This Week in WordPress #169

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 169 entitled new platform itis. It was recorded on Monday the 28th of June, 2021. I'm joined as always by my good friend, Paul Lacey, and this week also by Jamie Marsland and Philip Levine, so that we can have a chat about the WordPress and use for this week.
And as is always the case. There's plenty to talk about. We, first of all, get into the CMS market, share that WordPress dominates in 42% and counting, but what comes in second and third place, you may be surprised. We also talk about element or they've produced an article explaining their entire ecosystem by the numbers, and there's a lot of numbers to deal with.
Theme lock-in it was a thing. Is block locking, going to be a thing as well. We talk about it just in Tuttle up piece on WP Tavern, and then some product news plugin updates. There's a new product called orderable, and we also have updates from Astra, the page builder framework, and a significant update from I themes going over to version seven and a complete overhaul of the UI.
We talk about the fact that I'm going to be doing a w S form webinar later this week and give you details about how you can join that. And then there's a product over on AppSumo. It's a new page builder. Should we need one called Zion builder and you can get it for $99. And finally, we do talk about ninja forms and a deal that they've got going on at the minute, just before we round out with our pixel.
It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress, this week in WordPress was brought to you by a B split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? The new AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and tests.
Anything against anything. 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 demo at AB split. test.com. Hey, Hey. Hello. Hello. Hello. How is everybody this fine day? It is this week in WordPress episode number.
I've actually got it this time. It's episode number 169. The reason I know that is because it's at the top of the screen I'm staring at, whereas normally that's Tron and catered because we're trying out a new bit of software. We've been using this fantastic bit of software called stream yield, but just because technology allows us to try comp competitive things, we've moved over to a different thing called restream.
So forgive me if the technology breaks, but the intention is that it will behave exactly as normal. Um, speaking of normal, Paul Lacey,
Paul Lacey: [00:02:55] what, what are you trying to say?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:57] No idea. How are you doing?
Paul Lacey: [00:02:59] I'm okay. Yeah. You know, when you're like, this is episode 169, all that is in my mind is 169 dude. And I know it's not supposed to be 169, but outfit from bill and Ted.
Yeah. I'm a big fan of bill. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:12] Um, thank you for joining me. Once again, Paul, we've got two brand new faces. We've not had these guys on the show at all. So I'm going to hand it over as I always do to Paul to introduce today's fabulous guests.
Paul Lacey: [00:03:25] Alrighty. Well, first of all, we've got Jamie from pootle press and hello, Jamie and a pooch breast was born 10 years ago, but Jamie's actually definitely older than 10 as far as I can tell anyway, so I guess brutal press is the company and, um, You have trained over 5,000 people on WordPress in the last 10 years.
So I imagine you've got a course and you do indeed have a course. And you, you run a WordPress course for the guardian. He's one of the major, um, newspapers in the UK. Uh, probably pretty world famous as well. I think the guardian, so I didn't even know the guardian had a WordPress course, but it does. And you've done it.
And also as well as that, you've got a poodle press, which is, um, I think you do agency work, but you mainly focus on the plugins, the series of plugins that you create. And there's a ton of plugins for WooCommerce that you've done. And you, you kind of, I guess your areas for as far as I can tell is WooCommerce and the block editor, that's your, that's your niche?
Would that be about right?
Jamie Marsland: [00:04:26] Yeah, exactly. We started off as a purely training business and now we're a training stroke plugging business, essentially. Yeah. And. A hundred percent of our plugins. I've gotten both blockade as a base plugins. That's what we've invested in over the last two years, which has been a fun and challenging journey for sure.
Paul Lacey: [00:04:44] We might get into that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it was great to have you on Jamie. And also we've got Phil, uh, who is the president stroke owner of, uh, south Florida web advisors. And you've been building websites since 1997, specializing in WordPress and managing and maintaining. Over 400 websites, which some of those are your direct clients.
And some of those are your agency clients. So you like mental pain, I guess that's one of your things, is that, well,
Phil Levine: [00:05:17] no. I mean, it's, you know, the tools of WordPress that are out there, the management tools and so forth, it's allowed me to scale the business. I'm a one-person business managing that many sites.
Now, most of them are brochure sites that other than plugging up dates, I'm never having to do any other sort of updates, but, you know, WordPress has allowed me to scale my business that way.
Paul Lacey: [00:05:39] It's it's great. Yeah. And we met at the page at Nathan's event in we, the page builder summit. And as I understand it as well, your, a GoDaddy pro um, brand ambassador, is that what they.
Yeah,
Phil Levine: [00:05:51] the name is a bit fluid, but yes, I'm a GoDaddy pro I know the platform ice, you know, I do a lot on their, uh, on their community channel and I'm very involved with the GoDaddy environment, but I'm not exclusively go to HETI by any means.
Paul Lacey: [00:06:07] No, no, no. Of course not. No, but I mean, I use managed WP. I don't use the, I was already on managed WP, so I never, I never turned into the GoDaddy branded version of that, but it's like you said, you, you know, you're looking after 400 websites.
I look after about 70 and the tools that you need to do it. Oh, amazing. You know, so yeah. That's, that's fantastic. Well, it's great to have you on Philip and, um, yeah, Nathan, uh, I think if there's anything you want to say before we, uh, any questions you want to ask? Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:38] because this platform is slightly new.
Um, there's several places you could be watching this. Oh, that's quite nice. They look good. Um, the, the comments look different. That's one thing, but if you do want to comment, you're either going to [email protected] forward slash live. In which case you're logged into Google that's YouTube, or you could be in our Facebook group, WP builds.com forward slash Facebook.
But my understanding is that restream need you to sort of give your permission if you don't want to be anonymous. And you want your icon to go along with your comment, you have to go to chat.restream.io forward slash FB and click a button, which says I give permission. So yes, basically do that. The other things to mention are probably not that important, but if you do have anything to.
Go for it, stick it in the comments and we'll see how this platform copes with that. Whether they pop up easily for me to sort of put in, it looks like a couple of people have done that. So as an example, this person obviously didn't know to do that. Hello. Got my usual seat in the comments. I don't know who that was.
No idea, but if you want to go and click that link, that would be helpful. Oh, poodle press is based in my hometown. Lovely. Another,
Paul Lacey: [00:07:44] one's gotta be Chris Hughes cause he's talking about webs.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:47] Okay. Okay. So Chris, click, click the button or go to that link that I mentioned just a moment ago and there's camera.
And yet again, it's probably like four in the morning in Australia, so thank you, Cameron, for maintenance, maintaining, stay and sticking with us. I really appreciate that. Right. Okay. Let's see if I can make the screen work. Did that go on? Yay. New view people on the road. That is quite nice. Um, so we are WP builds, blah, blah, blah.
Do it every week. It's the same thing nothing's changed. So I won't dwell on that too long. I'm going to hand it straight over to Paul. I'm in a bit of a rush today because I know Jamie's gotta be off in. Yeah. 30 minutes. So let's just get stopped right into it.
Paul Lacey: [00:08:29] Okay. So the first one is on the juice dot. I don't know if I've said it.
Have I pronounced that right juice or is it used? Oh, okay. So Yost is the pronunciation. So yeah. But it's not the website isn't pronounced like Yost the plugin. It's the correct spelling of your first, his name. So it's J O S t.blog. And it is the founder of the Yoast plugin, um, who does every six months kind of CMS market share analysis.
And so he's done another one, I guess it's been six months. And as usual it is showing that WordPress is growing hugely. And based on this, let's just see what this share is at the moment based on the stats at this point, it's showing WordPress is 41.7% of the market. Some of the other highlights of it are that Shopify has now overtaken Joomla as the number two spot.
Yeah. And as a 3.6 markets. Which is sounds pitiful, but it's a huge amount of websites. It's just that WordPress has gotten so many. So Joomla's on gymnast seems to be losing market square Squarespace, which was relatively stable. Six months ago is growing again now at 1.7% and there's overtaken wit. And wicks also grew and is also at 1.7%, the same as Squarespace, but I guess Squarespace has just got slightly more, um, a few hundred thousand more installs or something like that.
Drupal's on the down and something that I've never even heard of called Beatrix. Um, and so Bittrex, blogger and Magento are all relatively stable, but on a very small, small amount there. So as usual, uh, WordPress is growing. So that's great. So I'm wondering to the, out to the panel today, why is WordPress growing and what do you think about the growth that it's achieving?
And, and what's what in your opinions is this, is this graph down to,
Jamie Marsland: [00:10:32] um, I'll go, well, a few things. One is pandemic and we, if you look at WooCommerce is growth, which I also saw released the other day that still growing incredibly quickly. So the pandemic definitely, and we saw this in our plugins. Last year, there was a, there was a big growth in WooCommerce sites because of the change of people's behaviors.
So definitely from the e-commerce side, we've worked WordPress through WooCommerce has had a, would have had a big sort of shift in momentum as well, which would have continued its growth. Um, as opposed to that, I'm not sure what else would be growing at apart from its continued, you know, dominance in the
Paul Lacey: [00:11:11] market.
Right? Well, commerce is growing faster than, um, Faster than Shopify. Those are worth mentioning as well. It's they expected Shopify to be growing faster than were commerce, but, um, based on six months ago, figures, but now we're commerce is accelerated and is, is exceeding, um, Shopify, sorry, Phil. You were going to say,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:31] yeah,
Phil Levine: [00:11:32] I was going to say, I think it also has to do with features and functionality and some of the other platforms, like I have a client that I just recently onboarding that was with Wix.
Um, and that they were really, they were doing some commerce through Wix and yeah. They needed to do something with coupons, whatever it was that the Wix platform just couldn't do it, that they ended up moving their shopping cart over to Shopify. And they said, if I'm moving that, why do I still need to use Wix?
