This Week in WordPress #146

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 146 recorded on Monday the 18th of January, 2021. I'm joined today as always by my co-host Paul Lacey. But we're also joined today by Vito Peleg and the Maziar Firuzmand. And we talk about the WordPress news that's happened during the course of this week.
There's been quite a lot to talk about. The first thing that we get into is new updates to Gutenburg 9.7, the new user interface, and there's some action in reusable blocks. We also get into the community proposal to decide when. We might be going back to live events. What about the fact that wordpress.com are offering to build WordPress websites?
Is that going to be competing with you? What about web flow? Is that a technology that you've heard of before? Is it something that dabbled in it's not WordPress, but it could be useful. There's a new show and hide blocker plugin, which we fare reboot briefly talk about. And also we briefly talk about WP scan and the fact that they're now allowed to create CVE numbers for security vulnerabilities that crop up.
And then we get into the interesting subject of tracking. Facebook, Google, et cetera. Is it all too much? You can find out today on this week in WordPress. This weekend, WordPress is brought to you this week by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? Like in a couple of minutes, use your existing pages and test anything against anything else.
Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything. And the best part is it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. Check it out and get a free [email protected]. Good afternoon. Hopefully you can hear me. It is this week in WordPress episode. I've no idea it's 140 something, but we're into the a hundred and 40th and it might be 146.
I'm not entirely sure I'm joined today as always by Paul Lacey, who is the regular co-host I suppose is the best way to describe it. I'm also joined by veto pedal ag. He's got some interesting things that have happened to him this week. And also by max, I'm going to say max, but max, I apologize. I have forgotten the pronunciation of your surname.
Would you kindly help me out? I'm so sorry.
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:02:24] Sure. That's expectable the right pronunciation is Maziar.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:29] Okay. Okay we'll go with that. Maziar okay. That's right. That's right. Perfect. Good. That's very seldom. Does anybody say those words to me? So that's great. Today. We are going to be talking about all of the bits and pieces that have happened in the WordPress news for this week.
Some of it strays off topic a little bit, and we don't necessarily always talk about WordPress, but we'll start trying to stay. On message. Just a couple of things. I'm going to share the screen. I'm sorry if you're listening to the audio you obviously can't share the screen with us, but here we go.
Anyway, WP builds.com head over to there. That's where we produce most of our content. We've got FID cast episodes and news episodes, rather than like you're listening to now going to keep in touch with all that head over to this link, the subscribe link it's at the top. WV belts.com forward slash subscribe.
I've got a Facebook group, I think it eclipse 2,800. Users this week, which was really nice. It's a very friendly Facebook group. Somehow we've managed to avoid all the incendiary things that tend to happen online. So go and join that. What else have we got? We've got a deals page. If you want to avail yourself of a WordPress deal this week, go over to that, check it out.
Searchable filterable. Most products never disappear. And then this is a little bit clumsy, but I'm going to try it anyway. If you want to keep in touch with what we do in terms of this, we produce a newsletter. And you'll get that by signing up with this gray form on the subscribe page. And then we'll send you on Tuesday a newsletter and it will contain links to what you're currently watching.
So if you don't manage to get through it or you miss it one week, then there'll be links to that. But we'll also have links to all of the other bits and pieces that we missed out of today because we just didn't have time and they look a bit. Like this. So there you go. If it's okay with you guys, I'm going to hand it straight over to Mr.
Paul Lacey, cause he's leading us on several of these items and he's in fact, leading us on the first one, which is entitled Gutenburg 9.7 something by just in block.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:22] Yeah, we've just had a news flash in, though that we need to cover something before that this, I know people who are just listening to this wherein be able to appreciate what we're talking about here, guys, what's the elephant in the room here.
Come on.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:35] Oh Lord. Oh, I don't know.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:38] Last week it was my midlife crisis and I dyed my beard a little bit darker, but Mark's has just brought back the facial hair theme this week in absolute style and his sporting an absolutely awesome mustache, but makes me feel really jealous.
Vito Peleg: [00:05:02] No, I can do something like that. It never looked so nice and full, brilliant.
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:05:07] Yeah. It was like 10 years ago. Something I had said mostly like this, so I really wanted to make it. the years why I went this harsh mustache. Sorry
Paul Lacey: [00:05:23] sorry. Back to news breaking news. Yeah. The facial hair news has escalated to new Heights. This week, so let's see what happens next week. Anyway. Okay. So the first article the actual WordPress article that we're talking about is Gutenberg 9.7 dropped last week sometime for anyone who's not sure Guttenberg is the block editor within WordPress, but yeah.
The Gutenberg plugin is like the experimental side of the whole project, where a lot of the new features appear first. So the plugin drops. You don't have to install the plugin. If you're using the core WordPress, you can just use the core block editor, but if you want to see the latest features that are going on, then you can install the actual plugin.
And you'll be able to see the kind of things that they're working on. A lot of the things that they do inside the Gutenberg plugin, some of them come through to core and then other ones, if they decide it's not yet ready, they push it aside and maybe concentrate on that later. So just in Tadlock on WP Tavern has done a great article that kind of summarizes what's new in Gutenberg 9.7, I'd say.
Fairly techie update. There is some user experience updates in terms of there's always a few kind of little bits and bobs going on there. One of the main ones is they have these things called lock of variations. And the example that Justin gives here is that let's say for instance, you've got the video blog.
When you add the video blog, you might pop in a YouTube URL, or you might pop in a Vimeo URL for instance, into that block. And then what the the use, the new user experience improvement. Does on block variables is in your kind of block inspector on the side where you can see a list of the different blocks that you're using or what book you're editing at the moment.
It knows for instance that because you've popped a YouTube link in there that that this is now a YouTube block, technically, even though it's a video block. So it's just some little improvements that I guess are based on feedback of people using it. One of the other things that is updated is.
There's a change to reusable blocks. So reusable blocks. I didn't realize this, but Justin mentions in the article that reasonable block seems to be a feature of the Gutenberg editor that has been. Probably a little bit left to the side for a while. It's not really been actively developed too much.
And Justin tells us in the article that one of the changes they've made a change to the how we can edit reasonable blocks. So we can actually now using the Gutenberg editor so far as I understand that edit a reusable block in the page that we're currently editing. And when we get to save the page, it asks us, do you just want to save the page or do you want to also save the, all the iterations of the reusable block changes that you've made?
It's an interesting idea. And when I saw it, I understood it mainly because Justin had explained it to me, but I'm, I think that this one will. In my opinion, B something that people will struggle to get their head around when they're saving something. They've got to agree to, for instance, saving two or three different items on a page plus the page.
So we'll have to see how that one. How that one kind of goes down. And then finally, the last thing in the article one of the last main things in here is something called page templates for full site editing. Now, even after reading Justin's article, I still didn't really understand what this was all about.
So if anyone else here in the panel jaws, that would be great, but it seems that. This there's this kind of some kind of a new feature coming in for the concept of page templates in full site editing. And Justin has some interesting comments because I do feel that Justin is someone that fully tests, these kinds of features and does know the implications.
He seems to be raising a couple of concerns about the concept of how they're doing it. And then there's a good, a bit of discussion in the comments as well. So I think this one is particularly interesting to anybody who is developing themes as. As opposed to users. So if anyone's got any comments on that in the panel go ahead.
But that's more or less the summary of that particular article. I'll just
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:27] make one quick comment. And it's about the the reusable blocks. I totally agree. I've used reusable blocks quite a bit, and I find the current workflow is really less than desirable in that. They, when you load, let's say a reusable block, you have the option immediately to save it.
And I always mistake that for. For making it into an editable, just a regular block. And I never quite remember that I've got to do that. And so I'll amend it in my cases. It's just simply putting a there's paragraphs prefilled out for the different sections of the news and things like that.
And I always clicked save. I've tried, I've added loads of content in and then think, Oh no, I needed to decouple it. And so I think there's quite a lot of improvements to be made. And I'm sure that will happen in the future, but you've got to find the right menu, make it, detach it and make it into a regular block and all of the language around that doesn't feel right.
