This Week in WordPress #173

This week’s WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 19th July 2021

Another week, and we’re bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days, including…

  • WordPress 5.8 has been released and it’s really quite large, so many new and shiny things
  • Lovers of the Classic Editor might be interested to know that TinyMCE has bought a new ‘Page Builder’ style editor called Setka
  • The Block Patterns Directory is live and wanting some new ideas from people like you – all to make WordPress site building easier for us all
  • Akamai takes down huge swathes of the internet this week and shows us just how reliant we are on a few companies whose products we’ve never even heard of
  • We’re not here for the next couple of weeks as both Paul and I are having some time off for a holiday. Yay!

There’s a whole lot more than this, as there is each and every week, and you can find all that by scrolling down and clicking on the links!

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This Week in WordPress #173 – “Block Patterns should be called Brians”

This Week in WordPress #173 - WP Builds

With Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Bob Dunn and Bernhard Gronau.

Recorded on Monday 26th July 2021.
If you ever want to join us live you can do that every Monday at 2pm UK time on the WP Builds LIVE page.


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WordPress Core

WordPress 5.8 “Tatum”
Introducing 5.8 “Tatum”, our latest and greatest release now available for download or update in your dashboard. Named in honor of Art Tatum, the legendary Jazz pianist. His formidable technique and willingness to push boundaries inspired musicians and changed what people thought could be done…
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum”
Introducing 5.8 “Tatum”, our latest and greatest release now available for download or update in your dashboard. Named in honor of Art Tatum, the legendary Jazz pianist. His formidable technique and willingness to push boundaries inspired musicians and changed what people thought could be done…
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum” Introduces Block Widgets, Duotone Media Filters, New Emoji Support, and More
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum,” named in honor of jazz pianist Art Tatum, landed earlier today. It is the second major release in 2021. It includes duotone media filters, block-based widgets, theme-related blocks, template editing, and theme JSON file support.The release also ships tons of other notable features, such as support for new Emoji and an Update URI field for plugin authors to offer custom updates. The latest update also drops support for IE11, saying goodbye to the era of Internet Explorer…
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum” Introduces Block Widgets, Duotone Media Filters, New Emoji Support, and More
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum,” named in honor of jazz pianist Art Tatum, landed earlier today. It is the second major release in 2021. It includes duotone media filters, block-based widgets, theme-related blocks, template editing, and theme JSON file support.The release also ships tons of other notable features, such as support for new Emoji and an Update URI field for plugin authors to offer custom updates. The latest update also drops support for IE11, saying goodbye to the era of Internet Explorer…

Community

Text-to-Give
Powerful Text-to-Give Fundraising for your WordPress Website The average person spends over five hours on their phones daily. Why not allow your donors to
Text-to-Give
Powerful Text-to-Give Fundraising for your WordPress Website The average person spends over five hours on their phones daily. Why not allow your donors to
Makers of TinyMCE Acquire Setka
Tiny, the makers of TinyMCE, have acquired Setka, a content design and editing platform, for an undisclosed amount. Founders Katya Bazilevskaya, Alexey Ametov, Vasily Esmanov, Roman Khudonogov, and the rest of the Setka team will join Tiny as part of the agreement…
Makers of TinyMCE Acquire Setka
Tiny, the makers of TinyMCE, have acquired Setka, a content design and editing platform, for an undisclosed amount. Founders Katya Bazilevskaya, Alexey Ametov, Vasily Esmanov, Roman Khudonogov, and the rest of the Setka team will join Tiny as part of the agreement…
People of WordPress: Pooja Derashri
Pooja Derashri shares the story of how she went from being an introverted girl from a small village in India to becoming a developer, thanks to the WordPress community…
People of WordPress: Pooja Derashri
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More Than Just Joost’s Wife
Marieke van de Rakt from the Netherlands writes about her journey towards leadership.
More Than Just Joost’s Wife
Marieke van de Rakt from the Netherlands writes about her journey towards leadership.
How to Create A Substack Newsletter in WordPress
Substack and ghost have popularised the creation of free and paid newsletter, but you can create a Substack newsletter in WordPress…
How to Create A Substack Newsletter in WordPress
Substack and ghost have popularised the creation of free and paid newsletter, but you can create a Substack newsletter in WordPress…
WordPress Pros and Cons: Why You Should Use It (And Why Not)
If you are unsure about whether WordPress is the right solution for you, in this post we weigh its pros and cons to help you decide…
WordPress Pros and Cons: Why You Should Use It (And Why Not)
If you are unsure about whether WordPress is the right solution for you, in this post we weigh its pros and cons to help you decide…

Plugins / Themes / Blocks

New! Introducing Wireframe Blocks: The Easiest Way to Wireframe in WordPress – Kadence WP
At KadenceWP we’re all about providing the support and tools to create highly effective websites. We stand behind this (like, really). We have made it our goal to put powerful…
New! Introducing Wireframe Blocks: The Easiest Way to Wireframe in WordPress – Kadence WP
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Gutenberg 11.1 Adds Drag-and-Drop Support for List View and Upgrades Block Borders
The Gutenberg plugin continues to march forward. Yesterday’s release, coming merely a day after the launch of WordPress 5.8, brings several new features and nearly three dozen bug fixes. The big-ticket items are drag-and-drop blocks in the list view and a much-needed upgrade for border support…
Gutenberg 11.1 Adds Drag-and-Drop Support for List View and Upgrades Block Borders
The Gutenberg plugin continues to march forward. Yesterday’s release, coming merely a day after the launch of WordPress 5.8, brings several new features and nearly three dozen bug fixes. The big-ticket items are drag-and-drop blocks in the list view and a much-needed upgrade for border support…
The WordPress.org Block Pattern Directory Is Now Live
Yesterday, the WordPress pattern directory went live to the world as the development team behind it put the finishing touches on the project. It will work similarly to the theme and plugin directories in time. Along with WordPress 5.8, users can browse and use block patterns directly from the post editor…
The WordPress.org Block Pattern Directory Is Now Live
Yesterday, the WordPress pattern directory went live to the world as the development team behind it put the finishing touches on the project. It will work similarly to the theme and plugin directories in time. Along with WordPress 5.8, users can browse and use block patterns directly from the post editor…
BuddyPress 9.0.0 Transforms Legacy Widgets Into Blocks
BuddyPress 9.0 was released one day before WordPress 5.8. As all major BuddyPress releases are named for pizza joints, this one has been dubbed “Mico” in honor of Pizzéria Chez Mico, a small restaurant on the French riviera, where you just may find capers and anchovies on your pie…
BuddyPress 9.0.0 Transforms Legacy Widgets Into Blocks
BuddyPress 9.0 was released one day before WordPress 5.8. As all major BuddyPress releases are named for pizza joints, this one has been dubbed “Mico” in honor of Pizzéria Chez Mico, a small restaurant on the French riviera, where you just may find capers and anchovies on your pie…
Identify and Select Blocks via the Wayfinder WordPress Plugin
Christopher John, a Seattle-based designer and UX engineer, released his first project to the plugin directory yesterday. Announced via Twitter to high praise, Wayfinder is a block outline solution for the WordPress editor…
Identify and Select Blocks via the Wayfinder WordPress Plugin
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Revisions Extended Plugin Lets Users Schedule Updates to Published Posts
WordPress has long had the ability to schedule content to be published in the future, but it can only make immediate changes to posts that are already published. If you want to schedule changes to published content, a plugin is necessary…
Revisions Extended Plugin Lets Users Schedule Updates to Published Posts
WordPress has long had the ability to schedule content to be published in the future, but it can only make immediate changes to posts that are already published. If you want to schedule changes to published content, a plugin is necessary…
Toolset 1.6 – WordPress 5.8 Compatibility and Bugfixes –
This joint release of Toolset plugins ensures full compatibility with WordPress 5.8. It also includes fixes more than 150 bugs and usability issues…
Toolset 1.6 – WordPress 5.8 Compatibility and Bugfixes –
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Introducing the New Gravity Forms reCAPTCHA Add-On: Support for Google reCAPTCHA v3
We are excited to announce the launch the new Gravity Forms reCAPTCHA Add-On. With this add-on you will find support for Google reCAPTCHA v3.
Introducing the New Gravity Forms reCAPTCHA Add-On: Support for Google reCAPTCHA v3
We are excited to announce the launch the new Gravity Forms reCAPTCHA Add-On. With this add-on you will find support for Google reCAPTCHA v3.