And they said, I'd rather have a platform that has more flexibility and you can grow with me as I have needs. And so we moved them over to WordPress for their marketing site. And in time we'll probably move them from Shopify into WooCommerce. So everything's in one place. But I think that that has a significant thing to do with it, as well as that, you know, while it's great that everything is all built by one company.
If they don't allow for some flexibility in features and functionality, then people aren't going to stay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:33] Yeah, absolutely. Um, one of the, one of the I'll just quickly put this slide back up. I just, I don't know how typical this is in, in any industry, if, cause I mean, what have we got there? I mean, I know it's over 30%, but 42% roughly.
I just don't know if that's normal, because if I think about things like social networks, it feels to me. Facebook's probably on par with that, maybe more. And if I was thinking about search engines or something, I'm imagining Google would be like the good, the dark gray and the blue combined. Um, it just seems like in tech, in certainly in the technology space, you know, not on the high street where there's just, you know, there's like four mobile phone shops, but on, in tech it feels like some things just rise to the top and dominate.
And I don't know why that
is.
Paul Lacey: [00:13:17] Yeah, they, they rise to the top, but they can be, they can be agitated. And, um, and sometimes, you know, big chunks can be knocked off things. Uh, you know, at the moment, like you said about the social, social media stuff and, you know, apple battling with the privacy stuff with Facebook, that's gonna cause some, you know, major shifts I think in percentages, that's a good point.
Yeah. Got browser wars as well. You know, Chrome is probably the leader and then operating system was, um, depending on different places, but I think was just
Jamie Marsland: [00:13:50] WordPress as well. As, you know, if you look at some of the more successful theme companies out there, like Astro asterisk and plugins, like elemental, the functionality is come on.
It's hard to remember that the functionality has come on leaps and bounds in the last year. Um, you know, in terms of be able to build, build sites almost with want click, which is very appealing to the markets like Wix. Um, Squarespace, that's kind of the markets that those guys are. So those, those markets that Wix markets and the Squarespace markets are being attacked from all sides, really, plus you've got, and I'm not sure this is true, but you've got good and both playing into that as well.
And that's only going to have, it's only gonna grow the WordPress market share because the technology is getting easier. It's getting easier and easier to roll it for, for the non-technical people to roll that size, but that's going to play into it as well,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:39] I guess. Do you know what, um, just a comment here from Cameron Jones, he says those non other CMS platforms look quite popular.
What would be really smart is to go outside, go out and like register the deal. Other or non dotcom and launch yourself as a CMS and instantly take like 30% right away. Yeah. It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. And these numbers are just gargantuan. Now. I feel so well armed when I talk to clients, which I do increasingly infrequently, but that, that kind of authority, that kind of look, we are 42% of the website.
Even if we end up hating each other's guts, you can just go somewhere else. And there'll be somebody who is really capable of taking your website over from me because well, more, you know, 42% of the people building websites are doing it with this platform. It's fabulous. I feel so fortunate. Um, couple of other comments.
Quickly here that other 9.5% is interesting. So that's the sort of, bit of all the other bits together. Wonder if it is decreasing rapidly and converting? Yeah. I'm imagining that every time WP goes up, those little colorful slices there on the page, just sort of shrink slightly and WP inherits them. I think
Jamie Marsland: [00:15:59] I've seen it.
I mean, this has been happening for a while, but I've definitely seen more enterprise type companies shifting across the WordPress in the last year that had, that normally had in house developers potentially that were a bit sniffy about it. And those are sort of starting to being, um, well, one, the objections are being answered, but to some of those teams aren't there anymore.
So in-house marketing teams are taking over that directly, the marketing and looking at WordPress as a solution, all that stuff
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:27] happening in the last year as well. Yeah. Um, whoever this is, thank you. I am so sarcastic. I love it when people are sarcastic right back at me, quote of the day from Nathan, which I do increasingly frequently.
Yeah. Okay. For in mail. Thank you very much, whoever that was, go and click on the Facebook link and a, and we'll find out who you are. Um, should we move on to the next one? Cause I want to get a couple in before Jamie has to go. So this is, this is all about Elementor and it's you again, Paul, isn't it. So let me pop that one.
Paul Lacey: [00:16:58] Now the mentor celebrates five years since, um, since it started, I think it was actually a fork of another system actually at the beginning of a mentor, but five years since elementary or, um, started his journey. And this is, this is quite interesting because this sticks onto the statistics thing. There's, they're aware of over 8 million, uh, websites active with elemental and now element or accounts for over 5% of the entire web, which is bigger than the number two CMS.
So Elementor alone as a plugin. Beats Shopify for market share, which is insane. And, um, as well as, um, celebrate in what elementary or achieved, you're dumb, I'm not an elemental user, I'm a BeaverBuilder user. I actually work for beaver builder, um, part time. Um, but you can't deny what they've achieved is, is, is pretty impressive.
And what they've, you know, they've, they've obviously got some problems as well with things like, um, performance. Uh, they, they sometimes get kind of criticized for that kind of thing, but as for kind of creating a platform that has empowered agencies, freelancers, and site owners to. To go and create complicated sites.
Some of them great. Some of them are complete mess. They've, they've created a tool that people seem to, uh, go to, uh, I don't know what their current growth, um, uh, angle looks like, but every time I've checked on the, um, used by website, I've got the websites called now. They're not built with yeah. Built with it's still growing and growing sharply.
So, but I've got, I've got a slightly controversial, um, opinion to throw in and just see what people think about it. So, uh, element or as a counselor, over 5% of the web over 12, almost 13% of entire WordPress in stores. Now, if you take element or out of the picture, Is WordPress still growing or is elemental growing WordPress for, for WordPress?
I think the answer is the element or, and we're commerce combined or growing WordPress. But if you take them to. Is WordPress actually a bit stagnant if you take those two killer apps as such an out of the picture. So I don't know. I just wanted to throw that one out there that if, if elemental went and did its thing that everybody thinks it's going to do, which is going potentially fork WordPress one day and go out on its own, does Matt Mullenweg have to start going back down to the 30% is every time he does a presentation.
Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:37] I imagine, imagine, imagine if something began with a three at some point in the future, how difficult that would be. Yeah, I was saying the other day, I think it was maybe on last week's episode. If we wait for 10 years, WordPress will probably account for 140% of the internet. Every website, plus 40% will be built.
I think it's
Paul Lacey: [00:19:59] going to start going down. I think after I think it's going to go up. To around 45, 50%, then I just think something crazy will happen like this. You know, this thing, Spencer for a forum foreman was saying the other day about Wix would buy Elementor and then fork the entire WordPress and launch its own thing and take away a huge chunk of users.
Shopify might up their game and then WordPress would be around the 50% part, but never hit that 80% and potentially start going down because I never, I never controversial on tougher in there because I don't think Gutenberg is a killer app. I don't think that that when it comes down to you take Elementor and we were commerce out of the picture that someone might go, oh, I prefer using Gutenberg than Wix.
I'm talking about like the mom and pop businesses here and not like developers or anything. So that, that's just one of my opinions and I, it's pretty crazy probably, but it's just, well,
Phil Levine: [00:21:00] I actually want to jump in on that, that. I think you bring up a lot of valid points, but what I think a lot of people like about WordPress is the fact that they're not tied into any one host or one company.
Whereas, you know, while I realize everything today is software as a service and, you know, Google, or, you know, Microsoft 365 and you're tight. You don't have a lot of flexibility. People still insert an aspects like to have that control, especially when it comes to the marketing of themselves or their business for back office operations to say, okay, we'll, you know, fit with whatever restraints, but when people want to market themselves, they everybody's a little bit different.
So I think, um, you know, you're not going to see people. I think if Elementor, as you were saying, if they went and said, oh, we're just going to be our own thing and you got to do things our way, I actually think it will hurt. It would hurt them because again, people like having that flexible.
Paul Lacey: [00:22:03] Yep. Yep. It could be right.
That's it? I think, uh, it's very difficult to predict at the moment. Jamie, what do you think?
Jamie Marsland: [00:22:12] Um, so I, I think, I think the element of things is really interesting. I think with, um, we talked a bit before the show about full site editing. I think that that's going to be a real challenge for all the page builder companies out there over and above where good burgers, because that fundamentally, once you start experiencing full site editing, which is the ability to design a whole site using blocks, once you experienced that, then you start to think, well, where does that?
Where does a page builder fit into a theme that you can design the header and the footer and everything on, on the site in blocks. And you, you kind of come out of that experience with the conclusion that they don't really fit in that ecosystem where everything that you're using WordPress is a block.
So then, you know, you talked about elemental forking off to become a SAS or something like that. That makes perfect sense to me. You know, if I was running the strategy in Elementor, I'd be heading in that direction as quickly as possible, because if you wind for two years and Gothenburg has become bigger, it's becoming more and more powerful.
And people, people are building really cool sites with it now, and you get all the advantages of a unified interface and lower training costs for enterprises and being able to tapping into the WordPress ecosystem and other things that blocks are bringing you. And the fact that all the loads of investment, if you look at the investment that's going on out there, a lot of it's around buying companies that are building block-based things at the moment, and a lot of the cooler innovations happening around good.
But, you know, that's, that's, that's my impression of where this wind for two years. Um, and you say, good, good, good. And it's not, yeah. Um, Kara, I think it probably is to kill her up. And I think that's probably, you know, th that's where all the innovation is happening. Um, so yeah, that would, that would be my view that if I was, uh, an elementary at the moment, I'd be heading straight off to, you know, if they've got 5% of the market already that they kind of fought to.
