This Week in WordPress #167

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 167 entitled elephant in the room. It was recorded on Monday the 14th of June, 2020, as always. I'm joined by my cohost, Paul Lacey, as we talk about the WordPress news for this week, but also this week, I'm joined by Cate DeRosia and Bernard Gronau.
There's quite a lot that we get into WordPress 5.8 beater, one has come around. And so we discussed that. We also discuss an article all about whether WordPress ought to have an apple ESC. App store. We also get into the subject of whether acquisitions are getting a bit too much or they're too many happening all the time at the moment, or is this just a demonstration of maturation in the WordPress space?
We have a plugin section that we've introduced and we talk about the new fluent forms, 4.0 release. We also get into the assistant pro plugin by beaver builder, which Paul has a lot of insight into an SiteGrounds SG security plugin newsletter glue have given WP builds listeners a 15% discount. So you can find out about that.
And finally, we introduce our pick of the week section with some surprises. What about elephants? It's all coming up next on this weekend. WordPress, this week in WordPress was brought to you by. AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time, then you AB split test plugin for WordPress.
We'll have you up and running 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 that it works with element or beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. Go check it out and get a free [email protected] this week in WordPress plaque or episode number 167 on I'm really glad that you come here.
If you found people just being really kind and generous, then go to this URL. I don't know if you're currently watching it on this URL and just share it somewhere, speak in your Facebook feed or your Twitter, and just say, look, there's a live thing happening right now. And it's not with people.
Three lovely people and Nathan. Okay, so three people and then this other guy from the UK he's in the top left. I don't know. Anyway, that would be really kind. If you want to share, that would be most appreciative as always. We do the show 2:00 PM UK time, and as always, I'm joined by Paul Lacey, how are you
Paul Lacey: [00:02:47] doing?
Doing good. Thank you. Don't go to think I had a bit of a heat stroke over the weekend. I will not go. I'm not good in the heat. And yeah, we,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:56] We had, and then lots of heat here as well. I went actually to the beach at about 5:00 PM and I couldn't cope with the amount of heat. It was the apocryphal 25 degrees centigrade in Yorkshire, which, we never get anything in 25.
So I I went to the beach and sat with my kids and it was really nice. Anyway, we're not here to talk about that. Paul, would you mind introducing today's guests?
Absolutely. Well, firstPaul Lacey: [00:03:21] time new guest we have Kate and so Kate is a meetup and WordCamp organizer and it's also half of the team behind hero press and also the marketing lead for big orange hearts, word Fest.
So that's pretty much a lot of stuff already, but that's not everything. Cause this has all led to her new role at WP buffs as community manager. And also, your, the other half alpha tofa.
Cate DeRosia: [00:03:50] I am. Yep. For it'll be 23 years this year. Um,
Paul Lacey: [00:03:55] that's, that's crazy. You need to smile. You need to smile and sound really excited when you say that as well that you spin 23.
Yeah, no, we know you both love each other very much, but that's great to hear about, I did hear about that. You've started at dopey buffs and I'm not sure if you fully got started on that yet, but what does that new role in evolve? Cause dopey buffs is like a maintenance company. It's like a WordPress maintenance company.
So what does like a community manager do in that?
Cate DeRosia: [00:04:29] So I'm running a couple of different hats or wearing a couple different hats. I'm doing content work cause I'm a writer first. That's my, my first set of skills. And then as the community manager, I'm a working like the. They're allowing me time to continue working on word Fest.
Cause I was certainly already there and they're a big proponent for big orange hearts. We're building out some new community resources around the WP MRR podcast. Helping the WordPress community learn more and find their own monthly recurring revenue, which we all know is so vital to keeping a business running.
So we're building out a community for that to key a free community for people to be involved in. And, and I just started ramping up planning for the next WP MRR virtual summit. So I'm planning to someone's at the time and building a community and writing things and then all the other stuff. So it's it's been, a busy dive into really full-time work.
So it's a lot of changes, but good. And I don't think so. I'm pretty excited about it. Really. I really value, we've been longtime contractors. So for some building websites since 1995, I like to say before the internet had pictures. And you know, I understand really how, what a struggle it is to try to keep a business running when you're working project by project.
So anything that allows you to bring in some recurring stable income just makes the future for everybody. Like the entire workforce ecosystem becomes so much stronger as we build in these systems that help lift everybody up.
Paul Lacey: [00:06:13] Absolutely. I, first of all, I feel super lazy at this moment. I can totally say that if I didn't have recurring income from WordPress care plans, I'd probably be in some trouble right now.
Actually, that'd be, I'm working all the hours, doing projects every single night and stuff. Totally looking forward to where's that community going to be, is it going to be a Facebook community or something like circles or something
Cate DeRosia: [00:06:37] we're going to use circle. So I've actually been a part of a couple of different circle communities.
Uh, we silly for hero press. We're also building a community and we'll build that one out in. I think we're actually gonna use buddy press to do that one. Yeah. I mean, there's the two different ways to go. If you've got the resources or a developer who can't turn things over to other people, you go the, build it yourself route, but if you're really looking for something to just implement quickly on your own, without going through the build process, something like circle is a really pretty ideal.
It's got a nice, comfortable interface. It's not as clunky as trying to work through Facebook. You get to own more of, you don't have as much ownership of the platform as if you have built it yourself, but you have more than something like Facebook, which can be so chaotic at times.
Paul Lacey: [00:07:24] One last question, sorry, before we move on, because I'm just interested.
Why why you would use buddy press on one system and then circles on another. My preference would be because I've used buddy press. It's been a long time ago since I used it and I found it very difficult to work with, but I know it's probably moved on a lot since then, but then I've also worked with circles and that was like the easiest thing I've ever used to manage.
So is there like a reason why someone would choose. But depress for is like a specific thing. You've already got some members or something.
Cate DeRosia: [00:07:57] One is that I'm married to an old developer who really likes to do things from scratch. Another one is that at the moment here, press isn't funded. Um, I mean needs, we need to we needed an option.
That's we need an option that's sustainable down the road that doesn't require a monthly fee. And like the monthly fee for circle is really pretty reasonable. If particularly if you're charging membership or, any of that is a nice, quick, easy way to get your website or you get your community up and running, but if you don't have income coming in, you want to look at other options.
Paul Lacey: [00:08:34] Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And
Cate DeRosia: [00:08:37] With the bus one, we're like with the WPM or arc community, it is going to be free and open. It still has the power of buffs behind it helping to cover, which, which we all know that, those, those monthly bills aren't always. Big, but if you're, a family trying to support it, as opposed to a business trying to support it it's a
Paul Lacey: [00:08:56] very
different thing.
So that's the lovely thing about WordPress. You can give it a go. If it doesn't work out, you can try and raise the money somehow and pay for circles instead. But exactly. Yeah. Cool. All right. The other guests we've got today is pretty regular guests. Bernard Gwenno of works also for pods. And also he has his own company called M Q D a, which I think w MQD you do websites for people?
I think that's what you, yeah, a little
Berhard Gronau: [00:09:25] bit of a CEI or whatever. But the smaller stuff and Kaplan's little bit of it's like,
Paul Lacey: [00:09:34] yeah. Yep. And you also help run your family's hot chocolate drink, business Elgin, hot chocolate. And and also something people should know about Bernard is that he's obsessed with elephants.
And that is actually a joke. I can't see any today, but whenever you see Bernard on a livestream, always look in the background and see how many elephants you can spot as a little game. I'm
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:04] going to drop a little bit of a what's it called? Like a cliff hanger, weave elephants are featuring in this podcast, but not the PHP kind of elephants, but yeah.
Berhard Gronau: [00:10:16] Of those elephants are just like, really that's crazy. But as child, I liked to collect them maybe because the company logo from my father was an elephant. I'm not sure, but maybe related. And so you collect them over time and all of this piloted boring. If people just buy anything to get a gift, because they don't know what to buy and it's far easier if they know, okay, you.
Prefer some elephant and then you'll get them in all kinds of shapes and stuff. And then it's funny. I know you have a theme, so it's, it's, it's not like an obsession, but it's, it's a nice thing. And recently I got from Scott to PHP LFN, which I can't show off now because I haven't taken them with me.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:00] So it's lovely.
