Welcome back to another episode of LMScast! Today we discuss how Thomas Levy and Chris Badgett solve technology problems for course builders in partnership with WordPress and the LifterLMS community. Chris and Thomas talk about how we approach development at codeBOX, and what problems LifterLMS is here to solve.
One of the key visions for LifterLMS is to remove friction in the course creation process. The core of LifterLMS is to create technology that facilitates your students education through your course or membership. Designing for scale is another big aspect of LifterLMS, and Chris and Thomas dive into that in this episode.
The course builder in LifterLMS is really great in that it is versatile and flexible to your teaching style, instructional design layout, and post-launch modifications. Thomas highlights the evolution of the course builder and dives into the origin of the LifterLMS software.
Chris and Thomas talk about how they work to reduce friction with the process of course building on both the front end and from a developer’s standpoint. The new Advanced Quizzes update to LifterLMS brought a lot of upgrades to efficiency when building your online course with quizzes.
A lot of people underestimate the power of quizzes and tests when it comes to building online courses. Now with the LifterLMS Advanced Quizzes add-on, you can incorporate these elements into your online course, and it is easier than ever. Chris and Thomas also dive into how they are working to make LifterLMS align better with how WordPress likes to function.
LifterLMS is built around the community’s best interest, so we are always looking for feedback from the community to drive the platform’s development. In our VIP Facebook group we are constantly running surveys and soliciting feedback.
Extendibility is a key factor of success with the plugins and themes of WordPress, because most sites use many plugins that do different things, and some sites have add-ons for specific plugins. The LifterLMS team focuses a lot on extendability of the platform so you can use other plugins and add-ons to form it to your vision for your site.
Head over to LifterLMS.com and check out all of the awesome things we have going on over there, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and today I’m joined by a special guest, the co-founder of LifterLMS, Thomas Levy. Today this episode is going to be a little bit different. We’re going to be talking actually about software in the context of LifterLMS and how we approach the development in it, and what problems it’s there to solve, and just talk a little bit about the vision of where we’re going. First, Thomas, thanks for coming on the show.
Thomas Levy: Thanks for having me.
Chris Badgett: One of the big things with the vision for LifterLMS is we see ourselves in the friction removal business. We’re trying to remove friction between the would-be course creator and the results they’re trying to get for the student or the learner. Now, they need software to create courses. The student needs to interact on the other side of that software in terms of taking the course.
Our job at LifterLMS is to create technology that facilitates that exchange and ultimately the transformation that occurs and the results that occur through the education. I wanted to bring Thomas on and share with you guys more on the technical side our philosophy of development and how we approach where to put things in the software and how it works, and where we’re going, because sometimes change happens gradually, sometimes it happens fast.
Specifically, I wanted to get in to the concept of the course builder. Thomas, could you talk a little bit about where the evolution of the course builder came from, moving to its own interface, and what the origin story of the new and improved course builder that rolled out, which later we’ve added the quiz builder, but how did all this start?
Thomas Levy: Yeah, so if you go back to the very first version of LifterLMS, back October 2014 I guess, somewhere around there, we built, if anybody has been with us for that long or was using LifterLMS prior to six months ago, there was a meta box inside the course, the traditional WordPress course edit screen, meta box being all those little boxes you can drag around and move them, things like that. You can close them and open them, and they have all kinds of custom content for that course.
Chris Badgett: And settings.
Thomas Levy: Yeah, settings and all that kind of stuff. We had a meta box where you can kind of drag and drop courses or lessons around create sections. When we first released that, it was I think pretty novel. A lot of our users really, really liked it. It was something I’d never seen inside WordPress before, was an interface like that where you can create other posts from inside one post.
To understand why that really matters, I suppose you need to understand a little bit of how LifterLMS actually works, and even maybe more so how WordPress works is that everything in WordPress is essentially a blog post. It’s stored in one database table. It basically all has the same core content, which is the content in that what you see is what you get editor, WYSIWYG editor. You get a title. You get a URL. You get a published status, all that kind of stuff. That’s a blog post, but a page is also that with the type of a page. LifterLMS courses are a custom post type called the course lesson sections, all that stuff, our quizzes, questions, all custom post type.
Essentially we’re looking at blog posts that we put at different UI on the front of. They all share the same core API. LifterLMS does something that WordPress doesn’t do, which is relates different types of content together through custom relationships and the database and things like that. I don’t think it’s the most unique or inventive thing in the world, but it’s something that WordPress doesn’t do natively.
