This Week in WordPress #152

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 152 entitled who should be on that page? It was recorded on Monday, the 1st of March, 2021, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'll be joined by Paul Lacey and also this week by Bernard Gronau and for the very first time by Tim Nash as well.
There's a lot to talk about as always. WordPress 5.7 is around the corner. And so we spent quite a bit of time digging into what's coming also this week, a bit of a controversy as blue host or accused of misusing WordPress trademarks. And quite a lot of things were dug up when we took, talked about that.
Also, what about WordPress is popularity in search over the period 2019, 20, 20 and 2021. What's happening? It's definitely changing, will commerce is going up and themes are going down. Also, we talk about the state of full site editing and talk about how generate press as well as oxygen are handling that going into the future.
It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress. This week in WordPress is brought to you by cloud ways. CloudCraze is a managed cloud hosting platform that ensures simplicity, performance and security. It offers cloud service from five different cloud providers that you can manage through its intuitive platform.
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And the best part is it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. You can check it out and get a free demo at absplittest.com. Hello there. Good afternoon, depending on where you are, I suppose in the world. Welcome to this week in WordPress number 152. I think we're on, I'm joined this week by three lovely guests.
One of whom, I don't think Tim Nash you've been on this before, but welcome Tim Nash. How are you doing?
Tim Nash: [00:02:26] All right. Thank you very much for having me. I know I was meant to come in January and then things happened.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:32] Yes. Say no more, but we're joined by Tim now. And we'll no doubt be plumbing, his expertise during the show.
Cause he's a very knowledgeable person. Speaking of knowledgeable person Burnett granola was joining us again as well. How are you doing? Good. Good Bernard. You're in a different location. Where are you today?
Bernhard Gronau: [00:02:52] I been here before on the show and in Corinthia, in the South of Austria on that business trip, a little bit of skiing and
graphic design that she, she lives here. So we meet up on a regular basis to just catch up. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:10] Nice. That's lovely. And finally pulled Lacey, how are you doing this week, Paul?
Paul Lacey: [00:03:16] So am I not a clever person?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:18] So the moment, the words Paul Lacey left my lips, I thought, I didn't say he's a clever person.
I'm
Paul Lacey: [00:03:25] sorry. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably true. So yeah, I'll just be Paul Lacey WordPress consultant over here. I'm not, I'm a bit clever. I know a few things, but I'm definitely not as clever as Tim and Bernard. Nathan. I don't think we've ever tried to out clever each of us. So we haven't figured out who is it?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:44] I don't think there's very, I think there's very little point in doing that. Cause there's only one winner and it's and it's tin basically. Tim's going to win Oh, you mean me and you? I think one day we should have a game of Splunk or something to to finally decide.
Paul Lacey: [00:03:59] Let's just stay friends.
Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:01] Okay. So for that way, we'll get on with some WordPress stuff in a minute, but Cameron Jones in the comment for some reason last week, we ended up talking about plumbers a lot and inadvertently, I just use the word plumb. So no, that was not a reference to last week. It was entirely by accident.
But thank you for joining us all the way from Australia camera. And I don't know what time it is there, but thanks for I'm guessing staying up late. And George, how are you doing if you have any comments, sorry for this bit guys, but we have to go through this. If you've got any comments, please go to WP belts.com forward slash lie.
If you need to be logged into Google because that's a YouTube stream. And if you're in our Facebook group, you can go to WP builts.com forward slash Facebook, and you can comment over there and any comments that you put we should be able to see and we'll put them on to the screen if we can. This is all about the WordPress news for the week commencing 22nd of February.
So basically this time last week, I go around and find the bits that I believe are interesting. And then Paul and I generally have a chat on a Friday afternoon and he says, no, none of those are interesting. How about these seven instead? So we use those. And that's how it goes, but we are gonna, we are gonna talk about WordPress stuff.
We are WP builds.com. I'll just share my screen. There we are. WP builds.com. We produce a podcast each week. And this episode, we're calling that this week in WordPress, if you want to keep up to date with any of that stuff, there's a menu link here. Subscribe, just fill out the forms. There's things like the option to subscribe to us on your podcast, player of choice or join our Facebook group.
The usual stuff. We post all of the news episodes in this archive here. It's called this week in WordPress and video. So if you ever want you to go back, I feel that most of the content in here is probably of limited value after the week has gone because we move on to the next week. Nevertheless, there it all is.
And if you want to subscribe to our newsletter specifically we use a third-party SAS app for this now called curated and it's over at news dot WP builds dot. Cool. So that's all I've got to say. Let's make a start. So the first thing I want you to do mentioned this week was this piece over on wordpress.org.
It is to say, actually it said it potentially could be a little bit stale by now. And in all honesty, there might be two or three pieces that have been written since this, but this is the one that caught my attention. WordPress 5.7 release candidate has been announced. And you can see if you're looking on the live, you'll be able to see the points that are of interest.
But if you're not, I'm going to read them out. Cause you might be listening to this on audio robots, API and media search engine visibility. I didn't explore that one too much. So if anybody in a minute has something to say, let me know. We've also got the detect HTTPS support and apparently this comes with a.
Button, you can now click a button and rather than having to go and fill out two fields and then click save and then get booted out and log in again, you can support HTTPS with a button, lazy loading. I frames jQuery. We're trying to migrate that over. And the, hopefully that we're on the last legs of that.
We've got this deprecation notice cleanup. We mentioned two weeks ago, this admin color palette is being standardized. I forget who did that work? But we had a color palette that we showed on the screen of about 70 colors. And the idea is to distill it down to about seven, I think it was. And then of course we got the newest version of Guttenberg.
I will just carry on for a few more seconds if that's all right guys, because there's a little bit more to go with this because there's a second article connected to this all about the fact that in 5.7, we have the ability. To let administrators send password reset links. So if you're looking at the screen, you'll be able to see Sarah Gooding underneath our profile picture.
There's the option to reset the password link. And we can talk about how we might find that beneficial a bit later. And finally I'll throw it in the mix now. This is an article [email protected]. And it's entitled introducing script attributes related functions in WordPress 5.7. That's probably above my pay grade.
So probably we'll have to get Tim to discuss that one, but there we go, coming down the pipe anyth anybody want to jump in any order? Just yell fastest.
Paul Lacey: [00:08:17] We all thought that the the biggest news in this release was the password reset link. And that was good news to me. But tell me who understands more about this stuff as highlighted that the inline JavaScript feature is way more important.
I didn't really understand why and what it means and stuff. But so Tim, I was going to apart from being really delighted about the password reset feature, because having clients that's really a useful thing to not have to write that email of describing, however, have you tried clicking the button?
Yeah, no, I haven't. So the JavaScript thing, the fact that you've highlighted, it means it must be important. So I wondered. What does it mean to the everyday user and and developers as well?
Tim Nash: [00:09:02] The short answer for is right now this very second. No, not long-term. This is this will be a feature that can be built on top of, so the idea is normally we have a method for in queuing.
Script files, whether they be on a remote resource or bits. And that's pretty standardized. Most developers get that you're meant to in queue a piece of, if you're going to add a CSS file or JS file you in queue, it. When it comes to inline scripts, people, it's a bit more wild West. There are many ways you can do it.
