This Week in WordPress #147

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 147 entitled check buttons and radio boxes. It was published on Tuesday, the 26th of January, 2021. We're joined today as always by. Paul Lacey, but also this week we've got Birgit Pauli-Haack. There's an awful lot to talk about in the WordPress space.
This week, we start off with the fact that Joe Biden's administration has decided to use WordPress for the white house website, continuing a tradition starting in 2017. We also talk about the full site. Editing outreach program and what it means that was a large part of our discussion this week. How can you get involved?
And what does it all mean? We also talk about Gutenberg times and a webinar that big it is running along with some of her friends. Next, we move on to an article by David McCann, all about using oxygen and about how David's content is the real deal. And then we talk about pods pro. This is a really interesting pricing structure and model for the pro version of it.
Pods find out all about that. We talk about the fact that Wordfence have decided to offer free word fence scans and cleans for schools in the U S and finally, we're talking about a podcast episode that we did on WP Builds. Yeah. About canceling word camp Europe in 2020, all coming up next 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 demo at absplittest.com. Hello there. Good morning. Good afternoon. Wherever you might be. It could be the evening. In fact, I suppose it's a, this week in WordPress, one more time. Every brunch, every Monday we do this. We have a chat with some people in the WordPress space about all of the things that have happened related to work.
But what I say, all of the things, some of the things. That we've discovered during the previous week, just a couple of bits and pieces before I actually introduce this week's guests, if that's okay. We've got had to WP Builds.com forward slash live. That's using YouTube. So you need to be logged into Google.
In order to get comments over there. Plus if you're in our Facebook group, which [email protected] forward slash Facebook, the posts should be appearing over there as well. And you can make comments. I know that many of you realize this is me regurgitating the same old stuff, but nevertheless, quite handy to to say it.
And just to say that we're covering the WordPress news for the week, commencing the 18th of January, 2020. So this week as always, I'm joined by Paul Lacey. Hello, Paul.
Paul Lacey: [00:03:01] Hello. Good to see you again. We've been talking all week.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:04] Yeah, we really have a lot this week. Do you want to give us your elevator pitch, your newly formed elevator pitch.
Paul Lacey: [00:03:13] I haven't really got one. I guess if this transitional moment I'm an independent WordPress consultant. Yes. Okay. That'll do for the moment. We'll wait till I've got a new until I've got a new website. Let's just carry that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:26] and welcome to the very first, for the very first time to be a good port.
Now, please forgive me if I butcher your surname. Cause we established what your first name was, but I'm going to say. Hope poorly hack.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:03:38] That's perfect.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:39] Hello? Hi. I'm trying to do this a little bit more professionally, so I'm going to read out and then you can correct me if I've, if any of this has changed.
Bill Gates is the curator on the Gutenberg times and is the co-host on the Gutenberg changelog podcast with Mark your reign. Is that right? Is there anything else you want to add to that?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:04:00] You could subscribe to the podcast, WIA any of your favorite podcast apps and we have also a weekend edition on the Gutenberg times of the news.
Or yeah, what happened last week, or if I find some articles that have, that are interesting for the community. You can subscribe to that every
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:19] Saturday. Yeah, thank you. It's lovely to have somebody on it, as we were saying, just before we started and pressed record, it's nice to have somebody on.
We've been talking about Guttenberg for the longest period of time. But to us, it's one of many things that we discussed. And so it's nice to have somebody on who's really deeply embedded in it. And perhaps you can give us some insights and what have you, as we produce the show today, the just a couple of things before we begin, this is the WP Builds.com website.
You can find it at. WP Builds.com, as you would imagine we produce a podcast every week and we produce this week in WordPress, which you are listening to now just like with Birgits productions, you can subscribe and you can do that by going to your favorite podcast player and typing in WP Builds. Or you can go to this page.
WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe. A couple of email lists, this gray one. That gets you it tells you all about the content that we produce at WP belt. And then the blue one is less used. It's when we hear about WordPress deals, there's also ways on that page to find our Facebook group and so on and so forth.
The other one to say is that we have a deals page, which people like so make use of it's [email protected] forward slash deals. And it's just a bunch of coupon codes for WordPress products and they seem to never expire, which is quite nice each week after we've done this live, we then put it onto our website and you can find it in the archive section here.
It's WP Builds.com forward slash news dash archives. And that's just the way of curating all of the bits and pieces that we produce over the. Of course of the year and yeah. Welcome you to go and check that out as well. But without further ado, let's get on to the actual meat and potatoes of today's show, which is all about WordPress news.
We have op first. Now this is actually quite an exciting piece of news. Those of you that have been following the U S election and let's be honest. It was a difficult to miss the U S election this time around. There is a new website and it's got something to do with WordPress and it has been launched on WordPress.
I believe it into WordPress the first time in 2017, it was if you like taken from the Drupal platform who had it for the longest period of time, and they've decided to stay with WordPress, this is a picture of what you see all, although it's not mentioned in this WP Tavern article by Sarah Gooding, all the indications apparently seem to point to the agency.
10 op. As the actual people who are behind this, but as you can imagine a website such as this, it really has to tick every single box, especially in terms of. I guess things like accessibility and speed and so on. So really I'm just introducing you to the new white house website. What do you make of it, Paul and Birgit,
Paul Lacey: [00:07:04] but say that I'm hoping that Biden and Harris will now get right into WordPress and we can see them subscribing to this week in WordPress and maybe Biden would like to come on as a panelist and let us know what he thinks of the block
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:19] editor.
He's not really got much else to do. How's he at the moment, there's nothing he needs to clean up or, yeah. It's nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:07:26] You said there's a statement they're all using the whole website uses the Goodman block editor. Actually. That's a statement by itself about,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:35] yeah, that is interesting.
So do we know if it's got a sort of like custom theme or anything like that? That is my memory of reading around this piece was that as a custom theme, but we, and there's a few little Easter eggs dropped in the code somewhere about some kind of reference to 46 and some kind of reference to other various statistics agencies that That the government uses to provide statistics and so on, but that's fascinating if it's using the block editor.
That's cool. Yep.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:08:02] Yep. There's also a link in there. If you want to work for the digital services at the U S government, you can apply there. And I know a famous WordPress committer, Nathan. No, what's his name? Andrew Nathan has actually worked for that service for two years.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:22] Nice. The th there was the inevitable commentary all about page speed and so on.
And you can see from here that it, this is the lighthouse scores, and you can see from the green, we've got 95 on performance, a hundred. On accessibility, which, that's really amazing. I suppose they rarely have any website on the planet was going to achieve this. You would have hoped it would be something such as this best practices, 93 and SEO a hundred.
That which led actually interestingly to the commentary in the comments. And that, that seems to be the thing that people were railing against the fact that this is, don't try to judge everything by these metrics, lighthouse and GT metrics. And so on, which I thought was interesting.
The commentary was all about that. But yeah, just very good. A nice little piece, all about the the importance of WordPress. I don't know. If it's going to be updated frequently, often, if it's going to have a blog, I don't really know how this website is utilized other than just being perhaps a brochure.