When we created that first version of the course builder, our goal was to allow you to quickly create a skeleton of your course, and then after you create that outline, you need to jump into other areas of WordPress. You need to go to the lesson editor. At one point you had to go to the section page to edit your sections or your section content after initially creating it.
Chris Badgett: All these different custom post types, they’re all different.
Thomas Levy: These are all different, yeah exactly. They’re all custom post types. Again, essentially blog posts just with a different user interface and a different strategy or goal of what it actually accomplishes on the front end of your website. What we realized, and then as LifterLMS grew, we added engagements, emails, achievements, badges, all those things.
Chris Badgett: More custom post types.
Thomas Levy: More custom post types. What we found both while we used our own product, because we do use our own product, Chris a lot more than I do. I use it for testing purposes. Chris actually uses it. Then through user feedback, which we see a ton of. You guys let us know what you like and you dislike.
But the other thing about this is that we never actually receive very many complaints about the interface itself. Now going back to what we originally built in version 1.0 of LifterLMS, which did not change at all, up until six months ago. Maybe it was three or four months ago. We didn’t get very many complaints about that. However, in support, what I saw day in and day out, what Chris would see day in and day out is people creating issues that they didn’t realize they created as a result of a bad user interface.
What we built originally was wonderful. We loved it. A lot of people said, “Oh, I love the way you can build courses in LifterLMS. It’s great. We love it.” But then there was all these issues that happened as a result of this interface, and nobody was saying, “Oh, if you fix this interface, this problem would go away.”
Chris Badgett: It’s one thing to understand a problem. It’s a very different thing to understand the solution.
Thomas Levy: Right, right, or the reason that problem even exists, do you know what I mean?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Thomas Levy: Over time, and I mean this started for Chris and I over a year ago when we started talking about where the course builder was going to go, and ways we can revamp this. As Chris said at the very beginning, let’s remove friction. One of the biggest issues I see with that old interface was that you’re always bouncing around. There’s a lot of page loads. There’s a lot of page loads to build your course, because yeah you could build a skeleton really quickly, but then if you want to edit settings on a lesson.
Prerequisites are a really great example of how many page loads you need to go through to set up prerequisites. If you have a course with even 10 lessons and you want each previous lesson to have a prerequisite of the lesson before it, you need to load each page, and not oh shoot, I want to move one of those around. Now you need to load up two lessons in order to change the prerequisite structure, at least two lessons, you know.
It gets really time consuming. Maybe what’s initially really, really wonderful gets really tiresome, as your course grows, as your platform matures, as you add more courses. We started to see these issues and we started to figure out, started to theorize what could we do differently? As Chris said, remove friction. We had this vision to bring everything, condense everything, shrink everything down onto a single screen, where previously you could create the outline from one screen.
Our vision is to allow you to create essentially, with some exception, almost your entire course from one screen. That’s what we started working on, I think it was in 313 I believe, 3.13 was the original, the initial update to the course builder. Now we’ve moved quizzes in there as … Again, quizzes, the quiz building interface is something we built in LifterLMS 1.0, and almost did not touch up until two weeks ago.
Chris Badgett: I just want to park on that for a little bit. As someone who’s built a lot of quizzes with LifterLMS, it was painful. I would have to create a quiz over here. I would have to create a unique question over here. I would have to attach answers to it. Then I would have to jump over to a lesson to attach the quiz, questions to the quiz and then the quiz to the lesson.
I had to go like five places per question. It was a lot. When the new course builder rolled out, oh my God, not only did you get all these new question types, I mean it’s easy to get distracted and look at that, but the fundamental architecture just accelerated my speed to create the course by a factor of 10.
Thomas Levy: I’m very much anti-propaganda. Actually I was talking to Chris yesterday, and he’s like, “Let’s do a podcast about this,” and I don’t want this to come off as propaganda for our newest feature, because it’s not. I 100% understand that people dislike this. People dislike users, and it bums me out a lot. I get really bummed out when I see negative feedback about what we’ve done.
I understand that we’re actually building this for you. We’re not building it … I mean, we are building it for us to a certain extent, and yes we make money off this. We’re not as generous as … We are generous, but we’re not doing this for free. We’re a business. We’re trying to make money.
