Episode 40: Best Practices for Your Business + 2025 Roadmap

[00:00:01] Speaker A: We are in episode 40 of the Cadence Beat podcast. Welcome back, everybody. I have Hannah and Ben here with me as well. Hi, guys. How y'all doing? [00:00:12] Speaker B: Hi. [00:00:12] Speaker C: Good. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Doing good. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Good. We have a lot of things to share. This is our first podcast in 2025 and we have a lot in store. We want to share some quick tips for business and marketing as you are getting into the meat of the year. We also want to share our vision and our upcoming roadmap. We have a lot of questions from our web creator community on Facebook that users sent in. We're happy to address those questions. A lot of those questions are asking about where our vision is for 2025 roadmap. We're excited to dive into all of that and share what's coming. It's going to be really exciting. You guys are going to be on the edge of your seats waiting for that information, I think. But yeah, let's jump into just talking a little bit about a life update. Hannah, you've been our nomad. So where are you at right now? [00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I am in Peru. It was funny after our last episode, a couple of our siblings texted like, oh, it's fun to keep up with where you are through the podcast. But yeah, we are in Peru right now. We've been here like a week and it's been an incredibly full on week. But next week we'll be on the beach, which will be lovely. But we did a. A four day trek through the Santa Cruz mountains, which I would highly recommend. It was insane. Really, really studied. And then because we're in Peru, we had to do Machu Picchu, so that was pretty amazing as well. We had sunshine and very beautiful. [00:01:43] Speaker C: Where are the pictures? I am your brother. We have like a family channel for sharing pictures. [00:01:50] Speaker B: We do. [00:01:51] Speaker C: I have not seen a single picture. [00:01:54] Speaker B: You know, I. I can get better at that. It's funny, the only place that we have posted pictures is Strava, so if you follow us on Strava, you'll find pictures. But I could. I should be better at sending pictures to my family. I'll work on that. [00:02:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. How are you juggling this, like, nomad digital life as well as all of your travels? Because you've been to many countries at this point. [00:02:19] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. Well, this week I did take time off, so there was that. Most of our weeks are not as full on. Usually we're just like kind of slow traveling in a city and we like in the evenings and weekends go explore. But then during the days we're just like working from an Airbnb in a cool city. So. But this week was, like. We had some friends come down, and they were like, we want to see all of Peru in one week. So I think we did it. We saw a lot of Peru in one week, and it's been awesome. But we'll be excited for that slow week next week. [00:02:51] Speaker A: That's amazing. What about you, Ben? What have you been up to lately? [00:02:56] Speaker C: Lots of snow here in Montana. Yeah. So kids and. And snow, and it's been really fun. Lots of sledding and snowmen and snow forts and all of that. Yeah. Montana in the winter. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Last we heard, you were stargazing. Are you still doing that? [00:03:17] Speaker C: Actually, it's been ridiculously cold at night. Negative eight last night. So not. Not been doing that because your fingers get super. But I have. I don't remember what I said last. [00:03:32] Speaker B: Time, but you hadn't used it yet last time. [00:03:34] Speaker C: Oh, I've seen the rings on Saturn and. [00:03:37] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [00:03:38] Speaker C: I've seen the. The storm on Jupiter, and I saw Venus when it was in a crescent Venus, which is really crazy, but, like, so Venus and is closer to the sun. And so at certain times in its rotation, you. Oh, you get a crescent Venus just like we get a crescent moon. And so we. There was like, a little slit of Venus. Very, very cool. [00:04:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that's amazing. [00:04:02] Speaker B: And that is very cool. [00:04:04] Speaker C: Super impressive. Yeah, I'm excited. And as it gets warmer, too, I'm, like, very excited to take it to Glacier, where there's a lot of stuff I, you know, I want to see the Andromeda galaxy. That's, like, top of my list. I want to look through a lens and see that. I think that'd be really cool. [00:04:22] Speaker B: Wow. [00:04:23] Speaker A: You guys are just, like, bred for adventure, it sounds like. [00:04:29] Speaker C: For sure. [00:04:31] Speaker A: That's awesome. Yeah. Last I think our. Our audience heard, I was in the process of moving cross country. We're all settled in now. I'm. I'm in Fort Worth, Texas. It's great and happy to have a normal routine again. That was a wild ride for a little bit. [00:04:47] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:49] Speaker A: But anyway, well, good update. Hopefully our community is happy to hear kind of what we're up to. But why don't you, Hannah, lead us into a few questions to get us started with some tips, if that's okay with you. [00:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah, totally would love to just ask you, Ben and Katie, some questions because you guys both have run successful businesses, and obviously Cadence is a successful business, but just wanted to ask some questions as we start the year. Like, what are some things people can be thinking about. So the first one, what are some outdated business practices that entrepreneurs should leave behind? [00:05:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the way especially thinking about websites. Right we're related there. The way that traditionally the content strategy for a lot of entrepreneurs, bloggers, things like that has been more content, lots of content, lots of filler content. You want to kind of create an interweb of all these connected keywords to get your stuff ranked. And so a lot of content that you call fluff content on your website. This has been trending out for a while and I think it's just going to become more and more like worthless to you to go and do that. There certainly is and it's still existing and people will argue an SEO strategy in that I'm. I don't think that that's even a thing anymore. But, but it's certainly debatable and no one really knows the exact algorithm that Google is using. But in general we definitely see the result of there's less traffic hitting sites