This Week in WordPress #171

Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 171 entitled. We love podcasts. It was recorded on Monday the 12th of July, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'll be joined by Paul Lacey, my cohost, and also this week by Cami McNamara and REM coast of Reese. There's always so much to talk about in the WordPress space.
And this week is no different. We start off by talking about WordPress block plugin building just in Tagalog, wrote a piece on WP Tavern. We then go on to the fact that cast OSS, which is a podcast platform has received nearly three quarters of a million dollars to help them enable private podcasting.
From there we go on to the block-based widgets editor because David McCann has made a video about that. Then beaver builder, 2.5 entitled Contra has had a really big update with some lovely new features. WP rocket's on version 3.9. They're deferring, JavaScript and CSS, some big gains there. And we get to talk about the fact that WP builds did a webinar last week about Ws form.
And this week has one with Leslie Sim from newsletter glue, and finally, to round it off. What about Richard Brunson flying into space in his own spaceship? It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress this week in WordPress was brought to you by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time, then you AB split test plugin for WordPress.
So we'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything. Yeah. Buttons images, headers rows, anything. And the best part is that it works with element or beaver builder and the WordPress block editor, go check it out and get a free [email protected].
I'm going to say hello a lot of times because the audio is always really terrible for the first eight or nine seconds. So that's probably about enough hellos from me. It is this weekend, WordPress episode, number 1 7 1, and I have got a new monitor and I've just realized that I'm never going to be looking in the right direction.
So I'm going to be all over here. I've no idea where I'm supposed to look. I should probably have moved that. Thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. I'd really appreciate it. If you fancy sharing it just, we're going to be talking and introducing one another. Why not flick open the Twitter or Facebook and share WP builds.com forward slash alive.
You can see we've got a lovely panel of people here today as well. Paul Lacey is with me. Thank you for joining us again, Paul. And it's all right with you. I'm going to hand it over and you can introduce today's marvelous guests.
Paul Lacey: [00:02:50] Cool. What's funny for me, Nathan is for me this new monitor you've got, you're basically looking at me.
I don't know if we're all in the same position or
Nathan Wrigley: [00:02:59] that's true. Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:03:03] Directly diagonally towards me. So I feel like I'm under pressure here. Then you keep the moment. There we
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:09] go. That's it. I figured it
Paul Lacey: [00:03:11] out. There we go. That's cool. Yeah, it's so great to be back this week and I just want you to introduce the guests actually. So first of all, first time on the show we have Cami who is the owner and designer at web site design, which is located in Seattle.
And also you are a, the in fact you're the original GoDaddy pro ambassador, the first one, so original and best, and you're located in Seattle and also. I know it's from Chris in your Twitter bio. You're a big Pearl jam fan. So I think there's some crossover there. Cause Paul Gemma from Seattle. Can we, did you ever go see,
Cami MacNamara: [00:03:51] of course then I actually went through a Thanksgiving day buffet line with Eddie Vetter in 1991.
So
Paul Lacey: [00:04:00] I literally just, I was just like,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:04] That's it Rimkus is going
Paul Lacey: [00:04:07] to be upset about this.
Remkus de Vries: [00:04:09] You want to keep it light? I thought we were going
Paul Lacey: [00:04:11] to have, yeah. Well, let's, let's briefly introduce you around because in that case, so you are a WordPress veteran, web performance officiality and you're also the co-founder of WordCamp.
Netherlands. Thank you for that. And woke up WordCamp Europe as well, WordCamp organizer and aspiring strong man. Look at his arms and a nut and Pearl jam fan as well. Jealous Pearl jam fan. Also, you worked for surf bolts, which is next level high performance managed hosting, which last time I called it server bolt.
But if you do go to the server, bolt.com, something fun quite happens, actually. So go to the real website. Is it surf belt.com? It is good. I got it right this time then, but if you do go to serve about.com, just check it out. It's fun.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:57] Oh, okay. That's intriguing. I don't have time to do that right now, but yeah.
Okay. I'll try that later. So yeah. Thank you Ram, Chris for joining us. Thank you, Cammy. And obviously thank you, Paul. Yeah,
Paul Lacey: [00:05:07] one of the things donation, obviously here in England, we had a huge night last night and the whole country was more or less on the edge of the sofa, not the whole, most of it, with the exciting news that just in Tadlock has built his first WordPress block.
Very nice. Nicely done. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:30] That was clever. I like the way you got
Paul Lacey: [00:05:31] a few hours planning that one knife and that's the
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:34] next level of bridging. Yeah, that's good. There was a football match here last night, but I was telling REMCOs just before we started the show that I don't know. I'm totally happy with the outcome.

Paul Lacey: [00:05:45] You know, the best thing when
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:48] I just people are really into their football and it just has never really helped with me. Uh, commiserations, if you took that badly, but anyway, there you go. Let's get onto some WordPress news. Shall we? This is our website. It's a WP. Do you know what I nearly introduces wordpress.com.
I'm getting a bit of my station. The this is WP builds.com, which is not a chromium.
Yeah. That's where I want to be. WP belts.com. If you fancy staying in touch with what we do and the episodes that we produce and so on and so forth, there's a box on the header of the home page and you can subscribe there. That's probably the best way to keep in touch, but we produce episodes like this each and every week.
And like I say, go and share it on Twitter now. If you want to put your comments in on today's show that would be absolutely lovely, but little quick thing, if you're going to do that, you'll need, and you're in the Facebook group, you will actually need to go to chat.restream.io forward slash Facebook or FB.
I should say, otherwise you will remain anonymous and we won't know who you are, which may be the way you want it to be. That's fine. But Lee, Matthew Jackson doesn't want to remain anonymous. He's clicked that link and he says, Hey folks, great to see another awesome lineup. That's nice of you. Thank you, Lee.
Okay, so let's get on with this week's WordPress news. We've got first stop. Got a piece over on WP Tavern. I don't know if any of you three are into building your own blocks, but Justin, this week, whilst it was the 4th of July celebrations, Justin, if you follow him. Twitter or anything like that, just in posts, quite a lot of pictures of cats.
He's really got lots of cats and he takes them, I think, quite seriously, there's lots of pictures of cats and he's treating them really well. And one of the things that he does on the 4th of July is he locks them inside, puts on some background, ambient noise and make sure that they don't freak out cause there's fireworks everywhere.
And so he was doing that this week and got a bit fed up and decided dang it. I'm just going to go and write myself a block. And so he did. And this piece really, aimed at developers was trying to express just how easy he had found it. He found that the documentation was brilliant, but also annoying.
There's a bit of a dichotomy there, but he ended up in a, just a matter of hours putting together a block, which you can see on the screen. And basically it's a little. Single use block. It does breadcrumbs inside of a block. So it tells you where you are within the website. They then goes on to describe how to use lots of little prebuilt components to, to add some fun to it.
So he was able to add little toggles for whether you wanted it to be on or off. He was able to add colors so that you could change the background color and the color of the text and so on and so forth. And he was obviously, he's got a lot of heritage doing this kind of stuff, but he said, it took him a couple of hours and he's now up and running.
Essentially, this piece is a bit of a Clarion call. Get on if you are in this space, and this is something that you are capable of, or even if you feel that you might be on the cusp of being capable of it. Go and read the documentation and let's make the block ecosystem bigger and better than it already is.
So there's me summing it up. I don't know if anybody has anything to say about that, but if you do, now's the time, anybody free for all go for it.
Remkus de Vries: [00:09:12] Um, do you know what I think it's building a block I think it's a good exercise to do if you're into that sort of thing. I don't think it's necessarily the best example of look how easy this is, if it comes from Justin.
I also think that the indication that it already took him a couple of hours, it sounds long especially considering having built blocks myself with ACF, which is. Not very complex ones, but if you have existing PHP code, it's relatively straightforward to make it do what you want it to do.
Certainly didn't cost me hours. And ACF, uh, for me still solves it nicer and better, I would say really solid documentation. So I, I don't know what the message is here if I'm honest.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:19] Yeah. I think w was, I don't know what the, I don't know if there's just like a general sense that people are not doing this as quickly as one might have hoped.