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Security

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Page not found – SolidWP
Vulnerable plugins and themes are the #1 reason WordPress websites get hacked. The weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report powered by WPScan covers recent WordPress plugin, theme, and core vulnerabilities, and what to do if you run one of the vulnerable plugins or themes on your website..
Page not found – SolidWP
Vulnerable plugins and themes are the #1 reason WordPress websites get hacked. The weekly WordPress Vulnerability Report powered by WPScan covers recent WordPress plugin, theme, and core vulnerabilities, and what to do if you run one of the vulnerable plugins or themes on your website..

WP Builds

239 – Use Patchstack to keep your WordPress website safe
So you might not have heard about the WordPress security company Patchstack before, but you will likely know about them! You see, until recently, they were called WebARX…
239 – Use Patchstack to keep your WordPress website safe
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Jobs

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Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

What’s Coming in PHP 8.1
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Transcript (if available)

These transcripts are created using software, so apologies if there are errors in them.

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Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 173 entitled block patterns should be called Brian's. It was recorded on Monday the 26th of July, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I will not be being joined by Paul Lacey as he's having a break. In fact, we're all having a break. We're taking a two week break after this episode is recorded.
So we'll be back at later in August, I'm having a bit of a well earned rest with my family and so a couple of weeks off, but we've got a big unpack show for you today. We are joined by Michelle Frechette by Bob. And late to the party by Bernard Greno, there's a lot to talk about specifically about WordPress this week, because 5.8 has rolled out.
So we talk about all of the new bits of pieces that are in 5.8. We also get into the subject of tiny MCE and the fact that they've bought something called , which is a little bit like a page builder. We also talk about the new updates to the Guttenberg plugin number 11.1 we're at now. And there's a new set of features in there, which we discuss also the block pattern directory has gone live.
It's a little bit small at the moment, but there's some new and interesting things coming down the pipe there and give WP have designed a way that you can text people if you would like to donate money to them. We talk about all of that and a picture of Neptune too. 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. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything.
And the best part is that it works with element or beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. Go check it out and get a free demo at AB split. test.com. Hello. Hello, good afternoon. Or good morning. Good evening. How's that like David Frost. Good afternoon. And welcome. We are here episode number or it's written on the top of the screen and falling leaf stream yard used to just use to truncate it and I could never see what episode it was, but restream this new platform?
That one doesn't it's episode number 173, usually. There is, is Paul Lacey, but Paul Lacey being the good chap that he is, he's gone on holiday with his children this week. And and in fact, we're actually taking a couple of weeks break because I'm going to attempt to be a good father and go on holiday with my children over the next couple of weeks.
So this is the last one until something like the middle of August. And I'm very pleased to have two people with us, possibly a third in just the moment's time. But we have today, Michelle Frechette, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you? Yeah, really good. Thank you. It's a little bit hot here in the UK.
So I'm in complaining mode. It's it's gone beyond the, the acceptable 20 degrees Celsius threshold and anything that's 21 plus causes moaning. So a moaning will, will be. I reserve
Michelle Frechette: [00:03:32] the right to complain about any weather, whether it's hot, cold, or in between, oh, this is
Nathan Wrigley: [00:03:36] uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable in the UK.
This is literally all we've got. It is the weirdest thing. If there's nothing to say, we genuinely talk about the weather and I know that's a bit of a cliche, but in the UK, that is the default conversation. Nothing else to say. Let's talk about your weather. Shall we? Bob Don also joins us. He's on totally on the other side of the United States.
So it's crazy. O'clock for him really appreciate getting up at two 30 or whatever it is.
Bob Dunn: [00:04:10] This is my morning voice, it's noise a little deeper because I haven't been talking all day and
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:16] your morning voice is just every bit as good as your daily voice, your evening voice in your afternoon voice. Very nice to have you both just very quickly because Paul Lacey normally does the introductions and sadly I'm ill prepared.
Can we go firstly to Michelle, would you just tell us a little bit about yourself in case anybody here has never come across to you before?
Michelle Frechette: [00:04:37] Absolutely. So I'm Michelle Frechette. I'm the director of customer success at give WP and have a whole bunch of other projects that I work on, including word Fest, which just was this past weekend.
And I know we're going to talk about that a little bit later, so I will say that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:52] That's okay. Thank you so much. That's really nice. And Bob, what about you? Let us know who you are as well. I'm currently
Bob Dunn: [00:04:58] doing a site called do the woot.io and it's for the WooCommerce builder community. So real excited about doing that, been in the space for quite a while, but this is something I've been doing for the last year.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:12] Yeah. Bob, Bob's been doing this way, way longer than I have. And he's a real veteran go and check out everything that he does just Google Bob WP. And you'll probably be inundated with multiple things that you can search for. And so on. We are at some point going to be joined by Bernard Grinnell, but Bernard Greno is currently caught in a traffic jam.
And as a result, he's not here. Uh, in erections it'll be about 10 minutes. So when he comes we'll we'll stick him on the screen, but for now, this is nice. We've got somebody popping in say and excited for the show. Appreciate that. Somebody's saying how Michelle's hair looks fabulous. Yes. Whoever you are.
Oh that I never get that comment.
Bob Dunn: [00:05:52] No me either, no matter how long I grow it, it's like I keep growing it. It's
Michelle Frechette: [00:06:00] hurtful. That's what it takes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:02] I was so fishing though. Wasn't, I'm glad that you're taking a break. Oh, thank you. Lee has got the extraordinary capacity to understand how the commenting system works, because if he doesn't want to, he can remain anonymous.
Like it says on the yellow thing in front of the screen, it says Facebook user. And, but these kind of decided some midway, he wants to be slightly de so it puts his name in brackets. If you want to do that's fine. But if you would like your. Your name to show on the screen and you're in the Facebook group.
Then you need to go to this URL. It's terribly smaller, isn't it? But it says chats.restream.io forward slash FB. And that will allow you to tell Facebook yes, give restream my credentials, let them know everything about me, including my bank and credit card details and and give, give all of your money to WP bills.
Good grief. No, I'm not ready for today's show. It's definitely gone wrong. And thanks for joining us. I would kill for 21 degrees right now. It's 10. It's been 10 degrees for months. I know. I know. Ain't it. The case, Cameron what, what, whatever we haven't got, we can we strive to have Oh, you does that little picture.
Can you? Yeah,
Michelle Frechette: [00:07:21] he and I have talked about the fact that we're in the purple hair club now, so
yeah. Okay. Maybe afterNathan Wrigley: [00:07:27] the holidays, I'll get a bit of debt. No, there's no way I'm going purple, empty words. We're here to talk about Facebook. No, we're not. We're here to talk about really try hard, Nathan.
We're here to talk about WordPress and boy. This has been an absolutely magnificent week. Usually at this point in the show we've gone through with the guests what's going to happen and I'm very often, it's about 50% WordPress and then maybe 50% of all the stuff this week, there is so much WordPress stuff.
It may just end up being about WordPress core and nothing else. We'll see how that goes, but let me quickly share my screen over here and kick the ball off. So this is us WP Builds, head over WWP Builds.com. If you like what you're listening to or you're watching. There's a form on that page, right at the top, fill it in and it will enable us to send you emails twice a week.
Usually just telling you that we've produced a bit of content. Of course, if you don't want to receive any of that, just ignore it and go to the website itself. Okay. This is probably the only non press Corps thing for a while, but I feel that this was something that we needed to sneak in right at the top.
I could drone on about my experience of this, but my experience of this is as nothing compared to Michelle's because Michelle has been involved right from the outset with word Fest live. I don't even know how many hours you probably gave up to make this event happen. But I, I was in attendance.
Yeah, yeah. The clock breaks at some point. Doesn't it? Michelle? Yeah. It's only so many times it can go wrong. Yeah, but the event happened last Friday. It was a 24 hour celebration of WordPress. I was involved in some small way on the day itself. I don't wish to claim any credit for anything.
And but you do, you wish to, you want to tell us what it was like and so on. So honestly the floor is yours, whatever you want to say about world festival.
Michelle Frechette: [00:09:20] First, I just want to thank everybody who put countless hours into building WordPress and making it what it was we had over 60, I think it was 66 different speakers.
We had upwards of a hundred different volunteers over the course of planning and the day of itself. And we had uh, it was, I think, 16 organizers there's eight of us who take the main parts and then we have deputies under us so that if, if you're hit by that proverbial bus, somebody could step into your shoes the day of, and it was just, it was very tail the day went so, so well, I was just blown away with how good it was.
