This Week in WordPress #151

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 151 entitled. We need more plumbers. It was recorded on Monday the 22nd of February, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And I'm joined as always by my cohost, Paul Lacey, and this week also by Sabrina Zeidan and Kyle Van Deusen. We're here to talk about the WordPress news and as is the case each week.
There's Toms that happens. The first thing to mention is the fact that the Gutenberg plugin has had its 100th release. We're now on version 10.0 WordPress contributors discuss the fact that they're thinking of moving away from a four release cycle, right? Each and every year to something a little bit less onerous, Google have launched a material design plugin for WordPress, Ella mentor or on to version 3.1, which includes an option to include custom code.
And also some performance improvements along the way. Sabrina goes through her wordfest.live talk, and she tells us five things that we shouldn't. Be doing in order to speed up our WordPress websites. There's a new plugin in town. Andre Gagnon has joined with Adam Prizer to launch Presto player. And Kyle knows an awful lot of, I have to, it would seem wordpress.org having yeah.
To remove fake reviews. This is an infuriating subject that keeps coming around 1 million websites have been infected that's Ninja form. So go and check that out. And also. Coincidentally Kairos on the week that WP bill to release their episode about his plugin with Andre Gagnon called docket WP. So we find out about that as well, loads to talk about it's a lovely episode.
Plumbers keep coming up for some reason, I hope that you enjoy it. 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]. Hello. Welcome again. Think we're all here. I'll just have the most. Cacophonous this noise in my head, I had about four tabs open with the music around and it was all done.
Okay. Now I feel rather unwell this week in WordPress. I think we're on episode number 151, something like that. We're joined as always by Paul Lacey, but we're also joined as you can see on the screen. If you're watching us by Sabrina's a Dan and Carl van Dusen, if you can't see them on the screen, you're probably listening on audio, but we'll just do a quick.
Quick round about, just to say who we are and why we're here. So let's start with you, Paul.
Paul Lacey: [00:02:55] Hello, Paul here independent WordPress designer and developer. That's me at the moment. There's another website to share in between websites at the moment.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:04] Yeah, it's a nice place to be. And Sabrina, tell us about yourself.
Hello,
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:03:10] everyone. Hello guys. My name is Sabrina, a WordPress websites. I also have a plug in the twins who are set speed to using page speed insights API. It's called speed guards, as you can see in my title. Yeah, I'm happy to be here again. Thank you guys.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:25] You're very welcome. And last, but not by no means, least Carl Van Deusen.
How are you doing?
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:03:30] Definitely least for sure. That's why he put me in the last spot. I'm I'm calling from the admin bar. I'm here to hang out with Paul Lacey. That's the only place.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:38] That's good. I like it. So we're going to talk about the WordPress news, but just before we get to that, we'll just share a few little comments that are coming in Elijah mills from oxygen.
I'm guessing that's a larger, higher Elijah. Nice to have you with us. Chris Hughes and this chap, some guy called Kyle has also joined us as well. It's you Kyle, but yeah, if you want to put any comments in, please do that. The way to do that would be to go over to WP bills.com forward slash live that's Facebook.
Sorry. That's YouTube comments. You need to be logged into Google, or if you're in our Facebook group, WP belts.com forward slash Facebook. You can comment over there. If you do go into Facebook, Then you do need to click a stream. You'll blink otherwise a bit like this person here. We don't know who you are just as element or sorry, just as Facebook user.
And in this case, something about Kyle.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:04:28] Yes, I can promise. That's Matt
Paul Lacey: [00:04:29] Davies. Okay. That's what I was going to say, my Davis as well. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:34] So we actually, we know who you are, mate. That was good. But what are we doing here this week? We always do a bit of a WordPress news each and every week can't make this banner go away.
Let's try a different one. Instead. We're talking about the WordPress news for the week, commencing the 15th of February and. Let's share the screen, shall we? And before we do that, let's make sure we're on the right screen. There we go. Just a quick little bit of promotional stuff from us. This is our website.
WP builds.com, which produce loads of content each week. We've produced a podcast episode on a Thursday. And then we do slightly confusingly, this little sort of jig, which we're trying to figure out Paul and I at the moment whereby we do this live episode and then we package it up and make it into a podcast episode, as well as a sort of video episode.
You can consume that 7:00 AM tomorrow morning on a podcast player or something like that. And the best way to get that is to go to this page. WP belts.com forward slash subscribe. And subscribed to this one, the newsletter updates, and then you'll be, you'll be told when that kind of stuff comes out or use one of these links and shovers in your podcast player of choice.
And that way we can we can come automatically to you. A couple of other pages, we've got this deals, page WP belts.com forward slash deals. It's like a searchable filterable list of WordPress fails. It's there each and every day of the year. And thus far, not one of those deals is expired. So if it's on that page, it will presumably be on there forever.
So if you're in the market for something this week, go check it out. And the last thing to notice is that we've got a news archive, which lives in here, and that's where all of the content that we're producing today will appear tomorrow. Episode number 151. We'll be right about there. Okay. What are we going to talk about today though?
We're going to talk about WordPress. No doubt. And we're going to go through each article. We've divvied up. Who's going to talk about what we're we're getting slightly better at this aren't we, Paul, we actually manage it a little bit better than we used to. So I'm starting. Can I,
Paul Lacey: [00:06:31] Can I.
Show some of the secret sauce that we have now that we actually plan the segues. So I know that I shouldn't really reveal that kind of level of magic.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:41] I'll just segue supposed to be like, just spontaneous and no,
Paul Lacey: [00:06:45] but the truth is I can't keep it quiet anymore. Okay.
It's been eating me up for such a long time.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:51] Yeah. Yeah. So we've got 10 things we're going to try and get through today. I don't know if we're managing it all, but here we go. This is the first one. This is Sarah Gooding over on WP Tavern. Love it or hate it. We're going to be talking about Gutenberg a fair amount today, and this is the first piece.
All about it. You may not use the plugin, but if you do actually use the Gutenberg plugin, which gives you like the bleeding edge of all the features, then that has reached its hundredth release, which is marked by the version number 10.0. And really what Sarah is doing is just illustrating a couple of the new features.
We've got this new dynamic pages block. This really is getting into full site editing a bit now. You can build navigation menus, and it can be inside the navigation block or used on its own. I'm curious. I don't really understand how you would use that block on its own. I just feel the right place for that is in a.
I suppose it could be a link or something. I don't really know. Anyway, it exists. Also if you've ever used the Gutenberg editor, one of the, one of the really difficult fiddly things to do is to try and find the parents of a particular item. And it really is annoying. In a page builder, it's just really easy.
They've got all that UI figured out and you roll slightly outside of the container and there it is. But in Gothenburg it's been really difficult. You've had to use the little pencil icon and go up the stack. But now they've got this new feature. You can just about make it out in this image here.
It looks like this, and it's the parent item selector. And as the Gutenberg layouts are going to get more and more complicated into the near future, Sarah makes the point that in the future, we're going to get your nesting support for paragraphs headings, lists and code blocks. They're all going to be allowed children.
Then it seems like quite a good idea to introduce something into the UI that takes care of this. So yet again, another little niggle disappeared.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:08:36] Unfortunately that little button looks like a duplicate button. I would have thought that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:41] was something look like a duplicate button. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Oh, okay. That's version 11. Whenever we'll have a new button, which looks like a, yeah. Why doesn't it look like the previous one, which has just got the, the three little lines or. Diagonally arranged don't know. Okay. And darker social links, a few little bits and pieces, but not a lot else.
But the one thing that I wanted to draw everybody's attention and I'm sorry, I'm going to get riot. Is it riot? Benguela. Is that how you pronounce his name? I don't know. Really interesting because he is in charge of the whole shebang really. And I just thought this comment, which I'm going to read in its entirety, which I don't normally do, but I'm going to do it.
Cause I just felt that kind of encapsulated the whole thing about Gutenberg really well. And it says to quote. With all the attention that the project received, it became difficult to discern constructive debate from mere opposition. We each come with our own context and some people had a fixed idea about what they wanted for the project.
Some wanted to just reuse an existing page builder. Others wanted to revile revive the field's API project. Some wanted it to be a front end first. Others wanted it just to replace the content area of the classic editor. Some wanted it to be in view JS others wanted it. No change at all. And with the project used by 40% of the web, we need to find a consensus.
