This Week in WordPress #140

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 140 entitled black Friday hot or not, I'm joined as always by Paul Lacey, but for the very first time by Christina Hawkins and after a little break, we've got Vito Peleg back as well. What are we talking about today? What we talk about the latest updates to WordPress core.
There's an article over on WP Tavern, which asks us to consider what we should be thinking about during the Thanksgiving. Black Friday season, can sta have got a new APM tool for measuring the performance of your website? Would you like something to be included into WordPress core 5.7 is just around the corner.
Perhaps we can discuss our wishlist Genesis, custom blocks, get to mention as well. And also we talk about the plugin company behind the WP builds podcast for this week. That's WP manage Ninja. And finally there is a monolith. Which appears and then disappears in Utah. What's that all about? Find out, stay tuned this week in WordPress coming up next, this weekend press was brought to you today by WP Ultimo.
They're entering the final week of that black Friday cyber Monday season promo. Hurry up and get your lifetime WP ultimate license with 35% off. That's a saving of $174. Head over to WP ultimo.com forward slash black dash Friday dash 2020. Hello. Hello, hear me. Hello. Welcome. Once again, I keep wanting to say the WP belts weekly WordPress news, but two weeks ago, we changed its name.
It's now called this week and WordPress, which I think is far more pithy, unless you turn it into an acronym. In which case.
Say, so we'll go this week in WordPress. I'm going to do some brief introductions if that's okay. I'm going to ask you just to introduce yourself and give us, give yourselves the elevator pitch. Um, three people on the call with me today. I've got veto palak, Paul Lacey, and Christina. So we'll start with Vito.
Hi, Vito, introduce yourselves. Tell us who you are. Hello.
Vito Peleg: [00:02:09] It's been a while since I've been here, I missed you guys. Eh, I'm Vito, I'm the founder of WP feedback, which is a platform that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:17] helps WordPress
Vito Peleg: [00:02:18] professionals deliver projects faster.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:22] Okay. That is good. That is like super pithy. Really good. Thank you very much for joining us FITO as always joined by Paul Lacey each and every week.
Pleasure to have you again, Paul, how are you doing? Doing
Paul Lacey: [00:02:35] good, but what does pithy mean? Like officially? What does that mean?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:40] Like shorter. Shorter.
Paul Lacey: [00:02:42] Okay. I'm going to try and do a pithy one then. Okay. So Paul here from the Dicky bird studio, WordPress agency in the UK.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:49] That is pithy that's. I would say that is the epitome.
It's very pithy. It's very good. And finally, somebody new that we've not had on before the Christina Hawkins. Tell us about that.
Christina Hawkins: [00:03:03] Uh, yes. I own global specs, internet marketing, uh, here in Houston, Texas. And I'm also a coach. Yeah for WP elevation and I run the Houston WordPress meetup and, uh, on the board of the Houston interactive marketing association.
So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:21] yay.
Really appreciate anybody joining us from silly o'clock and I don't know. Quite what time it is there, but I think it's eight something in Houston. So I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Uh, in the past, we always used to throw up the comments at the beginning of the show because it never, the, the show was live and that was kind of what we did with it, but now we're kind of repurposing it.
So if you're making comments, um, Please. I will put them on the screen, but I might not reference them until we get to the main content itself, if that's okay. Just a couple of brief things. Put the screen on we, our WP bills are kind of like a WordPress network. We produce lots of content each week. We're going to be repurposing this into a podcast episode.
And then on a Thursday, every Thursday, we produce a podcast episode. You can find all of that in this archives button at the top of the menu. Um, we have a black Friday deals page going on at the minute. It's WP belts.com forward slash black. If you're into looking for WordPress deals, then this is the page.
You go look at that one front and center. There's an interesting company right there in purple, and it would be P feedback pro right at the top. That's really cool. Um, so yeah, if you go over to this page, you can click this button and search for all sorts of deals and hopefully they are accurate at the time they should be publish themselves.
So that's what that page is all about. This is the main newsletter though. Go to news dot WP builds.com and you can find our newsletter and look, Paul threw together some album art. I say, look, if you're listening to this, I'm sorry, but Paul has strung together. Some album art, including him, himself, and myself, all kinds of like blued out.
Like we've basically we look like we're under water. Um, but it, yeah, I like it. WP builds news dot WP builds.com to keep up to date with that. Um,
Paul Lacey: [00:05:02] putting bubbles, put some bubbles.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:06] They do that, I reckon. Do we moved over to a new platform and this is the new platform. It just give them a plug for free. I've got no skin in the game.
This is a company called curated.co and it allows you to make these kinds of newsletters with a Chrome extension, which I really like. Um, it just makes the whole process a ton easier. I was doing them previously in Gothenburg, which was totally adequate, but this is just so much quicker. And I really liked, I really liked the way that they look SAS, where SAS is due.
I would say we've got an ad to this week. I hope nobody minds, but we've, um, we've been contacted by the guys over at WP ultimate who want us to mention something because they've got a lot of black Friday deals. So. I'm just going to quickly put this up. I hope you guys don't mind. And, uh, the texts that I've been given WP Ultimo say that they're entering the final week of their black Friday cyber Monday season promo.
Uh, there's not long left. You've got to hurry up and get your lifetime WP ultimate license with 35% off as a possible saving of 106. $74. You can see the link on the page. WP ultimo.com forward slash black dash Friday dash 2020. So yeah, props to WPL Timo. Thank you very much for sponsoring this episode of this week in WordPress, right?
Should we get stuck into it? Why not? Okay, Paul, do you want to kick us off? It's probably not going to be the article that I'm showing on the screen. You're probably going to get stuck into WordPress core. I think I am.
Paul Lacey: [00:06:38] Uh, yeah, there's a, there's an article out on the wordpress.org, um, blog, which is about the, um, the upcoming 5.6 version, which I think last week was in release candidate and they've, uh, Michelle butcher, James has put a blog post out called WordPress 5.6 failed guide.
And I think this is essentially if they happened to be watching last week or listening. And they would have known that we mentioned the release, cut the tape, but we couldn't really figure out what was in it. Um, because you know, we can find the list of different things. So they've kind of perhaps they were listening and they've, they've created a guide to exactly what is in that post.
And I think the main thing about 5.6, which I think is, um, scheduled to release on something of December, I think it was common which date it is, but, um, One of the main things about 5.6 that they highlight right at the top of the article is that the, the, the release squad. So that doesn't mean everyone who's involved in it, but the core release squad, uh, for the version 5.6 is an all woman and non binary release squad.
And, um, They're looking to, and basically there's a bunch of things that they then say that, um, are in this particular release, there is a fair few of kind of technical kind of things that I guess we're just happy that they're, that, that, that get done things like applique, the API is getting improved in a different way.
Um, we've got some also updates or things like, uh, you can set co major versions of the core WordPress itself to have auto updates and stuff like that. Um, the block editor has got a bunch of changes as well. And, um, so with the block editor, what's interesting to me on this one is kind of shows which versions of authors you can handle the phone ring in there.
Sorry.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:23] No,
Paul Lacey: [00:08:24] I'm good. Good. Um, the, it shows that this particular release of WordPress includes. The blocker, the changes from version 8.6 8.7 through to 9.2 of the blocker as a plugin, the Gutenberg plugin. So it kind of shows, you know, how many iterations of the Gutenberg plugin you get in a, in a particular WordPress release.