You're missing the elephants. There's no
Paul Lacey: [00:11:05] wear of cool. T-shirt to the, yeah, I can see, I don't know what that says, but it's, uh, it looks pretty colorful just like for those
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:14] people who are not
Berhard Gronau: [00:11:16] passion should be paid for it because that's a brand. The CQL is, I don't know if you know them, but in Australia quite well known for their funny t-shirts and stuff like that, that I like Collos into life because gray and dark is boring.
No. Not
Paul Lacey: [00:11:31] to be boring.
I'm boring. That's it Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:42] I've been consigned to the rubbish
Paul Lacey: [00:11:43] benefit has been turned off and silenced on that's right. I've got to click the button,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:48] which silences, or is there a black and white filter? Can we actually, in some way make him go CPR?
Paul Lacey: [00:11:54] I know he has got the filters pressing the buttons, right?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:01] It's going to go back to Kate's point where she was talking about growing community. I don't really talk about this one much, but I did drop it in the WP builds Facebook group. We're trying out, or I am trying out. Mastered on, which is an open source kind of Twitter clone, and a, if you fancy signing up for that, I am going to start mentioning it cause there's about 30 people in there now, and it's starting to get a bit of life and I've met some people in there that I definitely haven't met on Facebook or Twitter.
And so that's quite nice. And you can find that by going to WP builds.social, and you can just download the mastered on software. I can't remember what the URL is, but if you just type in mustard on, uh, on Google or whatever, you'll find it. It's got a, like an icon of an elephant. And so we keep coming back to do elephants.
That's not the
Paul Lacey: [00:12:50] only elephant references. This there's more, there is
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:53] more, has more, that's not the one I was mentioning. There is going to be more elephant because.
Berhard Gronau: [00:12:59] Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:01] It's all good. So thank you to Rick for showing up. Really appreciate your presence here. Really like that scar bay dos. That's where I live.
I don't live in scar Bados I live in Scarborough, but it's described as scar betas. W oh, camera, would you say that burners obsession is the elephant in the room. Kuching nice. Thank you, mustard. On sounds like one of those transformer toys. It's so good. Chris, go and download it. You can stick it on a DigitalOcean droplet or something.
It's basically got everything that Twitter's got, but the nice thing is you can do what's called Federation. So you can take your Twitter instance and you log in over there and then you can federate it with other mustard on instances. And so you can combine your efforts and you can share hashtags and things like that.
Or you can just stay completely autonomous and have no sharing facility whatsoever. It's entirely up to you. What are these little installs of mustard on can create a bigger, they call it the fed diverse and and it's great. It's really nice. So anyway, go and join it. What was it again? One last time it was that one WP build stop social.
We should probably get on with the actual main invention. We cause we're we're sort we're about 20 minutes and we haven't actually talked about the WordPress news, but it's been fun. So that's what we're here for each week. We we talk about the WordPress news. If you want to make a comment, you can either join the Facebook group or go to WP builds.com forward slash live.
If you're over in the Facebook group, you'll need to drop your work unless you have done. And you haven't cleaned your cookies out. You'll need to click stream yard link in the actual thread of the, I wrote a little while ago, it says stream yard.com forward slash something. And you have to click that.
Otherwise we don't know who you are and if you've got any comments or anything like that, feel free to just drop them in. And we'll try to put as many on the screen as we possibly can. With that being said, let's head over to this. I won't bother doing this one because we all know that WP builds a website.
What we'll do is we'll go straight to this one, WordPress 5.8 is just around the corner. Not that far away. And 5.8 beater. One has been announced and I had over the last few weeks and months got this, I've been following the WordPress news like I do. And I hadn't really got a grip with how big 5.8 is going to be.
And I think it's going to be a really big release this article. Of course, I will link to it in the show notes that we push out tomorrow morning. But normally these beta release things, there's just a few little bits, but this goes on forever. Really quite a long way. Um, but the things to mention are the highlights.
If you like, and if you want to test them, these are the things they're looking for. They've got new, some nice new blocks. They've got the page list, the site title, logo tagline. Obviously this is all to do with full site editing. They've got a powerful query loop block. There's also a nice, easier way to nested blocks within blocks.
And if you're familiar with a page builder, like beaver builder or element or something like that, the UI seems to be skewing in that direction and that you can drag things around and it's easier to find where they are. And also things that you're interacting with now have little rectangles around them so that you can see what you're interacting with, which in the past has been much more difficult.
There's a view list. Reusable Brock blocks have been in the creation of them has been improved. The duo tone block, which we talked about last week. There's some handpick patterns which they're going to drop in as well. That seems to be a work very much in progress. And some better tools. Internet Explorer, 11 is going away.
You can put blocks in widget areas, which might, might excite people who are still using those sort of widgets all over the place. And and there's some instructions on this page about how to join in the testing of this. Cause obviously it's a beater. They want as many eyeballs on this as possible, and there's a bunch of improvements which we won't get into.
Cause I'm more interested in all the new stuff that's coming along, but it does seem like a pretty, pretty weighty release. You can find it [email protected] forward slash news. But as I said, I'll link to this in the show notes and I'll just open the floor. I'll take this off the screen and say, if anybody wants to just go for it and tell me what they're interested in, go for it.
Paul Lacey: [00:17:25] I can say. Cause that. Me and Nathan, we, we both have a different view on the block editor in Gutenberg, and we were always talking about this. I've flipped between, I'm okay with it and then I'm not okay with it. And I'm currently in the camp of it's giving me headaches and I don't like it that much.
I'm back in that camp. And one of the reasons wasn't Nathan knows about this, I actually tried to build a site with the block editor last week. I was like I'm going to give it a go. And I was using a tool set because I needed to, sorry. I needed to achieve some archive use and stuff like that.
There was very low uh, importance on this particular project. I didn't have any major deadline. I could just play around with it. So it was, let's just see how this goes. And so I use toolset, cause I know that they've got one of the. Kind of, um, block archives and single posts, views, and stuff like that, that you can do fully with blocks.
I really wanted to embrace blocks and mostly it went wrong and some things just didn't simply work in toolset. So I was a bit disappointed about that, but I think that they will probably sort that out. As Nathan knows, we couldn't get the an image in the archive to, to be dynamically collect connected to the feature image.
But you could connect that image to things like the author image or random things. I think there was
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:56] three options that you could do, but
Paul Lacey: [00:19:00] clean, installs everything. Yeah. And then I was trying to combine it with the cadence blogs, because it needed a particular type of carousel and the CA all the cadence of work fine.
And then when I combined it with toolset, something with one or the other, wasn't combining well over the other, and that got me really worried. Cause I was like, is this the future? That basically, if you, you know, we're told that you can go and get all the blocks, but maybe they don't all work together actually.
So that was concerning. I don't, that's not no proof that's exactly. That's actually the case. It was just my, that was my lived experience with the block editor. And so, uh, I wasn't, I was pretty frustrated and the more frustrated it got, the more, the actual user interface of the block editor was just killing me.
And I was finding that because I look at it and I'm like, okay, that doesn't look like what my design does, but okay. I know it's a bit like, it was like, my brain was like, In this every two, two or three second cycle, don't remember, don't worry. It's not supposed to be exactly what it looks like.
And then my brain would be like, Hey, that doesn't look like mine. No, don't worry. It's not supposed to look hang on that doesn't no, don't worry. It was like, oh, my brain is context switching between this is, or isn't a design at the moment. So that was just a temporary that was my first full attempt at the block editor outside of just using it for, and I switched back to before.
Yeah. And so, so I've abandoned it for now and just I'll come back to it again and try again in a couple of months. So from 5.8, one of the things, yeah, it could have been heatstroke actually, Peter just to see a comment there. One of the things I'm looking forward to from 5.8 is I see that they've done this outline thing with the interface.
So you can really see much better what it is that you focus in on because Nathan you'll know, and you're a fan of the block builder when me and you on a screen share last week. And I was like, what am I clicking on? And you were like, I don't know, where's that been gone? And it was out, it was like comedy, wasn't it?
It was
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:11] really interesting. So Paul and I tried to build this site for about 20 minutes. I don't know, about half an hour on Friday, just as an experiment to see if we could get it to work. I really had no idea what you were interacting with. At least when it's on my screen, I can, oh, I'm a click there, but you were clicking too fast in bits that I didn't know but, but there's a fixed coming.
We've got this new block on it's not like a new UI element in Gothenburg, which shows everything and you can drag things and position them in there, which is going to be really useful. It's like a, it's like the tree view that we've got at the moment only, it just occupies. Like elemental does or beaver, builder, county occupant, and just fix to the side and it's just there and you can move things up and down and I've really wanted to be able to do that for ages.