Anyway, if you look at, if you actually use, if you use elemental to its fullest, you're kind of not really experienced in WordPress. In many ways, you kind of, you kind of using a different tool anyway. Or if you're using a Devi, you're not really using WordPress anymore and using a different system in many ways.
So they kind of already have full.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:34] One of the things that I find quite interesting. Sorry, Jamie, I don't know if I interrupted you there. Um, is that like, I foresee that in a couple of years, time, not only will we have full site editing in a fully fleshed out way, but third-party developers will have, will have added their own take on top of full site editing.
So we'll probably have the capability to have a different way of creating menus and a different way of creating headers and all sorts of different options by different companies. And at the moment, if you're, if you're using a proprietary page builder for want of a better word, they've got to build on top of that platform on that one platform only.
And I suppose you're taking a bit of a risk that, that that platform will continue to succeed. Obviously everybody's thrown their boat in there. All of them. Stuffing with elemental because it's a rising tide over there. But, um, you just wonder if, if full site editing became on par and then all the third party stuff, and there's so much amazing Guttenberg third-party stuff at the moment.
So the point where I just can't even keep up, somebody produces something each and every minute it seems like that supplements a piece of the functionality. And that I think is the problem is nobody's got time to play with any of it. Um, but also I think we're at the, we're at a point where it's still not usable if you like it, you know, the full site editing.
If you were to deploy that into the wild, I think at the moment, you'd, you'd have a bit of a, of a death wish really? You just asked him for trouble, but give it a year we'll I'm sure we'll be on safer, safer show. Yeah. I mean, I played, I
Jamie Marsland: [00:26:06] played with the, uh, T I think it's called T1.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:10] Yeah. One, I think it is.
Jamie Marsland: [00:26:12] I recommend anyone going to stick on a Tessa and go and play with it.
And it takes a bit of getting used to, but I just built my own. Uh, I built a header and, you know, it was kind of a profound thing. Cause you start thinking, well, I'm not restricted to this layer at all. You can literally use a columns block and I can stick my leg over here. And like, I'm the weird thing over here.
So there was literally nothing I couldn't build in terms of traditional header, just using folks full site editing, editing. So coming from a, if you've used WordPress for a long time, It's so different in terms of what you're, the restrictions you're being used to. Um, and then you start thinking about what themes going to be in the future.
Let me think where themes, like divvy fit into this. Um, and they're, they're going to be incredibly lightweight and fast. Um, so it's, um, you know, there's opportunities around that. Um, and then you look at patterns and the opportunities around block patterns and the cool stuff that's going on around that at the moment.
Um, so yeah, I think, I think, I think. You know, blocks are clearly gonna be a huge win, right at the start of, um, blocks of where, how they're going to disrupt the ecosystem.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:19] Uh, just have a quick look at some of these numbers though. Cause you know, if, if you were in, uh, in the element or crew right now at the beginning, the likes of Ben Pines and so on, you got to be proud of yourself.
These numbers are just breathtaking. So 5% of all websites, I mean, who, who, who can even claim anything like that? 8 million websites, uh, apparently are active currently. I've got the zeros right there. Yeah. 8 million websites. I mean, just look at this, they claim that a new element or website is created every three seconds.
So, but in the time it's taken me to do this sentence. What was that? Five or so, and your website's launch with ELA mentor? Um, they got a five, 5,000 two hundred and ninety nine, five star reviews. I don't know. W what the other reviews are looking like, but I'm 54 supported languages, 273 core releases. One, one mil, 1.9, 1.09 million lines of code and their communities.
You know, again, which other, which other community in the inside the WordPress ecosystem can say that they've got like their own meetup network. You're there are literally meetups there's one. I think there's like three or four in the UK. Just element or meetups. It's, it's a phenomenal achievement. And whether you love it or don't use it or dislike it, you've got to take your hat off to them.
They've totally aced it. Yeah. Just phenomenal. Yeah. Beautiful execution. Yeah. Um, Chris Hughes, Chrissy says one point not one line of code. Non-removable
Paul Lacey: [00:28:55] caught my attention. It's like they maybe want to remove and reduce some of that bloat or something.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:01] Cameron speaks of divvy. Meetups. Yeah. Sorry, Cameron.
That isn't, I'm not suggesting they don't exist. I've not heard of them in that song. Yeah. So if there are other meetups, then I think that's impressive too. Uh, this kind of goes, the next piece is as adjusting Tadlock piece on WP Tavern, it's entitled a WordPress theme lock-ins and silos and the block system.
So of all the positive stuff that we've just been talking about and how great it is that blocks are coming along, Justin Tadlock. Everybody knows. I really admire. He's got a slightly different take on it this time around. And he's talking about the fact that over the last decade or more it's been in there has been this entirely frustrating experience.
If you have, if you've gained functionality as a part of your theme, let's say he makes the, makes the use of portfolios. You know, you, you download a theme from wherever it may be and you, you start to use their portfolio functionality, and then you decide, you just want to flip over to another thing because you're fed up with the way your website looks and you realize, oh, oh, the theme did that.
Oh rats and all of that stuff has gone. So he's worried that in the past, obviously, theme vendors have been able to lock you into their ecosystem. I think it goes on to talk about how this may be something that is just beginning with blocks as well. So essentially it's just putting a flag in the sand and saying, we need to be mindful of this.
We need to be concerned about this. And on the screen right now is, are two photographs. One where he sets something up in, uh, with a block and used one theme. And then he went over to a different theme and you can see the differences striked him, you know, something completely worked on one theme and then it broke on another.
So what, he's his conclusion basically as the ship has sailed for this, this, this stuff is from WordPress 5.0, this is what we got. We, it might happen that we can have vendor lock-in again, but he's saying if that's the case, let's just make sure that those people who are building themes. I've really taken care of their people.
And you know, if you've got a theme company, you've got 15 themes, make sure, at least your own offering is interoperable. So that if you switch from one of your themes to another one of your themes, it just works as you'd expect it and not have not have this mess of things work in one time over here and not over here.
And he's saying that, you know, reputations can be forged in this way. And we're just at the beginning of that. So I don't know if any of you guys have ever experienced the frustration of something totally disappearing, but imagine if it happens in blocks, that would be annoying. Well,
Phil Levine: [00:31:31] yeah, I, I use a WP bakery is my main builder across a number of themes.
And there are some elements that are themes specific. Now, if I really want to get into it, I could start copying because you could move the elements between. Um, themes for Hallows work, but to this exact point, but I actually want to look at it in a slightly different ways that somebody said to me recently said, well, wait, does it really matter what theme I'm using?
And I said, no, because for the most part, the themes are just visual composer, page builder, whichever one you're using it, just the predefined layout for that page. It's, you know, it's some style sheet things, but for the most part, for at least the sites that I was building, it was literally, it's just, okay, which are the widgets for that page builder.
Are we using the theme of as didn't really matter? Because if I switched themes, as long as the widgets there, I get the same results. So I very much respect that opinion of, you know, being locked in. And I think, you know, we see that a little bit with Debbie. I think where, you know, you get locked in when you can't change to anything else.
You got to rebuild that everything. If you're going to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:41] switch
Phil Levine: [00:32:41] themes,
Paul Lacey: [00:32:47] Yeah. Uh, I think, uh, that the article is bemoan into a certain extent. The fact that we didn't necessarily have to have this lock-in situation, but like you said, the ship has sailed. And, and in one sense, it's kind of like almost everything will probably end up with lock-in, even if they'd planned it in a much more meticulous way that try to make the framework less prone to lock in.
But I think what it will mean is that you'll probably, like you said, Nathan have to choose your vendor to a certain extent and you'd be, you'd probably be able to happily skip around, um, the different themes from a particular vendor. So like in the old days of studio press, for instance, where you could switch between the different themes and everything would work, or your, your gen, you know, your Genesis function functions would work because they were all hooking into the same places and stuff.
And I think that the, the block version of that. In the future we're full site editing. Won't be quite as, um, code-based in that sense, but I think that your, your careful theme shop will think about that in advance and make sure, and it will be, and it'll be almost an opportunity to say, Hey, come with our thing by our membership, you get access to the 20 different themes that we've got.
You can hop between them at any point. And most of the time it works. But to be honest, I think the biggest theme shop that we're going to see is wordpress.com. I think they're building the tool to a certain extent. They've got lots of people placed in on the project. They can make a completely closed, um, environment by some of the plugins that they want to be.
Part of that environment. Make sure that the entire ecosystem for someone who opts into wordpress.com always works and wordpress.com was always like this. Uh, you can't really do what you need to do with it, but if you bring full site editing, Into wordpress.com and they've, they've made it a kind of safe environment where you are less likely to destroy your sites like you could.
If they gave you access to the PHP code on wordpress.com, then they've got an, a pretty amazing product that really does, you know, beat Wix and Squarespace and all those kinds of things. So that's where I think, I think that a lot of WordPress growth in the future will be on wordpress.com because the brand name of WordPress is with them.
People always say, well, if you want to be able to do anything you want, you need to go with WordPress. Then that person will start looking at WordPress and then they'll find a wordpress.com theme shop that didn't before. But is now able to say, you can do almost everything. Now you've got WooCommerce integrated.
You've got this. You can add on these other things. So I think there'll be tons of grief with a WordPress doc. And I think the theme shops that succeed will probably have to follow a method, uh, similar to however, wordpress.com, um, roll this out, but maybe without the website, as a service type aspect to it, but more like a studio press, uh, model again, making it all up.