And when we make compromises, it can be so difficult for those involved to avoid the feeling that their voice of their voice is being ignored. And I Fe I am one of those people, one of those little bullet pointed lists of things that, that people moaned about, I fit neatly into one of those little boxes.
And I just think, God, how do you satisfy this audience? And on that bombshell. It's over to you three to figure
Paul Lacey: [00:10:22] it out. I got it. I got something to say on, on, on that statement, like a Tony simplifies with Ryan on that. And it is difficult, I think to see the difference or to, read the difference, especially at the moment between the constructive debate and the just total opposition, especially when you don't have as much face-to-face staff at the moment.
And The one thing I would say though, is there's all these different things. This person wants that this person wants it to be like a page builder. This person is more interested in that. The text editor, I think the overall opposition was that if you take that list of all that can, that full list of different things was that the, it seemed to people that Matt Mullenweg wanted it to be all of them right away.
And I think that a lot of the people who were complaining, weren't saying, Hey, I want, I don't want that to be that. I want it to be this. Memorial really along the lines of Hey, if it's going to be this as well as that, and as well as that, can we get the basics right first? And then it will be a great page builder that will replace my page builders.
And if we get the basics right, then it will replace my text editor really well, and it will replace my custom field possibilities and those sort of things. So I think a lot of the opposition and criticism has been that it's always felt with the going back project that it's. It's gone. Okay. This is done.
We're going to move on to the next thing. And that's why we get buttons to find the parent, rather than that being part of the native user interface. That's my main criticism. But I do understand it must be so difficult to listen to such a vocal community when you can't actually speak to each other.
Face-to-face properly at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:11:58] I almost think like reading that little statement, it Gutenberg feels like that. It feels like it was trying to be many things put into one. And any time you have that, like built by committee type approach to things get really complicated.
And it just seems WordPress itself, WordPress trying to accomplish something is like when your government tries to accomplish something, like they have a lot of different voices. So listen to, they have a lot of different opinions and things just move really slowly, where when you have an independent page builder, they can just make a decision and move forward.
And that's why, Elementor has changed 900 times since Gutenberg project started. But yeah it's, it feels like it's been built by committee.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:36] Anything on that? Sabrina, do you have anything to add?
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:12:39] Yeah, I'm just thinking I think this is so cool that you have people from different areas contributing to the, and making these suitable for their everyday use and stuff.
But in my opinion, it's nice to have different voices when you define the strategy and then define it. And then stick to it because if you like in Gutenberg if you're changing your mind too frequently, this lack of consistency, it even those people who are heard before they feel that they are not heard this time.
And another people are not heard that time. But if there is like some strategic path that you stick to, everyone is know what to expect and. How expectations and. To my mind. It's better way to post things.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:13:32] What is the North star of Gutenberg? What does everybody, is everybody pointing at the same North star and pulling?
I don't know.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:13:41] Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I don't know where it is.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:46] Yeah. The sort of broad outlines are that. In the next release by the end of this year, we'll have full site editing, whatever that looks like, but then
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:13:55] W for what kind of people.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:59] 40% of the internet kind of people.
So that means literally everybody. Yeah, it's a really difficult one to pull off. It's quite interesting. The article does develop a little bit more on I'll. I'll read a little bit, we could change with everything you were just saying, Sabrina. Because Riyadh says that he admits the project, made a few mistakes along the way, but he also said this bit, which speaks to what you've just said.
It's a delight to see some people who are very strongly disagreed with the initial vision or approach to Gothenburg, gradually becoming users who enjoy the editor. And can carry on its vision. And then a little bit further down, we have a WordPress web developer who I don't know, called John Brown making the point that when he looked at it, he hated it, which I think it was a sentiment.
A lot of us could have said. And then two years on, he does a mix of Guttenberg and he's by the looks of it. He's using cadence to supplement that. He says he's using cadence, themes and blocks, and now we can build virtually anything with it. And it just feel to me that is the North star.
In a way is to be able to build anything with it within certain constraints. And I feel that we are slowly but surely getting there. But as Carl said, it's been done by committee rather than just a bunch of developers sitting in a closed room and then going it's finished. There it is. Oh, yet, but that's the way it's done.
Paul Lacey: [00:15:18] One thing I would say In terms of people coming on board of it that we don't have that much choice. So I think there's that thing. What'd you call it Stockholm syndrome. Yeah. Which probably is a bit of an extreme scenario, which is Stockholm syndrome is where hostages start to befriend the captors and because they become reliant on each other.
And so it feels like good to have the blog editor block editor. So we don't have a lot of choice it's moving forward. There are people in the community creating some good tools to help us through it. So we've got to go with it to a certain extent, unless we truly believe that a major fork could actually happen and go off in a different direction.
But for now I think energy to complain, should be directing in as much away as possible to be constructive.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:08] Yeah. Matt Davis in the comments makes a nice point. It should be easy enough for a plumber to use an expansive enough to, for a developer to use. So almost impossible in reality, to cover every base.
He says, just focus on the majority and go from there. And then he also makes the point that he really enjoys using it. I do. As well I basically use it just for text, really not trying to do anything complicated page wise or Sitewise yet, but for text, I find it's the best editor. In fact, over on a completely different project, I've been looking for a text editor to fulfill a certain need and the Gutenberg editor.
Really is sublimely good compared to all the other editors out there, it does so much stuff. The one Achilles heel at the minute, it doesn't do the concurrent editing. You can't be both logged in at once and watch each other typing. Whereas some of the other ones from the other open source projects do, but yeah, I felt that we had a segue there, Paul and escaped.
Paul Lacey: [00:17:01] There's sign is this this is a good YouTube video to check out as well, cause the direction of generate press and not generic, press Gutenberg and the whole full site editing thing generate press and generate blocks have been working. On this concept for a while, if you go to the January presses YouTube channel, which isn't particularly, it's more of a insider's release type YouTube channel more than anything, but there's a video on there called block element content template, video.
And it shows you how the upcoming version of generate press is going to give you some of these kinds of site theming abilities with the block editor. So archive pages, search result, pages, those sorts of things that we associate with tools like Beaver, FEMA elements, theme, builder, Divis, theme, builder tool set, those sorts of things.
I haven't watched the whole video, but I know that a lot of people watch this video are pretty excited about the possibilities of Designing archive pages and stuff like that. And single post templates and stuff with the block editor, which is something really reserved for toolset at the moment, the tool set tool.
Nice. Yeah. So it's worth checking out. It's worth checking out just to see how some of the third party products are doing the best to make this work. And that's what I have faith in. I know that there's so many smart product developers out there. I know that they can they'll. For those of us that are struggling, they'll probably solve our problems at some point.
It just might take a while. Yeah. And
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:28] the nice thing is we've got the other things, which we're currently using that just sitting in our stack of tools, just, keep using them until you're satisfied that this will work. And if you're never satisfied that it's going to work, just keep using what you're using, which is fine.
Totally. All right.
Paul Lacey: [00:18:42] It will probably always work for the lifetime of. The cycle of how we work. If we like working with page builders right now, we know that in, let's say three years time, four years time. That would naturally change the way we work with naturally change. Anyway, we have new things are coming out.
So I think that we don't need to worry about that our page builders will stop working or anything like that with those kinds of people that are using page, but just like me. Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:04] they bloom in the comment. Given a shout out to toolset. He's obviously a tool set user, either Dave and Chris Hughes saying that he finds it's good for content.
Me too, Chris. But he says it's a hot mess for web design right now. Yeah. You're not going to disagree, but for editing content and text is absolutely marvelous. So let's move on and take let's talk about the release cycle for this whole thing. We have an article from Sarah Gooding, which I know Paul wants to introduce us to.
Paul Lacey: [00:19:31] Yeah, it's entitled what it's on the WordPress Tavern site. Like I say, by Sarah Gooding, it's entitled WordPress contributors discuss scaling back releases for major releases is not a viable plan in 2021. That last part there from four major releases is one just suffer Aiden chum, Posey. Is that right?
Nathan. Yeah, I said that, right? Yeah. Cool. Said in her post called making WordPress releases easier, which is linked from the post in WordPress seven. Now there's a bunch of reasons that just effort talks about why she thinks that they need to scale back the release plan, the release schedule, but you could summarize it, that they are struggling with human resource.