because more people are finding the answers they want from Google's just like their AI response as well as people going to use AI tools for basic things that knowledge things. And so I would think about a strategy for post being more about opinionated and telling people what to do. Less about giving them a bunch of information, much more actionable, much more opinionated. Very like you know what people are wanting right now is like they want the answer, they want to know what to do, they want to know what to choose from a product level, from a, from that level. So just being a little bit different content strategy in terms of really focusing on having an opinions with your content, making sure that if you are writing something that's knowledge based, that has a lot of either stylistic things that people will read it because they like your style or has a lot of strong opinions. So people are coming in looking for like strong recommendations. The idea of creating this is a good example. There's tons of these on the web blog posts that tell you 10 products to choose for this thing and it gives you a big explanation of each product without much opinion, without much it's just like blah, blah, blah, blah all the way down that that is going away. I think people are going to get really tired of consuming content that way given how quickly AI gives them a response on things. So if you're writing content I think you need to be more opinionated to get traffic. And if you're in that game of really trying to get traffic, really focusing on getting subscribers and not Just traffic. So you have some way to talk to them down the road. Because again, the way in which you traditionally got a lot of traffic is through search engines. And I think that's going to diminish significantly more and more. [00:08:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree with that. To add to that, I think storytelling is going to become, I mean, it already is a really big deal, but especially with sharing your personal experiences and sharing a tutorial and also sharing your experience with how someone has used this in the same way that you're trying to teach someone how to use something. If you're writing a how to tutorial is really practical that something AI can't spit out for you, like Ben was saying. So that opinionation or the opinionated blog needs to have your personal experiences dripping all over, all over the content or going into video because people can get to know your personalities. People really want to connect with other people. Especially now that AI can almost replicate some of these videos. It's pretty scary how much AI kind of looks like, oh, wait, I forgot, I see this little tag when I'm on social media. It's like, oh, this is AI generated. This is not real. This is not reality. But it looks real. So you have to differentiate yourself and share your own voice. I think more than ever. [00:09:25] Speaker C: And I think looking for other channels is big. Like, you know, doing more in communities, forms, Reddit, things like that. Doing more in social media, like where there's communities, Facebook groups, things like that, and doing more, more things that like AI just can't do and can't compete with. So you got to go find customers in a different way. I would say, like, if your business is largely dependent on SEO like you, I would be looking for all the ways I can pivot to find new, new channels, new ways to get traffic and get whatever you're going for, subscribers, sales, whatever it is. [00:10:05] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:10:07] Speaker C: Cool. [00:10:07] Speaker B: Good answer. Okay, here's another one. This one's maybe more targeted towards you. Katie, are there any underrated marketing strategies that more businesses should be doing? [00:10:19] Speaker A: Well, Ben mentioned one earlier with community forums like Reddit, which is really great. There's two other ideas that I was thinking about when prepping for this. That one is the rise of personalization in marketing is very important. So here's a personal story. My husband and I went to Tampa the other day for my birthday trip. So we flew, had a little getaway. It was great. We were just trying to kill time. We went to this mall and there was a store, I think it was called Fit to Run. But they had these Machines all at the front of the store. And I went and stood on it with my socks on and it measured the arch of my foot and then made a product recommendation based on the width of my foot and how the arch was. And I almost bought, if it wasn't for me being out of town, I almost bought a new insole for my tennis shoe. And that level of personal personalization was really key for those, for those experiences. So like integrating quizzes or showcasing a user's name on the site or on the page if they're logged into your site for instance, is really important. Hyper targeting your offers based on content people are searching on your website is going to be really important. So anything that you can do for more personalization, so it feels like a recommendation that is more custom to them rather than just some blanket. You should just do this because this is the tool that we, we developed and everyone should use. It is I think going to be critical for marketing for sure in 2025. You want to add anything to that, Ben? [00:11:51] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think that's really good. I think there is like a stance before of like, let's just tell them what, what we're offering. And now you need to really personalize it for people so you can, you can abstract that into multiple layers. But like even the just traditional way you talked about things on your homepage pricing page needs to change a little bit. You need to be thinking about like making those personal like applications to people, even if you don't know who they are. But you're, you're going to say like, okay, generally I'm talking to this type of person, so I'm going to make it a little bit more voice to them. [00:12:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And Cadence has a lot of tools like that already built in with dynamic content, with conditional fields, things like that. So there are tools already built into your Cadence websites. If you guys are wanting to try to implement this even more into the new year. The other one that I was thinking. [00:12:46] Speaker C: About real quick, just, just to give an example of that, even with like conversions, the ability to do slides and slide in pop ups, all that, you can do that and say I only want to trigger this if they came from Facebook or whatever, there's ways in which you can talk to certain people, especially if you're running any kind