Gutenberg Changelog #100 – NASA’s New Website – the Switch to WordPress and Block Editor

Gutenberg Changelog 100 Stacy Holtz Gary Kovar -Special Edition.
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In this episode, Stacy Holtz, Gary Kovar and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss NASA’s new website – the switch to WordPress and Block Editor, the scale of the project, the block and theme development, design and migration.

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Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our hundredth episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. Now, let that sink in a little bit. A hundred episodes. That’s about at least 80 hours together, dear listeners. And today, the hundredth show. I’m thrilled to have a special show for you, for me, and hopefully also for our guests here.

I have with me Stacy Holtz and Gary Kovar from the Lone Rock Point agency. But how would you know them? Yes, they worked with others on the NASA’s new website. Switch to WordPress and the block editor, and we will have a great chat about the scope of the project, how WordPress really scales and how they did it in development, as well as in user training, content creators, blocking stuff, working with blocks.

I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time core contributor to the WordPress open source projects, sponsored by Automattic for the Future Program. So let me introduce my guest today. Stacy Holtz has been with Lone Rock Point for three years, focusing on project and team management as group account director. Her significant contributions to the NASA project have been highlighted through her leadership in user support training efforts, especially in guiding users on the effective use of custom-built blocks. Welcome, Stacy. So happy you are on the show also with us.

Stacy Holtz: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s cool. It’s cool. So also with us is Gary Kovar. Gary Kovar, principal software engineer at Lone Rock Point. And his role during the NASA project was, he was instrumental in steering the team towards the beta phase, was key in the integration of Search.gov, and oversaw the management of more than 200,000 redirects. He’s notably skilled in bringing together historic materials and managing the space station research explorer, as well as various other non-WordPress static content. Now there were a few words in there that I need to clarify later. Welcome to the show, Gary.

Gary Kovar: Thanks. Excited to be here.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s wonderful. I also want to point out to our listeners, what’s the connection with NASA? Apart from that you’re awesome and that you built a phenomenal block- based website. I have a high affinity for NASA. Fifteen years ago in 2009, I was part of the first tweet up for the shuttle launch 129 on Cape Canaveral. And we were two days where 150 people from Twitter that had been following NASA for the last two years or so on the platform. And they were invited to come to Cape Canaveral, spend a whole day in talks and meet some of the engineers, and meet astronauts, and I met Mike Macedonia, and Miles O’Brien was there, and quite a few engineers were there to tell us what this all entails. And we of course didn’t completely get it, but we had a very new take on it because, and that was the idea from the social media team, that the news take this in 129 shuttle starts. You can’t always, there’s no news in there unless something happens.

So there’s no excitement. There is no excitement about the payload, about what’s going on with the astronauts. Yeah, we raised with the astronauts from the airplane and that was really something. So we, 150 people, brought a new take on it, because it was all new to us and we wanted to share video and interviews and all that with our audience, and the story for the news, the main news outlets were the tweet up, we were the news on NASA, etc. So it was really interesting to talk to Miles O’Brien and all the others, and get the world treatment on the press mound. And of course the excitement of the shuttle start, it was really changing for me, and the Explorer part of it was really interesting. So I can’t really put it into words still. Yeah, after 15 years I am back there.

So I thought, oh yes, this comes good together and let’s do a show on the Gutenberg Changelog about the NASA website and bring this all together. So what will we talk about today? I think we have three main topics. One is briefly talk about the scale of the project, because it’s enormous. We talk about the sites, the people, the blocks, the processing, the time that it takes to bring something together. And then, we talk about the actual block and theme development about design systems migration. And then, the last part was, it’s the most important part actually, one of the paths was clear for the development, how did the content creators then needed to be trained, the publishing flow revamped, what new sites were built, new pages built and all that.

And there is another news part of it, April 8th, talking about scale, right? April 8th, what happened there was NASA live-streamed the solar eclipse, the one in 35 years, and there’s only one traffic number that I know about, and that is between four and a half hour span, one billion requests made to the NASA.gov website, with a large majority served under 400 milliseconds. So this is a real scaled operation. I don’t think that many other websites get, in that amount of time, so much traffic. How did that feel, Gary and Stacy? You probably were watching as well.

Gary Kovar: Oh yes. I traveled to view the Eclipse in person and I took my laptop with me. So as I was sitting there waiting, I was tethered and kind of watching traffic increase and yeah, stunning. Certainly the busiest site I’ve worked on.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How did you see the solar eclipse, Stacy?

Stacy Holtz: Yeah, same. I was not traveling, but I was running back and forth between my kitchen and the back deck to put my glasses on and view it, and then come back and check on everything, and make sure our user community didn’t need any support of any kind. So definitely it was a fun day.