I really don't know, but it's nice that I would say that it's the kind of thing that you could. Quite handily, go to your clients with and say, Oh you got any problems with WordPress? The white house are using WordPress, so you can probably trust it.
Paul Lacey: [00:09:30] So far as I know, I think they are using it with the last administration as well.
And I think that this. I, my understanding of the story is that the first before I'd have decided they've looked at different options again and decided to stick with WordPress. So that's good news for WordPress.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:47] The thing, it was quite interesting. I was listening to another podcast number 10 years. Whoa, no, actually, whilst we talk about this, you could go and find out, how.
Yeah. What's that tool that you use who built this, or how has it built or what's it built with or something.com you can type in a URL and they figure it out for you. There was a podcast that I listened to. It's got nothing to do with WordPress. It's called this week in Google on and listen to that each week.
Cause it's a nice, it's a nice podcast. All about the state of the web, especially relying on Google and Facebook and Twitter and so on. Do you have listened to it? Big, bigger. Oh, yes. For the last five years. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love the interaction with Jeff and Leo. This week in particular, they fell out right at the beginning, which is always a win
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:10:30] for Bonnie actually on that show.
Yes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:32] Yes, she was right. Oh she went off and did her own things. Didn't she? Yeah. And they were saying that there was nothing to do with this story, but related to it the Twitter handle, which has been so important to Donald Trump, obviously you perhaps know, or don't know that Twitter just a couple of weeks ago froze his.
Twitter accounts. And back at the beginning of his tenure, he declined to use this Twitter account, which is specifically reserved for the president. And it's called POTUS P O T U S president of the United States because I'm guessing what it stands for. And so Twitter of Chad to do this little shimmy over the last couple of weeks, trying to get everybody that follows Joe Biden to follow this new account.
I'm not sure how that's all worked itself out, but it just really interesting how. The online platforms is specially Twitter has come to play such an important part to the point where the white house and so on, have to go out and tell people, look, this is the account you now need to follow. He's only going to be posting pictures of cats on his regular account.
If you want actual updates, you're going to have to go and subscribe to this account. And the intention I think, was to bring people across automatically, but certainly Leo on that podcast said that his. Is it didn't transition for him. So if he wanted to follow Biden, he had to do it by himself. Anyway, we're totally going off piece.
Let's just say a few hires. Hello to Chris Hughes in the comments. That's very nice of you and Chris. And just to say, if you're using Facebook and you wish to make a comment and you wish for your face to appear, which of course you may not wish to do, then there is actually a link in the thread.
And you've got to go and click on a stream yard link, and that will enable us to see who you are.
Paul Lacey: [00:12:13] Lyles,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:13] Livingston. Hello? Yeah. And I don't know if this is Beth again, but yeah, we've been using it. And Paul again, sorry, Chris. Again. Yeah, I'm not gonna say that on there. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:12:27] That's our phone number?
Number 10 is using WordPress by the way for them log.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:32] And yet we know we never make any fossil about that one. Do we? So there we go.
Paul Lacey: [00:12:37] Number 10 is already using WordPress. I don't know if they're using blocks. It looks more like a custom theme. But I think for those people who don't know what number 10 is, it's like a tiny version of the white house in the UK for Boris Johnson and his
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:51] friends.
It's not sorry.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:12:53] It's the size of a closet in the wife's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:56] house. Yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:12:56] exactly.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:58] Literally. Semi-decent, it's not even, semi-detached it say it's a terrorist terrorists house. Three, four floors. But you're talking about,
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:13:07] you're talking about dining suite 10, right?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:09] Yeah. Number two, number 10 Downing street.
Yeah. Yeah, it's working now. We've got your image. So we know here, any comments that you make from this point on, we know who you are, so thank you. And hello, Cameron coming from us all the way in Australia. I happened to know that because we had a nice podcast episode a little while ago, so hello, Cameron.
Nice to have you with us. Should we move to number two? Our second story of today? I think we've probably done that one justice. And for this one, I'm going to actually hand over to Paul, who I think in turn is going to. Go to and fro with Birgit.
Paul Lacey: [00:13:40] Yeah. So this is an article on WordPress Tavern by Justin Tatlock.
And it is entitled first round of the FSC, which is the full site editing outreach program concludes and did identify as template editing mode problems. And so what this article is just basically saying, is that the. The first round of kind of user testing as such from this outreach program has finished now.
And that obviously it's come back with some feedback of some things that need improving and the general the article is generally summarizing the most of the users had a bit of trouble understanding the difference between. Editing the content mode and then switching into the template, editing mode, which kind of looked similar, but you could do a lot of damage, I think, to your website in template editing mode.
Just in summarizes at the end. I think I'm totally with Justin on this one in how he's summarize this. Let's see, he said gate. Switching between post and template editing feels like full site editing, 2.0 type of thing. The development team has enough issues on its plate. With the normal site editor.
It's a far cry from being viable production ready projects. The team's focus should be on working out the kinks of that system before merging it with the post editor crawl. Before you walk, before you can run, he does go on to say, though, He understands, this is an early development and he says, however, I am willing to be pleasantly surprised in the long run.
It will probably be a good thing that we are getting an early look at what these two different pieces of WordPress will look like working in conjunction. Like I say, I'm, we've just in there in that I've almost always liked the separation of design and structure from content and those things to be.
Quite distantly separated within a user interface, but like Justin, I'm happy to be pleasantly supply is later on. And the reason, one of the reasons we're particularly happy this week to have big it on is because a big, it works. Within the Christian Christiansburg project. I don't know if you want to mention a bit more about that for context.
But I'm super interested to see what your thoughts are also on the difference. The content editing versus the full site editing and generally your involvement in the project as a whole as well. Before I put my foot in it, As well, cause sometimes I complain about Gutenberg, so
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:12] yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:16:12] Yeah thank you for having on the show and this pod does of foods that editing outreach program is actually something new that came out of the experience.
Rolling out. The block editor and 5.0 and have a lot of criticism that decisions all behind the scenes and people didn't. Yeah, didn't get some input in that. And the program was actually announced in may, but only now in November, December came to fruition. Because the development wasn't far enough to do testing on the full site editing for the alpha version.
All the things that are not working or actually supposed to be not working because they're not there yet. But it's interesting for the team to see where the confusion starts and where they have to make the distinctions. I think the So the philosophy is actually to have just one interface and I'm like you, Paul, I like that separation of concern, but that is also what developers think about and what w what brought us to the mystery meat that referred to when he said we have all those widgets, we have sidebar, we have site goat. Shortcodes we have navigation screens, and people need to learn so many interfaces to to Manor said all now let's bring it all in one and people don't have to leave. Yeah. And so then now need to strike the balance and find the places where.
Confusion happens. I actually had a different confusion thing with the new version of Gutenberg that just came out this week with a reusable blocks. It's now a sidebar thing. And all of a sudden I changed my site my reusable blocks and didn't realize that. So I needed to switch a little bit.
My Mo. Yeah, but it's so my involvement in the Gutenberg team is pretty much that I test very early all the versions because Gutenberg times is using the Gutenberg plugin in production which you're not supposed to do that at home, but the good McDonald's just yeah. I have to wait two weeks till fix it.