I imagine in those different, um, releases of the question, Berg editor that, uh, we just get introduced, they get taken away when they're seen that. They're not that useful for instance. So that was interesting to me to kind of. For them. It's kind of summarize that, you know, that this particular release is, is got an amalgamation of a whole load of different, uh Philoctetes or real quick releases.
Then there's a bunch of stuff around site health. There's some stuff around PHB, PHB, eight readiness, and also they're pushing forward their, um, jQuery queer. So. Like calling it part two of a three step plan for upgrading the version of jQuery bundled with the core. So the first step, when they did it last release, obviously broke a lot of websites.
They released a plugin that patched up for people and puts lots of, uh, alerts on your, in your site. And I think that they're hoping that. All the major plugin creators and think creators will continue to update that book begins in readiness for the final part three, which I think is coming in 5.7 next year.
So that's, that's a quick summary. There's a ton of other stuff. And there is a blog post about that on the make.wordpress.org site.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:53] Thank you so much. Yeah. It's been an interesting, interesting, well, I think we've what have we got now? We've got about eight days. So final release for 5.7 is the 8th of December.
If memory serves correctly. Um, thank you, Paul. Thanks for doing that. I really appreciate that. We'll get onto this article. I'm showing an article which was produced by Justin Tadlock on WP Tavern called something to be thankful for. We'll get to that in a moment, but let's split this. Split this piece up into two bits of news, because it is about black Friday and cyber Monday.
Um, we've been talking for the last couple of weeks about all the stuff, which was going to happen during black Friday and cyber Monday. But I just want to do a quick round Robin, if that's all right, what actually did happen? I was very, very good. I bought, um, some hardware, some Google hardware. And as yet I've got about four tabs open for plugins that I'm thinking of buying one is WP live stream, which will enable me to do this.
And I'll never have to enter another shortcode ever again. I've kinda got that one on the hook. I'm thinking about getting that. Another one that I'm thinking about is WP grid builder. I think it's called, it's like a, it enables you to do, it's like faceted search. That's the other one that I'm kind of interested in, but I don't know.
Let's start with Christina. How did you, how did you cope with black Friday?
Christina Hawkins: [00:11:12] I, you know, last year at prior years I was really bad. I would just go bananas, maybe spend about a hundred bucks this year. Nothing. I really kind of looked at everything that I had and either they already renewed last month. Or I just was like, you don't re you know, here's the thing I'm learning about this stuff is that if, if I buy it with the intention that maybe I'll use it, then I don't buy it.
I've just got to stop going down that path and just be like, all right. If I need it, I've thought about it. I really wanted it. Then I'll do it. But this year, yeah, I did. It was pretty good this year. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:47] do you think that it's just wearing thin, do you think that you're just becoming a bit more. Capable of coping with it because you've just been through it a number of times.
Yes.
Christina Hawkins: [00:11:56] Yeah. That's pretty much it I'll bet you this and that. And I have a team now and so I can't just have a. Business. So I have to kind of look at the budget and I have to look at profit ratio and, you know, where's my money going. And so that I look at about weekly. I have an air table, I look at all my subscriptions and it gets pretty high up there.
So I have to kind of push about it. Now
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:18] you actually do that. You, you look on a sort of weekly basis. You check what?
Christina Hawkins: [00:12:23] Yeah. Wow. Is that there's things like the servers, like we, I just, uh, uh, upgraded one of our servers. You know, and that was more important than, you know, a black Friday deal on something. So,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:35] yeah.
Yeah. Thank you. That's good. What about you veto?
Vito Peleg: [00:12:40] And I bought loads of furniture. That was great timing on that. Eh, On software, nothing really at this time, but for philosophy was incredible. We kind of flipped the concept of black Friday. I had a feeling that this black Friday is going to be different than the ones before, because of the pandemic.
And because of just the pandemic that people are more cautious about. There, uh, about their spendings. So it's not really the, everyone was in a thriving mode as it was like last year. It was more of, um, yeah, people are kind of like looking into the different things. So we flipped the concept on et cetera, and released that free domain.
One, one license for free. And that was insane. That was just insane. Like the flood Gates just opened for the past few days, eh, closing it up in a couple of hours also. Uh, but yeah, so for me, this black Friday, I was more on the, on the other side, eh, rather than buying loads of stuff. Uh, you know, even though.
It is fun. It's
Paul Lacey: [00:13:47] fun to do the shopping sprees.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:50] How about furniture? Furniture is a good one,
Vito Peleg: [00:13:52] but yeah, that was a good, that was great.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:53] Yeah. So utilitarian useful. I think that's what I'm
Christina Hawkins: [00:13:58] kind of looking at now is, is just stuff. Furniture personal stuff is probably where I spend some time. Today, I'm finding things like that, but for the business,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:06] right.
I ended up spending more time looking at stuff in shops, you know, like Amazon general stuff, as opposed to software this year. I definitely spent more time looking at that, which is not what, the way I played it before. What about you, Paul?
Paul Lacey: [00:14:20] Um, yeah, it's funny. I wonder if we hadn't had the pandemic, if we all would have done our usual digital spending spree that we normally do.
Cause I'm similar to, uh, Christina in that, you know, normally I would go bananas on, although you mentioned that, you know, you'd go benign this and spend a hundred dollars and. In my circles, that's just getting started. Right? Um, not anymore though. Not anymore. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. We'll probably spend near enough, a thousand dollars on WordPress and SAS type deals and stuff.
And this year I've not bought any, I bought a bunch of X-Box games and I might buy the smash balloon plugging. Cause we do need that for a couple of things. There's Christopher Hughes who probably has spent over a thousand dollars. Easily on plugins and cause I know, I know Christopher spends, Chris spends a lot of money, um, on deals, stocking up for his different clients and stuff like that.
But yeah, I mean, Quite quite honestly, I'm, I'm a bit though out of the bubble these days, I'm not in all of the Facebook groups. And I think that, you know, the way the algorithm works with social media was hyping me up over the last few years to totally feel like I'd be missing out on this or missing out on that.
So, no, I haven't really spent that much money. Uh, like I say, some X-Box games, um, I'm super happy that, uh, veto your, your reverse deal has worked out because I think you do need to, Oh my gosh. Just
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:48] to give context, if you're listening on the audio, Chris is just North of $5,000, Chris.
Paul Lacey: [00:15:55] Yeah, Chris, Chris is keeping the WordPress black Friday.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:07] I do. I read somewhere recently and it kind of goes to the point that Christina was making earlier that somebody said, basically, if you don't need it, I mean, literally needed it. If you know that wasn't the phrase, the phrase was, if you can't use it immediately. Then don't buy it. Um, and
Christina Hawkins: [00:16:23] that was just an interesting, yeah.
I have this lifetime licenses for things that I thought it would use or I'd go back to it. And I never, I never really did.
Vito Peleg: [00:16:33] Yeah. If you don't do implement the something straight away and it just stays on the shelf and that's the problem with software,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:42] just to your point about Facebook ads and things. I, I.
Did I mention this the other week I tried an experiment out or I deliberately went around, searching for things in Facebook that I knew I had no interest in. And, um, and in this case it was kickboxing. I lit, if I see kickboxing, it's like no interest to me. At all. So I went searching for kickboxing and now I'm just flooded kickboxing content, which is great.
Cause I just nap. But, uh, but now the problem with the reverse problem is I'm going to be inundated with this stuff for weeks. All I wanted to do is to go away tomorrow
Vito Peleg: [00:17:19] in a couple of weeks, you'll you'll taking a kickboxing lessons. You got everything.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:25] Well, yeah, I'll say so much of it, but that nicely brings us to the point of.