But I want everybody to like this, but I understand that not everybody is going to like this. I understand that, and there are things we lose as a result of doing this, this way. I think one of the biggest concerns maybe that I’ve started to see come across the brow is that we’re not doing things the WordPress way. I understand that, and you’re 100% correct. We are not doing things the WordPress way. We’ve eliminated elements of the core WordPress user interface when you’re in the course builder. Selfishly, because we want more space for what we want to do.
That sidebar in WordPress takes up a lot of real estate, and it was something that we arguably were like, “Let’s just get rid of and see what happens.” If you’ve been with LifterLMS since 1.0, you know that once in a while, we do something and we say, “Oh, you guys are right. We made a mistake here. This was not the right way to do it.” So we made an assumption that removing that sidebar was a good idea, and time will tell if that actually was a good idea.
If you don’t like it, keep letting us know and maybe we’ll put it back. But there’s other things we lose too. One of the things is that you don’t have the whole post editor that you used to have on quizzes, which means you will never be able to use the page builder or the forthcoming Gutenberg with your quiz description. That’s something you’re never going to be able to do. We’re not going to give you the capability to do that, I don’t think. I don’t know. Things might change. Two years from now we might undo this decision and make quizzes work some other way.
But again, this is something that we’re weighing the pros and cons of what we ultimately want LifterLMS to be capable of. By moving that into this new interface, we do realize that we’ve sacrificed some things. We’re justifying it. We think it’s a good decision, and it might not be a good decision, but ultimately the goal here is let’s reduce friction and let’s make it as easy as possible for you, the course creator, to create your courses, that includes every aspect.
If we look forward, what we want to be able to do is you set up your whole course, you set up all your prerequisites, and you’ve never left the screen. Now when you want to start adding content to your lessons and adding content to your courses, you jump out back to the familiar WordPress editor where you can use page builders, where you can use Gutenberg when Gutenberg is fully a part of the core. For today, you can use your regular WYSIWYG content editor.
Chris Badgett: Let’s just [inaudible 00:11:59] parking lot for a second. I mean, WordPress has always done content very well. It is originally a content management system, a publishing platform. What we’re talking about sacrificing is we’re making a sacrifice for the user experience around settings, and architecture and building a skeleton and configuring a bunch of little details that aren’t really the content. I mean, the quizzes do contain content, but it’s a unique type of content that is actually positioned inside your greater website. It’s where it runs.
I think it’s also just very important to note that we are very pro-WordPress. We’re all about it. We have no plans to turn LifterLMS into a SaaS and get outside of WordPress software as a service. We’re committed to the WordPress community. We love WordPress. Thomas is currently the organizer of WordCamp Los Angeles. We attend these. We sponsor him. We work with other people who develop products in the WordPress ecosystem and try to figure out how to help remove friction and solve teaching needs together.
We’re very much pro-WordPress, and we’re very much getting ready for Gutenberg and we do want to find solutions to optimize the page builders. Just on the note of the page builders, which are growing really quickly, there was a time when those first came out and I remember myself included, I did not trust them. I’m like, “This is not the WordPress way.” Whether it was the back end page builder or a front end page builder, and now these are the fast and growing systems on the WordPress platform. We’ve kind of seen this narrative before. I just want to highlight that.
Thomas Levy: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: But also mostly just talk about our commitment to the WordPress ecosystem. We’re not anti-WordPress. We’re just anti-friction.
Thomas Levy: Yeah. That’s actually a really good point. I guess I get distracted and lost in my mind sometimes, but essentially what I wanted to emphasize was that this is not an attempt to build a code base that’s portable to something like Drupal or to a SaaS platform. I don’t have any problem with those other things, but I mean Chris and I both have a long history in WordPress, and maybe almost to a fault. I don’t really want to start exploring other platforms, because to me that just means more headaches and more compatibility problems.
I just don’t want to deal with those personally as a developer. I’d rather just have my one stack and we just move on. When I say we’re sacrificing parts of WordPress, I mean we’re sacrificing the parts of WordPress that for a quiz, or for a lesson, or for a course don’t really matter, because these aren’t concepts that exist in WordPress. These are things that exist in LifterLMS, and we’re trying to make those parts make more sense within the framework of WordPress. What do you want …
Chris Badgett: [crosstalk 00:15:04]. A custom post type is not for everything, right?