Gary Kovar: And I will say, some of the reason that we were able to handle that kind of traffic is there was plenty of prep. Obviously eclipses don’t sneak up on us, so we knew it was coming, and both on the content creator side and the technical side, we were able to posture ourselves for this expected increase in traffic and extremely thrilled with how it all went.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that’s awesome. And the latest web news about NASA, of course there are others, plenty of news and you can all check it out on NASA.gov, but the latest news is that NASA got the Webby Awards for the new live stream site. Congratulations to you all and the team. That’s wonderful. So what is that live site about? What was that? How did that come to pass?

Gary Kovar: Yeah, so NASA Plus is pretty cool. NASA, of course, everybody has a streaming service, so why shouldn’t NASA, right? So plus.nasa.gov is NASA’s streaming service. The neat part is it’s a WordPress site, and so WordPress functions is the control room for content creators to put together playlists and spotlight content. Any live event that takes place is run through and both live on plus.nasa.gov. And higher traffic stuff is co-streamed on www.nasa.gov. But you can install the plus, well you can sell the NASA app on any device and have live-streaming. It’s cool. Very cool. And the part that blows my mind every time I fired up on my Apple TV is that it’s just hitting the WordPress rest API. That’s pretty wild to me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, no, I can see that. Yeah, it’s really pushing the envelope on that, on the rest API, definitely. Yeah. So take us back to now, not how did this come to pass? Well, NASA 20-year-old content, I think they started way in 2000, well maybe even earlier, with putting stuff on the web, but so what was the project like? What was the scale of the project? When you went in there, how did you it to even scope it?

Gary Kovar: I was fortunate to join the project after some decisions had been made, CMS had already been chosen. There was a long conversation around that before deciding on WordPress. And so, I joined when development was very much in process. But I think even before that, it’s worth pointing out that the first domino that caused all this was the 21st Century Idea Act that talked about modernizing websites. And so, NASA certainly, a technical organization, every group center, club, cafeteria, all had a website, because it was important to have this information available. And they get that part innately and ended up where many agencies, both federally and otherwise have ended up, in that they have a sprawling footprint across the internet. And the Idea Act, further pushed by a memo ’23, ’22, last year, basically said we got to make this better for users. And so, NASA really went after that and found partners that could help them get to this point.

So when I joined Lone Rock Point, development was already in process and there were lists of things that needed to happen before launch. Like there’s thousands of sites that needed to be consolidated and we have content across four different major versions of the WWW site, and a lot of minor things that we’re also resolving at WWW at different addresses, that all needed to come in to make this thing live. There were some sections that to the federal law, the URL had to change the same, so there were perma link structures that needed to be considered, and it was this just massive checklist of items to get through, page after page of how do you account for that, how do you account for that? And on top of it, a really specific goal of giving content creators the tooling they needed to really tell the story, and give a compelling introduction or compelling reason for people to read and see what they have to say. So a very tall task. An exciting task. Exciting task.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, definitely. So when did it start? It was a process that took I think months if not years to put together. Yeah.

Stacy Holtz: I’m not sure of the official date. When I started the project, it was already in progress, and they were still making decisions around the CMS. So I joined it before Gary, but it was already in progress. So I honestly don’t know when the official timeline of that was.

Gary Kovar: I’ll say the 21st Century Idea Act was written in 2018, so shortly after that, I mean we’re 2024 now. Shortly after that, the planning had to happen and NASA had to start getting it together, because an agency of that size, there’s a lot of momentum to account for.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, there are also budget questions there. You need to kind of wait until the next budget round comes, and so it’s a year past before you get anything on the books. Yeah, definitely get that. Yeah. So you mentioned there were in your introduction, I read something like, what’s the Space Station Research Explorer?

Gary Kovar: Oh yeah. So Space Station Research Explorer is awesome and was a fun, I’ll say problem to solve. As I mentioned, there’s some federally required things by laws, PDFs here and there, and some digital cost analysis here. One of those, Space Station Research Explorer, is literally taking from the ISS data from research projects, and consolidating and writing reports. And that lived on a URL that conflicted with other permalinks, and also had some really strict requirements around where images existed and specific cell files, because they’re packaged up and used in other systems internally at NASA. So in many cases you’d say, “Well great, we can just redirect,” but not really an option in this case. So there’s a whole routing and URL management system within WordPress, separate from WordPress, to deal with the logic of the Space Station Research Explorer. That was sort of my toe in the water on the project was, this thing has to work, and get that working so we can get to launch. The first of many of those in the checklist.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Also, there are other things on the website that are really astonishing, and have a huge amount of data we handed that’s for instance also the mission, I don’t know if it’s called Explorer as well, but the mission database where anybody can look up a prior NASA mission, and see who were the astronauts, what was the purpose of the mission and all that, that also needed to totally, it’s in a database, but it need also revamped for that. So I’m assuming that’s also part of the project?