Why we sort of started discussing that. And it was this article over on WP Tavern. I'll mention the name again. It was something to be thankful for. Do you want to take this one, Paul, introduce it? What it's all about?
Paul Lacey: [00:17:41] So it's a, it's a, it's an article by Justin Tadlock. It's called something to be thankful for because it's obviously a reference to Thanksgiving.
Uh, but actually the article is in kind of two parts because he starts. Mentioning mentioned in the black Friday stuff. And he said that, you know, a year ago they did a Roundup of deals happening throughout the WordPress ecosystem. And he said that this year they're not running that post. And you said that it just doesn't feel right to do that.
He also references, um, Another article written by, um, George from pixel grade that we covered a few weeks ago as well called I discount you discount. We both lose, I know veto knows of this space as well. Now he's seen it. Um, which talks about software. Shouldn't be treated like perishable food, you know, it should be, um, if you need it and that it's, it's not a perishable food item.
So, so basically. That article by pixel grade was very much talking about their software and their products that they sell and how they just disagree with the whole concept of this race, to the bottom discounting. I know veto, you disagree with this stuff as well with your product as well. Don't have that mindset of, you know, we need to do what everyone else is doing and Saudi sort cheap.
So, yeah. So what, what Justin said in the first part of his article is that they've decided not, he's decided not to write that this article with a summary of all the deals this year. And he thinks that over time, over the year, this, yeah, that's gone next year, that's coming. He will highlight the products that you think are particularly useful.
And at the time when they seem to be relevant to talk to the community about. So that's the first thing that it, that he talks about. Um, the second part of the article is the facts, the facts giving part, where he kind of mentions, um, talking about what he's thankful for. And obviously it's a bit of a weird year that we all know about and everything.
And he's, he's saying that they had, you know, his family had to cancel the thing. Skipping reunion that they had and stuff like that because of obvious reasons. And he's also saying that the thing is generally, genuinely, most thankful for after, uh, writing for the. What best talent for just over a year now is just such a wonderful journey has had communicating with the community.
He also says that sometimes he can be a little bit negative about things. I don't agree with that. I don't think he is. Um, But, uh, he's saying that the reason he does that is for the benefit of the community. So he's trying to be as honest as possible about how he feels about different, different things.
And he's basically saying that he's looking forward to next year and that hopefully we've all got a bit more of a sensible head on us. The share, thanks to the. Pandemic that we're not just all racing to the bottom of rural revisiting. What we think is important in life and in business and stuff like that.
That's what I took from his article. So I think there's two points to discuss that there's, you know, has, has the black Friday thing, uh, Is it gone forever now in, in the, in the way that it was. And secondly, you know, what are people thankful for this year? Uh, after everything has happened,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:49] we don't really do Thanksgiving.
In fact, we don't do Thanksgiving at all. It was only the author the other year that I finally worked out what it was about. And it is interesting that the turkeys, right. Well, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, but it was interesting that this shopping sale, I mean, I don't know what it's like in North America, but here black Friday is the only thing of interest at this time of the year.
In other words, you have Halloween well more or less a month away in the past. And then you've got the buildup to black Friday and cyber Monday, which stemmed completely alone. And I just wonder for an American perspective, it must be kind of weird to have. Thanksgiving, which is almost a bit like Christmas, right?
Everything stops. Multiday up to this holiday. I'm not just wondering if everybody's sitting at the phone when they're supposed to be doing their Thanksgiving dinner, checking out the latest black Friday deals, you know, what's the, what's it like.
Christina Hawkins: [00:21:42] Well, like 10 years ago, it was a family time. You're prepping to go shopping Friday.
That's the time you're, you know, you'd have family and they're visiting all of us. Not because I never did it. I was never included in standing in line for any kind of store, but they, you know, they would rush to Friday morning and it was an all day. Wasn't Bonanza, you know, we could get LCD TVs for 500 bucks, you know?
And so it was just this whole, and I think also you in the U S you practically have Thursday and Friday off. So it was the perfect time to have all day Friday shopping. So I don't know if that just kind of migrated over into Europe as these Friday. The Friday thing and that's really just cause we had Friday off.
Um, and then whatever Monday started, what about five years ago when that five or 10 years ago as well, but you know, it's grown now. I think I read, uh, that it was up 3% this year in cyber Monday. Uh, more so than it was a prior year because of the pandemic, but um, yeah, Friday they said, uh, empty. Malls are empty.
You could see pictures of New York city empty. It's just the strangest thing for, uh, a Friday on, on that, something like that. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:59] that is fascinating because it feels to me, like we mentioned earlier, it feels to me as if I'm better equipped. To deal with it psychologically. I don't feel the same kind of pressure.
When I see the slew of emails coming in, I'm far better equipped to just sort of take the deal and look at the deal and be realistic and weigh up and balance it than I ever have been. And I feel that for as time goes on, I'll become only better prepared and probably more skinflint than I am already.
But my kids. My kids who are just old enough to kind of get online and shop they're totally into it. It was like been talking about it for ages. So, you know, as one generation passes out one and another generation just come along the conveyor belt, they're ready, ready to take over. It's not WordPress plugins, but yeah, it's interesting.
It is interesting. I think. This whole Thanksgiving thing is quite nice. There's a few nice comments at the bottom of this article where people like David McCann, who we know, um, mentioned that he's really thankful for Gothenburg and, and various other things as well. I G tofa, uh, was saying all sorts of things that he's happy about, including the WordPress community and so on.
It's just a really nice piece. Okay. Anything to add to that veto? Or do you want us to crack on,
Vito Peleg: [00:24:12] I would say that talking about your point about that Friday, how it is here in the UK compared to it is a, it is an American holiday that kind of came onto here, but we have boxing dates very much the same.
And it just doesn't it didn't they go into the software world yet?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:28] Yeah. Boxing day.
Vito Peleg: [00:24:35] But, uh, but, but I think that the point of it is, or the w the reason why it became such a big thing, and it's a, it's a thing it's like, It's a holiday. It's like the software peoples already, or the product makers, they all over the world. Um, there's another one in China. Like the bachelors, the bachelors day, China, isn't it, something like that yet.
So, uh, they, they, they do these kinds of things as a way of pushing, um, attention or grab grabbing the attention of a lot of people at the same time, because. People's people's attention span is getting shorter by the minute, right. As, as a, as a technology and as we all kind of evolved and, uh, it's very hard to grab someone's attention for a sustained amount of time and black Friday.
I think black Friday, cyber Monday, these types of holidays are a great opportunity for product makers to really, um, a be out there because that's a time of year where people are actually. Looking at, I think that a lot of it might not be as, uh, as insane as it is. It's been in previous years and so on, but still most people have 300, 500 bucks in their pocket that they know that they're going to spend over this time, which means that they're going into, um, into like research mode, trying to figure out which.
Software, it deserves my money or which software deserves my attention. Uh, so it's a beautiful time for product makers to really, uh, try and stand out, eh, doing thing. That's what, that's what we try to do. Try to kind of when the ocean is completely red, because every product in the world is promoting at the same time, we tried to just.
Dive deeper. Uh, but not from the, from the point of a discount, but from the point of understanding that people will give us their attention and how can we serve them in that, and not only compete on these $300 that they have now, but they're going to have to do it. That was more next month also, and that you might get, but if you lose it now, you're probably not going to get it then.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:42] Yeah, it's really interesting in that. I just see. This avalanche of email, that's kind of my experience of black Friday at the moment is, uh, an avalanche of email. Like if I have not my inbox now, Yeah, I've got about 25 on open today. I mean, I'm subscribed to every list, so I'd probably have a dip, slightly different experience.