I will say though, having put on an event like this and. Dealt with the stress of people not sending in their slides and their prerecorded video, I will never do to other organizers, what those people have done to me. And I am guilty. I did that to you, Nathan summit of being like one of the last people to submit.
I will never do that to anybody. Again, I apologize past transgressions because, oh my goodness. It is stressful. When you have 10 people still haven't submitted and it's two days before the day.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:38] Yeah. It's interesting that you do feel it yeah. More on the organizer side than you ever would only present a side.
Cause of course for you, it's a one-to-one relationship, isn't it? Whereas on the organizer side, it's one to many and you can't possibly square that circle. You just have to hope that everybody gets things in on time. And with you though, it was a different story. You weren't really late. You hopped in late night.
I was more than happy to have that support. So that was
Bob Dunn: [00:11:05] fine.
Yeah. But we had someMichelle Frechette: [00:11:08] speakers get sick and drop out at the last minute who were supposed to be live. And so I, and, but you never saw that on the schedule because we had people who were prepared as backup speakers who jumped in literally with 12 hours notice and it was seamless.
So it just everybody that was part of this you know, hats off to everybody and a much deserved break for Dan. Maybe I have to give him all the props. He is, the organizer, the lead organizer for the event. He is the director and the founder of big orange heart. And he is the one that keeps the big orange heart beating.
So he is on break this week and much, much deserved break and just all the props and everything to him. For sure. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:49] Yeah. When you go to a, like a real big word camp, let's say something like WordCamp London, or WordCamp Europe or us or something you are suddenly aware. You may not be actually, it might completely pass you by, but you, it is possible to be aware of the organization that goes on in the background because you see the number of people wearing the similarly colored t-shirt and you realize, boy, there's dozens and dozens of these volunteers going on.
And then you think by, and this event, these, these venues must've cost a fortune and must've taken a lot of organization and there's all the wheelchair access and the programs to be created and all this kind of stuff. And you can really see it, but on the word Fest side, you couldn't see it because it's just, it's a screen.
But honestly just trust me there. It was an incredible amount of work that went into it. If I could, I won't show you, but if I could show you the spreadsheet that was shared with people like me, just putting that spreadsheet together would have taken me off. It was thought out to the finest detail and really impressive stuff.
Very, very cool. Indeed. I have only only respect. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: [00:13:00] And I have to say having both Mike Lindell and Matt and my little wig in live interviews the day of the event and all of that worked as it should have was just amazing. And you and I worked on the same session with Mike Little and he is just delightful.
What a wonderful and lovely human he is. And I believe you said he was bigger than the Beatles, but whatever.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:23] Yeah, I don't quite know what happened there. I said that when I was a child, if somebody had said to me, what's the best sentence that could come out of your mouth?
It would have been. Yeah. Hi, I'm Nathan Wrigley and I'm in the Beatles. Like where do you go from there? It's as good as it gets. And then I said, and then I grew up a bit and then, kind of lost interest in the Beatles a bit, and now it would be I'm Nathan Wrigley and I co-founded WordPress.
And and of course there, he was Mike Little on the screen and yeah, it it was so nice to talk to him. He's that? He's such a gentleman. It became obvious. So anyway.
Michelle Frechette: [00:13:58] Yeah. Thank you. And of course, Mike Liddell is one of the founders, the co-founder
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:01] of yeah, one of the co-founders of WordPress. Can I just draw attention to on the screen?
If you go here right at the top, there, they're looking for some feedback and I would really like their events to get some feedback. So it ends up at word Fest, doc, my forward slash feedback and reserve fairly soon. A form that you can fill out. There's probably half a dozen questions or something, but it's point click.
There is no there's one field at the bottom where you can type text. So honestly, it'll take seconds. Really appreciate it. On behalf of everybody on that team, if you wouldn't mind going and giving your feedback. Cause I, I know that the feedback makes a big difference to the events that I am running.
The feedback is something that we genuinely look through and we try to make it better. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Right. We were joined by Bernard. Hey, doing
Bernhard Gronau: [00:14:51] quite fine. Quite fun.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:52] Thanks Bernard. You got through the traffic jam. Okay.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:14:59] No, it's just my car didn't stock properly. I think it's a software issue.
Electric car, new shiny toys. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:11] It wasn't like putting a computer in a car was a good idea. I just want a key on a key, which manually turns the ignition on where if I lose the key, it's my stupid fault. I don't want any of these. So all of my cars have keys. I don't want the computerized car. I said we could get into the whole sector.
Yeah.
Computerized. Because I don't know. I take andBernhard Gronau: [00:15:36] stuff like that. And, but it's convenient. I must tell you if it's the first car, which has and stuff like a default, like keeping the distance to the car in front of you. So you're just putting your speed. It's it's, it's cheating, driving. Traffic in electric car is a different story.
Anyway. If you put on top, then those convenience features it's, it's very refreshing because you just lean back a little bit, but the car would hold the lane itself and it takes care of the speed. So I don't mind it and you can take control and whenever you need feel the need
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:13] for it. Yeah, I am.
I'm a bit, I'm a bit fearful of the advent of self-driving cars. I don't think I'm quite ready to get in a self-driving car yet.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:16:23] That computers make less mistakes than humans.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:26] Yeah. But at least it's my mistake.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:16:28] Yeah, but if somebody dies from it's oh
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:31] yeah, yeah, you're right. But anyway,
this weekend self-driving cars,
Bob Dunn: [00:16:41] we should have turned it on and off,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:43] that's right. Thank you for joining us Burnet. We haven't got time for the usual introduction since we are about to start properly. We've just been talking about word Fest and how absolutely fabulous it was. But the big news of this week, I'll put the screen back on the big news of this week is that one of the, probably the biggest release of WordPress in I think years years and years has just rolled out, hopefully by now you've had enough faith in WordPress to update your websites.
I know that some people hold out for a little while, especially when it's a point release like this. When we get to six, a lot of people will hold off, but I've basically updated everything. And there was nothing that went wrong. It's called Tattem as always. Some jazz musician in this case, art Tattem, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
He's a jazz pianist, not somebody that I'm familiar with, but loads and loads and loads of good stuff in this release. So just to paraphrase, if that's all right with everybody else, I'll just go through what the bullet point list is. And then we can talk about bits individually. We have the ability to manage widgets with blocks.
So you can basically put blocks inside a widget. So that adds some kind of legacy to to WordPress there's a new block. There's a, that you can display posts with block patterns. You probably, you might've been using this for ages, but it's now been surfaced in a much more obvious way. And hopefully people are using it more.
There are, leave the edit templates around posts for a moment. There are some other things here. There's the overview page structure. It looks a little bit like this. It's a, like a little pain which sits on the left-hand side and it tells you where all of your blocks are and how they work. This is probably my favorite bit of this release.
There's also going to be suggested patterns for blocks. So based upon the kind of things that you've been doing with blocks, it's going to suggest other patterns that you might like to use in the future. You can style and colorize images with this duo too. Filter. It's a bit of a weird one, but you can set two colors and it'll make any old image.
Look a little bit here. Then you've got some theme developer type stuff. You can export styles. So if you're a theme developer, you can have default styles that are inherited when anybody installs that theme that are switched on or switched off inside the block editor. So that's quite nice dropping support for
Yay. Sorry. I E 11, not anything, basically anything beginning with internet Explorer is now no longer supported and we've got the, the ability now to add web P images as well. So absolutely boatloads in it. I'll stick my flag in the sand and say this one, this new block inspector. Is my absolute favorite.
I've been using it this week. One of the things that I really like about it is that you can just grab things. If you've got a really long page, if you're writing long form content and you suddenly decide that this entire section belongs six and a half meters above where it's currently fixed, you can just drag it with the inspector and it will go along.
You can also drag things from the inspector into the main text. So if you've got a block that you just want to slot in somewhere, you can drag it out and put it elsewhere. I find that to be the most, the most compelling thing for this release, but it's absolutely huge. I don't know who wants to go first, but I'll take the I'll take it.