To make it into a regular block. Doesn't tell me that I'm decoupling it from its usable reusable status. So I think you're right. I think there's quite a bit of work to be done.
Paul Lacey: [00:10:32] Yeah, Justin actually create the design plugin that helped not necessarily musical blocks, but I know he's got a plugin and there's another plugin that I use as well.
That helps you do things like convert. Reusable blocks to walk back on. And I feel that the block passing concept resonates. It makes a lot more sense to me. But I did have a problem with where you would find your block patterns. It was always a bit clunky, but I did notice when I was using the block of this or just, they have a day that when you start searching for blocks, it was now returning patterns as well, which was useful.
It might've been enough for a long time, but now at least they don't have to, Click the plus button, then click show all, then go over to the left and click on patterns. Then scroll down and find more, which was a bit of a laborious process. It seems that we're already there, or I didn't notice it, but so it seems that things are improving, but there's usually, I think this article to show that there's so much on sexual level thinking and I think the entire team and the entire concept.
I think that possibly struggling to pull all this together. I think I don't want to criticize them for it because they're doing great work, but I think that they're struggling. I think that this is a very difficult project, the entire Grisham book thing, the block editor. And yeah, I think that struggling from what I can see from I will see things rolled out.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:59] Anybody
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:12:01] I'd like to say that I really appreciate and support any attempt for usability in any content builder. We had this problem for awhile in element, or if you guys remember. So they there were extensions, including our own extension wonder WP, just for reusability of his tiles and yeah. Block templates, and then they all also added this feature.
Visibility is really a challenge mainly maybe one of the biggest challenges for designers, web designers, content producers. So I'm sure this is a good step forward, but for shorter or some more room for them, for events of a usability capabilities.
Vito Peleg: [00:12:38] Yeah, I would agree with that thing that eh, in most websites you probably have some sections that repeat over multiple pages, eh, and I'm still not sure, like how is it going to work here in terms of managing them?
So if I want to change. If I want to edit the reusable block and will it change it throughout or will it just resave it? Will it go and go through the other pages? So what the elemental did, there was a, basically they created another tab in the WordPress admin that allows you to manage all of your Usable assets, the templates, essentially they call it templates.
I think that this might be a good point. And we also saw that with with our page. Cause we have a good template that we're sharing like a wire frame templates and share with our users. And no one can know, can never find where to deploy this. Cause it's so hidden in the five seven clicks until you get to the right location. So I think that it starting to think about as the, as Gutenberg expands and it does expand, eh, for my, for week to week started about additional tabs inside the WordPress admin to allow you to manage more granular things. I think this has becomes a necessity now, especially with those kind of stuff.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:57] Yeah, we covered quite a few different projects over the week. Some we pull web that people have implemented different versions of the UI. So rather than having that customizer width. Section where everything goes, including things which really do need a bit more breathing space, like reusable, sorry, block patterns, which it would be really helpful.
If you could see a big version of it, lots of people trying out different things, taking over the full screen a little bit like, like things like elements or, and BeaverBuilder do. And I think the idea of constraining everything in that little sidebar just seems a little bit. A little bit silly and something that'll have to be dropped in the near future.
No,
Vito Peleg: [00:14:36] there was something about previews heal. And this article specifically that is being added. So you can really see a little more of what you're trying to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:44] do. Yeah. Yeah. These yeah. Th this is, I think this is quite nice. It's is it a rollover thing though? I don't think it's there by default.
It'd be nice if that was. I can't remember how this is implemented, but yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Should we move on Paul? You wanna do your next one?
Paul Lacey: [00:15:01] Sure. Okay. So the next article again is from WordPress oven and it's by Sarah Gooding, this one and it's titled WordPress community team proposes using a decision checklist to restart local events.
So it seems that a discussion on make.wordpress.org began in late December to start discussing. How do we return to face-to-face in-person events in the world of COVID 19, for instance. And I think that what they're probably talking about mainly at the beginning is things like what press meetups the smaller events, but obviously.
That's probably the best place to start, because if you can get that then obviously you can scale that up. And I think that the challenge that they're talking about here is that the meetings that they're really talking about, other kind of officially sanctioned WordPress meetups by, I think is an automatic who sanctions them.
I'm not really sure. So the official meetups and then leading up to the actual word camps, and I think it is a tricky one because. There's so many different factors here. So for example, if you go to the WordPress meetup in London, just the regular meetup, that can be a bigger event that happens every month than a full-on WordCamp that happens elsewhere in the UK in a smaller city or a smaller town, for instance.
So the situation is just different and then the situation is different in every single country. And then also you've got it. You've got to if you've got a checklist, then you've got to be concerned about, okay, at times you've got the checklist at time of organizing and then you've got the checklist of week before, and then you've got the checklist on the day and obviously safety comes first from every situation.
So there's this five points. There's five main points here that are worth reading out in terms of the in terms of what they've got on the checklist. And those are is your countries or States average positivity rate over the last 28 days. Under 4% for COVID-19. Number two is in the last 28 days, has your country or areas basic reproduction number stayed under one.
Number three is in the past 14 days, have there been under 50 new cases per 100,000 people reported, number four, does your local government allow for in-person events, which. That's clearly a critical one. And number five, is there a cap on the number of people who can meet at a time and will you as an organizer follow this guideline?
So I think the. When I read this, I think depending on where you are in the world, you will just read this and feel more optimistic or more pessimistic. Three of us out of the four today are in the UK. And we're probably reading that list and thinking that we're not going to see any in person events, maybe even in 2021, because here's where we're doing a great job of, going way outside of those kinds of numbers here in the UK.
And And also the starts are different in all kinds of places where I heard that in Australia, there's sporting events going on, people can go and watch cricket match. And I said, the situation is different in all different places. So I do think that this is cool that they've got this list, which does mean that at least in certain parts of the world, if you meet in the checklist, then there's a possibility that you can start looking at having in-person events.
I don't know what everyone else thinks about this, certainly from the UK point of view, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a reality check for me looking at that list. And I think it's really interesting
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:34] to happen from two different sides. Firstly, I'm, I'd be really keen on a personal level to go back to events as soon as it's possible too.
But I don't know what that feels like yet. Certainly within my local area would be something that I'd be more willing to do. Try to try out, let's say leads in my case, but then perhaps a little bit later progressing to other parts of the UK, London and so on. And then finally thinking about getting on planes would be like the last version.
But imagine that you're an organizer. Imagine the trepidation of getting 90% of your word com. Organized ready to go. Even if it's just a meetup, let's just say it's a meetup. It's a lot of work to suddenly be tripped up by one of those five hurdles. And it's something for which you have no con you just have no control over that.
You don't, it's a completely moving target. Okay. And so I wonder what the impact of people willing these events into reality, the people who were organizing these, I wonder how much less likely they're going to be to committing, to doing the events simply because with. With, with no intervention on your part that the rug could be pulled from underneath your feet immediately.
So yeah, two sides I'm dead keen to go, but I can also understand why they might be far less of these events in the foreseeable future until the world has really generally calmed down a bit.
Vito Peleg: [00:20:03] I think that it's a I'm on the same page as you and Nathan. I can't wait for events to come back. Eh, yeah.
I haven't left the house in a year. That would be great. But But that being said I don't, I think that's the government has those guidelines in place for for any type of eh, of, group of people that are gathering. So I felt like if it was me, first of all, like you can't do events, at least not in the UK.
But for countries that you can do or they already have, I imagine that, like you said, Paul, in Australia, they're running sporting events and stuff like that. I'm sure there's already a list of guidelines or checklist that these guys needs to go through anyway. So I can see why to create that additional layer for the organizers, for the sponsors that might be supporting an event in my lose the sponsorship because the venue was higher, that the pizza was older or something, and I would just stick with point full and that would be my suggestion for them stick with 0.4. And if it's allowed, then check the guidelines in your local area. But I also think that it's going to take a long time before people feel comfortable going, so even after it's allowed, eh, as much as I want to go, I'll probably still stay on the fence for a couple of ones.