Just it's just what I think at the moment, it was
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:55] interesting poll. I was on a chat with, as you know, I was on a chat with Brian Gardner this week and he was making the point that, um, that it would be, it was really hard for them for Genesis studio press to make everything compatible. It was a lot of work he was saying, you know, just to make sure that if it worked with one studio press theme, it worked with all of them.
And so he's got this new product, which is coming out fairly soon as a block template offering. And he's, he's really thankful that hopefully if people choose sort of. Design agnostic themes. This problem won't won't come about too much, Jamie. I know time's tight. So if you've got anything to add on, that might be a, just reading the article
Jamie Marsland: [00:36:38] actually, and trying and try to work out actually what, what he was getting at.
Um, so I think he was talking about using, I think he was talking about using standard blocks, but when switching between themes to standard, like if you use the paragraph block, then he switched him from the background would change, which was, which is, um, I was talking about, um, plugging, locking, I guess more generally.
I mean, one of the great things about work processes is this, uh, freedom to move between. There's a real friction and an interesting friction word for us that there's this, um, one of the best things about it that most users don't know. It's the best thing about it. That you've got this freedom to switch between themes and plugins and the data owned belongs to you.
And you own the terms and conditions of your site. If you're self hosting, But if you look at actually where all the growth is or has been, you know, you've got things like divvy and you've got element, or, and you've got tools that constantly push people into these silos. Um, this is more gentle generic point.
And then, um, the blocks. So a lot of the growth is around, um, companies that are actually sort of, uh, not giving users this freedom, like divvy, you can't really see, you're locked in to divvy and the Facebook groups are they're very closed. Um, so there's this fantastic friction in WordPress that you've got this, this beautiful ability to switch.
And it's a really powerful thing about WordPress, but a lot of the companies that are succeeding in it, aren't actually, um, utilizing that freedom or giving people that freedom. Some are for sure, some of the most successful ones are. So, and I see that a lot with customers who don't really care about the fact that you have the freedom to meet your content away from their side, they just want wanna, they just want to use a plugin that they can build a site quickly with.
Um, but I think it's something worth battling for if you're, if you understand why, you know, why, um, having the freedom to move your stuff or having control over your stuff is really important. And the same things like separation from content from design is a really cool concept in WordPress that most users don't really understand that your concept, your content, you know, having that separate from the designers are really cool things.
If you want to have a rebrand in six months time, you can do that without having to recreate it all. But a lot of users just want to use a plugin that they can build a site quickly with.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:58] And that's
Jamie Marsland: [00:38:59] fair enough. You know, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn't lose that, um, that ability, I think that's kind of what Justin was getting at, but the blocks give us this, but the way it's been designed.
It's not working terribly well.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:12] Yeah, there is the, there is the chance that you'll get that frustration where you switch over to a different theme and all of it doesn't look the same, but that's a really good point. I think, I think we, as WordPress people stress a great deal about the ability to move from this, that, and the other thing.
Whereas I think you're right. You know, look at the rise of things like element or people just want something that works if this works and I get the UI, that's all I care about. Yeah. Yeah. There's more
Jamie Marsland: [00:39:38] of this. Um, especially I see this in enterprises and small businesses actually, where there's the more strategic stuff that don't really need to know about, but it's incredibly important.
So they'll have enormous technical overhead in their businesses that they're building into it because of the techno technology choices they're making. But, you know, you say to them, well, six months down the line, how are you going to train somebody internally to use this tool, this bespoke tool, or this proprietary page builder that you're using?
And it's like, well, I haven't really thought about that. Um, which is one of the big things that plays into a lot of the sort of lock based conversations I'm having with people at the moment. Actually.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:16] Um, I'm wondering if, uh, Cameron, uh, is, is using heavy sarcasm over here. It's almost as if the block editor was rushed out without addressing significant technical concerns.
Jamie, um, I know that the time that you've said you needed to go has now arrived. If you need to hop out, that's fine. Very nice timing. We will carry on, but you gentlemen, come
Paul Lacey: [00:40:43] back, please.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:46] Um, right. Let me just see if I can cope with that one. There we go. So now we're on a little three, the three of us. So it's Phil Paul and Nathan all the way from now.
I think, um, I think Jamie's audio was being, I think he was maybe had a microphone attached to his laptop there. So hopefully it will be a little bit quieter from now, now on, um, are we done that one?
Paul Lacey: [00:41:06] There was one of I'm trying to remember what it was now. Um, yeah, it's gone. It's gone. So yeah. Let's move on.
Yeah. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:14] In which case we're going to talk about plugins for the next few minutes. We've got four things dimension or including a brand new plugin. Um, I confess, I don't know almost anything about this, so, uh, I'm struggling to get the screen to share as easily as I did on stream yet, but that seems to have worked.
So what's this about Paul it's called order.
Paul Lacey: [00:41:34] This is, uh, Adam prizes, new plugin, Ashley, Adam, um, obviously well known YouTuber has a, a bunch of plugins now. Um, I think the first one he did the first major one that he commercial one that did it was cart flows, where he partnered with brainstorm force. And then the next one that's been really successful.
And I use it all the time actually is Presto player, which is a video, uh, like a video. Plugin for your websites and the integrate service CDN, or can kind of rebrand the way that YouTube looks and stuff like that gives you all sorts of good options with that. He partnered with, um, Andre Gagnon from project huddle.
So another really well-known developer and this time, um, he spotted a gap in the market web with, with the whole COVID and pandemic thing. People needed to let small businesses needed to be able to have a kind of local ordering solution. So for instance, pizza that gets delivered to your house and you can order it online and choose a slot when that's going to happen.
That kind of thing. And what happened during the pandemic was there was a lot of, um, SAS based apps that came out that would give the, that were able to launch very quickly, enable and enable these businesses to, to do this, to, um, to deliver stuff. But one of the problems of a lot of these, a lot of these SAS apps is that they charge a lot of money sometimes up to 40%.
Of the sale price of whatever's being delivered. So let's say you're selling pizza normally. And someone comes into your shop and buys a pizza and you sell it for $10. Now you not only have to get the pizza to the person, but you're only making $6 for instance. So that's just a random example. So singers, you know, it seems that this whole idea now of local delivery is here to stay pandemic or not.
Um, Adam, this time partnered with a company called iconic who, um, are the company that just got, um, identifi partnered with the company iconic, but he partnered with the, the, the, the founder of icon iconic, uh, whose came cause camp James camp. Yeah. So this is some kind of a collaboration between Adam and James.
Um, and James Kemp's company iconic was just sold to, uh, liquid web. And it's a suite of around 15 to 20 different, very powerful group commerce plugins. So there's a, there's a lot of experience there in that team. That's gone into this plugin and, um, it's on a kind of presale at the moment. Uh, it seems to be a good solution for agencies and also for small businesses.
And it seems to be a bunch of different pricing options there. And I think there's, there's still 21 days left on the pre-order, but go and check it out. Um, there's a video on the site where you can sort of see a V uh, a complete video tour of how it all works.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:31] So this is literally like your pizza venue that's got that just suddenly wants to go SAS, but they don't want to pay through the nose.
And they just want to be able to take phone calls or take stuff on the web and have it just all managed on their website, whatever that ordering.
Paul Lacey: [00:44:46] Yep. It's not like that, but it also gives some good power to the end user. So let's say you're a local butcher. So I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of, um, there was a lot of local butchers selling big packs of sausages and burgers.
And then if that was around by you as well, Nathan and Phil, but round here, the local butchers were kind of doing meat packs and stuff like that. And what this plugin allows you to do that a lot of the apps probably down is number one, get rid of the fees associated with running the business like that, but also includes some kind of simple funnel type stuff.
So you've got things like, um, one-click upsells. So for example, the person who's at the checkout, they've just bought their packet of sausages and then they got off. Half price, pack of bacon, for instance, um, that's just one example use case, or for instance, if they're ordering pizza, then there's a discount on the dessert that comes along and it gives them the full power of WordPress to do everything.
And then it uses the WooCommerce checkout for them to be able to pay. But from what I understand, the WooCommerce integration, I haven't really tried it, but I was looking through the page trying to see where he's WooCommerce in this. And it seems to be very minimal, um, mentioned part of the plugin. Uh, so it seems to me that it's really just using WooCommerce as the checkout.
Right. And the plugin is from what I understand pretty self-contained. So you go in there and you do it all within the interface. So it kind of friend quite friendly to, um, to the end user. I think so I've, I've seen agencies buying this and end users buying this, but, uh, Yeah, Phil, I don't know if you have many clients that were hit by the pandemic and needed to switch to this kind of local order system.
No, but I, I
Phil Levine: [00:46:34] do, I actually have a couple of pizza, places that, as you said, it, you know, they charge a significant, they charge 25% plus on some of these orders for doing these deliveries and whatnot. And this could be a, you know, a benefit to some of these, uh, I live in a very high retiree of community areas of people.
That with the pandemic and everything they didn't want to go out. So this could be very beneficial to a lot of people. I think it also goes those two though, how the workflow is internal to the businesses, because the one thing that I will say that those other providers give even what their percentage is, they give a workflow management that it's just here.
It just adds in, into your system. It bumps the tickets in the kitchen and all that. It would be interesting to see how this integrates to all that. If it does, it's completely standalone. Um, cause I think that's the big piece that. Hmm. Isn't always thought about as the back house
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:40] operations. So on the website, then they mentioned that they do order layouts, uh, product batons, order bumps, one-page ordering time slots, order flow, holiday scheduling, floating cart, widget, and then auto management.
And then the, in the, in the roadmap, if you like coming soon, it says custom checkout. So that's interesting. So is that what you were meaning Paul? Maybe it just takes the word commerce out of the picture. Checkout tipping, SMS and WhatsApp. That's intriguing and then timed products. So you can make things expire after a certain date.