And I don't unsubscribe to anything because I want to know what's going on right in WordPress, but it is just like cutting through that noise is so difficult. And you know, you basically got the name of the product as a subject. Sorry. As the, you know, the person sending the email and then you've got like four words probably.
Yeah. Four words, and then I'm lost. You know, say I'll read it and then it just goes away. So it's just tough. It's really tough. I do feel a bit sad, um, for the, you know, the multitude of plugins out there that are trying to make some noise and get themselves recognized. And what have you, and this, this must be harder than, than anytime.
Yeah. Anyway, go and check this out to color. It was really cool. Nice really nice piece.
Vito Peleg: [00:27:35] So what I'm saying is that he's actually a lot easier than any time, any other time of the year. And that is something to consider, especially, I know you're working on a SAS yourself, so probably to start working on your next deals, black Friday slapped the, and Nathan.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:50] Yeah, that's it, it begins tomorrow. Yeah. Um, do you want to take the next one as well? We're going to move on to a different article, which I think is a really nice one. It's just in toddler. If we can, um, with WordPress 5.7, which is just around the corner, the articles called wishlist, save block editor, settings per user.
That kind of, it isn't really what we'll discuss, I suppose. But yeah, I'll leave it to you, Paul. I think somebody, I don't know. I think it might be you veto the, um, the mouses. Quite a noisy that's okay. There we go. That way, my massive
Vito Peleg: [00:28:24] pad, then
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:26] you bought the expensive, noisy mouse that you
Paul Lacey: [00:28:32] need to get a nice silent mouse deal on Amazon.
Why not?
Vito Peleg: [00:28:36] I, I, you know, I used to have like this galaxy massive, eh, like mousepad that went all over the table. Yeah, but it just became so dirty. So when we moved, I just checked the weight.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:51] yeah. Right. It's over to you, Paul, which
Paul Lacey: [00:28:54] year? So the article from, uh, Justin Justin's done, I think all of them this week. Uh, from, from the ones that we covered on the Tavern for, for sure. Um, it's, there's this kind of a call for, uh, the ability for the general settings and the block editor for five point for WordPress 5.7, that you can save the general settings by user.
Um, it's. Not really justifying an article in itself. I don't think, but I think the article is really saying, what do you want for first and 5.7, great Goodson bag or, sorry, WordPress. Um, what's on your list. And I mean, I can kick off with, with what I want having started to use it a little bit more, um, Personally if, uh, ma if you're listening show you are what I'd like you to push through, regardless of, um, whether anyone else agrees a little bit, like what you did when you went full screen mode, could you make it?
So there's a quicker way for me to get straight to the block patterns because I'm using the block patterns a lot, and I'm showing clients block patterns, and I'm generally pressing plus moving, press browse. All right. Going to the patterns tab and then choose my pattern. So if you could do something about that map, that'd be absolutely fantastic.
5.7, just push it through, push it through like the last time.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:15] Yeah. Yeah. I like it. No, that's a really, that would be a really useful feature. I think I'll do mine next because, um, I'll give you the other two chance to think if they've got something up their sleeve that they quite like work. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:30:28] Can we just say that Chris is just coming out with more honesty and he's just pushed up his, um, his budget.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:38] Hold on. Let's let's close the screen in moment. And uh, all right, here we go. Let's go back to the story from a moment ago. What have we got Chris Hughes. Oh, okay. Here he comes here. He comes by EDD EDD, $1,200 on EDD. 1500 on public connect app Sumo. You spent over a one and a half thousand dollars funnel to start, and they say says it's probably narrative,
Christina Hawkins: [00:31:05] Chris.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:09] Okay. But now he's back down to earth. Look, full screen mode is highly annoying. My, um, my wish would be to have a usable excerpts. Section in the Gothenburg post because I always fell out the excerpts to every single post that I write. And it's always longer than the space provided because I've got a few plugins which push that right to the bottom.
It means that when you
Paul Lacey: [00:31:36] fill it out,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:37] It just fills it up too quickly and it doesn't expand. And if you try to expand that anyway, it just doesn't work. Can we please put it somewhere more useful or at least make it three times as high? So Matt, if you're watching, please could we have the, an excerpts box, which is three times as high or some kind of false screen,
Paul Lacey: [00:31:58] but we'd break.
That's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:00] what we all really want a full screen. That's that's about right. Okay. Christina, any suggestions for five points?
Christina Hawkins: [00:32:06] Oh, stop asking me to get a tour of Gutenberg. Every time I load
Paul Lacey: [00:32:10] my screen,
Christina Hawkins: [00:32:14] click out. I know it's half a second, but every time and again, I manage 120 websites. So it's just like, Oh, there it is. Again, something as well as the full screen. Like I hate not seeing, I want my full screen and I have to say, my clients would say the same thing. They're a little annoyed with the extra clicks you have to do to do what we used to do.
Very, very simply. So I love blocks. I'm I'm more and more becoming a fan of it and I like it, but there's another thing that. Kind of is annoying, is the blocks separate blocks per paragraph. Right. And so, yes, it's kind of nice. I can move them up and down, but I wish there was some feature I don't have separate blocks.
Like it just, just a block of all my texts and not every time I hit enter a new block shows up. Um, it just sometimes makes it hard if I need to make edits and changes. The third thing is HTML mode. I feel like that's an extra four or five steps for me to do HTML mode and it's easy for me to see it, but when my clients try and do it, they don't, they, they, they liked the old text, HTML tabs.
And I, it's hard for me to explain why they switched it out. Um, and since, and even the HTML block editor of maybe one block, it's just not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for more of a, a bigger viewpoint. Um, so yeah, there's just got somewhere tweaks to do on it, but
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:42] I'll tell you what, Matt, Matt's got his work cut out this week.
Several orders coming from, from all of us. This is
Paul Lacey: [00:33:50] what I loved about that was. I'm just shocked, Christina, that you're struggling to explain to your clients the reasons why WordPress has changed some things and the way they have. But that's, that's pretty much my day as well. Introducing the bucket. It's busting the bucket of try again.
Christina Hawkins: [00:34:09] Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:10] yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:34:10] But I'm sure it will get there yet, but it is, you know, so Paul, why, why is this like this. Well, well, it's probably best we don't get into it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:21] Yeah. The truth is you don't know why it's like that, then you, you didn't even know it was coming to be like that, you know, just, Oh, well it just showed up today basically.
Um, Burnett says he doesn't like it either, but the handling of metadata is even worse. Okay.
Christina Hawkins: [00:34:37] Yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:34:38] definitely. The metadata things like ICF pods kind of things.
Christina Hawkins: [00:34:42] The permanent
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:43] care on a roll
Vito Peleg: [00:34:45] that was mine.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:50] Now let's finish Justina's first, then we'll come back
Christina Hawkins: [00:34:54] the, learn more about permalinks and the permalink itself. How many times have I clicked that dag on what is a permalink and not promote the actual link itself? Yeah. And it's not clear without showing a little, uh, editor icon on there for my clients that this is where you can change your file name.
Like they can't, they don't understand that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:14] I remember in the previous version, so I guess 5.5 and before you could edit it right above the sharpener.