After it's already coming out because we've already seen the seal that they like, like you said, it's a moving target and nothing is certain. And something that seems very clear in one week, then the other week you have another strand or, another mutation of it. And then the whole deck gets reshuffled.
So yeah, I think we're still at at least a year away from that, I would say.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:45] Legos. Oh, sorry. Maxie. You carry on. Oh, sorry.
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:21:49] Thanks, Nathan. From the point of view of Istanbul, I want to say that the answer to the question listed in this article is almost no to all of them. No event is allowed.
There are different kinds of limits, the lockdown times and everything. Even unlike UK restaurants, bars, and everything like that, every place like that is. Completely shut down right now in Turkey. And I can completely agree with you guys that we all cannot wait for. In person meetings, honestly, I really do not feel anything like the in person meetings when coming to virtual meetings we have in the marketing team or any such meetup.
Meetings. But thing is it doesn't look like anything possible anytime soon. And I'm looking at the situation, both in the global level and in Turkey and the amount of work that it takes. It's devastating for the organizers. I helped. I actually organized One of these meetings in VP NWP translation day, two years ago.
And I have helped some other events, but this one, I was the organizer and I saw closely how much work it takes and preparation takes even for a event at that scale, which is not comparable to a word camp, but just you guys say. It takes a lot of time and suddenly it can change this, you will leave.
And the day after you see something has changed, the lockdown times has changed in such. Given the fact that audiation canceled work camp Europe 2021 very early last year like I guess a month after word camp or two, three months after WordCamp Europe, 2020. And I was actually very disappointed for that.
It was actually interesting for me to see that this is something in the plans right now, like considering the possibility of a universe touring local work camps. I really look forward to that and I wish the best of luck for the team behind it, but the situation, the local situation that I'm here in Istanbul, it doesn't look like that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:47] Yeah, I guess the local situation is going to be the one that we're all most keenly focused on. If we can just get to something nearby, that will be a start. But yeah, a few comments around this Sabrina sit down saying it sounds like a lot of extra work for the organizers, which indeed it does, but like I think it was.
Vito said it's probably just the same set of regulations that you've government would require you to put in place anyway. And we also had Leo Mindell saying seems there's no reason at the moment to even try planning an in-person event because you just stay online. He says and make it work that way.
And then we'll have to see, this is going to be an interesting one because at some point it will happen, but they'll, I guess it'll just be like the dam breaking. Maybe, I don't know. The government just have to say on from one day to the next that yep. You're allowed in the UK to do this now, or you're allowed to travel outside of the UK to do this.
Let's wait and see, it's such a weird one because we were in a strange community where there's no profit in this. The Australian sporting events, there must be a real need for that to go on. So to get somebody's job working, to get somebody paid, but we don't really need to do that.
And, sorry, veto. I realize I talked over you about four times.
Vito Peleg: [00:25:05] Like I wonder if it's going to be like a dam breaking. I think it's more going to be like, starting to drip in and and it's going to be a process over a course of hopefully 20, 22 when Eh, when people start to go back to, to real life.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:21] Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of which I didn't actually put this in the show notes, but I think he's probably a good one to mention the there's an event happening. Yeah. In just four days, time, 22nd to January word Fest. We mentioned it last year. We had sorry, last week we had Michelle for shuts on, and she's one of the lead organizers along with a suspect, Leo is involved in some way.
And certainly the WP and as was now bigger and chart team are involved. So just a quick. Plug for them, word fest.life. So 24 hour events covering four time zones. And if you go just here, you'll be able to see the list of sessions and so on, and you can register with this register link just here, but it's absolute boatload of stuff happening and it's all happening.
This Friday, I'm hopefully going to be in some way, shape or form involved. I'm going to move it away from like in-line events. And I'm going to go to this one. This is not a new piece of news, right? We covered this last week. So Vito and max, sorry. We were re going over some old ground, but the reason I've mentioned this one again for the second time is because I just thought it was interesting that our non WordPress website, in this case, we're looking at a search engine journal.
Article have picked this up. And for me, that kind of demonstrates that this is actually of interest to the wider world. And it's this piece about wordpress.com now offering website development at this starting price of like $4,900 or whatever it might be. And there was a few interesting things which just.
Caught my attention. And it was that they put in some Twitter feeds of people from both sides of the argument. So you have some people saying, look, it's fine. It will grow the party. The pie is going to get bigger because of this. And then there was another piece which we didn't follow last week. We didn't really talk about.
And that was the ability for WordPress to use the word WordPress. And I'd forgotten that no, none of us are allowed to use that word. To advertise. We are in terms of, we can say we build WordPress websites, but we can't say we are WordPress. And I mentioned the search engine juice that, that you would imagine wordpress.com will get, if you're going to type in WordPress websites for $5,000, you can imagine what's going to come out as number one.
So I just thought it was interesting that another news outlet, which is tangentially related to WordPress, but in this case search engine side of things, picked it up. To be honest
Vito Peleg: [00:27:47] for most people for, I would say like 98% of even not just the world, but even inside the community. The differentiation between.com and.org is still very big.
And like really understanding that the.org is the open source product and.com is the commercial company behind eh, behind it all, essentially leveraging what is done by the community on the.org to create Like the biggest multi-site in the history, eh, on that platform. So yeah this discussion is coming back again and again, when it comes to the ability, because like you're saying, it's not a matter of just using the name, which is awesome for STL for them.
But it's also using the logo and. There's all kinds of of stuff that that the math has given specific allocations for his own company to use the same name as a product that is being developed by by the community and And supported by like by, by a charity essentially here in the UK, this wouldn't fight against the law.
If you would do something like that as a charity in the UK, eh, you would have to, you would have to choose either that or that. And one would have to change the name. You can't run a company. With the same brand name as a charity, eh, but because exactly of that and ear, they pay they're very much on regulation around the, around it, eh, non-profits and stuff like that, which I know that in the U S things are a little more.
Capitalistic. So they're a little more kind of a there's a lot more leeway when it comes to those kinds of things. But I think it's a very fair point. Yeah. Eh, for for all of us. We're sitting here talking about a product that then someone else is taking this name that we're, that we keep saying a thousand times doing this blood test and that capitalizes on that.
It's a very fair point.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:43] I am. I read the story and then looked at a few comments on it. And most of them were fairly sanguine. Most of them were eh, it'll be fine. Don't worry. But I've got one on the screen from, I don't know, this person, Jack Kitter hen with the Twitter handle code monkey on discord, Jack who.
Kind of, I think sums up the side of things who think this is a bad move on automatic spite. He says absolutely ridiculous that they have done this in my opinion, if they wanted to, it shouldn't be on wordpress.com. No one else can use WordPress in quotes in a domain. It's Hey, you all make WordPress popular.
Now we're going to steal your customers and then evil laugh, and then you've got the other side of things. So for example, Jonathan Boston Jer if I can find that quotes, did you do, where's it gone? Ah, here we go. Playing devil's advocate. What if this just makes the play even bigger as more people move to WordPress and when they need grows beyond wordpress.com offers they move to self hosted alternatives and then.
I think
Vito Peleg: [00:30:42] That the plans, the bill offering is not on the multi-site. It is self hosted. Your point of what they're doing is they're allowing people to come out of this closed a closed environment of wordpress.com, eh, over to over to more customizable environments, which I imagine also means that it's self hosted or at least hosted differently and using the.
And the openness, the open source, a product to expand it with that, with their plugins and themes and whatever that is created by the community, as opposed to, wordpress.com that is very closed in its a level of functionality. So like they are building what we are building.
It's it's a straight it's, some people don't mind the competition. I don't think it's going to be much of a big deal. But it is a competition that is like super clear.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:32] Yeah, the this is a comment made by Matt Mullenweg on the 4th of January. So this is right back before the debate really got started and he says, I would be extremely surprised if this impact anyone's consulting business.