So I'm just going to hang in there. But it's it started out in 2017. When I saw the first video about the Gutenberg editor. I got really enlightened, so to speak about, Oh, this is going to change so much and I want to learn everything about it. And I wanted to share everything I learned about it with everybody else.
So I build a little story. Fine. Kind of update page and then of course got bit by that. Don't build on rented land and yeah, a half a year later. And then I needed to start my own website and that's what the good times is. So I test everything I read a lot. And I do, I create issues on GitHub.
When something doesn't work to help them to make it better. I also run a page. Let's call it, keeping up with Gutenberg it's a handbook page, but it's an index of all the posts that the team around Gutenberg does and it affects core. It affects core CS as core JS The quick edit, of course.
And then, and the themes team and the design team. If they publish something on their make blogs, I put it all in one kind of list. So you can see from 2020, but Jean, July and December, all the updates that happen on the make blogs. So I run that Yeah, that's pretty much it. And of course my publications with Gutenberg, changelog Mark reign as a designer on the good book team.
And we have been doing that for now a year and a half. That every two weeks we have walked through the change log of the newest plugin version.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:01] Yeah. Yeah. Wait, we tend to have a much more cursory relationship with it. We just talk about the articles very often that are coming out of places like WP Tavern and what have you.
So we're relying a lot on Sarah and Justin and taking their approach on it. And certainly not keeping up to date with it as much as you, but it's been such a controversial couple of years. It is a couple of years now, isn't it? Wow. And so many people with different opinions, I've got some good friends who really want to stay away from it entirely and going out of their way to make sure that it never surfaces in their life.
And then you've got other people who embrace it fully, but everybody along the road, having at least, probably some points of confusion, you often see some of that really knows your stuff about it. Getting tied up with reusable blocks and. And I think things like the fact that the interface is all in one place, both Paul and I have been users a lot, I would say of Beaver builder.
And it's just such an interesting comparison to make, because we've got this fully fleshed out. Page builder plugin, which can do already many of the things which are on the roadmap for Guttenberg and the UI is just something that you got used to. And the creators of that didn't have anybody to answer to except their existing customers.
They could basically just say this is what we're going to do, and now we've done it. And that's the way it now is. They listened to their customers, don't get me wrong, but they can be watched more. They don't have to listen to as many people should we say. Yeah. And so the way that they do things in a sense becomes the way that you expect it to be done.
And I'm sure it would be the same for people to use element or DV or what have you. It's like why doesn't Gothenburg behave like that. And that's the thing about Gutenberg. It is a journey so far, it's a two years more, it's been developed for longer than that, but two and a half years, let's say journey.
And and we still got probably at least two and half years left. So we're going to come across these problems all the time.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:21:53] Actually med weeks, it's a 10 year project for him. Yeah. Yeah. And we are 20%. Yeah. So yeah, if you judge the, even the full side, the food side editing experience to something that has been built over many years in Beaver builder was its own interface that doesn't have to really connect with anything else.
Then it, you set yourself up for disappointment, of course. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm probably in a better stage because I've never used elemental or Beaver builder, any other page builder, a and every time I came across one, it was the worst of things. It wasn't any of those two and I, we stick with the core and then developed seams.
By developing them or writing code. Think that's where I'm in a much better place to not unlearn saying I have to unlearn things. I'm just in all, what can be done. That's so where I'm coming from, but I also think that having something that comes out of core that has a broader base.
Of developers on there that also works with other plugins and where the other page builders actually could build on top because it's a standardized interface in a standardized code base would make it probably much easier for someone who starts now with adding to the page, to the to Gutenberg and Quite a few plugins block collections this way.
Yeah. Go from GoDaddy Genesis themes and cadence themes, Astra. Yeah. They're all going to build on top of the existing code
builder
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:36] here. Hadn't really occurred to me, but yeah, you are in a quote enviable position in that you've got, you are not compared bring it to something. And I suppose in a sense that is the quandary that people such as myself face is that you want it to do a certain thing and that thing is possible.
And so you go to the block, editor attempt that thing and rather than think to yourself I'll just keep pushing on until I figured it out. You're always against the clock thinking I could have done it by now. I could have filmed.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:24:07] Yeah. Yeah. It brings me back to my early days at my computer. I got my first computer in 88 and I was in an accounting program and I wanted to learn multi-platform, which is on an Excel predecessor. And it took me all night to put one spreadsheet in there because I needed to learn interface.
Yeah. And the next morning I told my grandma who actually bought the computer from me, said, this was what I did. And it was really proud. And she said I think computers are a colossal waste of time.
It's really that the interface port that you have to relearn Yeah. And I'm totally sure that people who use page builders now to develop sites for others will take another two to three years to even think about getting into a full site editing experience. But they are also the ones that need to be.
Talk to in the early stages. And that's what the foods that editing program is actually about to have those who build site for others and need to streamline the processes, make sure that they have what they need in the full site editing experience. They, some of them, the early adopters would come sooner into the fold.
Then later it's every new invention has this bell curve. It was innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and then the laggards that will never go there. But so getting that wave a little earlier, that's probably so yeah, it's sooner or later it will come and Patriot and Elementor or really still.
Experiencing growth. So I'm really lucky really happy for them. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:51] That is a really incisive comment though, about the possible two to three year, wait time for people who are using something like element or Beaver builder and all the others, because this is the direct comparison all the time is that.
You hear people calling out Gothenburg because it doesn't do this, that, and the other thing, and that perspective never really gets shared is that we're on, we'll be at year five and a 10 year journey at that point, I suppose we're just used to things working the way they work.
And anyway, sorry, Paul, it sounded like you want to say something.
Paul Lacey: [00:26:23] I just got a lot in my head. This, so I'll try and put it out. First of all the the outreach program seems like a really good idea, and I don't know how the outreach program is selecting the people that. Get involved. And I wouldn't be surprised if it was a, people volunteer, but, and if it is that, then I would just, for the benefit of the team, who's developing it.
It would be a really good idea. For them to look for some people who, are known for using, a particular tool. I'm not talking about me. I'm not trying to get a job here or anything. People who work with, elementary or BeaverBuilder or some of the other tools even non WordPress products, you are.
Blogging about this stuff, or, leading the way on the design, designing with these tools or something to see if they can pull those people in a few of those people into the outreach program in the same way that a commercial product would. Go and head hunt, a couple of people to go. Okay.
Here's the people. The volunteer and here's some people that we actually want to get because I used to do a lot of work with them. Cool government, like 15 years ago. And I would go to these town meetings sometimes. And these were meetings that. Anyone in the area could attend anyone. You can just turn up, you get free coffee, you get free biscuits and you get to speak what you think about the new clock tower, getting built in the town, or there's just too many, there's too much rubbish or junk around in this area.
And I would go to some of these meetings. So I was involved in a digital side of things and it was the same people we used to call them the the usual suspects. And it was the same people. And then the government local government would use these voices as apparently these people are representing everyone and they won.