Paul Lacey: [00:35:20] Yeah, which was the,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:22] it was, as soon as I saw that, I thought, Oh, that's a good idea. And then six weeks later it's Oh, that was a bad idea.
Paul Lacey: [00:35:31] Do you actually
Christina Hawkins: [00:35:31] be the ones to answer questions?
So it takes a lot of time. Every time I get an email from a client, Hey, what do I change the file name?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:37] So yeah. Know what? It just opens up a can of worms. Doesn't it. The more you think about it, the more things you can sort of get, uh, get. You know, uptight and it's interesting. Cause Justin does make the point, as Paul said, you know, you sort of feel sometimes he's been critical, but it's not really easy.
We just offer useful
Christina Hawkins: [00:35:56] feedback with somebody about this
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:58] that's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. Veto off you go.
Vito Peleg: [00:36:02] So I have one about the link so I can never get to the page. You know, it's always like, eh, you create a page and then there's like seven to 10 seconds of the mouse going around, like,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:14] Oh yeah. The one around you.
No,
Vito Peleg: [00:36:16] no, no. My cursor, you know, just trying to find where
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:20] it is
Vito Peleg: [00:36:21] around the page. What was it again? It wasn't, again, give me a good three. Eh, but, so that's what, that's my thing about within bed, but I would say like that bigger problem, um, Eh, for me is they're not notices. I think it just got really out of hand and this is definitely something that they need to take care of, um, ASAP, you know, like you go to a page, you go to a website in the, you have like 20.
You know, it's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:48] crazy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're using something like main WP or managed WP, which has kind of silently updated scores of things. And then you finally log in, there's quite a few things to dismiss it. We talked about this. Was it last week, Paul, did we go on about
Paul Lacey: [00:37:03] this last week?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:04] Yeah. I said, I don't know if anybody agreed with me, but I thought it might be a, quite a nice idea to have a notifications menu in WP admin, where all of that stuff goes, you know, there's already. Yeah, no. I mean, for adverts and, you know, promos and updates and all of that just goes into this notifications area and.
Yeah. Anyways.
Paul Lacey: [00:37:25] So we suggested that you could, you know, decide to dismiss or marketing messages. You could see it because I think the reason we talked about it was because there was an article about, um, should there be a notification when a plugin changes, ownership.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:38] That was it.
Christina Hawkins: [00:37:39] That was right. Yeah. Yeah, that's a L yeah.
If you could just have a little bell, like most other SAS programs, red icon that says here's all the recent notifications. One of my programs. Yeah. But when a client logs in there's like five and it's actually pushed everything down and I get an email that says, do I need any of this stuff? What do I need to do with this, Mike?
All right. Another email, everybody.
Vito Peleg: [00:38:04] Right for yourself, it, me out. But like, and, and also there is no, um, hierarchy to those notifications. So some should be there, let's say socks or something. That's cool. You know, but there is no differentiation.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:17] Yeah. That's a good point. So basically this notification is, is pro admins only. And you know, maybe somebody will abuse that and put an advert in for any user role, but, you know, they quickly get.
Roasted didn't they appropriately. Yeah. And if you go to those SAS products, it's like that, that list of notification just goes on and on forever, doesn't it? You know, it's not like it's deleted, I suppose you can dismiss them. But in my case, the SAS app that I'm thinking about, it just, they just keep scrolling so I can just keep going.
So there's a history of them
Vito Peleg: [00:38:47] out. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:49] Then we've just solved the world.
Paul Lacey: [00:38:54] Not
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:54] be put in charge
Vito Peleg: [00:38:59] black on it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:03] Ah, right. Okay. Let's go back to this
Paul Lacey: [00:39:05] way. That, that it's a tool that you can use to. Have people respond to what the user interface is like on something like a website, for instance, does anyone know
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:20] about that?
Vito Peleg: [00:39:21] I even heard that during the promotion and there's only a few licenses.
Paul Lacey: [00:39:29] If you're listening, gets a dopey feedback and
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:34] give some feedback about the work
Vito Peleg: [00:39:36] about the UI.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:37] That's nice. Nice. Right. Okay. We're going to move it on. Um, Let's go for this one. This is our third, just in Tagalog piece. Wow. We really are going soup to nuts on Justin and WP Tavern. This one's called build editor blocks for clients with the Genesis custom blocks plugin.
There are actually two pieces about Genesis this week and I've failed to put both of them on the screen. But anyway, Paul, this is you again. Yeah, that's good. And if you've got a history with Genesis, cause I really don't know a
Paul Lacey: [00:40:08] little bit. Yeah, I did. I did dabble with it for a few sites at one point. And um, and then I switched to generate press for awhile, but I enjoyed working with Genesis because it's very, it was a very nice way to build websites.
I think it was kind of like an artisan way to build websites. Um, yeah. But I needed to get things done quicker. So I sacrificed quality for time. Noah didn't if any clients are listening. I, uh, of course now, um, but I think, uh, what Genesis, obviously, studio press was, uh, was bought out by Duke engine. That's right, isn't it.
And then obviously Genesis has always had a very, you know, a Genesis way of doing things and it is one of the most popular, uh, theme frameworks in the whole world, history of WordPress, but everything has changed so much now. Uh, Genesis has got to. Stay relevant. So what these two articles is about, there's two articles.
There's two things that they're doing in studio or Genesis. One of them is that they're creating a block-based, um, thing, which is the other article, but I'll just briefly mention that one. They're creating a purely block-based theme. And obviously they also acquired Automic box blocks, which I think they've called Genesis blocks or studio press blocks or something like that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:27] Genesis, let me just get that right, because got Genesis custom blocks.
Paul Lacey: [00:41:31] Yep. So they're trying to reinvent a Genesis way of doing block-based, uh, websites so much so that they've, they've built this, uh, plugin. Um, I'm not sure what its official name is going to be called, but currently it seems to be called Genesis custom blocks.
And essentially what it does is if anyone knows how to create blocks as a number of ways that you can do it, one of them is just by hand coding them and you need to know some Java script for that. And for those people that don't know how to do that, there is some solutions out there. And one of the big solutions that a lot of people use is, um, advanced custom fields, for instance, to which you can use to.
Create custom fields and then assign those to custom blocks that you create. There's other ways I know Bernard will be saying in a minute in the comments about pods and stuff like that. So there's a number of solutions that don't require you to know any Java script and basically use PHB to create the blocks.
But again, you don't need to know PHB either because there's a custom user interface for it. Um, So Genesis, I think they, they like to have it all in. So, you know, you, you, you can use the PHP hooks that we provide. You can use the blocks that we're providing. And now they're saying, and for the custom fields in your custom blocks, you can use our custom block creator plugin.
So instead of just promoting the ACF, you can do it with ACF pro because I don't think they want users to have to buy another product, which might get acquired by a different hosting company one day, who knows, uh, they're creating their own solution. So with this particular plugin, it looks pretty good, but it's a long way behind the competition.
Like I say, what you can do, you can create, for instance, your own block, you can assign a background image to that, so that every time a user drags in that block, they're filling in the different boxes and you can decide how that's outputted on the front end. So it's interesting that they're trying to stay relevant, um, these days and my thoughts on it really when I, when I was thinking deeply about this was I really think how WordPress has changed.
It's. Very very difficult for one plugin like studio press or Genesis or theme to be as huge as it was back when it was massive. I think the days have gone. I have a huge WordPress plugin, a huge WordPress theme, absolutely dominating because it's opened up the field so much. So, so maybe this is kind of Genesis trying to stay relevant and shift.