If you do have a current or potential client leave for it let me know. I don't know whether he means on Twitter or how you would do that, but let me know. It should be all new to WP users who wouldn't have been successful getting started. So he's obviously. Yeah. I don't know whether that will prove to be the case, but the intention on the 4th of January was to pitch this to people who've never used WordPress before.
In other words, he's trying to stop the migration of possible new customers to alternatives like Squarespace and Wix. But I don't know how you would determine if somebody truly wasn't new to WordPress or not will only time will tell Paul Midas, anything on this, sorry, feature.
Vito Peleg: [00:32:29] Yeah, go ahead and act silly.

Maziar Firuzmand: [00:32:32] Thanks Peter. I want to say, do you think this, we can interpret this as a WordPress. VIP is expanding from high-end sector of the market to mid end sector of the market. We, they are trying to expand their market of fit. Let's say for that service. This is how I'm interpreting
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:52] this move.
Yeah. Matt put out a video. Yeah. Matt, Madeiras put out a video where he said that he would, he it's pretty clear that he's he thinks this is a bad move in the video. He did. I think he, I think the video was called something. I call it WordPress with small cap, small w small P you can search it YouTube.
And he was pontificating that, yeah, that was that's. The play is start at 4,900 and then when that works and you've got the playbook figured out, then. Cut it in half, go to two and a half thousand and then cut it in half again. And until eventually you've got, I think he said something like $500 till you've got the $500 template, which is also possible.
And that's the fear. But I don't know, certainly from, if we're to believe what Matt says in that tweet and time will tell then that's not what they're trying to pitch, but yeah.
Vito Peleg: [00:33:41] What do you see? And we know that as as a consultant, as agencies, it happens that you have people starting to build something on wordpress.com or starting to build something on Squarespace or Wix.
And then they go to an agency or a professional to create the next level of product for them. And here they have they have And a built-in funnel inside the product. Something that I don't know is square space say offers or Shopify offers and in that same way, like it really does, affect the I dunno if someone can if an agent's a small agency in the UK can say is it's going to kill my business.
But it is a natural flow of people starting with flea products, like Wix, or really cheap water leaks or.com and then moving on to us as agencies. So it's bound to happen. What is this? What is saying is not
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:32] gonna happen? Yeah. I wonder if it was really successful and there was absolute proof that people's agencies have been directly affected.
I wonder if this could wonder if automatic would just box it up and put it to one side and say, look, that project was, it was bad for our community. Let's just shelve it. Although it was profitable for us and it was working well, let's just put it on one side. It's not
Vito Peleg: [00:34:55] the community.
Exactly. Like the word.is a different company. It's a different product, so eh, they don't have any they don't have any reason to consider that.org community, even though I'm sure that they will just from PR kind of point of view, but like a, looking at it in a dry kind of way.
It's it's completely two different products just happened that they are called exactly the same.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:19] A good segue from here, Paul, if you've got nothing else to add for this, we could go to your web flow piece. If you
Paul Lacey: [00:35:24] wanted. Yeah. So the last thing I'd just say on this one is obviously there says he'd be extremely surprised if this impacts anyone's consulting business and does give the offer out that if you are getting affected, please let him know.
And but we did speak to someone I'm not going to say who it was. Who's who, who had some good opinions on this whole situation and this person. In response to that pointed out Matt mullenweg's Twitter, what is it? Your description, your profile, the sentence underneath your name, basically.
And it says, Matt Mullenweg. I can think I can wait. I can fast. And I think that's one of the points from a business perspective of automatic is that they don't have to rush anything. So yeah, they might not affect any digital agencies or freelancers at this point. But if you look at the mindset of automatic and the slow burn that they can do on a strategy like this.
Then yeah, it's going to be very difficult to see the immediate impact on anything, but it will, I think but in different ways that we might not expect it and we might not be able to figure out right now.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:35] Lovely comment in the comment thread from, with Mike's over on YouTube devil's advocate position.
What if wp.com is just better at doing it? What if, ah, no. Then we've really got something to actually worry about. Okay. Add one. You can, of course, max. Yeah. So if
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:36:55] you remember last time we were talking and about decision or the news that they are promoting Nevato elements banners when actual authors that are promoting their products there.
So it's actually, it was raising almost the same kind of same type of protests and that's understandable. However, I really want to give this a time and see the actual. Consequences because we're press VIP. For example, was there for a long time. And there was agencies who were partnering with WordPress, VIP, or they were working independently.
And it was working, the economy was working. So we should see if this hypothesis of, stealing business because of the SEO juice or something is actually damaging others businesses or not. If it happens, it's really. E
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:40] it's really
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:37:40] disappointing. It's like we're leveraging on the trust that was built by the entire community.
So out of sudden, so I I hope that this won't be the case and the economy will continue to grow with, for both independent of freelancers agencies and automatic itself.
Vito Peleg: [00:38:01] I think that out of the VIP product, I think that VIP is like the biggest corporate level enterprise level agency in the world.
So the already corner, the market on that, on the high-end part which I am sure that there's a lot of agencies that would have wanted some of the action building get, eh the New York times a blog or something like that, so it already happened. That's what I'm saying.
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:38:28] Yeah, the New York times website, for example,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:32] sorry, anybody else? Anybody want to rebuild tech crunch? The, there was chatter and I can't remember whether it was in this article that we just had on the screen, or if it was elsewhere, there was chatter about them taking on agency partnerships, but I can't remember.
Whether that was just
Vito Peleg: [00:38:53] something without homework. They tried to do something with Upwork for a while. And which I think that's a, that's an appropriate kind of way of doing it. Eh, But, like under the same point that you said max, eh, within vital and elemental also have it like a, I think a few months ago they also released some kind of a platform like this.
There is more competing with the.com then with the agency level and it's, it would be like at a mental would start building websites basically. Leveraging the name that everyone was using this and starting building like agency websites or three grand or so it just seems wrong. Or let's say me with the, that would be feedback serving agencies and then also building websites at scale under the same brand name that they placed on everyone's on client's websites.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:41] Yes. Yeah, like a back door. Yeah. That's interesting.
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:39:46] You think maybe the same thing as a WordPress VIP partnership can happen in this pro within this program as well, like agency to help automatic help people build a website.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:58] It's yeah, unfortunately I've got a memory fail on this, but that is I'm sure what I've read is somebody talking about whether it was on Twitter or if it was automatic.
Proposing, I can't remember, but I think there is a plan for that. If anybody's got any insight in this, probably not in the in the comment thread at the moment, but I don't know if anybody does listen to this and know genuinely liked to know what the thinking is. There was talk
Paul Lacey: [00:40:22] that it was going to carry the ball, I think, but hopefully as far as we know as well Nathan and I talked to Matt Madeira just the other day.
And he was saying that it's very likely that he's interviewing Matt more than work. Exclusively about this particular aspect or if it's not exclusively about this, it's about the general business machine. The corporate machine part of automatic that is, is quite clear is moving at whatever pace it is.
Even if it's a slow one, it's moving and it's got a lot of money behind it. It's got a lot of power and it's got the community's wellbeing and it's. In the Palm of his hand in a way. But yeah, that probably does segue us to the next item, which is about a alternative product. So if you are an agency or a freelancer, and you've been exclusively working with WordPress the software to develop websites, then there hasn't been a ton of alternatives to genuinely.
Feel absolutely confident in because within the open source community, WordPress is obviously the main one. And if you were looking for something like, for as a kind of no code or semi coder kind of person there, isn't a ton of alternatives. Apart from there is a couple of commercial ones and one of them is web flow.
I've looked at web flare at a number of times over the years and I've never jumped in it myself. But I know a lot of people who have migrated from WordPress. To web flow in those people are agencies and they are freelancers and front I one, from what I understand of wareFLO is a pretty fantastic product at what it does, and it's doing more and more stuff.
All of the time. Workflow has been trading in a profit for a number of years, making quite a lot of profit, and they recently have just announced that they've acquired $140 million of series B funding. They even say in this article, which is on the web flow website on webflow.com, they even say that they didn't even really need the money.