And so-and-so, they've got, it's really interesting that we were talking about silos earlier about plug-in silos. And what have you that any concern for you, Paul, that if you got into this and you know, all of your orders were going through here and then you suddenly sort of fell out of love with it, you might be stuck cause everything's stuck in.
Paul Lacey: [00:48:31] Yeah, you would be, but I think you would be of any situation. I mean, just be honest about this silo thing, I'm not really concerned about it because like Jamie said, it's always been a thing. Anyway, you sort of, the growth in WordPress has been, you, you know, you sort of choose your stack and then you're sort of stuck with it really.
And then the only way you can work your way out of that is to say, okay, I'm changing my stack. The next website I built will be with this new stack and I'll, and I'll go with that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:56] Just keep doing that,
Paul Lacey: [00:48:59] like managing 15 different stacks on your care plans and stuff. But yeah, I mean, back to that whole locking thing, just briefly, you know, when we've, we've, we've had Anne McCarthy on the show, and I don't remember if we've ever spoken this on air as such, or this was possibly an offer, uh, conversation.
But I remember her talking to us about why, um, the full site editing is not just important to people for what it does. But also for the future of WordPress as an open source software. So no matter how many companies let's say go daddy who fell has, you know, association with, or, um, liquid web or any of these companies that are sort of, um, building these sort of pre-made platforms like Chris Hughes earlier said about that GoDaddy has got a very powerful word.
Platform that it did, it can push out. And that is probably behind a lot of people choosing that over Shopify, because it's a done for you, combination of things, but on McAfee was saying to us, well, that's great that that's all happening, but we are, you know, on the core [email protected], want to make sure that there is always a choice to opt out of these pre-made packages or, or whatever.
You can always just download the thing, download the plugins that you want, and that, you know, in a world where everybody is trying to build their stack and sell it to us by the hosting companies, there's always a choice. So with something like this, I don't think it's the same sort of lock-in. I think this is such a niche product.
It's a case of this reminds me of what day four. He said to us once was that when he was running his element or course, and a large percentage of his customer. Well, like what's WordPress and they fought WordPress was the plugin, this weird, annoying thing that you have to have in order to run an elemental.
So they came now, they came in and they, they, they came in through elemental as marketing. And we're like, why do I have to press update on this WordPress thing in the background? What's that for? Um, and I think that a solution like this is kind of like, it partly gets marketed as a, is a WordPress solution, but it really can be marketed as its own solution that doesn't really care whether WordPress is involved or not.
It's just that you need WordPress to have it. It's because it's so neat. And there's other products like that as well. Um, when they're Nisha think, um, this wonderful thing about WordPress is that. It does, you know, allow you to just create these products on top of that framework and, and
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:31] do that. Yeah. I love the URL as well.
orderable.com. You got to think that I'm so surprised that didn't go like in 2001 or something.
Paul Lacey: [00:51:43] It did some history on this. Um, I think it's, I think this is the one anyway, a while ago, Adam, on his YouTube channel, um, released a video saying I'm releasing something and I've just spent $20,000 on a domain name.
Oh, okay. So he did a video about it, about kind of why when there is something that is so perfect for your situation and you know, it's going to work taking that risk is worth it. 25 K. Yeah. I know Chris, Chris told me that he was talking to Adam about this actually. And um, so Chris probably knows a bit more background about it, but then eventually when this product was, um, announced.
It was, it was announced alongside, this was the domain that I bought this orderable.com. I just, we needed, we needed that name. And, um, we went for that so nice worth. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I can't afford to buy a 23 grand domain, no matter how successful any of my ideas are. So, um, yeah, yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:43] yeah. That's right.
Paul Lacey: [00:52:44] Yeah. Nice info or something like that movie. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:48] orderable.fish, which is my favorite domain name. Just anything who's ever gonna buy.fish, anything. Um, maybe like, I don't know, fishmonger adult fish or sign, but it's the weirdest one. Um, okay, so let's keep it going. I don't know who this person is, but thank you for contributing.
Um, yes, apparently that was the project that Adam was talking about. So yeah, I think so. Yeah. So orderable.com. If you want to check that out, right. Let me try and get things back on the screen. I'm struggling somewhat. Yeah. It's a new way of doing things. Cause it keeps putting things in, oh no, that's work first time hurrah.
Um, so if you are an Astra user, you may, I'll be pleased to know that the theme has been updated very quickly. Just run the view from through a few things. We're on number 3.5. Is there, is there a number at the moment? And they talk about the fact that they've got increased speed, faster loading front end with optimized CSS.
I won't go into the, the boring nature of all of this, but basically they will conditionally load CSS across your website, but also conditionally load it up on the page that you'll look sorry, the page builder that you are using. So I'm guessing that if you're on beaver builder, they'll just Chuck out all the stuff that might have anything to do with Elementor.
Um, although for all of that fun for you. It didn't, it didn't seem to me that the, the differences, all that magnificent, maybe I'm just being a bit picky, but the, the CSS file went down from 18.5 K down to 16.4 with, I suppose, as a percentage, that's a pretty big decrease, but you've shaved to just over two.
Kilobytes off the CSS. So anyway, there we go. They've also released some fairly nice controls for, um, posts related posts. So for example, if you're looking at the screen here, you can rename the related posts, um, control. So you can give it a title. You can then also, depending on the, the device that you're looking at, you can say, I want to show one column of related posts or bond column on desktop and two on mobile.
Why you would do it that way only God knows, but they, and also they have got responsive visibility. So you can also toggle off things like the site title and the site tagline and things. And then pretty much everybody's talking about accessibility at the moment and they have made some modifications to the.
The sort of the way the colors contrast, they're going to make it so that they suggest colors, which have a high contrast ratio, as opposed to, if you pick something which is difficult to read, which is my default, I always pick the difficult to read font colors, just because I've got no idea about design and, but there's nice, nice little update.
I don't, I'm not really using Astra anymore, but it seems like there's a whole bunch of nice stuff. That's come out recently. You can build headers and footers in their UI and stuff like that. So nice little improvements.
Paul Lacey: [00:55:46] Yeah. That related posts, title tech editor. Yeah. You can actually edit the tape. Those are the sort of things where you're kind of like, I, I, I want to use this related posts, but your average user won't know.
Literally, I just going to say related posts, I can't make it say anything else. How do I, how do I do this? Um, uh, was building a site in cadence just the other day. Cause I was wanting to give it a go and see, um, cause normally I'm on typically a generate press user and um, they had that feature actually, cause I had some related posts now I was so relieved to see, I could change the text because mine needed to say related videos and posts was, was going to be completely out of context and my options, if it, if that option wasn't there, it was going to be to try and find the PHB filter or something to change it or something like that.
And I didn't want to, I just wanted it to be there. So it seems that, um, Aster is still active. I don't know. Um, it seems to have lost its um, momentum. Yeah. The fastest growing theme for a long, long time, it probably is the most distilled or the winner of the most active installs for a premium theme. I think then they had that thing where they got chucked off the repo for a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks or so, but it seems they're still listening and looking at what the competition is doing.
And, um, and someone just said wasn't Austria required. I don't think so now I don't think cadence was cadence was, but Astro is so far as I know is still a brainstorm
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:16] on the, um, on the post it's it's written the post right at the very top. It says it's written by Sue J who is the, I'm going to say, CEO of brainstorm force.
I don't know if that's actually true, whether he's the CEO or not. As far as I know, they've not been bought out. So, no, I think it's still under the same management. I've heard nothing and I am a, I am an owner of that product. And so I would have hoped to have heard. So I think that's fine. Yeah. Got a quick
Phil Levine: [00:57:44] trick for you for that.
I've used on a number of sites where I needed to rename, uh, some sort of string and I didn't want to have to go into the, um, PHP and have to worry about it. Breaking is a plugin called Loco translate. Um, and that I'm just translating the English. Um, translation file the main translation and that I changed the string there, and then it, it, it gives me the ability to do that.
So I've done that with both plugins and deem elements and it's worked really well. And I can't take ownership of that trick because it was actually provided to me by a seat by plugin authors when I said, oh, well, how can I change this? They're like, oh, go use this and you can change it. So,
Paul Lacey: [00:58:28] so you translate in English to English basically.
That's cool. Yeah. And what's that plugin called again? Cause that was the secret
Phil Levine: [00:58:34] Loco trends.
Paul Lacey: [00:58:36] No, that's how you translate. All right.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:38] Fantastic. But back in the day, when I was building Magento sites, hardwired into Magento, was this capability to basically anything that appeared on the screen, anywhere in a Magento website, you could just say what the original string was and the next to it, write what you wanted it to say.
And it just figured it all out. And every time it appeared, it just became exactly what you want. So typically carts would become, I dunno, um, bag or something. We, we, we don't really use shopping cart here. We use the word trolley often and things like Ben would become trash and so on and so forth. So you could fiddle around with that and yeah.
Uh, yeah, that sounds like just what you've recommended fell. So that's cool. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Um, okay. Moving on very quickly. Let me just get used to this platform again. There we go. Next one is the page builder framework. We haven't talked about, um, the page builder framework for a little while, but this is nice.
They have David Vaughn, Greece. Of course the, uh, the owner and developer over there has added the capability to, well, it says I'm excited to let you know that we've added full support for generate blocks to our custom section feature. Paul and I have both played a little bit, I think probably fair to say the poles played with it more than I have, but, um, generate blocks seems to be like a really, really credible way of building layouts with blocks.
And, um, now the page builder framework out of the box will support. They've also, um, added, they've also created their first block that they're calling it, the notice block. And David makes the point that, well, he'd already created all of the notices that were required, so he decided to make a block out of it.