of ads or any kind of thing like that, where you're like, oh, I know what they're going to come in looking like. You can talk to them with that kind of context via conversions too. [00:13:13] Speaker A: The other idea that I wanted to Share was just about automating. The feedback process, I think, is becoming even more important. Reviews and testimonials are also critical because people want to know that it's a real product and that real users are getting results from it. So anything that you can do to streamline that feedback loop for you as the brand or the customer or. And the customer also is, I think, a win. I think that's something that we have been doing a lot at Cadence. In particular, our trustpilot rating is like 97%. It's something that we have been focused on as a business, but also listening to our community and. And having an ear to what our users want and then responding in that way of like, hey, you guys are wanting to know how we created this thing on the homepage. Well, the next week or week and a half later, we had a blog post showing you exactly how to do that, because we're listening to what our users want. So even if you are don't have a massive, you know, company like Kadence is, and you have a small blog or a small business site trying to do anything you can to automate asking for reviews or getting that feedback and then also displaying all of those testimonials in your marketing so that when new users come on board, they are trained to say, oh, everyone else is giving them feedback. I'm also going to give them feedback too. It becomes like this loop that helps your business, I think, take off in more ways. So that's one area that I know for my own personal business and things that I'm doing on the side as well, that I'm trying to implement more of those mechanisms to get more feedback after someone makes a purchase and, you know, checking in with them personally after it's been a few months from using their child theme or something like that. [00:14:55] Speaker C: But yeah, yeah, we incentivize reviews on Pinnacle Foods through credit system. So you get like credits for every purchase you make. You get extra credits points if you leave reviews and that, you know, creates that because it is a big deal and more and more people are not trusting even the reviews on your site. So start thinking about how do I get reviews in places like trustpilot and stuff like that? [00:15:25] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. [00:15:27] Speaker B: I've tried to review Pinnacle multiple times to get extra credits, but it doesn't work. I'm just kidding. That is great though. Like, I will absolutely review if I have some incentives. So love that wisdom. Okay, another one, maybe the last one. What is one habit or mindset shift that has made the biggest difference for you and maybe something that's changed from like even last year to this year. I love to hear like, oh, this worked for me so well in 2023, but now, like, I would never do that. If you have any answers like that, those are fun. [00:16:04] Speaker C: That's tricky. I think the, I am shifting to try to get AI to do as much as I can get it to do for me. I'm actively trying tools. I've recently been trying this tool called Hoop which tracks my Slack and then gives me via AI, tells me what actionable things I need to deal with. Currently My Slack has 326 notifications. So in the company that I'm in right now, like, it's just ridiculously overwhelming. It's like email, right? Trying to keep up with everything. And so Hoop watches my email and it watches my Slack and I can hop in there and uses AI to tell me, hey, here's the important time sensitive things you need to respond to and then I can check them off. And that has been surprisingly helpful in terms of giving me some like, hey, if I don't catch it and my AI didn't catch it, like I just wasn't ever going to catch it and it'll come back. And so that's, that's, it's helped me to be able to stay focused because I think like the biggest struggle right now in society is focus, is it's that, you know, it used to be time and now it's focus. Like because time without focus is nothing. And so finding ways to keep your focus, that using AI to help me do that has been a big, a big one. And I'm, I'm actively, you know, aggressively trying out different AI tools. I love the whole technology behind it, but I do think that there's something that everyone needs to take. Like how do I get this to kind of help me do stuff better? Taking notes for me, all that kind of stuff that everyone's kind of getting used to with, you know, all the Google meetings where they're taking notes for you now and stuff. [00:17:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's good. I use the tool, I cannot remember for the life of me what the name of it is, but it allows me to sync two Google calendars. So anytime I add something to my DIY dream site one, it also syncs up to my cadence one, so that I'm not like double booking myself or anything weird like that. And so that has been, I mean, I think that has saved me hours of time alone. And I mean it was, you know, a premium cost but it was totally worth the amount of time it has saved me. So tools like that are really, really helpful. But also speaking about AI, yes, AI needs to improve your life, but also you need to learn how to use AI and like, communicate with AI and it's not, it's something to embrace and to understand. I think the, the people who do embrace it are going to be the ones who rise to the top and can produce more, but you also have to. It takes a lot of wisdom to know what's good content from AI and what's not. So it still takes that human discernment. I think. [00:18:51] Speaker C: I think we're getting to the place where very much beyond the basics of, like, can it generate text for me? Like, you need to be thinking about, like, how can it do extra stuff? The idea of agents is huge and you need to think about, like, what. What could I have an AI agent be doing for me? Like, Hoop is constantly monitoring. That's like an agent sitting behind the scenes, like, reading every slack message I get and saying, hey, this one seems important. Let's flag it the other one too. If anyone's a coder, Cursors tool is impressive. I've been using CoPilot, which is GitHub, Microsoft's AI coding assistant cursors tool. This is like a replacement for visual code. It is exceptional. And I, I built a plugin in it just a week or so ago. So this is. I don't know, we might cut this out later, but in Kadence we have different products and you can upgrade. So like, if you come in and you get our, our plus plan and you want to upgrade to ultimate plan, you. You get a subscription with the plus plan