So I think this is going to be nice. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:21:59] Do you know what I would actually really like that if someone was smart enough to create like an expanded version of that tree view, that looked that showed you the columns as well and stuff like that. So I would be absolutely happy to not see my preview at all and just have a more advanced kind of tree view.
Ideally, we've columns in it. And then I wouldn't be concerned all the time that the thing I was looking at didn't look like the thing I was trying to create. I mean, it's like old school divvy and know the old school page builders. They had that sort of wire frame view. And so. That, that new sidebar thing combined with the new highlighting are two big improvements.
And I think the proof will be in the pudding to actually just install it, try again and see how it feels. Again, I think the block editor is like a, see how it feels kind of thing. It's like you either great. Or you enjoy the challenge. Sometimes I've tried David this morning on Facebook comment. Those things
take time.
Berhard Gronau: [00:23:09] If you remember how beaver builder started out or others. Quite sure it takes time, but I don't know. I still, my point, I still don't feel, feel, feel that's some things are going in the right direction. The interaction is fine. And for news posts, it's super fine. And for long form content, of course, while you write it down and you can do it and for nontechnical persons, especially because they can easily put it together.
But once you can come to, like you did with tools that I would have used part of course to structure content or stuff like that, where maybe I have a form to fill out and then display I'm lost with, with blogs. Because I don't know. It's, there's not really when there is some kind of pretty, pretty formatted stuff like those, I don't know how to, how they call them.
Just slipped my mind. But there is. Nothing in there or that the, those tiny sidebar for all the meta data. Come on, everybody needs to put a category or put, I don't know, changed it, the timer or the date or whatever, or some other option. And it's hidden in this tiny bar on the side and people don't really see if the righted, so if you're new to it, it feels like it's more hidden than the previous
metal boxes and you could combine it and that's, what's missing for me. If couldn't work to make it really useful for a little bit more advanced project where it's not just that block of texts to write down like a blog post, because it feels like it's back to the days where WordPress was just for blog posts.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:54] Interesting. What do you think, Jake? You got any thoughts on this? Sorry. Sorry. I thought you were finished. I apologize.
Cate DeRosia: [00:24:59] I like that they're bringing out more blocks. Cause I still find myself like less and less wanting to switch back to classic editor to get some of the things that I need. And like I can understand how someone who's used to having more control over the build process would be really frustrated with the whole block system.
As someone who is not interested in the build process, not nothing capable, but not interested. It's really nice to just be able to slide them around and put in places. I found my favorite block. Like I didn't think I would like. The blacks at all. And it recently was using the cadence theme, which ties in with the block editor.
And so there's it allows someone like me who wants to have some design choices without really wanting to build a website, to be able to fine tune a well-built theme without having to you know, dive deep into code. And uh, I'm excited to see, like I'm hoping that they'll only continue to go in good directions.
It's, it's a build process. You're gonna, like they're gonna build good blocks and they're going to build bad blocks and they're going to try things and some of them are going to be great and some of them are going to be awful. That's just how creating things works. And um, I'm excited for the new things coming out and I think they're going in a generally better direction overall for the average WordPress user.
And I think there's always going to be a place for the advanced WordPress user to find their own set of tools that fits them better, which is what they'll do anyway. Like there, there isn't a developer out there that uses the same set of tools. And there isn't, like it's just it's a highly customized environment anyway.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:50] I feel annoyed that I didn't make the effort to get a screenshot of the new uh, forgotten the name of it already. The new good to do list view the panel that can be time quoting. Now, uh, introduces the list, view a panel that can be toggled on helps navigate complex blocks and patterns. I feel familiar, at least that's the most useful, but also the query block, I think the query loop block, that'll be quite interesting to see what power that brings and maybe Paul, that will be the sort of thing that we were trying to do the other day.
And it would just, we just couldn't. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not
sure because but I thinkPaul Lacey: [00:27:24] cadence is possibly, I don't know if I've got this right, but I. I think that cadence is going to do something like what generate press has done generate press has got that ability to potentially skip using something like tool set for you to be able to create archive and single post templates and stuff like that.
I think it's relatively simplistic at the moment, but it's its first version. And I think this week, if I get some time I'm going to have another go at what I was trying to do with generate press and generate, press blocks and see if that experience is a little bit better. And I think it seems at the moment because we are in really early days.
So the idea of combining. Two big tools like tool set and cadence was potentially a recipe for disaster, but we did have the article last week from talk mag about how many different or these different agencies are embracing the block editor and loads of them from the 15 interviewed, according to the article, we're combining tool set with something else.
And that's where I got the idea. And I do toolset historically. I used to use it quite a lot until until I met Bernard, I'm going to need a quick pause until I stop using it and switch to pods.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:39] The the, it was interesting Mullenweg retweeted that, that piece, that 15. Agencies moving over to the Gutenberg editor.
He retreated it this week. So he was obviously captivated by the idea. Let's move on. Let's move on and talk about something a little bit different. We've got, so the next few bits, I don't really know how to classify them. We're going to do this whole thing in sections. I do the newsletter in sections and really don't know what this section might be called, but slightly controversial topics might be maybe a good way of describing it.
And the first one comes from a website of somebody that I only came across Jonathan very recently. And hopefully we'll get Jonathan on the show at some point fairly soon, but he's got this intriguing article called an app store for WordPress, where he breaks down. I would really encourage you to read this piece, whether whether or not what I'm about to say really irritates you or whether you're for it or not, he breaks down the idea of wouldn't.
Would this be a good idea? Would be, would it be a good idea to have an apple like app store experience, but it's not the way you might expect it. So the WordPress user base into three sections, and again, you may disagree with this creators extenders and hosting providers, and then he goes into the problems that they all face and what their success looks like.
And then he goes on to talk about wouldn't it be a nice idea to create some sort of. Curated app store that was by default put in by the hosting providers. And I won't go into all the nuances of all of this, but I've got to say I don't use an apple device. And one of the things that I personally like to do with my Android device is like side load things on.
So I find an app on the F droid app store and what have you, but there's a lot of them that I do use the app store for, but I've noticed on my Mac, obviously you get this Mac app store and you have to go through this extra hoop every time you want to download something from some third party vendor, you have to go through this extra Hooten on lock preferences, make it so that you can actually install this because apple doesn't want you to do that.
My gut feeling is that this is. Not something I want to see. I want to be able to go and download plug-ins from everywhere, but I do fully, I get the experience that he's talking about and the fact that people who are just consuming WordPress and don't want to be bamboozled by where on earth do I go to find the thing that I'm looking for as opposed to, is there a, is there an app store where I can get the premium version?
It's just going to show me all the premium versions in one hit. So really open question. What do you think about this idea of a curated host installed app store? Go.
Berhard Gronau: [00:31:40] It's convenient for sure. Yeah. That's a lot of those app stores four and it makes it easier. Don't I don't know. Yeah, that is subscription. And then, you know what, they are the subscription to, to grab your license key and stuff like that. So for sure, the details, it's just, you have those monopole discussions for the apple.
I've never easy. It's it's and I think it's difficult for such a diverse project to really get something like that. I'm not sure because then there are the discussions and that then who runs it and who decides it and all the, I think maybe as an add on for the plugin repository, do you like that you can at least have the premium versions directly from the store too.
So maybe it's this idea to go and many Premium black ends hot anyway, and free version. And you have some red link in there to get the premium version. So it's not that difficult. I don't know.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:41] Yeah. I think it's the, just the impediment of, you've got to go and you've got to go and try the free version first.
And if you're a newbie, you may just want to shell out the $50 or whatever it is. Just look, this one looks fine. I'm just going to go with this as opposed to, I'm going to try out 19 different things, you've just heard good reports. You just want to go and get it. And you want all of your licenses to be locked in one place.
It's really controversial. I have to say I can't imagine it happening, but yeah, intriguing.
Berhard Gronau: [00:33:16] Especially if I think about it we are talking app store wise, a few dollars, 3 cents, sometimes more for apple, less for Google. And we're talking about the average where it was plugged in. I'm sure about 50, 60, $70.
So it's a whole kind of different economy behind it and a whole different price tag. You have to think about it. So it's less like convenient or I don't mind it two euros per whatever.
Cate DeRosia: [00:33:46] Yeah. Kate
that a trusted store or, a store with solid criteria that is giving you a way to evaluate these plugins.