I think maybe there was an expectation by now that we would be almost flooded with a whole variety of blocks. And it almost seems like from my perspective, the block creators. Gone into building block packs. So they've gone for the approach of we're going to build a whole ton of blocks and sell them as a, as an individual, a one-off price and you get 58 different blocks.
That seems to be a really popular way of doing it. So I don't know. Yeah. Not quite sure anything can Paul
Cami MacNamara: [00:10:55] Well, I I'm in the beaver builder and I'm using that to build the websites well, I, I hear two hours to build it. I think that's a long time too. I'm somebody who's building websites for directly to customers.
And if I have to spend two hours developing one little thing like that, it would really not be advantageous for me. Correct. So I, I see the people building a whole and selling whole packet. So I have choices when I'm doing that, but it doesn't make me want to sit down and try myself at this point.
Paul Lacey: [00:11:34] Hm. Uh, the the thing I would have to say about it is just in response, I think that first of all, I would also use ACF to build blogs because I've got no JavaScript skills whatsoever. Literally I'm just like cut paste and hope for the best sort of thing. And and if I ever have a problem with something in JavaScript, I usually had to something like Fiverr and hope that someone can help me there, but it's very rare that I need help with that.
So I've got no aspirations that I'll ever create a block in the correct proper way that you're supposed to do it. And I think that the way that ACF does it is call for someone like me that isn't creating a product. I think what Justin's doing in this article is as usual, he's jumping head first in with the block stuff.
Cause he's really interested to explore it, almost like a hobby to a certain extent. But I think what he's saying is that. It's taken him two and a half hours to create a product, basically. What is saying, like, it's not something that's going to sell. It's not something that's probably even going to release because obviously almost everyone uses an SEO plugin and they all come with a block for breadcrumbs, but he was, he's probably just wondering how, how difficult is it to create that functionality and have it as a drag of backlog and it's taken him two and a half hours and he's done it.
I think, um, Justin's quite a big fan of the whole block experience. He tries to stay to, to give both sides of the argument as well. But I think he's always going to be on the glass half full side of things because he's interested in it. And for me, I'm just not a fan of blocks, rarely. I'm a beaver builder person as well.
There's some other things, even today that we're going to talk about that kind of keep writing off my interesting blogs for the moment, but maybe it will come back, but I'm certainly not going to be creating any block plugins, but for someone who has just been skills, what, in a way this article to me is simply saying is if you've got the skills, there is an opportunity at the moment to reinvent things we already had and make a product that might sell or make a name for yourself.
So get on board now and do it. They're reinventing things that already exist. That's
Remkus de Vries: [00:14:00] not what I got from the article.
Paul Lacey: [00:14:02] I didn't read it in full,
Remkus de Vries: [00:14:06] full disclosure. I hear what you're saying. Paul it's um, I don't know the tone of voice of the Tavern messages in in, in, in, in total, to be honest, I don't know who the intended audiences I don't know if we're tying to sell those who are currently not on board by starting into block development.
I don't think this is the selling uh, the best selling argument. I don't think it is.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:42] It's not working for you. Yeah,
Remkus de Vries: [00:14:43] no. And, and, and, and I'm not just basing this on my own opinion because that's, and is one and whatever, but I, I keep hearing the same thing. If there are third parties out there that solve this particular problem better you have Genesis blocks which allows you to do with on the Genesis framework, creator, create your own blocks with with, uh, with a UI.
You have ACF. If you want to dive in a little bit deeper, And then you have full native. In my opinion, it should be as easy as you can think of full native. And then, if you really want something tough, there's extra routes, but it's inverted in my opinion, which then makes it a very hard argument to make like Cami says, if you're in the beaver builder community, and that's your preferred way of working, you don't care.
And I, I understand I I've built, plenty of sites with beaver builder. I happen to switch from BeaverBuilder to using native Gutenberg blogs, because I liked that way of working. If I can minimize my overhead, I will. And that will have my that's a higher priority than having convenience, but the whole, we build something and then let's just see how.
People start using it. Come on. It's been two and a half years.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:11] Yeah. That's a really good point. It has been a long time. Hasn't it? And we're just beginning to push these things out. Yeah. That's a, that's an interesting point.
Paul Lacey: [00:16:19] And what if, what Ram Costa said totally, to be honest in terms of uh, we we've built this thing and then there's this kind of narrative that has caught on for out the world of WordPress that you have to get on board with this because it is the future.
And what I haven't seen is any evidence that it is the future, because we can't, we don't know what the future is and we are reinventing things that have already existed. And yeah,
Remkus de Vries: [00:16:50] in an ideal world, I would like to think that Gutenberg blocks is the base and BeaverBuilder would then be an extending that, or elementary will tend to be extending that in a radical way, if you need to have it in a radical way.
But I, I like the whole prioritization of things that were built inside of the Gutenberg project where two and a half years in. I think we've seen very limited effort on performance for instance, and where Chris 5.8 will actually bring the first two small things that help in actual performance on the, what is being loaded on the front end side of things like there's this huge push for.
And we'll pick that topic later. Core vitals. Why aren't we seeing that very prominently in this project? Why aren't we seeing developer focus way more prominent? I don't, I just don't, I don't get it. I don't get it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:48] Yeah. Yeah. It is a really interesting point, Paul and I seem to be slightly different sides of the same coin.
I'm bullish on Guttenberg just because I really don't appear to need any reason to be bullish about it. Whereas Paul's much more kind of I'll be, I'll be bullish about it when I've got some solid
Paul Lacey: [00:18:09] proof. Yeah. I'm in the trenches though. You know what I mean, Comey, we make websites for people and we wait in something that is really, I'm speaking for you here.
Comey, I'm shaming what I'm thinking, but at the moment there's a number of things that aren't solved and weren't, don't look like there'll be solved in a long time. And we'll come on to a few things where you can see people are solving some of these problems, but I'm not prepared to jump on board of them because.
I need to see that's a long-term product that I would buy into that would solve that problem with the Gutenberg editor. If the book Gutenberg editor, wasn't committed to solving it itself. So I'm still okay. Excited that it's a way, but a text editor than the classic editor. Yeah,
Cami MacNamara: [00:19:03] definitely.
Cool. It seems like it's heading in the right direction, but logistically when you're building websites for people, you have to be able to implement it properly. And my worry about jumping over is that it's going to slow down my process. And you know, right now the process that I have set up works for me.
You know, I fully intend to just make a switch when the time comes, but I just don't feel like it's there yet.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:35] A really good point. Yeah. Yeah. And Paul, what point well made about you actually building client websites? And if it's, if you can shave, I don't know, an hour, two hours, seven hours off a website builder.
It just makes no sense to not, to shave that time off with the tools that you've got so far. Yeah. It's all very well having a bit of time, actually, it is quite interesting. Cause Justin does make that point right at the top. He full disclosure. He says something along the lines of, I've got lots of time now because I'm working as a journalist for WP Tavern.
So not only am I I've got some time to play with these, but also in a sense, this is what I do. Maybe, maybe the likes of you, Paul, and you Cami, you just simply don't have, but nice cause dropping in the ACF option and the Genesis option. Is it still called those it's still called Genesis blocks.
That's now totally free, right? There's no, no payment paywall on that at all. I think. Correct? Yeah. Okay. Okay. REMCOs just one quick thing. I think we're getting. Everybody's audio going round your system and coming out a little bit. I can see on my audio that when we're speaking with, it's coming back looping back through yours.
I don't know if it's possible
Paul Lacey: [00:20:46] to, we just turn us down a little bit at your end. Yeah. That might just
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:53] be not a big deal, but if you can. It's more when we're talking and I'm talking and I don't see anything. Yeah. Let's just say it's better now.
Paul Lacey: [00:21:03] It was better. It's like a kind of wobbly noise constantly in the background.
It wasn't major, but I think it's gone now, okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:10] Thank you for that room cost. The next one, then let's talk about something slightly different. This is something that is maybe I'm the only one amongst the four of us. That's going to care about this, but this is something that I really I'm keen to talk about.
This is castoffs. If you ever listened to a, the WP belts podcast, we push all of our podcast content through castoffs. Let's say it's a SAS platform that allows you to create podcast, audio tracks, but they also have a WordPress plugin and put simply you don't need to have a third-party solution.