because that's a WooCommerce subscription product. And if you want to upgrade, there's not really a good path because of the way that upgrades work. We've always done the stance of like, upgrading means you start a new year. So then we prorate it based on how much is left of your current year. Woocommerce or subscriptions Core doesn't have any method for subscription switching in that manner. And so what we've done in the past is we've actually created a new subscription, canceled the old one, and did the math to give you the prorated rate. And so then for a while you actually had two subscriptions. One was pending cancellation and one was the active subscription. So finally I sat down with Cursor and I was like, I want to plug in. I want you to build this out for me where it has A meta box for all my products where I can tell, hey, this product can upgrade to these products. And then on the account page, I want you to show that to the end user. And I want you to automatically calculate the price of after it's prorated based on how long their subscription is into their subscription they are. And then when they add a product to the checkout, I want it to show like, that the product is setting a new subscription price, but show them what the actual price they're going to pay today is and all that kind of stuff. And then behind the scenes, I don't want you to create a new subscription. I want you to go into the existing subscription, remove one product, add a product, and then set a new subscription date and new prices. And so I just did all of that, mostly with AI. Granted, I know how to code. Someone is going to listen to this and say, oh, I can do that. No, I had to coach it. I had to coach it. But the amount of work that I didn't have to do to go look up how do I hook into WooCommerce subscriptions. The AI just knew. It knew which actions to run functions on and it could get me very, very close. And then all I had to do was use my knowledge to say, oh no, that's not right. It's, it's. Sometimes it comes up with fake functions that don't exist and you have to kind of check that. Obviously all of this had to be tested a lot, but it's actually live on the KDence site. So now if you upgrade today, you will upgrade in this new system where your license key remains the same, which is one of the key things we wanted to do. We wanted to keep everyone having the same license key, regardless of. So if you upgrade, you don't have to get a new license key. You have the same one. We just change what is associated with that key. [00:22:23] Speaker A: That's amazing. [00:22:25] Speaker C: So, yeah, AI using AI is huge. And you need to be thinking about how it can improve your workflows, make you more productive, all that stuff. [00:22:36] Speaker B: That's amazing. Just the other day my husband was like, it seems like not long ago we were using Chat gbt. We were asking it to tell crazy stories about bunnies and the president or something. And now it's like people are using it for these extreme. I mean, that's huge. Like you created a plugin with not chatgpt, but with OpenAI. You know, like, it's pretty amazing. And it's like not that long. We've seen that kind of innovation. So actually we can kind of keep going with this AI conversation. Last week in the Facebook group, I reached out and was like, hey, we want to know your questions and it's fun to see people's response. And as always, we had questions about AI. I feel like we have two sides of the spectrum where people are like, please don't work on AI, I'm over it. I want all these other things. And then the other people are like, oh, we love AI. What are you doing with it? So we are doing both. But Ben, maybe tell us kind of how we're innovating with AI. Cameron Nelson is one that asked that question. He wants to know what kind of innovations are coming as far as AI goes. [00:23:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I think what we're focused on right now is these idea of a page blizzard which we kind of announced for a while and then we had some other projects that took priority, so we did those. But this one is very near to completion. And it's simple in its concept of like, AI does the best when you can do multi multiple steps with it. So generally if you just hit it with a blank prompt, it doesn't respond as well as if you can iterate on that prompt a little bit. And so this is a multi step iteration with AI where we can ping the AI and say, hey, here's a page I want to build. This is what it's all about. And then the AI can come back and say, okay, here's a structure that we think will work for that kind of page. And then you can kind of tweak the structure and say like, well, actually I want the call to action to be, you know, third on the list and not fourth or things like that. And then you can kick that back and then the AI will pull up a bunch of different page designs with that structure in mind. So like, hey, we know we're going to start with a hero and these kinds of things. And then it'll give you that structure with some basic images that fit. And then we'll take that and allow you to edit that and then kick that back to the AI one more time. And it's going to fill in all the content. So it's going to take out those words and actually put in words that makes sense for the page. So the idea is, can we, can we do a multi step where AI gives you a much closer to ready page? Because you've had a hand in the process of, of deciding which path to, to take with the AI? I think that is, that is not very Innovative in terms of, like, we've known we could do this for a while, and we've been. We, like, we've been thinking about it right now. The question is, what. What is AI going to be and what can we do? And so we've been doing different experiments behind the scenes of, like, if we told AI this is all of the markup and all of the structure for cadence blocks, could we get it to start generating block content straight up? And that is still not there. We keep running into roadblocks where the AI is just not good enough to consistently produce results that are actually meaningful and useful to end users. But those are the kinds of things we're experimenting with. So we're looking for ways in which we can make it very specific to cadence and not just general AI tools, because we're not trying to be a general AI tool for WordPress or doing Asian stuff in WordPress, things like that. We're mostly focused on, like, okay, what are people problems are facing using cadence and how could we improve that? And so it's about creating content and creating a lot of content that helps the user know how to get past that white screen of like, I have a page. I know I should put content here, but what. So