Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, welcome back to the Kadence feed. This is the podcast where we talk about all things WordPress and of course, all things Kadence. And this is episode 42, which feels like a big number. We've made it a long way. It's been slow going. We made it to 42. We have a super exciting topic today. I'm really excited. I'm Hannah. I'm the project expert at Kadence and I'm joined by Katie and Ben. How are you guys?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Good, good. How are you?
[00:00:29] Speaker C: Yeah. Excited to talk about this.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: I'm doing good.
It is officially the end of Quarter 1Q1 and we're like entering into springtime most places in the world though, as you can see, it's dark behind me and it's not. We're not like working in the middle of the night. At least Ben and Katie aren't. I'm in New Zealand and it's. We're going into fall here, so a little bit different than Katie and Ben, who are going into springtime.
[00:00:59] Speaker C: Yes. And you're in the future.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: I'm in the future.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Yes, you are in the future. I mean, that's a good thing to clarify because it's tomorrow for you today.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: It sure is early in the morning.
Yeah. Not too early, but that's it.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Living in the future.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: If only you could give us like the winning lottery numbers or something.
[00:01:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Shout out to asked you how well she slept last night.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: She's like, did I sleep good tonight? We do have like the longest Monday ever, though, flying home. Because we fly home on a Monday and we get home an hour later on that same Monday. But it's like a 16 hour flight. So though like, oh, we should have made this like a Saturday. Like a long Saturday, not a long Monday.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: That's funny.
Yeah. Weather's changing here in Texas. We have a bunch of garden beds in our backyard, so we've been having to slowly weed it. And we're going to start planting lots of fruits and vegetables. We're excited about that soon.
Yeah. So that's about as exciting. It's that and work right now.
My life.
[00:02:11] Speaker C: Nice. Yeah. We're in the spring zone too, and we just started eating dinners outside on our deck, which is something we love to do as a family and do most of the summer and spring and fall. So it's just finally warm enough, which is weird because it doesn't seem that it was that long ago that we were building igloos and snow forts. I mean, it was four weeks ago, but it's it really did switch quickly here, which is. Is cool.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Then you should post somewhere that picture of the Iglo that you guys made because that was pretty epic. I mean they made a full on igloo in their front yard. It was amazing.
[00:02:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Fit our whole family. It was fun.
It was a lot of work, but really, really fun.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: So cool.
Okay, well, let's dive in. Today we're talking about seller sites which if you get our emails, you probably saw us mention it. Maybe you've heard some chatter about it in the community.
So we're going to talk all about it. But before we do that, I thought it would be good to get some clarity around what exactly is Stellar? Because there is confusion there for sure. Like we are Cadence, but also we're part of Stellar. And what does that mean? And what is Stellar? And so Ben, if you want to kind of start there, like how we became a part of Stellar, maybe bring some just clarity to our audience.
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, Cadence was acquired by at the time, there wasn't a Stellar when we got acquired, but we got acquired four years ago, something like that.
And part of the pitch for me and we're making this decision was like, hey, we are getting software companies together to create this thing. At the time we didn't know it was going to be called Stellar, but that there was like energy around trying to bring together a group of software companies. At the time iThemes, which now is solid and the events calendar was already on board. There was give was like in the process of coming on board, Give WP and then Cadence. And then, you know, there was learndash and Iconic. And so part of that initial pitch was like, hey, we're going after a lot of the really good solutions in WordPress for e commerce and for different types of things from whether it's doing events or doing donations or whatever. And we're going to build this team. And that presented a really awesome opportunity for Cadence to jump into that and get to, you know, we went from a company of two and a half kind of to to a lot bigger instantly, but then started to grow the brand more and more.
And so as all of these kind of companies came together as part of like a liquid web acquisition, we formed into a singular company called Stellar. And so we still run all the brands separately. There's a lot of people in the Stellar. Org that like basically only work on one product. Most of our support team is that way because it's just so technical. Understanding the Exact product stuff. But then there's a lot of other people. Most of our devs are basically focused on one, one product.