And so now you can, you can put things like an error message or a warning message, or what have you, um, into your posts and pages. And this spit I think is really nice, uh, on the screen, I'm showing you the quick edit menu for something in. The page builder framework. And typically there's just a few little options in there.
You know, you can change the post title and you can change the date that it was published and whether it's draft or what have you, but David's put an absolute boatload of stuff in there. So basically everything that you would be able to control if you opened up the post itself. So whether it's got things like sidebars, whether there's a footer or the head has gone, or you wouldn't just a left side, but all of that is now available in the quick edit menu.
And it might be that I'm just being ignorant and I've, but I've not seen that before.
Paul Lacey: [01:01:05] No, that's a cool feature.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:09] Yeah. I've really only just started using quick at it. Cause I made a point in the Facebook group, the WP builds Facebook group. About six months ago, I made this sort of slightly snarky comment.
Nobody uses cricket. It what's the point of it. And then like a torrent of like, you're an idiot. Everybody uses it.
Paul Lacey: [01:01:25] You wasted service. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:01:28] And so I've started using it. I've quickly found the utility of it because honestly I just figured by the time I've clicked that and it's just gone down, I might as well go in anyway.
And now all of that's in there. My, my theme of choice, I'm hoping that they follow suit. Cause that's just really, really cool. You know, you suddenly know. Bugger, it's got a sidebar and you just want to get rid of it. There you go. So Bravo David, I think personally, I think that's such a cool feature. Um, and then there's a bunch of other things, um, little sides, if you like, there's an option to rename WooCommerce, carte menu item, text option to disable WooCommerce gallery light box, um, will commerce menu item shortcode and improvements to the Guttenberg integration.
And he doesn't mention what they were, but, uh, yeah, some phenomenally cool little updates there. Nice work. David Paul felt
Paul Lacey: [01:02:17] anything on that. I think the January press, sorry. Degenerate block support is a really nice one because, uh, first of all, it's, you know, David is absolutely happy to announce that he's integrating with a product that is owned by one of his major competitors generate press.
And, uh, I think that that's actually just how Tom generate press and David from, um, Patriot a framework. Ah, they're just not, um, that they're kind of let's work together rather than work against each other kind of people. And, um, so I think that's a super good update because what, what it's done, I think it means that generate blocks can now be used in their custom sections thing, which is kind of like hooks, I think.
So let's say you want to build your own footer, uh, out of blocks. It means that it's quite difficult to build a footer out of blocks without something like generate blocks and specifically without January blocks, it seems to be the best solution specifically for that because of the way it's grid. It's great module is, is so far ahead of anything else I've used anyway.
So it's, it's brilliant. It means you can use generate blocks with the page builder framework and you know, it's gonna work. So a lot of funds of, of, um, his theme are going to be pretty happy about this. The problem David's got, I guess, is that his theme almost does everything that it needs to do now. So, so I guess like probably the sort of things we'll see from him, um, and his updates will be making it work better with the cadence blocks or making it work better with the stackable blocks or something like that.
And him being able to say my product is what it is, is not trying to be cadence. It's not trying to be, Australia's not trying to be Blocksi none of these kinds of things. It's not even trying to be January press. It's different. But what I'm going to do is make sure it works really well with all the third party things.
So almost everyone here is my customers tends to be using. So that's sort of, that's what I think is going to do. I haven't spoken to him about it, but it looks to me like that is the case. And that'd be a good news for any user of his product or think, um, Phil, what, what's your go-to theme these days, if you were choosing it rather than inheriting the site or such?
Yeah, the, the
Phil Levine: [01:04:33] main theme that I use is one that I found through, um, through theme forest, it's called a Lambda by, uh, Oxford, Jenna. I've been using it for a number of years now and it uses a WP. Bakery is the main page builder within it. The biggest thing that I like about it is that they have a skins functionality, which is in essence, the style sheet that, you know, rather than having to go in and use one of the third party, um, Integrations to control the style sheet elements.
They in essence do a custom post type and it's, so it doesn't add as much overhead to the site load I find. Um, and then they just, from that custom post type, build a CSS file from that. And I I've been using for a number of years. I actually got concerned because, um, they finally just released an update about two weeks ago.
But before that it was like December of last year. And you know, that's one thing that, you know, we're talking about updates that, you know, that I always get concerned about them. When I talk with clients about picking a theme is trying to find one that is actively being updated because you know, WordPress is adding so much and if they're not updating the themes to take advantage of the new features in WordPress, even if you're not using all of them, it's still, it's like, well, at some point.
Is this theme that a break, am I going to push upgrade on WordPress? And all my sites are not going to break because that theme hasn't been updated to keep up with it. So that's my big concern. If you know, of any of these themes that, you know, if they're not being actively developed.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:06:13] Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good point.
We all want to be able to sleep easy at night and seeing the, uh, the change log. So people like David putting that stuff out, um, is just great. You just see it and you see that there's new features and he's taken care of some bugs. And what have you, because that was the last point on the list. I think it was, uh, just says and more, which I presume might be bug fixes.
Just gives you a bit of a. Bit of reassurance that it's not going away. That's nice. Yeah. The, um, the next one is on poll, but I've got to say just before we begin this one, it's about theme security and it kind of feels to me like three or four years ago, I was, I was really making use of, I think security and then all these other rival things came along like web barks and Mulcaire and all of those.
And they really took me off and I stopped basically using I themes for no reason other than that, these nice, shiny tools, which did things. And it looked more interesting. I stopped using those, but now I themes according to this new article that we're going to put out, it looks like they've done a real big overhaul over to you, Paul.
Paul Lacey: [01:07:20] Yeah. I am a fan of I themes, uh, security and I've been, I didn't stop using it. Um, one of the things about WordPress security for me is I don't really understand what what's actually going on. So, um, so. But what I do know is that I want to have something that hardens WordPress, something that is a firewall and then something that is scanning properly.
So my stack these days tends to be a theme security mixed up with Malka. So I know that Malka has got a firewall. It's taking care of scans really well. And it's also doing all the backups, uh, while it's doing one, one, at least one level of the backups for me. And I use it all the time. And I w I was also combining it for a while with WebEx or patch, dark, as it's now named, of course, I actually removed patch stack from my.
For my security stack, because it didn't nothing. I mean, this sounds so cowboy, but, um, nothing bad happened whenever we moved it from tons and tons and tons of sites. I just wanted to remove, you know, when someone was getting blocked from something like a client was getting blocked themselves as like is as Malka blocked them out or is I themes or as, as patched doc.
And I was just like, I just don't know anymore. Who's getting blocked by what? So I removed, I removed patch stack. I'm not saying people should remove patch, but I did. And I stuck revised team security pro um, I know it's been sort of criticized in the past. There's been, um, I saw, uh, dopey Johnny, uh, the guy who's well-known for, um, uh, performance improvements and stuff like that as a real expert in that he was, he called it a checklist plugin, um, which are kind of, it is really in a way that you kind of, you have all these different things, right.
You assume that because you're ticking so many boxes, it must be doing lots of good stuff. Well, the funny thing is in ICM security, pro seven, they've sort of admitted in a way that there was a lot of aspects to it. There were, that were just checklist stuff, because one of the major things they've done in, in this version seven is remove 15 to 20 different, uh, features that they've basically said this feature isn't just not relevant in 2021.
So we're just removing it and let's just get that out of the situation. We don't need it anymore. So they've removed those kinds of things, but then they've added some hardening and other areas that felt more relevant to them. Um, now based on what 2021 is, the other thing they've done is completely redone the interface, which was much needed because it's been the same interface for at least five years, as far as I can remember.
Yeah. The best part that they've done in this is the onboarding. So if you install this as a brand new plugin, um, the onboarding is fantastic. It's like a questionnaire you go through, you even sort of say, are you a, um, an online shop? Are you a brochure site, these different kinds of questions that start you off with the most important, if you don't know what's going on and you're like, I don't know, domain, don't ask me hard questions, but I'm a brochure site.
You'll say, don't worry, we'll take care of it. But then as you go through the onboarding, you can get more granular about the different things that you do want on and the things that you don't want. So it's, it's a really cool update. And what pleases me about this as I've, you know, I've got a lifetime deal with Iceland security pro I've also got a lifetime deal.
We've restrict content pro, which is now owned by the same company. And in my opinion, restrict content pro also needs a massive. Over, you know, overhaul, just like they've just done with this. So I'm hoping that my other product that iPod restrict content pro gets the same treatment that I seem security protests with great onboarding and features that people need now, rather than things that were useful five years ago.
So a really, really good update, to be honest in my personal opinion. And I'm glad that there's less things that I don't understand now. So that's. Yep. Here
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:24] we use a fill. Yeah,
Phil Levine: [01:11:26] I actually, I have the same lifetime license on this that I got back in. Like it was like version like 3.7. They were running a, a special at some point.
And, um, I had been using this pretty much exclusively up until about two years ago when I switched to, uh, Wordfence and Curry. And the biggest reason actually that I liked work fence was the fact that it actually did a file system scan for malware versus I themes was always just doing it as sort of like the end user where it would do a front end website scan.
And there were times where you get malware that, you know, you never see from the front end. Um, actually about four or five months ago. Um, I even sent out an email saying, oh, you know, we're interested in getting feedback. Are you available for like a zoom session? And I spoke with the guy and I actually.
Did a whole screen-sharing with him. And it's interesting to see what they've now done in seven. Oh. Because a lot of things that I'm seeing here were things that I know that I specifically had mentioned to him where I said, you know, I think that I themes is very utilitarian, at least in its current format that you look at that screen of settings and fold to your point is if you don't know what, you know, some of those things are, it's like, you look at it, it's like, what
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:47] on earth am I supposed to do with?
