Integrability number theory. Tomorrow afternoon, starting from 3. Who want to be here? OK, so we are starting our afternoon session. And the first talk will be by Sivak Murcian. And he will speak about the point processes that turn in points of large lozenge tiling. Thank you very much. Thanks to the organizers for the opportunity to be present at this wonderful workshop. I'm going to talk about point processes that arise in the lozenge tiling model. Today I'm going to introduce the model, but I'll introduce it again. So what is the model? Well, consider the triangular lattice, a portion of the triangular lattice. If you take two neighboring triangles and connect them with each other, you get a rhombus. And there are three different orientations that you can get drawn by in three different orientations. And these three rhombus are called lozenges. Now, what you can do is you can take some region of the triangular lattice that can be tiled with this rhombi, with these lozenges. And the lozenge tiling model says we'll take a region. There are many different tilings of this region by lozenges. Pick a random one, say uniformly random one, and understand properties of this as the size of the system goes to infinity. Now, the same model, there are many different ways that this model can be described. So it can be written in terms of the diamond model. It can be written in terms of nonintersecting lattice pads. There is one that will be relevant for us. This is called the plane partitions, or skew plane partitions. The way this works is you take, say, a rectangular region. You cut out a staircase shape from the corner, a young diagram from the corner. And in the rest, you fill integers, non-negative integers, in such a way that they are weakly decreasing in the southeast and southwest directions. Now, this is an analog. This is kind of a two-dimensional analog of partitions. Now, what you do is you kind of draw a height diagram associated to this. So if you see the number three in a cell on top of that number, you stack three cubes. If you see the number four, you stack four cubes and so on. And you get something like this. So if the numbers were all zero, I would get this picture. There would be no cubes, just an empty room with a weird wall at the end. And with these numbers, I get a picture like this. So like the first column, the first cell has three boxes, the next one has four, and so on. And when you look at this, you can see that if you think about this as a two-dimensional picture what you're seeing is a tiling of a region by lozenges. And because I didn't specify a maximum for the numbers that go in here, if you think about this as a tiling problem, then what you're doing is you're taking this infinite region and you're tiling this. Except what does this correspond to, this cut out thing? Or what that means is that basically way up high at infinity, you have some boundary conditions, which are saying that up at infinity, you are going to have, if you go high up at infinity, you are going to have this tiling and then this and so on. So the boundary condition specified by this ends up being a condition at infinity. So this is the model. Now what kind of results are there? So as Ken mentioned, this model exhibits this phenomenon of limit shape. So if, for example, you take a hexagonal region, large n by n by n hexagon, in this case, this is a 75 by 75, 75 hexagon, and you take a uniformly random tiling of this hexagon, then it's almost always going to look like this. In particular, I see one of my colors is showing up as white. Hopefully it's distinguishable for you. So what are you seeing? Well, if you look at the corners, even though we took a random tiling, the corners, you don't see any randomness. For example, if you look at this corner, what you are going to see is a tiling that just looks like this. Only one type of lozenge is going to appear in this corner. Only one type of lozenge is going to appear in this corner with probability 1 and so on. So the corners are deterministic. They're frozen. The randomness just stays in the middle. And then there is this curve, which looks like a circle. And as n goes to infinity, it is actually going to become a perfect circle in a script of the hexagon, in this case. And that divides the two regions. So in statistical mechanical language, you would say there are frozen regions. There's a liquid region. And there's a phase transition that's happening along this curve. And that curve is called the frozen boundary. And the first results, showing this kind of thing, were obtained by Kohn-Larsen probe, Kohn-Kenyon probe. They used a variational principle to show that there is a surface that minimizes this. It's basically, if you think about this as a tiling problem, then you have this inscribed circle outside of which you have the frozen regions. Inside you have the liquid region. But if you think about this as a pile of boxes, then it's a three-dimensional stepped surface. It's a stepped surface. And it turns out that there is a particular surface that with probability 1, every surface is within epsilon of it, or arbitrary epsilon, as n goes to infinity. So these are results. And there are many, many other results that I'm not going to mention. So Kenyon and Okunkov studied arbitrary polygonal regions. So you don't have to have a hexagon. You can just take a region that looks like this, or any polygon where the edges of the polygon are parallel to the three lattice directions. And look at tiling of this. And understand, for example, this frozen boundary called the Arctic curve that you get, or understand the nature of the randomness that you observe in various points. So this is for bounded cases. As I said, we are going to consider this plane partition model as well. So here, because the number of configurations is infinite, there is no kind of the region that your tiling is unbounded. The uniform measure doesn't make sense. So the measure that's considered here is the so-called volume measure. So you pick a parameter q, which is between 0 and 1. And you say the probability of a configuration is going to be proportional to q raised to the volume of that configuration, where the volume is just a total number of boxes. A different way to think about this measure is you associate weight q to each box. And the probability of a configuration is just going to be the product of the weights of all the boxes. And all I have done here is basically written q to the volume as a product of volume many q's. But you'll see why I'm writing it that way later. And to be precise, basically the probability of a configuration is just going to be q to the volume of that configuration divided by the normalizing constant, which is called partition function. It's called mechanic, which is the sum of all this q to the pi's over all pi's. Does the model make sense? So on to results. So now what you want to study is how this thing behaves as n goes to infinity. In this language, there are some results that go back to the 80s with Bernhard Nienhuis and co-authors. In early 2000s or like late 90s, Okungov and Roshitikin studied the following kind of boundary conditions. So you take, say, an a-n, my b-n, room, and look at the back wall that looks like this. c1, n, c2, n, c3, n, and so on. So c1, c2, c3 are constants, n goes to infinity. You're tiling a room that looks like this. You want to understand random tiling of that, with respect to the skew to the volume measure. This was later generalized to rooms that can have a piecewise linear back wall. The way to interpret, so we generalized this with co-authors, to piecewise linear curves where the back wall can have arbitrary slope in this range. So what I mean by this, for example, if you have a wall that has slope zero, what that means is that it is discretely approximated by something like this. And then the most generally, you can have arbitrary piecewise linear back walls. In this range. And so you can take a shape like this as your floor, write down your integers here, and take the room corresponding to it, and tile it randomly. And so this is an exact sample. You get something like this. And so here, you don't really see the boxes because they're too small. Each box is roughly the size of one pixel. But you can see that there is this random region, the liquid region, there are these frozen regions. And then you can see that there is a particular curve separating them. And you can show that there is this curve. It's kind of the law of large numbers to result for something like this. So all the results that I mentioned so far, we're talking about this kind of the limit shape or the limit curve. What about the fluctuations? What are the randomness in the liquid region or in the other regions? Well, to study those, you study through correlation functions. So if you look at something like this, you can notice that if you just know the positions of the horizontal laws and just the light colored ones, then that completely determines the whole picture. Basically, if you know where the stacks of cubes end, you know the whole configuration. And to understand the fluctuations, you can just look at the local correlation functions of the positions of the horizontal tiles. So if you just look at the positions of the horizontal tiles, you get a discrete point process. And just look at the correlation functions of the discrete point process, the two-dimensional point process. And Okun-Govind Reshetikin showed that this point process is actually determinantal and wrote a formula for the correlation kernel. Sorry, I pressed the wrong button. So it's a determinantal point process with this correlation kernel where all the information about the boundaries encoded in this function's