It's just that those people were the only ones turning up. Other people did care about it, but they didn't even know about these meetings or they didn't prioritize them. So I'd love to see those things. I'd love to see from a product development side of things, I think that they could get some good insights from people using.
Completely different products. And and then that leads on to my other comment, which is more of a question really for via gut. So Matt Mullenweg was talking about this, this widgets menus there's the appearance section is to customize it as does the editor. And I totally understand like his idea of, do you know what we should.
Put all these together, there's too many different things to learn. And I just wonder if his mind, how much of his mind can get changed through the feedback. Because when I listened to that concept, it sounds great, but it's also quite a zero sum argument that, Hey, there's lots of different things. The solution is to put them all together.
And it's who said the solution was to put them all together? If we asked anyone, I know it makes sense. And it's almost like to me that, you've got something like the New York Philharmonic orchestra, and you say, we've got strings, we've got brass, we've got percussion.
What didn't we just get that guy? Who's got the percussion on his arms. He's got a symbol on his head and he's got a Trump instructor's mouth. That's surely a better option. And then if you then paid to go and see the LA the New York Philharmonic orchestra, and you turned up and there's this one dude with like laser, an accordion here, and it's some symbols on his arms going like this, you'd be quite disappointed that this wasn't sounding quite as good as the Philharmonic orchestra.
So do you think bigger that. If enough feedback came from the right people, Matt's vision would be bendable to say, do you know what? We should bring a lot of the stuff in here, but some of it doesn't ever belong in that it really shouldn't belong in that even. So I wonder how much his vision is bendable in your opinion, then a little bit more.
I
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:30:18] think that there's something there's a mystery out there and I an idea or myth up there that Matt is pulling the strings all the time. He is a release lead, but the Gutenberg development has not started in 2017. It started in 2015 where core committers had tried to bring it all to the modern space and have over and over hit some and.
Yeah, some posts out there. Maybe we need to surface them a bit. So when you think about the say, yes, there are, if there are voices there that have a good argument, why things change, but they need to come from a place of knowledge. Having. From the outside, look in and say, Oh, I would love to do it this way.
Why do you first need to know the history where everybody's coming from before you change something? And now every three years in or four years in in the development of something that started five years ago I think I like your idea that the people who Work with page builders now.
And yeah, it should come to the F as E program. Yeah, but this is not there. No. And best in embossed invitations, if you, because it's a lot of work. So inviting someone to do more work on top of their own work is something that only a volunteer would do by. On his own or her own volition. Yeah. You cannot make somebody do the work.
And there is an open invitation there in every open source program. And if you want to do put the Rook and the people who do the work, decide where it's going. Yeah. So if if join in there will not be an embossed invitation there it's all open. It's all in the open and yeah. Opinions are heard, opinions are discussed and opinions are fighting over.
There is no coherent kind of thing. There's a, okay, this is one thing. And everybody has on the fringes is not heard or is not respected or something like that. That's totally not the place. The the case there was Do you probably remember yours devolve who started out being the marketing lead on the team.
And then three months later said I can do this because what I wanted to do is not what the team wanted to do or what it's supposed to do. He had an, his resignation dog, one sentence in there and said, I thought they were decisions would be in private channels on the Slack.
And that is actually not the case. And I took it as something like, I was always wondering about that, but I was really happy to hear that even if it doesn't work out, like he needed to. Work it out. And I think approaching that like a commercial software of also restricts who's making decision.
And everybody is when you look through the GitHub repository and there might be a hurdle there that non developers are not going to get up. But the discussions on features is actually there with good arguments with mock ups, like hundreds of messages with mock ups and very detailed going in there. And then also the consideration from, if it changed it here, we need to change it here and you get, yeah.
But this line of work, you need to really get into it to actually Yeah, and this testing script was very restricted to these are the things that we wanted to learn from it, but it was also it gets you over the hurdle to get in Yamaha. Is it supposed to work? When I'm also part of the documentation team for the block editor end user documentation, not for the developers, but for the, for those who actually use the interface.
And I our problem is that we are not, we can test it against what it's supposed to work because nobody writes that up for us. Yeah. So we are the ones that people come to. Is that, how is it supposed to work? As long as we don't know, we can publish it, but so we need to also go in there and learn these things.
And so it's it's an open invitation to who has. A passion for it who has made business from WordPress. I say this it's a good business case to actually do the five for the future part and contribute not only code, but sharing your opinions, arguing your opinions, arguing in on a case and bring arguments that are actually helpful for the developers.
So if you, yeah. So if it doesn't work they will change it and make it work. Yeah. So that's my plate here.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:12] It's really interesting because over the years that we've been doing this show we get it from both sides, we get the we get the conversations, which go something like.
Look, I wish it would be more like this. But why aren't they doing this? Why aren't they doing this? And as you've said, basically it will be steered by those who have the time and the inclination to be able to commit to it. And then we have like the other half who were saying, I just don't have the time because I'm firefighting my business.
And it appears that those people who have got. The investment behind them, who perhaps let's say, I don't know, work for a big WordPress company or, a hosting company or something like that. And they're succonded and they're given the the finance to take a day off a month or what have you, and go and do those things.
They steer the agenda. So it's an interesting dichotomy, but the truth is it's open to anybody. But it might, you might find it more difficult than somebody who's got the backing financially to take some time off to, to go and commit. So both sides of the argument come into play,
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:36:13] right?
Yeah. But they're all yeah, like our agency, I'm the one who's contributing to WordPress as the agency owner. Because I have people who do my work. Yeah. In that and that from, for us, it's definitely a business case. Yeah. We made six figure revenue in the last 10 years about it. A WordPress without paying any, anyone who builds the software.
Yeah. To have a Yeah. And any upgraders comes for free. I get, we get free support if we needed to. Yeah. Just put out a question on yeah. On the support forum or on what's the name of that? Stack flow overflow. Yeah. When people help you, it's the most generous open source project that you can see WordCamps meetups.
Yeah. The business cases to view already got so much give a little bit back to the community. And I know it's not always the case that somebody can carve out that time. But there are only 50. So from the 600 contributors to 5.6, just the numbers, it was about 600 contributors. There were 57 companies involved and of which probably 50 only had one contributor in there, but that makes all the difference.
Yeah. If that. Person gets a little bit doing that during the time. Yeah. Maybe Friday afternoon is your time to contribute to WordPress or yeah, something like that. It's definitely, you can put yourself back in the lean back and say automatic has 70 people in there. Joseph has 18 people in there, but alone, the two.
Yeah, it's it's going so less than there are people or companies with four and five. And then there are the one person companies in there and then the other 600 or $500 contributors to it. Every little bit helps and.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:15] Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I'm good. Done. Okay. Thank you. No, I was just going to say the, I suppose another issue involved is surfacing these projects and making them visible.
W we have a small audience of people who are really into WordPress and there'll be other, such podcasts, and they'll be people who just read the WP Tavern because they're into WordPress. But I would imagine that quite a lot of people using WordPress are literally just using it. And they're not in the ecosystem of news.