Thomas Levy: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. There’s reasons to use them and there’s reasons not to use them. Yeah, yeah 100% we’re doing away with areas that it makes it more difficult to do it the WordPress way. We’re getting rid of that stuff. Then other things where it makes the most amount of sense to do it the WordPress way and use the WordPress core UIs. They’re going to stick around. As far as settings are concerned, like Chris just said, we want to move more and more settings into the course builder so that you can set up your restrictions, your prerequisites, your engagements, and all those kinds of things from one …
Chris Badgett: Start dates, launch dates.
Thomas Levy: Start dates, yeah, yeah. But then when you actually want to write your content, put your video in, that sort of thing, you’ll go over to your WordPress editor. That allows you to continue doing things like use SEO plugins, to use page builders like we’re talking about, any other plugins, your theme to adjust the layout and maybe custom theme settings that let you customize the header and footer per page or per course or something like that.
All those kind of things are going to stay. We felt it was okay, and I feel really strongly that it’s okay to remove quizzes from that because quizzes are very much a contained element that sits what’s inside your quiz, but LifterLMS is going to do that for you and you can skin it with custom CSS. Your theme could support quizzes and add their own CSS to quizzes, but the quiz infrastructure itself is something that’s self-contained, and we just want to control 100% of LifterLMS.
You don’t need to add SEO to your quiz, because your SEOs aren’t public. You don’t need to page build the quiz, because I’m just not going to make that possible. There’s too many variables inside quizzes for me to build a short code for every quiz. Although that’s not actually entirely true, and you may see quiz short codes down the road. I’ve already had a couple of requests for areas of quizzes that might make sense to actually create short codes for.
Chris Badgett: I just want to highlight that what you’re hearing there is we are listening. We’re openly … This is an active conversation with you, the listener. We have hypothesis, we test them. You see us doing a lot of surveys, soliciting feedback, we take feature requests. We’re doing this together with you. We do have a culture of feedback and trust and valuing community, and I think this podcast episode is really important for …
I just want you guys to kind of see some of the backstory and the conversation and how Thomas and I work together and how we make decisions to move forward. Really at the end of the day, we have your best interest at heart, but even almost more importantly, your students’ best interest at heart. What’s in your students’ best interest is that you can build a course. You don’t get lost in the technology when you’re trying to build the course. You have enough other things to do to teach and build the content, and that your student experience needs to be optimized and frictionless as can be as well. I just want to throw that out there.
The other thing that we’re always aware of is, and we’re always trying to get better at, is designing for scale. LifterLMS is a flexible platform, but when you look at some things in the course builder, like for example, the sections are closed by default. The reason for that is with all the lessons inside, somebody comes in with what we call a giant course and everything is all expanded and loaded up, it’s unmanageable. You may have one course or you may have 100 courses on your site, and interfaces are designed to grow with you. I don’t know if you want to speak to that, anything else that we’ve come across in terms of designing for scale.
Thomas Levy: Sure. There’s actually a lot of things under the hood in this latest quiz update that had to do with scalability and just working towards being able to support 100,000 member courses and things like that. Scalability is always a question where there’s a lot of factors that go into that. It’s not just your code base. It’s not just the plugin. It’s also your server and your host.
If you come to me and say, “LifterLMS doesn’t scale well,” but you’re on a $3.99 a month shared hosting plan, you’re pointing your finger at the wrong person. You might be right if you point to a particular area of the code base that doesn’t scale well, but that could sometimes be overcome by just having the appropriate amount of firepower behind your code base.
Actually one of the motivations for the course builder was there was no way to collapse anything in the old version 1.0 of the course builder in the meta box. If you had 30 lessons in a course and you wanted to move lesson number one down to the bottom, you had some issues with trying to drag and scroll at the same time. It’s 100% possible, but it was just complicated.
There are a couple of other scalability issues with the way all of that stuff worked as well that just didn’t work well for larger courses. That’s one of the issues we’re trying to combat here. There are still some things that need to be worked out there. I’m not going to come and say we’re finished here. If you’ve been with us for a while, we iterate, we improve. We’re always improving and there’s more improvements that need to be made on the current iteration of the course builder around scalability, but I think we’ve got a lot of those issues dialed in.
On this update, there was actually a lot of scalability concerns with how quiz data was saved. Not only scalability, but also extendability. That’s something that if you come back to the WordPress way, if you’re a developer, you understand what actions and filters are. If you’re not, actions and filters are essentially the part of the WordPress core that allows us to build something like LifterLMS.