With some caveats for sure. But one of the great things and even like from day one that happened is all of a sudden we now had access to people who, who really knew a lot about areas that maybe I didn't know a lot about or that understood WordPress or architecture from a code perspective or marketing or design or whatever. We, we just all of a sudden had like, more people we could, we could reference and talk to and strategize with and think about things with. So we, we started to form Stellar as like this, you know, umbrella brand to handle like all of these sub brands. And then we started doing more and more communication and like creating more feedback with each other. And you know, what the Cadence audience doesn't know is that like, there are key people that have never pushed pull requests into Cadence, but have had significant impact into Cadence because, you know, me or other devs on the Cadence team have been able to go to them. So Timothy Jacobs is like, he's a core contributor. He's the main architect for solid security and most of the solid products. And he's brilliant. One of the smartest devs I know and he knows WordPress better than anyone else I know.
We have been able to like, take things to him and be like, hey, what would you do here? What's the best way to do this within WordPress? Or like, from a security standpoint, how should we approach this? And that's something that we just. You can't really get when you're not in an an org like that. And so being able to get that kind of stuff has been huge for Cadence all across the board from, from all that. But then it's also really fun like as, like, I'm senior director of product right now, so I'm able to like, jump in and kind of think about other products in ways that their product teams haven't been thinking about it, because I come from a different perspective. And then I can help kind of say, like, hey, what if we think about it this way or, or do this?
And so Stellar is essentially an umbrella brand. But as we have come more and more together, we've started creating more and more stuff as like under the brand of Stellar. And initially that was a bunch of internal libraries that we were using and even publishing for the development community. So we have some internal tools for how to manage databases inside of a WordPress website where you're doing custom database tables. And how to do custom fields and different things like that that are all like used within our products. So we're like sharing these licenses or not licenses, these internal solutions libraries. And then we started releasing those out to the public and then we keep building some internal ones. So licensing is one internal one that we like. We had a serious problem with our licensing and we were able to solve that as part of Stellar and created a whole new licensing system to handle selling licenses for pro things and dealing with that.
And so as we did that, then we started actually thinking about like products that would be under the Stellar brand. One of them we released last fall, which is Stellar Pay. And that is a solution for taking stripe payments in WooCommerce. And it's more integrated with Stripe than basically any other Stripe payment solution you can get for WooCommerce where you, you get a lot of the Stripe data and ability to look at stuff right inside of the WordPress account. You get some extra reporting and things like that. And there's a really, really tight integration with that and with Stripe subscription model. So you don't need WooCommerce subscriptions. You could do, you know, custom subscriptions with Stripe's model, which is just going to have a better, some benefits in terms of like, depending on what you're selling. And so that's. That came under the Stellar brand. Stellar Sites is the next, you know, kind of big thing we're releasing under this Stellar brand. And what's so great is like, as we're doing this, you can't really point to like a brand that this is coming out of. This is like we're taking some of the smartest people across our whole org to strategize on how should we do a hosting environment, how should we do and be able to package this and deliver it to people in a way that's easy.
And so Stellar Sites is. It's exactly like it's a host. It's a way to host WordPress to wait to, you know, get a WordPress website, but with a lot of the things that we as like product people have always wanted and then packaged in a way where it's like I get everything I need from one thing and I'm there.
So, you know, Stellar Sites will be releasing with different plans depending on what your goals are for your site.
At launch, we'll have five different kind of verticals. One that's just foundation. Like I need a, I need a site and that comes automatically with like hosting that is from our parent company. So we are a Software division of Liquid Web. Liquid Web has two brands that do hosting, so Nexus and Liquid Web. And they offer, you know, premium hosting with really, really good performance metrics and all that kind of stuff. So we take the infrastructure behind that and then we're able to put that with our products into a solution where you can, you know, buy, check out. All of a sudden you get all the products you need, whether it's an E commerce site or a learning management site or whatever.