They said that they could carry on, but they felt that if any time there was a, an opportunity to move to the next level it was now. And they said that they gained over 10,000 new customers over 20, 20 than they were expecting as a result of most likely of COVID now workflow. Taking 140 million here gives people a product that they can feel extremely confident is not going anywhere, even in a global economic downturn.
So I think this is the case that as automatic does cause problems for the agency or the what Madeira might call the always turn the blue collar WordPress implementer, or the blue collar WordPress designer or developer. But there are now other options and you can cut your losses and go somewhere else.
And it's definitely something I'm looking at. I don't think I'd be fully migrating away from WordPress anytime soon, but I look at Webflow as a product and I think my user persona is pretty close to what they're talking about. Know, when you have invested so much
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:29] already. Yeah. When you were looking at it in the past.
Cause I confess I've literally never used it. I've probably seen 20 seconds of people doing screen demos of it. And I just thought, Ooh, that's interesting. That looks really nice to look at. What, why did you what was it that prompted you to have a look? Is it just shiny object syndrome or did you genuinely hear from people that it's good and it's possibly could do the work that you need it to do and why didn't you start using it?
Paul Lacey: [00:43:55] It's very aimed at the corporate brochure type website. Okay. And they've, they figured out what those kinds of, what that particular persona needs, and they provided all of the tools there for you to do that and all of the flexibility to do other things as well. So if you are an agency or freelance, so probably the typical person doing that kind of job, 80% of their work.
Is brochure sites. And when you [email protected] as a platform, you need to combine maybe 10 maybe even up to 20, maybe sometimes even more plugins to give you, give yourself the functionality that you might typically need for that kind of site. Then you've got the care plan type stuff that you need to do.
Not because you just want to make profit because WordPress sites for corporate requirements. Naturally I'm going to have security issues then naturally going to break at times. And yeah, if you want to go down a different route than Webflow is something for that as well. There's also a number of commercial reasons.
Someone might maybe because there are people now who businesses who are aware. There've been burnt by WordPress before whether they were burnt by a WordPress developer rather than the software, but from their perspective they may have felt last year, cost us a hundred thousand pounds in, in loss because of what they deem as WordPress, it was actually the developer maybe, or the consultant, but they heard someone else was doing really well with Webflow and didn't have any of these problems.
So there's thousands of businesses now looking for web flow developers, looking for website agencies and. And that's a commercial opportunity for anyone with the same skills that are operating within WordPress. So it's if I was automatic right now, I'd probably be looking at web flow as a serious competitor.
I think that automatic can outdo Wix. I think that they can outdo Squarespace, but web flow is a different beast and they've just acquired $140 million. That's a lot
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:44] of money. If somebody gave me $140 million, it would be completely. Breathtakingly large amounts of money, but I wonder what $140 million in this with this
Paul Lacey: [00:45:56] profit, you're already trading profits.
They have a stable product and hosting is part of their that their whole set up there. So I think this will allow them to just take it to another level. And this is a big threat to automatic in my opinion, because this company knows how to market and not have to hide what they're doing.
They can just say, this is who we're targeting. This is what we're doing. We're a business. And we're here for our
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:20] customers. The comment thread again, with Mike's on YouTube saying that's the problem is that it's not extensible. It's doesn't have the same architecture like WP does. Which enables you to do anything with added.
Plugins and so on and so forth. I don't know if that is true then. Yeah, that is a bit of a drawback, but it's the target market is just this one type of website, which it fulfills admirably. Yes. I would imagine it is a threat.
Paul Lacey: [00:46:47] You can extend it quite a lot. Further, especially you can hybrid it with WordPress now as well.
There is a plugging code and I think it's usually.com. I'm not sure, but if you Google, you just Lea or Webflow, WordPress converter, you will find it. I know a few people now who are using the UDAs leap plugin they create that their website in Webflow, and then they convert it to WordPress using UDAs league, which converts it into a theme and a plugin, a bit like.
Let's say combined in generate breasts and generate press premium it integrates with WooCommerce and all of those kinds of things. So you can create your base brochure site in Webflow and enjoy the amazing code outport that you'll get from that. Plus the absolute pinpoint, no code control that you've got over the design compared to something like the block editor.
Then you can push it to WordPress and you can add another layer of functionality there as well.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:36] Can you guys backwards and forwards with that? Can you then, okay. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:47:41] Yeah. There's ways to sync it backwards and forwards. So you've got the design level in one place and then you've got the functionality level and another, so there's a lot of stuff happening in Webflow and it'd be interesting to see the progress.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:53] Okay. All right.
Paul Lacey: [00:47:55] We wanted to actually segue before we get to number five. Nathan, I know we're probably running out of time, but we, I think accidentally someone found out the other day that VTS product w feedback is rebranding. And the reason I checked with VTA before this, that we could ask about this, because it seemed to me from what I saw in the rebrand, that veto you were moving.
Away from being attached to WordPress, the word or WP to a word that your new brand doesn't have the word WordPress. And it also seemed to me that you're all saying moving towards a SAS direction as well. So I just wondered, and I also heard your interview on dopey tonic, which was really good. And it was a different interview that I'd had from UVA because this was more reflective and it was talking about the future.
And you were talking about the masses of problems that you had as a result of things like the Gutenberg editor or the J courier removal and the whole ecosystem changing so much. And I wondered being, as we're talking about an alternative to WordPress, are you looking to move away from WordPress as the center of your.
Right and such,
Vito Peleg: [00:49:02] Not like in the long run. Yes. The idea is to open this up to to all of the other ad platforms that are out there. Eh, but that's not because that's not because I don't enjoy the work like WordPress as a tool. I still love it. And I still use it literally every single day.
And as. My point or like what, one thing that happened specifically with our product is that I didn't feel that it's a plugin anymore. So what, when we first started or matter of feeling, the fact is that it's not a plugin anymore. When we first started, we started as a plugin company. We released a plugin that you stolen people's website.
And that's it. That's everything that we supported and, that's, that was the extent of the functionality. It was contained inside the client's website, like every other plugin, if you will. But over time we saw the need for creating like a way of managing. The entire agency, as well as multiple websites or dozens or hundreds of websites, we have users that have literally hundreds of websites connected on there.
And that's when we launched our pro dashboard, as we call it, the poor dashboard is. and react and and it runs on AWS and it has every single characteristics of a SAS company. Eh, while the, while what started as a plugin has become just the client interface. So in the same way, like Intercom has a plugin.
And to integrate their SAS application to to someone's website or Zendesk as a plugin to integrate some functionality in there. That's how we've been running for a little more than a year. Now, the thing is that everyone's still saw us as a plugin and plugins are priced very cheap because they have a.
And they have different overheads. They have different kind of even cost of development is like completely different around that. And that really hurt us in terms of the positioning people. Eh, just seeing us as a single plug in while we are carrying the same duties and the costs and responsibilities as companies like Zendesk or Trello, teamwork eh, with with our product.
So We're still priced like a WooCommerce add on it's ridiculous. So that is eh, that was what I said, all I have to do have very like big old maybe like brave decision. Of taking what the name has done for us WP feedback, which was awesome for the past 18 months.
And just put the stop to that and having people, first of all, not look at it. WP implies that it's a product that it's a plugin and the word feedback implies that's all it does. It does create feedback on a website, like we're, this is where we were version 1.0 and pretty much three, four months after that.
We were already not a feedback plugin and not a plugin even. And so that is , that was inspired the ch the change that is coming later this month with version 2.0, where we're putting a lot more resources even more over to the dashboard side. And everything is like a, this version to Porto is also going to get us to a point where.
Even though we started as a plugin that is installed. So all of the data is installed. It was stalled on the client's website that is now being taken out as well over to our side. So the website stays clean, like Zendesk or Hotjar or active campaign, or, all of these kinds of guys that have a plugin that's just integrates via API.
Eh, but yes, later this year basically because of a users demand. We're going to be expanding this to a script that you can deploy over to web flows or two weeks Squarespace, wherever even starting to look into creating additional plugins for different platforms because having a plugin creates.