I don't know what the real Genesis users think about this. Cause it's such a shift in the way they do things. So it's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:13] full on, isn't it full on in with blocks that I'm currently showing on the screen? We've talked a minute ago about Justin feeling. It was sometimes a little bit critical. There is absurd thing in the tail, in this article, which is entitled the big problem.
And he he's very, he's very. Careful with his language. This is about us, about us crosses. I've seen Justin ever get, and I've quote, he says the plugin commits the greatest sin of WordPress development. It fails to, you can only have this on a WordPress blog or podcasts. Can you, it fails to prefix or namespace its custom functions.
So they use things like. Block on the score field and block on the score value. And they're completely global, which obviously kind of stops the Guttenberg team, uh, in the future using what would appear to be fairly useful names that they might want to keep for themselves. So, you know, block underscore field that.
Seems like it could be quite useful elsewhere block underscore value. Yes. As well. But anyway, so if you're using this, just be mindful, maybe they'll namespace space, the in the future, and that problem will go away. Christina,
Paul Lacey: [00:45:20] I was going to say a worse, worst sin than that is the classic editing, the core files of WordPress websites when you start doing it.
So just in probably it's probably a bit more advanced than didn't even ever occur to him that, that. Actually happens.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:37] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, Christina veto in any order, just have our interrupts first, if you've got anything to say, if you don't, we'll just move on.
Vito Peleg: [00:45:47] I'm going to talk about what the poor mentioned here, when it comes to the considered the consolidation of, uh, of, uh, of the industry and our companies.
Uh, you're saying it's going to be hard for companies to become big. Going into the future in this space, because I guess it's, uh, too saturated, right? That's the that's, that's what you had in mind
Paul Lacey: [00:46:08] for. Yeah. Yeah. So changed and it's, uh, it's I don't think you can, you can absolutely dominate and capture a, such a huge audience anymore
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:18] theme
Paul Lacey: [00:46:19] in particular with a theme or a giant plugin or something.
Yeah.
Vito Peleg: [00:46:22] Right. So like that, that's the, I think that's one of the beauty of, uh, one of, one of the most beautiful things about WordPress that, uh, eh, everything can happen. In this aspect because it's open source and whereas a lot about rely a lot on the community and Goodwill from the community. Uh, some things can really take off.
And I just read an article about that, a mental, which 50 million AI, uh, you know, it's like Zapier status, you know, like this is stuff.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:52] Insane.
Paul Lacey: [00:46:53] I forgot about elemental
Vito Peleg: [00:46:56] rather than you
Paul Lacey: [00:46:57] about that.
Vito Peleg: [00:46:58] Yeah. So like when they, they all, they all big exception, they over there, but, eh, eh, but with money coming in food from hosting companies, like, uh, with, uh, uh, with this platform, for example, and this thing can definitely happen again and again.
And, you know, I even think that the tools that we really take for granted nowadays, I was just going to this, not maybe not disappear, but they're not going to be a big thing as they work. Another good example is a Yoast and the rank math. And what happened over the past couple of months there, you know, when, when we were in a, in a word campaign European last June, eh, they were just starting off.
Right. And now this is like a massive, massive thing. So, um, yeah. Anything is possible, man.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:45] Christina.
Christina Hawkins: [00:47:46] Uh, I haven't used, um, Genesis in a while. I think since about three years ago, I was all Genesis all in on Genesis. And then I think BeaverBuilder kicked in. So I've been full on Beaver builder for a while, especially when they came out with a femur Beaver Redeemer that changed everything.
I was like, that's crazy. And so I kind of left. Studio, but I think it goes back with Paul and Buda. What you guys are saying is, you know, to be relevant, they have to really kind of keep up. I think things are changing very, very quickly. And I feel like Genesis kind of missed the Mark as a feel like it's like a blockbuster situation, you know, they were, they had the.
The skill, they have the developers, they have the time, but they just, they missed something. I don't know. Um, somewhere along the way, they didn't quite get the notification that the page builders are coming up. And so I think, um, they just, I feel, again, I feel like it's a blockbuster thing. They, they were really good.
They still are. Um, and there's still some hardcore Genesis fans and it's a very, still very clean theme, clean code, which so, so important nowadays. Um, but. Uh, yeah, I just, I don't know. I kinda went to them, like, why would you do block field block value? Like what were they thinking?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:59] But yeah, that's a big deal, actually.
Christina Hawkins: [00:49:02] I don't know. Yeah. I'm surprised WordPress, the community hadn't already used those fields. I'm a little like,
Vito Peleg: [00:49:09] where are we plug? Is this yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:13] Um, yeah, everything that you just said, Christina kind of mimics exactly what I think. And I'm going to. Preface this with saying it's probably what Paul thinks as well.
Cause you know, literally, you know, along comes BeaverBuilder and both of us kind of dropped everything. I didn't have a great heritage before then in WordPress anyway, but I know Paul did and it'll just change for me at that point. It just feels like Genesis isn't. It was being talked about everywhere.
You know, there were just articles coming up everywhere when I came into the WordPress space and it feels like it's going, it's gone the other way. And now maybe they're trying to clear it back, but with the pockets that WP, um, I would say, yeah, WP engine have got, who knows anything is possible. You can maybe spend your way back into the game.
Um,
Vito Peleg: [00:49:56] I think it's a lot of, lot of, um, a, a lot of it is a matter of mentality. You gotta have the startup mentality to stay ahead of the curve, you know, Cause, uh, if you let yourself, uh, uh, you know, like, uh, rest on the laurels, eh, then, then people are just gonna ride past you. This is exactly what happened in this case and blockbuster as well.
Eh, you always have to keep, like, you always have to keep that kind of innovative mentality. Within the business. I think it's one of the best decisions to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:28] make it
Vito Peleg: [00:50:29] a core value, staying innovation innovative. So that this way you have that as a, as something that you, that you really contemplate about or.
Constantly like on a daily basis, how can I be ahead of the curve instead of how can I just do what I'm doing,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:46] right. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think the agile nature of these things is often what does it right. You know, along comes Netflix and probably blockbuster just thought, well, there's some probably not work out for them and let's just stay the way we are.
And, uh, you know, they could have saw
Vito Peleg: [00:51:01] it so easily stopping. With their mailing list, you know?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:07] Yeah. It is, it is amazing.
Christina Hawkins: [00:51:11] The flip side of that, and it goes back to Beaver builder and Elementor and all these page builders, it's been about three or four years and, and Gutenberg is now out. And I don't see a lot of cross working with, with Gutenberg block editor.
So wherein is. You know, these page builders going to start figuring out how are we gonna work with Gutenberg? How are we going to work with lock editors? So I think, hopefully they're thinking about that, but until there's going to be another company, if they don't, there'll be another company that's going to come right along and say, I got the next greatest thing.
It's BeaverBuilder and Gutenberg all-in-one and yeah, well now I can't jump ship because so many websites on BeaverBuilder, you know, licensed goes with it. So I'm hoping, but that's not to say the next iteration and the next. 10 years or five years, whatever of, of new websites that I start to build that has that new, because it's just better.
And it's cleaner code it's faster. Performance is more excellent and I can do more with it. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:08] do you know, that's really interesting. I think the, the legacy is what keeps a lot of these things going. So I am, I'm wondering how many new websites get built with Genesis and how many websites are. Every year was updated to the latest version of Genesis, a good friend of mine, David warms, or here I do the podcast with, he's got a whole slew of Genesis websites.