Right out the gate with Cadence already pre installed and running and solid security, solid backups, solid, you know, performance and mail and a lot of these solutions that like really just make it all work together so you're not having to like piecemeal together a WordPress environment and things like that. So we can get into more of the like specifics because there's like some really cool things that we're doing that I'm going to be moving my sites day one into Stellar as soon as it's launched. Like Pinnacle Foods is going to be hosted on Stellar sites because there's things that I'm like, I want access to that right away. And that's like, that's the main thing. But questions about like Stellar, does that all make sense? The kind of, how it goes? I just rambled for way too long.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: No, that was a really good overview. I think the biggest thing is that WordPress isn't necessarily considered easy. It's not the easiest way to spin up a website. If you are a small business owner and you're like, I need to get a website online and I don't have a ton of technical experience, what, how do I go? What's, what's my path forward? Usually you're going to start looking at some other SaaS tools like Wix or Squarespace or Webflow or something else so that it's an all in1 solution. SaaS software as a service is a nice little jargon word we use around here. So it's nice to be able to just check out at one of those tools, right, and then spin up your site and you're ready to start working on it. And if you want to go get a WordPress website right now, that's not really a direct path. It's like you have all of these micro decisions that you have to make before you can actually start the customization process, which is quite a challenge. So it's like, oh, you want to start a WordPress website? Great. Do you want WordPress.com or do you want WordPress.org? okay, now you got to figure out you want.org, you got to go figure out who your host is going to be. And then there's do you want shared hosting or dedicated hosting? Okay, so there's like four decisions that I just shared or however many in that little span and you still don't have a website ready to spin up. Now you got to think about themes, now you got to think about plugins, now you got to think about, you know, how do I secure my website? There's just so many decisions that have to be made even to get to a point where you're like great, now what am I saying on my homepage? And so we want to shortcut that process and we have the brilliant minds and the capacity, the resources behind our team at Stellar that now we can actually create basically the power of WordPress with a SaaS like onboarding experience so that you can go pick your plan, check out, get your website spun up. You can even use the AI wizard that we are also kind of iterating on and optimizing as well for the Stellar sites experience. So if you truly are a brand new user and you're thinking where do I go get a website? It's like go get a seller site, it's on WordPress, it's you're going to check out and then you get to even use a little AI tool to get your first draft online and then boom, you're spit out into your WordPress dashboard where you already have Cadence installed, you already have solid security installed, your hosting is there. Optim, there are going to be some opinionated settings already pre configured for you based on that environment, which I think is just so incredible and I think pretty revolutionary right now for the WordPress community. I know that I am a website designer as well. I don't want to ever mess with the hosting and the support side of things. I don't want to white label that, I don't want any business. And that all I want to do is work on a client's website and to be able to tell them to hey, just go sign up for this and then I will log in and, and design your site for you. Or something along those lines is a huge benefit for me as a designer. I know. And also it's a win for my clients too. So I think a lot of freelancers are going to benefit from this. Beyond those, those businesses as well.
[00:15:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I think we hit on a little bit. But like one of the things that you know, we've put some energy behind is really thinking through how do we make, you know, more and more things with AI and work better with AI? I mean, AI is going to be such a big part of the future and right now everyone, you know, especially the insider group on Cadence is like, blah, blah, blah, AI sucks, you know, you know, whatever. And that's fine. Honestly, like, I get it, it's not a highly sophisticated tool yet, but I still think it is the future. And so as we're doing improvements to the AI wizard for like just people being able to spin up sites on Stellar, there's also been, you know, more effort on our side as we think about Blocks 4.0 and things like that of like, we need to make sure we're writing this so an AI can write this like in the language that they're going to understand the best and be able to build out. Because more and more, as we put more energy behind allowing people to build first draft sites with AI and things like that is we're thinking about how is AI to impact and improve the way that people build pages, build just anything with AI.