The premium plugins is an ideal idea. We've watched in, vAuto try to do it and I've got some. Some problems with how Enbato does theirs. But I mean, it is like for the average user, if we want to open WordPress up to more people to be able to use it, then we have to make it easier for them to find the things they need to find.
But. I struggled with wanting my hosts to download it for me or my face to decided for me. And I struggled with wanting WordPress to be involved in it in any way. Because I feel like it's, we've seen what they've done with the hosting list. You know, wordpress.org it's, you it's not like they're, their fingers should not be in the marketplace.
It's fine. If they're billing things and submitting them I believe everybody should be making money and but this is not something that we're pressured to be involved in. And this is not something my host should be putting on my website. This is something that should exist.
That's find-able that I can go access.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:05] Yeah. Paul, you had a really, I don't know if you remember what we spoke about on Friday. Have you had a really curious idea for how it could be monetized in a way which everybody thought was fairly benign.
Paul Lacey: [00:35:16] Yeah on Friday I was panelist on dopey tonic and just completely randomly Jonathan world was the other panelist alongside, alongside me.
So I had a good chat with him. It was one of the discussion pieces on there. And the first thing you said was you know, the whole article is religious. Like I don't have all the answers. I just wanted to put the idea out there and see who caught onto it and whom I, think it's a good idea, bad idea, or have some ideas.
And so he and, Spencer foreman was the cohost alongside, with, um, Jonathan Denwood and Spencer was very strongly opinions. XE always is that this could never, ever happen because the powers that be are automatic and Matt Mullenweg, et cetera, wouldn't allow it to happen. So. But then what that's when Jonathan was saying I didn't mean necessarily that's, who would run it and it could be that someone else.
And he was when he talked about the idea of the hosts, sideloading it? That wasn't necessarily that the hosts again, owned it or anything like that. It was just that hosts onboard customers. And one of the big problems for WordPress is the whole onboard in that you can install it and you've read this blog post or something, and you go to the plugin directory installed on your site and you think so, am I going to get some, you just assume probably as a new user, I guess it's going to be a bit like Netflix.
Or obviously it's going to be a bit like the app store and it will recommend some things to me that I, useful to me based on some of the preferences. I might've told it or some of the things I may have done before or something like that or whatever as part of an onboarding. And it also might say, what kind of solution you're trying to do.
And it would be quite happy to recommend that look, a premium solution is what you need here. You can keep looking throughout the throughout the whole thing, but you need, our community when they want to do this solution or choosing this plugin or this plugin, or here's a free one, or here's one, we have a 20% discount at the moment as well that's featured or something like that.
And so there wasn't really a structure as to how it should work. I know Matt Madeira has been talking about this for a number of years saying, the WordPress needs some kind of Some kind of marketplace that isn't invited because Invitae was a different sort of model as to what Jonathan wildest talking about.
And maybe, obviously would probably have a big problem with the concept of this, but what if it was a case that it was set up as some kind of thing. We have a board, a non-profit and it was all helping the developers. And 5% of all revenue went back into WordPress core because WordPress has this thing called five for the future, which is encouraging companies who are involved in WordPress and hosting companies, that kind of thing to invest 5% of their revenue from WordPress related business back into WordPress core.
So it helps everyone. So it probably, and again, there's all sorts of problems with my idea there, I imagine. Yeah. But in terms of well, how could this happen, Spencer former might say, it can never happen, but you could say, well, what if we broke apart? All the problems that say combined can never happen, can we solve half of them in some kind of creative way?
And one of them might be this five for the future involvement and a completely changeable every a board. And it's a nonprofit and that's where the hosts sideloading it. That would be just their choice because this thing would, might exist on its own. And the host would be like I think that that's a really good thing to add to our customers and they can turn it off.
Cause it's the plugin that connects to an API or something like that. I don't know. All sorts of problems with my understanding all sorts of problems with Jonathan vault. World's original idea problems with Spencer's rejection of the idea. It's just. The beginning of a discussion. Really? Yeah. Is it feasible?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:44] I've had a few thoughts whilst you've been talking. The first one is that when WordPress is marketplace for the bond of a better word, plugin directory came out the way that the app store on apple, the Mac app store and the Google play store, I would imagine that they've really refined quite well.
The sort of the engine, which delivers what you're looking for and exactly what you said, Paul, if there was some sort of onboarding that you we've got really specific about, if you could be bothered to go through some sort of onboarding saying, look, this is the intent of my site. And then it's, then it surfaced exactly what you wanted.
Also, I slight concern about gaming the system. And I, I don't know how gamed the system is on those mobile app stores, but I'm sure to some extent it is yeah. Pretty gained, people go in and that would be a big concern. You've got some plugin that's very successful simply because it was able to marshal a bunch of robots to go and give it a five star review.
So some mechanism to have a reassurance that really, this is bonafide and genuine. I do like the idea of onboarding. And also I would think you're exactly right Paul, that anybody under the age of 18 coming into WordPress will have an expectation that there's a paid element to it. And that this is just what it is.
You can totally find free stuff and paid stuff. Ad supported works. Yeah. So th that's just what those people have grown up with. Obviously it's not what I'm used to. I, some, I feel a little bit of I can feel some sort of rejection in me building up, but I can also see that this might have some legs.
Wow. That's a neat topic. God, we could go on for ages. Do you mind if I move on, though? Sure. Okay. All right, so next one, this is fairly controversial. I've got no way of introducing this with the thing that I wanted to introduce it to cause I'm in an incognito browser, brave and brave will not allow me to open Facebook.
Don't matter what I do, whatever I switch off in brave. It's no don't view Facebook. Anyway, I put a post out. This week in the WP builds Facebook group. And I will link to it in the show notes. If you're listening to this on Tuesday or afterwards where basically I said, I answered, I asked this question and this question was prompted because I do this each week and I follow the WordPress news pretty carefully.
And it feels like the acquisition news just seems to grow and grow. A couple of years ago there was a piece of acquisition use, very infrequently. Now we seem to get them really rather a lot. And so I asked this question, open question. No answer on welcome. Is the WordPress acquisition market too much?
Does it bother you that company X is buying up all the things or is it just maturation of the WordPress ecosystem? Like I say, open question go. And we got quite a few comments, Twitter and the Facebook group and so on. And we even got two people who went off and wrote blog posts on the back of it, describing their position.
And it, it came about because I saw this one and I just thought this was an extraordinary story. This is Ian Paulson's plugin, which an Ian's been on the podcast and. And he built something called a plugin rank and he started it a really small amount of time ago. So less than 12 months ago. And during the last few weeks he's managed to sell it.
So he's gone from idea creation to acquisition all in a 12 month period. And it's actually a really cool plugin. What it does is really nice, but that, isn't what I'm here to talk about. It's just the fact that it happens so quickly. Ian really seems to have his finger on the pulse of of the whole acquisition market in WordPress, because he's got a newsletter called WP trends, which you can subscribe to and it tells you all about what's coming up and what companies might be valuable.
And I'm just not sure, again, like in the last piece, something about me, I don't know what it is. There's something about me, which is that the onset of, of kind of monopolies forming and. Anything that's decent on the WooCommerce side, say just plucking something out of thin air WooCommerce. If you want a decent world commerce experience, all the decent stuff has been bought up and it's over there and you'll have to, you have to go with that hosting company or that big company.
And if you want, oh, I don't know if you want to do list building or something else. It's all over it, this silo. And if you want to do an LMS, it's been bought up and all the good stuff is over here. So that's my fear a little bit, but I also understand that creates room in the marketplace too, for other people to say yeah, we've recognized that people find this a problem and we're just going to go and fork something or build something ourselves.
So I'm really, I am on a Seesaw and I go up and I go down and I go out and I go down and I don't know which side I'm going to fall on. So again, I've introduced the topic. I'm just going to say, go talk about it.
So I have uh, so I thinkCate DeRosia: [00:44:59] the answer here is yes. It's a problem, but it's not a problem.
It's the normal life cycle of business. I know so many developers who don't want to maintain something. They love to build it. They just want to get rid of it. By handing them off to somebody else, it's more likely the plugin will be developed and create a more stable version of itself than relying on a developer who doesn't care about it anymore to try to maintain it.
So the plugin potentially has more life to it. If it gets sold and it dies, it was going to die anyway because the developer wasn't going to maintain it to begin with. And so then we had an unstable element, it's like leaving that last peach in the fridge that nobody's going to eat, but it's just going to make the rest of the vegetables rot, it's, um, It's one of those things that happens in that, but the differences and the beauty of it is that we're not building cell phones.