They're struggling with. People's motivation, peoples other other things that they need to get on with in life and also the pandemic and the lockdowns and what that has done to anything so to everything. So there was a plan, there was a previous plan that WordPress would have four major releases every year.
And what Jeffery is saying is that she's listening to the people on the ground, the contributors. And she's getting the feeling that they need to slow down the release cycle to make it a little bit more sensible. Now I think that there is some pushback on that. There's a lot of people agreeing with it.
So a lot of people in the comments saying, thank you for even starting this conversation. I don't know about you guys, but I'm seeing just F his name in a lot of. Articles and stuff. Now it seems that she's really becoming the voice of the top brass WordPress, to come and speak to the community and then speak on behalf of the community as well.
But I think that there's some pushback notably from Ryan what's, I don't know what his surname is. A guy called Ryan. Who's one of the product director major. Product directors, human made, who are a major, a WordPress agency, international WordPress agency. And also know that human made contribute a lot of human resource to the project.
He was complaining that the problem with this is that they've planned their year around the release schedule, and this is going to cause them a lot of problems and everything. Now I can sympathize with that, but on the same sense, I think that there is almost anything that happened in the last year.
That you had as a plan. You've got a great excuse right now to readdress that and make major changes in your plans because the whole situation has changed. The economy has changed the, the way that we look at our health has changed and the way that people interact. And Joseph has noticed that.
The year prior to that people were going to meet ups and teams would be able to look each other in the eye and have good conversations, have a few jokes and laugh about some of the things and basically get to know each other a bit better. And in the last year I project like this with a completely distributed workforce who is almost fully voluntary.
You don't get that interaction. And I think she's trying to put the brakes on for the benefit of the contributors and the product itself. So yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:39] Yeah, you don't normally get things like this. Do you, you don't normally hear about, I'm just quoting from the article again. It says Hayden, John Posey cited a number of challenges, including update fatigue, quite an interesting expression, risk of contributor, burnout, lengthy onboarding process for contributors skilled at doing the administrative work required during a release and a lack of seasoned core developers to keep the process moving efficiently.
It just feel like, yeah, she's taken the reins and said, look. Let's just put the brakes on a little bit. We're going to fast. And if we don't have enough bodies on the ground to pull this stuff off, Then we need to stop. And you're right. I was lucky enough to chat with her the other day.
And one of the things that she did mention was the real world interactions that are required to make the WordPress project function. And although I've always liked attending WordPress live events, I never really thought it was for that purpose. I just thought it was nice way to get everybody together and everybody learned a bit, but I didn't see it as crucial and integral to the actual.
Project moving forward. And now that I think about it, it really is. And so hopefully now that we're all lining up in different parts of the world to have a job and hopefully inoculate us against the vaccine that will slowly start to return. And maybe this four week for a year release cycle can hit the ground again so that people like human made can have something a bit consistent to work too.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:24:03] It's amazing. The perspective difference, because I can see watching or reading this why people who are contributing are saying this is way too fast, but then as somebody who's just a WordPress user and who isn't thinking about those things on a day-to-day basis, I'm like, why is this taking so long? So there's two sides to the coin, but you got to take both into consideration.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:24] Cameron Jones. Hi Cameron. In the common saying he remembers before Gothenburg was merged, Matt Mullenweg proudly announced, there will be no more fixed release cycles and release. It would only then would be made when they were ready and then carries on. Then as soon as Gothenburg came in, it went straight out the window as he threatened.
Oh yeah. Corrected himself a window. Yeah. Interesting Sabrina.
Paul Lacey: [00:24:44] You've contributed officially to WordPress. Haven't you. So you're on the list your name's been on the list. So I know what do you think about, about, how w how connected did you feel to everyone in that release? Was it.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:25:01] As we just mentioned this early thinking about our local community.
And so I'm running this meetups in my city in here. And it seems that before to get to the meetup, you had to go one hour there, one hour the whole, like two hours in transport you have to dress up and stuff. And now you can just turn on the link and join the meetup.
But we are not willing to do that anymore. People we're willing to spend two hours in the transport. Elder people would come from different from other cities just to tent the meetup and have beers afterwards and stuff because it's not about learning. It's not about. But when it's contributed, for example, it's not about contributing itself, but it's about spending time enjoyably with people you like with like-minded people with, it's not about Julia doing that specific work, but everything that's around it, like the feeling of being a part of something being around your friends, even though, just few people from here right now, I think this is such a nice point about the general fatigue about being online. It, we just can't take it out of our lives and pretend that it doesn't exist.
Paul Lacey: [00:26:22] Yeah. Yeah. I think the time that you have to celebrate the successes of the project, if you're a contributor and limited to a tweet, Or something versus versus being a contributor then going to a meetup or a camp and meeting some of the people on the list that you saw in the Slack conversations or something.
Hey, we were part of the. We were part of the release, and having that kind of extended celebration, that doesn't happen at the moment. And I think that just F was doing the right thing. I get, the chap from human made because they, they have financial they commit financial reason to it and everything, but just EFA is the one who, whose head will roll.
If it all goes wrong. So she has to she's at the top. They're going, Oh my gosh. That I imagine I'm guessing all the pressure from Matt Mullenweg, then as the stuff from the community, then as the fatigue and it's, and at some point you say, I don't know what to do with all this. Let's just slow down.
And then we can figure out how we fix this whole project and make sure that it's healthy because I know that part of her job is to listen to the contributors and to make sure that they've got everything that they need to be able to do the job that, that the community wants to wants them to do.
This is to me, her response, let's slow down.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:46] It's it's a heck of a job, isn't it? That she's got really big job.
Paul Lacey: [00:27:50] I wouldn't like that job. No,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:52] it's a big job. It is a big time. Okay. Let's move on. That was a nice piece. I enjoyed that. We're going to move on to talk about check this out. This is cool.
We've got a we've got a, an article which I'll show in a minute, but it's all about the material. Sort of Google material design plugin for WordPress and Kyle who quite remarkable. I don't think anybody's done this before on this show. Having read the article, Carl then diligently went off and made a website to illustrate what it could do, which I thought was outstanding.
Kyle's so props to that. Bravo. Thank you.
Paul Lacey: [00:28:27] That's typical, Kyle though, that is for anyone who doesn't know Kyle, everyone who does know Carl knows. He's just able to pull rabbits out of hat at any moment. Carl, I just want to ask why have you not finished the Gutenberg project for us?
Because that was one of the previous articles. Couldn't you have just done that as well. Nobody
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:44] asked me Kyle's job four o'clock this morning. He's had plenty of time to finish. Guttenberg let's be honest. Come on. But we'll come back to your site. As Kyle probably wants to talk about this a little bit more, but the article in question, I don't know how I ended up with nine to five Google.
This is not even a website I've come across really before, but it's a website dedicated to Google because on this occasion, it is right in the wheelhouse for that. The article is entitled Google bringing material design to the web in a significant way with WordPress plugin. I've not used it. Carl's obviously got the only real contact with this, but I'm familiar with the.
The sort of the UI elements, because I have an Android phone and the material design is just everywhere on Android. Basically if you create an Android app, you're going to use the material design and all of the things that are pre-packaged and Android. And so they've decided they want to push this out into the web.
I really do like it actually, I, that is to say our light material design. Th this whole sort of framework, love Google products, their drive, and Gmail and all that kind of stuff. So having this as an option in WordPress as a plugin seems pretty neat, but Carl, you can tell us whether it's any good or not.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:29:53] Yeah. For me when I saw the things we were going to be covering this week and I saw this was available and it's free, I thought I'm going to throw it on a cloud ways, install real quick and just see what it does. And what was pretty interesting about it is you install the plugin.
It has a really good onboarding process. So you install the plugin. It asks you if you want to. Put in the whole theme and everything you say, yes, it asks you if you want to put in demo content. I said, yes. And this is what it spits out here. And so the onboarding process is it's pretty nifty to get all this going.
This was a couple of minutes worth of work and all of this is here. They've done a lot of work inside the customizer to really tailor all of this, to fit within this design system. So they give you a few. Different options inside the customizer where you can click through different like font, pairings, or color combinations.