That one of you wants to leap in. I hope.
Michelle Frechette: [00:20:16] I love the idea of being able to drag and drop in that frame on the left-hand side. To me, it's as big as when suddenly you could edit CSS in the theme, in the, in the drop-down editor, because prior to that, you needed to either know how to code and do those kinds of things and add things to your site, or have a plugin for that.
And so when that ad got added, and then also it was very easy to use because it would tell you if you were making a mistake to me, that was huge. This is that magnitude. If that more, because it just makes it so much easier to edit your site and to know exactly what things look like and what blocks are, what, and especially if you're taking over for somebody else, right?
So if you didn't write it, but you have to edit it now, because you're working on a blog with somebody else. Now you can see exactly what it is that you're working with and you have a much easier way. It's faster to be able to do it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:09] Yeah, it really is significantly faster. It's the kind of thing that I feel that the direction of travel here has been coming down from page builders.
It's like page builders down and WordPress have taken some fabulous cues. I think they've done a really nice job of it. It locks itself in position on the side. Whereas previously it was some sort of opening thing that hovered over the top. So that's really nice as well. Yeah,
Bob Dunn: [00:21:32] I discovered it.
I discovered it when I was actually going into going to 20 different separate posts and moving the something from the very beginning to the end, it was like, oh my God. It was, it was like an epiphany for me, music came on and everything and it was so much easier. And, but no, I really liked that.
I like I I'm particularly fond of the query. Just because I've used that in so many ways, do themes, through their widgets and stuff, pulling in content and being able to have content displays certain ways stuff. So I guess I'm looking forward to what, how you can, what did people do with that?
Because I think there's going to be a lot build around that and yeah, I, I liked that. Yeah. It's yeah. I w I went in and just I, I think actually my host auto updated and I went in and said, oh, cool. Started playing around with things. And it was really interesting and I'm not, I feel like I'm losing my mind.
Sometimes. I feel like I'm in award press. I don't know. Vortex. And I'm thinking, was this here before I changed the color of my change? And I'm not sure all the little tweaks it did, but it changed the color of my admin. And I suddenly noticed by doing that, the little dots under the, when I would go to schedule a post, the little dots under the numbers, that show when there is a post.
It's almost. Do you see, do you know what I'm talking about? It's really strange. It's I, and I don't know if that's something to just came out or because I change the color of my admin is more apparent to me, but it's, when you're looking at your little calendar and you're going to select a date.
Okay. It shows you little dots of where there's already a post scheduled for that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:22] Okay. There was something around that. I'm sure there was something around . My memory is failing.
Bob Dunn: [00:23:30] It's such a tiny, I was telling Matt Malone would once on the podcast, I find the little bizarre things, most helpful for me, that's like, because I'm, sometimes I'm trying to remember what day was that?
I don't have a post I'm trying to schedule it. And I don't want to go back here and look at the date and everything. And there's all these tiny little dots. And the other thing that I don't know if any of you have this problem and I noticed they fixed it in this version is when you go into select a date for scheduling and a time, sometimes it would close after you did one, you select the date and you'd go, okay, now I've got to open again, put this right.
Then
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:06] they fix that. Still failing for me. I just did it
Bob Dunn: [00:24:12] fixed with this one. So I don't know, maybe it was just yeah, Moses or something.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:17] It had to pick the date. And as soon as you pick the. It would collapse and you have to let it for me after five point. Okay. You got a special 5.5
Bob Dunn: [00:24:28] 0.8, Bob, let's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:31] go the bulk release, which is
Bernhard Gronau: [00:24:32] really nice.
No issue.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:35] Yeah. I th I, I suspect you're right. And because I wasn't looking for it being fixed. I didn't even, it didn't even occur to me, but now that Bob said that I'm going to be furious until it's fixed. But two things that I noticed in my, in the block editor the line height has gone up. It's collapsed.
So whatever it was before I had really nice spacing. So in my theme, which is the beaver builder theme on the WP Builds website, the, in the block editor, the spacing was almost identical to how it outputs on the front end. Now everything is compressed. So the ascenders and descenders collide. So that was one thing.
And I've, haven't looked into why that might be just yet, but hopefully somebody will be able to shout out and go, oh, it's obvious it's this. And the other thing that I noticed, which is. Really pathetically trivial is the little, the dots. When you log in and supply your password then are bigger.
That's so exciting. I like the little dots,
Bernhard Gronau: [00:25:41] a slightly bigger,
Bob Dunn: [00:25:43] If we would have actually done this together, live Nathan, it would be just puts any counts. We'd be over these small little things. People might be skating. Get these guys off
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:55] those dots. They're way too big. I see our whole booklet.
I should probably put the WP to have an article because as always, as soon as something happens in WordPress core or in the WordPress ecosystem, WP Tavern hop on and just in, Tetlock's done a bit here and to speak to Bob's point the where's it gone. Where's it gone? There you go. The queer.
I think is probably the most exciting, not for me because I'm already doing this in other ways, but probably the most exciting for the project, because now you'll be able to start to create your own custom queries without having to know any kind of code. So you'll be able to say, I only want to show things with this category or this particular tag or whatever it might be.
And all of a sudden, the ability to create listings and make pages where only specific types of content are shown won't live within the purview of a, of an experienced developer. You'd be able to do this natively in WordPress for free, without learning a third party tool. And I just think this is totally fabulous.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:27:02] Yeah. That's heading in the right direction. You know, my beef with work.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:07] Yeah, yeah. But still the, this is not Guttenberg as such. This is just well, okay. Yeah. But I know with your background in pods, you've obviously got, there's a great deal. More that you can do with pods than you can currently, or
people theme or, but it'sBernhard Gronau: [00:27:23] heading in the right direction.
When you think about it, if you then put this Curry loop and put this block and make it aware of the current context, you're almost there, what people theme of that. Somewhat. So you're not far away from full site editing for, I have pages or other stuff, because you can build your archive page now.
And it's just one step to let it be the actual archive page and not just another page, which serves the same purpose. So it's weird a little bit. At least it feels for me you know, I'm still missing the whole, I like the way it hats, but I'm still not satisfied with the user experience around any metadata because it's still in this tiny side power and it's many clicks and it's not obvious for the, for the, for many people.
At least that was my findings when I let others test it. So I don't know, but it's hard to get the proper UX for that part. And the know, I don't have an idea, perhaps it would have submitted it, but I don't like the whole handling of custom fields of metadata because the editor itself. It's getting great.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:37] I feel that the promise of delivering on this is just still slightly out of reach. And what I mean by that is the it's still going to be really difficult for a complete novice to WordPress to make head nor tail of what any of this does. And they'll still be a requirement to go out and read blog posts and what have you.
But I guess each iteration, each time we jumped through a point release and get to the next version of WordPress, it just gets a little bit better and we are dealing with these things are quite hard to understand the idea of what is a loop? What, what does a query mean? It's complete gobbledygook, isn't it?
And um,
Bernhard Gronau: [00:29:17] Do we need to get to a point it's more a philosophical question where everybody can just understand it. Because a few years back, I had the discussion with my customer. She had a cosmetic studio. I said, oh, you're no, you're so great that I need to know all that stuff. And then I told her why, I don't know you, how to do your stuff either.
And I get my car repaired to the car dealer. I don't do it myself. Because there needs to be room for experts or stuff like that. You can't know everything and use everything because just it's around on a computer. So everybody needs to know how it works or how to do it. It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out.
I'm fully agree on that, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to have a little, at least a little bit of pre and to understand about what is a blog or what is a post or a, I don't know, stuff like that. Because if you want to use those advanced features, you need to know that stuff to make it properly, to build it properly.
So maybe it's a good thing that it gets simpler to use because then you can educate your colleagues or whoever is in charge of writing the texts, but they don't need to understand everything behind. Yeah. Yeah.
Bob Dunn: [00:30:42] It's almost, I was just gonna say, it's almost pie in the sky. I've often thought of this over the years when I hear that talked about, because there's just too many variables.