We're not building cars, we're not building something that requires that resource heavy investment. It's an open source project and every time a. Say a host buys a plugin and does something with it that you don't like, you just build a new one, like it, it happens all the time. It's how open source has continued to grow and flourish, throughout all of it.
It's why we see windows starting to embrace the open source idea, which is something I never thought I would see, but it's because it has a life to it. It's how we get our innovation in generally. Like it is there, there is a time when it is, you, you miss the thing that you had or, things are a little bit harder cause you don't have that plugin that, company X bought.
But the new one that comes out usually has problems fixed. It has new technology behind it. It's got a more stable system, like, so the innovation that comes from these acquisitions, I think is what's going to drive the future of our industry. It's, what's always driven the future of our industry.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:54] Yeah. That's, I seem to remember Kate, you dropping into that Facebook group and making those very points and making them really well. What about, or Paul?
Berhard Gronau: [00:47:06] And maybe it's twofold. It depends. I always think about if it comes to plugins about forms, because that's uh, in the end, at the beginning, there was just gravity forums and then many, many, many more.
And now we are, I don't know how many different plugins that are on the one hand. It makes it very difficult for a customer to decide which one to use. Even as developer, sometimes I dunno, I can try them out all and which one is the new shiny one and which one is not then whatever. And then there is the question, do they get bought and continue to be worked on?
Or is it just buying out the competition? Yeah, so
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:45] yeah.
Berhard Gronau: [00:47:46] Yes, it opens the room for it. But in, on the other hand, it's, at one point might become difficult to establish a new brand because some of them are so big. So well-known that maybe people, I don't know, what can you do? New reforms and still there are people out there building new form plug-ins quite successfully.
So it's, I don't know. I think it's, but Chris has been there now for a very long time. I think part of it is in that current process, because many more and more business entities are using WordPress. I think it's, it has to do with more paying customers. Tend to pay more or be able to pay more for a single license, like Pippin roses prices to maybe cards or to their PR.
People can spend more on it. Because if you'd be honest, if you build a decent site, you are quickly just buying a few plug-ins above a thousand dollars per year. If just for some basic WooCommerce functionality, because every single part like shipping is over, they are paying is or whatever. And so maybe it's not that bad to have some of those things come in one package from one vendor to, to get your suit of packets, which work well together and are tested together.
And you can say arcades, it's a little bit more than the single solution, but you get a package for a little bit more. Because building stores at the currently it's not cheap. Everybody talks about open source, but it's not really free anymore. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:23] Just a couple of quick comments before we give Paul a chance.
Peter Ingersoll says um, like most WP questions. It depends. Yeah. Yeah, he does. And and Paul is in agreement with Kate, I think more people buy and sell their plugins, but then he says hashtag vested interest. So
Paul Lacey: [00:49:43] cool. Yeah, Chris does have a vested interest and he's, uh, somebody who's bought and sold a lot of plugins, actually.
Not everybody knows that, but he's you know, a serial entrepreneur and does that kind of thing. And I, he was telling me just the other day he has launched a website. She called WP broker.com. That's the vested interest that Chris has got dopey. broker.com is like a WordPress acquisition plugin marketplace.
So if you've built a plugin and you're looking to sell, which is. A big thing that people are doing who do create logins or for whatever reason, wherever that you always wanted to do that, or you're just tired. You've had a tough couple of years and you don't, you feel bad that the users, even if there's only a few hundred, that reliant on the thing you created, but you need to move on in life to other things.
So dopey broker.com, Chris's new thing. But as for the the rest of the question. So I think the acquisitions in general, as news is starting to get, at least for me, and probably, I think for a lot of other people, a little bit boring to keep hearing about now, it's like this company bought that company, they bought them.
And at first it was like, oh my gosh, what's going on? But it feels that it's just already just the normal thing. And it's pretty much like what everyone else has said that let's say one of the big companies buys one of the form. Plug-ins someone else will release another one. And and whether or not that company shuts it down.
Or makes it a bigger thing. So we've seen that in the forms. I can't remember caldera forms shut down and then fluent forms, which was already a a form plugin that had the benefit of hindsight of everything. Every other form plugin had done before it created itself and improved on almost everything else saw the opportunity and offered all the caldera, lifetime deal.
People who had no longer got a deal and didn't get a good deal, offered to them from ninja forms, offered them a good deal and created a migration tool because it's open source and they can do that. So I think in a way, like we can't control it, we could just keep looking at the things that we want to use and, and be diligent about the tools that we want to use.
That goes back to the idea of this app store. Imagine that these app store that if you sold your thing on the app store, the terms and conditions protected the consumer in a way that none of us have ever been protected. So I need the other week. There was a load of drama because ACF got acquired by delicious brains and the LTD lifetime deal customers were under a temporary impression.
They might not get their deals on it. And that's happened all sorts of times over what if that was impossible? But there was no need for a plugin owner of who's bought something for whoever knows what, I don't know if it's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, it doesn't have to send a team out someone go in.
What do you think what'd you think about this idea for like your customers? And you're like, no, I don't want to think about my lifetime deal and re imagine it's already a lifetime deal. It doesn't really matter like what the scenario is, but just thinking that there would be a way to standardize the protection of the customer so that the vendor and the customer always knew where they stood.
That would be a good thing for me, but I still find it a bit repetitive now. And I'm trying to not get triggered by it. I can sometimes get triggered by it in a good way, or sometimes in a bad way, but I've learned just man, it happened since I bought them. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:23] Good point.
I do want to give a little hat tip to Kevin quirk because, and there was, like I said, there was somebody else and I didn't get their article, but just to say, well, good grief. I don't think anybody's written an article. There were two this week, but nobody's ever written a whole article on the strength of me writing something.
So I very proud and felt quite pleased that you've done that. So thank you, Kevin. I'm much obliged. That was very nice of you. Okay. So as I said, at the top of the show, we're going to try and in the future, we might be a bit more structured about this, but we're going to try and block the whole.
Episode up into different sections. I think really that might have been called the business section. And that's what Paula was imagining. It might be called core and business. And now we're going to just have a little bit of a chat about various bits of plugin news. So I guess this could be called the plugin section.
What we need. Paul is some swanky graphic that comes in with a bit of light and the music also. No, we probably don't want that, but we'll do it anyway. Cause it'll be fun, but we're into the plugin section and Paul's going to lead us through it all.
Paul Lacey: [00:54:27] Yeah. I don't know if you want to bring up the first one on the screen.
It's we were just talking about it. Fluent forms has released their version 4.0 and they've made a blog post about that, that you can read. And there's a number of things that are in this version of free informs, but the big headline, I think, is that conversational forms. So that's like where your form is a bit like a chat.
But so you can know you've got the typical you can see on the video there, actually that Nathan is Shane. We'll have to figure out Nathan. I know that we can play YouTube videos. Can't we through stream yard somehow, but not today. Let's not risk
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:04] it. You've got to be incredibly careful with copyright.
If we get more than a few seconds of if there's some background music that we're not entitled to play, then yeah, we could be in bother. But then again, if it's on YouTube, it should be them getting into trouble, not us recycling. They're the, the parasitic truth. But anyway,
Paul Lacey: [00:55:25] if you're watching this at the moment, rather than listening than you, you'll be able to see a kind of preview of the YouTube video I'm talking about.
And fluid forms, like I said, has had the benefit of hindsight has been able to build an absolutely beautiful interface to build and manage your forms. Gravity forms is. Jumped into action and create great, a huge improvement on its own interface there. But the conversational forms is one of the big headlines there.
And there is another thing that I spotted in their list of things that you can now create forms that you can have embedded on a different website altogether. So I don't know how that works, whether it's going to be an I-frame or something like that, but you can create a form on one website and share it on another website, which is pretty cool.
If you think about the possibilities of things like online purchases for our forms, one of the things they said in their list of stuff as well, that they've done, they've made some improvements to the payment aspects of their forms. I think one of the things that fluent forms may not have at the moment is Stripe based subscriptions, which I think gravity forms does have, but it does say in this blog base that they think that is coming in the next version.
So maybe perhaps 4.1. So I imagine that's going to come pretty quick though, because. It must've been a lot of work to go from, three point X to 4.8 X.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:49] Oh, sorry, Paul. I was just going to stay on that point. I think they're adding in Mali as well. I think that's coming is that from like a European payment processor?