Gary Kovar: And I’ll share that some of this stuff is not, it’s old content, but it’s continually updated. There’s a piece of content from the history office called the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and to this day it’s still updated as different artifacts are discovered that people who worked in the project took home, and are sharing and finding. We have better technology now to try and understand some of these garbled transmissions.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, yeah.

Gary Kovar: Yeah, so there continue to be updates there, and it’s a highly trafficked area of the site that had to be migrated in as well, and recognize the effort that volunteers across the globe are making on that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you mentioned thousands of public sites. How can you even have thousands of public sites? That’s really interesting. But when you say the cafeterias and all the offices, they all had public sites, so it kind of gets together. Then 456 users that log into some part of the website, and they’re mostly content creators, I would assume. And then, I read in one of the blog posts that you built 55 custom blocks. Yeah. So how did you approach the development that went from, so you had a design company I would assume, or was it also done in your agency that design steps to come to that?

Block and Theme Development

Gary Kovar: Yeah, great question. So design actually happened in parallel while CMS was being chosen. So the design system we use is called Horizon Design System, and a design agency put this together, very ambitious design system. They tried to account for every use case they could think of within NASA, without being informed by what can the tool we’re using actually do. And so, Design System was, I’ll air quote finalized, like design systems never finalized, but finalized around the same time the CMS was chosen, give or take a little bit.

During the implementation, actually developing this, there was a lot of discovery of, oh gee, this wasn’t considered or accounted for, because there was no way the design company could have discovered or accounted for it. How do we deal with that? And so ultimately, if we had completed the entire design system as specked out, I wonder how many blocks there would be? Probably hundreds. So many compelling ways to tell the story. We ended it at 55 by virtue of, I mean at some point the things got to launch, we can’t build forever, but also these are the pieces that are necessary broadly to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Since launch, a couple more blocks have been added specific to streaming.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Oh yeah, totally get that. So there’s this underlying question that probably any agency has that needs to talk with clients about it. So what’s the decision between, okay, using core blocks versus creating custom blocks. I can see that there are not a whole lot of blocks like tabs, or accordions in core, so I get that those definitely needed to be created, but what are other blocks that you built?

Gary Kovar: Yeah, I would say that there’s a lot of blocks that allow relating content to other content. So selecting related content either automatically or dynamically, identifying you might want to continue reading on. In some cases that’s accomplished with custom blocks by virtue of the design system needs. So the design system sort of dictates that to accomplish this, we need to give content creators X amount of control that aren’t available in core blocks. Even things like imagery, so we’ve extended the core image block quite a bit to account for not just captioning, but credits, descriptions. There were some needs to link to, in some cases an image article, in other cases to link to the raw image that’s dynamically chosen when the block’s in use. So there’s a lot of, one of the major goals was provide compelling content and continue providing compelling content. And so, to that end, the blocks serve that purpose and go beyond what core would need specific to NASA’s needs.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Speaking of imagery, there is this image, the hundreds and thousands of media assets, mostly probably images and videos, and know that the Hubble Telescope and now James Webb Telescope, they produce tons of images. I don’t think that goes through the WordPress media library, or am I…

Gary Kovar: Correct. Yeah, so NASA has an internal CDN that’s used. Some of that stuff, it makes sense to bring into the media library and scale for use.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. What’s the CDN?

Gary Kovar: Content distribution network, so like an S3 bucket, or some other place to store it that-

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Just for the purpose of our listeners, we all have sometimes a bit of a jargony. Just wanted to make sure. Yeah.

Gary Kovar: Sorry, I’m still living in my own head in my own life.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I know how to stop you. Yeah, CDN. Yeah. All right. Yeah, so it has its own CDN and then, but there’s still a link to the article, so that is probably custom development as well.

Gary Kovar: Correct. And that CDN is embedded, so if you’re in the media library, external or internal, of course you can still upload and use as appropriate. And even looking specifically at the media library, there were needs, there’s a lot of PDFs, contracts, and other information that gets updated, and one of the needs our content creators have is they need to be able to replace this thing. I’m not even sure where all it’s being linked from, so it’s not as simple as saying, “Upload a new thing to the media library, redirect.” Yeah, it’s complex. It’s complex. A lot of business logic behind it. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I can imagine.

Stacy Holtz: It’s not like you upload your own, you think in your own WordPress website or wherever, you upload your image and maybe one or two other people use your image. You think about, you have hundreds of content creators and they’re looking for a specific image that was uploaded, and it’s used in multiple places, or the PDF is used in multiple places. You as the original person who uploaded it, have no way of knowing where it was uploaded. So you have to be able to account for that, right? If they need to update something on the PDF, make changes to that, that it gets changed everywhere.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I can see that. And that definitely needs to scale quite a bit there, because it’s also geared towards NASA and the use case there. Were there any blocks where you considered maybe later on we could kind of public source them, or open source them and make them available for the wider WordPress community?