They have some like preset ones ready for you. But then you can also go in there and change all those things on your own. But unlike, I don't know, I feel like a lot of things nowadays are more like a really general framework. You could do anything with this material design setup, it's all the changes you can make are within the bounds of material designs framework.
The customizers pretty neat. The way you can style everything. They also give you a button kind of where the publish button is in the customizer. It's like a blocks page. You can click on that and it opens up a page. Like you might make a style guide on your website where you can see what all your headlines look like and buttons look like and all that.
They've basically done that, but. With all the blocks that come part of this material design plugin. So you can see in real time as you're changing things, how it changes all these blocks and they have the global settings for rounded corners on things and where headlines are in cards and stuff like that.
So it's a pretty interesting little thing now to me, when you just, but this outright here, this looks like a Google help doc. And I don't really necessarily want my business website to look like this. But there's no arguing that if you use their color palette and the type, all graphy that comes in here and use the system your website's going to be very, user-friendly like anybody can load this up and know how to use it right away.
But I think it's probably gonna take a fairly experienced designer. To take this framework and make it look probably the way you'd want to and still fit within those bounds. So it's interesting. If nothing else, like you said, I put it on material dot the admin bar.com. You can go there and just go through it.
I'll leave it up there for a couple of weeks for people to look at, but everything's free to download it's worth checking out and playing with it. It's a neat little project.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:18] It's it's really utilitarian, isn't it? It just does what it says on the 10. It just. Creates nice topography and an interesting color palette.
And you're away to the races, but wow. Google stepping inside of WordPress. I wonder if it's, because they've got a load of websites that they maintain in this way and they just needed it or are they actually being good custodians to the WordPress community and really thinking this would help the community?
I don't really, I don't really know why Google would be involved in this, but it's interesting. They are.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:32:49] I agree. One other thing that I did notice this, all the blocks that come with it, so they have blocks for all these cards and everything that just comes straight out of the box with it.
What's what is nice about it for somebody that's, let's say the plumber that's using WordPress, right? Using the block editor and figuring it out. Everything that comes part of these blocks is really simple to update and it's all perfectly responsive. Like you would have to do almost no work to have a website.
That look like that now is that the website everybody wants? Probably not, but it'd be a really good starting place for people who are, who just want to get something up that's usable and user-friendly.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:25] Paul,
Paul Lacey: [00:33:25] you were gonna say, yeah, I was gonna say, we actually talked about not this plugin, but the concept of the block editor having.
Some kind of design system thing built into it that you could hook in because currently you can have lots of plugins that give you blocks and themes can come with blocks. And then there's the core ones. And you could easily just knowingly just combine a couple of plugins and themes and have a really inconsistent style set and also lots of problems with responsive design as well.
So I think the thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago was. The material design system, as it's called, has a set of rules. And if the block editor had ability, you almost had a rule that said, Any block that is created by a theme or a plugin needs to be designed. System compatible said it, you could install the the material plugin or the bootstrap plugin or the foundation design system plugin.
And it could override all the core styles of all the blocks that you're using from your theme or your plugin, so that you always had consistency. And I think that'd be a nice way to solve the S the. The separation of design from content which I know Matt Mullenweg wants to design and the content to be together, but that is problematic for the end user, the plumber, for instance, who wants to create a simple website, they will struggle.
They probably won't even see the inconsistencies in the mess that they're creating, but. If you just, WordPress had its own core design system and then you could go now I want to switch to the material one, or I'm going to create my own design system. And that would be, for instance, were theme developers could come in and go, Hey, I'm generate press.
And I've got a design system. When you install a, your site, you can use the January press design system, the WordPress core one. You can even use the Google material one if you want, and everything will work fine and look wonderful. I'd love to see that. And I think that. The Google is probably, number one, just wanting to say, Hey, check out our design system.
It works with the blockage or a number two, thinking this could be a good future for our design system as well much. Like when you see all these admin templates that you can use for your SAS apps, but tons of them all work off bootstrap. They've all figured out. They can save tons of time for their UI by just hooking into bootstrap.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:47] I'm imagining it's about 10 o'clock in the morning over there in Texas. So Carl's probably got seven or eight hours just to knock that system up for you bull. It could be night before, before tea time coming to
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:35:59] Gutenberg in 2031.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:01] That's right. Matt Davis makes the point in the comments. The more that Google impart their knowledge and skill set into something that powers 40% of the internet, the easier it is to get people, sorry to gently bring people into their own systems, analytics, ads, et cetera.
No reason why they wouldn't contribute massive benefit to them. Yeah. Good point. Role con conservant the URL, sorry. The the UI that they prefer. Yeah. There's the Chrissy who says this plumber is paying a lot of air time this week. Maybe you should guess Jack, can we have a plumber on next week and just watch them build a website and Gothenburg special edition episode, watch a plumber builder work.
Paul Lacey: [00:36:38] Yeah. And then we'll ask them, so what do you think about we website for getting the leads? And they'll be like, I just use Facebook. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm booked up for the next six months.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:49] Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. You don't need a website. I just use Facebook anything on that.
So bring them before we move on.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:36:56] I dunno. Maybe this is a step to compete with weeks, this material design plus WordPress, and then you make like your Service offering lumbers to make their websites on the base of material design and WordPress and without much designing. And so isn't it is tapped to compete.
Weeks'
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:37:18] audience. Yeah, it's an
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:19] interesting point because Google, if you buy there, if you've got there, what it used to be called G suite, I can't remember. It's called now with Google workspaces or something like that. If you've got that, you do have access to this site, building technology, don't you?
I think it's a sites.google.com or something like that. I don't know anybody that uses it, but It'd be interesting if they planning on moving into WordPress, they've got the, they've got the cloud architecture to quickly spin up a WordPress website in the background. And if all of their UI is in there and all of their bits and pieces,
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:37:50] I don't even think you have to have work space for that.
Cause I know a lot of people here in my community that don't spend money on advertising though. They'll set up their Google, my business listing and then have one of those Google business sites. That's. Their own little builder.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:04] Yeah, it would be nice. Matt says to have a Google site system move into partnership with WordPress, where we certainly make it a lot, not more more palatable for us, but thank you, Carl, for making the effort to do that.
That was really cool. I feel like we've got a high bar Paul from now on every time we come across an article, we've got to create a website that demonstrates what a plugin can do.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:38:24] It literally
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:25] took five minutes. Okay. That's good. I feel good credit for it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:38:30] I just hope Nathan, that if we were to discuss something like WordPress performance, that's one of our panelists might have even done an entire talk in a blog post about it, but we'll see.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:40] Wouldn't it be great if one of our panelists today, because we do want to talk later about the speed and optimization, if they built a plugin, in fact, to to, to give you insight into how fast your website, that would be good. That would be useful,
Paul Lacey: [00:38:52] but that's asking a lot, but we'll see.
Yeah, that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:55] really put me to shame too. That was awesome.
Paul Lacey: [00:39:00] Okay. We're putting us, putting me in. Nathan's a shame that's for sure. Yes, these headlines
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:06] just read things out. We don't actually have to do any hard work at all. But we're going to move on because Paul wants to tell us about element or 3.1.
Paul Lacey: [00:39:16] Yeah.
Elemental of 3.1, I don't know if this is the full release. I think it is the full. I don't know if I want to say the word stable release. Yeah. There's a couple of new features and one of them is called easy embed code. And essentially it's something that you would get in a theme, like generate press or asteroid or any of the themes that use a hook based system whereby you can put chunks of code in and say where you want that to hook into your site.
It also is like a. Replaced replacing to a certain extent plugins I can't remember the code embed code snippets. That's the one. Yeah. So that's interesting elementary. We're putting features in here that are completely overlapping with a lot of themes and completely overlapping with existing plugins that do the same thing out with it.
So that's interesting. And it does backup a lot of people's theories about how elemental wants to be able to say, Hey, you know what? You don't need to have all these plugins anymore, or you can just use our thing, which would make sense from their point of view, because they have a lot of stability problems when elementary is mixed with other plugins and other themes.
So it may well be that one of their strategies. Is to try to basically say, okay, does someone need this feature? What plugin do they use? We get lots of people complaining that element or doesn't work with this. Okay. Let's just give those, give the users that functionality then they'll, we'll never get any more support requests about that plugin that doesn't work anymore.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:40:42] There's a good point to that too, when you need to do something with Elementor there's plenty of times that I install code snippets. To put in some kind of piece of code to do something in element. So now if they're getting support requests where they're telling people, go download code snippets, and then go, why do that when they can just put it in there?