So it's a bit like, so you can connect all of your payment processes, like Stripe and okay. Pile and all these other ones into this one system. And, it, it looks really good. I was actually looking at it the other day, but I got really bored when I got to this sign up now for them and realize it was like, oh, really eight pages.
Okay. It's I've got to actually dig out details of companies and things like that. They're doing it right. But I was just curious. It looks really nice. Anyway, Molly, so Kate or Bernard, anything to share on this or feel free to just say no, move on to the next one. It's up to you
Berhard Gronau: [00:57:37] using fluid forms.
Cate DeRosia: [00:57:41] I like the storytelling aspect of it, the, the possibility to continue a conversation. It looks pretty easy to like, Style, which was nice. I don't always think of forums as being easy to style. So those were, those are some things I'm curious. Part of me is also a bit why you know, like here's something I want to look into more
Paul Lacey: [00:58:02] for the
future.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:03] Yeah. This conversational forms. If you've ever used Typeform, basically it presents you. Let's say you've got a form and there's an eight questions. Typically though, that form would display all eight questions, perhaps separated by, you could fill out for them and then click next and go onto the next one.
This presents you with one question at a time and the UI is it's, everything is bigger. So the font size is bigger and there's a proceed button underneath every question. And it just brings it into focus. You answer that question, then it pushes it out to focus on the next one slides in or fades in or whatever you like.
And and it just makes you do one thing at a time and it feels it's quite beguiling it feels like the whole process is a little bit easier. You can show some sort of visual demonstration of how much is left, but it does feel less, less cumbersome because you're just doing one thing at a time and you're only concentrating on one.
You can't see all the other things, so nice release free. Yeah. It is very distraction-free and, but there is some sort of like little conceit. You can see very much faded out onto some sort of gradient. You can see what the next question is and what the previous one, but it's really out of view and you can't quite read it, it's there somewhere.
So anyway. Good. Good
Paul Lacey: [00:59:15] point. Micro-commitments is one of the things that they talk about with these sort of forms that if you saw a form of 12 fields and you're like, I'm not filling that out. Yep. I ain't got time for that. Whereas you saw one field and you're like, and you get 1, 2, 3, you filled out for four.
Well, I've committed now, I think this time. But then if you had stats on the forms, which I ma I don't know if they've built stats into this, but they haven't been great that showed you at what question people were dropping off. You can go, no, we're going to do about that. You could go. All right.
After question four, first of all, that's reduced from 12 to eight. And then after question four, where everyone seems to drop off at five, put a little, Hey, you're almost there. Keep going know, just to keep people encouraged to keep going. And that's the thing you can do with some of those conversational forms that can be used really badly as well.
But if you, if you're thinking about conversions, they are a good tool. In the arsenal sort of thing to, to use the things
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:20] it's a bit like when you then on the, on, hold on the phone to the bank for 40 minutes, you can't not keep going. Cause you know that you'll have to do that 14 minutes again, I'm not hanging up, not till midnight, if necessary, because I've put in so much of my day into this.
So anyway, really nice updates and, Well, we got next poll. All this is right in your wheelhouse, isn't it? It
Paul Lacey: [01:00:45] is. Yeah. So the team, behind BeaverBuilder have launched a plugin quite a while ago, actually called assistant hand. It's a productivity plugin, really. If you build a lot of websites that allows you to quickly managed the different pages that you've got within your site, the different templates, all those different things.
It's not specific just to BeaverBuilder, but it does work really well with beaver builder. And they've been rolling out a beta version to some friends of the team this pro version, which is basically like a cloud system. David warms has done a video. If you just search on YouTube for David Ramzi assistant pro, or just search for David warms, you'll find his video and he's done a full kind of walk through of how it all works now.
Instead of playing the video. I also use a system pro because I do freelance for BeaverBuilder and we use it in the team to move resources around. So for instance, in the upcoming version of beaver, FEMA is a four new head of templates and four new footer templates, and I've designed and built those.
They're very simple, but in terms of how I get them to the people in the team, all the different people in the team that need to look at them for different reasons. I just put them in a library in a system pro and then share them with the people via email that needs to be shared. And because they've got an account with assistant, they can access those things.
Now the pro version, from what I understand allows you to share these different libraries and you can have private libraries and public libraries, and I'm pretty sure that. Even if you only have the free version of assistant, you can still get access to a library if it's a freely available library.
So if David Wamsley wants to create some templates and he wants to make them free, he can share them with the world, with assistant, with his assistant pro account. But anyone who's got the free version of assistant can use that. I know there's a lot of productive productivity plugins out there, and I'm no way biased.
I technically probably should be biased towards a builder having a better tool because I do work for them, but I've used a lot of the cloud-based template sharing plugins, and some of them are really good, but this one totally has worked its way into my workflow specifically with BeaverBuilder.
Not so much for, of any of my other stuff at the moment, because it's still in beta and I'm not using it in that way, but. I could actually quickly share my screen now and then show what it looks like. I don't know if it's gonna work, but let's just see if we can do that. Screenshot. All right, window.
This one,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:32] this is the best bit in the audio, by the way, this a nice, quiet, silent meditative, but I've got it. I'll add it to the stream. Oh, it is nice.
Paul Lacey: [01:03:40] Cool. Okay. So first of all, this tab is the backend of a system practices like the cloud area, where I've got all my different collections. And one of my libraries is this one here.
It's just some templates that I've done that are launching with assistant pro, I think, and they're all the different templates. There, there is the color scheme. So you can save your color schemes and stuff like that. You can do. They've got some plans for one click installer things. So we've this particular library here.
It's a full site in BeaverBuilder and beaver Thema. It's got a header footer or a foray for a search results, a page template, a single post template, an archive view, a bunch of different landing page templates. And when you see it in BeaverBuilder itself this is the site, but let's say I hadn't loaded this in yet.
Then I could click on the little assistant thing here. And if this library had been shared with me wherever I'd in shared with it for free, or maybe I don't know, in the future, if they're planning to have it so people can actually sell. Libraries. So that's a way to deliver templates. I can click on that and you can see there, all the elements there, and I can click on a button to import all of them in one go.
I'm one of the other nice things that it does is it pulls in all the assets as well. So I've used templates, but the asset, like a photo is still linked off somewhere else. Yeah. So I think that there's a lot of plans in the future to expand this away from just templates and color schemes and that kind of stuff.
But at the moment I have to say it works really well as for us as a kind of internal team working within BeaverBuilder. Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:15] nice. Oh, poles. That's so great. We've got to get
Berhard Gronau: [01:05:22] sneaky into pops banter
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:24] before you do that. I've just got to explain for those people listening. Paul has actually completely removed himself from streaming.
He made his own he made his video disappear off the, his video of the screen, and then he's watching himself disappear. I'm hoping that it'll be fine. I'm sure it'll be back any moment. But yes, Burnett now is the time to seize the opportunity and talk about pods. Go for it.
Berhard Gronau: [01:05:46] Luckily today there is the next better release for pots.
So if we want to take a look, I shared the posting with you in the private chat and in the file. So you can read up what's new for pots. 2.8. Well today we released the salvation of the Panther. So come take a look, give us feedback. Especially the integration with Gutenberg is interesting and to be tested and stuff like that because we moved all the widgets over to two blocks and you get feel groups and complete rework, and you have edit pod screens.
It's really a big release which enables future features more easily because participant has been around for ages and you collect some technical depth and it's never easy to get rid of it.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:42] It looks like a big release does
Berhard Gronau: [01:06:47] absolutely release that makes possible for advanced features in the future.
A repeat able feels not only like our flexible relationship, but really as a repeatable field stored in the same same field and stuff like that, which is the need to bring mine. You got the opportunity to build blocks yourself with some easier and a few lines of code. So it's well bringing pots into the future.
I don't know.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:19] Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. That looks good.
Berhard Gronau: [01:07:23] And it's it's, it's impressive. What's going on in the backend and how much has been done to, to get this step? Finally done all the
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:32] setbacks head over to pods.io. This is pods 2.8 to one. It's an announcement by Scott Kingsley club.
Berhard Gronau: [01:07:43] One was released already in February, but to release the third reaction. So it's already improved on it. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:51] Yeah, thank you. All has just sent me a private message saying his browser has crashed, so he'll probably be booting up, but it says Cameron saying BeaverBuilder, must've tried to stop him stopping releasing things.