The level of flexibility and integration that you can't do with just the script. So that that really helped us create a product that works on the backend, the front end, and really, doing one-click push into the media for the auto log-ins, all of those things that you can't do with just a script that doesn't really like properly integrate into the database.
And we're looking into options for doing this for Shopify. I think that would be the first one after the script. Yeah, massively bland version two point. Oh, very exciting
Paul Lacey: [00:53:27] as well. I
Vito Peleg: [00:53:28] think it's called the day. I tell him that it means websites in Hebrew actually, which is
Paul Lacey: [00:53:33] mine knife. And then I guessed it was a Hebrew word.
Vito Peleg: [00:53:39] Andrew Cuomo. He He was talking to her about this and there was thinking about different names and all of that is what's the problem just to go through it, translate and find something that kind of applies. And it's such a great exercise. And at that end just made perfect sense because that's where the focus Chris will still be.
But it's still a broad word that no one really knows what it means, which means that the vision can expand with it as opposed to a ward like WP bills. That limits you in Nathan, you can now get, become a Magento expert with WP deals, right?
Maziar Firuzmand: [00:54:18] For this move. It's actually a very meaningful, strategic move. I would
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:23] love it there. Thanks. Yeah. Good luck. Yeah, it is amazing. And happening, at the end of this
Vito Peleg: [00:54:29] month with version 2.0, okay. Yeah. We're, we've been working on it for six months now. And I'm like, like what, what inspired this kind of a, I was waking, I was telling Nathan before we started the broadcast Friday morning, I was, I'm waking up looking at my phone and I'm seeing people sharing with the new website.
Still being developed on social media saying what happens if is like,
Paul Lacey: [00:54:54] Oh my God is out of the bag. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:57] I guess it comes from concern though, doesn't it? Because if you see something that you've become to rely on and somehow the media gets hold of it. And in this case it was Facebook groups got hold of it and it's out there.
It's, the full intention was that you would announce this in due course and probably write things so that they were as explanatory as possible. But it would concern you wouldn't, you'd be like, what the heck? What I'm relying on this now explain quickly which now you managed to do in record time, you said?
Yeah.
Vito Peleg: [00:55:25] So it was platform a few weeks from now and everything that it was supposed to happen over the upcoming three weeks was crammed into three hours on Friday that I woke up and I had to deal with all of that. So the video is out. And eh, but even more than that, people were going into our new, the new in website and seeing all of the feedback items that we had just internal discussions of of the different kind of yeah.
Maybe this needs to change.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:51] Lessons learned yeah, that, that. Re congratulations. Well done. The only question Paul is, can we have him back? That's you know, if there's not,
Vito Peleg: [00:56:01] no one chasing you,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:06] right. Let's move on few quick things. If that's all right, I'm going to go through this really quickly. A couple of things to mention, just to. Plugins really few nice additions to the plugin universe just in tablet mentioned. This one is called show and hide content via the block visibility, WordPress plugins.
So this is a dead, simple little plugin. It allows you to currently change based upon user role. What else was that? It's in that image there, which is now too small. I can't remember, but Oh, date was another one. So essentially this plugin will allow you to stick stuff on a WordPress page or post and simply say, show it at this time and then remove it at this time, which is, I think for a lot of people, this is the core functionality of a membership style plugin show it to this particular user role or this particular user.
There's a pro version comment. I did want to talk more about it, but probably with time running out, we'll just drop it and say there it is. It looks really good. And Justin as always has a good look pro version coming out soon. The next one, I think Paul, you should probably leave on this one because you've had a much more involvement with the guys over at generate press.
They've got a new project. Actually it's not a new project. It's just, they've got a new angle on a previous project. They've got pro version of generate blocks.
Paul Lacey: [00:57:21] Yeah. So January blocks is a plugin for the block editor and you don't need to use generate press or anything like that, but it's by the same people, it's by Thomas born at January, press this plugin.
So the core generate blocks plugin gave you, I think it was just three blocks, but you could do a ton of things if those, so that they go down a different route than, this block pack that has 30 blocks in it, for instance the generic way is. How do we make something, have as much longevity as possible.
And that's Thomas bone's decision making process always. So he re released January blocks the free plugin, which pretty much whenever you see anybody trying to make a agency type or a designer, trying to make a website. That looks something like what they might have made with element or BeaverBuilder or something like that.
Almost always, they will fall back on the generate blocks, plugin and use that because it's a plugin that gives you very intricate design control within the block editor, compared to what it gives you by default. Now they've just released. I think it was a couple of days ago, generate press blocks pro French.
It was Friday. Yeah. And it gives you, again, it gives the designer type person or the professional site builder, all of the stuff that they asked for from January blocks that they didn't have, but we've holding back on some of the things that they might have asked for, but really they could do it another way.
So this is what I would call a very mature way of approaching. Intricate level design in the block editor the pricing of the pro plugin is $39 a year for one site, $69 a year for 10, and then $99 a year for 250, which that's the one I've come with. You can get a real feel of what is achievable with generate press generate box pro by looking at the.
The series of templates that you get fit. I think how many, 150 professional templates, I think that's full sites. I think that's different template layouts and stuff like that. They've all been almost all of those have been done by a really awesome designer called Mike Oliver who works for generate press and generate blocks.
And I know that Tom and Mike have worked extremely closely. For Tom to understand what a real professional designer genuinely needs out of the block editor. And all of that thought has gone into this. The product is pretty awesome. If I was building a website and. WordPress and I was going to be using the block editor.
There's just absolutely no doubt. This is what I'd be using, but I am a generate press fan, boy, I will put that out there. So I am slightly biased, but I think that a lot of the community agrees as well. Just to segue from this as well. Mike, the actual designer of all the templates in there. You can find his [email protected].
He intended with the launch of generic quest blocks pro released his course, and his course is entitled how to build lightweight and WordPress websites. We've generated breasts and generate blocks. So if you go to his website and you want to learn how to use. Generate blocks to the level that allows you to do these kinds of layouts, this kind of mobile optimization.
And you want to learn that very quickly, then you can go and sign up to Mike's course on his website. Michael Lluvia, Mike oliver.me. Yeah, it's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:57] Mike oliver.me forward slash generate press dash generate blocks dash course. It's like a nice one, two punch. Isn't it. Tom comes out with the pro version and then somebody that works for him, but independently on more or less the same day releases a course about how to do.
I think that's quite a nice symbiosis just to say the pro version doesn't add any. Customize it, it doesn't add any more blocks. It's just the ability to customize things. So for example, on the screen, we're showing a screenshot of the additional option. So things like being able to add transitions and opacities and box shadows and transformations and all of this kind of stuff, the fun stuff in a way.
But you can build all of the layouts, although they might not look. At least they would be less easy to create the sort of visual effects and so on and so forth. Yeah. Ah, interesting pricing as well, $39 for the one license. And then what was it for 250?
Paul Lacey: [01:01:51] Something like 350 sites or something.
I think the, I think it was $69 with 10 sites and then $1,900 for for 250 sites. So
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:00] interesting. Isn't it? Because we had this, we had the same thing from the guys at grid builder. Do you remember their lifetime deal? It just, they went for one site to 10 site and then it was, I think, 999 or something.
We've got Tom doing the same thing. Just fascinating. What the rationale behind that is. I would imagine that most people just because it's not that much more, we'll just go for this $99 deal just because 30 30 bucks gets you 240 more
Paul Lacey: [01:02:26] sites. I think one of the cool things about this product as well. Not just to pick it up even more, but I am, is that these design templates that Mike has produced with the plugin have all been done with just the three blocks that generate blocks, the free version comes with and the pro Adam, and mostly the core blocks that come with WordPress.
So it's not like there's. 70 or 80 or even 250 different modules that are needed to create these designs. These designs look as detailed as the things that you see on the element or, templates and stuff like that. And what generate blocks is doing is proving that it's possible. So as much as I'm a massive doubter of the entire concept of, the block editor, it's proof that it's doable.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:14] Can we see them? Are
Paul Lacey: [01:03:15] there any ways on that? I think this might be a secret link library dot generate blocks.com. Try that. See if you can get that in the
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:23] library. We're not actually go, Oh, I can't spell. We're not actually doing any naughtiness era we thought generally.