They're probably not. Attending word comes and so on or just, they might miss something so wonderful that organizations like WP Tavern put the message out and hopefully things like this will alert people. So here you are. If you've got any issues with Guttenberg full site editing and so on, this is an article you can see on the screen.
There'll be links in the show notes, go and click on that. And you can find out about the outreach program. I did actually put the URL. Have a post on make.wordpress.org on the screen a little while ago. In fact, let me just quickly put that back up again.
Paul Lacey: [00:39:13] I feel like I've learned so much in the last five, five to 10 minutes about how this all works compared to everything I've ever known before.
And I think, me as an individual. Previously running an agency and it was so busy. I'd never had any time to do anything other than just read pretty much what just in Tatlock would say, or maybe what Matt Madeira would make a video about or a few other people. And I think I probably have been, frustratingly, but blissfully ignorant about how a lot of this works.
And it seems that if someone is really interested in it, Getting into any kind of product development. Then this is just an open ticket to say, come and get involved in this. It might not be what, how a commercial product development goes, but I bet that you can learn things in this, getting involved in WordPress and Gutenberg at this level.
That you can take into con into the commercial area as well. And I think that a lot of us have seen snippets of information here and snippets of information there. I'm putting two and two together and coming up with five. Think one of the things in my mind is. Oh, what, why doesn't it just pay some, professional UX people or something to do this.
And someone might say it's an open source and I'll be like it seems to me that automatic commercializing this really behind the scenes. And so I think there's there's a big misunderstanding of what is actually happening. And then I think it'd be great if Matt mulloway could do some more interviews.
I know he's not necessarily doing the whole thing. Some more, very open interviews to answer. Some of these almost conspiracy theories that people are starting to come up with now because they're not particularly, and they're very believable as well, but a lot of them are probably not true whatsoever.
So I would love him. I'd love to see, I don't know what his job is. Don't know what he's supposed to do. What was somebody. Who seemed to be very senior to come out and be doing lots and lots of interviews answering all the questions, listening, feeding back to the main core team. I'd love to see that, but do you know what I think this segues really nicely into something that I'm really, especially after today, gonna do my best to turn up to if I'm allowed.
I think that's how it works. Bigger, the. The next Gutenberg live Q and a January 29th 4:00 PM, U2, UTC, 11:00 AM, ETA and GMT. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? I know that we've focused on not many articles this week. I don't think that's a problem. I think this has been a really interesting.
Influenced discussion about Gutenberg and everything, but there is a an, is this an open invite? Can anyone go to this? Yeah,
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:41:59] we have a hundred seats. I think we've just had a 37 tickets, but we also will. So the webinar it's more live Q and a, that will be a live stream to YouTube. And on the YouTube channel slash Gutenberg times, you, you can certainly watch it.
And we will have the latest update and full site editing. We also have the program manager of the outreach program and MECASA India, and then Carlina, NEMA and Ari . They, both, our theme developers had have their first. Block-based theme for the full site editing in the repository and they can help.
So it's more like the update, but also what can seem developers do to get ready for it. And also how is the transition, the migration path from the current theme development to the future theme development? There's not a whole lot of the changes if you want to stay with what you're doing, but there are other things that could change and why would they change for the better?
And the time again is 11:00 AM Eastern and it's 1600 UTC. And I think it's seven. It's five o'clock GMT. I don't think I finished the sentence there when I wrote that. That's still a middle European time zone.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:19] I think, yeah, so the URL is long and complex. So on the screen and in the show notes, I've put a Bitly link, which will make life a little bit more straightforward.
But so this is just go sign up. You got a few days left before it starts. And yeah, I think like Paul says, it's fascinating to see all of these things. Like I hear the two on known community from Paul and I's pallet anyway, not the two on known, nice to see exactly what you're doing when you've described it all today.
It's not brilliant. Paul we've been schooled a lot today. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:43:50] I knew I would be as well. I knew we would be today and that's what I'm really looking forward to today.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:43:56] Yeah. A person you should invite to your either the this weekend WordPress or in to roll this together is just F a Haven because she's EFA is actually the executive director for the open source project.
So she is the one who make sure that the team's got what they need. And also yeah, how it's all going. Yeah, how the releases are done and who's doing the releases. Hi Peter. It's good to see you. Thank you so much.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:26] Peter has making a nice comment in the comments basically saying, let me just pop that up again.
Big at, and Mark put a lot of work into an open, honest, open and honest discussion about the block editor and it's greatly appreciated. Thank you, Peter. I'm sure. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:44:39] Yeah. And if you go to Gutenberg times.com there's a registration link right there. So if you miss the pitcher link as well.
Yeah, no, that's perfect. Yeah. I hope see everybody
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:51] there. Yeah. Thank you. Another person who has been like really helpful in our little community again, segwaying a little bit there. Yeah. Is David McCann and we're moving from Guttenberg over to a completely different page builder now because David McCann puts articles out.
I don't know how frequently, but when he does them, he really goes to town. Would you agree? He really is the kind of guy that doesn't put something. W without a lot of thought into it. And I just wanted to give him props this week. It's [email protected]. You'll be able to find the link in the show notes.
And it's an article entitled creating a website with oxygen, obviously oxygen. Yeah. Knife.
Paul Lacey: [00:45:32] I heard that David's middle names was definitive guide. David definitive guide McCann. That's it? Yeah, because if it's not, I would believe it. If that was true. But that's what people say.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:45] Yeah. He's he's put this oxygen guide together.
And essentially there seems to be a groundswell of people at the moment who have made it, that their page builder of choice, they've gone to Beaver builder, they tried out elements or, and they've gone to oxygen and that, yeah. Very happy with what they see over there. And obviously there's a steep learning curve.
And you can see it here. Look there. There's the table of con when a blog post has a table of contents that long what's going on and he's supported it with a video there's probably about 20. Maybe even more, maybe there's more like 30 steps to this blog post, but essentially if you've not been familiar with oxygen and what it can do, and you would just one place to get the soup to nuts version of it, then go and check out David's posts.
There's little for me to say really, except there's a video to accompany it and he's, I just love his style. He's very. It is, delivery is very deliberate and and it's, it's not all about snappy graphics and all that. It's just about getting the content to you. So anyway highly recommended.
I like that one and let's move on to something which I think is just such a nice evolution of a product. This is pods.
Paul Lacey: [00:46:54] Cool. Yep. Yeah. There's a new article on the pods, the IIA website, and it's entitled introducing pods pro by SKC dev. Pods 2.8 in Q and a and new YouTube videos. And so the main part of this announcement on the pod's website so just the context.
Pods is a plugin that allows you to create custom fields, custom taxonomies, custom post types, and use them all together to create. A bit more of a kind of relational database structure of a website. So I use pods are tons of people are listening. I've tons of the 10 people listening use pods and it's a much loved product and it's something similar to toolset or advanced custom fields.
And. So pods lost its core funding about a year ago. I think it was by automatic. I'm pretty sure automatic was one of the core funders of the project. And it wasn't like they did anything wrong to lose that. It's just the deal came to its natural end and renewing the deal didn't seem to be. In the benefit of over if the product itself pods or for automatic.