And then max, hi max as well. There's a react based alternative to, to coach nip. It's called WP code box. I confess I have not heard of that if anybody's using it. That's, that's a good suggestion by max. Maybe go and look at that one. I'm probably going to take polls. Well I will, I will. I know, I think because Paul is supposed to be doing the sort of plugin section.
We've got two more and he's done the research on those. So I'll skip his and we'll come back to those toward the end, if there's time. I'm going to mention this piece instead. I don't know if you saw this portion, but cloud ways have partnered with patch stack. Two unpatched act by the way, is what used to be called web box.
We've had Oliver from the PO from WebEx on a couple of times, but they've rebranded recently to patch stack, and they formed a partnership such that all of the security benefits that a subscription to patch stack might bring to you will be pre-installed on your cloud based site. It says here you can see on the screen, I'm going to quote to the security companies features will be fully integrated into cloud ways to allow users to scan and automatically patch vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes, but perhaps of more interest as a little bit further down, which SES cloud ways aims to better than yes, open source community by making websites more secure, which led to a natural partnership with, um, patch stack.
Oh, here it is. Sorry. I'm on the wrong paragraph. Cloud-based is releasing a WordPress command line interface, WP CLI patch packages designed by patch stack that will be available to anyone as to use as open source. Don't exactly know how that's going to work, but presumably other hosting companies will be able to on some level make use of this, but because it's quite exciting and I happen to know both Oliver and Robert Jacoby from cloud ways.
I contacted them both last week and I've set up this live event, which is happening tomorrow. It's Tuesday the 15th, it's 4:30 PM. So it's about, about an hour from now tomorrow. And I'm just going to have Oliver and Robert on the line and a bit like this 15 minutes, 20 minutes. Nice. Quick in out.
Just explaining what it's all about, what the open variety of it all means. And so on. I don't know if either of you have got anything to add about that if your cloud wares users and it pleases you, or if I should move
Berhard Gronau: [01:10:34] on. Not cloud-based users, but about the VPC integration, it's just a set of commanders and you can extend
We have the basics provider provided pres and every black in can extend them. So they just provided a pet catch of additional features related to pets. Like it's hosted on GitHub. So like you can
Canberra the API because professional users actually move over to, to do press maintenance. commanders.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:09] Paul, whilst you were away and I'm going to cover up your face with this, not with this little bit of information. Eva builder must have taken him out to shut him up. What happened? Said too much.
Yeah, that's right. That's what we thought they actually somehow got in and broke your network. Did you? They are
Paul Lacey: [01:11:26] treating me really well.
Berhard Gronau: [01:11:28] Yeah,
lovely. But you're backNathan Wrigley: [01:11:35] in the room and that's the main thing on that story just quickly, sorry to cover your face up, Paul, I had no idea whereabouts rebranded. I saw the news and didn't think twice because I've never heard a patch that, yeah. So there you go. It is web box. It's exactly the same.
They just literally changed their branding. So it's an exciting thing. Join us tomorrow about this time. Roughly about 45 minutes after this. Oh, no, four 30, not four. O'clock four 30. So about an hour and a quarter from now tomorrow. And I'll be chatting to Robert Jacobi and Oliver sealed all about it.
That's quite nice Paul, because you've dropped out. We just skipped. No worries, but no, we're not going to skip them. We're just going to give you a chance to go back and and mention if you want.
Paul Lacey: [01:12:17] That's a security thing, isn't it for cloud ways. Um, I'm as a tree, do, does what does that word mean?
I'm as intrigued that's as everybody, else's what this is going to mean for cloud wise as a cloud-based user myself. So I don't know like where the patch stack integration will sit, but I imagine that's what you'll probably find out on this on this interview. So I'm going to definitely watch that.
Yeah. And also I'm wondering, like I saw in some of the Facebook groups some people wondering if this means that, CloudWave and Malka Blackwell no longer partnered, because we know that any CloudWave users probably saw that Mulcaire is providing like some bot level bot protection. But then again, I don't think that, I think that's a different thing than the the firewall solution that patched doc has.
So it might be the partner in partnering with Malca for specific intelligent bot protection and then partnering we've patched stack for a firewall web application firewall. I like, I like a patch doc. I've used it. I've got a lifetime deal with it. Hopefully last forever.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:33] Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Wait, you said you were board of acquisition.
Debates is just not acquisition. Is it's partnership? It's very different. Anyway, join us tomorrow. WP belts.com/live in about an hour and a quarter. And Paul.
Paul Lacey: [01:13:47] Yeah. Who knows it could be an acquisition one day because you know, you got Robert GKB joined in as a cloud-based director of WordPress and then all these other big hosts to acquiring companies.
I was wondering myself is cloud is the type of company that would acquire them because they're more of a panel,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:05] but I don't really know, but I was thinking I might acquire cloud ways. You know, just. I've got a few quid line about some loose change. I don't know, actually it's a good point. It seems like, it seems like partnerships are a good way to go here.
Isn't it? Cause you don't have to maintain that. Let the experts who are already really good at that stuff, get on with it. Just amalgamate your services. But I don't know. I don't know what the model is in the background. I might ask those questions tomorrow, is there money changing hands in the background that we don't know about?
Is it based upon, you click a button and so a proportion of the fee that you pay each month then goes over to patch that if you enable this stuff or is it just always on by default? I don't know. I'll ask tomorrow and
Paul Lacey: [01:14:46] find out well, you see the thing is I think I think the cloud wise we'll do partnerships like this because the, the cool thing is there's no way to say if you acquire someone then suddenly you've just taken their whole thing.
Whereas if you partner with people and know cloud ways is. He's seems to be more interested on onboarding more customers for revenue than the other hosting companies who are like, we need to onboard customers to make us worth more money or something. So I could see cloud just going around and partnering with.
Every influential sort of company that is relevant to them and where it works and getting all those kinds of referrals as association maybe. But the, yeah, the next one we're going to talk about was SiteGround I think, is that the next one? Yeah. Cause my entire browser shut down, so I lost it. It was me.
I shut the browser. Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:37] On, over on the chat message here, Paul and I use signal, it says browser crash. It's not a
Paul Lacey: [01:15:45] crash, isn't it? Yeah. I've decided to fess up user error. Yeah. So don't let me share screen again. Not that clearly. I clearly can't do that, but as SiteGround another massive hosting company, I've got a new login come out called SG security.
They've also got another one called I think it's probably called SG performance or something like that. So if you are on the site, ground system, then it probably makes sense that you. Probably going to get your WordPress sites pre-installed with SG security. And I think it's one of those sort of checkboxy type plugins that does a few different specific things that tend to be something that's really in your responsibility.
So you've got like the, the host's security and that will go to a certain point. And then you've got your kind of user choice stuff. So do you want to, do you want to use Google two factor authentication? That should be chosen by you because it's Google and you're exposing your customers who use your, or your own website.
You're going to be sharing something with Google. And then there's some other things like, disabling the admin username and those kinds of things. And it's this plugin is up. Is it effecting the application of WordPress and how it's used as opposed to the service side security? I think it's a cool thing.
They seem to have checked off. On that list of things that it deals with the top things that people should do. And as a kind of onboarding experience for new customers, it probably gets pre-installed and help someone understand that these are good practices that they should do with their website.
So I don't know if it works for other people. I don't know if you can use it if you're not using SiteGround, but and I don't see it as SiteGround trying to move into a security plugin. I see it as uh, an add on new bonus for SiteGround customers. That's what I think it is. Anyway, it's already got 5,000 users.
Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:46] I'm going to guess that it's not related to SiteGround specifically, but I do know. No, cause it doesn't seem to mention that, but it does do all the normal stuff, like, uh, login access to FFA disabled, the admin user, a new user limit disabled, the admin users. There's no more admins limit login attempts.
What else have you got lock and protect system folders, hide WordPress version all. And the list goes on I'll link to it in the show notes, but we are so short of time. That I'm going to have to move us on to the next thing we, I'm just going to be really quick if that's all right. I do apologize.
The, I just wanted to mention a deal that came my way this week. This is newsletter glue. If you look at the WP builds newsletter, if you subscribed to that, this is the plugin that we've now started to use. And Leslie, um, SIM who is the plugin? W one of the plugin founders that her and another gentlemen they just reached out and said, there's a deal a 15% off.