You won't build anything with Genesis to my knowledge these days, but he'll still be. I don't know if he's paying for his Genesis license or if he's all in, on a lifetime deal or whatever, that stuff's just going to stay on Genesis. And he's thankful that it was so good. Cause he says it never breaks.
Everything you built is going to be Beaver builder and his favorite theme, whatever that might
Christina Hawkins: [00:52:48] be there was, there was, um, Genesis and then BeaverBuilder came out with a very simple plugin. So I had Genesis. Websites with the Beaver builder, you know, editor inside the plugin. And that was great. But then I went full on, um, but just, just, just a few folks know, and developers know that it's not going to stop me.
So Beaver builder starts to go downhill. It's not going to stop me. I'll just have to keep maintaining those, but I will go and get a better theme. It's if it improves performance, improves my talking to my clients time and I get a better product out of it. I will switch over, but, um, Am. I like, I'm not switching to Elementor cause it's like, The same to me.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:29] Just to an important news update from the spending review of Christopher Hughes, uh, is for Beaver builder as well. Uh, it's just admitted. They just keep coming. What we need is a sort of an annual budget, a bit like the, in the UK Ritchie sooner, the chancellor, the Exchequer stands up and gives us the load.
What we need is an annual Christopher Hughes spending review. Yeah,
Christina Hawkins: [00:53:59] it's a question. If Genesis is so good, why switch of Beaver builder? It was a completely different tool. It's just, Genesis is one tool. BeaverBuilder is a totally different tool and it just did way more.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:10] I missed that one. I'm sorry. Who was that?
Christina Hawkins: [00:54:12] Shannon O'Neill.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:13] Uh, okay. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:54:15] Um, Peter goes on to say, Genesis, doesn't have a page builder.
I think. Um, she's answering to show on as well. And, um, but in a way they're trying to kind of. Kind of unknown, reverse engineer, one with the purchase of a atomic blocks and a block based. So you can see kind of see what they're trying to do, but they don't have the leader anymore. Brian Gardner isn't part of the situation, you know, he's and any last week we featured one of his tweets where he was kind of laughing at the, uh, you know, him trying to just use the block editor and trying to figure out how to do something.
And so, um, Yeah. You know, I think if some, if somebody invented a user interface that was as good as BeaverBuilder or good as adamant or, but it actually, you made use of blocks. So it just said, you know what? The block editor, isn't really working as a UI. We're going to make a UI that feeds into it. And you can switch to the backend a bit like when Devi, you know, DV still does, doesn't it, it has its front end and its backend.
And so does dopey bakery because those plugins came back far enough to not our front end editing. So if someone. It feels to me that that's going to happen with the buck editor over they'll do it themselves, or somebody is already working on it and is building a front end UI to do what happened with DV and dopey bakery to give us a front end, usable front end.
Um, wouldn't
Vito Peleg: [00:55:45] that make more sense for Goodwill to do it
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:47] from the
Vito Peleg: [00:55:47] beginning? Because everything went to the front end. Anyway, it is as a logical step because the scripts are running on the front end. Uh, eh, everything is happening as it should. You can't do you can't get the same experience in the backend as you would with them on the phone.
Uh, so I, I didn't get that step from the beginning. It should have been ended with good with Gutenberg. You go to the front like Beaver builder or elemental or these guys.
Christina Hawkins: [00:56:12] Right.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:13] Great. Um, Andrew Palm has mentioning Gothenburg hub, which gets quite a lot of attention from Justin. Justin Tadlock does actually talk about this quite a lot.
So we're just very quickly show you this project, which is really nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, just like. Lee, if there's one person on this planet, apart from Vito. Who doesn't sleep and that's not because of his new child it's because he just doesn't asleep. Um, it's, it's this guy money, a commodity, just like how many things can you do at once?
Paul Lacey: [00:56:45] This is his as well. Wow.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:47] I'm sure this is right. Isn't this money. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just a ton of amazing resources, basically switch, switch, Gothenburg on and go to this website. Find what you like copy a bit of code, paste it in and you're off to the races. It's really good. Um, and Justin has been banging the gong of it for a while and like really begging him up, which I think is well-deserved.
So that's good. And boat, cop.com. It's very rare on this podcast that we successfully have a segue and I had one. And it's gone. I've completely forgotten what it was. Um, it was all to do with the fact that, Oh, I know, I only know it was that some companies can come out of apparently nowhere and suddenly become like ubiquitous and you can't stop hearing about them.
And the lawsuit was about with this, this lot. This is a WP Bill's podcast episode. I mean, you know, we did a podcast with, um, Juul from. Uh, fluent forms, fluent forms do fluent forms. They do Ninja tables. They now do fluency, RM. This is one of those companies where I've I've basically, if they build it, I'll buy it.
And a year ago, I don't think I'd heard of them. And now everything that they do. So these are one of the companies that have maintained in my Facebook group. It does just go to show that you can, like, who would have thought that you could come along with a plugin. That is a formal course. Yes, get a decent stab at the market share.
And it was, it was an intelligently low lifetime, which got it. I think a lot of people interested and then came up with a CRM product this last couple of months, which has really got some great plaudits. I have a copy of it. I haven't deployed it. So I can't mention it really, but I think it speaks a little bit to what Vito says.
Maybe you can't become the only one that anybody's talking about. Like. Like Genesis did, but it does speak to the fact that these guys, they have been able to, um, you can't really see a lot on the screenshot anyway, it's a podcast canvas into it.
Vito Peleg: [00:58:47] Um, because the market,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:48] yeah, you can do it. It is, it is possible.
But I wonder, I do wonder if. If there's a ton of people, who've tried to crack plugins, let's say forms, who've just fallen on their face and that about a stout, a good tailwind and good marketing strategy. Great team, listen to the, listen to the feedback from their audience and so on and just. Anyway, there you go.
Just,
Paul Lacey: [00:59:12] you know, plugin that company, for instance, they've got, um, they've got something right. Uh, for sure. And the two things that I notice about that company is number one. Um, they utilize their personal brand quite a lot. So in the, in the form space, you could say that's a totally crowded market, but you know, it's difficult to name.
Someone who is leading one of the foreign companies. It's uh, I think it was one that got bought out recently. Um, the gravity forms is obviously the most famous form plugin, but. I think the founder of gravity forms is kind of notoriously, um, quiet doesn't really come out and say much in the community so much.
And, um, those guys are pretty vocal in the communities and stuff like that. And the second thing that they've got, um, is that they're able to see what their predecessors did without having to go through that whole learning curve. And, um, You know, that's kind of what veto you were able to benefit from that, you know, there's a bunch of different plugins.
Well, there's like probably one WordPress plugin that you compete with. And then there's a lot of SAS products that you compete with and you, you know, you can see what those people have done. And add personal brand to it. And guess what? That's what you did veto and it worked out pretty well for you as well.
So I think that is like a way to do things now is to, you know, sorry,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:37] sorry. I have to, I have to interrupt. We, this. Uh, smash bulleted,
just so that, you know, uh, that's
Paul Lacey: [01:00:51] so good
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:53] to everything that we say you bought this year. You know, we could've gone so in the opposite direction, but it's lovely. I don't know. He's got a good sense of humor.
Vito Peleg: [01:01:09] Walk away.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:12] I'm sorry, I, that was, I had to do that. Um, but I think Beto, you were about to speak and I apologize for that.