Gary Kovar: Yeah, there’s definitely an ongoing conversation that I think it’s in the public web experience office. I think it’s intent to get to the point that we can open source, and I will say, not that there’s probably anything compelling or earth-shattering there that will change the world for developers, more so that this is a way we solve the problem. And I don’t know, I like spinning up projects like that. I think it’d be fun. If I wasn’t working on it, I’d probably be cloning it. So I don’t know when it’s available, hopefully soon. Obviously many hoops to jump through, but something on the horizon.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Wonderful. Wonderful. No, I can see in one of the posts and we link all the posts that I’ve mentioned here to the show notes for later, for your own perusal, dear listeners, but I read in one of the posts that you had a tabbed block where you can have the tabs on top, and then four page, and then have different content in the tabs, but then you also could move the tabs around, so you create your own tabs and all that. So that was a pretty neat block to see and how it works, and it would be really cool to have that, at least for those who also have these huge publishing needs, or have a need for not only have a linear content creation or launch page, but wanted to have some additional ways to highlight things. Yeah. So you mentioned it multiple times. The CMS was chosen. What was the leaving CMS?

Gary Kovar: Drupal.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Drupal?

Gary Kovar: Yep.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Drupal 7?

Gary Kovar: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: There were some migration issues there, I would think.

Gary Kovar: To say the least, yeah.

Stacy Holtz: Well, and Drupal it somewhat of a different data model, and that site was headless.

Gary Kovar: Which of course is a continuing conversation for us in WordPress land, and I think there were some interesting things to learn from that in the sense that publishing there was effectively creating JSON files that were being consumed, and so you weren’t necessarily hitting a rest API, you were hitting a static file. So from a speed perspective, it was very fast.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So the data came out of the database into a JSON file, and then that was consumed by the CMS, is that what I’m understanding?

Gary Kovar: By the front end, yeah. So you would publish it on the front end. Yeah, the front end would consume it, correct, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Gary Kovar: Yeah, and that content was of course the most current content, but that site also had to accommodate the previous designs as well, that were not migrated to the new design system at that last move. And part of that were all these micro sites that, maybe 10 or 15 pages that have a specific use case, but didn’t really fit any of the existing design patterns, but also told a pretty interesting story, useful information for the public and whatnot, all fell under that roof. From a migration perspective, I’ll give you a huge shout-out to Andrew Norcross, who was my colleague at Lone Rock Point, spearheading migration. The migration system is, it’d be really cool if we could just bring this stuff in and stick it right into blocks, and say, “Hey, content creator, make sure this matches what you think it is, and let’s go.” In addition to bringing content in, there was sort of a re-strategizing about navigation.

So the information architecture itself changed entirely, so it wasn’t even necessarily a one-to-one, because many different people had many different responsibilities across the system. We had content that was duplicative, or incomplete, or disagreed with each other just by virtue of age, and the information hadn’t been updated to the other person was updating, what have you. So the migration worked in two phases. First content came into the staging area, and the staging area was a safe place, custom post type, where content editors could come in and it would make the first pass at trying to convert to blocks, core blocks, basically, none of our custom blocks.

And from there, content creators could apply the custom blocks and really figure out how to retell the story in the current system, and it gave them an opportunity to say, “Where does this actually fall in the new system?” And eventually get it to the appropriate post type, in the appropriate category, owned by the right people.

Now, if you think about that, you go, “Well, that’s cool, except it’s possible that something had come in and it previously had three or four URLs as consolidating down to one.” So every piece of content that came in, we have an old URL for, in some cases that remain the same. By and large, they change, but then there’s also these pages that no longer exist that need to be accommodated for. The URLs still exist in search results and old links, and what have you, and that all has to kind of burn down to a logical system where we handle redirects.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So the content creators must have come in pretty early in the project, because when they converted to blocks, they needed to already know how to do that. So training or the outline and the processes, they needed to work in parallel, I would think. Did that work, Stacy?

Stacy Holtz: Yeah, so early on, we had a sandbox available for the content creators, so as blocks were released and information was coming out, you have to keep in mind too, we were learning this alongside the content creators. It’s not like we could go out and Google these new custom blocks, have them built, and how does this work? We had to work closely with the development team to learn all these little great settings and fun things that had been provided for us, and so we started small, and that we would bring in smaller groups of content creators, and work with those groups. And then they could help then train their teams, and so we didn’t have to necessarily bring in hundreds of people at a time. We tried to start small and work our way out to have a bigger outreach, to help everyone get comfortable learning how everything worked.

Gary Kovar: I think the metaphor we’re all familiar with is building the plane walls in flight, but we were building the rocket after it left the launch pad.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s how Gutenberg is built, right?