None of them good. And they result in just random blocks of JavaScript and CSS on your page. This is. Apart from being really a pain because you can't necessarily find the blocks. You don't know what plugin generated, those blocks, et cetera, et cetera has a second problem, which is if you're looking at doing things like security, headers and content security policies, which is a content security policy is effectively a firewall for your browser.
So it allows the site to say only the following scripts should be run on this site. And that's really handy because you can say. If this, if script from bad hacker.com runs on my site and I haven't white that, so on my allow list, please don't run bad hackers grip.com. But I, now, if you wanted to do that in for the WordPress admin area, we couldn't do something where we could say we only run certain bits of JavaScript on the page.
Because we don't know what bits of JavaScript we're running on the page. So we don't know whether that piece of JavaScript this running on the page at the moment is good JavaScript or malicious JavaScript. We, so we have to in our content security policy, declare. Yeah, please allow anything caught anything on the page to just run and it's referred to as unsafe inline.
And I think there's probably a hint in the name of, when you're having to type out in a content security policy unsafe. Wait, am I doing this in line? Yep. So what this will allow us to do is we'll be able to finally know what scripts are being generated by WordPress. And we can see what we're generating.
We will be able to do things like add nuances to the scripts to say, Hey, I'm going to change the rate, this one-time code, which I'm going to reference for all the scripts on the page. If a script or CSS block doesn't have a nonce, then don't let it for it. That's a way down the line at the moment it's getting these this basic code into place.
Get an, the next step is the big and the hard one is going to be convincing. Everybody who's ever rotating development code. Who's focused on scripts to convert it to the new system. Hence why? I said, this is great, not today, but it's a really important feature. And it's going to be one of those features that you're going to find a lot of the, a lot of education is going to be needed to really make it work.
Your current builds this isn't going to gain great benefit from your new builds. And as you start to build, particularly for theme developers and any plugin developer who has to do anything involving the front end, both a DB admin or the front end of the website, these scripts are going to be, these new functions are going to be fantastically useful.
And by using them, you're going to make everything better. Sorry. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:20] Yeah. I'm curious as to why this hasn't been made more prominent yeah. In the future. And also, I'm just wondering if, do you know Tim, maybe you don't, whether they're borrowing this from, I dunno, another CMS, for example, somebody's still taking the lead on this and WordPress is playing catch up or is WordPress actually out from here?
Tim Nash: [00:12:38] I was about to say a really mean comment that WordPress has never out front. That's not true, but it's one of those weird bits where we could have standardized this a long time ago. It's just never had the impetus that someone to drive it forward. But there's now a real change generally on the web.
A lot of places are getting idea that hang on, we probably don't want card skimmers. Taking payments out of our WooCommerce sites, for example. So most people would be familiar with major having a good, strong CSP or content security policy would protect against most card skimming if it, unless they get really clever about it.
So there's there's been a subtle change that from when we have first introducing and queuing scripts. There's been the world has changed a lot since then. And so this is just a sort of next generation, if you like. I was gonna say I reason, I think it's not been massively promoted is that this is one of it before you can fully make any real use of this.
Long-term we've got to get the education in place. So I expect to see a drive on it. Hey, use these new functions where possible.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:47] Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, that was, thank you. Thank you for that. That was a real mix short yet to deep dive into why this is there. I honestly, this is the sort of thing that would have passed me by.
So that's really, I'm pleased that you mentioned that. That's great. Bring it up. It's
Paul Lacey: [00:14:01] over my head as well, to be honest, but just the fact that there's, some good announcements about something that it's not just the main thing is the latest Gutenberg changes or something to upset me. There's some good, there's some good things for, some some different headlines, for different types of users.
And I think that's cool. So I don't know if that's like a different faction of people who work on those sorts of things and again, managing to get them pushed free. I'm not sure, but it seems like it's good news that it's moving in the right direction under the hood in other aspects of WordPress as well.
It's a
Tim Nash: [00:14:39] lot of the little things get pushed through as almost silent releases. And you only find out about them afterwards. And one of the, unless you follow the make blog, which is a really good tool for developers to follow, not necessarily the most easiest thing for someone who would just consider themselves a user or just who is an administrator, they often, as you say, go over most people's heads, but.
The downside to that is they make terrible video materials showing off the latest Gutenberg changes is nice and visual, and you can understand why they get into the video calls, not so much, but the information is out there. And each iteration there's normally one or two tiny improvements. Just doesn't feel like it goes at the same
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:22] pace.
It's interesting because I'm back on the WordPress 5.7 release candidate piece. And it just does that. I could be wrong, but it doesn't look like it gets a mention. It maybe isn't that one of the, maybe they try to limit it to six or seven headline pieces, but There you go. Fascinating. Thank you.
That was really good. The bit that was of interest to me was the sort of more aesthetic stuff. The color palette stuff, as well as the sorry, burner.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:15:47] Very, you still got a 61, Carlos. The choose from. Yes. Yes. I'm
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:53] not displeased it. I kinda like this. I like the endeavor to make that all standardized.
So I must admit I was liking what I was reading about that, but also this password reset link thing, I sign up to quite a lot of things on WordPress. And a lot of it might be, I don't know, memberships to things and what have you, and really frequently. It's not every time. It's probably not even wanting five, but quite frequently, the process that you have to go through to sign up for things is the password reset.
And so they tell you that they you've got an account, but the, in nowhere in the email that the template that they've created, do they say, go and do this. You just have to figure it out. And I've always thought it's really all that. We don't have that. And now we do, but it may be as cluttering up the UI a little bit because it's quite a long link.
And it's squashed in amongst all the other little links. I know that Dan, maybe the other day was saying he felt it was making an already. Cluttered UI slightly more cluttered, but at least we've got it. Now I can see this being bloomin' helpful and yes, Paul, you don't have to squirrel away that email template to use when a client gets locked out.
Paul Lacey: [00:16:57] Yeah, that's good news. Yep.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:00] Okay. Now I think we've done the WordPress 5.7 bit in that case. Should we move on to the blue host story poll? We had an interesting one this week. It's mentioned on WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding. Yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:17:13] Sarah Good. In a right to an article it's entitled blue host misuses WordPress trademark reigniting the controversy over recommended hosts page.
So just to talk about what the recommended hosts page is, if you go to the WordPress website, somewhere in the novel, there's a link to a page called hosting. And on that page, there are three recommended hosts, which to be honest, seem to be the same. Since 2007 or so I think, especially because two of these hosts, blue hosts and dream, I remember when they were the cool hosts.
Like those were like, Oh yeah, they're like the, small companies and stuff like that. And they, they give you a lot of Ram and everything and then SiteGround's on as well. So you've got blue host, DreamHost, and SiteGround, so SiteGround, to me is more. W recent, I think but DreamHost and blue hose just feel like big companies.
That one once upon a time, we used to talk about in a kind of positive way, but I don't think that any of these companies that you see on the recommended hosting page, other than maybe SiteGround tend to come up in almost any community conversation about. WordPress hosting. So this page seems to have been the same for a long time.
There's a message on the page that talks about how to get listed on the page and that they update it every so often, which clearly they don't, which might just be an administrative error or something, or they just didn't highlight that. But this story comes up ever so often that why are these three hosts?
The recommended ones? There's always a lot of conspiracy theories. Some of it's true. Some of it might not be, I don't know. The blue host is owned by E I G I think it is. And apparently they were investors at some point in automatic years and years ago. Apparently at some point there was some affiliate links on here, but there aren't any more.