You can do everything to do with your podcast inside your WordPress install. So we were talking a minute ago about saving time. This simply saves time. If you didn't have a WordPress website that might be a different kettle of fish, but obviously I do. And they've received three quarters of a million dollars from automatic.
Now it says on the site here Yoast, but I think Rimkus in a minute will tell us it's not Yoast. It might be a different,
Remkus de Vries: [00:22:13] it might still be Yoast SEO as the company Yost as a company, but uh, Yoast and Marika is what I have understood to be the investors and.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:27] So some private, perhaps some private money on the outside side as well, but yeah, no.
Okay. But automatic, certainly. And some configuration of Yoast or Maricka and the, the intention here is to help them expand their private podcasting offer. So private podcasting is, it's, I guess it's a little bit like a membership site in that you can create a podcast, but you can limit those people who can consume it.
And that to me is exactly the opposite of what I want to achieve. If I create a podcast episode, I would like every single person on earth to listen to it. But, um, but, but the intention. You know, this
Paul Lacey: [00:23:18] study would only come if that was
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:21] okay. But the, the, I hadn't really thought that podcast private podcasting would really have much of an audience or a purpose, but then reading through this, it became clear to me that maybe it doesn't, it's not something that I would ever have assumed would happen.
But the idea being that maybe if you're in part of a big organization and rather having the daily briefing, somebody just records a podcast, uploads it onto the post. It goes into your your CRM based inside of WordPress or something. And it's like almost like the daily briefing done for you. Anyway, this is quite a lot of money and I'm really intrigued as to why automatic putting that money here strikes me.
If you watch the news and you keep your ear to the ground in the technology space, you're probably aware that podcasting a during the pandemic, lots of people became podcasters because they were literally looking for outlets. So that, that went through the roof. People actually making content, but the audience didn't increase.
But apparently now it is now that people are getting back into their cars and doing their commutes again, that's when people traditionally listen to podcasts, not entirely but often. And so the audience has now started to pick up. So we've got this double whammy creation is happening much more. The audience is picking up.
So it's all for the good, but I'm assuming the automatic would like a slice of this pie. On the.com site. They've got it all sealed up. You can do podcasting. If you pay the subscription to.com, it's all taken care of, but in the.org side, I don't know what the finger in the pie will be for automatic, but now they're, they've obviously got some sort of skin in the game with podcasting, which I just think is really interesting.
Again, the floor is open, anybody interrupt,
Paul Lacey: [00:25:17] I can start. So first of all, I really like castoffs as a product. I think it's really good. I was using it just the other week and went through the whole onboarding process and everything how easy it was to set up and get listed in the different directories and all that kind of thing.
Great. Really good. Also super cool that you know, you can, if you're just a podcaster and you just want a simple solution, you can actually go to wordpress.com. Like you said, Nathan, and have almost everything taken care of. And the onboard. I've never tried that, that route, but I imagine the onboarding is pretty simple.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:55] Yeah. They basically got a block. You just drag in the podcast block and it just takes care of it.
Paul Lacey: [00:26:01] I mean, you this was, this one is definitely, you could come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories about this, uh, this one. And most of them are probably true. Tricky, probably true. But I mean the, the thing that this is, is that, automatic and wordpress.com have this podcast platform within their platform.
And both of these platforms want to get into this private podcasting and automatic as throwing some money at cost us to do the work, in my opinion, and then to share the results and share the resource. And as a, as an end user, that's going to be great news for anyone who wants to solve. So that's great news for them also.
So that's, that's kinda like the obvious fit. We have some times on the show, Matt Madeira, who works for and and he's also been really critical of automatic in the past and wordpress.com and the founder Milan wagon, which has been really useful actually, because then Matt Mullen workers had interviews with Matt Madeira and they've had discussions there's still, in my opinion, loads more that the two of them could thrash out in a longer conversation.
And so do some funny it was, it was some people making some funny kind of conspiracy theories like, oh, it's, actually that was the first thing I fought just as, almost like a joke inside my own head. Oh, that will shut Matt Madeira ourselves. He won't be allowed to say anything bad about automatic anymore because his boss was just, had a lot of money from them.
But I doubt that's the situation as well. I think that That it's the automatic one would never put that in place. And that Matt Madeira will probably continue to say what he thinks about the whole situation and all that does is improve things through communication. Anyway, so there's another conspiracy theory.
And then the one that, automatic is controlling the whole project, and there's building the block editor really for its own product, wordpress.com, which again is probably partly true, but here's the thing. So anyone can get involved in WordPress, right? So you can get involved in influence how it goes, which means automatic can get involved in WordPress as much as they want and throw resources at it.
And as a result, they will be able to influence it more. And so sometimes we think automatics control thing. We've got Matt Mullenweg, but whoever froze the most resource at the WordPress project influences it the most. It seems. And that's my look on it. This is just the nature of the environment of the entire project.
It's just how it's set up. So that's all I've got to say. And the other thing, congratulations to cast us for the investment round, because a great product. And I'm sure you're going to do some really good things with that cash and good luck in the future,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:59] Kemi, anything or REMCOs anything?
Cami MacNamara: [00:29:02] Well, I will just say that like from the big company viewpoint, I see where this would be incredibly useful for a company like GoDaddy that has internal channels and ways to reach there.
They're always trying to reach their own employees and stuff like that. And then on my side as a small business owner, I have a little Facebook group with about a hundred designers that are friends of mine, and this would be a great way for me to. Attempt to podcast without having to really go out there and do it and try it with just my small group at first.
So I think it's a great idea.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:39] Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. anything
Remkus de Vries: [00:29:43] I think I concur with what pulse I think it's interesting from many different points of views of wanting to have an influence on where this is going. I think we are also looking at just very lay of how this technology can actually be used.
I think there's way more possibilities and just what we're doing right now. And then internally, I think there's a lot of movement towards communities, turning on audio for whatever reason. And I suspect that market is going to grow rapidly. For the simple reason is that there is a lot of so anything you publish on a platform that's owned by someone else is going to be met with some sort of restriction, right?
There's stuff you can talk about. There's stuff you can limitedly talk about. However, if that self published, you can do whatever you want. There's no no worry of having to have your stuff censored. And I think with what we're seeing now is that the move towards podcasts or audio uh, information.
Is probably just at the cusp of something really big. I think if the last 18 months have shown us anything, then the need for connection is become bigger and bigger. Um, um, you uh, a website only appeals to the visual component. You need auditory as well. So I think this is long overdue and I totally get by both, um, Yoast and Marika and automatic, invested in this for various
reasons.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:41] It's weird, you going back like 10 years before podcasting was the big thing that it now is honestly, I'd have put no money on audio becoming a thing. I would have thought, no, it's all going to be video. It'll probably be AR AI, sorry at AR and all of that kind of stuff. And yet here we are where it's just growing exponentially.
The only reason I can think that may be. A bunch of content creators are producing really great content. Some of the podcasts out there just sound like really expensively, carefully made. There's some private podcasts is what I mean by that is people who are just doing it by themselves for themselves.
We've managed to create breathtakingly, cool content, eat every bit as good as what I would listen to on radio, but also the fact that people are able to just get on with other stuff. I regularly just carry on with what I'm doing. Got my podcasts in my ears. Yeah.
Remkus de Vries: [00:32:45] See what I mean with, if we're visually entertained, we can't do anything else.
If we're auditory entertained, we can do stuff we see.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:56] And not only that, you can be instructed to do stuff from the actual, there's lots of recipe podcasts, and I would have thought no way that needs to be, that needs to be visual. You need to see how you just now chop the, now do this and do that.
And it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. And it's growing. Nobody can deny it. And so I think it's very clever to get your finger in this pie again. Thank you, Paul. I didn't say well done to Craig. Actually, Craig was one of the very first people we had on the WP builds podcast. I think he was like episode 14 or something like that.
And he started this company. When there was no light at the end of the tunnel, it was just a go, he was just trying something and he stopped with it and stuck with it. And now he's reaping the rewards. And I think they're, they've grown from I think, seven to 13 people. And so Bravo well-done and I'm really happy to be a customer.
Paul Lacey: [00:33:49] Just say I'm enjoying reading free to comments. So thank you everybody. Who's commenting at the moment while we're talking about this. One more thing, I'll just say I'm really glad that these two platforms are, collaborate in any way. I would much rather these two platforms be the kind of winners than the recent news that we heard about Facebook offering a platform now.