And so that's, it's like, for us, it's like a lot of what we're doing that's gonna be a part of Stellar Sites is also going to be a part of Cadence and going to be a part of starter templates. And the way that we can help people get those first draft sites that are more highly designed, that do have a lot more, you know, we're looking at ways to do more, more kinds of higher dev finesse, if you will, in terms of like getting the AI to produce that. But, but yeah, that's an exciting part because the idea for us is like just to be able to take an idea of a business, plug it in, have the AI spin up a site for you that's your first draft and you're like off to the races not having to worry about like, what security plugin do I need and how am I going to manage this. So there's some cool things about the hosting environment that like, isn't generally, you know, out there. One like, really fancy thing is the integration with cloudflare Enterprise. So out the gate users will have Cloudflare Enterprise running behind the scenes on their DNS. So they're going to get some actual, like, defense against bots and things like that. They're also going to get added performance benefit of the, the cloudflare cdn. And then because it's cloudflare Enterprise, they get access to the cloudflare imaging tools. So one of the big things that hits you on a speed score is your images, whether they're P, you know, the right format. So if like a PNG or JPEG should be like a webp, right?
Or it's size properly, like, hey, that site, that image is too large in an area. Well, one of the cool things about being able to take advantage of Cloudflare Enterprise, they have an imaging tool that allows you to build images in the exact format you need and the exact size you need on the fly. And solid performance is going to integrate with stellar sites to actually implement that across your site. So you don't have to do anything on your side. Like you just literally add the images to your site. You don't think about it anymore. That all happens because you're on Cloudflare Enterprise, which is one of those things that's like, it's another added cost. You know, one of the things that's so tricky about WordPress is like, everyone's like, well you can go get cheap hosting, it's only this much a month and then it's like, but you need this and then you need this. And if you want this kind of performance and it's just like on and on and on and it feels like a lot of things tacking on together. Well, with this you're going to get access to the power of Cloudflare Enterprise and right out the gate be able to go with that. I mean, solid performance has been a tool that we released last year. We've been working on iteratively a lot. And right now it has a way that it can even deliver page cache without hitting the php server. It literally skips the whole php server. So WordPress never even has to load. So there's some major performance improvements there in terms of now we can give you page cache straight without hitting PHP and you get optimized images right out the gate without having to do any settings or anything like that. So there's some cool stuff with Cloudflare Enterprise that we're working through. There's already like this visual compare built in. So the sites will do automatic updates and then it'll test five pages on your site. So behind the scenes it actually takes your site, spins it up somewhere else that's hidden, runs the updates, and then does a visual compare on these five pages to make sure they, they match what currently exists in your site. And if they match within a certain variance, then they'll go to your actual site and run those updates for you. So you get like a, a pre check on all that. You get Built in backups with solid backups. There's so, there's like so many things like that that we're thinking about, that we're implementing that just make it so you don't have to think about it so you're not having to make this big. Now I got to figure out how to optimize all my images. Well, no you don't actually because we just solved that for you. And I got to figure out how to, you know, which caching plugin or how to optimize my site. All that kind of stuff gets just so much easier to handle.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And I feel like some of these features nowadays feel like they should be there already, but that's not the way that WordPress is. So like if you go sign up for another SaaS platform right now, like it's going to be secure by default. And we believe that your WordPress website should be too in a lot of ways. And so. But that's not the case unless you go research your plugins and then go install a free version, hopefully it's good enough. Or you go in and buy something premium and then it's another bill you have to manage. Like there's just so much of that, like decision fatigue and maintenance that you have to just deal with on a day to day basis that I think is going to really become a blessing to those who, who don't have to deal with that anymore.
[00:21:31] Speaker C: Yeah. One of the powers of WordPress, right. Is the extension. Like it's so extendable, so easy to find things to be able to get what you want and you're dealing with plugins of that and all of a sudden all of those extra plugins are adding to your site out of that risk. Again, another area we can solve for that solid security has virtual patching with patchstack. So you have a security company that's doing all of the work to find real issues in the existing plugin repository and provide ways to protect your site from those without you even having to, you know, update quick enough or whatever. And that's all gets built in. So there's like just so many things like that they go, okay, I can just have less stress about running my WordPress site.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
So this kind of brings us to some questions that I can imagine the listener might be thinking about right now. I don't even know if we've outlined any of these, but just like off the top of my head I'm thinking like people are going to be like, well, can I, like, how does this work? If I already have a website. So like migration topics, they might also be thinking about just like, what if I want to use my own domain, is that going to be possible for me? Like, can I just spin up one site or can I spin up many sites? Do you have some answers on those three questions there, Ben?