Gary Kovar: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: WordPress.

Gary Kovar: Well, to that end, the best way to understand what users want, is to get something in their hands and get feedback. So it’s a very real feedback cycle and helps refine the product for what’s actually necessary, for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also, it really helps to know what the people actually will do the work two years from now kind of start out and need to learn how to do it, and how that works for them in their publishing floor, and content creation is really the meat of the matter, yeah. So 70,000 pages before I divide that by 465 users, is that each user would roughly deal with 150 pages, which probably isn’t the case. Some have more and some have less of course, but that is a big amount of time to spend with a new system when you have to get some pressure on it, and sooner or later it needs to get live, and then that’s not all of it. Then you have other, as you mentioned, the image resources and the PDFs. And then there were also, did I read this right? 845 podcasts or episodes?

Gary Kovar: I’m pretty certain that’s episodes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Episodes, okay.

Gary Kovar: Yeah. Yeah. There’s only a few that are regular that continue to be published. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. And you also needed integration with other systems. I’m thinking that NASA has huge technical systems that also need to integrate with the CMS or with the website. As you mentioned though, this, what was it? The Space Station Explorer.

Gary Kovar: The Space Station Research Explorer, yeah. And technically the back end of that is using MSSQL database. And so, there’s this wrapper in there in WordPress that’s making an external call to a Microsoft database, which is kind of cool. As part of that process, you can’t just log in to WP Admin. Within NASA, there’s a card-based system, so the SAML integration required the big one, SAML, I don’t know, don’t ask me what it stands for. I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: It’s a single sign-on kind of security thing.

Gary Kovar: Yeah, exactly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Okay.

Gary Kovar: Yeah, you have to put in your card and pin, and lick the screen, and count to 10 backwards, and all that. Yeah, yeah. All sorts of fun stuff. The really cool integration that I am excited about is, search.gov. So we’re familiar with WordPress internal search. One of the challenges here is that there’s multiple sites at play, there’s NASA Plus, there’s www.science.nasa.gov. It’s actually another installation, a WordPress. It’s not multi-site, but it’s using the same systems.

And so, all this content needs to be searchable somewhere. GSA, General Services Agency, federal government provides a search index for federal agencies. And so, we worked really closely with search.gov to drop in a faceted search and replace WordPress for search. One of the benefits is that working with GSA, they’re doing what every search engine does, and they’re indexing content. So by virtue of working with them, there’s some pretty good SEO things that Bing and Google like, but also good practices to make it easy to identify content and understand, and that becomes more and more necessary the fringe content that’s not content creator direct type stuff.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it probably also didn’t help that Matt Cutts was part of the GSA for a long time, who was the spam fighter at Google, and he left Google to go to the General Service Agency, or to the universal data place. And I also know that Andrew Nason, one of the core lead developers, work there as well. So yeah, there are some great technical minds in there as well.

Gary Kovar: Yeah, that’s an agency that can do mighty things for sure.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You mentioned the mobile apps, the iOS app, as well as the Android app from NASA, in conjunction with the live stream, but you can also just see the website there, or navigate the website there, but that’s also headless then?

Gary Kovar: Yeah, correct. That’s just using the rest API.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

Gary Kovar: And then, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, so you build both mobiles up natively, and then just go out and pull the data from the rest API. That’s right.

Content Creators

Gary Kovar: There’s another team that does the apps. There’s an apps team within, that we worked pretty closely with, and by and large, you’re hitting regular WordPress rest endpoints. There’s a couple of custom endpoints we rolled, but generally it’s built-in endpoints. One of the fun use of rest endpoints that I think is pertinent here, I talked a little about science and the WWW site being two different sites. As a content creator, sometimes you span, you’re working on content that spans both, and so you need to be able to link between the two, so the sites communicate with each other by the rest API. And so the blocks, when you’re linking to content, when you’re searching for content, you’re searching both sides to link to the appropriate content within blocks. So as a content creator, there’s not an apparent difference between sites other than what do I have access to? What am I allowed to edit?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, interesting. Totally interesting. Yeah. So now the site is built or somewhat built.

Gary Kovar: It’s like the internet. It’s mostly done. It’s like the internet.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, internet is a fad, right?

Gary Kovar: It’s a great fad.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I wonder when it’ll take off, right? Yeah. Websites are similar to these Japanese design models. It’s called wabi-sabi. It’s never finished, it never lasts, and it’s never perfect, but we really want to go get close to it, and now it comes the content creators in that the blocks are built, the migration comes in. It’s kind of, yeah, what’s next? Stacy, how did you approach the whole, okay, people need to unlearn things before they can learn new things. And even that, people at NASA are probably ahead of the technical curve, but they’re all humans. They hate change, so how did that go? So they want to get their work done, they want to get the work back to the same time or faster than before, and now they are all crashing to a halt, because they have to learn this new thing.

