[00:00:00 ] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things, WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case using disposable WordPress installs to test out plugins.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy and paste that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m very keen to hear from you, and hopefully get your idea featured on the show. Head over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Nick Ahmann. Nick works for Inisev. A company which provides SaaS services for WordPress and other platforms. They have a range of products, but today we focus on TasteWP.

TasteWP is a service which allows you to spin up a disposable WordPress install in a matter of seconds. From there, you can use the site for free for two days. If you’re wanting to test out a plugin or theme, but don’t want the hassle of creating a site on your own hosting or local machine, TasteWP could be a useful option. It behaves as a normal WordPress website, and you’re not limited to what you can install on top of the defaults.

One nice feature that we talk about is that you can pre-install plugins and themes from the WordPress repository by modifying the URL when you visit the TasteWP website. This might be useful for educators or plugin developers who want to demo their free plugins, but don’t want to maintain their own infrastructure.

We talk about what promoted Nick to work on this plugin and how he sees it as helping the WordPress community, as well as being a vehicle to make people aware of the products and services that his company offers. If you’ve ever wanted a WordPress site to play with for a few days. Then this episode is for you.

Typically when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case with these WordCamp Europe interviews. We were competing against the crowds and the air conditioning. And whilst the podcast is more than listable, I hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world we’re at play.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Nick Ahmann.

I am joined on the podcast today by Nick Arman. Hello, Nick.

[00:03:29 ] Nick Ahmann: Hi, Nathan.

[00:03:30 ] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you. We are in the bowels of the Super Bock Arena in Porto. Have you ever been to a WordCamp before? Is this your first?

[00:03:38 ] Nick Ahmann: No, it’s my first ever WordCamp.

[00:03:40 ] Nathan Wrigley: So what brings you? What is it exactly that you’ve decided?

[00:03:43 ] Nick Ahmann: Yeah, that’s a good question. So for one it’s the networking part. We’re surely gonna talk about later, we, um, working on a couple of WordPress products and TasteWP, and I wanna spread the word for it. I also just wanna immerse myself in the WordPress spirit and energy. And what’s a better way than going to a WordCamp?

[00:04:02 ] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you’ve not been to an event like this before, have you been in the WordPress space for any length of time or is this fresh to you?

[00:04:09 ] Nick Ahmann: It’s not entirely fresh. So we’ve been developing plugins for about six, seven years now. Not me personally, I don’t have a clue about coding. I’ve been in the space that time.

[00:04:18 ] Nathan Wrigley: What is it that you’re expecting to do? I know you said that there was networking, but do you anticipate going into some of the talks? Is there any of that that interests you?

[00:04:26 ] Nick Ahmann: Yeah, for sure. I’m gonna listen to some of the talks. I’ve noted down one or two. But it’s just, you know, meeting like random people in the hallway and just getting to know them.

[00:04:36 ] Nathan Wrigley: The hallway track is totally a thing. It’s a thing which I think probably a significant proportion of the people who come to these events actually never go into the presentations because they just enjoy the networking aspect and all of that kind of stuff.

We’re gonna talk today about a service that you offer. It integrates very well with WordPress. It is WordPress. It enables you to get WordPress in a heartbeat. It’s called TasteWP. What is it? What’s the point?

[00:04:59 ] Nick Ahmann: Okay. The point is, basically TasteWP, developed from scratch your own itch situation for us. Working on a couple of plugins and we needed an easy way to test them, different PHP versions and, and WordPress version combinations.

And we never found a tool that really suits us. So we thought, okay, why not create such a tool? And then we thought, okay, uh, instead of just using it internally, why don’t we just make it a bit nicer and bit more self explanatory, as you would with a tool you only use internally, so that, uh, we can offer it to the public. So TasteWP is a site where you just go, click once and then it spins up a WordPress site where you can play around and test themes and plugins.

[00:05:41 ] Nathan Wrigley: So I confess that I’ve had a go and it’s very quick. I don’t know if that was part of the initial scoping document, to make it almost instantaneous, but when you go to the webpage and you click the button, there’s more to it than that, we’ll get to that, but if you just click the button, I’m pretty convinced you’re under five seconds before the site is live.

[00:06:01 ] Nick Ahmann: Right. Just over three seconds is now the average.

[00:06:04 ] Nathan Wrigley: Which is pretty incredible given what’s going on. You know, you’re spinning up some sort of server in the background and downloading plug-ins and themes. And again, we’ll get to that and it’s configurable, but it’s basically there in the time it takes you to pick up your coffee cup, have a sip, and then return it to the table.

[00:06:18 ] Nick Ahmann: And let me just mention, I wish I could take credit for it, but it’s entirely the developers who did this.

[00:06:24 ] Nathan Wrigley: The, principle though, when we got into talking about coming on the podcast, you talked about it from the community angle. You mentioned that it would be a really nice tool for community to get their hands on. Talk to us about that. Tell us how do you sort of pitch it as a community tool?

[00:06:39 ] Nick Ahmann: Right. I think it’s our contribution to the community in the sense that I think everybody who works with WordPress, uh, no matter what the role of function is that they need such a tool. You can talk about the developers who need a site to test their themes and plugins like that was the initial idea, why we needed it. But then beginners who just start out with WordPress, they need an easy way to spin up a site and play around. Also again for developers to demo their products.

So what you can do is, if you, for example, if you’re in the, um, plug-in directory on WordPress and you on a plugin page, like, wordpress.org/plugins/pluginslug. And in that URL, if you just replace WordPress with TasteWP and click enter, then it spins up a site with that plugin already installed. And that’s useful, I think for almost everybody, especially also for those who want to try out plugins before using them on the real s