Everybody uses their site differently, has different needs with the site. It's just amazing. And most of us have been doing this a long time and I can bet each one of us has learned something new in the last week with WordPress or some. Oh, this is interesting. So yeah, it's I'm constantly, I'm watching my own videos.
I'm Googling. I swear to God I do this. I go back and watch some of my own videos and aha, I'm glad you're around. I talked to myself a lot, so this is rather pathetic, but it's true. You just, there's so much to do and you can't even retain it all. And if we expect beginners or people that are just starting to retain it, when.
Those that have worked on it so long. It's yeah, we're constantly revisiting relearning. And that's just the way it is, especially in technology. Yeah. But
Michelle Frechette: [00:31:49] what's interesting is people who are just starting to use WordPress now it's native to them, so they don't have to learn it the way that we have to relearn it.
So that makes a difference too. When Gutenberg first came out and everybody was like, feet screeching against the gun, like I will not do it. And I've never played it, but I'm going to leave a terrible review and the repo about this plugin right now and all of that, and then I hired somebody who'd never used WordPress before.
And he taught me Gutenberg because it was native to him. He just jumped in and learned it. And I had stopped teaching WordPress because I hadn't had the time to learn Gutenberg yet. So it's, it's, it's that kind of thing. I also think, have you ever seen the TV show? Or like they all die and they wake up and they're in heaven, the good place.
And on the wall, it says welcome. Everything is fine. I think they should replace hello world with welcome. Everything is fine. Every time we do update,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:45] you have a plugin for that.
Michelle Frechette: [00:32:48] I do actually add that to the list.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:54] Yeah, that's right. Yeah. First page that you create is everything smart. Everything is fine.
Yeah.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:33:01] I totally agree with pop. Google, I think in our business, the important skill of all is to read and understand how to use Google and how to just check out which, which articles you need or which inputs, because you can't run it, but all because it's such a broad topic and always there's something new and a new tool and that and this.
So it's always learning. So that's one of the things I like about this job, because you're forced to keep on your toes to learn new stuff. Don't get settled in your ways. And Gutenberg is for sure a big change and for somebody who didn't use WordPress before and think it's great. It's just, I don't like it because I tend to have people who are regularly under short notice.
That's my topic. Cause I normally have the old style was you have there, you have your title, your post field, and then fill out these fields and everything looks. So as soon as you have structured content, you are lost with Gutenberg because they are way down the fields or hidden on the side.
So it's like the category or stuff like that. I find it cumbersome. I don't know how it works for you. So I
Michelle Frechette: [00:34:16] just told us that his hit the heels on his shoes wore out by being dragged in.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:21] He is being dragged. We'll get him there one day. Bernard will come on the show and say, I am satisfied now with God.
It is it's good at off now. Yeah, just, just a couple of things that are calming the camera. And again, thank you. Camera new very full of comments today says overall, he thinks it's a great release. The theme Jason felt, yeah, this is the we're getting into the developer end of things, which I could probably show you that right at the bottom of the WP Tavern article, Justin talks about this and about how it's fairly limited in scope at the moment, but it would appear that Cameron's having real problems with it.
Cameron is a developer and a, and there's obviously found it to be tremendously buggy because this is unfortunately the theme Jason is so buggy. It's not funny. And he also says you're not alone. This is probably about the memory thing here. I just have to start honestly.
Bob Dunn: [00:35:15] And it's interesting. I get people that asked me, oh, Bob, have you written a post about this? And how honest. And I ended up going in, searching my site with Jake could have done too. So it was you know, it's like, yeah. Oh yeah. I remember that. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:30] Yeah. What you've written so many that you genuinely have no recollection of writing.
Yeah. And then,
Bob Dunn: [00:35:35] half of them are gone and I still search firm, which has
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:38] put that. He couldn't to tell him, wait, there is one of the users. Yeah.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:35:43] Lola, that like you have kind of project and you remember, I have used that one wanted to use it rarely to use it. Oh yes, it wasn't. Then you get, go searching and find it.
But
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:54] hello, Facebook user, whoever you are that saying, hello, everyone. Hello. If you want to say who you are, either write it in the comment itself or go to the URL, which I'm about to put on the screen. It's chat.restream.io forward slash F B. And that will allow us to to see who you are. The, you made an interesting comment Bob just a second ago, and that was the.
Was it Bernard? I can't remember. So there you go. There's the memory at work? Like
Bob Dunn: [00:36:23] confetti group here,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:26] who are you? Who are all of you? I've no idea how I got in this room. The, I have found that to be a feature of my life. You mentioned that you like the challenge all the time. Whenever I've done a job and I've done quite a few different jobs during the course of my life, whenever I've found that there is no longer anything to learn, I very quickly become bored of the job and want to do something completely different.
Not like WordPress. That's one of the things I think, which has enabled me to stick around and web development in general, the fact that it is now. Ever, it's never going to stop. The juggernaut will never grow into a hole, which is cause of anxiety in some respects, because I am getting left behind, the new kids on the block can do things that I can, I've got no pretensions that I'm going to make the effort or keep up with them.
But it is interesting watching it from the periphery, doing what I can do to stay up where I need to stay updated. I just feel that's a really important part of tech for me, the fact that it keeps me busy because I'm curious and I want to live.
Do right. Should we go to the next piece? The next one is this is, I don't know if there's a great deal to talk about around this one, but I'm going to mention, anyway, this is the classic editor. The one that Bernard loves yeah. Is, was, was an implementation of tiny MCE and tiny MCE is a product created by a company called tiny.
I don't know if company is the right word, but anyway, it's created by the organization tiny. And it would appear that they want to get into the sort of Gutenberg page builder type space, because they have acquired a company called and go over to the Tavern article. I'll link to it in the show notes, you'll be able to find this one.
It's called makers of tiny MCE acquire sector, Sarah Goodwin writing this. And I don't know if you guys had a chance to look at it, but they've obviously got this feeling. That a simple text editor is not enough. And just slightly curious as to why they didn't put their endeavors into sex something a bit like Guttenberg why they've decided to go their own separate way.
Cassette appears to be what I consider to be something a half way between visual composer and something like element, or you can see all of the bits and pieces you wouldn't see on a page, I'm probably better off not describing it, but you imagine you're constructing a page and it's got three columns and so on and so forth.
When you build things, everything is strictly demarcated by horizontal and vertical lines so that you can see, okay, this has got three columns, even though most of them might be empty, or you may decide to put things in there. Just curious that a company that's making tiny MCE also wants to. In the page builder space.
I don't know if anybody's got anything to add to this, not,
Bernhard Gronau: [00:39:22] You need to stay in the business and keep innovating and try new stuff because else you get, at some point I no longer needed. I dunno, maybe it's something like that because this page builder stylish thingy of using stuff is for sure the future.
Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:46] Let me just Google Setco and I'll show you what I found and you'll see whether you like it or not. That I'm using top taco. Hey, here you go. Look. Here's the way it looks on the screen. Sorry, if you're listening to this on audio, we're actually just looking at what it looks like.
It's kinda um, you know, you've got the panel along the top with the typical editing function you know, left, I actually, as soon as I saw that, I thought I'm at home with that. I really liked the fact that the editing stuff is on the top a bit like in a Google doc. So if you want to align things left and right, it just resides on the top.
And I'm really familiar with that. And then you've got this palette of things down the right hand side which do various other pieces. And unfortunately, the video that I was looking at earlier seems to have gone away off this website. It just, I don't know. Curious that they would want to, they would, I don't know, just it's a bit old.
When
Michelle Frechette: [00:40:36] you hit, when you understand that WordPress is what closing it on forty-five percent of the internet, why would you not want to create something that part of that 45%? So as opposed to leaning into something that already exists, everybody wants to have their own piece of that.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:40:54] Yeah. And I think there's room for, or many different takes.
Think about how many phone plugged into or no, have, I've lost track of them. And I can say, because I haven't tested all of them or how many page builders there are now leaving Gutenberg aside, but from elementary, which started from nowhere and it's not one of the biggest or prissy or beaver builder or oxygen kinder, or I don't know, they all launch are still around it's TV and all the other stuff.
And some even continue to use visual composer. It's a nightmare for me, but Hey, they know it from way back and they still use it. So-so there there is a room and there is always room for a little niche, especially if it go to that high. Of numbers of blood pres and maybe that's one reason why it was reached.