experimenting with that. We're experimenting with right now. Our design Library currently has 800 patterns in it. It's a ton of patterns. You want to sit there and scroll through 800 different things to try to find one. We have categories to try to help you find what you need. But we're exploring the idea of using AI and feeding it all these patterns and saying, okay, describe them. Give us a lot of keywords. So that helps with the search, but then also relate them in terms of, like, which ones look similar. So that way, when you pick a pattern, you could look at a pattern, you could see what's similar to that pattern. And with the AI kind of controlling, that would allow us to. To do that pretty quickly as we try to, like, update and iterate on our. On our pattern. So those are the kinds of things we're thinking about with AI. I think there's a lot that we have, like, you know, thrown out and meetings of, like, what if we tried this? What if we tried this? Where we, you know, kind of get into that phase of, like, let's just test a theory and see if it can produce decent results. And so I certainly expect more, especially in the coming years, where it'll be, like, much more helpful. But right now, the. The improvements already, like, we haven't talked about this a lot. But in terms of content, like, the AI has gotten a lot better at writing content that when you ask it a question in cadence AI, it'll come back with like. Or when you ask it for a sentence, whatever. It's getting better. Significantly better. [00:27:59] Speaker A: Right. I think a lot of people hear the word AI and they think, done for me with an easy button and I have to lift no finger. And I think with cadence AI, it's important to realize it's AI assisted, meaning that it's not going to be a magic wand. And then, boom, you have a Perfect website that's 100% ready for you to publish it. Like, it's just the same way as if I go ask ChatGPT right now to write me a blog post, it's going to spit out trash. I'm not going to be able to copy and paste that and write that as a blog post in. In an opinionated, meaningful way. Like, it's going to take those multiple steps like you're talking about. So, looking forward to seeing, having more control over each of those sections. I'm definitely looking forward to that. [00:28:42] Speaker C: Yeah. So before we get to the next questions, I'm going to jump right into, like, just talking about what's on our roadmap for 2025, because it's going to answer a lot of those questions that are coming and then we can just kind of fill it in. I think the. The main thing that we're looking at in the next quarter is blocks 4.0 and how that means, what that means for full site editing and global styles. And this is going to be a pretty big shift in the way that we think about cadence blocks structurally and the way that we think about the theme structurally. So, first off, I want to make it clear we are not going to break everybody's website because we are going to create a lot of new stuff. And part of the plan for this is actually to not screw with anyone's existing stuff and blocks. And so we're going to create a whole new set of blocks that allows anyone's existing websites. You have no reason to update it. You don't need to use global styles. You have a website. We're not going to screw with that. It's mostly for people who are building new. They're going to see these new blocks and they're going to be able to use those to build with. So, for example, the row layout block that we currently have is going to get replaced. Doesn't mean it won't be accessible inside of the editor, if you built with it right now, it's great. It's powerful, powerful block. Probably the most powerful block in Kadence blocks. It's more of we're going to redo the entire structure so that it can work with global styles in some really powerful ways that we've kind of dreamt up. And that means we need to remove any backward compatibility issues, do an entirely new structure from the perspective of CSS classes and the way that attributes work. So we're not going to break everything. We have a plan for people who want to migrate into it if they want to transform some of their existing blocks, but it will be a new set of blocks. This is going to give us the ability to do some good stuff without having to risk a bunch of breakage, which means great for us. We get to really think about a new structure. That's 20, 25 structure, not when the row layout block was first built, which granted, we've done a ton of slow iterations on that block. It's. It's performant. It's doing a lot of good things. It's just still using attribute names and things that are like, yeah, we would do that differently now. Now to kind of rope this in of like, what are we trying to do? I think one good way to think about this is if you're building a site, you right now you go into the things like the customizer and you set up your global colors and your fonts and things like that, and you apply some global settings to your site and then you go into the page and you work with blocks and sometimes you link those things back to those global settings, like I said, a color and it's linked to my global color palette and things like that. But in general, you're building kind of that way where it's like loosely global and then a lot of very specific stuff in the block. We're going to create a style book that breaks down all of the global settings all the way down to like, letting you set the button text color globally and then all the way up in a tree where it's like, okay, I've set the button text color globally, but I've also got button styles. Within those button styles. I can set different button text colors. Those button styles are based on global styles. Then I can go a step above that and I can say I'm going to apply a lot of these global variables that are set all the way through. I'm going to say that if it's in this preset, those all change to something Else we're going to create components that are new. So it's a package of settings, is a component, and then the components will go to blocks, and then blocks will go to global styles, and then global styles will go to the global style, like the main style of the scene. That's highly hard to explain without a diagram and things like that. But let me try to give a brief example. Right now in Kadence, if you have a section that has a white background, black text, blue button, and you want that to be dark, meaning I want a black background, white text, maybe a white button or maybe a blue button, depending on what kind of blue. You've got to go in and set that on each block. But we're going to allow and preset global styles where you'll be able to say, like this white section, I