fee. So this is a product over the whole boundary. And there are various papers which analyzed the point processes that you get in this model. As the size grows, the limiting point processes, for example, Okun-Govind Reshetikin showed that in the case that they studied, that in the bulk, what you get is the incomplete beta kernel. On the boundary, you get the error process. There are these costs that appear that you get the accuracy process. So Drick but yes, studied what happens when you go very high up in a region like this. You get what's called the bead process and so on. So all this, there are various papers which just give you the limiting correlation functions in these various regions. So the rest of my talk is going to concentrate on one point, which I haven't marked here. That's a point that's like this. This is a special point. It's called the turning point. And in 2006, Okun-Govind Reshetikin wrote a paper with a catchy title, The Birth of a Random Matrix, where they said, where they conjectured the following things. So if you look at the turning points, which are, they're called turning point because if you look at this point, three phases meet together. The liquid phase meets two frozen phases. Or in other words, yes, sorry, in this formula, where what boundary? Oh, the boundary is encoded here. So this is a product over, there's one multiplicand for each. So if your boundary is say, this, then these things are going to have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven multiplicands. And the multiplicand is going to have the plus sign or negative sign depending on whether this is going up or down. And so if you look at this point, then what's happening is you have a frozen region where only one tile is appearing. You have a frozen region where only one tile is appearing, but it's different from this one. And then you're turning from here to here. So they call this a turning point. And they conjectured that the process that you're going to see here is universal. And it's going to be the same as the GUI corners process. On the next slide, I'm going to explain exactly what those things are. And one thing I want to mention is that if you're starting the Q to the volume measure, to get anything interesting, you should take the limit when Q goes to 1 from below. Otherwise, if Q stays finite, then your configuration size isn't going to go. The average size of your configuration is going to stay finite, so nothing interesting is going to happen. And the other thing I want to mention is that in all the examples that we have seen, there are only frozen regions where one type of loss-inch dominates. So a frozen region means just it's a facet with one tile tiling it completely. OK, so let's look at these turning points. In other words, we're looking at what's happening at this edge. Well, let's look at the first slice. If you look at the first slice, you can tell from the geometry that there's only going to be one particle on the first slice, the red particle. If you look at the second slice, there are going to be exactly two particles on the second slice, the two green particles. And the red one is always going to be in between the two green ones. If you look at the third slice, there are three particles, the blue ones, and the green ones are going to be in between. And so on. The k slice is going to have exactly k particles, and the particles on the previous slice are going to be in between. That's called interlacing. So on the discrete side, we're going to look at the first k slices. And the look at all the particles in the first k slices, they form this kind of triangular array. On the other side, let's take a Hermitian matrix. So it turns out that if you take a Hermitian matrix and look at its eigenvalues, of course, they are real. So if you take, say, a k by k Hermitian matrix, it has k real eigenvalues. If you look at its k minus 1, k minus 1 corner, it's going to have k minus 1 eigenvalues. And those eigenvalues are going to be in between the k eigenvalues of the original matrix. So the eigenvalues are going to interlace. So what we are going to do is we're going to take a GUI matrix and look at its 1 by 1 corner, 2 by 2 corner, 3 by 3 corner, and so on. And look at all those eigenvalues. And so you'll get this one eigenvalue, this two eigenvalues, and this one is going to be in between those two and so on. So you're again going to get this triangular array. And this is the joint distribution of this is called the GUI corners process. And what is the Okun-Koroshniki conjecture? It's saying that, well, if you take the positions of the horizontal lozenges of the first CK slices, you center them around this height. You scale them appropriately. Then as n goes to infinity, they're going to converge to this GUI corners process. So in the paper where they conjectured this, they actually prove that that holds in this case, that if you have skew plane partitions in these boundary conditions, then if you look at the turning point that arises here, then indeed, if you center and scale appropriately, then it converges to the GUI corners process. But they conjectured that they should hold universally. So first, I'm going to present the result which confirms this. And then I'm going to present a regime where it seems to fail, because I've modified the measure somehow. But then we will see that it actually hasn't completely disappeared. The GUI corner process is still somehow there. And then if there is time, I'll show you a regime where we have completely killed the GUI corners process. So first, let's look at something like this. So we are interested in what's happening at this point. Well, think about it this way. Let's draw a line here. And let's condition on the positions of the horizontal lozenges along this line. If you know the positions of the horizontal lozenges on this line, this part doesn't really matter anymore. And so you can look at just this part, this region. So in other words, look at the region that's like this, condition on what's happening on this last slice, and try to understand what's happening at the turning point. So what we want this to grow, in other words, if you look at this picture, as n was growing, this is going to grow as well like n. So take something like this. Take a region like this with n, specify the positions of horizontal lozenges on this nth line. There are going to be exactly n lozenges there. And take the limit as n goes to infinity and understand what's going to happen to the first k slices. Now, when you take n goes to infinity, this is going to grow. And what you can do is you can specify an arbitrary density function, limiting density function, for the positions of the horizontal tiles. So take any density function here and say you have a sequence of discrete approximations of the density function. And take regions corresponding to those discrete approximations and take the limit as n goes to infinity. And so with Leonid Petrov a few years ago, we showed that if you take the volume measure, q to the volume measure, you take arbitrary. So f here, think of it as the density function. The way I've written here, it's not the density function, but it pretty much corresponds to it. So take an arbitrary profile and take a sequence of shapes which approximate that arbitrary profile that you have specified. So this is distance n. You're specifying an arbitrary profile here given by a function f. You're taking discrete approximations of this as n goes to infinity and you're studying the process here. And we showed that in the limit as n goes to infinity, if q goes to one from below, and this is the right scaling for q, then if you center and scale the particles near this point, then they converge to the GUE corners process. This approach of basically looking at regions like this and then conditioning on this and understanding that was first used by Vadim Gorin and Greta Panova in the case of the uniform measure where they obtained this result. And notice that the parameter q that I have is e to the negative gamma over n. And if you set gamma to zero, in particular, you get the uniform measure. And so the gamma equals zero case recovers their result. The different thing to notice is, so I said, let's cut it like this, but it actually turns out that the hexagon is a particular case of this. So we said we can specify an arbitrary density for f. Let's specify the density that looks like this. Tightly packed, and then nothing, and then tightly packed. Well, if you think about the tiling, if these two are horizontal lozenges that forces this to be horizontal, that forces this to be horizontal, that forces this to be horizontal, same here. So if you specify that all of these are horizontal, that forces this tiling here. And so if I specify the density to be one, zero, one, then essentially I'm just tiling this hexagon. But in particular, this says that if you take q to the volume tiling of the hexagon, then over here you're going to see the GUE corners process. In the uniform case, when you're just taking uniform tiling of the hexagon, this was obtained by Eric Nordenstam and Kurt Johans, and this was, of course, this preceded the result of Vadim Gorin and Greta Panova. Okay, so these are the results which tell us that we get the GUE corners process. Yes? Yes. Yeah, we need speed of convergence. We need speed of convergence. Yeah, think of this as clarifying that point. Yeah, we need the, I mean, and we didn't try very hard to get an optimal speed of convergence, but we need some speed of convergence, yes. So as I said, I'm going to look at slightly different measures. So all the results that I mentioned so far were working with either the uniform measure or to q to the volume measure, and