So there is a, there's an upcoming whether it's really so not yet Facebook is getting into podcasting because guess what? Audio is one of the most trusted media types. We still trust what we hear on the radio. We still trust what we tend to hear on podcasts. We don't really trust what we read in the newspapers or on the internet or on the TV these days.
So audio is one of the last ones that we trust. Facebook can see that it's getting involved. And guess what, if you want to sign up to use Facebook's platform, you have to greet agree that they can reuse your content and mash it up. So what will happen if people realize that they think, oh, Facebook is the way I should go.
That's the easiest way to do it. As opposed to even wordpress.com or cast us doing it themselves, or another hosted independent platform as such. Then basically what we'll have is mashup podcasts that are almost like a kind of montage of opinion, that doesn't work in context, but allows people to, or companies or big tech or whatever to create narratives that simply aren't true, which is going to be ridiculously dangerous in politics and religion and all of a divisive stuff.
And. That's a really good point. I think we've got to, podcasts as much as possible support that support people on their own platforms so they can do what they want. And no one can reuse their content support
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:37] podcast. Everybody
Paul Lacey: [00:35:39] give them money.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:42] Here's the other thing about podcasting is the barrier to entry is seriously low.
You really don't need any equipment. You need a phone and an idea. And in this case you need somewhere to put the audio, which castoffs does for you. You don't need clever audio equipment. You just need a piece of wood. Yeah. It would be great to have all that, but there's no, you don't need editing software.
You don't need a great deal of skills. There's lots of free software or Udacity cough done. What happened this week? Sorry, go on.
Remkus de Vries: [00:36:13] I just wanted to say the, one of the comments that just came in maybe nice to highlight Jordan Hayne, Sam. I don't watch normal TV at all. All my information comes from podcasts, YouTube.
I think that that's exactly what it is. We have a choice now to consume whatever we want, wherever we want, how we want it. Yeah. And a lot of that for us, at least Nathan and I discussed this briefly before the show, I don't watch TV. I don't care for TV nor have I, I haven't had proper TV in almost 20 years now.
But I do consume a lot of information in just very different ways than TV. And I think maybe I think maybe the, the rest is catching up to this idea. As in, I don't really want to watch this. I don't really want to, I don't care for this radio show. I don't care for this TV show. Let me just choose what I like to hear.
And podcast is a wonderful example for that. There's a lot of comments in saying driving and learning. Yeah. That's what I'm doing.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:22] Yeah. Yeah. And the nice thing as well is you don't need a connection. If you've got a podcast player basically, and you set it up, which is the default in most cases and you subscribe, I think they start beginning to call it follow more than subscribe, but if you subscribe or follow a particular podcast, then it will just download the latest episode as it comes in, wherever there's a signal.
You know, you could be in the middle of absolutely nowhere and you've got content ready to go. And there's a couple that Paul and I listened to, which has got nothing to do with WordPress. And we, we actually message each other quite frequently to say, have you seen the latest episode is out? And we, neither of us even listened to it, but there's actual, genuine excitement.
Cause the latest episode is out, but I just love getting on with other stuff at the same time walking, I basically don't walk anywhere by myself now, if I'm going to the shop, even if it's like a three minute round trip, I'll still put a podcast on because during that three minutes I could find some.
Chestnut of what I want. Yeah. Thank you for all the comments. Jordan's reflecting that he said, you as room cassette, he doesn't watch TV. I'm the same as Ram because we don't have an aerial. So we can't get regular tele, we've got the tele, but it's connected to like the BBCI player and the internet and things.
And then. Oh, hi, Phil. There we go. That's nice to Phil Levine. The important thing is knowing the source. Yeah, that's a good point. I suspect we'll see, there'll be a plethora of really bad content, but the great thing is you can just unsubscribe and you never hear from them again, which is lovely.
I haven't mentioned
Cami MacNamara: [00:38:58] that I have a podcast that I love that helps me sleep better at night. So there's all of these podcasts with people that have like voices that just put you out. And it's an archive podcast, but it's called game of drones and it's boring recaps of game of Thrones. And even if I have a lot on my mind and I'm one of those people, I've got so many irons in the fire with work, I will lay down to go to sleep and I can't sleep because I'm thinking about work.
And my game of drones podcast just puts me out.
Remkus de Vries: [00:39:31] Awesome example. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:34] I'm listening to what at the moment, which is, it's a 10 part series and it's all about how the, what is the German band who did the scorpions who did wind of change. It's entirely possible that song was paid for and written by the CIA to encourage the downfall of the the former Soviet union.
It's fascinating and hours of content. It's not, we could
Remkus de Vries: [00:40:07] do one boring WordPress news.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:10] We've done that episode 171 of boring. There's no change. That's very kind of the Facebook user who is anonymous. If you click on the link in the group post at the top, there's a Facebook link to restream. And if you click on that, we'll know who you are, but you might like to remain anonymous.
And Cameron, thank you for joining us again. I listened to welcome to Nightvale to help me sleep. My one of the most popular formats is apparently like real crime. Just stories about people solving crimes. It's like the detective story, but over on the audio side, and there are hundreds of those, I'm not sure it's called real crime.
I'm sure there's a, there's an actual word for it, but it's okay. Say it again. Can we use criminal? Okay.
Remkus de Vries: [00:41:02] Yep. I'm following and interesting one called I think it's called, I don't even know what it's called. It's called. I think it's called dissect. And he dissects music like, oh, I, I got hooked um, I think by a Kanye west whatever the long title of his album was, I keep forgetting it, but it's the whole, how that album came to be, and it's so diverse and so brilliant in what he does.
And he had dissected every single bit of it, like from loop to idea to concept everything was explained. I'm like, yeah. Wow. We can talk for 30 minutes for. About three minutes of a song,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:47] have you REMCOs totally going off piece. Have you ever come across the YouTube channel by a guy called Rick, but you have to, I have not.
I'll send you, you were linked when we finish. If we remember he does the exact same thing, but with YouTube it's Rick Beato B E a T O and he spends hours dissecting songs and he's awesome. Brilliant. And I enjoy that kind of stuff. Wow. Okay. So we've gone down a total rabbit hole of podcasting.
Does anybody have anything else to add to that or shall we move on? I'm enjoying this conversation. It's right up my street. Okay. Let us move on to something a bit different. I just wanted to Paul, I don't know because of the time, I don't know if you want it to go into this piece in depth, but I did want to just mention somebody who's in our Facebook group and often contributes really great content about all sorts of things.
Often page builders it's a piece by David McCann. He's shot a YouTube video called the block based widgets editor and with a regret that I didn't actually have time to watch it, but because I like him so much, I just want you to give him a bit of a plug. Paul, was there anything you, did you get a chance to see it or should we.
I've not watched it
Paul Lacey: [00:42:59] again cause it's, blocks and it's just not my thing. But David, uh, McCann's Facebook group I'm not in too many Facebook groups anymore, but David McCann has one called dynamic WordPress
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:11] that with a C or a
Paul Lacey: [00:43:12] K C the old product dynamic WordPress. And it's my favorite Facebook group.
I know it's one of the only ones I actually comment in because it's just feels so relevant to me, all the stuff that's going to be talked about in there. So well done David McCann for what is probably, even though none of us watched it a really good video because we know all his previous ones are really, that
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:37] was it.
It was on the strength of that. That it was a bit like we were saying about podcasts later, earlier. Sorry you you know, once you've seen a few pieces of content by a predictor. Person, you get to trust that they're going to put out something good. It's 17 minutes long. It's called the block-based widgets editor and David McCann is the author.
So if that's your bag, go and give him a thumbs up. All right. This one is very much in kameez and Paul's wheelhouse. I think beaver builder has got a new update. I'm going to say nothing more. I'm just going to let Paul wander into this one.
Paul Lacey: [00:44:13] Yeah. This is version 2.5. And most of the people who know about this release are pretty excited about it.
There is a bunch of things that people have wanted for a long time, and those are some major improvements to existing modules. So what a couple of those, just to highlight the pricing table. So there were add-on packs that have pricing table modules and they have pricing table modules because people found that the core one for a long time.