Stacy Holtz: So that’s a really interesting concept to think about. I think we all kind of came in thinking, “Oh, it’s WordPress, we’ve totally got this,” and go into these training sessions and office hours, and realizing that all of our content creators have mostly been using Drupal and are very familiar with that system. And so, we were missing a key part there, because some of us didn’t understand how they had been using it before, and so we had to take a step back and help bridge that gap between we understand this is how you’re doing it before, but now this is how we do it going forward, and things that maybe we might take for granted. I think one of the things I noticed was that all the different settings and options that they had in the block itself, and each block has its own set of very specific settings, and so it really was just sitting down and taking that time with the content creators, and creating learning resources.

We’re talking videos, handwritten ones, and making sure that they got into the hands of the content creators. And we learned early on too, that just creating them and throwing a link out there, and saying, “Here you all go. Here’s the newest learning resource,” really wasn’t working, because the content creators are so busy. For a while there, they were creating double content right before we got to where we were launching. They were having to maintain content in two different places. And so, we started hosting office hours, and one-on-one support, and just making ourselves available all the time to support them, and make sure that they got the information that they needed in a timely manner, to help ease that transition and ease that frustration. It is frustrating, right? I’ve been doing it this way, now I have to learn this whole new thing, and I’m excited about it, but I’m still frustrated, because it’s just one more thing that I have to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So there must have been, and each person probably had a different timescale on that, or timeline on that, but there is a point where you say, “Okay, this new thing isn’t so bad, let’s kind of dive in.”

But the resistance is, because I have to get this thing done, but the new thing, it takes me so much longer because I don’t know yet well enough. When was that? What was that click that made people think, “Oh, this is better. This makes me more creative?” That’s an assumption of mine, but…

Stacy Holtz: I think it was different for everyone, because some people picked it up super-fast, because they had more time to devote to it, or maybe they had used WordPress before. They were super familiar with it, so the learning curve wasn’t quite as steep for them. Maybe it took longer for something else, because they were already buried in other things, and I’m the only person that manages this content, and I manage X, Y, and Z. So I’m the only one man show over here, and I have to do all these things. And so, I think it just really depended on the person in the group. Overall though, the majority were very excited about it and still are. And when we roll out, when the development team rolls out an enhancement, something that we’ve gotten feedback on, we make sure we share that widely with our user community. And they’re all very excited, because they’ve been working on it since it was, they started in the sandbox, and it was feedback that they gave, and yay, now we have this new piece of functionality and we’re very, very excited about it.

Gary Kovar: I’ll add onto that, one of the now of being live is that we have the space and expectation to build that way. As we were getting to launch, it was get everything in, every block we can, as polished as we can get it before we get live. Once we got to beta, we had to transition into this place where we take a more refined approach. When it’s not public facing, content creators will tolerate some disruption, some, but I mean that’s reasonable. They’re understanding that things are going to break. We’re still actively developing. Once we entered beta, that changed significantly. And now, as new features roll out, there’s space for feedback and exposure prior to it going live in the system, and I think that’s made a tremendous difference in users’ competence in the system and sense of stability.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I definitely can see that. Yes. Yeah. So you mentioned that you had a lot of tools at hand to communicate changes, but it wasn’t only… So office hours, was it a monthly or a daily thing, or where 450 people? Yeah, it’s definitely in a new system. They probably want you right by them. Each one of them wants, “Sit next to me and show me this thing.”

Stacy Holtz: Yeah, so we set it up as an open, it was an open invite, and everyone was included and we just held it once a week. Actually, we still have it, and us as the web support community, all of us who are supporting, we would just go and we would be there, whether someone showed up or whether someone didn’t show up. I think the first one that we held, we hit the panic button when the ticker was going up to, we had over 200 people in office hours, and we were sending out like, oh my gosh, we’re going to need a little bit more support in here, just to help manage. If someone had a really complex conversation that someone could then take them to a breakout room type of situation, and sit down with them, and help them work the problem, but we didn’t abandon the other 199 people that were in the room.

And we were finding the process. We got to the point where we were putting up agendas and things like that, and this week we’re going to be demoing this. This was just released and come with questions. And so, it was definitely, we’ve refined as we’ve gone through it and it’s gotten better, as far as keeping it streamlined and being there to support our users. And then, we also would set up one-on-one support. We made ourselves available. We still do that. Send us an email, send us a Teams chat. If you need something, we’re here to sit down with you and work on this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Wonderful. Yeah. It mentions also, you also had a weekly blog newsletters that gone out? I think that-

Stacy Holtz: Yeah, we do a weekly blog and a newsletter, and we have a subscriber list that the newsletter just goes out to. It is an email blast, and then we have an internal site that the weekly blog goes up on. And then, in all of these channels that we’re communicating with our users with, we post all of these links. We cross post them everywhere, so that way people have visibility, so that they had the information in hand, and so they didn’t feel like, “We have to ask, we weren’t given the information. We have to ask.” And then it’s given to us. As soon as we have it, we share it, and then it’s always living there, so they can go back and look, “Right, oh, you’re right, this was released or this was changed,” or something like that. So that has been a really valuable resource to support the users as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and I can imagine that at the beginning you didn’t have any FAQs, but those definitely started coming in quite a bit.