So people are wondering why these, first of all, So in the scene why are these links even on the page? The actual article this time, but as resurface, this discussion is that blue host tweeted a promotion about the hosting and they use the WordPress logo in the graphic, which is a violation of the trademark in advertising.
And they said in that tweet there's a reason WordPress officially recommends blue host more than other hosting service. It didn't say the reason was because there was an investment years ago. We also didn't say that no, one's updated the page, but it definitely implied that they must be awesome in to be on that page.
Which is debatable as to why that page hasn't changed to be fair. But the story this time is that the logo has been used in the graphics. What's also interesting to me about this story other than the violation of the terms is that just suffer Hayden CHOGM posts, John Pacey, who is the who's, the WordPress executive director of wordpress.org.
Immediately got involved in this and scheduled a call with blue host to find a resolution. So apart from, the aspect of why the hosting page never change, why are those three companies there? The issue around using the logo, to me feels more like a, somebody who just worked in marketing didn't know, but then the, then flipped to another interest side.
It's is it just ever Hayden chum, posies job to call it blue host when they use the logo in there. So it doesn't face into me, seems to me just half a dozen or stuff, she must be quite tired, but anyway, that's the story. It's an interesting one because it's frying up the drama again, and there's some good comments on the WordPress to have, and that bring up some evidence of past violations and all that sort of stuff.
But yeah, I don't know, guys, what do you think.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:54] Just to say that 13 comments on a WP Tavern article is a pretty good row of comments actually. And there were 13 on this, and when you get into the twenties, it's usually something really controversial. So there's obviously a bit of feeling I confess I didn't read the comments, but just, could I ask Tim in particular as somebody who until last year was working with a hosting company?
Just this sort of stuff. Does it earn, is it irritating? Is that it? Can you think of any good reason that stuff is there? Does it seem anti-competitive what's going on?
Tim Nash: [00:21:25] About four years ago, they announced that they were going to do a new round of updating of that page and invited people to make applications.
And I remember sitting around a table with eight. Sizable port part of very far speed dot-coms certainly the, all the marketing people we had and we were all chatting about how we write our application. The naivety in this was beyond cause we fought because I, they were talking about how it might be regionalized.
It might even be by country and it's Oh by country. Yeah. Yeah. If it's by country, we're assuring. We'd like at the time we were the only ones WordPress managed hosted in the country. This was not going to be a problem. We both are pitched, had nothing decide, never changed.
I think, th the sensible solution is to remove it. Yeah, it is a conspiracy. It, depending on how much tinfoil hat stuff you want to go into, you could easily come up with very conspiracy theories that are plausible. Not just wild out there ones. It's quite easy to come up with a fairly conspiracy theory that would pass muster and might even get you to the point of someone taking you serious and was going, Oh, that's almost fraud level.
But I don't vote for one second. Think about, I actually think it is as simple is what typically happens in WordPress. And I think Paul's comments about. Josepha probably is an indication of, she didn't jump on this because it was anything to do with her. I'm pretty sure she did jumped on this because she is a really nice and be one of the very few people who seems to be any good at communicating anything from the senior leadership team in a reliable way that people understand and truly get emotionally.
Whenever things like this happen, it is a big ball of emotions. Everybody thinks of hosting as being big companies and EIG for insurance is a massive company and go down to your own massive company. The next tier down the difference in the Gulf between them and the next competitors. Is so far and for small, for smaller hosts, who w when we're talking about smaller hosts, they have hundreds of thousands of customers.
They are small, tiny hosts for those being on that page would change their business model, the free people who are on that page. Currently their business model probably isn't affected by being on it. That's an interesting I, with the possible exception of dream hosts who are a bit who are in the next tier down SiteGround and blue hosts, if they were taken off, they would see a massive dip in their traffic, but they wouldn't change their business model completely.
If somebody, if one of the smaller hosting companies go on that page overnight, their business would change. They were swamped with customers. Potentially any, anything up to 40,000 customers a day, suddenly appearing potentially coming towards them, at least hitting their landing pages. They are going to be overwhelmed very quickly.
And I think Matt's arguments has always been look, we have to put the biggest people on here who can handle that. Which is a rubbish argument. Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's a good argument, but I can understand why they're saying. So we have to have these really big companies on here. We can't have smaller companies on here because the, even if they got lousy support, they can at least sign you up and get you an account.
If we put a smaller company on here, they're probably not going to be able to sign you up because their site, which is a sort of fair. But I, yeah, I just take the page off. I don't understand why he hasn't. It causes, when you a person who runs a massive multi-million dollar company, you have a bunch of other stuff you have to be doing to say I'm taking personal charge of auditing a single page, which has free links on it.
Surely you just go, I don't give up monkeys about this and I'm just going to delete the page. I'm amazed. He hasn't done it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:31] Let's read. I'm just going to read in full the piece that the reply from Mullenweg on the WP Tavern article, I can't provide any context of where this fit in the narrative of what you're saying, but this is just what it says when the one of the lists, when the list is open, anyone can apply.
I refer. The honorable gentleman to the moment to the comment Tim gave a few moments ago. I take a hundred percent responsibility for the editorial though in the past and the future, we have people help test testing hosts and collating all the threads in the forums. I also get a fair number of people emailing me directly feedback about the hosts listed and how the host follows up.
And this is part of my evaluation. It's true. The list of hosts hasn't changed in a while. It's an interesting use of the word wireless, the current list is as a, sorry, is all in there. Good standing. I stand by the long-term behavior and service of every company linked on the page. It is past due for open applications again, but I have prioritized my other work on.org.
No one can pay to be on the page and there are no affiliate payments made for customers sent from that page. It's free opinionated and editorially driven. I actually don't quite understand what that sentence means. I do believe it drives many millions a year in business, which is why the potential for things like bribery or conflict is high.
If it were open to a larger group, deciding who's on there.
I think Tim has possibly the best solution of all the, yet. If there is concern about the millions that could be generated and there's a panel of people in there and you've then got to make a judgment about who ought to be on there and who has literally no connection, then. What's the point in the page.
If it's only three companies who are getting a really big share of the pie from that, and Tim, you just alluded to the fact that if we put tiny host.com on there tomorrow, it would probably sink them in the short term until they managed to recover. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:27:28] And some of them are even not the best options in my opinion.
So why put them there? I don't understand it, so
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:36] get rid of it. Yeah, I think so. I think the [email protected] is probably the most electricity of its it I'm guessing it just sinks to the bottom of the list of things to do. Oh, that's fascinating though.
Really fascinating that you went through all that pain and process and sat all of your team around them and then it fell into a black hole. Yeah. Yeah. So it also, if we, what did he say? Maybe it's time to open up the listing again. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:28:03] Yeah. Quick what you said to him about just F she's very approachable.
It seems very approachable. And I hope I get to meet her at some point a wide camp because she does seem very approachable and I think you're right, because it feels like there isn't many other of the people that you can name. And I think, Oh that's the person that, you know, and you have lots of companies where you have this concept of this brand ambassador thing these days.
So a company has, it needs to be on, it needs a company needs to have it. It's support from the louder people and the mob search I wonder if wordpress.org. I don't know if it works with the whole system, with how it is open source and everything. I wonder if it needs more.
Brand ambassador type people who can listen and feedback and make a real impact because I know Matt talks about, I do read the tweets, I listened to this and you'll be surprised, some of the things that I read w they do get pushed through, but no, I don't think people really feel like it does.