we're thinking about different boundary conditions. Now what happens if you modify the measure? Now, as I said, q to the volume, you can think about as product of all the boxes, a weight q corresponding to that box. And up to now, all the boxes had the same weight. Now it is natural to consider a regime where the weight of the box depends on its position. So let's take weights where the weight of the box depends only on its horizontal position. So the boxes on the first slice have the same weight, say q one, the boxes on the second slice have the same weight q two and so on. So if I took weights like that, then the probability of this partition, the of this plain partition would be proportional to say q one to the zero, because there is no particle, there is no box on the first slice, there's one, there are two boxes on the second slice, so it will be q two squared, q three, there's one here, four here, five, and so on. So this is the measure we will consider. Well, we can take arbitrary q's, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to consider q's which are periodic. So it takes some period k and consider weights which are periodic with period k. So you have weights q zero, q one, q k minus one, q zero, q one, q k, and so on, periodic weights. Now before, the limit to study was when q goes to one from below. Question arises now, what limit should we consider now? What is the natural thermodynamic limit of this system? Well, you could say all these q's should go to one from below, but it turns out that if you do that, that's not that interesting because what you can do is you can pretty much replace all these q's by their geometric average, and the processes and shapes that you're going to get are going to be the same. So what's more interesting is to consider weights like this. So your weights are going to be, you still have this q, but weights are like alpha one, q, alpha two, q, alpha three, q, and so on, still periodic. Where these numbers, alpha one, alpha two, alpha three are fixed, and q goes to one from below. And alpha one, alpha two, alpha three can be arbitrary. And you can study the limit when q goes to one from below. So this is the natural thermodynamic limit to consider in this case. Of course, the product of the alphas should be one. Otherwise, so if it's less than one, then the average size of your configuration is going to be finite. You're not going to get an interesting thermodynamic limit. If the product is bigger than one, then your partition function is going to be infinite. So the natural limit to consider is when this is one. However, it turns out that if any of the alphas is bigger than one, then you still have an infinite partition function. The measure doesn't make sense. You can think about it this way. Imagine the weight given to boxes here is two. Then if I have m boxes here, then the weight will be two to the m. Just the sum of these partitions is already going to be infinite. So your partition function is going to be infinite. And you can say, okay, I'll just make sure that the alphas which are bigger than one don't fall in this corner, but it turns out that that's not good enough. As long as the product of the alphas is one, and there's at least one weight which is bigger than one, the partition function is infinite. So it looks like the measure doesn't make sense. Actually, you can make sense of this measure by picking, so in the case of two periodic weights, you can make sense of the measure by picking the weights, picking the boundary correctly, but that doesn't scale to general k periodic weights. So what you can do is you can say, okay, I want to have this k periodic weights, but I'm going to break the periodicity just in one slice, in this middle slice. Now remember that we want to understand what's happening, say, a turning point. And so you're basically thinking if I just make some small change very far away from my turning point, that shouldn't really make a difference for the processes that I can observe at this point. So there's just one modification of the weight on this middle slice shouldn't have an effect on the processes that we are interested in. So that's what we are going to do. We're going to take weights alpha, arbitrary, take the product of all the ones which are less than one, and just put that extra factor on the middle slice, other than that, it's completely periodic. Just just guarantees that the partition function is finite, so the measure makes sense. They said that shouldn't have any effect on the processes that you observe at the turning points, but it does have an effect on the process where you put there. So if you actually look at the random tiling, these are, again, this is just a very large sample where there are just small boxes here. I've changed the color scheme a little bit. And each box is just, again, of size roughly one pixel. And you can see that, so this is what would happen if you just add Q to the volume. And this is what happens when you have, say, two periodic weights, but this middle slice has this extra damping weight. What you observe is that the system now exhibits a first order phase transition along this middle slice. The limit surface is not actually differentiable along this slice. Neither is the frozen boundary. Neither is the curve over here. And that suggests that there is, so if you look at the local point process, here it's going to be different, and you can actually write down the point process here. It's, of course, still determinant, and it's determinant with a kernel that looks like this. Now, if you pick two points, t1 and t2, what you should do is you should look at this, so if you look at this bt1, t2, take your two integers, you have this sequence of one over alpha. So this is the case when the weights are periodic, by the way, alpha one over alpha, alpha one over alpha, and so on, except, so you have, in the middle slice at slice zero, your alpha is bigger than one, on the middle slice it's supposed to be alpha if it was perfectly periodic, but now we have just replaced it by one to make sure that the measure makes sense. And that's what we were observing here, and so if you just count the number of ones between t1 and t2, that's what goes in here. So if the weights were just, if this was just q to the volume, this bt1, t2 would be zero, so this would just become one minus zero to the delta t, this factor would disappear and you would just recover the incomplete beta kernel. But right, but now you have this extra term coming in. Now this is a point process in the middle slice which is not translation invariant in the horizontal direction, but of course translation invariant in the vertical direction. So that's just this effect of putting this extra weight in the middle slice. So what happens at the turning points is just to simplify, so what we're going to do is we're going to look at regions which are not just this general shape that I was considering just to take a simple floor, infinity in one direction bounded in this direction. And let's look at the following thing. So let's say we have weights alpha one here, alpha two, alpha three, and so on, alpha k. It turns out that the quantities to look at are not these alphas, but look at their products. So beta one is going to be this, beta two is going to be the product of this two, beta three is going to be the product of this three, and so on. Now if you look at those things, beta one, beta k, if you have k periodic weights, this don't have to be distinct, so let m be the number of distinct betas. So it turns out that when you do this, the system actually develops m turning points. In particular, if you take k periodic weights, then you end up having k turning points generically. It's just that if some of those betas coincide, then the number of turning points goes down. So basically what happens is you just have one turning point, now if you take four periodic weights, then over here you have four turning points generically. Now what is a turning point? You're supposed to get a frozen region here, here, here, here, and here. And the system actually develops new types of frozen regions. So the system develops frozen regions where you don't have just one type of tile, but two types of tiles in a deterministic pattern. So in this picture, at the top you have this frozen region, next you have this frozen region, next you have this frozen region, next you have this frozen region. So you have these new types of frozen regions that appear. And actually, so all of these frozen regions are just facets, they are basically vertical walls. And if you project them to the floor, what's going to happen is the first wall is going to project just to this line. The next wall is going to project to this line, they're just going to divide this angle into equal parts. So in this case, you have these four types of frozen regions, they're just going to project to these four lines, they're just vertical things. And it turns out that if you specify any rational multiple of pi over two, then you can pick weights, so pick any rational multiple of pi over two, pick any periodic pattern, I'll say two up, one down, so this is a pick a periodic pattern, say two up, one down, one up, one down, and then repeat this, this will give you some slope, it will be rational multiple of pi over two. Then it's possible to pick weights so that the system generates a frozen region, of course, that looks like that.  