Do everything they needed it to do. And even those add-ons had things that it didn't always do. Things like be able to switch between monthly and yearly on a pricing table is something that people were using hacks to do. We've using tubs and then two pricing tables in each of those, but they've completely rewrite the pricing table and it works really well.
One of the big updates as well on an existing model. Again, it's the menu module. So that was because I work with BeaverBuilder as in they pay me to, to work with them. And one of the things that I was doing recently are some work on the next version of beaver Thema. And that was to build for header templates and for photo templates.
And what I found in doing it is that if you couldn't use any code, which was one we wanted to do, we wanted to make sure people could create headers on photos with not having to use any code that the existing menu module had problems with it that you just couldn't, you couldn't do it basically. You couldn't have a mobile responsive header and footer without using some code.
So they do already got some plans. Me building out those menus, everything came out in the wash as to what was missing for the, for that module to basically be as perfect as it can in the BeaverBuilder way, which is the BeaverBuilder weight tends to be get the person to the point where they can then customize in their own way, rather than having absolutely everything in the user interface.
But probably one of the nicest updates on this particular plugin update is the, what's it called? The. Let me just check, what is
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:29] this thing here? Isn't it. Top of the outline panel.
Paul Lacey: [00:46:33] So this is something that was the block editor has to a certain extent as a visual tool. And I think that element, or has something like this and oxygen has something like this and what it is for anyone who's not looking at the screen is like a tree structured view of your entire page.
So all the rows or the columns or the modules, and you can drag them around in this panel on the side, rather than for instance, let's say you want to drag something right at the bottom of the page to the top of the page, it's complicated. And sometimes you can't even find if you've got a very complicated page, you're like, where is that module?
Because you made it semi invisible and you can find things easy and move them around. I'm also recently been building out some templates for a beaver builder templates for the, that might be coming out in this release and also some templates for their other plugin called assistant pro. And I was using the Bita and the alphas all of the time.
And this particular outline view was just such a massive time saver. They're also been focusing on performance type things as well. And it's just a massive release. So if anyone is using beaver builder and then it's worth going in to have a look when this comes out to see what's new and definitely read the release post because you'll see everything that's in there.
And there's a lot of time savers in there for developers and then users and freelancer agency types like me. Um, well done to the team. I've seen them doing it from semi inside of the team and they don't even want to talk about version 2.6. I tried to talk to them about 2.6. They're just like, let's get this version out and super stable, which is what they always do.
It always comes out and it works straight away, which is one of the reasons product.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:24] Can I ask you a question, Paul, if so the structure again, if you can see it on the screen, you'll see it's nested. So you've got, the parents are indented and then child items are indented and then more indented. If you grab, let's say a parent, one of the lowest level elements, can you drag and take the children with
Paul Lacey: [00:48:41] it?
You can move everything around. You can. When I was using this for the templates there, wasn't the ability to drag and drop things around. And then what they BeaverBuilder release these plugins out to people who want to beat her and alpha test it. And a lot of feedback came back saying it's nice and useful, but we really want to be able to drag things around and then they've made that possible.
Yup, exactly. Yeah. I think I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure if you drag a parent, the children come with it. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:11] Okay. Cami, I'm going to sling this in your direction if you will.
Cami MacNamara: [00:49:15] Yeah. I am super excited about this because you know, Paul said, sometimes you just are lost in your, in your control panel, working on everything in the dashboard and the ability to see that outline is going to make a huge difference.
And then I, I also, in addition to beaver builder started using the page builder cloud. And so I, in my head right now, I'm wondering, I hope all of that is visible there too, because then as I'm looking through all of my design library, I'll be able to just take a quick look, look without having to dive directly into that.
But I love beaver builder. I love everything they've done. I had the opportunity to meet Robbie at one of the word camps that I was at. And I'm just so grateful to have something that allows me to work in such a fast way. And it also allows me to give the client something. So everything I see here is something that will also help the client when they're managing their own website.
So I just think of the lay of the land view that they're going to give everyone. And it's just going to be huge. Huge class.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:32] Um, Cami, the, the assistant plugin that Paul mentioned in the very near future, they go purported, correct me if I'm wrong. In the very near future, they're going to take on a lot of the heavy lifting that your page builder cloud has.
So you'll be able to sync everything back and forwards. And I would imagine that it would play nicely with their own product in terms of this panel that we've just been mentioning. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Remco so I don't know if this is your bag or not.
Remkus de Vries: [00:51:06] A little bit, anytime a product that is hugely um, effective in solving a problem also then finds a way to improve itself and make it faster and more performance.
I'm all for that. I like the outline, so Gutenberg has the same outline, but it doesn't allow for the. Moving around. Not, there's an interesting thing. I'd love to see ported back to
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:35] WordPress and that's coming. I think that's coming in a, in a fairly, in fairly short order. That's certainly been mentioned as a yeah, that would be nice.
Yeah.
Remkus de Vries: [00:51:46] We recently, published an article which had close to 10,000 words on how to speed up Wil commerce. And you can imagine there's a whole bunch of hierarchical stuff happening from top to bottom. Having that outline is a huge time saver. Where did I do that? Where is that? And especially if it's so long that the outline you click on it, it doesn't even fit in the screen, you need it.
So yeah, I, I think that's a great move.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:20] Yeah, it's, it's kind looking at what the commercial rivals are doing and. Using that I echo Paul's thoughts. They're very thoughtful bunch of guys aren't they? And they they only produce stuff which works when it first comes out, which is nice.
Paul Lacey: [00:52:37] Fortunate in a way to, sorry, go ahead.
Cami MacNamara: [00:52:40] Yeah. Paul, I have a quick question for you, as I'm thinking about this outline, do you know that it's a global element is moved if it moves it globally?
Paul Lacey: [00:52:49] Uh, no. Cause I didn't really use the global elements, but that we should talk about after and figure out specifically what that would look like.
And
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:02] do you mean you've got nested child elements inside of a global element,
Paul Lacey: [00:53:07] like
Cami MacNamara: [00:53:08] a global room, the femur as well. You know, you've saved a template for a page and you've got the, your outline and you move something. Is it going to affect everything globally? If that element has been saved as a global module.
Paul Lacey: [00:53:24] Don't know. Oh, no probably because they tend to the level of detail. Having worked with, I talking with Justin and bran and Danny and Jamie and barely, those are the people I tend to speak to the most and their approach is just, you can suggest what you think is a cool idea and they will just apply full on critical thinking to what you just said.
And explore all the different that then never in a rush to say, we need to do that because our competitors done that or something like that. And I think that's why there's so many people who choose beaver builder and then stick with them. And I'm not just saying that because I'm technically on paper, I'm not an official payroll as such, but I've, I was a fan for a long time before.
And one of the really cool things that they've got coming out for the next version of Thema, which is, I think it's in the alpha of their current theme of alpha is so at the moment, let's say you've got something like BeaverBuilder and you have a blog post situation. So two options you. Give the client, the classic editory can give them the block editor.
So to block editor inside Thema or the block, or the classic editor inside of the Thema. And a lot of the time you're like I've already taught them how to use BeaverBuilder how to do rows. And I've saved based on own. And that kind of thing, what you can do with the new version of Thema, for anyone who uses this is you can use BeaverBuilder inside a single post Thema single post template.
Does that it's like what's the inception. Yeah. Deception is what Nathan was just saying because yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:03] Oh, inception. It's like beaver builder inside of beaver builder
Paul Lacey: [00:55:08] inside BeaverBuilder so from your client solution, point of view, if you're able to make performance websites that pass all the tests and we'll talk about that in a minute as well.
Then yeah, you're going to have more depth. And I think the phrase that the guy who's founded oxygen invented was deception actually. When he was taking the Mickey out of a page builders, you're going to have a few devs, but the end user doesn't care. And as long as the website is still performing and not causing a detrimental effect to them, then basically you can say, Hey, this is how you use your landing pages.
And guess what? I don't need to show you how to do crazy hacks in the classic editor. And you can ignore the block editor and you can use the safe rows that have created for you to create your blog posts. And obviously you can be locked in to doing that, but every scene, everything I'm seen in the Gutenberg world is locking you into one set of blocks or another.
So it's no different to anything that's already going on there. I think you're always locked in if you're not using the classic editor for content in one way or another. So nice updates come in for end users and that totally listening to the market, but still doing their thing, which is. Let's consider every option we make this long make, give us longevity.