And then that's why you have all these ridiculous not ridiculous, but, conspiracy theories sometimes and everything.
Tim Nash: [00:29:09] WordPress is a massive project and putting people on pedestals in the saying, I am a, I am associated with brand. And I'm the place to point to school sort of the point, your concerns when it comes to WordPress?
Paul Lacey: [00:29:25] I don't want that
Tim Nash: [00:29:26] pretty much. Yeah, it's pretty much saying please put me in front of the firing squad.
I remember the visceral that members of the Gutenberg team went through. Whenever, one of them stuck their head off to the power of it. And then people complained that they weren't communicating enough. And it's last time they tried to communicate. You literally hit them with a baseball bat.
He's talking about, do they need body guards? Not, should they turn up at events? I knew. Yeah. You see this stuff with the with Mika and the plugins team that was recent recently in the, how she's getting different.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:58] Oh my Lord. That was the most horrific article. It's very
Tim Nash: [00:30:02] difficult to suggest.
Who would want to be a brand ambassador for WordPress and on paper, it sounds fantastic until you've just put it in that context and I think, yeah, just efforts. Really good at diffusing situations. And this is a good example where you might query, why on earth did it go up to her? But the answer is it went up to her because she could stomp on it quickly and come back to you and give an answer that sounded like, Oh wow.
Some dealing with it. And. Sure enough dealt with. And yeah, I think that's why we way she does so well is because you're really good at communicating and that's something that's been lacking in. What is a predominantly boys club driven, changed massively in the last few years, but it hasn't been very much the same four or five people at the top.
And they sometimes aren't the greatest communicators. So it's good that we're getting more people at the top who are now. Understanding that perhaps talking before the bang mob comes and knocks on your door helps, stop being mobs generally.
Paul Lacey: [00:31:07] Yeah.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:31:09] Yeah. But you will always get people who disagree with the decision that there'll be made.
So it's. There will never be a uni mace. Yeah. We'll take it. Or we all hate it because everybody has a different angle coming at the project because it's used in such many different ways. It's gotten such a big enterprise in the end. If you think about it. With this customer numbers two weeks ago, it's just mind blowing what happened in the last years.
And it still seems like there's this growing.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:43] Spoiler alert. We'll come to that a little bit later, we got an article about the growth of WordPress, by the way we transcribe this. We transcribe this thing and I foolishly just plucked out of thin air, tiny hosts.com and I was just wanting to make it very clear.
So the owners of tiny dot-com who who Chris, actually, Chris in the comments pointed out that they, you should go to tiny host.com. It is without doubt, the most slimmed down version of a host I've ever seen. And they need the HTTPS button by the way, just saying W we weren't mentioning you.
That was just purely by accident. If you come off cause with your lawyers, you're probably lawyer have a small hosts are available. Other small homes are available. That's right. And Chris to that point says, why not just have a huge directory? Especially for those looking for a hosting company and their native language.
I could see me drilling down on UK newness of that. If there was an international version and I could drill down to one based in the UK, but then he goes on to say Chris Hughes and the comments that is some bad actors and performers, poor performance host, but let's be honest.
Two 99 blue host is going to be like treacle. With Wu, I quite like treacle, just so that, let's let's leave the blue house conversation behind and we'll do you
Paul Lacey: [00:32:54] think tiny host.com right now? I just struggling there. For 40,000 people possibly. As a result of listening
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:04] can
Paul Lacey: [00:33:05] probably change their business.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:07] We want to be, you don't want to be a part of that page. They just
Bernhard Gronau: [00:33:10] want to be mentioned like,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:16] yeah. Listen, there was absolutely no intention for me to in any way promotes tiny house or indeed mentioned them. I just a mistake. Okay. Let's go on. Let's move on to this piece, which is let me just put the screen back on. There we go. This is a big, long piece. Take a. Go and grab a large cup of coffee for this one.
This is by Alex Denning, [email protected]. There's no way I'm going to do this piece justice. I've met Alex a couple of times at word camp London, and a very amiable and likable chap. And he's really gone to town in this one. And he's putting together the search trends for 2020. And just to paraphrase it really, it's probably about a 10 minute, maybe a 15 minute read if you actually stop and look at the graphs and try to understand it all, but the you as you would imagine the sort of searching overall for WordPress has gone up especially during 2020 will commerce.
I'm showing a graph at the minute where we're looking at the percentage increasing in WordPress searches, such as relates to WordPress, and he splits that out a little bit more, and he's a bit more nuanced than that than the graph. I'm just going to show you, but percentage increase increased for just WordPress.
And various words associated with that has gone up by 14%, which in any year is pretty incredible. Plugins has gone up by 18% woo commerce by an incredible 44%. I don't know if that trend is set to continue. When the post COVID world finally greet sauce and we're back to normal bricks and mortar shops.
I wonder. How many WooCommerce shops will pass away or whether it will still maintain its interest. Certainly hope so. And then finally themes has gone up 9%, but in real terms that could be seen as a decline. The expectation would be that would have gone up slightly more and you'll have to delve into the article, but yeah, essentially WordPress is on the rise.
As you might imagine. Look at this WordPress hosting we've got on the screen. Average search volume per month, 2019. It was 38,038 and a half thousand for just WordPress hosting. Those two words, press.org/hosts. That's right. And it's been blue host or so, yeah, and it's it's gone up by 22%, 447,000.
I won't bore you with the statistics. Cause if you're listening to this. It's going to be really uninteresting, but just to say, it's looking solid for plugins. It's looking really solid for WooCommerce, the stuff that Google's driving, little bit less. If you're in the theme business and Alex tries to trust and go into why so curious about your thoughts.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:35:56] Why themes are less? It's easy because everything else got bigger. If I think back a few years there was one or two form plugins and all was one packet for this and that, and not take a look at how. Alone on my phone plugins out there, or how many options for e-commerce because you have rules and you have others BigCommerce trying to get people over and stuff like that.
I don't know, such engine. It has been ghost and not much more. And now we have so much, many more ranked reps that you present all the others, same floor. Almost every area of our plugins exists. So nationally there are more people searching for stuff in that area because the theme isn't the only thing.
I think that's the big reason behind it that it's just diversification. We're seeing with word press.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:47] Paul in your previous life with w working in your agency, did you over the last year, did you get more phone calls for WooCommerce related stuff, or was it just that sort of blended into the background because would that increase you'd imagine that's half of what the phone calls are these days?
Paul Lacey: [00:37:04] I wouldn't say we call it more ankles, but but. I'm using WooCommerce a lot more. Just today. I think he's going to launch tomorrow actually. We're launching a website for choir opera consort, and they can't obviously do any performances at the moment. And usually they weren't doing any performances in their own venue cause they didn't have one.
It'd be Formance it's in different venues around the UK. But they're launching today or tomorrow an on demand, one where they recorded some things and it's using WooCommerce and it's enabling the user to buy a season pass so they can watch the different streams that come out on the eighth and then the 20th, the second flood, et cetera.
And so that was a company that was never going to use with commerce, but now. They are now and it's been an absolutely fantastic solution for them. In terms of the themes coming, going down. I think that seems natural. I don't think it means that the theme is dead by any means at all. I think it's just that maybe a few years ago, themes were.