So if you are keen to avail yourself of that, you use the co I can't even remember, but it's on the WP, builds a deals page. So if you go to WP belts.com forward slash deals, you can see on there, just search for newsletter blue. And so I wanted to be thankful. That was a nice thing that she did on solicited 15% off.
So go check it out. It's fabulous. It's really great. It's for me, it's what blocks were invented for? It's this. Totally. I didn't see blocks being used in this way, but as soon as you see it, you can drag in blocks and you can say, put this block in the newsletter or in the post or in both. So you can make one post, which handles the newsletter and the blog posts content separately, but all in the same UI, it's absolutely lovely.
15% off and heralding a new section, which we've never done before. We're going to try this pick of the week pick of the week. I've got one. Paul's got one. Kate's got one. I don't know if Bernie has got one, but if Bernard hasn't got one, we'll just go with three. Mine is elephants.
Paul Lacey: [01:19:58] You can share that. You can share that.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:00] Yeah. Yeah.
Berhard Gronau: [01:20:04] That's a great one. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:05] So this is the shared one, right? This is just totally nothing to do. Do with WordPress. Probably the others haven't got anything to do with WordPress either. I. I just couldn't stop staring at this photo. I do not know why I'm not like Bernadetta have a great deal of interest in elephants.
It's not dominating my living room, but like it is for Burnet, but some drone just captured this pack of elephants. Who've done this 500 mile or kilometer Trek across China. And apparently this is somewhat unexpected. They don't usually do this. And so there's been a team of Chinese people who've been more or less like shepherding them, making sure that they don't hit obstacles that, like a city or a town, they don't really know where they're trying to get to, but they're trying to make sure that they don't hit things which are going to cause them problems.
And every so often, they to go to sleep and then they suddenly the drones and take pictures of them. And I just look at it. Isn't it. Isn't that cool. You love to see that in real life. Just ELA
Paul Lacey: [01:21:10] for looking at the little one in between the time. Yeah, that's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:21:13] cute. But it's like a jigsaw puzzle. They really do seem to lie down very literally like texting that little one line up with each other.
Aren't they like, the back of the trunk of one slips over the back of the other and the leg goes around. It's just delightful. Absolutely. Just restores your faith in. Elephants, not humorous, but that was my pick of the week. Should we go with yours next? Paul, what was yours?
Paul Lacey: [01:21:38] Mine is, I'm really excited about the new masters of the universe.
He-Man cartoon coming out on Netflix.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:21:45] I need to open it. Wait a sec. I did have it open and then I appear to have shot it. So I'll just quickly open it. Oh, I don't want to get rid of the elephants, but here we go. Yeah. It's all right. I'll mute it. There we go. It's muted. Anyway, go on.
Paul Lacey: [01:21:57] It's really cool. The animation looks really cool.
You've got to watch the trailer. The trailer is really, um, exciting, I would say. And as someone who grew up with. Playing He-Man and watching the cartoon. I'm really excited to see the universe revelation.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:17] I wasn't into this as a kid. He man was the one that always raised his. And when I have
Paul Lacey: [01:22:24] play the power of grace, call
Berhard Gronau: [01:22:28] back it's back.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:32] My life is complete. My life is totally complete. So when's that coming out?
Paul Lacey: [01:22:37] I dunno. Oh, is it July? Maybe? I think it's nine. Yeah. Yeah.
Cate DeRosia: [01:22:42] And I like that they kept the feel of the original and just upgraded. Like it, it doesn't, it's just, and it's amazing. So now thunder cats, can I put in a vote to get thunder cats to come back?
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:53] I'll take that. Yeah. We'll go for that next time. You're on we'll get
Paul Lacey: [01:23:00] it sorted for you. Don't
Nathan Wrigley: [01:23:01] worry. We'll make it we're influences right. To somebody I'll write a letter greatly important and well-worded letter. So somebody else can take notice have to say though, hours, the hours were nice, but Kate's is cool.
Cause it's something quite personal to her. Kate says cases, this one it's over on tree hugger, which I confess I've never heard of tree hugger. Is this a site for do it yourself projects? Or what is this? I'll be quite
Cate DeRosia: [01:23:30] honest. I don't know. My mom actually sent this to us, but it is so many things that I just love about it.
So it's a converted school bus that a design student had, I think, $10,000 and he built this all using donated or repurposed. It repurposed materials, including the school bus, like the school bus was within his budget. And I, it might've been 10,000. Would've have been 30. I couldn't remember exactly.
But part of what I really love about this is how he used the space. A school bus is, can be, feel really narrow, even if you're converting them. And this one doesn't, it's got, designated different living spaces. The bathroom is actually tucked in behind the headboard of the bed.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:15] Just here.
Just there's a little door
Cate DeRosia: [01:24:16] just there. You actually walk in there, but then the shower is Behind the bed. And so you can open the big back door and if you're on someplace private and you can have all that air flow going through, there's a side door on this bus in particular, so that, you can go in and out that way.
He's even got, you can see a piano, tucked in under the dining area out,
and then between the dining area and the bedroom area, there's an actual L-shaped sofa, so, I mean, for something that you're gonna be living in, this has that amazing designated spaces where you can feel like you're moving through a house, but it's only 35 feet long. And so it just, the, the, what he was able to do in this space and the ideas he had, it just, it was really phenomenal and goes back to our idea of blocks.
It's like taking living spaces and, turning it into compartments or pods, if you will. And it just, it was just phenomenal to me that he
Nathan Wrigley: [01:25:17] was able to do. I I look at this and this is right up my street. There's no way that I could do that. But if somebody came to me and said, would you like the equivalent in money of what this costs or this thing every time I'd say, give me the thing, give me the convert boss, because I could just see like life being totally CATA, catastrophic.
That's entirely the wrong word, remarkably different. Okay. And you know, just getting out on the open road or something like that, my only concern would be when you buy a caravan, like a typical, you call them RVs, don't you? I think we, I don't know what we call them, but uh, a vehicle attached to a car, basically.
With living accommodation on the back, they always go for like lightweight materials that everything's like super lightweight, like balsa wood, and everything's, hollow where it can be this looks as though it'd be quite a way thing to drive around. You'd have to have good
Paul Lacey: [01:26:12] suspension probably made of stone.
Yeah. Burn a lot of fuel. Yeah. It's a bit gray there. Isn't that?
Nathan Wrigley: [01:26:20] Yeah, we need a smash.
Cate DeRosia: [01:26:25] The great thing. So with going with a school bus is they are designed to haul you know, loads of children, which we know are not heavy and love to jump in things, so the suspension on them is great. Yeah, I would give up anything and start renovating school buses any day,
look
Nathan Wrigley: [01:26:41] at it. It's properly.
Cool. Yeah.
Cate DeRosia: [01:26:45] It's really unreal.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:26:47] I think I'm going to start a new podcast about converting bosses. Look at that. That's so that looks like it's like a converted radiator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's very nice. Look at that. Like piano pulls out. Very cool. I am. If you get one of these Kate, I fully expect that you've written and drive around.
Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [01:27:13] Tofa said he would drive over to the UK already. He's already said,
Cate DeRosia: [01:27:18] yeah. Our current one is 30 feet long and I haven't quite decided if I want to tackle trying to drive something that is 35 feet long. That's getting substantial.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:28] Yeah. Yeah. You, over here, you need a separate kind of driving license.
Cate DeRosia: [01:27:33] You S you do not any idiot can get it and want to just drive off.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:37] Okay. There's another good reason to move to America. The couple of things here, the, to your point about He-Man. I remember all the toys being out of stocks as Chris Hughes the local Argo shop Max his pick of the week would be a low-key on Disney plus can't Loki from like the Avengers.
Him at one. Okay. Oh, this is a TV series with him in. Yeah. Wow. I just don't watch. I don't watch enough tele okay. Okay. And Chris, again, a YouTube for fun for Louie did this with a school bus. You should watch his videos. Okay. Fun for Louie on YouTube. That's it. We're totally out of time. In fact, we've gone two minutes over.
I do apologize for for our guests, if you've been delayed doing something, but we will be back next week. We'll do it all again with some different guests, please burn it. And Kate, we'll get you back on at some point in the future. I hope you've had a nice time. Yeah,
Berhard Gronau: [01:28:33] we're so sad with you and so much talking and this awful British
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:37] accent can gray and it's not good, but yeah, we now have this bit, which we have every single week where I press the end button in stream guard, and we have no idea how long it's going to take and we have to wait.
If we have to wave awkwardly, I'll press the button and say, bye. See you next week. Oh.