We can hook into all these different things. A great example of that is when the page loads, we have the opportunity to tell our plugin to do something. The WordPress core loads your page, and there’s different points where we can fire in our own content or data or information or functions. Actions and filters are one of the core parts of the WordPress ecosystem that allow us to do what we do, that allow page builders to do what they do, that allow SEO plugins to do what they do, et cetera, et cetera. Without that, there’s nothing.
Then plugins themselves, really good ones, follow suit with this kind of development philosophy of extendability, which means if there are some … If you’ve ever had a custom request in support and talked to me, you’ve probably seen me say something along the lines of, “No, it’s not possible through a LifterLMS feature, but it is possible.” That’s the kind of thing where it’s like almost anything is possible in WordPress. You just need to know how to write the code to do it.
LifterLMS itself uses a ton of actions and filters in order to allow you to extend our core functionality to add whatever you want. I’ll use WooCommerce as a really great example of the way this works. WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform designed initially, I believe, to sell like t-shirts. Then the guys from Prospress came along, their development company, and they built WooCommerce subscriptions, which is an add-on to WooCommerce. It’s not the WooCommerce core. It’s something that you can add to WooCommerce.
Chris Badgett: It’s made by a different company.
Thomas Levy: Yeah, it’s made by a different company than the team that originally started WooCommerce, which I believe was actually just one guy who originally started Woo. But yeah, it was a completely different company, and they were just like we want to do recurring subscriptions. The WooCommerce core doesn’t do recurring subscriptions because WooCommerce subscriptions, this other team does that for them, so now you can do recurring payments that happen on a monthly schedule, on a yearly schedule, whatever.
That is possible because of the extendability of WooCommerce, which is possible because of the extendability of WordPress. This is like an overarching developmental philosophy that permeates everything in WordPress, or it should permeate everything in WordPress. That was one of the things that quizzes were this black hole that was just like people would ask me, “Oh, I want to do something with quiz data,” and I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be really difficult for me to explain how this works, because it doesn’t make any sense.”
That’s like one of those dirty little secrets that developers like you code something sometimes and you’re like that wasn’t the right way to do it. Now you need to spend six months undoing that mistake so that people can now gain access to that data. That was one of the big updates in quizzes, which you didn’t notice because you don’t have to, but if you’re a developer that wanted access to that data, it’s a really, really big deal.
What does that mean for the average user that doesn’t care about a black hole, that just wants to interface the work? It means that other developers can come in and if there’s a question type, for example, that we haven’t thought of yet, or we haven’t built yet, or that you want to custom for some very niche thing, I can’t think of any example off my head, and even if I did, I might not share them, because I think I want to build them myself. That’s not entirely true though. Reader did have issues, and if there’s anything you want to do, go build it.
You can go build that in a custom plugin and add it to yourself. That was one of the big, big things was extending LifterLMS. Then also scaling the quiz data around LifterLMS. The way the data was previously stored, not only was it not accessible, but thankfully we haven’t run into a lot of issues with it, but it was one of those things where I just knew if we keep going the way we’re going, we’re going to run into scalability issues for those of our users who have much larger courses.
So we moved all that stuff into a custom table that’s more easily searchable, and sortable, and scalable, so that it’s just easier to use that data and that data will be more performant as the website grows and more people take quizzes, more students take quizzes on your website. I think you asked me about scalability. I don’t know. I rambled [crosstalk 00:25:27].
Chris Badgett: No, that was good. I just want to highlight Jack over at WP Fusion, that’s an example of someone who’s building a product, then hooks into certain things like LifterLMS, enrollments, and courses and memberships or whatever, but this is part of a bigger conversation about when someone comes to LifterLMS or they’re thinking about doing a course on a membership site, the very first question they need to ask themselves, in terms of platform selection, is do I want a self-hosted or a hosted LMS?
WordPress is self-hosted. Like Thomas mentioned, you buy a hosting account, you get your domain name, you install WordPress or it’s already installed there for you. You start adding the Lifter plugins. You can add plugins like he was mentioning in the Prospress example in WooCommerce. You can add other plugins from other companies to build a really custom solution where you get to benefit from the whole WordPress ecosystem and the flexibility of all the WordPress options, the openness of it, the opensource nature of it all. You can hire a developer to build a custom feature for just your site.