[00:22:54] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. I mean migrations is kind of a weird pain regardless of what you do. But we have a team that's going to help handle migrations and they're a little bit different on a use case by use case basis. Right. Like depending on what you're trying to migrate. But in general all hosts offer like, here's a migration path. This is how it'll work. We are working on a more, we'll call it fancier way to do migrations within solid central and backups where we'll be able to like r sync your site across into a stellar site. So it'll just be a lot less points of failure, a lot more stable.
And that's something exciting that's going to be coming out like right about the time we launched stellar sites. But there's also going to be use cases where you're like, hey, I just have a zip and I need to use that. I got a backup from this plugin and I'm going to use that. There's lots of ways to migrate WordPress sites. We have a migration team that can help and then we have some do it yourself ways and then we'll have this way within central to our sync your site across, which would be really cool as well.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: Sweet. And then the domain, can you bring your own domain? Like how does that.
[00:24:08] Speaker C: You can bring your own domain. And one of the nice things about this, like I talked about Cloudflare Enterprise, the way that this is set up is you'll be able to use your own Cloudflare account in front of the Cloudflare Enterprise account. So you don't need like you can host your site on Cloudflare and create your own rules. Even a free Cloudflare account allows you to create rules, which is highly beneficial if you're running an E commerce site or whatever, to create some basic rules for your checkout page and login page, things like that. So where you're doing like browser integrity checks and things like that on, on specific pages, you can do all of that and then still point your cname at the stellar site cname and set up that so you get the benefits of cloud for enterprise allowed to pay for it and you can still manage your own DNS and cloudflare if you want. You can even use your own Cloudflare Pro account if you wanted to buy Pro. You don't. One of the nice things is you don't need to at that point. At that point you get the benefits of enterprise because it's through stellar sites. So.
So yeah, you'll be able to manage your own DNS, point your custom domain at the Stellar site cname and then you'll go away. And Cloudflare is so slick that they, even when you're doing like Cloudflare to Cloudflare to Cloudflare, they bring all that together so there's no performance loss, which is really cool. Yeah, they're brilliant.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: That's amazing. So I'm curious why we at Kadence are focusing on this. Like, sure, Cadence is a part of this, but, but why are we. So, you know, we have a whole podcast dedicated to it. So maybe share a bit more about your roles here and why this is our focus right now.
[00:25:52] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, so to say it's our focus is not true. Like the Cadence devs right now are working on 4.0 and updates to other stuff. They're not working on stellar sites. To say it's part of my focus is absolutely true because I'm senior director of product at Stellar wp. But the way that it's, it's really interesting for Cadence in terms of like just long term stability and growth and us being able to invest more into the product is we now have a new channel for creating value and where you can create value, you can put more investment. And so we want to invest a lot more into Cadence. Now we have a way to make, allow people to spin up a Cadence driven site very quickly. So like, if you think about it from a marketing perspective of like, how do you promote Cadence to an average user? You have to be like, yeah, Cadence is a great tool to allow you to edit your website and drop in pre designed content and do a B testing and conversion optimization, all that kind of stuff. But before you can use it, you need to go figure out Hosting and get WordPress installed and then do yada yada, yada, yada yada. Now right from the Kadence site we can just send you just other sites and you can spin it up and you're away. You go like you're dropped right in. And so that's a critical piece. But I mean I think anyone that's worked with Kadence and Kadence support, like there's, you know, we care about the customers, you know, we care about the Support. So like there's that piece too of like hosting is as often as good as its support. And you know, you know, there's a big part of this where we're backing that with our support teams and stuff.