Phil Levine: [01:12:50] And then each one of those settings had like five to 10 settings within it. And I said, you know, I'm a tech guy. I understand a lot of this, but if you want the, um, you know, the average end user, who's just going to buy this, uh, a one-off site. They're going to be completely overwhelmed by this. Um, and in seeing these onboarding screens, I think that that is huge.
Now, I don't know, from some of the underlying features that, you know, have they improved some of those or is this more of a, you know, make it look a little prettier and easier to use, but they haven't really necessarily changed from the background things. I think that time will tell as it starts getting rolled out.
But, um, Paula, like, like you said, I think that this is a huge step in the right direction in terms of usability of the product.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:41] Yeah. I mean, re it's it isn't that often that you see a complete overhaul of the UI and a company just stripping out a load of stuff and stuff. We just stripped out a load of stuff is way better.
I think that's really cool. But also, I wonder if it speaks to the fact that maybe they've done some research and figured out who their audience is, you know, maybe, maybe they've got an audience, so they've really nailed as well. They'd they really aren't that technical. We just need them to, to handhold them through it.
Um, one step at a time, explain what's going on and, and, you know, we're talking about elementary or earlier. Most of those people I would imagine who are using, um, I'm sorry. That's ridiculous. Not most, but a lot of people who are using Elementor could certainly be non-technical users, but they might discover that, you know, Solution that offers me protection online.
I've heard, this is something I need, I don't really understand it. I need to be talked through it, but also really cool that you are on the call today, Phil, and you actually had a chat with them and they listened to what you've said. So it's, it's a bit like there are some companies that kind of go off my radar and I almost think they're going away, that we won't be hearing from them.
And I kind of have that feeling about things a little bit, but everything that's going on at the minute means all of that was wrong. You know, they've acquired cadence, which is about the hottest property. It seems at the minute they've bought, they bought a brand new version of things. Um, security out seems like everything's going well for them at the moment
Paul Lacey: [01:15:11] and the free version as well, very soon.
So the free version we'll get a similar sort of treatment, but yeah, I mean, I don't want to get too much into the business side of things, but just briefly, um, if you imagine that. Well, like GoDaddy has it's kind of WooCommerce platform version of things. And, uh, GoDaddy has it's, um, integration. We have security that is kind of can be potentially invisible if you, if, if the package does that.
So same thing can kind of go for the four themes and that, you know, liquid web, their parent company, that they can launch this and say, Hey, let's set up your site and you go to the site and like, let's choose your theme and you, and you go. Full onboarding process where you choose your cadence. Cadence is that it's already the pro version.
You choose your template. Okay. You're done. Right. Let's set up your security. What kind of website are you? You said that when you chose this one, you know, you chose this template, which is an e-commerce template. So let's get you set up for that. I can see this kind of, you know, BOM, BOM, BOM, BOM, BOM, and then your, um, and then you're good to go with your website, right?
Let's do your SEO now. And I don't know if they've bought, I don't think they've bought an SEO plugin yet, but I, I wouldn't surprise me. Um, there's, there's a bunch of SCA programs that would be, yeah. The, you know, you got Yost and then you got all the rest, which are all buyable, uh, think that, you know, run by small teams and, and potentially, you know, people might be does it, I'm sure.
A number of those SEO plugins, SEO press type plugins will be considering. All sell
me enough money,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:16:46] ask you a question, Paul, if, cause you've used cadence, certainly more than I have. Um, is there anything about this UI, which, which is similar? I mean the, obviously the first thing that comes to mind is it's blue, right? I mean, but that's just, is, is there some coalesce color lit coalescence?
Is that a word, do you think? I think stuff is coalescing around this one UI and that the sort of themes bit will match the cadence bit. And it'll all just feel like the liquid web Stella WP bit.
Paul Lacey: [01:17:14] Yeah. So I've only used cadence twice and from memory, one of the screens that I land on regularly in the backend is the kind of the screen where you can control all the settings within cadence.
And actually it does look just like this with a bunch of. Rectangle blocks in there that take you to things. When you click the majority of them, they're just shortcuts to part of the customizer. So that's basically what you're doing, but it wouldn't surprise me. I didn't, I didn't think about it, Nathan, but now you've asked that question.
I wonder if the, you know, the team at cadence and the team at, I think security had a little zoom call where they looked at each of us interfaces. And they said, because that's one of the things that they've said about all these acquisitions at liquid web, that it means the teams can pollinate ideas. And I themes would say, look, we really need a big update to our, um, user interface.
Who's done it well within a fund. Cadence, I've done it pretty well. Well, let's get on a zoom call with them and, uh, and they can tell us what we think we should do. And we'll combine that with talking with some of our end users and agencies like Phil. And then we can roll something out that we feel confident is tried and tested and takes account of what the users asked about and S and want it as well.
So, yeah, there's definitely some similarities nation. Definitely. I
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:38] think, I think the takeaway here is if you've got a plugin, which isn't working as, as you type, just give physical, he'll sort you out on a zoom call, just get you straight. Yeah,
Phil Levine: [01:18:48] I will say I've seen a number of the plugin authors, at least the bigger ones, you know, ask for feedback because as much as, you know, seeing the feedback in the, you know, in the wordpress.org, you know, in the support groups and also like in code canyon, but getting feedback from actual end users and seeing real world case studies of how it's being used, I think it helped.
You know, not only the plugin author know how to do something with it, but us as end users to get a better
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:22] product in the yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's very important. Okay. Well just sort of move on, but that wasn't, that was interesting. Um, this is, this is just something elicit bit of a self plug, I suppose, in a way it's not really a plug.
It's me asking if you would like to come and be present. When I talked to Mark West guard later this week, um, Mark West guard has a plugin called w S form and honest. Go and check out Ws form. If you, if you want a dead simple form solution that will just, you know, take a contact form that this might not be it.
But if you, if you want to have a, a form solution, which enables you to do really horrifically complicated things in a, in a UI way, this is fabulous. I, I remember I first came across it a few months ago. David Wamsley put it in a podcast that we did about, um, forms and I'd never heard. And it didn't take me long to figure out that mark has really done a fantastic job is incredibly impressive.
The way that you build the forms is a bit like the old tool set layout way of doing it. You've got this grid of 12 and you just drag the form fields on and you make them as big as you want. So you might make the, I don't know the name on the email half, and then you can say on mobile, make it look like this.
And so you really can configure it how you want, but then you've got calculations and conditional logic and it connects. So just everything it's truly impressive. Um, and I'm talking to him Wednesday, uh, exactly this URL. If you're watching this, you can come back to this in two days time, uh, in fact, two days and about 40 minutes and, uh, and get your questions out there, ask him what it is that he's done and why he's done it.
So I'd really appreciate it. If anybody wants to join then, uh, yeah, we'll be doing that this time next. Well, in two days time. So there we go. Next one's a bit of a weird one. Why are we even, why have we got this one on Paul? I've never heard of this before in my life.
Paul Lacey: [01:21:25] Zion builder is. Yeah. So this is a page builder or a site builder.
I think I've not really fully tried it that much, but I think while we've got the, we've got the Gutenberg project going, we've got element or doing its thing, we've got some of the old guard DV and BeaverBuilder doing their thing. And then there is a, some new kids on the block. Um, and probably those, the two that I'm seeing people talk about is our bricks, bricks builder, which is, I don't know if it still has a lifetime deal at the moment, but it launched with a lifetime deal.
I think there's about just under $200 a thing called something for the lifetime deal. And then another one that I was just ignoring constantly. Was this one called design builder. Um, until I do see it being talked about in, in, um, communities, by people who I think know what they're talking about quite a lot.
Um, so this is a, uh, a theme company who did this, who had a theme called I dunno how you pronounce that. Actually, I've never tried to pronounce it. Let me just try and pronounce this, uh, Kelly as Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, us theme. That'll do. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit like the Lambda one, but, um, Phil's talking about, it's one of these kinds of, we've got 70 pre-made demos and you can start right away and it comes built with a, a page builder built in, but I think that Kelly us didn't use dopey bakery.
Didn't use the element of free version. It had its own thing called siren builder. And I think what they've done is they've completely rebuilt. Xi'an builder. To be something that replaces the old iron builder that was part of the theme and replaces a theme. So I think this is a, I think this is a full site editing type solution, similar to bricks.
And the reason we're mentioning it is just because, um, there's a deal on AppSumo for $99 up. Sumo seems to just, you know, has changed a lot over the last year or two. It used to be lots of SAS tools, but they, they started this thing called ups in my marketplace, I think, which is where almost any company you can decide.
They want to kind of list on there and AppSumo will take a big chunk of the money and everything. But Zion builders seems to be getting a lot of people talking about it. I don't know too much about it, but if someone is, is looking for the, the new, the new kids on the block and has tried bricks and wants to try something else and figure out what the.
What their thing is going to be for the next few years, then Zion builder. Isn't a brand new company it's been around for awhile. They've done themes for a long, long time. And they, they built a page builder before and it was it wasn't bad. And this one is apparently pretty good.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:14] There's a Chrissy who's in the comment who said that he hasn't bought this lifetime deal.
And I think we can. Yeah. Uh, if you've ever listened to this before, you can guarantee that Chris hops on every lifetime deal. So he's saying that's the litmus test, but, uh, I don't know. I mean, there it is. It's on AppSumo at the moment. It's what is it? Did you say Paul it's $99
Paul Lacey: [01:24:34] $99 for unlimited sites? I
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:36] think it's got a theme builder in, cause I'm looking at it on the screen.