Moreover, so if you're taking four periodic weights, as I said, the projections are going to be these five lines, so the first frozen region has to be like this, the second one has to be like this. The third one can either be two up, two down, or it can be up, down, up, down, and so on. So there are two different sequences of rational approximations which project to this, and by picking the weights correctly, you can get any one of those that you want. And what happens if some of these betas coincide is that some of these turning points disappear, so one of these lines can disappear, or one or few of them can disappear. Okay, so that's the new types of frozen regions that you can find. What about the point processes? Well, it turns out that because of these turning points, you cannot possibly see the corners, GUE corners process anymore. And it's easy to see if you just look at the number of particles. So for simplicity, let's look at the case of two periodic weights. So there are going to be two turning points. If I look at the first slice, there's only one particle, it has to be either here or here. On the first slice here, maybe there's one particle, here there are no particles. If I look at the second slice, there are two particles, and this has to be in between. So one of them has to be here, the other one ends up being here. So there's one particle here, one particle here. On the third slice, you have three particles, one has to be above this, one has to be below this, the third one ends up being here. So you have two particles here, one here. And if you continue this way, you see that the number, if you look at the number of particles on the slices, and this is what you see. And of course, now if you look at just this process, this is not going to be the G corners process, neither is this. And in general, what's going to happen is you have this one particle, two particles, three particles, four particles, and so on. This is just going to be divided by some curves like this. Once you're going to get near each turning point, you're going to get a process where the number of particles looks like this.  And so when you write down the correlation functions, they look like this. Now, so how is this different from the G corners process? If you look at this NT1 and NT2, if these were just T1 and T2, that would be the G corners process. But now NT1 is actually counting the following thing. You have your weights here, beta one, beta two, beta, say M, beta one, beta two, beta M, or beta K, let me say. And so instead of, if you're on some slice, instead of counting the number of slices that you have seen, you should only count, say, the number of beta ones that you have seen. Or you should only count the number of beta twos that you have seen. So that's all that N is. You get a detrimental process which looks like this. So it's not the G corner process, but it turns out that the G corner process is still there. Basically, what you can do is you can do this. Take any slice which has just one particle. Take any slice which has two particles. Take any slice which has three particles and so on. Just make sure that you get the number of particles correctly. And look at the distribution of only those slices. Then it actually will be the G corner process. So you can basically get that from this. So essentially what you have here is a bunch of G corners processes which are somehow non-trivial correlated. So that's what we kind of, this was supposed to be a regime where it's outside of this G corners process regime, but you can see that G corners process actually survived. I'll show you one last result where actually the G corners process doesn't survive. So let's do the following thing. Let's take two periodic weights, alpha one over alpha, alpha one over alpha and so on. But let's study the regime. So if alpha is one, then this is just the Q to the volume. And we know that there is one turning point and this is the G corners process. G corners. If alpha is bigger than one, then we know that we have two turning points and these are not the G corners, although the G corners process is still somehow hidden there. What happens as alpha goes to one? You try to squeeze these two turning points together. All it turns out that it depends on the rate at which alpha goes to one. So basically what are we considering weights alpha Q, one over alpha Q. And Q goes to one, but I also want alpha to go to something. Well, Q was let's say e to the negative r. And so if I write alpha Q, then alpha Q is going to be e to the negative r plus something and one over alpha Q is going to be e to the negative r minus something. And this something, we want to go to zero. It depends on the rate. So it turns out that there is a phase transition that if this thing goes to zero like square root of r, if you take weights like this, then something different happens. If these are your weights, then in the limit the system behaves exactly like the Q to the volume system, the homogeneous system. So if you look at the frozen boundary, it's exactly the same. If you look at the point processes in the bulk, it's the same whether it's Q to the volume or it's this. So this two periodicity of the weights has completely disappeared everywhere. Or if you look at the frozen boundary, you will see the area process. Everywhere you don't see this two periodicity except the turning points. The turning points remember, you actually get a point process that looks like this. Remember the weights that I had on the other side this parameter gamma. Once you have a process that looks like this, if gamma was zero then this would just become w to the t2, c to the t1 and that would be the Ge corners process. But now this is split between these two and this is not the Ge corners process and the Ge corners process is nowhere to be seen here. You get some kind of one parameter deformation of that process. I'll stop here. Thank you.


Alright, welcome. No worries. So welcome everyone to this workshop by learnowordpress.org. This workshop is called, I just got this WordPress and don't know how to use it. So this is meant for folks that have inherited a WordPress site and our beginners don't know what to do with it. So that's what we're here for. Next slide, please. And so what we'll be talking about today are the basic concepts of WordPress and web hosting, some important habits for keeping a WordPress site healthy, and how to identify and learn the specific editor that's in use on your WordPress site. That said, on the next slide, what we won't be covering today is editing content in WordPress or troubleshooting a broken site. If you have any questions about a site that you're working on yourself, if we have time, we can go over some specific questions at the end of this workshop. And so that said, I would like to introduce you to our guest today, Tiffany Bridge. She's been using WordPress for about 18 years, probably since the beginning, right? That's almost the very beginning. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, same here. I've been saying 16. I was just like, no, I never using WordPress pretty close to the beginning myself. So we are old school WordPress users here. She is the product manager for WordPress e-commerce at Nexus and a contributor to the hosting team on the WordPress source project. So take away, Tiffany. Thanks for joining us today. Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming in tonight. When Courtney and I started doing this workshop, I had really been thinking a lot about people who walk into WordCamps or walk into WordPress meetups that I've been part of. And they always have the same story, right? They're volunteering for a nonprofit and somebody just handed them the keys to the website. Now they're in charge of the website now and they've never used WordPress before or they've got to do job. And their job is now the WordPress website, but they've never used WordPress before. And they're doing their best. They're going to WordCamps and meetups. And they're not always finding that those workshops are at the level that they need. And so I really wanted to put something together for folks to just, here you go. Here's a WordPress that's already built. You didn't build it and maybe the person who built it before isn't there anymore. And now you're in charge of it. So with that in mind, what I'm wondering is, all right, come on now, has this ever happened to you? Have you logged into your WordPress and seen a mess like this, right? There's all these alerts. They all look important. You don't know what any of them mean. What's a foreign object cache drop in? Honestly, what is that? There's all these little red bubbles with numbers in them and that looks important. Otherwise, why would it be in red? But you don't know what any of that means or what it's for. That's kind of what I want to talk about today. You log into WordPress and you suddenly hit with all of this stuff that feels very overwhelming because it is overwhelming. And I want to talk about kind of how to sort of address those things. So the first thing is, don't panic. It's okay. If the website is working right now, we don't need to panic. It's fine. First though, we're going to get into some vocabulary just to make sure that we all know kind of what I'm talking about as we move through here. We're going to talk about like basic pieces of WordPress. There is WordPress, which is the software that runs your website. It's the software and a database and it exists to put content into the database and bring the content back out and displayed as a website. And inside that WordPress website, you have the theme, which is kind of the little bit of software that covers the look and feel. And then you also have plugins, which are the ways that you add additional functionality to WordPress. If you just installed WordPress fresh, you'd have a blog, basically. But with plugins, you can add all kinds of things. You can add an event calendar. You can add an e-commerce store. You can add an online