It needs to, it can't lose its longevity.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:26] I've thought of a segue for the next piece, which is that the page builder summit, which w which happened a few months ago. The, one of the talks was Paul was talking about core web vitals and he was relating them. Pushing out pages in BeaverBuilder and you managed to get fabulous scores, which is obviously what everybody wants with beaver builder.
And you had a few little tips and tricks for how to do that. It was really great. And so on the screen, now I'm going to be showing a nice update from WP rocket show. We've all heard of WP rocket. It's almost like the go-to. I would say if people mention a caching plugin, I don't know if that's true, but it seems to be on the top of my list anyway.
They've released recently 3.9 and there's some really nice stuff in here, but I could drone on, but I honestly, I think Paul, you're better at this stuff. Would you lead with this one? Yeah.
Paul Lacey: [00:57:20] Sure. So first of all, about that talk and COVID vitals with beaver builder the purpose of the talk was just to show that not necessarily with BeaverBuilder, but probably applies to a lot.
The more classic page builders that you don't need the caching plugins to achieve the scores. So my talk was to achieve those scores without just whacking up caching plugin on top of it and going, Hey, look at that. What a great job I did there. I had no idea how I got the scores. The point was building the website up from the beginning now, just to sort of caveat that uh, uh, the guy who is one of the founders of Conversio the hosting company.
I heard him on a podcast the other day. And he was saying that he's noticed that a lot of people are accidentally creating performance websites using the block editor. So it doesn't matter what page builder though are using. You mentioned oxygen, he mentioned BeaverBuilder you mentioned Devi, you mentioned elemental.
So oxygen was in there. The people were more accidentally creating more performance websites with the block editor that had previously accidentally created non-performance websites. So there's definitely a thing that basically, if you don't know what you're doing, then choose your tools correctly. But if you are an agency or a freelancer and you're a professional, then something like beaver builder is possible to achieve those scores by just designing websites properly and doing things in the right way now to put an even bigger Polish on that.
You've got tools like dopey rocket, and they've just released 3.9, which is actually my pick of the week for later. So probably don't need to say that anymore. But it's an amazing release they've complete. And here's the thing about dopey rocket. They were recently bought. By a huge hosting company in, I think Germany somewhere in Europe.
Anyway, I think if backward OVI H
Nathan Wrigley: [00:59:12] and cheese is a giant, it's
Paul Lacey: [00:59:14] French, it's a French, is it? Yeah. I heard a rumor and from multiple people that this was actually one of the biggest acquisitions that has happened this year. So there's ones that didn't even get hardly any coverage. So everyone in terms of
Nathan Wrigley: [00:59:29] Ash transferring
Paul Lacey: [00:59:30] hands, you know, you had the cadence on, you had liquid web buying, all sorts of different brands. And this one was actually a lot bigger than people probably imagined. Now that's just hearsay and rumor, but if it is true, then they're clearly doing things that, with that money that make a lot of sense to end users.
So this particular 3.9 update is taking on core vitals in a very good way. So you've got other plugins that I've seen out. But basically try and trick what's going on at the end to the core vitals testing tools, they just trick them and it's wrong and it will get your website banned probably at some point or delisted or D ranked in Google.
Now, doopy rocket has been very diligent in this article. Lisa saying they are to say that they're approaching this in a way that isn't just trying to get you better scores. It is actually also trying to improve the user experience for your end users as well. So it's true. We're vital at COVID vitals improvements and to get to the point of what they've done, there's a number of things I've done, but there's two major ones.
One of them is the way that they are creating a feature where you can defer the JavaScript on the page until the user starts interacting. Now, this isn't an unfriendly feature. They've already had this Blair before, but it wasn't the most stable of things. Nobody's got this right yet the plugin they've completely rewrote it.
And this is version 2.0 of how they delay JavaScript execution. And they show some examples on this site of using this on an element or website, which is generally elemental gets all the bad press for being the one that creates the worst scores at the moment, or some of the older ones do as well, but definitely elements or get hammered in the communities for that compared to some of the other solutions out there for your scores, they use it as a, they use an element or built site as an example, that's got animations on it and all sorts of stuff going on and they show what the scores were before and what the scores were after just from this.
Aspect of the tool just from this differing, the JavaScript I've tried it on my site that was reaching around 92 and 192 mobile and a hundred and the BeaverBuilder site. We've no caching plugin. I installed this and obviously you put the caching on and I got 99 and a hundred and it was pretty impressive.
My compliance thing broke, but it turned out that was already broke my compliance cookie cookie thing. So it has nothing to do with WP rocket. So it's pretty impressive. They've also got another major feature, again, tackling the core vitals and again, being a human improvement tool, which is where they are reducing things removing or reducing unused CSS on your page.
And this is a beta function. And what it does is it analyzes your page, just like the light lighthouse tool does. And he's able to say, Hey, there's a bunch of CSS on this page that isn't being used. So let's just remove. An output of this only the CSS that is used on the page. I've tried it, it is working really well.
And it gives you a much better score in terms of lighthouse cracking down on you for having wastefulness in your site, whether you're using too much CSS, that you'd not even use it on that particular page. So for anyone, this to me is flattening the curve as such in this whole argument between, Hey, I'm using this tool and I get these scores.
So to me, it's now Hey, I use this school, this tool, it's a diligent choice. And I'm using these techniques. The reason I use this tool is for my end users. And guess what? We're all scoring the same now for if we're professionals. So it's just an amazing update. If anyone is using dopey rocket just check it out.
It's just see what it. Thank you,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:28] Paul. That was great. It was great. It was really good. I'm really keen to get REMCOs in on this because so we're on the plugin side of things over here. Take this wherever you go. But the company that he works for serve bolt, they've got a different way of doing this and I'm keen to get your, whether it's this plugin or what you guys do feel free to just promote.
That's fine. We'd like to know. Yeah. Okay.
Remkus de Vries: [01:03:56] Um, so the end goal is to have the user experience to be the best one you can possibly deliver. That's the goal what WP rocket does. And Paul, you, when you say you turn caching on what you're actually doing is you're turning optimizations on, cause cashing in itself will help you in some ways, but mostly if you just have crappy house.
Uh, at sir bolt, we have a little bit of a different approach towards where should problems be fixed. And that sort of drives us to look at directions of where we are solving stuff. So for instance, one of the, we have a hardcore, and I think I've said this the last time as well. We have a truly hardcore focus on performance, which means we take different decisions in getting to the point of delivering that performance.
So we start off from having, uh, you know, short time to first bite being as performing as we possibly can be in that direction. Then if you look at optimizing the the best way to go about it is to build yourself. Performance for what it needs to do. That means you as a developer, as a site owner, you determine where you want to load what, when you want to load what, and at what time do you want to load that specific thing?
So that's all your assets that your CSS, that your images, that your JavaScript, so solving things correctly on the hosting side of things. And I'd like to think we are because the WP hosting benchmark reviews confirmed. So then there are those cases where the front end. Has a lot of ways of optimizing.
So what WP rocket does is, is really good. I especially enjoy their CSS critical CSS generation, stuff like that. But there's ways of getting to the core of at vitals, hitting everything a hundred without necessarily installing a plugin. That means you are conscious in how you develop your theme.
Like I said, you, you load what you don't want to load and, you'll make your proper decisions. And what we've done is we've built a tool called accelerated domains, which is an add on to any sort of bolt hosted site that essentially accelerates your domain. And then core vitals is a small port spark, sorry, small portion of that.
So it's it's a little bit of a different approach. But it optimizes to the point where the entire delivery of those assets are done in a. Let's just call it the most optimized way of servicing their client requests from your browser to the server, then getting the feedback and then responding that as in the result in your browser.
So we optimize in two directions and it's a different layer, I would say. Um, th th this is no hate on WP rocket far from it. But from our perspective stuff is being solved in the wrong layer. If that makes sense. Yeah. Having said that if you are on our hosting, our latest version of the server called optimizer plugin, 3.1 ads uh, what's the word collaboration between WP rocket and our plugin.
So we do optimize for it, but one of the things that we optimize for is by turning off there. Okay. Okay. Cause it actually slows it down on our servers. That's fascinating. Our own version server level is much faster, but ashing solver that the right place is what we're saying, but I genuinely like what they're doing with regards to how they're constantly focusing on the optimization side of things on the front end.