What, like what businesses saw as the solution in WordPress they needed to pick a theme and maybe they would pick X theme or Jupiter, or one of the ones on theme virus or something like that, because that's where you had your one, especially the DIY would get their one-stop solution from the theme that came with all the things that they needed.
Whereas I think now that the people who are all doing those searches. Probably not the people who already have their stacks sorted out. Like we probably do that. People coming into it going, where do I start? And the thing that they're not probably searching for is themes as much. I know that a lot of DIY uses for tools like elemental, think that WordPress is the add-on and the element, or is the main thing.
And then there's a slight plugin called WordPress that sits in the back that doesn't look as good or something. And so I think. The trend is great for the growth. I don't think it's necessarily that WordPress is amazing. It's a reflection of the success of WordPress, but yeah, I think that's me.
We've commerce. I can see it getting bigger and bigger themes will become a have that have their place in things. And then it will be interesting to see what happens around page builders in the next. Yeah, will tell you. But just to note, if you do Google, if you do Google or. WordPress hosting.
Number two for me is the WordPress hosting page on wordpress.org. That's number one on duck guy. We've no ads show. So they, I can go for that. Yeah. Sorry. I'm going back.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:42] Yeah, stop that. Yeah, it just. Fascinating, just a breathtaking amount of time being spent on WooCommerce at the moment by a lot of people.
And the the article is actually picked up by Chris lemma. Who has a piece about it. It's a follow on piece. And he talks about the WooCommerce growing during this period. And he comes from a, I F I, is he, is it neccess that he works for nexus liquid web? That's the name that I'm morphing? I think the one on the same thing.
Yeah,
Bernhard Gronau: [00:40:15] I don't know which way, but I think one was bought by the other combining to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:20] stuff. Yeah. Tim you were saying this
Paul Lacey: [00:40:23] list is they actually accidentally bought each other out. There's just so much money. They just don't
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:31] the exact same
Paul Lacey: [00:40:32] moment. They just put,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:35] bought each other. That's a good, that's brilliant.
Anyway, he picks this up and talks about the growth, not just for a small. Businesses and he makes the make, goes into pain. Say, I don't really know what small is but the fact that there's now some seriously large businesses millions of dollars businesses using WooCommerce, I never really, it never really thought that would be the place where people would go for.
Million-dollar businesses or felt that WooCommerce wouldn't be that they have something bespoke or, I don't know, but no. So I'm told it's just great. If you've got those huge businesses as well. Anyway, he links to Alex last week. It's called last week in WooCommerce. Grab Tim gone.
Tim Nash: [00:41:17] I was gonna say, I would like to say that this is someone who basically specializes in WooCommerce, hosting telling you will come good.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:24] Yes, you're right. Yeah. In fact, if you look at the piece at the beginning, you only need to this first paragraph says that. Did you say that the company that they worked for liquid web nexus, that's a specialist.
Th they deal primarily in WooCommerce. That's their thing, the
Tim Nash: [00:41:39] nexus, they seem to have Merde moved it so that the nexus is there. We commerce the fakest side. Got it. So liquid web is a, has been a lot. I hate to use that word, large battery in scale, not large compared to some of them, but they're a fairly big company and they're using the nexus brand to drive their route commerce side.

Bernhard Gronau: [00:42:00] Yeah. A few years back already, that started to do. Optimization for newcomers in the background, like moving stuff to separate tables. Like when was it started to enable all that stuff. So they focused heavily on improving performance with e-commerce sites in key areas. So it's natural that they promoted.
And I don't, I wonder, I haven't used any other real shop. Solution besides WooCommerce. And I think it's partly a bad percent success because it was easily accessible and usable and you have many people using it. And everybody knows. You have to use words. So maybe it was the de facto standard.
I don't know. And it's, I think it's still compared to other tools, fairly easy to extend or to modify it because you're right. Fastly find a PHP developer who can do maybe not in the best way, but in a way that reps for you iterate on your root commerce store and try that for again, or other tools you pay far more money.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:14] Are just going to say that Matt report, Matt, an interview with Matt Mullenweg recently, two mats on one podcast at once. And he was, Matt was can't you say Matt? M can I, Matt Mullenweg. It was really bullish about the chances of WooCommerce being a, almost like 1% of what it's capable of being.
Right now, when I came into the WordPress space, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, it felt like people would talk about WooCommerce in amongst other stuff as part of their blog. It would be a thing. Whereas now I can, there's like whole blog networks and you've got blogs just. Only talking about WooCommerce is growing and growing.
Yeah, obviously it's a an area of strength and Chris Hughes in the comments again. Thank you, Chris. You're commenting a lot today. He says he's got a few multi million dollar, sorry, a few million dollar Wu sites that he manages digital products, as long as the limits. It's okay. But he does rely Onyx external services.
Metorik I can't say I know what that is, but Metorik et cetera. He says. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [00:44:24] Okay. There's a lot of money. There's a lot of money. There's going to be tons of money. When you click on the nexus website link, I was just browsing for you. I was wondering like the GoDaddy WooCommerce hosting has a bunch of as a deal or something with automatic, where they get that.
If you're a. Buyer of that product. You get a bunch of these extensions where we commerce, like memberships, subscriptions, some of those things that people need. I was looking on the next best one. They've made some deals, I think. And this is what all these acquisitions is always about. You can see that if you sign up with the WooCommerce deal with nexus or liquid web, your getting things like I themes pro you're getting Astra.
Theme pro you're getting a bunch of extensions that like a pro thank you page creator, which is which people need, because I'm, just this week on my side, I was just making these last few days, just to control your thank you pages. And it's just not really there to do that in the core product.
So we've commerce. It's going to be it's. It's going to be absolutely massive. I think for January and income for automatic and all that, and all the hosting companies deals and everything, it's going to be astronomical money.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:37] So many plugin developers on the show as a few lined up, I think I've probably got about three in the queue coming up soon about plugin developers who make a living out of just doing one tiny customization to WooCommerce carts.
They offer the ability to modify the flow or the layout or whatever that is that keeps them, the bills page. That one little modification is amazing. Let's put Wu behind us and talk about this piece, which is over on WP Tavern. This is Justin crikey. We've got to 53 minutes into the podcast and we haven't mentioned just in toddler.
I'm going to have a sit down. We were on a piece called yeah. FSC standing for full site editing outreach, round two, building a custom home page. We've gotten bug site editor. What's this all about
Paul Lacey: [00:46:26] Paul. This is the first of three. I think the last three of our articles that we're covering, which all cover different ways that you can build WordPress in a full site editing kind of way.
And this is obviously the official core version of full site editing with WordPress, which is obviously very early in its days at the moment. And McAfee who works for automatic and is. So as far as I can, as far as I know, I've tried to hone in on Slack a little bit is her job. One of her jobs at the moment is to help people through the the testing process and try and get people involved in the testing process of the full site editing.
So from the WordPress Tavern article, there is a link at the top where you can click through to the testing page on the On the make.wordpress.org. And what it does on that website is talk to you through step one, step two, step three, joining the dots to help you experience full site editing from the ground up where they're at this point.
And then they're inviting you to feed back on that. So you start with setting up just the theme, the word WordPress, and then you go into modifying your head or a little bit. It asks you to create some. A bit of a layout and then also to add a sidebar and you can see that's what Justin has done.
