yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. And that conference you mentioned, Snap, you were there alongside as a sponsor alongside LEGO and Glidden paints and I think Black & Decker, and it was a completely different experience from your typical WordCamp where the majority of people have been using WordPress for a little while. Well, I wouldn’t say the majority, because I’ve been to a lot of camps where a lot of new campers were there, not necessarily new to WordPress … but this Snap conference, the platform, I would say 90% were using WordPress, but it wasn’t their focus. They weren’t passionate about the platform itself, they just knew it as a tool to accomplish their goal of creating a blogging business based on their craft or their skills. So it’s interesting when you go to different events other than WordCamps. We’re doing quite a bit more of that this year, because we feel that the good word of website security needs to be spread, especially to those people who are building businesses with their website. Because if you get hacked, there goes your income for X number of days until you notice something and can get it fixed. Mike Demo: Yeah, for sure. I’ve met so many people doing some very cool stuff with the web. I just came back from NamesCon Global in Vegas, a domain conference. There was so many people doing very interesting things with domains and blotching that is just a lot different than what you kind of thing about. For example, Ethereum is the new big crypto currency. They now have a non-centralized Ethereum TLD that you can use, kind of as a QR code, to send Ethereum back and forth instead of the really long, huge, super long string. Adam Warner: You just blew my mind. Mike Demo: It’s very interesting. I learned about branded domains and how people are developing mini sites and selling those mini sites with a template and everything and they spend like an hour on them, and they use WordPress and other platforms for a lot of that, and that’s kind of exciting. Adam Warner: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, the future is wide open, that’s for sure. You have people building intranets. Everything from blogs to intranets to restaurant reservation systems, all using WordPress, and now with the REST API being released, what, two, three years ago now, people are really pushing to decouple the front end from the back end of WordPress. And what I mean by that is that people are using React and other code libraries to basically only interact with WordPress to pull and push data, and then display it in a web browser, with a completely different tool, rather than a standard WordPress theme. Mike Demo: And that’s exciting because there’s a lot of plugins out there that are very bloated and turn WordPress into something that it’s really not intended to be, and what I mean by that is the CMS layer. For example, there are plugins that turn the WordPress CMS into a full customer relationship manager, and it maybe has all this extra bloated weight when you could use something like the REST API and still use WordPress, but you don’t need the CMS portion. And that’s kind of what’s exciting with the technology changes that are coming. Adam Warner: Yeah, yeah. It really is. And as Gutenberg matures, it’s gonna go from the post editor to the customizer to the admin. In two or three years from now, WordPress is going to be a completely different platform. I think that’s exactly what it needs to continue to excel and take even more of the, what’s it now, 30% market share of all websites on the Internet. I’m excited for that because I’m passionate about the platform, and also I have a few dogs in the fight here, as it were. Mike Demo: Definitely. Whatever we can do to keep the market share growing and not have services like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, other SaaS offerings kind of control the web. Because those platforms are cool. That’s one reason why BoldGrid exists is we want to have a similar Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace user journey, but in something that person owns. Adam Warner: Yeah, and the key difference there with those platforms you just mentioned is that they are closed. They are closed platforms. You do not own your data like you owned your data if your utilizing WordPress. Of course, you are beholden to your web host in a certain way, but you can certainly do file backups and database backups and for all intents and purposes, that data is yours to keep. Which is important for the open web as a whole. Mike Demo: Cool. Well, we have about five, ten minutes left of this [inaudible 00:22:43] episode. I encourage everyone to go to BoldGrid.com to learn more about BoldGrid. And Adam, where can people find you