That number is because of the flexibility, because they can use this tool or that tool, or switch it out or whatever. I don't know, I don't know how money is such an energy block in stone and instill you think, okay, they can't do a new thing and then somebody does it differently and gets attention and the share.
Bob Dunn: [00:42:05] I never know,
to me, it just, I always down for tissue facetious when I say it, but it's jumping on the bandwagon. Hey, things, aren't working, things are going in a certain direction. And, I mean, that sounds very, maybe negative kind of connotation, but it's true. It's yeah.
They're, they're seeing what's happening and Michelle and Anne Ardboe said, Hey, they're following the stream.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:42:34] Yeah. This is the WordPress implementation. So they've got a WordPress plugin and. You can just see what I mean by it's like mimicking the page builder, but also the fact that it's adding in all of these extra horizontal and vertical lines to give you a real strong indication of where things are able to, by the looks of it, achieve some really quite intriguing layouts.
I don't know what the technology is behind that or how it's implemented, but I just, I did find it curious. I thought it was really interesting that we've got another editor and I did, of course start to think. I wonder if when WordPress moved away from using tiny MCE and obviously at some point in the near future is going to stop implementing that and supporting in any way, shape or form whether or not they were just thinking our bottom line is going to disappear.
The, the interest in tiny MCE will evaporate because the giants in the room WordPress is stopping to use it. I can't see myself using something like this. I don't see anything here for me, but anyway, it's out there. You guys can check it out. And obviously the guys behind tiny MCE probably know a thing or two about building stuff like this.
Michelle, Bob Burnett, anything else? Or shall I move on? Yeah. Okay. Fair, fair. Do you know what I've got this browser and I've got it. I've got it in dark mode and I'm really struggling to see which tab has currently open. There we go. I think it's this one now then back to where we should be Gothenburg 11.1.
We did mention this earlier, so I'll just go through this reasonably quickly. We've got Bernard, were you here when we were talking about this here, when we were talking about this, but yeah. Okay. Um, Gothenburg obviously is a plug-in, which stands in isolation to WordPress core. You have to go and download this 11.1, but there's quite a lot of nice new stuff.
We were talking about this new list view, which is quite nice. Justin, he's obviously been looking for this for a long time. Look, he says drum roll as well. And then right at the end. Yeah. He says, I do not often use emoji, but sometimes I like to Dole out a slow clap for a job. Well done. And he's done on two clapping emerging.
He's obviously delighted with that border support. Can't see, that's going to be something I'm particularly going to use, but if you are wanting to. Put borders around things like buttons, groups, images, searches, and tables. That's all going to be taken care of in the UI. Nice Gothenburg S UI for that. And you'll be able to decide whether or not you want your columns blocks to stack on mobile.
Currently, if you use. Call it the columns block or columns in Gothenburg, no matter what you do, they're always going to stack on mobile. So there'll be stacked one on top of the other, and now you can switch that off. So Justin's making the point that if you've got a tiny little set of horizontal things that you wish to remain horizontal on mobile.
So in this case, it's just his image with some stuff about when it was published and so on. You're going to be able to keep that tag clouds, anybody using tag clouds. Beautiful. Bueller anyone? No. Okay. And you can navigate your, sorry. You can create sub menu navigation colors as well. So it was whole load of nice stuff coming in there.
Anybody China,
Michelle Frechette: [00:45:54] if you use those colors, just make sure that you are always using proper contrast for people who have low and low V vision issues. So that if you're using blue on blue, for example, you want to make sure that your site stays accessible. So giving more views like that always gives you more opportunity to fail.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:15] Was there not forgive me, Michelle? I could be completely wrong about this. I have a memory. Crikey. There we go. There is something going on up there. I have a memory that there was, this was going to be. Taken care of it was going to suggest things which were of high contrast. I don't know if that's in there or not.
Presumably you can override them anyway, given that it may or may not be in there. What's your preferred way of making sure that contrast is something that you're taking care of. Do you have a tool that you go to? I
Michelle Frechette: [00:46:46] haven't, there are websites off the top of my head. I can go find one for you, but there are websites that will look at your, kind of do the overview of your site.
You put the page in there and it'll let you know what kinds of issues you have. But generally speaking contrast is one of those things that people who aren't using screen readers still need to be able to see. You know, light text on a light background is very difficult for some people to read, especially as you get older, I like to see a nice dark, large font on the page or my own eyes.
Yeah, Cameron saying there is a word I have to pick colors with poor contrast. The problem with that is you can still do it. So you might decide that you're yeah. You may decide that you still like it. But it's not a good, it's just not a good decision. So I just wanted to make sure that with all of these options you have, that you keep accessibility in mind.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:47:36] Yeah. And it's important to use really test tools because you can be fooled by the contrast. I have seen contrast option, which to normal, I, you look perfectly fine and then you go and test it. And it's very poor because there are a sudden color plant necess and stuff like that which, which shifts the way, how the contrast works.
So it's, if you go before a test tool, you find many other for them out of their checking for all the accessibility issues. And for example, Firefox the color picker Firefox shows you the contrast ratio. Like the number for it, because it depends if it's a large font or smaller font how, how, how great the contrast must be or should be.
There are suggested value somewhere hidden in the, I don't know. And you can see on those sides. Okay. You can make the font size bigger than the contrast is. Okay. Oil change the color. So sometimes it can help to make it fun, a little bit bigger and you have less contrast issues, but
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:32] we don't. So is that like an.
Color picker within it's such a long time since I use Firefox.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:48:38] With the in-built tools, Firefox shows you the contrast. If it's not always perfectly, because it depends. If he if the color picker picks the proper color for the background, especially if you have transparency and stuff going on it's not always proper, but you get an indication about the rating you get.
Yeah. Okay. I got to say,Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:03] I listened to a whole variety of different podcasts. Some of them related to internet privacy and security, and it seems to be. Real endeavor on the part of Mozilla to be looking out for people who are privacy and security conscious, the ability to stop tracking by default and really going the extra mile.
And and it may very well be that at some point fairly soon, I drop chromium as my browser and go-to. Yeah, that's what I'm using because I'm totally wedded to the Chrome extensions ecosystem. There's just like boatloads of them that I've got. And I don't even know if they're available on the Firefox side, but just, I
Bernhard Gronau: [00:49:47] think most of this stuff, I'm for the daily stuff, I'm not always using Firefox, but if it comes to development stuff, oil, it digging deeper into some CSS issues or stuff like that is Firefox.
Developer tools are still the best because for grit and stuff like that, you see the grit laid out and in colors where all the lines are. So it's, it's great for Deepak in grid and Flexbox staff too. And I find I found it better than Chrome, but it would need to check again because those tools rapidly change in so many areas.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:21] Peter Ingersoll. Thank you. He's mentioned that there's again, dragging me back into the Chrome ecosystem. There's a, an accessibility to call wave. And yeah,
it's [email protected] by
Bernhard Gronau: [00:50:44] using regularity.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:46] Thank you, Peter. That's really helpful. And Peter, I'm guessing you're recommending it because you've used it and you actually think it's good at that job. That's good to know. Thank you.
Bob Dunn: [00:50:55] We don't. I was just going to say, bottom line is find a tool and don't depend on your own eyes or ask your family to tell you what the contrast looks like.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:05] Yeah, I am. I was recently on the UK. The UK has a, there's a whole bunch of websites, which are. In this one domain, should we say? And they're all to do with government. So it might be like school applications or COVID testing or whatever, and it's all done in this. And I was really use it quite a lot, but I was looking at it today with kind of fresh eyes.
I don't know why, but suddenly the accessibility thing was in my head. And I thought that if any website is going to need to be accessible, it's this one. And I was really. Really drawn to how big the text was everywhere. Just slightly bigger, but bigger. And all of the check boxes were enormous. Absolutely enormous, but they looked beautiful.
And so it was obviously an attempt to make it as accessible as possible, but there wasn't a single bit of it, which I felt the style had been, let's say compromise for one of a better word. It all looked absolutely fabulous. And even with, I would dare to say pretty poor eyesight, you would be able to, I would imagine glean everything that you needed to off this page.
And if you needed to put your finger on a mobile phone to click that tick that checks box you, you really would have to try quite hard to miss iron and get it in the wrong place. Yeah. Yeah.