Stacy Holtz: Just on and on and on and on. It was crazy. Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do you also have a central point where you collect them, so people can look them up? I always have been a little bit worried about FAQs, that they don’t have, yeah, you can’t sort them.

Stacy Holtz: Yeah, so we started off with that and admittedly, I think our FAQs are probably a little out of date, but we have a form that we use, that users can submit feedback requests, or a bug report, or anything like that. And then it gets categorized and we all get a chance to review it, and decide who should take point on this specific issue, so that way that we don’t ever want our users to feel like they asked for some help of some kind, and it just fell into a black hole, and no one ever got back to them. And that can happen when you have multiple communication channels. They posted it somewhere, nobody saw it. So having this, “Please put your request here in this form,” is really useful, because then it does get dropped into a spreadsheet and we can track it, and we can see what happened to it. We don’t want to lose track of that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, wonderful. So when you say that they’re still really excited about it, so what are the things that they are really excited about with the new block system, and how they built their sites, or how they built their articles and all that? What makes the life easier in terms of the new site versus the old site?

Stacy Holtz: I don’t know that I’m qualified to make that comparison, like new versus old. I think that we can see though, just looking at the new site and how the content creators are sharing content with the spectacular images, and all of the well-written articles and content that I think it kind of speaks for itself, right? It’s its own showcase and I love watching them. Everything that is created is so visually appealing and I really enjoy looking at it, and it’s a lot of fun for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, the website is really spectacular. With all the images and all the, it flows very nicely in finding your content there. So when other people would follow, maybe not that big of a project, because that’s pretty rare, but having similar publications that kind of need to migrate over. Were there any surprises that you, and that’s both of you, any surprises where you said, “Hm, that would have been nice. I didn’t think of that?”

Gary Kovar: Yeah, because the main site is launched, but the consolidation efforts continue. And as much as each site is unique, we can identify some patterns and some concepts that each of these different sites have and group them conceptually, and say, “How do we deal with a site that’s like this?” And start assigning them that level, so that everything is not custom. We can build some broad tooling that deals with that. I say that realizing that in this sprint, that’s what I’m working on. We have some existing old set of content that no one’s going to continue old, but continue to own, but it’s important that it remains online. And how do we get it out of an S3 bucket somewhere and effectively into WordPress is a question.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How about you, Stacy? Do you have any surprises that you kind of thought, “Oh yeah, that is really something?”

Stacy Holtz: I don’t know, I’m sure that I do, Birgit. I’m going to have to pass on that one though, because I’m sitting here thinking about it. But I’m sure that I do and I’ll think of it later, but at the moment, on the top of my head, I can’t.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, you can always ping me on the, just like, “I got my surprise.”

Stacy Holtz: Figured it out.

Gary Kovar: I do want to throw out a developer tip though. I had this revelation. Working on the site as a developer, you’re obviously working with local development content. It’s probably weird and an image of a cat or something, and it’s placeholder stuff. I feel like a lot of developers do that.

Stacy Holtz: I know where this is going.

Gary Kovar: And when we entered beta after all this mayhem, I sat down on the couch at the end of that day, and I pulled it up on my phone, and actually looked at some of the content that the content creators put in place. And I got to have the experience of a new site user of being inspired, and really in awe of what they put together. It was so cool. And I scrolled on my phone while Netflix was on in the background for hours that night. That was what I was doing on my phone, was looking at this beta site that ostensibly I’d been aware of, but I’d been so focused on my portion of it. So I’m really thrilled they have the opportunity to work with people that can put this compelling content out there, and assemble it in such beautiful and meaningful way. It’s very cool.

Stacy Holtz: Agreed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So now you say they are ongoing, you’re doing additional and ongoing migrations, but you also are working on new development, new blogs, or I know that the agency is also working on the block theme for government agencies. So what’s next for you and for the NASA site?

Gary Kovar: Yeah, next is I think you asked if there were more blocks coming, and I think the answer is it depends. There’s still…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a normal developer answer.