You can’t do those things on a hosted platform. They may have a place to upload your logo, change the color scheme, but it’s just kind of like their way and you’re paying for monthly access. If you’re going to do a self-hosted LMS and you’re going to do it on WordPress, this is where LifterLMS lives, and you can see as we innovate and move forward, we’re building off of what the best WordPress has to offer. We’re open to the community and trying to make it to be a good citizen, if other people are trying to serve education, and entrepreneurs out there need to get access to certain pieces of data or connect, this is what we’re all about. But yeah, I just wanted to highlight that.
Thomas Levy: If I could jump in on that point, kind of calling back to earlier about the course builder not being the WordPress way, one thing that I’ll rant a little bit, it bothers me to hear that kind of thing sometimes, because I think if all we ever do is look at the way we do things currently and we never look outside of our ecosystem or our space or our sphere or our circle of friends or competitors or colleagues or whatever. There’s absolutely no growth that will ever take place. This isn’t me. I haven’t figured this out. We’ve all heard this before.
But in the context of doing things the WordPress way, a great example is what’s going on with Gutenberg right now. Some people are very, very excited about Gutenberg, and some people are very, very scared of Gutenberg, and others think it’s the worst idea in the world. What Gutenberg is, is the WordPress core team, perhaps specifically Matt Mullenweg, looking outside of WordPress and saying, “How can we do better to solve problems that WordPress wants to solve?”
It’s different. It’s not the way WordPress is done. It’s not the way page builders are done. It’s its own thing. They’re looking outside of WordPress to figure out how to improve WordPress. When Chris talks about self-hosted versus hosted LMS, do not think for a second that we’re not looking at what the hosted LMS platforms are doing, or what other things are doing outside of LMS altogether. We don’t just sit here and think, “Oh, this is a great idea.”
We draw off sketches and we come up with interfaces, but we’re drawing inspiration from outside of our own space to figure out how are other people doing similar things? How are other applications doing similar things and being successful at it? What can we draw from them? What can we steal from them? Not in terms of lifting code bases, but like how can we …
Chris Badgett: In an opensource way.
Thomas Levy: Yeah. How can we use that as a source of inspiration to improve and solve the problems and these friction problems that we’re talking about. I spend a ton of time sharing, and I’ve shared all this information with Chris, looking at different places like how do other people build questions, quizzes, questionnaires, things like that? What do those interfaces look like, and what can we drop into WordPress that’s similar to that, but still kind of feels like WordPress to a certain extent?
If we only ever do things in meta boxes and the WordPress way, we’re kind of stuck. I know that’s a little bit of a side and a little bit of me ranting, but change is hard. We don’t like it when we upgrade our phones. We don’t like it when we upgrade everything. But at a certain point, you need to look back and think, we didn’t have cellphones.
You know what I mean? So, changes are changes. I’m really excited about the changes we’ve added to this course builder and improvements we’ve made to quizzes. Again, I will acknowledge that there’s things that we’ve done wrong, and there’s improvements that still need to be made, but yeah so …
Chris Badgett: Yeah. Sometimes a vision takes a long time to execute on. Like Thomas mentioned earlier, like engagements are also a custom post type. It would be nice to kind of manage some engagement settings or certificates. Unifying the course building experience from 50 different places to one is a really … I mean, that’s the overarching vision. That takes a long time to execute, because there’s a lot of moving parts into building an online course or a membership site.
I think sometimes the path doesn’t really make sense or it makes more sense the further you get along down the path. But the hope for this episode is just to kind of take you behind the scenes and look a little bit at this vision about removing friction. Thank you to Peter Fallenius who helped me with that concept of friction removal. I heard that from him, and then it really started influencing how I looked at things. So, thank you, Peter, for that.
But yeah, the vision takes time. There’s always like a why behind the what. That’s why things are happening. Not every decision is mutually exclusive, which means we’re not going against WordPress. We’re actually taking the best of WordPress and then taking the best that we’ve got from outside and what our users need, and their students, and combining that all together and moving forward. It’s more of a question of integrating what’s working, and continuing on the path in service to the end user. That’s what it’s all about.
Thomas, I want to thank you for coming on the show, and that was a lot of fun to take people back behind the scenes and look at the high level. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on that, and I feel really lucky to work with Thomas. When we come together around a problem, it’s a lot of fun.
I know a lot of people out there who this is your business. It might be a side project or it might be your main business, so we take this very seriously and value your trust and value your feedback. So, thank you for being with us in the journey. Thanks, Thomas, for coming on the show, and we’ll catch you guys on the next one.
Thomas Levy: See you.