learning management system. You can do all kinds of things with WordPress plugins. And so those really feature in, figure into a lot of what we talk about when we talk about managing a WordPress site. What we're really talking about is managing all the things you add to your WordPress site. I also frequently refer to plugins as the cause of and solution to most WordPress problems. It's always a good idea to dig into plugins if you're running into an issue. And then, of course, there's the content, right? The texts, the files, the pages, the posts, like all the stuff that makes your website your website, that's your content. And before I go any further, does anybody have questions on anything we've covered on this slide? There is a question if we could make the slides bigger, but I believe you already have a full screen. Is that right? Yeah, the slides are already about as big as my giant, as my big monitor can get. Okay. Yeah, there's a tip from another attendee to minimize the speaker view and should show the slides larger and zoom. So, yes, that's a good tip. Yeah, do that. But we will have, I think these will be downloadable afterwards, yeah? Great. Okay, so I'm going to move forward. All right, so there's your WordPress website. But that's not the only thing you need to know about. You also need to know about, and here I actually have made it small. There's hosting, which is kind of like the house your WordPress lives in, right? Like that's the hosting refers to like the server that is serving your website. That's like the people you pay money to to make sure your WordPress is on the internet. And then, of course, there's also the domain name, which is like the address of your house. It's, you know, example.com. It's your website.com. It's that it's the way it's the thing that you type into your browser's address bar to get to your website. Those things are all like those are all just terminology that you need to know in order to manage a website. So what do you do with all this? Okay, so you've logged into your website. You've seen all this stuff. You don't know what any of it is. We're going to assess it. First step, you got to figure out where your website is hosted. Now, sometimes when they hand you the keys to the website, they'll tell you this. They already know. Sometimes you could ask and they'll be like, I don't know. And if that's the case, there's a couple of things you can do. You can, you can go to whoishostingthis.com and try to figure it out. It'll look at the website. It'll look at the domain name servers. It'll make an educated guess about where the website is being hosted. Is it at GoDaddy? Is it at Bluehost? Is it at LiquidWeb? Is it at Nexus? But if that doesn't help you, if that isn't enlightening, or if it tells you something not terribly useful like Cloudflare, basically what you need to track down is kind of follow the money. Somebody's credit card is getting charged for that website. And you just need to know who's charging it. So figure out who's handling, who would handle the money for that. And that's probably your best bet for figuring that out. Let's just figure out who's paying the bill and then who's issuing the bill. So once you know where it's hosted, you can figure out other important things like are there regular backups being taken of your website? That's going to be really important for some of the stuff we're about to do because if you have a good backup, you can also, you can always recover from anything that you may have blundered into. And secondarily to that, is there a staging site? What's the staging site? A staging site is like a perfect copy of your WordPress website, but it's not your live website so you can break it and no one will notice or care. Like that's the most important thing to know about a staging site. It's the place where it's safe to break things. Something that I really firmly believe is that the best way to learn to use WordPress is to just get in there and start using WordPress. But when somebody hands you a website that's already built and that people are using, that can be really scary, right? Because you don't want to break it. What if you don't know how to fix it? That's what a staging site is for. You can break it over and over again. Break it so bad, you don't know how to fix it, delete it, and make another staging site. And ideally, if you're lucky, the website is being hosted in an environment where there's like a one-click staging feature. A lot of web hosts have these. Not everyone does. It's sort of a feature that is more common on like what's called like managed WordPress, which really just means it's a little bit more money, but there are more features like backups and staging and things like that. But if you're not hosted in an environment like that, there are plugins that you can use to create staging sites. You can take a backup and just restore it on another website that you host somewhere else. There's a lot of options here. It can be hard to know how to do that, but I definitely recommend like finding a way to have like a second copy of the website somewhere so that you can play on and feel free to break. Because like I said, I truly believe the most important way to learn WordPress is to just use it and don't be afraid of it. That's how I learned it. And to be fair, 18 years ago, there was a lot less of WordPress than there is now. And so having a staging site was less important. There were fewer things to break. I still broke them. I broke all of them. I broke a lot of WordPress sites in the first few years that I was using it. So I definitely want to encourage you to really dig in on this question of backups and staging sites because I think it will help you be brave. And that's what you need to be. You need to be brave. Why is my slide not advancing? Great. Are there software updates to be done? Okay. So when we were looking at that slide earlier with all the like the red dots on it, at least one of those red dots is about software updates that need to be done. Okay. Here I'll flip out into, this is one of my demo WordPress sites. You can see here on their plugins, I've got four that need to be updated. That's important. You can see that there are plugins here that need to be updated. The reason that that is important is because the number one cause of damage to WordPress sites from like hacks and malware and stuff like that, it's plugins that don't get updated. So you've got to keep those updated as much as possible. However, because plugins are written by lots of different people and updated at lots of different rates, sometimes it is possible that updating something will break it, which is another reason for the important for the staging site. And we'll talk about that again in a little bit. Do I have access to tech support? Now, some of that is, some of this question is like, what kind of support is available from your web host? They can help a little bit. But the other thing is like, are you lucky enough to work for an organization that has an IT department that's helping support the website? That's very exciting. And that's very important for you to know. Who does your organization call if there is a website outage? Is there somebody who works on it either on a regular paid basis or an ad hoc basis? It's just important to know that. In a lot of cases, there won't be anyone and like, you are now that person. But if there is somebody who is more technical than you that's available, that's an important thing to know because then you know who to call. That's just a good situational thing to be aware of. And then finally, which editor is the site using? And I'm hitting this question here because the editor experience in WordPress can be a little bit fragmented, right? There can be kind of the default. Where did that go? Here we go. The default WordPress editor, the block editor, which is this is what it looks like on one of my demo sites, right? You've got your post information over here. If you clicked this, it would be block information. This is the default block editor. This is the major, this is the default WordPress editor experience currently in WordPress. But it wasn't always. We used to have something called the classic editor and a lot of older WordPress sites are still using it. And it will probably still be in use for a little while. So if your editing window looks like this, this is called the classic editor. And then sometimes because the classic editor lasted so long and WordPress did get that nice visual editing experience when people were ready for it to have it, there are lots of plugins that are also editors. And so you might have something else entirely. You might have something like this. This is an example of a third-party editing tool. And so it's really important to figure out which editor you're using because a lot of the experience of using WordPress is just like Googling up tutorials and figuring out how to do stuff. And you want to make sure that you're looking at the right set of documentation because the documentation of WordPress.org is going to focus on the block editor and occasionally the classic editor. But if you're using, for example, Elementor, you're going to want to make sure you're reading Elementor's documentation and seeking help from their help files because the other stuff isn't necessarily going to be as much use to you. And so that's just a really important thing you need to know. It's like, which editor even are you using? And there are more. There's Fever Builder and WP Bakery. And there's all kinds of editors. And but these are kind of the three big ones, I think. There are a few more, but that's an important question to have answered. Okay. So now that we know whether or not we have backups