So a new plan was put together pilots look to getting more income from their donations. What's called friends of pods. And then this idea of pod pro started and it's been slow marinading for a long time. And it seems that it's really getting off the ground now. So SKC dev. To me is clearly Scott Kingsley Clark.
And what it says in the article is that pods pro by SKC dev is a separate financial entity to the core pods project. So it's been positioned as the best of both worlds. You've got pods is the core thing funded by donations. It's a foundation and then you've got pods pro, which is. Like the official add-ons for pro add-ons probably this means things like integrations into the block editor in specific ways, possibly into third-party things like page builders, especially beans as Nathan, you had Scott on for the page builder summit recently, some of those videos snippets in this post as well, where he's talking about how pods works with.
Beaver builder and Elementor and oxygen and some of the other tools. But I also think what's interesting about this article is that there's another thing that's happened in the world of pods, which is Scott Kinsey Clark who's one of the core developers of the plugin is also or was an employee of modern tribe who.
Create the plugin, the event calendar, which was recently just sold to, I think, liquid web, including the entire team. So I'm not sure where Scott is at the moment. I'd love to find out after check him out on Twitter. See if he's saying in the phone about this and I'm way, and I'm hoping that this whole situation, that's the change we positive change with modern tribe.
Actually seems to me that maybe Scott is able to spend more time on this pods pro project, as opposed to less time. It just seems that the timing of his blog posts a week or so after the acquisition of modern tribes event calendar. Is possibly an important thing in the timing of it. So I'm really interested to see where pods pro goes as opposed to user.
And I wish Scott and the rest of his team at S K C Def all the best with it and look forward to seeing what happens
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:22] there. Do you know Paul? What let's say you came at this purely from a, what do I get angle? Do you know what the additional features and so on are that you get? If you become a.
A pro user. I don't
Paul Lacey: [00:50:36] think it's totally clear yet. I think that is probably the next kind of things that we hear are going to be around what these different integrations are, but the fact that I'm just trying, I'm probably reading clues into things that really aren't they're here, about Scott's time.
And also the fact that there's a YouTube video from the page builders summit on the same post. It seems to me that pods pro. Is aiming towards people that use things like ACF, which tend to be freelancers agencies and implementers of WordPress, as opposed to end users.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:13] So wants to say
Paul Lacey: [00:51:14] something at this.
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I think I've said enough to be honest.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [00:51:19] Think he must have recently updated his page because it says it's it's, ad-ons created with integrates with Beaver builder and Beaver Thema, Divi theme and oxygen builder. So he has been working quite extensively on those integrations and now makes it available for.
Pawns users. So that's really great.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:40] Yeah, that's really good news. Yeah, it was quite nice. I think a lot of, I don't think a lot, but I think there was some what's the word? Some, what is it when people meet and invitations or connections? That's the word I'm after? I think there were a few connections made during the page builder summit around this, which was quite a nice sort of.
Thing that came out of it. I thought these people who had previously been in their own little silos got to be all hanging out in the chat at the same time. And yeah, that's really nice that Scott's put that video on there as well. Let's see.
Paul Lacey: [00:52:10] Yeah. Big as spot. It's something that I totally missed in this article, which was the link through to SKC deaf website where indeed you're right.
There is a, the first add-on is called the page builder toolkit. And as you mentioned, it integrates with these page builders. So that's a very interesting, I know there's always been a Beaver builder integration with politics which was largely worked on by regular guests, but not but I'd go, no, who's regularly on, on this show.
And I imagine he's probably had something to do with helping Scott on this. So really excited to see where
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:47] this goes.
Paul Lacey: [00:52:48] Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:48] So if you go to the link in the show notes, you can then follow a link. I'm looking at the pricing page. I don't know if that's what you were referring to Paul and beer get, but that's what I'm seeing now.
Yeah. Page builder toolkit. Add on advanced relationships storage out on. A table, press integration. Okay. So some nice beginning moves. Yeah. $79 per year for the single pack, which I presume is just one site. Yeah, that's right. Oh, really interesting pricing. Look at that. So 79 for one site, and then you have to find another $50.
To go on limited, honestly, so much interesting pricing in the WordPress space at the minute around these things. And it seems like on limited areas, obviously what he's trying to get you to get into, but so what a reasonable offer that seems to be.
Paul Lacey: [00:53:39] Yep. And you can save more money if you, this is a really, when pods lost their funding from automatic.
I think a lot of end-users were worried. I was a bit worried. I thought, how are they going to do this? But they've put a lot of thought into this and on the pricing page, on the on the pods pro website, it shows that if you want a further discount on the pricing here become an active friends of pods.
So Scott is encouraging you in a way to contribute to the core projects where he's got. No profits, as far as I imagine, maybe he's on some kind of salary situation there, but I know it's, I don't think anyone's any under an illusions that he's, dining out and going on Caribbean holiday is as a result of pilots or anything like that.
But he's really nicely encouraging you to become an active friend of pods, which is from $60 a year. And you'll get a further discount dollar for dollar towards. Pods pro pack. So you actually get a bigger discount. You can save money by sending some of the money towards the active friends of pods, which is a wonderful concept.
And. Props to the, to Scott and everyone involved in this because there's a lot of doubters that this was going to work, but this looks really promising
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:56] after this. So on the pricing page, if you go down below the two or the pricing table, which has just got two columns and you look for in the accordion, will friends of pods get a discount of some more information in there.
So essentially you can, if you donate to the pods foundation, pick this up for free. If you went in at $79 or above, have I misunderstood that?
Paul Lacey: [00:55:17] I can't quite figure out the maths, but it seems that you get. Yep. Even it's better to actually become a friend of pods, even for you, even if you want to, if you don't can become a friend of pods, I think you're probably going to spend more money.
I think that's the way I've understood it. Wrong
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:34] here. If you're listening at this moment, maybe a bit of clarification next time, which probably won't be too long. Interesting comment for Peter in the comments, always a challenge too. Consider reasons for switching as a toolset user. Do I spend the time to find reasons to look into prospect?
Yeah, of course. This is the dilemma that we face in a marketplace where multiple things. Yeah, ostensibly do the same thing, but fascinating, not only that this product now exists, but also the pricing model that has gone for encouraging people to go back and support the bedrock of the whole operation pods itself.
So I think that's. That's a really how to describe this. It feels like a really moral position. I like that. Something very nice about that. Should we go to the next one then? The next
Paul Lacey: [00:56:16] one. Yeah. Okay, good. Did you have anything else to say on pod? So you good to know? Okay, cool. This one is probably a good one for you too.
We've probably covered some of my, my. Second level thoughts on this particular article, but there's an article on WordPress Tavern by a chap called just in Tagalog. Never heard of this guy before.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:38] Now occasionally I read things out that he's written.
Paul Lacey: [00:56:42] Yeah, that I think maybe copies some of the stuff that we talk about essentially.
Yeah. I think it's that way around. Yeah. Anyway, this article by Justin Tatlock, who we regularly cover, 90%, 90% of our content is probably a sourced from him in some way. It has done a little article about. Plugin code custom layouts and it's customized plugging creates a post display system for both of the classic and the block editors.