want to be dark. I'm going to apply my global global dark style. And so instead of going into the text and saying, I want this text to be white, the text will always be your contrast color. And globally, or one step above that on the section level, you'll say, hey, the contrast color, which might be globally set for the theme to be black. In this section, that contrast color should be white. So you'll be able to very, very quickly define all of these things. So you can create sections and you can change them and be like, I actually want that section to be white, or I want it to be a highlight color. I want to be something totally custom. Because you'll be able to create custom presets like that. Then when you're selecting things, we're going to move further away from you setting pixel values and more toward you setting presets. Fonts, for example, or typography. You get into the typography settings and you're like, well, this is an H2, but I actually want it to be my extra large font size, which means I need the line height to be this and the letter spacing to be this. And then I want the font family to be yada yada, right? Because that's your hero font, which is not related to H2. Because typically in a HTML structure, you've got H1, H2, H3, and that's defined as a hierarchy because it's used in blog posts and long form content. But it's not very useful on a page where you're not using long form content. And your H2S might need to be very large in one setting or very small in another because of the way that the page is written versus a blog post. Or long form content. So you'll be able to apply presets to that where it's like, this is my HERO headline. And it won't matter if it's H1, H2, H3, you'll apply that. It'll globally set things like font family, letter spacing, font size, all of that. And those presets will show up above the section for, like, setting your font size and all that. So from a user perspective, it'll be very simple of like, add this text in preset, boom. And you'll just click on that from a like text typography component level. And then you'll be able to define those presets globally and even add to them. So we'll have a number of presets built in, but then you'll be able to add a lot more as you need them, and that way you're doing less work of like, oh, I need to remember that for this page, or general, for my website, all of my hero h2s are actually 34 pixels or anything like that. It's much more like, you just find the preset, it'll set the font family, all of that done. So we're really moving to a way where most of the controls by default will show you a preset option. And then if you want to get custom, you always can, but this way you're just able to move much faster. We're just like, preset, preset, move on. And then you can globally change those presets on a section by section basis or page or whatever. [00:36:39] Speaker A: That's amazing. I know much of our community has been asking for global styles, but can you speak to how I know that everybody thinks about global styles and they want to compare it to something that they already know, a competitor of some sort. What's your thought process on how Cadence is approaching global styles? Is it going to be the same as all the other competitors out there, or is it a little different? [00:37:03] Speaker B: No. [00:37:03] Speaker C: Yeah. So, like, a lot of competitors, some of them are leaning into, like, utility classes, which I'm. We're not going to try to do. So you'll be able to force that in if you're like, I must use utility classes. Okay, fine, whatever. The tool technically could work that way, but it's not going to be designed that way. For the most part, we want to keep people away from thinking about what a CSS variable is, because for most people that they don't need to know that. They just need to know, like, I'm using my HERO headline preset and My HERO headline preset effect is this. And I set that in my style book or whatever and I controlled that with drag and drop settings that I didn't even realize but also were connected to other presets along the way. We're going to try to move away from this idea of a select box and add all your global styles that you've custom named and custom done, or go into like a certain component and set your custom variable. It's very much like you'll be able to make custom things, but we're trying to go about the way of like, for most people, you should never have to create a custom variable. You should. You might want to create some global styles, but our presets should probably cover you. And so mostly for the end user, it's just thinking through a realm of presets of like, I can apply this, I. I can apply this border preset, I can apply this padding preset instead of actually going in and making controls. And one of the things about this that we're wanting to implement is this ability to lock users into only being able to edit with presets for you doing client work. And you're like, hey, they're going to get in and they're going to be able to set the padding to whatever the crap they want. And I know that padding shouldn't be set that way. You could lock users out of using custom controls and they would just see the ability to set presets you could limit while still giving them the ability to create stuff and not need you to create pages. You would be able to limit them to only do it within the confines of what controls you've preset. They're not just adding some crazy font in there that's going to just look weird or whatever. [00:39:18] Speaker A: Awesome. Will you tell us how this plays in with full site editing? Because we're working on a full site editing theme too, and how global styles is. It's a solution for both. Right. The classic cadence theme and then the new full site editing theme. You want to speak to that a little bit? [00:39:37] Speaker C: Yeah. So our approach to full site editing is going to be different than what Core has done in general. So when you think about full site editing, we're going to take the approach of creating blocks that give you a lot of the controls that you currently have. So like a big diss on full site editing is like, if you want a sidebar on your blog post, going in and editing the template to add a sidebar is actually pretty complex, especially when you think about the complexities of like, now I got to update that sidebar and so I got to go into that template to update it, make changes. It's not dynamic. You got to think about how that's going to flow into mobile and stuff like that. And for most users, that is way over their head when right now in Kadence, if you want a sidebar, you like literally click one button and you have a sidebar and then you have one nice convenient