online and learn more about SiteLock and some of the other places that you live? Adam Warner: Well, I would welcome people to visit wpdistrict.sitelock.com, that’s where we blog about all things WordPress and you can learn more about our Smart scanner, our Smart Plus product, our TruShield web application firewall, and any other information that’s related to WordPress and website security there. I can be found on Twitter @wpmodder, that’s W-P-M-O-D-D-E-R, or you can tweet us at wpdistrict on Twitter. Mike Demo: Yeah, wpdistrict does some great blog posts and awesome content. Definitely want to check that out. And Adam’s personal Twitter should be on the screen, so you can just take it from that or click the link in the show notes. So before we wrap up, Adam, what was your favorite WordCamp memory of 2017? Adam Warner: Favorite WordCamp memory of 2017. There’s so many, Mr. Demo, there’s so many. Boy, it’s really hard to choose a favorite. I don’t know. There really is just so many. I would say the easy go to would be WordCamp Europe in Paris last year. That was amazing. I had never been to Paris. We worked hard, we played a little bit hard, and I was able to take a day and see some sights, and it was just as amazing as I thought it would be. Mike Demo: For sure, definitely. Paris was awesome. I was able to take half a day and go to Disneyland cuz [inaudible 00:24:42]. I’m gonna cheat a little bit. I’m gonna go back to 2016. Remember when I got this sword that’s kind of on the wall behind me? Adam Warner: Oh, yes, yes. That was a very good memory. Would you like to share that story? Mike Demo: Sure, and you can jump in. So we’re hanging out at WordCamp Baltimore, December 2016. It was one of my first events with the BoldGrid team. Newish, I should say. Talking to GoDaddy, and GoDaddy wanted to go to Medieval Times, and we got tickets and got the upgrade to the king’s package and Adam was invited and we ended up all going. And in the car, we had Uber, Adam was like, “You don’t have to touch the food, do you?” Adam Warner: Well, yeah, so there were four of us on a car on our way to Medieval Times. I have a bit of an issue with greasy fingers, so what I remembered about Medieval Times is they give you huge drumsticks with no utensils. So that was my first concern. But then, of course, when we got there, we also got the knighting package. So among 20-some other children, there were four of us adult men who were also greeted and knighted by the king at Medieval Times, which was quite entertaining for us, and also, I think, for the rest of the crowd. Mike Demo: It was quite entertaining. They got us on every upgrade. Upgraded us to the team package. “Well, would you like to get knighted?” “Sure, we’ll get knighted.” And then they’re like, “Would you like to keep the sword you’re knighted with?” And I’m like, “Oh, I have to go on a flight.” “Well, we ship.” So I ended up buying a sword, which you can see on the wall behind me, which my coworkers still think I put on my expense account, which I did not. Adam Warner: Of course not. Mike Demo: Of course not. It was a good night, and hanging out. And do you want to talk about the Twitter love we from Medieval Times? Adam Warner: Yeah, we were able to utilize that as a bit of a marketing opportunity too, because if you’re not familiar with Medieval Times, you get put in a section and you root for a specific knight out of six. Our knight happened to be what they called the Black and White Knight, and his horse had a big black and white checkered cloth on it. So the four of us, I don’t remember who came up with it first, but we started referring to him as Zebra Knight. I forget who tweeted something to Medieval Times, “#zebraknight,” suggesting that they change the name from Black and White Knight to Zebra Knight. So Medieval Times, to their credit, their social team was on the ball, replied to us, we had a whole thread, and then … what, Mike, four or five months later? Mike Demo: A while later. Adam Warner: A while later. Mike Demo: Like, it was multiple months later. Adam Warner: Yeah, Medieval Times just happened to send a tweet, tag us all in it, and let us know that the Zebra Knight was doing well. So kudos to the Medieval Times social media people. Mike Demo: Or as they would say, “huzzah!” Adam Warner: Huzzah! Yes. Mike Demo: And on that note, Adam, I just want to thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure having you on this inaugural episode of BoldLife and for all the viewers and listeners to be able to learn more about you, SiteLock, and FooPlugins. Adam Warner: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Mike. This was a lot of fun, and I’ll see you at the next event. Mike Demo: See you soon. Adam Warner: All right, bye.