You can insert ahead a and then you add your body w you know, for a single, for, I don't know, a custom post type or a WooCommerce product, or what have you. And then you can add in the footer as well. So, Just amazing,
Paul Lacey: [01:24:52] but I think it's enough of a performance focused one as well. So, you know, the criticism, a lot of the old systems was there's too many dibs, uh, oxygen came out and I think they invented the phrase exception, exception.
Yeah. And then, and then oxygen. So oxygen was like, Hey, we, it is possible. You know, it's not just crystal black, they can do this. Then bricks has come out with a slightly different angle and now Zion builder. Um, so does it, there's a new, there's this appetite for, for companies to take this risk and launch something like this in the world of Gutenberg.
So. There's still people bringing out their educators and saying, Hey, I'd be happy with not 0.2% of the entire, still a
Nathan Wrigley: [01:25:35] boatload. Isn't it? Yeah. Chris, I'm sorry. Camera and the saying, I think that Chris has signaled it's. This is Chris's signal that he's been kidnapped. I've been rescuing, you know, if he uses the words that I have not bought this lifetime built, somebody quickly phoned Chris up.
Um, he says the main reason he hasn't bought it is because he needs things like ACF integration, everything else, unless these builders can get big enough for people to make those add-ons. Then they aren't much use to him. It's like a message within a message camera and I'm blinking twice. Is that the signal?
Very nice. Very nice. Um, okay. There we go. Zion builder. Anything about that one? No, not off hand, no fair play. Right. Okay. We'll move on. Last one. I just want to bring to everybody's attention that, um, ninja forms are 10 years old. We were talking about Ws form a minute ago. Now we're onto ninja form 10 years old.
And if you are, if you've signed up to their list this week, apparently they're going to do a bunch of deals during the course of this week. Some of which may be 80% off memberships and ad-ons that they've got, I honestly can't spit. I have no inside knowledge into what that means, but it's already started.
So if you go to ninja forms.com forward slash flash dash sale. You can get yourself on that list. And they also, if you just scroll down at the bottom, they've also partnered with a bunch of other companies. Codeable email octopus, neccess kin stir, give amongst others. And, um, and you can just copy a copy and paste a coupon code on the, on the website and you'll get some cash off, some other plugins as well.
So just thought that was a nice little nice little way of celebrating your birthday. Not only offering cash off your plugin, but organizing it so that you can have cash off other people's stuff as well. Neat. Okay, last one is, well, I'll say last one. It might not be the last one is the pick of the week. I don't know if Paul and Phil have got one.
I do. Um, and it is it's professor Brian Cox, the ever youthful professor, Brian Cox, the man who is far cleverer than you should be allowed to be a far younger age than I am. Um, did you know about Phil that he was in the charts with a band called D ream? He was the guitarist. I think, I didn't know that he was in like the charts and he went on tour around Europe and stuff and all at the same time as like studying to be, you know, studying at university and finally becoming a professor at Manchester university in physics, which as we all know is a really easy thing to do to become a professor of physics at Manchester university.
And, uh, and he puts together these fabulous programs about the cost. And space and stuff, and he's been doing it for a decade and he's got so many programs under his belt. Now that loads of the stuff that you said 10 years ago and over the procedures has changed. So he's going back over his programs and saying, here's what I said.
And here's what true now. And oh my goodness. Some of it is just so mind bending, watch the one about time. It's just like, what, what, how, how can that even vaguely be true? It's absolutely brilliant. So highly recommended if you're not in the UK, you'll have to use a VPN. I think because the BBC, I didn't say that.
I didn't actually say, didn't say do that
Paul Lacey: [01:28:50] just as well. The infinite most
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:52] called the infinite monkey cage and I listened to it every week and it is. Yeah, really good. It's about science, but it's comedy show about science. He's got his comedies comedian sidekick, and it's really good as well. Yeah. So that's my pick of the week
Paul Lacey: [01:29:08] film though.
The tone I can lower the tone here. It's a YouTube channel. It's my favorite YouTube channel at the moment called Viva LA dirt league, the Villa dirt league. And it's kind of, it's good for, you know, nerds, people who are into computer games, video games, X-Box PlayStation, it's just comedy, YouTube channel, uh, really funny.
So check out Veeva Luddite league. Do you
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:30] know what, like, I don't know if it's, I don't know if I'm Phil, you've got kids and I know Paul, you have, but I don't know, like nobody watches the tele in my house anymore. The tele is a conduit to what. Online stuff. So that's like YouTube or Netflix or whatever.
There, there is no hint that we're going to sit down at seven o'clock because this thing is on and YouTube as always been a real, really no interest to me. I kind of watch the stuff that I go and look for, but my kids are, they just love it. And there are people who are making content, you know, like 18, 17 year old kids who were just killing it on YouTube making content.
And I'm looking at it, thinking a kid did that. That's like a TV program. You really, and they love it. I'll tell you, YouTube is a license to print money. Well,
Phil Levine: [01:30:23] this is a great segue to the site that I'll I'll give. Um, this is the site I use episode calendar.com. Um, what you can do is it has, you know, the database.
Thousands tens of thousands of TV shows and all the episodes that have either at aired or when they will be airing and you set up an account and you can track the shows you've watched. So, um, you know, I watch a lot of TV, but a lot of it, I watch either recorded or, you know, on demand. And this allows me to say, wait, what have I actually seen recently?
Or did I miss that episode? Because again, when you watch a lot TV, it's like, oh, I can't keep track of this or
Nathan Wrigley: [01:31:04] an old series. So I got off missed the premise that it keeps track of what you've done. It, it somehow knows that you've logged in and you've watched this episode on YouTube log in and
Phil Levine: [01:31:15] it has a calendar, the upcoming shows or any shows that you say, oh, well, I want to track this.
It then gives you a series of check boxes that you check off each episode as you are.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:31:26] Nice. Very amazing. Yeah. That is really useful. I confess I'm just not really a television consumer. I've just never really been all that into it, but it is it's phenomenal to me, the way that the internet has taken over what felt to me like a totally rock solid business model, regular TV, and it got to worry that people like Brian Cox and his fabulous TV program that I've just mentioned.
My concern is that people will only be watching YouTube and stuff like that, that the kind of the marginal content that has only got a tiny audience will kind of get pushed out. And that's my concern. And I w I feel, um, sorry, I won't I've um, Brian Cox on the tele anymore.
Paul Lacey: [01:32:08] Yeah. Viva dirt league will still be available to you.
Yeah, of course. Okay. And watch that instead. Yeah. Yeah. So
Nathan Wrigley: [01:32:15] spell that for us. Viva dirt league. Is it Viv?
Paul Lacey: [01:32:19] V I V a L a. Eva. And then dirt league, like dirty, dirty mud and league like football league. Yeah, I think there's probably a few people here watching, probably watch this channel as well, but, um, fills, um, fills, uh, fills.
I, uh, suggestion here is really cool. I can see on screen, one of the ones they have suits, and this is really useful because suit's was on Netflix. And, um, but they, it was one of those things where you didn't get the latest season. So when you got up to the thing you're like, right. Suits is, is now on season seven or something, but I'm stuck as end of season five.
I can't watch season six yet. And then you just go away from it. And then three or four years later, you're like, I was somewhere in suits, but I'm too intimidated to go in and try and figure out where I was and figure out what happened. And so if you're kind of keeping track of where you were then. Yeah, that's great.
Especially if that system kind of has like a quick synopsis of, you know, that's the thing sometimes when these shows, uh, you don't see them for like two or three years, you forget what was even going on
Nathan Wrigley: [01:33:25] during the pandemic. There was this plugin that we installed a extension that we installed into Chrome.
I think it was called watch party or something. And it integrated with Netflix and it allowed you to basically have a comments thread, like we've got here, but you're all watching the same program. And somebody has the ultimate control of when you press stop and when you press play and we did it a couple of times, it was really good.
It was really nice, fun, um, loads, a little services like that crop in there. Daughter
Paul Lacey: [01:33:49] was using it for friends watching films together. It was really.
Phil Levine: [01:33:53] Yeah, Disney plus now has that built their platform and I think everybody is doing it, but yeah, no, actually what this also gave me was once I had caught up on all the current, um, shows that I watch, it was like, oh, well, here's this show, you know, that is, you know, from five, 10 years ago that I always wanted to see, I never had time then.
And oh, what, let me start watching that. And so I keep track of that as well on there. So. So, yeah, no, and this is bill. I, you know, this is one of those sites that I think it's built by like a single guy. Um, he talks about the tech technical things. Like it's Ruby on rails. I know is what he uses for building this.
And, you know, it's, you know, I like supporting the small guy when I can on certain
Nathan Wrigley: [01:34:36] things. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. And of course, a YouTube, if they're successful, we'll, uh, you know, I'm sure they'll, they'll probably buy him up for a large amount of money because it gets people to watch more because it figures out what you haven't yet finished watching.
Um, oh, good grief. Oculus. That's the thing that goes on your face, right? The Facebook VR
Paul Lacey: [01:34:57] VR headset,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:34:59] or I don't know if I'm ready for that. No, I'm not ready for that, but, um, anyway, there you go. Uh, that's it. I think we're done that. We've got everything done that we want to do, so. I'm going to say goodbye.
Normally when we end the show, there's this awkward, wavy bit. I, because I don't know how long it's going to take for the stream to, and I have no idea if we're going to have an awkward way, a two
Paul Lacey: [01:35:20] second wave. So we don't just do a micro second wave, then hit the button and see what
Nathan Wrigley: [01:35:26] happens. Okay. So if we all wave right, and we'll start now and we'll go one, two, and I'll hit.