place to control it. We're going to implement a lot of that in our full site editing experience, where you can if you want to go in and edit the single post template, but in general, we don't think anyone wants to. We think you want to control that dynamically. We think you either want to control that with elements where it's dynamically done based on whatever preset conditional you want to use from category, tag, whatever, or we think you want to be able to do that from some kind of centralized page option settings where it's like my blog post have a sidebar or they don't have a sidebar or they have a narrow width or they have a wide width or their box style and things like, I want to have a featured image above it. Rather than going into your template to then say, I want to put in a featured image inside this template or not, you'll just control that via our setting in our style setting for the theme. So there's a lot of controls like that that we're going to. Yes, it's using a full site editing template and you can override that, but we're going to put a block in there that basically listens to the controls. So that's kind of how we're thinking about full site editing. It's like, how do we give you a lot of the power that you want, but also make it way more user friendly than what currently happens with full site editing. Right now, the current plan, and there's some reasons we might not launch with this, because it's tricky and Core doesn't want it to work this way. And we'll have to see if Core decides they want to allow themes to do this. But our current plan is to make it inside of the current cadence theme. So it would be a path that you could choose where it's like, hey, I'm using the cadence theme and I want to use it in full site editing mode or I want to use it in classic mode. The reasons for that is we get to keep some of the same wins in the same code base. We get to move forward with the cadence theme and not create a whole bunch of confusion over which cadence theme are you using. Obviously, that means there's going to be two pathways and literally two pathways, because full site editing is so different in certain things. But because we're using this style of creating blocks that run the layout for the single post page, some of those settings will cross over. And that'll be really nice in terms of if you're coming from a classic that's still being worked on. But that's the gist of the plan around. Full site editing is that and a style guide that allows you to set some of those things similar to what you use in the customizer. Right now, the way in which this works in the global styles is that the default global styles for Kadence Blocks will be inherited from a theme that sets them. And if no theme sets them, then blocks will set them. That will mean that people could build child themes and it'll define all of those presets, all of those things through a child theme that Kadence Blocks will need immediately inheritance. And if it's not there, then cadence blocks will just use its default. But it means that blocks as a plugin, global styles, all of that can be really transmittable in terms of which global styles, which presets, what are the settings for those presets, what fonts are available. All of that can be handed off via a theme, which is just a really powerful way to set someone up. [00:43:58] Speaker A: Amazing. One of these questions here says an update on FSE would be nice. This is from Boss, but he said what happens to elements in the full site editing? [00:44:10] Speaker C: Elements will continue to work in the way that they do right now, where you can conditionally set them. You can say, hey, I want to override stuff. It'll get very similar in terms of if. If you're using full site editing the way that we imagine you would with these container blocks that basically function between the header and the footer, those container blocks will be the templates that are currently what you can set in elements. So right now in Elements, if you want to replace the single post template with your own custom thing, and you want to do that conditionally, you can do that. You'll be able to do that same thing with full set editing, because what you'll be replacing is that block that we're putting into our templates, that single post block. You'll still be able to hook into the content. You'll still be able to hook into after the content, before header, after header, all that kind of stuff, all those hooks will exist, you'll still be able to do it all dynamically. You get all the power of that while still being a full site editing theme. [00:45:09] Speaker B: That's amazing. I think people will be very, very happy to hear those updates on both of those things. It's huge. Just to kind of maybe start spitballing some of these other questions just to speed up a bit. People are always asking about ShopKit WooCommerce, where's it going? What are we doing with it? Pierre specifically asks what are big plans for Shopkit taking into account WooCommerce blocks development? [00:45:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, I mean this is one where like we need to hear from you of like what the big plans are. And a lot of times when we do hear what some of the big plans are, we're kind of like that's really out of scope. Scope or out of left field or not really part of the roadmap. So I think in general, like if you're looking for some big things, it's kind of like what are exactly you're looking for? It's hard to answer that. Just like, whatever. I will say that like the ability to control the shop page, the, the, the art, the archives like catalog and the single product pages dynamically is, is something that you still need and right now looks like forever you will need Shopkit for because even with their implementations of new blocks, they're not building it in a way where you can do dynamic things very easily. And so in a lot of ways our plan is, will be to update some of that as they come up with new blocks and new styling where you'll be able to use some of that inside of the cadence templates and elements and things like that. But in general what they're doing is not going to like supersede or make it obsolete what Shopkit does from a templating perspective when it comes to full site editing. I think what they're doing with the, I've been, you know, requesting that they do this for a long time. So I'm glad to see what they're doing with the editing experience of products and how they're working on that. But they're also, I mean that's been out for quite a while and it still doesn't support variable products and things like that. So there's quite a lot of work that has to be done before even WooCommerce Core is there. And then