Paul Lacey: [01:03:30] No, I think you can find this link from within the blog is probably okay.
Yeah, no, this happened to veto anyway, didn't it. It's all fair. So yeah, I don't know if this is just the road blocks, but I think all of the actual templates, the full-page templates are probably baked into the actual. Plugin itself. Okay. But I know you can have a sneak peek there for anyone who sees this link.
So hopefully that's not
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:54] nice. Okay. I'll put that in the show notes. Library, degenerate blocks.com looks cool. Yep. Max veto, anything, or should we move
this same year? Oh,
Maziar Firuzmand: [01:04:06] you too.
Vito Peleg: [01:04:08] And so eh, there's a, there's all types of ad-ons and.
Paul Lacey: [01:04:14] I'll be right back
Vito Peleg: [01:04:16] classic fall. But eh, what I'm saying is that recently Oh, since it wouldn't bug has been moving it's just been pushed out with so many limited features or like lack of features.
It inspired like a full on industry around it with a bunch of people that are. Putting a lot of faith in creating, ad-ons creating plugins that are created doing some basic functionality that I think the page builder should have had the block reader should have had on its own. To me, it seems like such a risky business model because you don't know what's going to come up next month.
On Gutenberg and how long this product likes for now, it looks amazing, eh, but this is what I would expect from Gutenberg to have, if it's core, the ability to do those pretty basic stuff of that, adding a, background color and the border radius and those kinds of stuff.
So I'm really interested in seeing like what what kind of drives people to just. Put all of their fatal or the entire business over something that is, it happened with other builders before with, without a mental as well. They would release a feature that will make a plugin obsolete and that's their prerogative, that's the core product.
They can add whatever they want onto it. That makes sense. But, yeah, but this seems like a, like I just seems risky is it seems scary to me to do something like that to go down this route.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:47] He's lucky in that. He's got a very this is Tom's got a very good reputation with this generate press theme.
And so I imagine he's going to bring a lot of people on board,
Vito Peleg: [01:05:56] And audiences from scratch.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:58] Yeah. Yeah. Max, sorry, you were going to say.
Maziar Firuzmand: [01:06:01] Sure. So I want to say that this product is impressive. I've not used it, but just looking at this preview it makes sense to me. And I think this is like a good answer to those who think that there has mean WordPress specifically Gutenberg has reached its limits in terms of capacity to for new products.
See Vito says they have the, better than the future of Gutenberg. But right now, it would make sense. And I'm me, myself being someone who's building WordPress websites. I'll definitely check it out, but maybe something happens tomorrow and they add this feature to itself. And then.
Something may break. This is exactly what you're going to do. This is the risk that they're taking and but looking at the product right now, it makes sense. I find the value that they propose looking forward to
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:56] that. Yeah, it does look nice. I've. I bought it and I'm just going to have a play with it over the days and weeks to come.
We'll see where we go with
Paul Lacey: [01:07:03] that. Certainly at risk isn't though. We've we've developing the long side, the block editor in Gutenberg, like max was saying that it's young in its lifespan, the the block editor, but there's commercial opportunities right now. But it's risky because so much can change.
And if someone sees an idea that's done really well, the spirit of WordPress is you can mimic that and build that into core. And I see a lot of the plugins that come out at the moment, for instance, the member, the membership type micro membership type thing that we looked at just before this piece to me has functionality that I could totally see being bought into core.
And plugins like that, that I can see getting
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:49] pulled into court. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah, it would be a risky thing to make the pro version of that only to discover that somebody actually
Maziar Firuzmand: [01:07:58] Nathan, I'd like to bring one more point about this. We actually had some pro and actually have. A similar product did for elements or it's an extension for saving styling for element or widgets and saving them into cloud and be using them in other priests, sorry, elements for projects, the same way you can save blocks and use as well in other, and it's actually working, but it's like Sometime past an elementary team decided to give this feature.
It's not exactly the same feature, but the global styling that they released later on, it was somehow overlapping with this feature. We, we are not monetizing that product. It was just for more like a contribution. Did the community, but we actually in closely saw this happening. So yeah, it's very risky.
You have to predict a lot of things before taking such risks, but I do, I wish all the best for the generate risk guys.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:53] Yeah. Thank you. That was a nice little segue as well. W I was going to talk about WP scan, but I'll just simply mention that it's quite an accolade. We had Ryan do Hurst on the pocket just a few weeks ago.
Ryan does a fantastic job. Probably is. Very on the known, shall we say, but he's the guy behind WP scan, which, and he's built. I think it's fair to say largely single-handedly the WordPress vulnerability database, which a lot of the companies, which you think are creating these vulnerabilities, it's actually him, the, the more.
The more well-known companies in the WordPress space, he's actually subletting his list out to them in many cases. And he's been given this nice accolade. He can now create CV numbers, which is really boring, but if you're into what he does, it's going to make his job a whole lot easier in the future.
We'll be able to identify WordPress vulnerabilities. He will be able to give them a number, making sharing of them a whole lot easier. So just about a hat tip to Ryan who has done this work tirelessly since 2014, I think, and has only recently come up with a way of monetizing it. So for years and years, he was just doing it for the benefit of all of us.
So thank you to Ryan weld-on and. Dunno. If this is going to affect you. I don't know if this is even mentioned well worth mentioning, but if you're a user of Facebook advertising, then iOS 14, now I'm not an iOS user. So I'm still going to be battered by Facebook adverts and it will still be as effective.
But I always 14 Apple have made it such that. A setting which was previously, you had to find it yet to bury into the second things and find this setting to switch it off. Now they've basically had it gone it going to have it on by default and it's going to prevent Facebook and presumably other people, but Facebook are the ones that are probably most in the firing line.
It's going to present them being able to track you in quite the same way that they have previously. I think it's to do with anonymizing. Tokens, as opposed to them being able to literally follow you around. So perhaps, if Vico goals and I would imagine both of you have been involved in Facebook advertising the Apple side of things, which is a massive slice of it, you are going to struggle to make those adverts pay. And Facebook got up in arms, they put this press release out where they were claiming that really it's all about the small businesses. This is wrong for the small businesses. No mention of the fact that they, they track you all over the place and probably know more about you than this is sensible for a company to know.
But yeah, it's just an interesting piece of news. I think, cause I use Android, this one affect me, so it's a bit of a non article in my case, but yeah. I think this is the right decision from Apple. I think somebody needs to put the brakes on what these tokens going around the internet can find out about us.
Paul Lacey: [01:11:43] And next week on this weekend, WordPress, Facebook deletes Apple's Facebook account.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:48] Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [01:11:53] I'm probably mine now too. And YouTube de monetizes this video. So yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:00] That's, that would make the slightest bit of difference. So that's perfectly all right. But just interesting. I think a company like Apple are the only people that can really pull this kind of thing off. I would imagine that Google wouldn't dream of doing something like this, because it will hurt the underlying.
Proposition that Google has to make money out of Android, which is the same stuff. Yeah. Selling adverts all over the place, just without the Facebook, without the Google name attached to it. So like it's
Vito Peleg: [01:12:25] not going to stop it and make a difference in terms of at you're seeing ads or not. You're still going to see ads, eh, but it just makes a difference in terms of that's what I think.
I, I understand what Facebook is saying is it's not going to decrease the ads for anyone. All that it will do is it's going to make it harder for businesses to show you relevant ads. So you might see , you might see like a food fund guy when you're like a 12 year old or something like that.
Because there is no way of targeting this. Just to Nathan, for example, it's fascinating.
Paul Lacey: [01:13:02] I didn't say
Vito Peleg: [01:13:02] that it
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:03] depends on the pixel. I'm not going to react. That's unsure and a screenshot of what iOS is now going to show. And it really it's the language that I think Facebook are objecting. So this menu, which is on the screen, it was previously a menu. You have to go and find, and you could basically set it on or off, but now.