I think that's their approach.
Paul Lacey: [00:41:01] Exactly. They've also in their And they're, blood-based talks about improved asset loading, so they won't get it says get faster page, load times. And it's what they're calling a, an experiment. So I think that some of the features that they put into the actual stable releases, you can turn on and off as experiments a little bit like with G suite has kind of experiments and stuff like that as well.
It does seem though that have you released at the moment is addressing something to do with performance. But at the same time, you have to assume that every time you add two or three more, Features that replace a, another plugin or something that you adding more and more resource that is loading into the plugin for the end user more bloat.
And then so it sometimes feels like it's two steps forwards and Is it one step forward, two steps back on the performance thing and that they move forward. Then it's a bit of an afterthought to try and address it because it seems to me that the functionality that they're putting in to elemental to try and help with the performance aspect is less of a performance aspect.
It's more of a tick box exercise for the page speed checkers the page speed testers and stuff like that. And the functionality that they're talking about seems to me to be something very similar to what almost every caching plugin. Or already he does where it can delay the delivery of JavaScript, for instance.
So I don't know how useful that is, but I think that they probably need to keep talking to their audience and showing that they're doing something about it. I don't use elemental, Carla. No, you definitely used to a lot. I don't know if you don't so much anymore, but what does it is, does this, is this great news to you or is this kind of like.
Whatever. Yeah.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:42:41] I do, I have, I don't know, it's close to a hundred sites running Elementor dev sites and stuff, probably 40 something live sites. So I'm heavily invested in Elementor. But when a release, this comes out, I don't dare update it too soon. I think we've all just learned that bit, but I watched a video policy at WP tuts.
Did. When this release came out, testing all the performance stuff, it didn't seem to do, a whole lot, but how I've I did a blog post a while back where I was getting frustrated with mentor and try and Gutenberg and eventually oxygen. And it seems like a lot of these things you have to do for El mentor to be faster, or at least to score better in, in page speed tests is a bunch of addition to try to subtract.
What's already out there. So it's like doing. Subtraction by addition, I think is what I wrote. And that's very much what it feels like. Like we have to add all these things in there to subtract all this stuff. That's already grandfathered into the system that it's too late to go back and fix now. So we have to put a bunch of band-aids on everything.
That's how it feels to me. I don't know if that's a really accurate description, but that's how it seems.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:47] I love that description of, addition by subtraction. By addition though, I liked that. That was really insightful. Yeah. Sorry, Sabrina. I know you've got probably a ton to say about this.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:43:57] You mentioned that they are doing what's most helpful caching plugins or doing laundry for a person and stuff, but that's not what this feature is doing. What they're doing with this in your update, then train not to Lords tough on the teachers where it's not used. So if there is some pro at or something, some good it's you somewhere the SS for this widget specifically would be loaded there.
And if they're not used, they wouldn't be loaded, which is a nice thing to do. And there are two plug-ins who do this as well as it's a cleanup. Pro and three version and perimeters the page version on. Yeah. So I think this is a nice step to do this. It's always nice not to load stuff if it's not used.
But then what you just mentioned, like one step forward and two steps backwards, this thing for letting people insert the code, instead of, for example, Google analytics since plugins and stuff. It means that I can serve the, whatever I want. This will be lauded right everywhere. So now w whoever is using elements, or would go there and serve even more than they were doing before, and they will have even more complicated problems.
Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:16] basically, there was a, it was a, sorry, just to interrupt ever so quickly. There was a, I can't speak to the element or UI, but that there is a condition button I can see in the UI. So you may be able to add a condition to say, I don't know, load on a particular. Custom post type or with a category or maybe a particular URL.
So it may be possible, but I can't. Yeah.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:45:39] All their condition agent is like that. So you can do it. What they're showing is the entire site, but you can do page by page basis categories, blog posts, only whatever there's tons of conditions you can do in there, but will people go do all that on that?
Yeah.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:45:52] Yeah,
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:45:54] yeah. Yeah. It's easier to hit. Everywhere, the entire website. Yeah. Because then you can't
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:00] all right. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like we've got ourselves another segue here because we're talking about speed in this case element or and we want to carry on talking about speed because we've got this article by somebody Sabrina does it down.
If this is your, is this your word Fest talk Sabrina? Yes. It's
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:46:21] The recording from my water.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:22] First talk. Okay. So it's entitled how to speed up WordPress sites, five popular recommendations that don't work. Now, the reason I have to say to be perfectly honest, we didn't we didn't intentionally include Sabrina's article because it, because she was coming on the show, I actually put this in.
At a time before we knew Sabrina was coming associates, a really nice bit of a synchronicity. But what I really liked about this when I first came across it at your actual word festival was the sort of the way that you flipped it upside down. Cause everybody's always talking about how the five things to do.
And you're talking about the five things, basically just ignore those that's complete rubbish. So do you want to just run us through what it is that you talk about in this video? The sort of headlines, if you like.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:47:10] So there are 27 minutes of me talking. It's just not do not follow advices.
Bluntly, just think what you are doing. That's it. For example, what we just mentioned the, one of the commonly used advice, just disable and used plugins. But that's what elementary is doing. You guys don't need all those plugins, just use Elementor, but would it really benefit the performance or it won't.
That's one of the examples.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:43] You had you had some other examples about, upgrade your hosting if in doubt, pay more money, just give you a hosting company, more money.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:47:50] Yeah, of course. If you address your concern, so you have concerns about your site performance, and if you address those concerns to your hosting provider, what they would say just a great your plan.
If you address these concerns in a hosting group, there will be tons of hosters who would come and tell, just come to our question and you will have your old problems resolved, right? So the advice depends on who it's coming from.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:17] It's a really nice video, as Sabrina said, it's about 27 minutes long, but it's going to unteach you a bunch of things that you've probably been told a thousand times, and it's just assumed to be true and
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:48:27] waste time on yeah.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:48:30] And resources. I just saw this so many times that people would. By something like a break hosting plans by some services that they don't need at all. And it would let them to no results at all. And they're just getting more and more frustrated with all the thing of site performance, which seems to be even more complicated with each cycle of spending more money.
Paul Lacey: [00:49:00] I've got a question, actually. Like a lot of us don't like the Google page speed test because it gives us, what we feel is harsh scores on the mobile. But what is nice about that test really in a way, is that the reason it gives reduced scores. And I know that it's not all about scores, but the reason it gives the reduced scores is because the mobile simulated test that it does is.
It's simulated to be throttled almost like. So yeah. You can test your website in desk, in mobile mode on your desktop, and it seems to load super quick and all that kind of thing, but it seems that the, when you throw a website as a browser a web browser or a device that maybe doesn't have as much Ram or capacity to render the page quickly.
That's why it's marking you down and giving, 30% on mobile and maybe 90% on desktop. And so the question I've got is that no matter what your hosting is and stuff like that, if the code output. And all the files and the CSS and JavaScript and all these different things that are loading in and the handshakes that you described in your talk, where it goes and talks to MailChimp and MailChimp says, Hey, I can see you.
Yeah, you're cool. And then it goes back to the website and the website goes cool. Okay. Let's display the thing. And if you've got a poor computer, is it easy, even worse when there's a lot of bloat because your browser runs out of. Memory as such to process, so many files, even if the hosting is fast, the end user with an old mobile phone or an old laptop or a slow laptop, is it even worse?
Is that why it's good to see those Fratord results?
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:50:40] You see the performance like it's so complicated. It's complicated on the, on our side, what we are doing it on the website. But it's complicated from the user side as well, because just for example Apple devices would give about 20% faster the content of the same website that then enjoyed devices.
On the same internet connection from the same location, just Apple devices, just as you mentioned about trim and stuff, they just have the way to deliver the content faster. I'm Android the Android user, by the way, but yeah. And Google page speed insights there on tests using Moto for, I think.
It's throttled connection also 3g connection. The location of those tests are unknown. So what we know it's outdated device, first of all, then it's throttled connection and unknown location. Which means we know nothing about our real user experience on the website. So for example I am a local plumber.