And this is, I think just in interest in this article is that. It's a, it's one of the first plugins probably to use the block editor to create a kind of template layer that you can then use to create a list of posts. So there's plenty of plugins out there for you to help you create a list of posts and a grid or a masonry layout or something like that.
And this one is fully going in deep with the block editor to help you create the template level. And then pull that list of price into the front end. So it has a level of templating. It has a level of data with the query that you can apply and then you have the presentation level on the front. So it's almost like that classic MVP is that no, not VP.
I want to think of yeah. When you separate data structure and content, and this is interesting to me because at the beginning of this conversation, that backs up my argument that I think that the template, this is an example of where the data and the content does seem like a really good idea to separate it.
And to me, this is A great area of discussion for the core Goodson bag team to see what, how they've done this and why this separation makes sense. Even if other separations don't make sense. But obviously, good news for the creator of this plugin for creating a new plugin.
I've segwayed that announcement to my own agenda here. About talking about templating and stuff like that. But the creative, this plugin is also has a plugin called search and filter, which has over 40,000 people are using it and the free version. And I'm a massive fan of this plugin. I use the pro version, which is very.
Very reasonably priced. And it is a plugin that allows you to have a series, whatever grid you've got on the page. You can filter those with dropdowns, checklists, check buttons, what they called, check boxes, right? Buttons and various other interface to filter your grids and your posts and stuff like that.
Something like facet, WP, social fields approach is definitely mine. My favorite one because it's so well-priced as well. But yeah, lovely new plugin looks very interesting. I'm going to check it out and it'll be just to see if what they're doing here can be replicated in the block editor in maybe a year's time or two years time.
And that's what I'd love to see that somehow that can make it work.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:59:38] It feels like a real strong contender for something like pods to, to create inside the blocker. So I don't know if they already have that integration. I know the tool sets have enabled their views functionality inside a custom blocks.
So you can throw it together. This they've done it. They've done it. Yeah. But pods, maybe, I don't know if they've done it already, but I'm pretty sure
Paul Lacey: [00:59:59] that the in the page builder summit, Scott was talking about. Or Bernard was telling us at some point that they are having a good user interface for creating your creative items in, within the block editor.
So it seems that this is one way to do it and that I know toolkit have nailed it. So it is possible to do it all in the block editor. So I'd be interesting to see the difference in how people find. Which is easier to use and what the
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:26] future holds. Yep. So you can check that piece out on WP Tavern, anything to contribute there that'd be good.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [01:00:34] No. Really like all the innovation that is around the block. Editors cannot test its boundaries and push her. Push them a bit and have alternative ways to do things. And that has been quite interesting. We are with editors kit which is a plugin for the block editor who extends the co the core blocks very nicely with additional styles and different features, the same with editor plus
Editors kid is by Jeffrey, Karen Nang. And then when you come all with editor plus, so they're all. And that is also very, I would say you had the creativity around, it just exploded in the last two years and
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:15] such an amazing rapidity that both of those plugins have come on in leaps and bounds. Again, it's not something I've deliberately intentionally played with but Justin is obviously a big fan of writing up about both of those.
And so we, we get to see the updates for you, his screenshots, and they are extraordinary. I do actually have a local install of both of them, but it just never seems to. Be something that gets opened up and played with. I think what I
Paul Lacey: [01:01:39] like about those plugins edits and and also the one by Minea.
I love how the innovating with the Gutenberg and the block editor and that they're not restrained by. Having to be part of a big discussion, they can just go, I've got an idea. I'm going to put it out there and see what people think about it. I think that's the beauty of, having the mix of the open source core project and then entrepreneurs and individuals on the outside doing things as well.
And those things making waves and creating attention. And I think that in itself probably feeds back to the. The core team, I'm sure that those plugins must be discussed by the core team members and referenced by people because they've put so much effort into thinking about solving the core problems quickly.
That will hopefully, in two or three years time. Be part of core in a very mature way as well. Yeah.
Chris?
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:34] Yeah. Chris Hughes in the comments making a really interesting point from the perspective of a personal use versus an agency use, the, they changed so rapidly that he's saying they changed so rapidly that when he circles back everything's different, then he goes on to say the good for your own site, but it would really be hesitant, rolling them out for clients' sites.
Finding new features before me, where does this fit in? Yeah, that's a good point. Thank you for us.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [01:02:59] Yeah. Christopher don't blame you. I'll do the stadia for our clients. We just use the core part of the block editor and I'm just and for the future, yeah. You will see this. It's an, a reassurance for clients that there are new things coming in, but.
I'm going back to Jeffrey. When he and Jeffrey and rich table, they worked together on the coal blocks that was bombed by GoDaddy and and they were actually contributing quite extensively in the early days of Gutenberg because of their. Own knowledge about the react and how blocks can help.
So there is a back and forth it's not only just somebody goes and does a plug-in. And then the core team looks at that and says, how can we imply that implement that? Or it's also the other way around. It's okay. Okay. I tried this out. What do you think about a PR on the GitHub repo for the core block and then patch it in?
Yeah. So give and take with a whole community. That
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:02] really interesting point. So it's not just to say that, these guys who are producing these plugins over here, they're not contributing to the core, which you clearly though, didn't they do didn't they collaborate on some kind of minimal markdown at its surfer.
Oh,
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [01:04:15] I have a product called ice builder, Patsy
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:18] ice iceberg. I spoke yeah. With a little penguin logo or something. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [01:04:24] It's a writing tool on top of Gutenberg and puts away all the distractions that they have. You can actually do it in a doc mode as well. I really love it. When I do writing, I write an iceberg interesting view on it on the good note
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:39] times, I'm just using core Gothenburg.
To do all writing. Cause I just see it as the best interface, actually, oddly, just before I've gotten bug launched, I was actually using either Google docs or a third party solution and then just copying it all in. And as soon as I realized that you could move paragraphs and things in good and bad, that was it.
I was all in. And I, now I love it. I love it. For writing. I see it as the best interface out there. Okay. We're very, w we're overrunning on time, which we always do. Beg it. Are you cool for time or are you wishing to find it?
Paul Lacey: [01:05:09] Okay. We'll press on. I wanted to answer question from Peter. Oh, sorry.
Ingersoll is saying that he uses a tool set and his. He's asking if he should consider looking into switching to pots pro I would just say pizza. What happened last time? You tried to look at another tool. He knows what I'm talking
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:28] about. Firsthand knowledge there. Okay. Fair enough,
Paul Lacey: [01:05:33] Peter. If it's not broken.
Don't fix it. I would say as someone who is addicted to trying new things constantly, I wasted a lot of time looking at the next shiny object. So if you're really happy with tool set, and I think you're working with generate press as well, and you find that a really good. Combination. I would spend more time looking at doing other things than finding a replacement.
That's just like the I'm going to
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:58] stop doing that. And also by the time you get really good at something like. The toolset suite of products, you are probably able to do a bunch of stuff by instinct that would take you apps and frustration with the UI. And it doesn't work the way you expect.