Vito Peleg: [01:01:17] And I, I was, I was got to, uh, was put to what you were saying, Paula. I agree a personal brand is because this community, this industry is driven by community and driven by this stuff. You know, I sit a year and talking about this and that happens throughout the week in other, in other foams, eh, you know, no pun intended, but eh, but when it comes to, uh, to who I think, eh, like it's the personal band, but it also has a lot of.
Another thing that you could see in all of these new, um, it's, let's say the new generation of products in the space, you know, from the past couple of years that are kind of rising. And I think if I may say about myself with like, it's about the border vision, So word persists to be a concept about like a lot of faggots still do.
It's the very niche style function and you get that function, that's it? You know, and as people are a, an as, as a community verbs, it becomes more about platforms. And I think that the ones that
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:19] really win
Vito Peleg: [01:02:20] look at the full solution. Rather than, uh, rather than trying to look at, uh, just that tiny, uh, fragmented kind of flow of all I can do just this.
And even if we're looking at the company like gravity for when I'm an avid drug abuser, I've been using them for more than, I think more than 10 years now been on the developer license them, eh, but eh, But it stayed the same, you know, it's very much stayed the same. Yeah. So, so it was really easy for other plugins to, to come and say, okay, it's not enough to have just, uh, just a straight up.
Like list of fields. You also need to style them. You also need to do this. You also need to do that. And that would work in that broad fruit form, like really above it, above the rest, in that aspect. Yeah. Another one that is exactly the same as elemental that went on to work to, like I say, all right, why would you need a popup plugin?
Let's let's do a popup widget. Why would you need that? This and that, that it's all included in there and we're taking the same approach instead of just looking at like, why do I was, should only be stickers because like those visual. Points that I used to use with envision. That's what they did. Eh, it's, it's just, uh, the means to the end.
It's not the, it's not the core of it. So if you look at the entire solution of velocity solving the project delivery as a whole, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that you saw, but we be building for the dashboard and two other things. So I think that this is like a, I agree, personal or bad, but it's also an expanded vision that solves a bigger problem than just that one.
Eh, you know, change the ad category is two pages, you know, like this kind of type of
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:02] stuff. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [01:04:03] Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:04] this is, this is a great episode. I'm enjoying this. There's lots of, lots of fun in the comments and stuff. It's great. I'm loving it. Thanks. Uh, thanks to the three of you and all those people that are making comments really appreciate it.
Uh, this is just very quick. I'll just mention this literally as a news item that we haven't really got time to discuss it, but if you're a kid, the user. They released a zero hassle performance monitoring tool. This week, you go into your, my kids to.com uh, get, find sites, click on the site name, and then it's right near the bottom.
It says monitoring. You basically switch it on. They make the point that it, um, it does. It does impoverished performance. I imagine it's very slight, but it starts to measure things. You then leave it for a period of time while your site has been used by end users. And then come back, switch off and gather up the data.
I switched it on about an hour before on a couple of websites. Uh, and let's, I'll have a look maybe, maybe next week, come back and see if there's anything you've split in that. But just to know if you're a consistent user, you've got a new thing and it's free, it's on every plan. Um, so there we go. Right.
And the very final thing I'm going to mention this week as possibly the most important piece of news. This this year, frankly. Um, you know, COVID yeah, it was quite important, but yeah, an obelisk appearing in the middle of Utah, I think we can all agree is of catechist cataclysmic importance. This is such a great story.
There's a presumably a there's made an hopper LISC and then driven it and then walked a heck of a long way. I mean, it's really off the grid. And they put this on police ground, like 2001 styley. It was found by these people who were cattle ranchers, and they were counting cows or sheep or something, and they saw a shadow.
So they landed the helicopter there. It was. And then eventually a couple of days later, some people found it. And now it's gone.
It's the same person who made it has, well, maybe it was the aliens. Let's be honest. That's probably the most unlikely story. Isn't it? You know, the aliens came planted it and then just got weary of the news coverage fed up of their Twitter feed, being followed. It came and took it away to brush it under the carpet.
That was a mistake. We accidentally drops our monolith. Yeah. Anyways, such a great style. I love quirky stuff like this. Presumably somebody did this and is having a right laugh at our expense. Apparently if you actually got up close to it, like a couple of Intrepid people did who tracked throughout the night to find it.
Um, apparently it's not quite as cool as it looks like. There's a couple of rabbit holes that have got rivets
Paul Lacey: [01:06:40] missing and stuff like that. Plus
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:43] it's not the, it's not the impact. It's not the perfect thing. Anyway, there we go. Isn't that cute? There's a great story. There you go. That's all we got for you. We keep it very brief.
Now we used to do this long drawn out ending, but, um, just very briefly, anything happened in this week. I'm trying not to spend money, but I'll sum it up for me. Vito poll, Christina, let's start with, uh, let's start with Vita
Vito Peleg: [01:07:07] and I have a loads of unpacking to do so I'll be pretty much it. I have my gym to build, eh, eh, so I'm excited about that.
Yeah. Wrapping up black Friday. Um, this is, uh, this is the. On the business aspect. This is the weekly focus.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:23] Cool, uh, Christina,
Christina Hawkins: [01:07:25] uh, you asked me what our weekly focuses for this week.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:28] Just anything that you're going to be engaged with this week. Anything you want to tell us about room?
Christina Hawkins: [01:07:33] Well, I bought a company, so I'm still trying to merge with them.
We've got a lot of processes we're trying to build out together and they're just learning more about their company, about their customer. So that's still kind of doing that. Trying to combine processes from one company and my company and figuring out which of the best process and checklists and stuff like that.
It's really, it's pretty time consuming. And just trying to learn how somebody else does their job and judge does their agency. So we're trying to merge, but, um,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:59] you didn't buy this. Uh, on black Friday,
Paul Lacey: [01:08:07] black Friday.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:10] Yeah. Well like walk, right? What a great bit to announce at the end. Do you want to tell us a little bit more? If you like, that sounds intriguing.
Christina Hawkins: [01:08:18] Uh, it's just another local Houston, uh, WordPress company here. So we both were very involved together in, uh, the WordPress community. And we just have very similar, um, customer service relationship.
We had the very same kind of outlook when it comes to running an agency. Uh, so he decided he wanted to do something else, but he's still part of the company. So we kind of. Still have some, uh, history, you know, I can ask them questions and things. So yeah, it's, uh, one of the good ways of growing your business is just, you know, but I'm working, buying another company, so, yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:52] that's nice.
I'm trying to be like
Christina Hawkins: [01:08:54] a one this year, actually, so yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:56] Wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, we'll have you back on in a few weeks time and maybe there'll be a third. Um, thank you for that. That's really nice news. Paul, anything for you this week?
Paul Lacey: [01:09:08] Nothing to note. So, uh, yeah, I got nothing. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:12] I would just get
Paul Lacey: [01:09:14] to the bottom of my inbox.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:17] Mine has got to be just delete, delete, delete, delete, delete that's all my needs. Uh, speaking of which this was posted by Christopher Hughes, uh, during the article about the, uh, the monolith, he bought it Friday and, uh, he's got it shipped back to, uh, to wherever he is. Ah, that's brilliant. There is. There was so many nice comments.
It really makes it worth doing when people comment. Thank you so much. Really, really appreciate it. We'll be back this time next week. I can't honestly tell you off the top of my head who will be joined with Paul. Lacey will be one of them, but, um, thank you so much guys, for joining us this week. We'll see you at 2:00 PM UK time.
Next Monday, this is this weekend. WordPress signing off. Take care. Thanks. Thanks Paul. Thanks Christina.