If if anyone's watching, rather than listening, you can see Justin who is obviously very skilled has created a nice looking page about a made up restaurant called the grilled cheese, which he said that if he does open a business in this way, this is what he's going to call it. And this will be the website.
So he's had to go. It. You can see in the screenshot that we're all looking at there, that it does have a kind of area for where the logo would go. It does have a navigation set and he has managed to make it look quite nice. So anyone who wants to have a go at this, there is a step-by-step.
Process that and McAfee's page talks you through and you can have a go and then you can feed back and it tells you how you can get involved in feedback on that as well. So yeah, that's the, that's where they're at this point. The MVP does look very NVP and that it is their MVP, I think, and just ever has talked about this on her own podcast, I think, and in other places is really about.
Can this system create a one page website. We've never had a landing page.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:42] Yeah. A
Paul Lacey: [00:48:43] landing page. We've enough bar. And and that is I think what we're all starting to understand MVP means for full site editing. So I'm going to, I'm definitely going to give it a go. I tried it the first time round, but I think I came into it a little bit late the first time round.
And when I downloaded the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin, I couldn't get it all to work. And I think that was because. They'd moved on from the tests that I tried. So there is a deadline on this. I'm not sure. Let me just check what the deadline is. It's March. I'll just check for you
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:14] March the first 3:00 PM.
UK time, you got four minutes
Paul Lacey: [00:49:20] March the fifth. So if you want to have a go of it, have a go of it this week and and then feedback and see what you think. And we can learn a bit more about
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:28] it. What my first question to you, Paul would be, was it. Was it intuitive. I know that you said that you came on stock possibly because things were not working.
Did you find the bits that you were able to interact with? Were they intuitive? Cause I know that you're used to using a particular tool.
Paul Lacey: [00:49:45] It wasn't, but I think to give it in all fairness, I don't think it was working right. Because I have watched a couple of videos of other people doing it. And I wouldn't go as far as say it was intuitive, but it worked and it was possible to do it.
And just in, talks about in this article where you going to build the patient much quicker in just pure HTML, but it is what it is at the moment. We're at the beginning of this process. Really? I think I think that the they've been talking about putting this into core and that, especially for myself, that's just made me think.
That I think it's done. But having talked to some of the people, I think that's the important thing sometimes. If we don't talk to the people or you get the impression that in fact we're defining redefining goals and milestones completely differently. Especially if we're used to commercial products, putting out an alpha and it being pretty fully featured.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:39] I have to say I'm getting
Paul Lacey: [00:50:41] two will be a bit better. Yeah. So I'm
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:42] going to do it. You're getting familiar with this UI we're shown on the screen that if you lock Gutenberg's, what is he even called? The editor interface to the top of the page. I've forgotten what the word is. I'm really getting familiar with that now.
And everything seemed to have settled down nicely. Everything's where I expect it to be. And it has been for months now, nothing is nothing major has changed. And this really just looks like it's adding extra options on the right. So the ones that Justin's highlighting at the moment is I'm not entirely sure the query block, I believe it is.
And it's all just adding extra buttons and extra features. So long as they don't play with that too much the navigation. Looks as though it's something a bit different because you've got it the top in the middle, obviously some sort of inspection of which bit you're working on, the screenshot, we're looking at there, fiddling Dustin's fiddling with the footer.
And I guess there's no real way around doing that. You've just got to isolate those things and put it somewhere, but it looks, it's all starting to look pretty familiar to me. I like it. I haven't played with it too much. So I can't really say, but I think ultimately this interface will always work for me.
Paul Lacey: [00:51:47] Yeah. I think one of the challenges at the moment is that the interface. I think people are getting really familiar with it for a text editor and for having column left image over here, video putting the video there. And it seems to work really well for that. I know. We got it as one of our articles, but I know elegant.
Is that what it's called? I'm looking for divvy. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Elegant themes. I'm releasing an update to their plugin. Just last week, actually. And they, if anyone's used Divi builder, the page builder, it started out as like a backend builder where you saw everything in a sort of what you would call it a wire frame view.
So it was structure. You could see your columns, you could see your rows and you could see your modules and then you click into a module or a row and you would edit the settings associated with Rome row module, column, or section. And They've obviously recognized that people still liked that, but to do it on the front end.
So they've released something called wireframe view, which means that when you're looking at, when you're editing your DV site, you can edit the front end in wireframe view. So it's not attempting to look like the website anymore. It's just showing you the structure. I think that's quite cool. But then the opposite of that, you've got the pure front end editing and the challenge the block editor has got with this full site editing thing is that it's trying to be everything.
It's trying to be like wire frame view, structure, navigation, all in one thing. And it's a really difficult challenge. And I think it's going to take a long time to get there. I do think they'll get there because at some point I think the powers that be will realize some direction needs to some serious investment in time and money maybe needs to go into the UI.
And the user experience and at the moment they're on MVP stage. So I've been criticizing the project quite a lot, but I've probably been expecting too much and expecting where I think they, they are versus where they really are. So you need to give them a lot, lots more time, I think.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:44] Yep. Tim Burnett, anything, or should we move on?
You
Paul Lacey: [00:53:49] know, my, my
Bernhard Gronau: [00:53:50] point, it's not there yet. They're trying, and it's good because if they would have stopped that price 2.0, we wouldn't talking about what it was anymore. So it's the natural thing to do to just iterate and get better and better on the stuff they're doing. For me it's missing some T parks still.
And let's see if they advocated in, because for me it's all about the field connections or how ever you call them and about mobile editing and for adding on a mobile responsive stuff. And that's a cooking product. I don't know. Anywhere usable for me in the default state without any add-ons or stuff like
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:37] that.
My use of it frustrates me a little bit because it doesn't look exactly how I want it to look in that is to say. I've got the representation on the screen and it's ever so slightly not how it looks when you click publish and view, because you've got all these extraneous blocks that aren't actually blocks.
They're just there are places where you could put blocks. It's the plus icon that, the one plus icon expands the road that you're in by, I don't know, a couple of centimeters or something like that, 50 pixels or something. And. And so it just throws everything out. So you have to accommodate for that all the time.
Whereas my experience with things like Beaver builder, that there's, none of that stuff is thrown in. It just really manages to have a great representation of what is what you get. So I think those are the obstacles we're so used to it, looking like it ought to look that when it doesn't, it's a bit frustrating, anything on that, Tim, I don't know if you've used Gothenburg a lot or.
Tim Nash: [00:55:35] I come from the point where I never used any sort of builder. I just figure out when I started there wasn't one. And by the time things like a official composer turned up, they had destroyed any belief that our building software was a good idea. Yeah. To the point they could be amazed all the new, this sort of looking at what we've going to be talking about for the next few minutes and undergoing.
Yeah, I haven't used any of these. I use Gutenberg. I use Gutenberg because Gutenberg is the future. I look at all the other builders and go that sucks and know that you're effectively going to have to either integrate with Guttenberg. Or die. There is no, and it will end up that way. So they've got to be now pondering.
What, one of those two routes do we take what we've got done and do we make BeaverBuilder fantastically brilliant parts of Gutenberg or do we go and find a new thing to do? And I think they did their little AI assistant thing on this, and you can see that they're diversifying and you can see people where it feels like they're going, we might. Ended up becoming more good, some good and bird friendly and generate practice blocks and things.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:56:49] Yeah. I'm not quite sure because they can look at, I don't know, it's still up there and they're still making, I don't know what it's called reprieve bakery now, and they're still have sites being built on it.