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Yeah. I've also spent some more time on the Stellar Sites launch because my role has expanded here as well. So not only do I manage the Cadence marketing efforts now, I've also taken on Stellar Sites, Stellar Payment and also Solid, which is kind of the foundational team within the Stellar brand. Only because every single one of those tools are kind of foundational for even if you're getting a brand new website started. So we have other, other brands within the org as well like learndash and the events Calendar and things like that. But those are kind of some niche verticals that not everyone needs. So that's the reason why when I say the world found the foundational Cadence, everyone needs a theme, everyone needs some sort of design tool, everyone needs to have a secure website. That's what I mean when I say that. So it's been really fun getting to work on a new project that I get to also have a lot of input and say on. But for the Cadence community specifically, like, wouldn't it just be amazing to get Cadence hosted? Like genuinely, that's kind of the biggest hook for the Kadence user. Now it may not be right for every single Kadence user and that's also okay. Like you can still get Cadence that you know and love and install it on your own hosting as you see fit. That's never going to go away for us. We're just trying to provide an additional way and an easier way to spin up a WordPress website, especially for those who are diying their website or they're getting started kind of as that beginner niche like a small business owner or a freelancer or I mean even some small agencies as well. So that's kind of the overall benefit to the Cadence user. I think that's awesome.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Okay, so this sounds amazing. Like I don't have to do 13 steps to now start a website, which sounds incredible. I actually feel like I point so many of my friends. This sounds bad because I have worked in WordPress for 15 years, but I'm like, oh, you should like probably just use words or something if people have no experience. But this is such a game changer because it does take away those 13 steps, which is obviously amazing for those who are coming in fresh, but also the benefits those who have established websites. I think, Ben, you really touched on that which is, it's huge. So this is very, very exciting. Okay, Katie, if I want to get involved, what do I do? Like, I'm in. How do I, how do I sign up?
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So we are actually in the early access phase, like the pre launch phase right now as this episode is airing. So we're hoping sometime, let's just call it mid April, we will be launching officially to our early access crowd essentially. So we wanted to share this with you, our community, kind of early mainly because we would love your feedback and your input. We first of all want you to give it a shot and also be a part of something new and exciting and also help shape that product as we continue to grow it. So you can join our Waitlist page if you go to stellarwp.com stellar sites, all one word stellar sites. We'll be sure to have a link below as well, wherever you're listening or watching this. But that's where you can get signed up. There's also an incentive. You can get 50% off for your first three months. It's going to be a coupon code that will be sent to you in an email or if you'd rather pay for an annual plan, then it's going to be a 30 off coupon code so that you guys can be kind of an early adopter, if you will, and give it a shot. So that is the way to get involved right now. And then we'll definitely keep you posted via email and things like that when it officially does go live.
[00:31:19] Speaker A: Sounds amazing. Can't wait.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: I imagine after we launch this, there may be a number of questions. So please talk about those. Drop them in the comments either on our YouTube channel or in our Facebook community. We are happy to answer any of those questions. I know that there's going to be a lot. One off the top of my head I can think of is, okay, if I use Stellar sites, do I only have to use Stellar tools? No. Once you get spun up onto your WordPress website, you have the full power of WordPress at your fingertips. So if you no longer want to use a specific plugin, you want to deactivate it and activate a different one. It's the full power of WordPress. It's not like some junior version where we're like hiding a bunch of stuff and locking things down for you. It's not that at all. It is truly the full flexibility and power of WordPress at your fingertips. So I know that's probably like a okay, but what's the catch? There's no catch. We're literally just trying to make your life easier. My opinion, anyway.
Yeah, yeah. So ask questions and we'll share more as time goes on. For sure.
[00:32:23] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. We'll have lots more chatter, but thanks for listening, Katie and Ben, thanks for being here. Oh, the sun. The sun's just coming out here.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: Just in time.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right, guys, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you on the next episode.
[00:32:42] Speaker B: Yep. See you in 43.