So I think this is a great example of if you have crappy hosting and crappy is from my perspective. No, no hating, but just how I look at it. Then that's a great tool for solving a lot of problems. But if you have a high performance site or if you need high performance or scalability and all of that there's more that goes into the mix of solving them.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:25] REM because one day we should get you on the screen and you can show us around what we actually click and point and touch and what configurations. Yeah, that'd be good. That would be written well, let's make that happen. We'll chat after this, but thank you. Time is running short, so we're going to have to go.
I apologize, Cami. I left you out. Okay.
Cami MacNamara: [01:08:47] I just want to say real fast. I use WP rocket have for years install it on every single website.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:08:53] I love it. Nice.
Paul Lacey: [01:08:56] I just need one question. Of course. First of all, I don't disagree with anything Ramco just said, actually, that was a totally agree of all that. And one thing I noticed when you can do the lighthouse tests I don't know how I found this bone.
I found this button on the test results. They have a day where you could see me. What your scores would be if you were able to change certain factors. So if you had a high time to first bite, you could see what happened. If you reduce that, and it would show you what your scores were would be. And the time to first bite was really shocking, actually, because 10 milliseconds, when you get to the kind of, you're in the nineties or the eighties or the nineties on the scores, 10 milliseconds gives you 1%, 10 milliseconds is one whole percent on the scores.
I was like, wow. It really, is really making a difference to have that absolute root of your site on the best hosting that you can, whatever your budget. Put the most, you can put into your hosting, we can't all afford, the best solution, but you based in time on the other levels, unless you've at least got something half decent at that level, but 10, 10, 10 milliseconds, one per 1% on the scores was shocking actually.
Remkus de Vries: [01:10:08] So that's essentially what we're doing by having our extremely short time to first bite. Yeah, yep. Done correctly. It's somewhere around 60 or so. Yup. And that's 600 or 760.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:10:23] Yeah. Yeah. That's okay. That's a tiny amount. We'll talk. Peter Ingersoll, thank you very much for making a comment.
He also just, he's just basically just saying, hang on a minute, let's just talk about content, the core where vitals thing seems it has taken us all by the neck and dragged us into this conversation. We seem to be having it rather a lot in these saying, don't forget about making good content because good content can help you in Google as much as other things.
You know, if you've been, if you've been producing tiny articles and obsessing about why you're not scoring because your content is rubbish, even though you've got a really fast website have a really fast website with great content. There we go. Thank you. Content is still king,
but yeah, there's a Remkus de Vries: [01:11:05] new focus in town, which I think um, just needs a lot more before it becomes a mature thing.
It's still not part of everybody's thoughts as they're building sites and we have a long way to go there.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:18] Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup. Okay. We'll just quickly move on very short of time now just to try and get through some of these things. So that was by the way that was on the WP rocket site itself. I'm sure you can find that.
I just came across this. I literally have no idea if it's any good. I just thought I'd put it out there. It's a deal on a plugin called post-tax caveat. Emptor no idea. It's like a query block. It makes queries Paul and I were saying, I don't know. Do you really want to get into this when Gothenburg and core are going to be tackling this head on, but I just thought I'd mentioned it.
I know people love all these lifetime deals. So anyway, post-tax is a free plugin
Remkus de Vries: [01:11:56] that sort of does this already. Oh, good. What's that called is by a Ronald Eureka media run called custom query.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:04] Perfect. Maybe get that one instead. Custom query. There's no lifetime deal. It's on the repo, right? It is.
Yep. Okay. Custom query blocks. Thank you. Is that, uh, is that the URL you've just dropped into
Remkus de Vries: [01:12:18] the URL? It's a different URL, but it's the right
Nathan Wrigley: [01:12:20] plugin. Okay.
Paul Lacey: [01:12:22] Let me just grab it briefly summarize what this plugin does. It creates you grids and masonry type layouts and carousels of posts, but it's killer feature is the ability to create archive pages in most of the themes, which is a tricky thing for a lot of well that's brilliant.
Uh, the, the thing, the reason we actually put this in the news wasn't to so much say, Hey, you should check it out and maybe buy it. I don't even know if you can still buy it, but it was, yeah. The timer seems to run down, but I did check and you could still get to the checkout. It was more a case of, products like this come out and you can spend money on them, but I just cannot tell you how many products I've bought in this manner.
That then just became irrelevant and didn't have a business model to move on any anymore. I'm not saying this product doesn't have one, but I'm saying how can a product at the moment have that is from a relatively new calmer. It seems to, I've never heard of the company. And a lot of people were saying that in the, in private discussions, in Facebook groups and stuff like that, I'd personally never heard of this company.
A lot of people hadn't. So how can someone genuinely invest in something at the moment when nobody really knows the direction of the block editor and what the block editors are going to do in core with full site editing? Because the moment the block editor has this as full site editing and it works really well.
If that ever happens, that pro plugin has no. No reason to exist anymore. So if you built it onto 25, 35 clients sites, and then that company naturally has to move on and there's no plugin updates getting done. And the Gutenberg block editor is constantly changing around it. Then you've got egg on your face and you've got to, re-engineer what you've done again.
Not saying it's just that plugin. It's just, that's just my main narrative on why I stay away from, oh, look, here's a new blocks thing. I'm going to dive in and start putting it on clients' sites. I just don't want to do that to my client's sites at the moment.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:31] And what I've just been, I'll look on another screen about what this custom query blocks does and I'm loving it, but
Paul Lacey: [01:14:38] Chris Hughes, you can refund it.
My
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:40] Chrissy's will have bought it and completely not relevant to anything. I love that image. I don't know why I really
Paul Lacey: [01:14:49] like that image.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:14:54] Yeah. It's just great. I don't know why that is. Okay. There we go. So we recommended something with a completely withdrew. It here's a free one. This looks nice. Let's go with that. Okay. Right. Couple of very quick bits of self promotion. I hope you don't mind. The first one is to say that I did a did a podcast episode with with the guy Mark West guard from w S form this week.
And if you have no idea what Ws form and why you might like to use it as your form plugin, I actually got him on the screen. So this is a bit like what I was just saying to Remco. So it'd be nice to get you on the screen. I did a webinar with him and we had a few people along for the ride. It was nice to have you and he demoed it.
I just think this is such an incredible plugin. Forms, you don't have to listen to me, go and check it out, go and watch the episode or go and read some reviews. And what have you. I just really liked the look of it. And in that vein, we have a new one coming up this week with Leslie SIM who was actually in the chat.
She still hates me.
Paul Lacey: [01:15:57] She said what? She was here for the gossip.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:15:59] She's here for the gossip. There's some gossip, Leslie doing a another of these webinars tomorrow at roughly this time 2:00 PM. Is it 2:00 PM? Yes. 2:00 PM UK time. And the plugin enables you to write content, blog, posts, and newsletters.
At the same time, it's all done with Gutenberg blocks and you can hide things in the newsletter that you can show in the content. You can put them both in the content or just in the anyway. It's absolutely fantastic. It's so good. That REM cause you. Yes. That's yeah. We also have a badge REM because he uses it.
I think
Remkus de Vries: [01:16:38] I'm actually on there, on her
Nathan Wrigley: [01:16:40] side, on the website. Yeah. You're like, what are the people? And I'm surprised because Paul Lacey's usually on any website that you come across like this, but not on the newsletter. Yeah.
Remkus de Vries: [01:16:50] And wanting to publish a newsletter for years, just never got around to it.
But I, I also find it I'm way more in the WordPress dashboard than I'm in other systems. So for some reason it never happened. And then I saw Leslie a tweak this, I don't know, a half a year ago, maybe longer time is blurry. But uh, I quickly realized that allowed me to use WordPress as I knew it and still use MailChimp as the delivery system and have them take care of subscribers and things of that nature.
And I, I was in love. I loved it. And especially, uh, the openness of listening to feedback and processing that into either solutions or even new features. I think she's just brilliant in how she does this. So, um, yeah, I highly recommend it. I believe it supports convert kit.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:52] About three weeks.