Like when I moved from Drupal over to WordPress, it was constant, but why doesn't it? Why can't WordPress? But in Drupal it in it. And I think you're right, Paul that's Sage advice. And he said, Peter in the koan says I do. He knows what you're on about, but I don't, but let's move on to the next one penultimate piece proper, but we might drop a surprise last article.
And this is just a lovely thing coming out of the word fence. A blog. And it is to say that we're friends have decided, I guess this is pure philanthropy, certainly reads that way. That they've decided that they're going to do free sites, cleaning four sites for K-12 public schools. Now being in the UK, I don't really know what a K-12 school is, but I think it's what we would call a primary school.
So it's almost like up to the age of 12, perhaps. That's why it's 12 nodes school
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [01:07:07] years. It's from kindergarten to 12th school. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:12] What does it encompass? The basic school system from, starting right up until you would likely leave if you didn't want to go to university and what have you.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Thank you so that, okay, there we go. Perfect. Now we have them offering free site audits. Presumably a whole bunch of school sites are using WordPress. I know actually the school that my children go to, they've adopted WordPress on a recent update to, for their school. And a lot of the stuff presumably is of critical importance, especially now that we're in lockdown and I'm guessing that's what this is all about.
Really the fact that these websites really more than ever. Need to be up and running and clean and easy to use and allow the parents to download the data and the timetables and the lesson plans or whatever it is that's going on. So they're rolling it out and they've decided that they're going to keep it at the moment at 20 website cleans per week.
Fingers crossed. Let's hope that they'll never reach that 20, but that's what they've earmarked. If you actually think about that's a lot of time. If they're doing their full audit, they've also offered. Schools their service as well. Let me not misquote them. It says Wordfence is committed to helping public schools.
Safety provide safely to provide education to the next generation. Each word for site cleaning and site audit is valued at $490 effective immediately off Wordfence is offering the same services free of charge to public schools. Now I misread that possibly as they were going to give the schools access to the plugin.
Maybe they're not, maybe they are. But anyway, it's just a nice gesture. Bravo word funds. Well done.
Paul Lacey: [01:08:49] I think this is what's cool about this in my opinion, is that it just raises the awareness level for the schools that are having these websites, because I know, I don't know what it's like in the States, but here in the UK, you do come across a lot of schools with.
Quite amateur looking websites. And you don't mind that the website doesn't look great and it doesn't look professionally designed, but you do have concerns just with the school itself. The people who have got better things to do in the school might find themselves dealing with a malware infection and getting very panicked.
They're already overworked. And who deals with that in the school? Where do you go? What do you what'd you do? And this to me is just fantastic with Wordfence conveys the awareness of this and just get. You know that every school has an audit once a year maybe Biden was no, he loves WordPress so much can give every K-12 school a 500 foot $490 to pay to Wordfence or whenever a company to do an annual audit.
That'd
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:52] be nice. The thing about this one, we mentioned early the discoverability of projects, like the full side editing project. This is just one that could so easily go under the radar. So if you are listening to this and you have children at a school in the U S which is qualifying, just want to just phone them up and tell them that they can have this because it's there, it's free.
They're offering it. It's a great gesture. And why not? Why not, there might, it might already be infected in some way and Wordfence, we know they can clean this stuff up. That's their day job. They do it. I've been
Paul Lacey: [01:10:22] doing it for so long and doing it so well. And they're always trailblazing. On this kind of stuff.
So many other organizations that are involved in security to get their information from the WordPress Wordfence blog because they actively go out there and find these problems.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:38] Yeah. Great. The thing is that the people who are governing schools and running schools, they won't, I'm guessing be visiting the word fence blog post about this particularly frequently.
So spread the word. If you've got kids, go on, spread the word. Anything about that big hit or should we move on? Move on. Okay, fine. This is to personal plugs. I'm sorry about that. But here we go. The first one is I just thought this was a really nice. A podcast episode that we did, it was with Celia Blom, who was part of the many people involved in organizing Wordfence WordCamp Europe in 20.
Now let me get this right. 20, 20 the one which was canceled due to COVID. And we had an episode where we talked about not only what it takes to set up. A word camp, but what it actually takes to counsel a word camp, what it actually takes to deep, demolish it and deconstruct it and then make it go online.
Obviously everything has gone online for the last period. We have Fest last week, which was an absolute, ah, just such a beauty, typically organized event. I think as time goes on, all of these organizations are learning from each other and perfecting these online events, but it's just a lovely episode.
With sealed about that. What was involved with what they did, who, who had to be just little things that you don't think about, like you've got to return your sponsorship money and you've got to try and get them back on as a sponsor for the online event or will they just flop straight over?
It's just a lovely little chat. The one that was canceled yet, this is
Paul Lacey: [01:12:10] snickering is prudent
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:13] one that was canceled due to COVID. Is that a new friends episode? Yeah, like it very good. And then finally I'm just, do you know what? I'm not going to do the one that I was going to do on finally, cause I'm not a hundred percent sure.
I want to say about it yet. So I should just stop talking and say, there's no unfunded. We're done. That's it. We're finished. Thank you. That was a really nice episode full of really. Interesting insights especially from Birgit, as we've not heard her voice before over here until VP builds and telling us a load of stuff that we misunderstood.
So that was really nice just before we go, anything happening to you being at this week?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [01:12:52] No. Apart from the live Q and a this week and Friday I want everybody to come of course and learn about full site editing and how the themes are. Affected by that. Other than that yeah, it's going to be a busy week.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:06] Yeah. Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: [01:13:07] Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight to talk to you and thanks.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:13] Yeah, no, thank you. I'm sure we'll make the effort to have you on again. Should you wish to, but the two big it's events Big it, and all those events is in the show notes. It's a Bitly link, but it should take you to the registration form where you can find out more.
We'll be back with Paul Lacey, anything that you want to throw in at the end of that
Paul Lacey: [01:13:32] we should probably plug our friend, Matt Madeiras because he just released a. Gotta be episode of the decade, I think.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:40] Yes, you're right. It's probably, I would say it's probably the best media that's been created in well, in a lifetime involves.
Yeah. I'm not going to say I don't want to just go. So yeah, it
Paul Lacey: [01:13:50] didn't matter. My material was on the mat report. I'm going to say he interviewed you and I about this show actually in WordPress, in general, which was really enjoyable. And I think it was released yesterday. Yeah. So if anyone wants to hear more rambling and 19 minutes, isn't enough for you then there's another 30 minutes.
Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:10] this definitely don't go and listen to that. I shouldn't say that. Cause the Matt report is something beautiful. Go and check it out. That's really nice. Yeah. Thank you. I'd forgotten about that. But we will, we'll plug it in the, that report. It's my report.com. You can go and download the episodes over there.
We'll be back. I'm going to have a podcast episode out on Thursday is either going to be an interview episode or it'll be an episode that means David Walmsley droning on about a letter of the alphabet, but we'll be back here next week. 2:00 PM UK time talking about this week in WordPress for now.
Thank you for making the comments. Thanks for joining us. Really Fred pleasure to have you all on and we'll see you next week. Bye.