and we know whether or not we have a staging site and we know where our website is hosted and what editor we're using, it's time to get the house in order. And you'll notice as I'm going through these slides that I just, I love a list and I feel like I don't know about you lists make me feel very confident because I feel like I have all of my ducks in a row. And so that's what we're doing on this slide. First, take a backup. Just take a backup. Ideally, your host will do this for you. Like your host will have the tool available. Like for example, where I work, this is what our backups look like. If I get a backup every night, and if I want to take one that's like right before I get started doing something, I can just click this button here and create another one. Ideally, that's available to you. If not, you're going to want to install like a backup plugin and run a backup that way. And there are again, lots of those, but definitely do get a backup because that's going to be like if something goes wrong and you get worried that you've broken something, the backup is what is going to help you get it back to where it was before. Create a staging site if possible. I hope you have one through your host. If you don't, I believe there are even plugins that'll do that for you. The last one I was aware of was WP stagecoach. I don't know if that's the little thing, but there are ways to do this. You can take a backup and just restore the backup somewhere else. Like I said earlier, you can have a second WordPress. There are places to get to host WordPress very inexpensively if you need to. Like if you have to pay out of pocket in order to get one, in order to get a staging site, you can do that very cheaply if you have to. But please do give yourself a safe playground for this. It's important. And then you're going to start updating things. And when you are new to a site, I definitely recommend the practice of updating your plugins one at a time. And you literally are just going to go through your plugin menu like this. And you're just going to click update and wait for things to update. And then you're going to check the front end of the site to make sure nothing broke. So I've updated a plugin. Now that was a kismet. It's not going to change anything on my front end, but what I can do is just go look at my front end and click through and see if anything broke. I don't have a lot on this site, so there's not a whole lot for me to check, but you get the idea. And then you're going to go back and you're going to update the next thing. And this is a little bit of pain in the neck, especially if you have a lot of these updates to do. But I think it's very important while you're still getting used to what everything on the site does, that you don't do the bulk update at once. You will probably get to a point where you're just up here like bulk actions, update all. I love it. I call that the YOLO method. And I think it's great. I'm actually a big fan of it. But when you're updating plugins for the first time, especially if it hasn't been done in a while, you want to do that. You want to take a little bit more care and ideally do it on a staging site first. Once you've done all the updates on the staging site and they've proved to not be consequential, you can update things a little bit more quickly on live. Though, again, you do always want to make sure that you're checking up on things. You would hate to break something and then walk away from the computer for two days. But that's how you're going to go through that process. And then you're going to note anything to follow up on. For example, some plugins are what we call premium plugins. And that means that the developer of that plugin charges a fee for the ongoing updates to the plugin. And when that happens, there's a license key that you put in somewhere. And when the license expires, like if somebody hasn't paid for it recently, you stop getting updates. So those updates aren't going to run. Just take a note of that because the answer might be that you just need to go buy a license key or figure out who's responsible for updating that license key or buying that license key. The answer might be that you don't need that plugin. The answer might be that your web developer who built the site is supposed to take care of that for you. That's a question that you're going to have to answer. But anything else that you see, like anything else that alerts that you can't dismiss, things like that, just go through and start making changes. In here, I see I've got this WooCommerce database update required. I ran a WooCommerce update and then it gave me this message. And now I've got to make sure I actually follow through on this. And again, this is an area where we just, as you do it, you want to go through and just make sure that nothing on your site has changed. If it does change and you don't want to get it back, that's what your backup is for. And by the way, when you're using your backups, you don't have to restore the whole backup. A thing you can do is download your backup, open it up. And this is maybe a little bit advanced topics. But a thing you can do is just get the old version of the plugin out of the backup and put it up on the server and overwrite the plugin that updated and broke your site. That's a little bit advanced. You have to get comfortable with like FTP and stuff. But that's something that you can learn about in your web hosting portal. I don't want to get too deep into that because now I'm often a tangent about troubleshooting a broken site. And I said I wasn't going to do that tonight. But I find that topic irresistible because it's always where people panic and I hate to see people panic about WordPress. And then you can start exploring your content editing, which is where the fun is in WordPress. I really encourage you, even if you don't have a specific update that you're trying to do, if you've got a staging site, just get into the editor and start writing content. Start inserting things into pages just to see how it works. To me, this is the fun part because especially lately, and when I was first teaching myself WordPress, it was the most basic editor. It was just a text box. It wasn't even as rich as the classic editor was. But now, it's really fun. You get to do all kinds of fun things with it. You can drop in a whole photo gallery. You can drop in a whole block pattern library. It's cool. You can do fun things now that you couldn't always do, that you couldn't always do before. If I want this layout, I can just drop this whole layout in and then just start editing it. Just get in there and start doing it. It's fun. I hope that you find some excitement in learning how to do this. You know, as WordPress has started to change, and we're moving from a state of these classic things where the theme was very locked down and you just had a few options to customize, we're now to something called block themes where you can edit the whole theme in an editor. The last time I played with it, I just started giggling because it was so much fun and it was the most fun I've had in probably 16 years in WordPress. I really want to encourage that sense of exploration, but I want to pause here for a second and just check on questions from people in the chat here. I threw a lot of content at you, so how are we doing? Laura asked if we can use local as a staging area. I've only used local for demos, so I never tried using a staging. Here's the thing. I would not rely on local as a staging forever. You absolutely can't, especially if that's the easiest way for you to get a staging site quickly. Yes, do that. I don't think it is a long-term substitute for a server environment that is as close as possible to the server environment. Your actual site is hosted on. I mean, the idea of having a managed host that has one-click staging is that staging has pretty much the same environment that your existing website does, so it's going to be the most one-to-one correspondence. I don't think local can necessarily provide you with that, but if you're just trying to get in and learn some WordPress and run some tests, sure, use local. Absolutely. Thank you. John had asked on that last slide if there was a problem with the update, what next? I thought you touched on that. Yeah, I touched on that. Ideally, what you're going to do there is restore your backup. There are a couple of ways you can do that. You can restore your whole backup. You could just restore the entire site back to the state that it was before you started doing anything. Now, the disadvantage of that is that you're going to lose anything that you did between the point where you took the backup and the point where you stopped doing things. If there were multiple successful updates in there, you will lose those as well. That's not necessarily the end of the world. It can be a problem if you have an active e-commerce store where there's orders coming in all the time. Another way you can do it is you can download the backup and it'll come in some zipped compressed format most of the time and you open it up and you'll see as you get through the directory tree in the folder, you'll get to where your plugins are stored. That plugin from that backup is the last version of the plugin from before you ran the update. As you get into your web hosting portal, and this is just like I said, this is our web hosting portal. This is just what ours is like. You can get the information you need to use like an FTP client to upload the old plugin to overwrite the new one. That means you have to get comfortable using an FTP client. An FTP client, FTP stands for file transfer protocol. That's just a fancy way of saying it shows you your website in a folder