Bob Dunn: [00:52:21] On a side note, my, I was at a word camp and handed somebody my phone. To take a picture and they said, my God, Bob, but why is your font so freaking huge on your phone?
Michelle said, it's I looked at him and just scaffold them your day will come, buddy. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:40] Who are you? I don't even recognize you. The friend of mine I saw uh, it was exactly 12 months between seeing her one time and seeing her the next time. And she's always had the very latest iPhone and a year ago when I saw her, she had the iPhone and there was nothing remarkable about it.
It was, it was just her iPhone this year. I saw it. And I think her eyes obviously deteriorated enormously during the space of this year. And the font was such that you could only really fit a 10 letter word across the screen. Normal. It was truly enormous. And I made exactly the same. Silly comment.
I said, wow, that your eyes have red. And she said, yeah, this is now where I'm at. This is what I've got to do. I can get just a handful of characters across the screen at the same time. So her experience of the internet on that phone was so different to mine. I could leisurely hold the screen, read a fairly long article with just swiping a couple of times.
And then, you get the whole thing finished for her. It was a constant process of swiping reading, swiping, reading, swiping reading, and there was no way of separating the two things swiping and reading happened at exactly the same moment. I found that really curious and not something. Yeah. Really thought about it, but it was truly enormous.
And and, uh, but then th the flip side of me was thinking how fabulous is that we've got a tool in our hand, which can enlarge text at the click of a button you know, go back to printed materials. And once you've bought the book, You're either holding the magnifying glass or pushing it further away.
But my my Kindle, the text is slowly but surely been getting bigger over the years. Yep. Same here. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It
Bob Dunn: [00:54:21] makes the book seem longer too, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good, suddenly it goes from 200 pages, 2000, it's like
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:32] my words though. I feel my Kindle is fast becoming my favorite piece of tech, that actual hardware I'm drawn to it more and more.
I don't know what it is, but as I get older, I'm. Desiring to shop the laptop. Whereas I was always desiring to keep the laptop open in the evening. Now I'm desiring to shut down the laptop and get the candle out and spend an hour or two reading in the afternoon. I think it's, I don't know what that is, but that's, I'm just so delighted that I've got it in the technical.
Bernhard Gronau: [00:55:03] It was more like a book like you're used to because we all have started out using real books and printed stuff. And sometimes still like filling a paper is different. Although I doing most of my stuff digitally because I don't hate the hate, the paper laying around, and then you can find what you need and then you've lost it or whatever.
But if you take an iPad in your hand or a Kindle, it feels more like a book or a piece and you can hold it differently, like from your position and stuff like that. So it's, I think it's it can, can, and you can use it on a couch or wherever using the laptop on a couch is at least for me, it feels.
I can't do it. It's not the right thing to do.
I get it. And also you you can put yourself in those spotsNathan Wrigley: [00:55:50] where you wouldn't have the ability to like the beach is a great example. You can sit on the beach and with a Kindle, you can literally hold it above your head to block the sunlight.
I imagine
Bernhard Gronau: [00:56:03] strong.
Michelle Frechette: [00:56:08] I'm going to blow your mind and tell you, I read all my books on my phone. So every read in the last three years has been on my iPad. Wow. I just downloaded the app and then I have
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:19] No, I've got to say I have no truck with this. Michelle, I think
yeah,
I can't confess though. The, the ability for me to flip from a book to the Kindle was seamless. I remember the day I was absolutely convinced that all of that, sorry. Technology eBooks was not for me until I held one. And a friend of mine got one of the first Kindles with the little keyboard at the bottom and the round keys.
And I was just curious, I said, what's that? And she said, it's my new Kinzer now almost and then I just out of the corner of my eye caught sight and it was like, give me like, oh, let me hold it. I want to see it. And that was it. The second I saw it and she said, yeah, it can hold like 4,000 books. Oh, okay.
Fine. I
Michelle Frechette: [00:57:13] had a Knuck instead of the Kendall and I went on vacation. This was probably seven years ago. Now went on vacation and read four books, but it only took up this much space in my luggage. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:23] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I, yeah. Yeah. I couldn't consume it on a phone. It would make my eyes hurt. I would definitely, I make the
Michelle Frechette: [00:57:31] text bigger.
Bob Dunn: [00:57:31] That's all.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:32] Oh, I see.
Bob Dunn: [00:57:36] Like 9,000 pages. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't matter
Michelle Frechette: [00:57:40] because it's still the same amount of words
Nathan Wrigley: [00:57:43] can roll it though. Do you have something which makes the text move? Cause that would be my frustration with the Kindle because I'm holding it the one hand and my thumb, the way that I hold it, my thumb hovers over the screen and you just need to the mirror just touch on the screen and it'll flip to the next page and it just does, there is no scroll.
It's just one page next page. And you can do the same on the other side. So you can go backwards if you accidentally go forward. I just it's just a scroll with your phone. You've just got that little habit,
Michelle Frechette: [00:58:10] one enormous page on the Kindle app, but on the app, just you swipe it and it has a page, like a page pagination.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:58:16] That's curious, you are the first person I know who reads entire books on a iPhone. That's fascinating. Okay. All right. Let's move on. If Nathan can find his mouse, there it is. Next one then is I think. Possibly the, one of the biggest things that we've got going [email protected] block pattern directory, which is now live.
I should probably explain what a block plan is. If you're listening to this and you have no clue, imagine if you're using a page builder or something like that, it's pre designed things. So it may be a hero section. It may be a layout where you've got an image on the left and a contact form on the right or some text on the left and so on.
It's a pre-configured thing. And they can be as complicated as you like, or as simple as you like currently. They're not that straightforward to create I feel that they're out of the realms of Non-developers shall we say, but soon to change. And at the moment, there's not many things in a directory that you can download, but the directory has launched and you can now go and find these for yourselves.
The fear, is that we'll end up with uniformity in websites. There'll be a few block patterns which rise to the top and maybe they'll just create a design, which we see all over the place. But I just think this is a fabulous initiative. The idea of WordPress of course, is to democratize publishing and the ability for non technical users to go and find layouts designs made by people who really know what they're doing.
You basically click a button and from the moment it's on the page, it's yours to edit. You can take bits out, resize the tax, change the color and so on. It's just brilliant. And I want this to be a real thumping success. Yeah.
Bob Dunn: [01:00:06] I, I was just gonna say, I love it. I love the ideas. Am I the only one that finds it a bit confusing?
That they're called patterns. Yes,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:18] no,
Bob Dunn: [01:00:18] that's, I think of, when I first heard the term, I thought of. Something totally different. You know
Michelle Frechette: [01:00:27] yeah.
Bob Dunn: [01:00:28] And I'm thinking of, people just starting beginners and stuff and and I know that's a small thing cause you learn it, you figure it out and you're here beyond that.
But that was the very first thing that struck me was the name of it. And I just found a bit
Nathan Wrigley: [01:00:44] confusing, but yeah, no, I still think it's confusing, especially. So for example, one of the things that I've got a plug-in called newsletter glue, which I keep talking about, cause I really am deeply impressed by it.
And it allows me to create newsletters from blog posts and it's done with their collection of, I think now seven blocks and they're templates which would be far better called templates have to be called patterns because if you wish to save them, they're going to appear in the block editor.
As a pattern and you're right. It doesn't fit. It didn't take me too long to just forget that 10 patterns was the wrong word and so on. But I think everything out, everything else uses the word template for this you know, it's a page template or a layout template or whatever, and yeah, it just, I think it's possibly not the right, the right word for this.
I would agree. Yep.
Bob Dunn: [01:01:46] Yep.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:01:47] Yeah. It's called pump because layout is so generally. And, uh, I think it's not, I didn't it didn't strike me as odd because for me the pattern is something like reusable because you have patterns in all kinds of flavors in in, in, in, in, in, I dunno
Bob Dunn: [01:02:08] Yeah, I guess I'm thinking of the non-tech person, what pattern means to them.
I mean, it's, it's hard sometimes to reach outside, or, or understand why we easily adapt to it but you don't need to
Bernhard Gronau: [01:02:23] keep talking about it. It's interesting because
Bob Dunn: [01:02:25] it is an interesting thing. And I still, every time I hear it always a little bit, it's like pattern, I know what a pattern is, A lot of people.
I know if I said, what do you consider a pattern on a page? And they'd probably come up with something totally different.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:02:43] Yeah. It's almost like the decoration on wallpaper or something feels like that's what the pattern is. Yeah. I'm coming from,
Bernhard Gronau: [01:02:51] if you come from the broke brick programming side, then you have stuff like software design patterns or like general solution, or like, um, an other written hall, default specific thing.