I'm a big plumping comp company in California. I do bump in for all that mountain view. People who have money to feed, and they want all those Facebook and Google employees to see my website fast. So how do I know it's fast for them? I wanted to test my website from California. I wanted to test my website using the connection that they have, and they have not 3g the type of connection.
Obviously they have something much, much faster that will link. And the devices that they're using, they're not motto for there or something. So whatever would like to do to real, to really, to know my user's experience is to test in to test in a real life circumstances. And that's not what Google page speed insights could have.
Paul Lacey: [00:52:47] Why does Google page speed insights for all the way down to a 3g? Are they do you think that will, at one point, they'll go, Hey, it's time for us to throttle it to 4g now. And then we'll all be a lot happier. Yeah. Probably
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:52:59] something like this. I don't know. That was like this for years.
They just started with motor a motor four and 3g throttling and they're just sticking to it. I have no idea.
Paul Lacey: [00:53:12] That's good to know. It's good to know, to tell our clients that. You need to look at who your audience is and yet, is your audience in a third world country, then Google speech page speed.
Mobile test is good for you. If it's, if your client like for the plumber my local plumber is in Brahms Grove. They've definitely got 4g and some of them will have 5g and they've all got mobile phones and a customers have got mobile phones and good computers usually.
Sabrina Zeidan: [00:53:40] Right.
Paul Lacey: [00:53:41] Yeah. That's really interesting.
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:53:45] I guess I don't ever think of those page speed insights score so much for the user experience. I'm more worried because this is Google's tool measuring this, how this affects how they view my website from the SEO perspective. So if I'm getting really crappy scores using their tool, is that going to negatively affect my SEO?
So that's what I mean from the user experience. Point of view, the best way to do is just pick up your phone and load it and see what happens. You know what I mean?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:11] I am. I like to do things very slowly. So I know Paul has recently bought and bought on an iPhone and, you can have your 20% faster.
That's fine. I like things to load slowly, so I've got a chance to read them. I didn't know that though. I didn't know. There were 20% off the bat faster. That's fascinating. Really interesting. I have now become a plumber. I've decided I've changed
Paul Lacey: [00:54:34] more money. I think, to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:35] be honest. Yeah, I've done it officially.
I've changed my name on the on the video. I am now. Plumber. Okay, go to that page. It's Sabrina's right. dot com. And the article is called how to speed up WordPress sites, five popular recommendations that don't work. And there's a video that you should watch because that's really what the content is going to watch.
The 27 minutes. Word festive video. We've still got a little bit of time. We got a new plugin that we want to mention. I obviously, I didn't even know this one was out there until about, I dunno, five days ago or something, and then it just popped up on the radar and it looks really interesting. Lots of people seem to be talking about it.
And I know Paul wants to To introduce it and probably with Kyle's help.
Paul Lacey: [00:55:15] Cause Kyle, I'm probably going to pass it over to Kyle, quite a scene, but just to, so anyone you recognize is Adam prize or they're from dopey crafter. This is one of his brand new products that he's just released. Previously he'd also released cart flows, which was a pretty cool WooCommerce add-on for funnel based checkouts and.
Now he's scratching his own itch again to create a plugin that gives a much better user interface and a much better user experience for embedding videos into your own website, whether that's YouTube, video Vimeo, or a self hosted video. Now, the most interesting thing to me about this whole product when it launched was not the product, even though I am really interested in it and I have bought it, I'm pretty excited about it was to read the Adam had teamed up with Andre Gagnon.
Who is the creator of project huddle and also the co-creator of docket WP car, your product as well. And one of the reasons he does, yeah. One w one of the things there was interesting. I thought how does Adelman Andre know each other? I just didn't feel like they were in the same kind of circles.
So it did drop a couple of messages to Adam, and he was kind enough to get back to me. And he told me that he, and I went want to a word camp for the first time. It was at seven St. Louis, is that right? Yeah. You us. Yeah. What can you S and and he met Andre there and they got on really well, and they kept in touch ever since.
And he just said to me that. From his perspective, it just shows how important it is to go to these events and get FaceTime with people because Adam hadn't, Adam was pretty, Adam's pretty famous in the world of WordPress. He's, one of the most successful affiliate marketers in WordPress and YouTube is.
But he'd never been to a WordCamp before, so he hadn't had FaceTime with anybody and he went my Andre and Andre's wife. They got on really well, kept in touch and developed a product a few years later. But in terms of the actual product itself, we're probably hand over to Kyle and cause you've Created a bunch of websites with it already, as far as I can tell that,
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:57:14] I think God, I think I've loaded it on five.
I will say, I don't think I told either Adam, I have a friendship with both Adam and Andy and Andre, but I don't think I told either one of them this, but at one point Adam asked me. How it was working with Andre on docket WP. And then Andre asked me some questions about Adam. So that's funny.
Yeah, they're both really good people. And they
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:35] still ended up working together, even now
Kyle Van Deusen: [00:57:38] after everything I said about both of them. When I, when they first told me about this It's been a month or two ago. And I saw a little sneak peek of what it looked like.
I thought, okay, that's cool. But I didn't really see this didn't seem like it was, for me, I'm not doing a bunch of video stuff. So I didn't think a whole lot about it. I thought it was going to be something really niched. As it came here, close to launch and I got a good look at it and stuff, I became more excited about it.
So I think The problems it's really solving as you can load up your WordPress website and embed a YouTube video, which is fine. It's free the performance. Isn't great. And then you have to deal with all the YouTube branding all over it, and then the suggested videos and stuff at the end. So it's not a perfect system to use, but it does the job.
Or you can go with something like getting a Vimeo account or a Wistia account and going that route. Obviously those things come with a pretty good price tag on them. What they've built here is basically a video player with tons of control for branding. They have really cool features in there, like it, like what you're seeing on screen right now.
It auto-playing, while it's on mute with the closed captions on there, which kinda invites you to to click on it and start watching it. But they've built in an integration with a bunny net, which is a CDN where you can actually host those videos, or you can just use a YouTube. A link or you can use a Vimeo link or you can self host it.
So there's a few different options there. I think really where they're pushing people to go is to sign up with something art, to sign up with bunny, a bunny net, because it's so cheap to host or files there, but it's been really cool to play with and see all the things there's a media hub where you can basically create a library of all your videos and reuse them.
It's really user-friendly and obviously it's really pretty as well. So I'm actually pretty excited about it. Once I got my hands on it and started playing with it. Did I
Nathan Wrigley: [00:59:22] read? Did, is there, isn't there some kind of integration with LMS is where there's some experience that they've created, which works well with like courses.
This is where you've got this thing. And then you've got to watch this thing after that. And this thing after that, from my muddling things up. You're
Paul Lacey: [00:59:35] Yeah. Okay. It remembers where you were in your progress in the in the, so if you were on like, lesson two and you stopped where you were, then one of the features they're building in, or they've already built in is that when you go back to your LearnDash site and I assume they'll probably integrate with lifter as well.
If they haven't already. That the user experience for the learning per the person learning from your online course, they'll be able to pick up exactly where they left off in the video.
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:00:02] And not only that it's dropping a cookie on your computer. So not only will they remember like where you were at in the lesson, they're going to remember your preferences, like how loud you had the volume, if you had the speed change to, I watch every video on two times speed.
So it's going to remember that I'm watching that twice as fast and it's going to automatically do those kinds of things. So it's pretty neat. That's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:20] how you do it all in a day. That's how we now know you've got a button that times two life let's get more dumb. Sorry, Sabrina. I interrupted. I
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:00:30] was kicking in the episode of WP builds with Kyle just a couple of days ago.
There is the content you have Nathan on WP builds a website, right? And I think in how knows it would be too quick on the part of the content and to jump to that section without having to ruin it. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:48] Yeah. The plug-in though. Yeah. Use does offer that function, obviously. It's just I'm not like Kyle just never get around to doing it, but I should.
I could, I, we did actually start when we started the WP belts podcast, we did do that. We found the different bits in the audio, but I. I quickly realized that literally nobody used it. They just listened from start to, however far they got. And that was what they did. But yeah, you're right. Especially for courses and things, if you're breaking up content, that's it's crucial that you know exactly where you are.
Mom. Maybe just want to miss a bit out because you clearly don't need to know that bit. You already understand it. That would be really crucial.