Gary Kovar: Yeah. Well, some of it depends on where some of the current blocks evolve to. So the bug fixes and enhancements that we continue to work through in our sprints are in some ways fundamentally changing how some of these blocks work. And we may solve other issues without needing to create new blocks, because there is a fire hose problem. If you have so many custom and you can’t find that one, you sort of have to limit a little bit. Like you said earlier, sites are never done. And so, that’s definitely part of it. There’s ongoing work. A lot of the ongoing work is around content at this point. And so, that inherently is getting some of this content that’s not so easy to find, or is external, or couldn’t be handled at the initial pass, getting that into the system appropriately, so that it’s in search results, it’s available in all blocks to be used and embedded. Those are really the areas of focus and growing, the footprint of the WWW site.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Are you also trying to figure out how to use the new APIs that come in with the Gutenberg or WordPress, like the block bindings with the custom fields, the block hooks, and then the interactivity API? Is this also something that you’re working on, or is there something that you say, “Okay, well let’s wait for a year to settle everything, and then kind of see how that comes in?” Because Gutenberg changes every two weeks, but you’re not using the plugin in production, I would think.

Gary Kovar: Correct. We’re using Block Editor to merge to Core, yeah. Yeah. The answer is it’s a little complex. So if there’s a use case for those pieces, yes, we will definitely make use of it. I hedge my answer, I’m a developer, but also because I think the real answer is some of that we’ve baked in our own way in some systems, and what would be nice to move to the way core it, there’s a lot of momentum in the existing way. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it type attitude.

So I would think long term, yes, there will be a concerted effort to identify. We need to be more in line with Core. That’s definitely the goal. WordPress is very powerful and one of the benefits of WordPress is that there’s a huge community behind it. So from NASA’s perspective, using WordPress means that I can bring in other or different disciplines to work on this stuff. And the closer we adhere to the way Core does things, even if we were doing it prior to something being merged to Core, course correcting to that is the right way to do it. And I think that there is effort to do that. At this size, it doesn’t happen quickly.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Core now… Well, it’s still not in Core, but it will come in 6.6 days. Well, patterns have been in core for a long time, and I’m assuming some of the design systems are translated into patterns for the NASA website. But now with WordPress, you can also create your own as content creator, create your own patterns, and then make them sync over certain sites. Is there functionality that you will roll out, or that you kind of guardrail a little bit, so not to disrupt the system?

Gary Kovar: Yeah, believe it or not, the initial work was done pre-patterns being available. So we have a very similar concept of, you create a new piece of content and it drops in a bunch of blocks, but I mean it’s effectively the same thing, but our implementation. So yeah, that’d be wonderful to be able to share stuff like that. I’ll say the easy way to do it, people literally, not between sites, but within the same site, people will copy and paste content and say, “That’s a great way out. I’ll copy and paste that entirely, and then replace it with my stuff, or adjust accordingly.” And it’s cool. That works well, honestly. So yes, it would be awesome if we could exchange patterns, but we do it the poor man’s way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: The analog way, right?

Gary Kovar: Yeah, right, right. Sneaker net. It’s sneaker net.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So would you say, Stacy, what’s next for content creators on NASA in terms of needing more stuff from development? Are there, what are the new requirements that, the new ideas that come out that challenge the developers?

Stacy Holtz: Yeah, I think that those come in through the, oh, it would be really nice to have this, something like this. And that can be kind of hard for me to list out for you, of what all those things are that our content creators have thought of. “Oh, I have this piece of content and I would really like to be able to do X, Y, Z with it.”

But I can tell you as those are reviewed, or we think about these pieces and parts for our content creators, that they’re always excited about the new things that come, or even if it’s just a tweak to an existing block. Like, now you can do this with this block, and it’s like, “Oh wow, that’s really cool. That’s something that I wanted.” So I see that for the community is always really receptive and open to the new ideas, and great at sharing feedback and letting us know what they need.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, I think I’m out of my questions. I learned so much from you two. So is there anything that you wanted to share with your experience that working on the site, that we haven’t talked about or that you didn’t get to say all that you wanted to say?

Gary Kovar: I think the last thing I’ll throw out there is, one of the things we’ve heard is like WordPress is at scale, or WordPress isn’t enterprise ready, or blah blah blah. And that’s, I mean, obviously Balderdash, but to see it succeed at this scale has been a ton of fun. My background is agency and previous agencies, I was slow to get in the water on block editor, and what it accomplishes for content creators is significant. We’re very much headed in the right way, right direction.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Stacy, any…

Stacy Holtz: I don’t have anything else to add.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Okay. Well, this was fabulous. Thank you so much for coming on the show and letting me ask you all the questions about this phenomenal project that you had on NASA.gov, and all the other sites, the live stream and all that. Dear listeners, I will have all the information that I had in the show notes for this 100th episode, and I’m really happy that Stacy, you and Gary were celebrating with me the 100th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. It was fantastic. Thank you so much. 

As always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. And if you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to cover, send them to Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com. That’s Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com. And I wish you all a great weekend.

Gary Kovar: Thanks for having us and congrats on a hundred episodes. That’s awesome.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Thank you.

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