structure here and it shows the folder structure of your computer here and you can drag files in between. A good idea is to get comfortable using one of those before you need to so that you're not doing it like, oh my god, I broke my site and now I have to learn to use an FTP client. That's a thing that is helpful to do. That's another way you can try to restore things without having to restore your entire backup. This is another point about backups to be aware of. It's a good idea to know what kind of backups you have from your host. Like at Nexus where I work, our backups that we provide to clients are what are called block level backups, which means when we restore, we're restoring like literally the bit by bit so that the hard drive is exactly in the same condition. It's an amazing backup strategy in terms of restoring things accurately. It is not a great backup strategy if you just want to fix something you broke real quick because a block level backup can take hours to restore. I can't say that I recommend that for day to day use. In that case, you might want a more plugin-based backup solution. There are lots of plugins that you can use for backups. I know a lot of hosts will say, oh, don't tell people to use backup plugins because they consume a lot of resources and we do that for them. But my thing is, I would rather have the built-in suspenders of backups. My host has a backup. I have a backup that's stored somewhere else. Even if that means you're downloading a backup to Dropbox every night. I just like to have my own backups for anything that's important. I mean, I've got all these demo sites and I don't bother with that because they're just demo sites and I kind of throw them out. But for something that's important, have two backups. Have two backup strategies. That's a great idea. Your backups. We have actually quite a few questions flowing in. Do you want to go over them right now? Yeah, let me place. Let's see. If you have a site that you're no longer using that already has content, can you back up to it and will your new content overwrite the old content? Yes. If you restore a backup to any WordPress, even if that WordPress already has stuff in it, it'll overwrite the old stuff. So if you care about the old stuff, back it up too. But if you're ready to be done with it, yeah, you can restore right over the top of that. Now, how do you know if you have a staging site? That is a great question. Hopefully, your hosting plan has it. A thing that is, it kind of depends from one host to the next, how obvious they make it. But a host that has one click staging is going to show you. Here, I've got staging and dev here in my, and again, this is just our particular portal. I can see that there is a staging environment. On a different site in my portal, I would have a button to create one. You have to look for the feature. If you really are stuck with that, open a ticket with your host. That's what they're there for, right? Get them to tell you. Make them tell you. Where do you store the backups? So a lot of backup plugins will store the backup like literally in the web directory with your website. Don't do that.  Most decent backup plugins will have an option for you to store your backups off site, whether that's like in your Dropbox account, in your Google Drive, in an Amazon S3 bucket, which is a little bit advanced. There are a lot of options for storing the backups. Do not make a practice of storing your backups on the same web server where your website is, because what if something happens and you get hacked, now your backup is untrustworthy. Then what are you going to do? So store your backups somewhere else. There are lots of play. I mean, even if you download it to your local hard drive, that is better than storing it next to your website. That brings up a question that came earlier of someone said, or Desta says, my website got deleted. How do I get it back? Hopefully your host has backups. If it was more than 30 days ago, your host probably does not still have backups. But if it was recently, your host hopefully has backups. If they don't have backups, then I'm very sorry that you may be out of luck. Whether or not your host has backups for you will depend a lot on what level of plan you have. Like there's budget hosts where you're paying like $3 or $4 a month for hosting. They're not doing anything for you. They're not backing you up. They're literally just putting you on the internet and everything else is on you. Whereas if you're paying for something that's a little bit higher end, they may very well be taking backups for you. So definitely do check in your hosting portal for that. If you use the staging site to try out something and you like it, how do you make that the main site? This is such a great question. So smart. There's a couple of different situations. Some hosts have the ability to just push from staging to live. And what that usually means is they will just copy the entire staging site to live to your main site. You want to be really careful with that, right? You want to be really careful with that, especially if you have e-commerce because you might lose orders that way. You want to be really careful with that because if you did any of that like sandboxy stuff we were talking about earlier and like you junked up a couple of pages and then you push staging to live, it's going to push the whole thing, including the junk. So I would say if you did something on your staging site and your staging site wasn't like really fresh when you did it, your best bet is to just do it again on the live site. Does a staging site have to have its own URL and hosting? If you are working with a host that has staging included as part of the plan, that will all be handled for you. It'll have like a temp URL, like these URLs on my site here, this D2DB9. That's what a URL looks like at Nexus before you've put a domain on it. And so this would be what the staging URL would look like for us. And so no matter where you're hosting, there will be something like that. If you are working with a host that does not give you a staging site, you've got to figure out where to host it, right? And you might be able to do it just right there next year or website in your hosting and that's fine.  That's an option. But they don't typically need their own domain name, if that's what you're asking. Like you don't have to go buy like mystagingwebsite.com or whatever. Do I know if Hostgator provides staging? I don't know. I don't know. I haven't looked into what Hostgator offers recently. But if they do, like that'll be like when you click down and like look at like what the features of their plans are, like they'll tell you if they have staging sites because nobody is hiding that information because it's an important feature. If they don't say that they have it, they probably don't. If they say that they do, then they do. But I don't have them to know. I would probably also depend on like the level of plan you purchased from them. Some plans may not have them. Some of the higher end plans may come with that. Look at that. Somebody has posted a link. That's very helpful. Thank you. Oh, that was you, Courtney. All right. We're good on questions for the moment. Cool. So, okay. So, step three, we're just, this is now just, we're going to move forward, right? Regularly manage the site. Make sure that there's a regular cadence of backups and updates. If you've got a host that's backing up for you, they're probably backing up nightly. If you have used, if you have purchased a backup plugin, make sure that you have it configured to backup regularly. Nightly is great. But if, for whatever reason, like storage for that becomes a problem or like performance becomes a problem, weekly is probably okay if it's not a super busy site. And then also make sure that you are regularly doing updates. I like to do updates on sites that are important at least weekly. Some people only do it monthly, but make sure that you are doing it on a regular basis. Don't let your site, your plugins, your themes and stuff get too far out of date. Don't let WordPress itself get too far out of date. What WordPress releases updates regularly that are important to apply, because that's where all your security fixes and stuff are going to be. And you want to make sure that you're keeping up with those to keep your site safe. Okay. And then once you've got that done, you're going to find some tutorials for WordPress in general and for your editor in specific.  And like, I can't cover like every possible permutation of how you would want to like edit your content, right? But I guarantee you, whatever weird specific thing you want to do in WordPress, somebody out there has written an article for it. And the internet is full of those tutorials, learn.wordpress.org, of course, is a great source for learning all kinds of things about your WordPress site. But there are also plenty of other websites. There's plenty of like bloggers about WordPress out there.  