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:01:23] Yeah. Thanks really helpful on tutorials, where you might need to jump to a certain art and rewatch something. But yeah, it's a pretty neat little plugin.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:30] Yep. Lots of nice comments about it, Chris, using in the comments saying it's great. Oh, sorry, Sabrina. I've cut you off. Cut you off. It's great. Picked up 50 license plan using it on 10 to 20 clients sites fairly soon. Mainly. Thank you, pages and ordering and onboarding. Chris.
Paul Lacey: [01:01:44] Chris he's just cannot resist stacking.
He just, he loves to stack this guy. He's addicted to AppSumo. I know that. And so yeah, the deal, your time deal that was available was 25 licenses. Clearly that wasn't enough for Chris. So he's he's stacked two deals there, it's good to I think I personally am very excited about this.
The amount of times that I've had a situation with a client where they want to put some video on. I know that Nivea YouTube nor Vimeo is really the best. Possibility for them. But then I think about the conversations that we'll have to go another way for that client and how complicated it's going to be.
And I go, it's got to you just use YouTube or Vimeo, but now with this, even in just the release of the plugin, Adam an Andre who I'm going to call it a squared from now on our they've got. Some really good tutorials that tell you how to export the video, how to get it into bunny CDN. It turns out this Bernie CDN thing is one of the cheapest CDNs I've ever seen, but it's apparently pretty stable.
And it's just, just from the plugin launch, I've learned a bunch of things and I'm ready to go. We've next time I've got a client project that needs something like this. I can go down this route instead and feel alone and also not have to load in all the junk that YouTube and Vimeo pulls in.
Can I ask
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:01] about that? I know that you, that Vimeo in particular, because there's the paid accounts that obviously you're just serving up the file, but doesn't YouTube bring along all the, like the, when you finished watching the video, isn't that part of YouTube deal that you get the now watch this, the related videos, does it avoid all that?
Can they, and they bypass that.
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:03:20] Well there's a listen inside Presto player. There's a, an option labeled experimental features, not experimental in the fact that it's like unstable or they're not sure how it's going to work. It's that it's all built off of YouTube API, which could change at any point.
I, on on the admin bar's website, I re I updated it all our video podcast episodes to use the Presto player to embed. A YouTube video. So it's pulling in those YouTube videos and I used all the experimental features to turn everything I could YouTube off. So now it doesn't show the YouTube logo.
The player doesn't look like the YouTube player. It looks like the Presto player, which I custom, set up for that purpose. And at the end of the video where YouTube is usually going to show all the cars and suggested videos, it's showing some thumbnails sales of other videos from my channel. But they're not clickable.
So yeah. It at least, at least it's not showing you things to take people away. But I'm not seeing where you can actually like, just go to the next video on the channel or something like that. But it certainly makes it look a whole lot nicer than a YouTube embed. Nobody watching it would know it's a YouTube
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:25] embed.
Interesting. So the advertising or anything,
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:04:32] Does it also take the advertising away? That ads, the breaks through the video.
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:04:37] That's a good question. I I think I signed up for the free YouTube, whatever premium account. And I love not having ads so much. I just pay for it. So I don't even remember what ads on YouTube were like.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:51] Yeah, my suspicion is that. It probably won't be allowed ultimately to take all of those ads away. Cause that is Google's model. I'm sure that, you can figure out a way around it, but equally I'm sure that Google or reign those people. And if it becomes really popular Chris saying that I'm using Bonnie CDM.
Simple. With that, I haven't tried it. And he's who else might Davis is using Bonnie instead of Vimeo as well. So there you go. I just, for the purposes, just for Chris's benefit, I'm going to write a plugin this weekend called there is no code in this plugin, and I'm going to release it on the repo and it's going to be $500 for life.
And maybe he'll start yet. That'd be good. Do you wanna join me on that? Anybody?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now that's the perfect segue at the moment. I was supposed to do some other articles in between, but I'm not going to, I'm going to do this one instead, because yeah. Again, believe it or not, Kyle, literally, you got no idea. We record the podcast episodes of weeks and weeks in advance.
And when did we do this? Six weeks ago or something? I think it was in December. Okay. So quite awhile ago, probably eight weeks ago. We recorded this podcast and by pure coincidence, Kyle booked onto this episode, and this came out as our podcast for this week. It's by you guys, it's you and Andre.
So pivoting slightly, but docket WP, which I incorrectly called WP docket, I think in the podcast. And tell us about it.
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:06:21] Yeah. I approached Andre sometime after summer, around summer, last year. I think we all have processes for the ways we do things in this particular case. I was, I have a process list set up for when I'm launching a WordPress website and the 900 different things I need to check to make sure I didn't screw something up.
But the problem was having to switch back and forth between apps. Yeah. To go find this checklist over here, go back to WordPress, do this one thing, go back to this other tab. So I asked Andre how difficult would it be to make a little checklist that I could pop up inside WordPress? And he said no problem at all.
And then I complicated things very greatly from there. But basically that's docket WP allows you to create. And manage and use checklists specifically built for process type checklist without having to leave WordPress. So things like optimizing a blog post, or launching a WordPress website, all those things are right there.
We have a cloud library where you can download a bunch of of pre-built processes that some we've built. Some we've brought other people on to build, or you can create your own process lists, save it to your cloud library and then access it from any install. You're using on WordPress.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:27] So if you've got a if you've got a process which you just go through habitually, every time you set up a WordPress website, you can go in, install the plugin, download that list.
And all of the things that you want to do are done, but you could also push that towards your client. You'd use that as a checklist for them, for creating blog articles and setting up their SEO correctly and all of that kind of stuff. But the, yeah the killer feature that I really liked was the sort of third party stuff.
The ability to download. Yeah. The experts in other areas like, you've got you've got Pete Everett, I think, I don't know if that's done yet. The SEL side of things. Yep. And various other people. I think Matt Davis, who's in the comments now is I think he's on board
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:08:08] with that as well, or.
No I've talked with him about it, but he doesn't have one in there. We have there, you're looking at the list of everybody. Yeah. Right now. So yeah there's a bunch of, we call it like our official library. So there's a library of checklists that are already in there for all kinds of different things.
And the idea is you can bring those in at least have a starting place. I think there's a lot of like small one-person agencies like me that are like, Oh, I have imposter syndrome saying this is the process for doing something like, who am I to say that? But. This will allow you to bring in somebody else's process.
And then you tweak it to however you want. You can edit all these things, save your own copy. And then you're just able to repeat these processes every time, instead of forgetting to uncheck discourage search engines from indexing the site, which we've all done.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:51] And look, we got Elijah mills. From oxygen saying that he's using it on a site right now, it's great able to convert the entire scope document to do, and I can pull it right inside the WP admin should mention the URL is the URL for the podcast.
You probably don't care about. You probably care about the product URL it's called docket wp.com. And go check it out. Nice. One
Paul Lacey: [01:09:13] of the things I love about WordPress is ever so often things come out and you get very excited about them and. Only in WordPress, these kinds of things sometimes, it's been a long time of things since we've had a lot to get particularly excited about there's a few years ago where, every day there was something cool coming out for WordPress that we could buy.
And but it slowed down a lot. And I liked the sort of maturity of where a lot of these products are going from a user who's bought so much junk in the past as well. But I think For anyone who doesn't know Andre Gagnon and his product, project huddle.
I think everyone who is aware of his product knows how quality is and how well created it is. And I think that, that's why, Kyle, you probably reached out to, Andre cause Westworld, you got to know him a bit, but you knew that he would produce a product that was absolutely quality and.
You'd be able to work with him. And I did speak to Adam about that. And Adam actually said one of the, there's one of the things too, to two of the things that you wanted from a partner was someone that was absolute quality, like a developers developer. And number two, someone that didn't have an Adam.
To help him promote his product. And we've Andre teaming up with you, Kyle, and, you're pretty good at marketing the products that you create or marketing other people's products. And Adam, Adam's audience is absolutely huge and he genuinely wanted to find someone that he could work with, who he could pull out of basically help that developer make a lot more money.
Than they otherwise would and the kind of money that they deserve in this kind of world of WordPress, where all the products are under priced. And so I just hope that it does work out for a squared and that Andrea and Adam make a ton of money and and keep producing and keep working on the product and improving it over time.