Good great tool to make the editor bedroom for that first. But I don't know if they haven't yet figured out how to really make it to full site experience, because, and a mentor and Beaver builder and all the others are I had of them and they will keep iterating on their product.
So the question is how fast will, will sell. Catch up or will the ever catch up, because I don't know, you have stuff in before and still many plugins, which iterate on that, which add features to that. So maybe it's the whole ecosystem and to still have a good book builder them, which adds to Gutenberg like Flocksy, or I don't know, like general clocks and stuff like that because good practice lays the groundwork.
I don't know.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:57] It's interesting. Sorry, Tim, you carry on. Nope, no,
Tim Nash: [00:58:01] I was just going to say, I don't think they need to catch up. They just need to be good enough that nobody goes to look for anything else. He might not catch up. They might not get the current people who use elemental. They might carry on using that forever, but all the new people and.
WordPress is increasing its market share. We commerce is increasing its market. Share those new people. Aren't going to be looking at element or, and the, and hopefully we've managed to bury visual composer. They're not ever going to find that comparison is fantastic these days. But those things will disappear because the market, because people will just see the shiny builder and go well, that doesn't work with the shiny builder.
Oh, that was really helpful.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:42] It's interesting. Because over the last few months, Tim, we've had quite a lot of conversations and the one that's the one that sort of stands out as a success story is element or which you've just mentioned, so you've heard about it. And the piece that we I've now closed the tab, sadly.
So I can't really resurrect it, but the Alex standing piece about the searches element or other mental really bought that trend over the last couple of years, they've somehow they've almost become well. Again, I'll throw into the mix. They are about to throw a SAS product out there, which I'm presuming is in some way built on WordPress.
I'm not entirely sure if that's true or not, but they've almost become. A a brand, you build an elemental websites you don't, and you never really need to interact with WordPress. So it's quite interesting. I think you're probably right Tim, but I can see that for a really long period, people will search for ELA mentor and so on and just build out with those solutions possibly.
And some of the other ones and the market is just separating a little bit and at the minute, They satisfy exactly what they, they need to achieve, they can do all the full site editing. It really does look like it's supposed to look and so on. You click save and all that happens is the editor goes away and everything's exactly as it was five seconds ago, just without the editing Chrome.
Whereas Gothenburg isn't there yet. And I just desperately wanted to show that, just show that and it is slowly but surely these little component parts are dropping in full site editing. It's great. I'm loving it
Paul Lacey: [01:00:12] to, I have to say my opinion is getting changed slowly. I do think that the page builders will continue to be relevant until there is a third party vendor that pulls that, that uses the Gutenberg basis and provides the quick solution for everyone that when someone actually on onto that solution.
Totally works for them. So if you want to weave commerce site, it's maybe there's a couple of vendors out there now that are doing it, and they've got a set of blocks. They've got some WooCommerce add-ons, they've got this and that the other they've got the core theme, et cetera. And they're presenting the entire solution.
It's maybe not using full site editing, but if you combine all that tools, you can do the majority of the things that you wanted to do with Beaver builder or Elementor or something else. We've just the tools, which are very block-based.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:05] I'm just waiting for the segue. I'm waiting for the segue.
When's he going to say it? No, it
Paul Lacey: [01:01:09] wasn't going to say generate press, but it wasn't actually good. January press is doing a different thing. January is sorry. So I was talking, I'm talking about cadence. Really? That's what I'm talking about. When I think you go to a website and you see their templates and their templates are ready to go.
They look good. And they've got everything you need and you don't need to use the page builder. And if they can do that, then the future can be, they can out-market that this is the good solution versus someone else who can go don't use the block editor stuff. It's too difficult. Use elemental. Yeah. They can say that at the moment.
And they can probably win that argument until things like web titles. Comes really into play. And and the junk that comes up, something like element or that's or visual composer for instance, is just overwhelming on their Google rankings or something. So I do think it's, I do think it is possible, but it will take the block editor to be good enough that a third party can market it.
And make a ton of money out of it. And then all the affiliates can make a ton of money out of it. And basically the community can get on in and start advocating. This is great. This is great because people don't like to advocate for bad experiences. They're not going to say, you should use this.
It's really hard to spend my speed score. Just saying, yeah. The segue you were talking about,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:33] I honestly thought you were leading into that
Paul Lacey: [01:02:39] it does fit into it to a certain extent. Yeah. Generate press have that generate blocks and they've. And we know because we've talked to Tom a few times that J GPP, Miriam 2.0. Is a massive relief for generate presses. Add on GP premium because it introduces what they call here, that the GP January press theme builder, essentially, without going into too much details here, they are showing in a way how full site editing we've dynamic data can be done with the block editor.
And I think there's them. And there's. Toolset and probably pods pro is moving in that area to be able to create archive pages, single post templates with ease, without having to understand the complexities of something like the WordPress theme hierarchy and how that all works. Now, generic press has done a great job of this.
And a lot of people are very excited about it. I'm pretty excited about it. I can't wait to have a play. Nathan. You've had a play with it, essentially. It's something a bit like Viva Thema. Tulsa pods, all kinds of you can create the same kind of solutions. It's quite early in its release. This is 2.0, but Nathan you've had to play with it.
And they are, as you said, still limited by the poor UI of the block editor in general, but it's still quite difficult to use because the tool that they are building on top of is it's not quite. Easy to use enough for the typical user.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:13] Yeah. The, I basically followed whenever you come across these tools, I always find the easiest way is just to follow a video tutorial that if it's on the site and just copy what they were doing.
So that's basically what I did. And so on the screen now is something which I try to achieve and the sort of disconnect here on the generator. Blocks one is that you've got two. You've got like this metadata box at the bottom, which is where you've got a hookup where it appears. So you've got your you've gone out of the Guttenberg UI and you've dropped into their proprietary display rules at the bottom.
And it's easy to understand this piece of cake. Tell it where to go, entire site or what have you. But the primary thing was just Gothenburg getting in the way, you would you would click on something and then you weren't quite sure whether you'd clicked on it because things were nested within other things.
So you had to use the, I don't even know what it's called. Is it the inspector, the little three icons, which indicate the hierarchy of the blocks and then select the right blocks. So that you've changed the background color of the correct one, not the thing, which it's contained in and then you get little.
Residual bits like on the site, that little plus icon living in its full width box, taking up room in the UI gets in the way. But if you can get over all of those little stumbling blocks and you just just agree to accept that's the compromise you've got to make at the moment it worked. And you click update and look at it on the front end.
And it worked really well. And I do love. The little container block, but Tom's belt where you can stick a container and then stick a grid inside the container and then do what you like once you're in there, they're much more straightforward than anything I've seen. But there were just some blocks, again, going back to my my grandmother and allergy, there's no way my grandmother could, you could have used this.
It was just too many things to have. Too many things you needed to understand prior to getting involved, but watching the video really did help, but it's the future. This, I think this is a novel way of doing it, but you can only imagine that yeah. In the future, a lot of this stuff that's at the bottom on the screen, we'll have to drop into a menu on the right hand side, just to abate the conventions.
Paul Lacey: [01:06:14] The one thing you give your give the product it's due or to give it a breaker such as that you did clarify to us that your grandmother has sadly passed away. So yes, she,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:25] She is basically on both to build any websites. You've raised a sore point there. Paul, I'm just going to go and have a little a week over in
Paul Lacey: [01:06:34] January Presto
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:35] to highlight.