And now that you have all of this vocabulary, and you kind of know what they're talking about, you'll find them a lot easier to follow than you might have before this session. And then finally, like leverage leverage that staging site to get brave and experiment. Start or start your own site, set up a WordPress blog, get in there and play with WordPress. It's the only way in my opinion to learn it. Like you can read tutorials till you're blue in the face, but until you're in there, like clicking on the buttons and developing the muscle memory for how you want to use the editor. That's really where you start to become like a competent user, a confident user of WordPress. And also, I just want to want you to know that like, you've totally got this, you can you can do this, you are already well on your way. And I believe in you and I hope you believe in you too. And that is the end of the content I have prepared for you. So if there's more questions, more discussion, would love to open up for that. Yeah, I always like to hear if there's something new that you learned in today's session, feel free to drop that in the chat. And yeah, the floor is yours, folks. Linda, what kind of problems you're having with with customizing your site? Let's talk about it. Oh, that was the best way to find someone to help you. Oh, yeah, that's a great question. The best way. Gosh. Well, it kind of depends on what sort of help you need. Because if you are, if you're looking for help solving a particular problem with a plugin, plugins will have their own kind of support, the kind of means of support. Any plugin that you download from the WordPress.org plug of repository, developers are supposed to support their plugins there, whether or not they do, can be a little bit hit or miss. If it's a premium plugin, you are paying for that support. So definitely chase them for that. If it's problem with WordPress, generally, I've had really good luck just kind of making WordPress friends at my local meetups and word camps. And, you know, even like using Twitter, I know Twitter's kind of having a moment right now, but getting into like social media where WordPress people gather is a great way to do that. If you are on a deadline and you need help, you can always, you can, you can contract for help, right? There's everything from like folks on Fiverr and Upwork. There's also an outfit called Codable that has like developers that you can work with almost like in a like a temp agency kind of format. There are, there are a lot of different service providers for that. And so you can, you can kind of all the way from the like free, let's puzzle it out together up to like, I don't have time for this, let me just pay someone to fix this. You can do that as well. And hey, look at that learn WP even has a quick tutorial on finding help. Thanks Courtney. I think we have folks also chiming in with what they learned today with, you know, questions to you. So staging site sense. Yeah, the developer, the developer for the theme is a good, like if you have a, if you can work with your theme developer, that's even, even better if they're available to support you. How easy is it to change or update your WordPress theme? Yes, you can absolutely use a different theme on a staging site to try it out. And I think you should. A thing that is a little bit challenging about swapping themes on a WordPress site. And this is something that I think they are working on improving, but it has been a little bit of a gotcha with the platform for a while is if you, so you've got your existing theme and you've done all of this configuration on it and it you've got it just the way you want it. And then you swap to a different theme and you play around with it and you don't like it. So you try to swap back all of the settings that you set in the theme before are not preserved. So if you're going to start swapping themes around again, take a back up, take a back up because then you'll have a much easier time getting back to the state you were previously in. Any other questions? SEO and security, are they always covered by a plugin? Such a good question. So there's kind of a few schools of thought on this. In my opinion, a lot of security plugins are meant to be used on that kind of budget hosting where they're not doing a lot for you on security, right? If you are using a managed host where you're paying a little bit more money, ideally what they are doing is they are already monitoring for threats to WordPress and they are already configuring a web application firewall and they are already scanning your site from malware and quarantining things if they find it. However, not every host does that. And so you want to make sure that you know what your host is doing to help with that before you go putting a security plugin on your website because security plugins, like I'm not trying to complain about them, but they can be quite like resource intensive, right? So you don't want to use one if you don't need one. SEO, an SEO plugin is going to give you some settings to kind of help you identify like focus keywords and things like that. But I think the most important SEO is just writing really great content and a plugin can't do that for you. You've got to do that for yourself.  Like that's not how that works. So we have a session on the block editor. I'm sure I think that's a question for Courtney on the block editor. So specifically about creating content, I believe because this question came up earlier, there is one on Learn WordPress. It might be slightly out of date, but I will find that link for you. Yeah, the block editor does change quite a bit. It is one of the fastest moving parts of WordPress right now. But it's in my opinion, it's one of the most exciting. So mostly, and I don't know if that's maybe because I remember like the bad old days of like, you had to like put in a short code any time you wanted to do something the least bit interesting in the website, and like it never made any sense. And so the block editor, like being able to build my website out like Legos is very exciting to me. I just dropped the link in the chat. Cool. Yeah. Right. I think I'm not seeing any additional questions at this point. What was the name of the group of coders you said were for hire? There is a company called Codable. That is, that like specializes in WordPress. There may be others as well. That's the one I happen to be aware of. Will a chat be available to read later? Yeah, we usually don't save the chat, but I can compile these links and share these with all the attendees via the penip.com event or through an email through Meetup and on the discussion board. Gutenberg. What is Gutenberg? So Gutenberg is, so Gutenberg was the kind of codename for the block editor project. And so sometimes you will hear it used just to refer to the block editor as opposed to the classic editor. But since the block editor is now the core default editing experience and WordPress, if you were to install the Gutenberg plugin, what you would be getting is like the beta of all the new stuff in the block editor. And just as a note on that, if you are working on like a production site that actually has to be like working in a very predictable fashion all the time, I would not do that. It is super fun to run on like a personal blog or staging site because you get all the new stuff as soon as it's ready. But it does, it can and does occasionally like change things on the front end of your site unexpectedly. So I wouldn't necessarily run it on a site where you're going to be like frantically having to go back and figure how to fix those things unless you have the skills to do that. It's not necessarily a great plug in to run on like what we call like a production site, but it's super fun for like a personal site where you're doing a lot of tapering. All right. I think I love the painting. Thank you. I love this painting as well. He comes to all my meetings with me. Linda did ask if we're available for consultation. I personally don't do that, do any consultation, but I do recommend, as Tiffany said, going to your local WordPress meetup, even if it's online event or just ask questions on their discussion board. Yeah, even like hanging around on like WordPress hashtags on Twitter has been really valuable for me and like meeting WordPress professionals. I also don't really take on a lot of outside consultation mostly because my job keeps me pretty busy with that. And when I'm done, I'm like, I would like to think about something other than WordPress. Much as we love WordPress. I love WordPress. I love WordPress, but I do need a few hours a day to think about other stuff. Yeah. Thank you for asking. That's very flattering. I think that's it for questions. All right. I have a couple of things to share on the next slide. So something I'd like to ask folks that attend these workshops, if you could fill out this quick survey that I see a link to in the chat. We are constantly trying to improve the resources that we provide to the WordPress community. And we'd like to know how you like to learn. Do you like these workshops? Do you like these video tutorials? Are you a text based learner? Having your answers here will help us like shape what WordPress comes in the years to come. So it would be appreciated if you can fill out the survey. It'll just take you a few minutes. And then on the next slide, just to point you towards learn.wordpress.word again, we have more tutorials and online workshops. You can search for whatever subject you're looking for. If you're not finding the subject you're looking for, please reach out and let us know. You can join our conversations on the Making WordPress Slack, which is where we chat. Contributors to WordPress are all available, not available, but around. Over at chat.wordpress.org. Note that this is not a support forum or anything. This is where we work on the WordPress project. But if you join the training team channel at the chat, this is where we develop the content for Learn WordPress. That is it for me, too. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. If you have any more questions, just reach out via all the different avenues we have here online, which is either Slack or you can find us on Twitter. There is also an email address. I think it's learn.wordpress.org for anything regarding Learn WordPress. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, Tiffany, for presenting. Thank you, Courtney. All right, folks.