Bridging Web2: Apollo award to Wordpress plugin for Textile Buckets

winners-circle Nov 11, 2020

Today, we are continuing our work to spread some of the best projects built on Textile from Apollo, EthGlobal, Hack the Rainbow, and elsewhere. For today's post, we are excited to share the work of @luckyr13, who build a fully-featured WordPress plugin to backup or mirror WordPress sites on IPFS (and soon, Filecoin).

The plugin caught our eye for how simple it made the process of connecting one of the world's most popular CRMs into some of our favorite protocols. The Textile-Tools plugin allows a WordPress admin to store a static copy of their posts in Textile Buckets. We've awarded them for best plugin for a popular developer or designer tool, wohooo!

We asked @luckyr13 a few questions about his work.

Where are you from?

I am from Mexico! :)

How did you get interested in IPFS & Ethereum?

A friend of mine told me about Bitcoin a few years ago, and I told my brother about this miracle coin. We got interested because of the rumors of people getting rich thanks to cryptocurrencies. Who doesn't want to be rich?

I learned some about IPFS thanks to ConsenSys online courses, but I haven't dived into it. There are many things to learn about blockchain that are exciting, but you must invest much time studying to get the best.

What got you interested in Textile?

I discovered Textile thanks to a hackathon on the Gitcoin website. This was my first time on Gitcoin, and I was looking around for projects. There were so many cool challenges and projects that took me time to decide to participate. Textile created the most interesting project that I found that day, so I decided to take my chances.

I got attracted to these projects because they were looking for solutions to real problems and wanted to participate. The name of the challenge that I want to solve is: "Create A Textile Plugin For A Popular Developer Or Designer Tool."

I did some research about Textile on their website and immediately got interested. Textile Tools offers an API to interact with IPFS and Filecoin; this means decentralized storage. It also makes so many things that I haven't covered all yet.

What pain point are you trying to solve with your hack?

For many people, and WordPress is one of the biggest tools out there. It has a great community, and it works like a charm when we want to deploy fast a website. But we have to admit something. WordPress is based on Web2 technologies. So it is old fashioned, don't you think?

On the other hand, Web3 sites are still in their infancy. Web3 is all about Decentralized Applications (DApps). Blockchains are a trending topic but they are so new, complicated, and frightening that not so many people know how they work, how to use it, or even what they are.

When we talk about Web3, most of us imagine sites developed using React, Angular, Typescript, and so on. A gap between Web2 and Web3 exists.

We need more people to join the crypto space. We need more users on our DApps. We need tools that facilitate this for us.

After some research on the WordPress Plugin Directory, I find out that there are almost no solutions to bring blockchain solutions into WordPress.

Maybe we can bring some Web3 magic to an old Web2 WordPress. We need to see more plugins related to blockchain if we want mainstream adoption of this technology.

What is your solution?

My solution is to bring IPFS to WordPress using the tools created by Textile. This solution involves the development of something called a WordPress plugin.

The WordPress plugin handbook says:

"Plugins are packages of code that extend the core functionality of WordPress. WordPress plugins are made up of PHP code and can include other assets such as images, CSS, and JavaScript."

Textile offers libraries for different programming languages like JavaScript. So, in theory, we can develop a WordPress plugin that imports the JavaScript libraries created by Textile to extend the WordPress functionality for IPFS support.

And how about preserving your posts? Maybe you would like to save your publications for posterity. If that's the case, you can generate a static copy of your WordPress using our plugin. This copy is uploaded to a Textile bucket with just a few clicks. Textile buckets are special because they generate unique URLs to access and share your content.

For example, take a look at this page generated by Textile Tools for WordPress: https://bafzbeidcrhu46dzy55ya4j3pb7iqkzqrppr4j5dxvdwxxpzyxn6fgu2dgu.textile.space/textile-tools-demo.html

Why do you think Wordpress users might be interested in your plugin?

If you want to start taking advantage of blockchain technologies and don't want to spend months learning about it, you need to try the Textile Tools for WordPress.

With this plugin, you can interact with IPFS and upload as many files as you want, as long as you don't exceed the quota of 4gb.

Amazon offers a similar service called S3 (Simple Storage Service) that offers simple storage for the Internet. This means that you can upload files to Amazon buckets using a web interface, and they charge you for space usage.

The problem with Amazon is that it is a centralized service. When you upload your data to their servers, you give them total control over your content.

The problem with Big Tech is that they tend to censor people. There's no free speech on social media. If YouTube doesn't like you, they will shut you down, period.

Blockchains were created to be unstoppable. They were created to be resilient and trustable. With this humble plugin, you can get all the power of IPFS into your WordPress website. Start uploading files to IPFS and share the links with your friends, colleagues, and followers.

Be different, be unstoppable.

What are you planning to work on next?

My goal is to get certified as a Blockchain Developer in the next few months. Also, I have other projects with my brother. We have a little company called Criptoalfa. We are best friends, so it is great to work together. We share all our crazy projects and inventions there: http://criptoalfa.com

You can play my first and latest video game here.

Where can people follow your work?

If you are interested in learning more about the project, you can find @luckyr13 on GitHub. Or follow the work of him and his brother at Criptoalfa.

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