Yeah, no, it's good. And it's considering what's available. Of all the things that I've tried, this is fabulous. I, it really
Bernhard Gronau: [01:06:45] question about complexity in the end with all those kinds of team builders stuff. Be it blocks the way you can hook your staff, be the Astra hooks, or be the 10 red hooks or, the turn red clocks with field connections or dynamic data, how they all call it.
Has been themed Tara tardy for years where developer builds stuff for others to use. So these tools just move, I think, kinda in between people who know how to do it themselves anyway people who build sides and maybe just. We'll leave it a little more stuff, and now they can move in this in-between area, but you still need to understand how the hierarchy works.
What is an archive page? What does this thing and singular page and stuff like that. So maybe it's for that fit in the category. I build sites with those tools because it's quicker and easier and I don't need the latest performance and the latest millisecond because. Most of the customers don't care because they don't compete with bigger sites where they might need to rank higher because they have their niche or they have their tool or they have their local audience.
Then they don't care if they load in 1.5 or 1.7 or 2.2 seconds. As long as it doesn't take 15 seconds to load decide, they just want to work with it. So it's hard. It's sometimes easy to lose. That the site for what user the tools are built or who uses the tools. Because talking about 50 to 60% of the web pages using WordPress, that's a myriad of different
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:28] customer types.
Yeah, that's a good point, to Tim's point about it becoming the default at some point when it's good enough, it will do, but we're just used to commercial products needing to be all bells and whistles from the get go. And this is not that process. And as you've identified, Paul, you've you've worked that through in your own head that.
This is just one little step at a time when it's good enough people, I imagine Tim's right. We'll just start using it because it works right. We are running out of time. So I'm going to press us on it. One
Paul Lacey: [01:08:55] thing you will love this product, is your classic Genesis user who used to build build their websites with hooks and filters.
Yeah. Especially the Genesis user who too. Read a lot of tutorials, a lot of the time and copy and paste the code snippet. Cause what general GP generate press premium two does is essentially it's using all the hook locations throughout the website, which is very similar to a Genesis framework.
But you don't need to know code. You can swap code. For the block editor, basically your area's enough. Yeah. We've all been laughing at your comments.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:09:35] That's good. I love that aspect of it.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:09:45] This hook question. That's one imperfect thing to teach us today, but we deal with proxy. They even allow you to target the second age two on the side to hook, then your custom block into it, anticipate your block. So it's very interesting where all this leads more and more people use it.
I wonder some of it. For me, it would belong at the core of Gutenberg. Like those dynamic data, field connection type of stuff, because now we have channel based building their own way and LuxSci has some of it. I don't know, cadence already has. I'm not sure. And there was another lock Stuart, which adds that.
And then there's a plaque in which equity several blocks. So that's even what created and it was before.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:28] Yeah. Oh dear.
I thought we were going so well, there you go. We're back. We're back to square one, right? Forget it. Forget Gothenburg. Just right. I'm stopping. I'm stopping this podcast. We don't need WordPress anymore. Lee is sharing some nice comments about you can't see, but Tim has a resplendent beard. And my, my poultry that I left for.
Or in date poles, punctured effort is is it's. It's not as good, frankly.
Paul Lacey: [01:10:56] Yeah. Just remember the other day. It's the lock
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:00] down. Be it. I've got the lock down on top. Which I've noticed you're sporting a bit of as well. Tim, actually I noticed
Tim Nash: [01:11:08] behind.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:10] Yeah. Cool. Yep. All right. Last one then very quickly.
Cause we've got very little time left. We're just going to mention that oxygen users. Yeah, exactly. So oxygen released version 3.7. They just flying under the radar and really think this is quite a bit. Quite a product I really do like it. And whilst I don't really use it too much, I follow it really closely.
And what they've got in this new. You section a 3.7 is two things probably worth mentioning. They've got the option to use their new CSS grid capability. My, my advice would be rather than me trying to explain it, just watch this video of a larger who's the lead developer, larger mills, and probably the first five minutes.
He explains the UI for putting things into your CSS grid. And it's just really nicely done. If you were to sit down and think, okay, Again, going back to the example of my grandmother. Could my grandmother do this? No. Could she do it with oxygen? Yes. Is it really easy yet? Is it ridiculously easy and the answer's yes.
It's done really well, so kudos to them. And secondly, something that I didn't know was coming was they've got the first paid for add-on. For oxygen, which is called composite elements. And it's like a pre-built set of things that a typical user might want to Chuck into a site.
I actually can't remember the example that they used in the video, but it's typical things that they probably noticed over time. They use mega menus
Paul Lacey: [01:12:37] that kind of can, the counters review box is a click box is dynamic sliders.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:43] Yeah, all of the bells and whistles that would require you to know a bit of JavaScript CSS and so on.
And, typical website user might not know that stuff. So they've built it in. And I think it's 29, something like $29 a year. So that's their first forays into something paid, but it looks really nice. I'm sorry, Elijah. We didn't do it any justice there. Did we, but Somebody in the comments.
Who's that a prim NEF. Hello? Primness says oxygen is awesome. That's good to know. But yeah. I'm done. I have nothing else to add. We always end was
Paul Lacey: [01:13:12] I was going to say oxygen was like really talked about a lot. Wasn't it? In your last summit, the page builder summit. So it was, that was, it
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:19] was really well, not a surprise as such, but it gained way more attention than I expected.
And we only had a couple of talks about this. This page builder oxygen. And it, there was a lot of people who were very, it was almost like they'd got on board years ago. Cause they were very effusive about what the, what they could already achieve with it. But they're obviously a like a community maybe it's I dunno.
I dunno how they run their stuff. Do they do Facebook groups or what? I don't know, but it's not something I've really dip my toes into too much, but it was really well received. And he's a great. What's the word. He's just the perfect person to make these kinds of videos. He just punches it out in 10 minutes and it's exactly what you want.
It tells you what you want to know. 10 minutes. I know nothing
Tim Nash: [01:14:03] about oxygen, particularly other than that video was really impressive. I would love to see the CSS grid. As a block.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:12] Yes. Yes. You're going to build that and I want you between now and four o'clock. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, something like that.
Yeah, that's a good point. We should probably mention that shouldn't be micro Thema can do all that kind of stuff, but yeah. Yeah. I always say that don't I you're right. Cameron. I always say where we were about to end and then somebody has extra things to add, but I'm conscious that I don't want to.
Oh, I'm desperately trying to end it now because I have to go in six minutes time. Exactly. So you'll forgive me and look, I've actually literally blotted Bernard out of the of the video. So we are going to have to go whether we like it or not six minutes remaining, five minutes remaining, four minutes remaining.
Thank you for coming on Tim for the first time. We'd love to have you back. See, in a few months time, if things have changed. Thanks, Bernard. Thanks Paul, anything anybody wants to say anything happened in this week, especially I'm just working, putting out podcasts that kind of nonsense.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:15:14] No go test and go and test pods.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:19] Thank you, Jess pods, 2.8. They need feedback. All right. Very nice. Thank you very much. Now we're about to enter the bit that we do every single week, where we have to awkwardly wave until streaming decides it's had enough of this. I press the button, but the waving could go on for any length of time.
Thanks for joining us guys. Take it easy. .