once WooCommerce Core is there, there's quite a lot of work for all the third party developers to then support that new kind of stuff. [00:47:26] Speaker A: And we've released a bunch of new updates to Shopkit recently, correct? [00:47:32] Speaker C: Yeah. So if we go back to like, what's the plan for Shopkit? Well, we're always looking for like, really good things that synergize with the products. And so recently we did an update that allowed you to do badges, we did Quick View, we've done various other improvements and last year we did a new settings panel and things like that. So there's been a lot of of work into ShopKit in terms of like improving it and updates and all of that. And I would expect more to come. I mean, at a pace of, you know, it seems like pretty consistently we're pushing out something, some new thing in Shopkit and we've got a lot of those kinds of things. So it's just a matter of like, are we thinking about some massive solution for something that I would want to know, what is it that you need the massive solution for? Mostly we're looking for ways to extend what WooCommerce is doing in really like clever ways. [00:48:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:25] Speaker B: Cool. [00:48:26] Speaker A: One quick note. If you have not gone to our feature request area, please go do that. One of the best ways for you to share your ideas and get those ideas to our developers is to go through our official feedback channel through our feature request and then you can upvote on existing ones or you can always share new ideas, but that is the best way for us to consider it. One of the biggest things that we have as a culture here at Cadence is listening to our customers on a. On a daily basis. So in our community, in our feedback forums, all of those places are great ways for you to be heard for sure. And we review those regularly. So please keep sending in your ideas. [00:49:09] Speaker B: I can link to the feature request form in the show notes. [00:49:12] Speaker A: Awesome. [00:49:13] Speaker B: Okay, a couple more really quick. More pre built section names coming. Eddie Panella says this saves me lots of time. [00:49:21] Speaker C: I'm glad it saves you lots of time. And I think, yes, more is coming. We want to do more in that we're always doing more, actively improving it behind the scenes as well as coming out with and announcing new stuff. And I expect, you know, that's a. That's like a weekly almost. We're kind of improving that. So more for sure. [00:49:41] Speaker B: Cool. What about an advanced CSS grid builder? We have plans of adding something like that. I think maybe it's. Vakan asked this question. [00:49:54] Speaker C: Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. With the update right now, the row layout block is a grid builder in the sense of it uses CSS grid allows you to create columns that are defined and then as you add to it, it's a grid. So if you put three columns and then stick nine sections in there, you're going to have three columns of three roads as a grid. The complexities of certain types of grid building is where you want the second row to be a different thing, which again, not a huge use case because you can use two rows and say my second row has two columns, my first row has three and that's a grid. Where it gets interesting is how that grid breaks down. So if I've got three columns and two and on mobile I want to go to two columns and then two columns pulling up from one of the bottom ones and then one column, you know, that's where it gets interesting because two rows can't merge together like that. So that's the kind of grid building that we're looked at is being asked about. And I just want to clarify that, like it's very uncommon to need those kinds of intricate things. We do even have some existing patterns inside of the row layout builder where like, you can create a pattern of like 2, 1 when you break down a three column layout on tablet. But complex growth builders would allow you to say like, okay, I want the first column to be one third of the width and I want the second to be two thirds. And then in the second row I want that first column to extend down into the second row and then I want another section. And so you have three sections over two rows. And that's the kind of weird intricacies of a complex grid builder that is in the cards for us. It's just not as high of a priority as everything else we're doing global styles, so we've talked about that as a potential for even our new row layout block. That would allow you to set different column widths, which would cover a lot of it on different rows. Like as you extend down rows you would be able to set those columns separately. The other thing would be to actually give you a grid builder where you could highlight boxes and say, I want this section to take over these boxes of a grid and then that section would fill that. And so that's something we've talked about how that UI would look and what kind of build time, but it's just not as high as everything else we're doing. [00:52:28] Speaker B: Cool, very exciting lots on the roadmap, lots to be looking forward to. We do have more questions, but I think we're not going to get to them today. I'm very sorry, but thanks for sending them in. And then we can save some of these for next time. If we didn't get to your question, please reach out to us. We'd love to just, like answer on Facebook or whatever. And thank you again for just our engaging group. I think this week we're going to hit 16,000 members in our Facebook group, which is so cool. Super exciting. [00:52:58] Speaker A: That is amazing. I'm really hopeful that our community is excited. The fact that we're sharing that we have a full site editing theme, global styles and blocks 4.0 in the works right now is, I feel like enough to make the majority of our users happy at this stage. I mean, everyone should be pumped about what's coming. I know I am. And I'm excited about the consistency that all of my websites, especially for clients, like. To hand over a website to a client is another thing for them to not break it. So, like, for them to just choose a preset, I'm very excited about. [00:53:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's huge. So awesome. [00:53:37] Speaker A: Okay, well, I think that about covers it for our podcast today. Thanks everyone for tuning in to episode 40 and stay tuned. We're going to have a few more of these updates coming, hopefully in a month or two. [00:53:51] Speaker B: So, yeah, we'll get better. [00:53:55] Speaker A: We have a lot on our plate. [00:53:58] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty sure. [00:54:00] Speaker A: So thanks, guys. Talk to you later.