So Chris on refund the refund, because I've just, I'm just reading, she sent me a message on messenger. I don't know the name of this one. I know it I've seen it, but I just can't pronounce it. Is it called Klaviyo? Is that how you pronounce it? Clavio? And convert kit is coming and she sent me that message or about two and a bit weeks ago.
And she said four to six weeks. So let's say it's about four weeks from now,
Remkus de Vries: [01:18:19] but the whole thing is really well thought out. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:23] Yeah. And I've
Remkus de Vries: [01:18:25] honestly cannot recommend this high enough, I think for 2021, this is my favorite place.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:32] Yeah, I'm totally in agreement. The minute I saw it, it was the fact that you could have a block which could be in both one or the other was totally what I wanted, because I don't want to put, I'm going to embed this as a video in the blog post.
What's the point in putting that in a newsletter, it doesn't belong there. So you put it inside a container and say, don't show this in the newsletter and then it just doesn't. And then you could have a button which goes in the newsletter, which doesn't belong on the website because it's pointless.
It's brilliant. It's really good. There are six. I th that's not six. Is it? That's five Nathan six six little blocks, which enabled you to do. All manner of clever things and super strong recommendation. Anyway, if you're not convinced come to the demo tomorrow, she's going to show you how it can be used and building
Remkus de Vries: [01:19:25] on Twitter.
Cause she
Nathan Wrigley: [01:19:26] shares everything. Yeah, she's great. It's all built in the open cracky. It's this is like the newsletter glue promo moment. Isn't it. It's great. It really good.
Paul Lacey: [01:19:35] Oh no, I don't use newsletter glue, but one thing that is fine, it just clicked in my mind because I've still because I don't have a newsletter.
I've been like, I still don't get what all the buzz is about. But the fact that you write your blog posts and your newsletter at the same time, it's like a mental encouragement to not have an extra barrier to oh, do you know what I'll do the newsletter tomorrow? And then you don't do it.
You just do it at the same time that you're writing the content on your website. And now. I get it now they've got
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:07] this killer. Sorry. No, I apologize.
Paul Lacey: [01:20:09] I was just going to just say about Ws forms. I've not watched a video Nathan, but what I have seen is how people have reacted to it and like
me,
they do obviously it's can I watch a video about yet another WordPress form plugin, but from what I understand, people who have watched this and you've said it too, this isn't just another WordPress form, plugin, this, I don't even know what the things are, but from what I've seen in people discussing it, it's taken it to a next level.
I just wish they'd sold their branding out because I was just turned off from the brand and immediately. So if please get the branding sorted out and you'll probably have eyes on the product. It's got like an
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:55] actual console so that you can see what's what any errors are. It's got like an actual calculator.
So instead of trying to do it all with ridiculous, if you're trying to work out okay, if you buy this product and then you buy this, add on thing, you just do it with a calculator. You press buttons on a cow. It's brilliant. It's so good. Anyway, yes. Come and watch this tomorrow. You'll enjoy it.
I'm sure. And if you don't you know, don't say I didn't warn you and what's the last thing. put something in the show notes that he wanted to share with us this way. I don't know for him cause covered any of what we're about to see moments ago where he was talking about serve bolt, but he's got a piece here called the serve bolt stance.
Oh no this, no. So this is all about sustainability and green hosting go. I
Remkus de Vries: [01:21:40] Did that. This is, uh, this is this was our CEO explaining that the whole quest that we're having in wanting to deliver uh, fast and, uh, performing websites doesn't end with just offering exactly that.
It's a, it's a, it's an open letter explaining why the performance side of things is not the only thing on our mind, but indeed, how are we doing this in the most sustainable and Greenway? Um, the, so what I did cover was when I said time to first bite, that's a great indicator of how long the computer has had to process your website into a, something in the browser.
So the shorter your time, the first byte is the less energy it consumes. Simple as that. Nice. So that's, we're building what we're doing. So one of those things is in sustainability is also in energy not wasting energy in producing something that could be done smarter with our partner which you just showed is the CO2 compensation that we're doing for everything.
Um, that we can't offset in the normal way with renewable energy, but it's something I'd like to see more happening. People understanding that green hosting is not just saying, Hey, we have renewable energy. It's also about how does, how do you spend that energy? How efficient are you with. And I thought that I am of the humble opinion that this deserves more attention.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:23:27] Yeah. Yeah. You know what I think the environment that, that w it just seems like more important than ever. I don't know exactly where, oh, we, let me think. Don't don't know if you're situated on the west coast, but some of the stories that I've been hearing about, Southwest Canada and the Northeast of the United States.
And you just think, boy, if now's not the moment where we reign things in, he said doing a live podcast through multiple networks yeah. Cough. But
Cami MacNamara: [01:24:01] when it is 118 degrees and BC, that things are changing dramatically.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:24:10] I appreciate that people like serve both making the effort to make the connection tie up the, what I wouldn't have.
I wouldn't have made the connection between time to first bite and the impact that you might have on the environment. So I've put it on the screen. It's served, bought.com forward slash articles forward slash each of these words is separate by hyphen serve bolt on sustainable and green hosting. I'll put it in the show notes so that you can see it.
But yeah. Thank you for sharing that REM cause that's great. I don't know if I'm. I don't know if anybody else had something in the show notes that they wanted to share. I do. I just want to speak into the environment. It's great. When people take care of the environment, one of the most important things for us, although I think is to go into space as often as possible.
And you know, literally burn thousands of gallons of fuel in order to get. Check out around the earth is Richard Branson did it this week. And I believe that Jeff Bezos is doing it next week. There was a petition on, I don't know what the website was, but one of these websites where you can go and petition and within about a day, 70,000 people had signed it.
That was about two weeks ago asking Jeff Bezos to not come back, which I just thought was interesting. This piece of content will be hosted on Amazon S3, so don't expect it to be around for long. But anyway, I just thought it was fascinating. We have now got to the point where people with deep enough pockets can burn through money so that they can go and check out space.
What you, what an incredible thing that is. I don't, D get rid of the environmental comment for the minute. Just take that in a person like you with no training, just a deep pocket. That's the criteria you can get on a spaceship. Now pay some money, like going on a cruise and you can actually go into space.
That's from
Remkus de Vries: [01:26:00] a technology perspective. I think it's fascinating that's like two seconds. And then I'm like what a huge waste of, and I need to be careful not to cross here, but what a huge waste of money and resources and energy and everything.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:26:15] I'm glad you said that. Cause that was my take on it as well.
Fascinating from the point of view of the, it can be done. It's like that Jeff Goldblum thing in Jurassic park, nobody asks whether we should do it that just ask, can we do it? Yeah, we can do it.
Cami MacNamara: [01:26:31] With all the acquisitions going on in the WordPress arena, who do you think is going to be the first WordPress person to go to space?
Nathan Wrigley: [01:26:42] Apparently he's got a, and I forgotten the number, but it is in that article, I believe. So I believe it's 150,000, maybe pounds or dollars. I'm not sure, but it's a kind of, so it's a considerable amount of money. The entire trip takes an hour. I believe that you're weightless for two minutes and then it returns and it behaves like a normal plane.
So it was very short-lived experience. But given all of that, I believe that at the number I'm going to say 600. But it could be wrong. 600 people who've already said we'll pay that. And, um, and I'm not one of them. I don't seem to have 150,000 pounds burning a hole in my pocket. And if I did, I'm sure I'd find all the waste, but I'll just get a great big picture.
Paul's got on the back of his wall there of the galaxy. And then were some clever goggles. Cheaper. Yeah. Trimming some steady like weightless. No,
Remkus de Vries: [01:27:40] no risk of getting dizzy and nauseous.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:44] That's right. Anyway, there we go. Nobody else has got anything to add. I don't think thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it.
We'll be doing it all again. Next week. Can't remember who's on next week at this point, but there'll be some lovely people. I'm sure. REMCOs thank you so much, Cami. Thank you very much, indeed. And obviously Paul yeah, every week is the cohost really appreciate it. Paul, the platform survived till the end.
Yeah, we haven't
Paul Lacey: [01:28:08] finished yet. You have to press the button. Yeah. I've got to press the button.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:12] It's at this moment, you don't know this. W we have to do this awkward wave where we don't know how long the awkward wave will go on, but if we start waving awkwardly now and I'll press the stop button and say, have a nice week.
See you later.