When you install iOS 14 or presumably when you buy a new iPhone with it installed every time that you go to a new site, this is the warming that you get. And the only well that's I don't know in all honesty but here we are looking at the Facebook variant of it. It says, allow Facebook to track your activity across other companies and apps and websites, sorry, other companies, apps and websites, and.
So the language is interesting because I think most people given that sentence will say, no, don't do it because what's the benefit to you of being tracked. I think a few of us on the standard and maybe you've got a better app. But it doesn't, but you don't want to be tracked. I think most of us have that kind of built in tracking.
Ooh, no. If they've worded it. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah.
Vito Peleg: [01:14:16] Okay. Tell me about the fact that you can show you can serve ads that are relevant to what people are interested in. I like that. I don't think it's a bad thing from a consumer point of view, why do I need to see ads that are irrelevant to me? It is show me something that can really help me get to the next step.
Everything in life, instead of just random eh, whatever, it BT or or Virgin media adds, cause that's, what's going to happen. It's just going to be going back like you watch TV, 95% of the ads are irrelevant to you because it's not focused. Yeah,
Maziar Firuzmand: [01:14:52] I think part of it will be affected by this fear or this new things.
If this trending things that we have had about Facebook sharing, WhatsApp data with Facebook, the midst of all these events, there's this fear and lack of trust people have generated against Facebook. So just like Nathan says I guess many people will just say no. They don't like to be tracked regardless of the outcome.
Maybe even the positive outcomes getting tracked just in this case might have for them, they will see less irrelevant ads. They will see, more relevant ads if they don't say no. But yeah, there is this mistrust about this kind of companies and yeah, it was another blow in the face of marketers by Apple.
Maybe the second or third in the past years. So let's see how we can deal with it.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:39] Yeah. Facebook user, I'm sorry, I don't know who you are. The reason we don't know who you are is cause you have to click a link above the actual video in Facebook and it allows streaming up, which is the platform we use.
It allows you, it allows them to track you. So it's probably the exact thing that we're talking about. But yeah. The Facebook user, whoever you want. I says, Hey, goes it doesn't say turn off tracking. It says the app will ask app knots to track implying that the app might say, now I'm going to track you.
I don't think so. My understanding is that if you say no, you, it really does sandbox. The experience that Facebook and. Apply to that, but I could be wrong. And the,
Vito Peleg: [01:16:16] What you're saying, if it's going to be shown on every website, which means that every website of every client that has a pixel is going to be throwing those popups.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:16:25] No. Yeah. You would have thought that they'd have. Maybe figured out that the Facebook pixel can no longer work across the board. I don't know. Let's see what the, how the dust settles and find this out. I always leave tracking off everywhere, again, in the comments tracking on everywhere. Rather see adverts I might want to make for a better experience, which beautifully segues to the last thing that we're going to do today, which is an article on the website.
Let me just pop that on the screen. And take that post off. It's from Cara McLean. Who has made it a golfer herself during 2020 to stop using Google products, basically, because she thinks the same thing about Google, as we've just been talking about with Facebook. And so she's gone out of our way this year.
Yeah. To try to replace all services that Google have their tendrils. And so on the screen. There are things like, so she's going to replace Gmail with proton mail Chrome. She's gone to Firefox developer edition, she's using.dot go and imagine a laundry list of Google services that she has decided to replace.
I actually, I was persuaded by this and during the course of this week I've completely shut down Chrome. I've on installed it now. I haven't, that's not true. I've basically taken it out of the doc on my Mac and I've put a chromium version called brave. On instead. And I'm not gonna, I'm not going to be quite so gung ho as she is, but I'm interested to see what drawbacks there are for me.
If I try a different browser for awhile, if I can get myself away from Google. So that's just an experiment that I'm carrying. You may notice. I don't know if you see the UI of the browser that I'm using, but it's brave and it has this nice little feature here, which it may not show cause I'm in a.
Incognito window. It shows you what truckers are happening on the current session that you're using and you can then take appropriate action if you like, but yeah, I'm convinced. I think she's got a good point. I'm not going to go nuts. I'm going to use Google drive. I'm going to use Google maps, but I'm going to stop giving Google for a period of time.
Everything, every single thing that I browse on the internet through the Chrome browser.
Vito Peleg: [01:18:32] I switched out of Chrome, mostly because it just kept crashing all the time. Eh but even with the, with our music edge now which is also chromium, just a, based on the same concept, eh, but eh, but I do find myself using incognito.
As a default, eh, like when I browse around the internet, especially on my on my phone and my iPad, it's just like the standard is that it's going to open something in incognito, eh, yeah. So I'm hoping that's it. Even though you don't know, you never know the
Paul Lacey: [01:19:08] tracking one of the features in it.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:11] Yeah. No, you get your use of VPN and then that's another thing. No, this brave browser comes with an alert check. Check this out. One of the options is to open up a new private window with tall. Hang on. I wasn't showing the screen. So look at this. I'll just turn Christopher's comment off so you can go incognito.
But you can also go incognito and that window will be served through the tour network. Which I just thought was fascinating. Is
Paul Lacey: [01:19:38] that like a free open-source VPN or something?
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:40] I really a VPN, but it's, it has similar, it basically separates up your web browsing experience sends it to multiple different locations and then rebuild.
It's much slower, but it is. Provably more secure, not perfect, but very close to perfect. It stands for the onion router or they say router elsewhere. But I just thought that was an interesting privacy for each. So you wouldn't even need a VPN, but your browsing experience would be much, much slower.
Chris in the comment says, Ugh I couldn't do all of that. It's my worst nightmare. Back to the days of things, not working with each other. Yeah. I get it. I'm going to see what bits of it. I just can't drop in which bits of it I can. And. See
Paul Lacey: [01:20:20] what I got a message for Chris. I think I can imagine Chris uses, the full Google suite and says yes, are offering on Facebook and probably gets a lot of adverts for lifetime deals for SAS software as well, most likely, which makes me wonder, which makes me join the link up with Chris.
Cause he's probably a bit of a legend in in terms of being one of the most prolific buyers of SAS software. How's he's well admitted on this show a number of times. So Chris, you might want to switch and it might save you some money it's so
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:50] that the proposition of these combined services, the stuff that Google provide ostensibly for free, we all know what that means, right?
You are the product, but it's unbelievable. My kids are on homeschool and literally it couldn't be done without Google classroom. This completely free suite of products, which Google built several years ago for a situation. Exactly like a global pandemic where no kids can go to school. And it's absolutely brilliant.
And I do not know what schools would have done without it. So it's not that I've got an ax to grind against Google. I'd just like to experiment and see if my experience has changed by just tracking your kids. Yeah. Oh my God. So much actually. No, I think. There are bits in the terms and conditions that you sign that are different because it's geared towards children's use.
But imagine they're taken anonymous metrics of, what works, what doesn't work, but not perhaps attached to an account name or what have you. Yeah. Interesting. Lifetime deals, lot audit 20, 21. There he goes. I've got the trophy, Paul, right? I'm done. I think we've done it unless anybody has gotten and they want to drop.
Yeah. Say it now, otherwise we'll knock it on the
Maziar Firuzmand: [01:22:06] head. I like to thank you. Nathan and Paul and veto. It was nice to meet you guys and thanks to everyone who watched it was
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:13] beautiful.
Paul Lacey: [01:22:14] Yeah, it was nice again,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:17] isn't it like Paul? And I constantly say when the show finished cut, that was so enjoyable.
I really enjoy doing this. Yeah. It's just nice, especially now that we're all trapped inside. It's more pleasurable than it ever was. Just having a, having an hour and a half in this case just to chat through and shoot the breeze with some like-minded pieces. Yeah. Just hang out. It's wonderful. So firstly, thank you to veto.
Thank you to Paul. Thank you to max and thank you to anybody who joined us. If you've got any comments to make, stick them in. YouTube comments or stick them on the Facebook post, whatever you like, wherever you like. And what other podcasts out on Thursday and we're back next Monday, 2:00 PM. UK time. Take it easy.