Really excited. Yeah. I guess I'm
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:11:06] really selling Andre on this. I don't know why he's too busy to add more projects, I think right now. But the other thing that's really nice is Andre went to school for graphic design. He's an he just builds things that looks so beautiful out of the box.
Like nothing we ever had to talk about building docket was ever design-related because just whatever he did looked great, but. And besides that, he's a super good guy. So I'm glad to see him doing this with Adam and then seeing success already in the first year.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:31] Yeah. I've actually approached him so that we can build a plumbing plugin specifically for.
To-do lists just for plumbers, that video yo player as well. Yeah. It's brilliant. It's going to sell like the clappers. Is that even a phrase? Okay. Let's move on. Do you know what I think I could go back. I'm just going to very briefly mention these ones ever so quick. Cause they're just points of interest.
I'm not going to go into them. The first one is if you have. Ninja forms. It might be on an idea to get that updated. I'm just pointing you to the word fence.com article. It was produced on the S I can't remember what the date was on the 16th of February. Go and search for that. Something like a million million downloads of this particular plugin.
There's a vulnerability which allows attackers to read redirect site. Yeah. Administrators to arbitrary locations. And there's a second floor that makes it possible for attackers with subscriber level access or above to install a plugin. That could easily intercept all mail traffic. Ouch. Yeah. Sublime just fascinating.
I love it. When they say his articles though, too, it would allow attackers to easily install a plugin to intercept all mail traffic. But it's actually really hard to do that unless you know what you're doing. And then if you do know what you're doing you probably called Andre. And the very last one that I wanted to mention probably.
Was this one, Paul, have we got time for this? Do you think I don't. I just don't want to travel anybody
Paul Lacey: [01:13:01] as well. Now you might as well now. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:04] This is just, this is, this kind of really frustrates me. So this is a plugin called accessive B. And an accessibility consultant, whose name is John Dolson? I should say.
Sorry. This is Sarah Gooding on WP Tavern. The article's called wordpress.org removes fake reviews for access login. It would appear that. I don't know who's behind this. I don't suppose we'll ever really know who's behind it, but there were a bunch of fake reviews put on the wordpress.org repo. Now the article goes into how it was going to discover that these were fake reviews and largely it's a bit of sleuthing, actual, real words with real world slipping and going and checking out like somebody creating a CSV file with all of the different IP addresses and cross-referencing sings and seeing a match in the kind of style of the language used and the quantity of comments and how many things they've done with it.
Four and the dates they'd signed off and all this kind of stuff, but it just, I just find it really annoying, in the same way that it really annoys me when I discovered that the Amazon product that I thought would be really good, that I've now bought the filter pieces in three seconds, had 48 reviews.
And actually when I look at it, 47 of them were just complete garbage and I just didn't bother to read them. And it undermines the whole enterprise. And obviously somebody like Sabrina. Has real skin in the game here, she's got a plugin it's on the wordpress.org repo. You could totally fall foul of this in both directions.
That's the problem you could pay for people to fake review your plug-in really well. Or you could be a part of our sort of hack for want of a better word, where people are fake reviewing your website really badly, because they've got a bit of competition. I don't have the answer. I don't think there is an answer, but I'm just disappointed that this kind of stuff happens.
Paul Lacey: [01:14:50] Block editor had the Gutenberg plugin had the same thing in a way in, but not the same thing at all. This is like a naughty marketing trick that didn't work. And hopefully they'll learn from that. It does say they've got history in this, which, I guess we just need to take that into account when we're, anything we buy or use.
But you remember the The Gutenberg plugin itself. We've got absolutely canned from users with zero star or one star reviews when it came out and they weren't real reviews. There were political statements using the review system as such really. So I don't know where I'm going with that, to be honest, but it just reminded me of, the reviews that aren't legit.
When you're looking at a product reviews with baggage,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:38] yeah. And the thing is I really use that as a trust mechanism. So if I'm downloading something from word press.org, first of all, like the number of users matters to me, if it's like seriously brand new and doing an absolute boatload of stuff that concerns me.
But also I do look at it and it's if they've got two and a half thousand reviews and. Majority of them are very high with just a few down at the one rating that gives me, for instance, if somebody can gain the system, it does question whether the systems fit, fit for purpose. I'm not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I don't know what the answer is, but, having some real world tie up rather than being able to just create a bunch of fake wordpress.org user accounts.
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:16:22] There's those like really in depth product review type websites, but it takes you 20 minutes to leave a product review for something. But I know they're checking things very carefully. I left a, I think it was on G2. I left a review for project huddle. Because it's a product that I use all the time.
They do their review process and they denied my review for project huddle because I have a relationship with Andre through docket WP. So they like dug into it and then said, yeah his opinion doesn't count because they're in a partnership together. So yeah, pretty much just
Nathan Wrigley: [01:16:53] figured that out that there was no point in your review where you gave that away.
No, that's really reassuring. That's why those platforms
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:17:01] I'm gonna leave a review that takes 20 minutes, unless they're really happy or really pissed. There's no. In between lukewarm review on one of those platforms.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:10] But if you, if your product was taken down and I think the word that they use on the website, I can't remember now, I've just scrolled away.
Yeah. So Dolson in the article said, I found evidence of a hatchet job conducted systematically against another plugin. He said, which is chilling. It is really, Sabrina, what do you think about this? You'd be. God seems to wake up in a couple of weeks to discover that your very favorable rating, which you have at the moment is totally the opposite way round because somebody just decided I don't want that to be successful.
I'd rather mine was successful. I
Sabrina Zeidan: [01:17:42] think there are sides on this coin. Because first of all, we do not know who placed those reviews. For example, if I have a competitor who I want to be punished for having fake reviews, I can just buy fake reviews for his account and get him all over famous for having fake reviews,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:05] yeah. Yeah. It's the way it is thing. I just slightly disappointed in people. Come on, everybody play the game, play it fairly. That's all I've got to think. I don't have any other things to mention, unless somebody else wants to throw some, throw something in quickly with four minutes to spare.
You everybody wants to carry on with their life. Kyle is going to go and solve the the Arab Israeli conflict. It's got 28 minutes or so before lunch. I'm going to probably go and have a lie down, but that's it we're done for this week. Thank you very much to Paul. Thank you very much to Sabrina.
Thank you very much to Kyle in all seriousness. This is a serious question not being silly about it, anybody up to anything this week that they want to mention. If so, do it now.
Paul Lacey: [01:18:55] We're crazy headedness
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:57] nation. Yeah. You're not doing anything. COVID right. We're all just staying
Paul Lacey: [01:19:00] inside, sitting at home, crying until next week show. Yeah, that's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:06] what going, can I go and get my handkerchief out and begin? I think
Paul Lacey: [01:19:10] it's worth saying Carl Kyle tells me every week that he listens to this show while he's tidying the house.
Doing the cleaning on doing the polishing and the, disinfecting of things on on site. Is it Saturdays? You do the, to do the cleaning. So I
Kyle Van Deusen: [01:19:24] don't know. It happened several months ago. Every Saturday morning, like the whole family will get up and we'll do cleaning. Everybody has some assignments.
I'm usually on kitchen duty, cleaning up the kitchen. And I started listening to this show and if I turn it on 1.5 speed. I can usually get through a full episode and the time it takes me to clean the kitchen. So it's just become a habit. Now I almost look forward to Saturday morning cleaning because I get to listen to this show and catch up.
Of course I'm like a week behind. So it's last week in WordPress for me, but it's still working. So this Saturday is going to be weird. Cause I'll have to listen to myself and I've already heard it.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:56] Oh yeah. I think he's doing the vacuuming. Let's be honest. This is it's something to just add a little bit of background noise while in the background.
Anyway, there we go. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back. It was time. Next week, 2:00 PM. UK time, WP bells.com forward slash live. It is an absolute pleasure as always Paul Lacey. Thanks for coming on. You don't really, you don't come on the, or you are the co-hosts of this. I'll just say that. Is that a habit?
Yeah. Yeah. But thank you Sabrina for joining us. Hope you come on again. And Kyle, thanks so much for coming on as well. Now we have to do the awkward wave. Where we have no idea how long the wave's going to go on, but I'm going to click. We end on. Bye everybody. Bye.