So that's, that's a software design pattern and you have patterns all over it. So it's, it kind felt natural. Maybe a way to separate them from other stuff because templates. Yes, there are templates, but in the end there are patterns because you fill it with different content.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:21] Yeah. So
Bob Dunn: [01:03:22] we can feel rest assured that all the developers get.
Yeah. That's all that
Bernhard Gronau: [01:03:26] matters.
Bob Dunn: [01:03:30] If that's been solved, we conquered the
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:33] world. I think we should just call them something. Divorced from anything, like maybe they should just be called, like Brian's or something like that. Or I'm going to download a nice Brian for my website or a Cynthia or something like that.
Michelle Frechette: [01:03:49] We're of words. There are in the English language until you try to name something, you have no idea of the limitations of the
Nathan Wrigley: [01:03:55] English language.
That's right. That's right. There's a word for everything. Except when you need a new one and then suddenly it's one word for five
Michelle Frechette: [01:04:03] things, but that's a very good,
Bob Dunn: [01:04:05] I, you explain to people why I have something called do the woo. It's like, okay. Yeah. And I thought it was hard enough to tell people what I did, so on the screen some implementations of this and by the sounds of it, I forget who probably just didn't. Yeah. Justin was the writer of this piece. The, the 20 and teachers who've contributed their own patterns and I want you to say design or template, then they have categorized them as follows.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:04:37] And you can actually just search this like a category filter. So they're made up into buttons, columns, galleries, headers, images, and texts. I don't know if anything will be added in the future. It looks like. 70 patterns at the moment. So this really, really is the very beginnings. And I feel that there, there are career making opportunities in this for people.
If somebody was to really throw themselves headlong into this and come up with some splendid block patterns that everybody was in, or have I failed that somebody who has yet is struggling to find their way in WordPress, that this feels like the cost of something you couldn't. Yeah. I've heard that
Bob Dunn: [01:05:18] a lot from people I have on my podcast, because there are a lot of builders and a lot of people from core talking about it, that's been the kind of the over and over.
I've heard it. They said this is probably the, one of the bigger areas that there's going to be. Incredible opportunity for growth fan and who knows where it goes and stuff. So I think, yeah, little industry's made
Nathan Wrigley: [01:05:41] within that, for sure. Yeah. And they look nice. The ones that were shown on the screen suddenly if you can't see them, you'll have to go onto the WP Tavern article.
They're nice. Just building blocks the way to get you started, they're not necessarily going to be used by you throughout your site forever and ever. Amen. But there might be some ideas in here, but it's going to grow. I would imagine that those 70 volunteers give it a bit of time will creep up.
I don't know if those numbers have solidified or have they been growing slowly over time, but go and get yourself stuck into this. If design is your forte, how are we doing with that one? Anybody else?
Bernhard Gronau: [01:06:18] I think it's, it's the, like that exists in the other page builders. For people builder to safe template or all those pre-constructed templates, you need to look into the UI and how much you can change or in the end, they are just another name for safe blocks.
I don't know. Or some like a group of blocks safe like that. And I'm sure it's difficult to name that kind of stuff. I'm not quite sure you can really put you in a distinct position because most of the obvious stuff is when you have an image of in text left. Whatever. It will be very fast, becoming very hard to say, okay, why is this is one better than that?
Or what's the new, what I mean to do? I do make yourself know what I mean. Okay. Yes. If you do it well, and to make proper. Additions for mobile staff, because that's the really interesting part of it. How do they work then in the mobile view? So you don't need to always do it again, but
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:22] yeah. Yeah. I wonder
Bob Dunn: [01:07:23] if a lot of these patterns that I actually use the word patterns will come out as More niche industries.
I see that just like themes almost, here's the patterns for the restaurant here's patterns for whatever, businesses and stuff. And that's where they'll kind look the same in a way, like Bernard said, you know, it'll be like, what makes this better? Oh, but this one allows restaurant menu items versus this one could do the same thing, but it's obvious what this one does.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:07:59] A couple of people in this field that spring to my mind, the first one is Mike Oliver. And he's already selling access to a predefined to a set of. Patterns. So he's made a bunch of patterns that you can use. I can't remember if there's a constraint because I know that he's very keen on generate press.
I think that might be used. Yeah. I don't know if you need generate blocks there. That block add on, um, to do complicated labs. I don't know if you need that, but you can certainly get predefined. And so there's an industry. And then in the very near future Brian Gardner is going to be releasing.
He may have done already frost, which is a very similar thing. This time built off the back of L Genesis, which is now freely available. And so that the, these two gentlemen are going to be hopefully making a career out of selling beautifully designed. Patterns and if these two are doing it, I can't see why other people wouldn't wish to try to do the nice thing.
I th the thing that I like about it is that it could become really atomized. And it could be that you get almost like little micro payments because you only want two or three little solutions. You don't need the entire suite. You just want the header one. So you go to the website and you pay maybe, I don't know, $5 for all the headers, but you don't really want all the other stuff.
Cause you're able to do that yourself. Or you just like the look of the footer. I'm going to give you $3 to give me all the footage. I've no idea if that kind of ecosystem will come around and to burn it. I have no idea how people are going to surface to the top on here. We've obviously seen countless examples in the WordPress plugin repository where, different things have been tried.
Star ratings. Number of installs are used as different ways of surfacing people to the top, but I'm almost sure that once you get past a thousand, it's going to be too difficult to use unless something's built into surface good work, see
Bernhard Gronau: [01:10:03] the patterns more like you get a theme and to set up a patterns that suited well, or you get like, like you have it as a beaver builder guy.
Like we have it with Astra or others. Prebuilt sites and then you have your rows and your staff you can use, which are all in the same design style like that. So you can just replace the text and maybe change them in color and you have a decent looking side. So it's just pre-built and you don't need to grab your blocks from 10 different sources or whatever blocks over there and still need to change the color.
Or I don't know, depending because the one block doesn't fit the other, I think, but I'm not sure it will be more like you get a set to build your whole. Pre prebuilt blocks and in a country. Okay. This book and this block th th the more interesting question is hard to hide all the other stuff from the editor.
So you don't get messed up your own site. So it's, it's because if you look now in cotton products, All the blocks you have. And if you don't take care of it, it's, I don't know, two years, this one, or that one.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:11:17] Great. A little thumbnail of the entire thing. So if it's a long block and you've got three or four long blocks or patterns I should say then, then it's going to quickly go down the page.
And also the install process at the moment for, of as is it's as it's what we've got, but it's not perhaps as seamless as you'd hope for in the future, you've got to download all these little mini Jaison files and you have to go and upload them. And they, the name comes along for the ride.
So at least they've got a suitable name. He just called them like header 1, 2, 3, and four, and you'd have to figure out over time what, which ones you preferred, but you have to go and upload them. And this obviously will, hopefully in the future, obviate the need for that. You just go and find the one that you like, the look of it looks like they're all given for.
Just put that back on the screen. Again, it looks like they're all given the same amount of space. So they like a theme thumbnail. They've all got a little rectangle and obviously they're going to have to try and advertise. What it is that they're best at, in that tiny little rectangle. There's the image of the day, love me staring through my fingers.
And, and you'll obviously have to UN just decide how you want to market it. There. Some people are put, some learn extends, right?
Bernhard Gronau: [01:12:31] Fear. That's like the maintainability of all the stuff. Okay. That's the developer speaking, but you don't know who built it. When was it built? I don't know. Couldn't product change in between.
Do they need update when Gutenberg changes will there, because it's free because that's nice and shiny, but we all know from Unix and picket matching on and stuff like that's not easy to keep staff on a level where everything works together. And if you mix them blocks from seven different alters, because of to look and feel of them then maybe they don't look the same on mobile.
Okay. So it's kind tempting on first glance. You're not, I say crap the thing, but would it work out in a year or two. Yeah. I think one thing is missing in WordPress is this more global color palette because that's when cadence started solving it and others tried, but we are still not. And then your client can go in or change that color or that color, or it's, it's much stuff to deactivate to keep people from doing the wrong.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:13:40] Okay. Okay. Anything else anybody, or shall we move on? I do think this is exciting though, personally. I'm quite sure. Of course. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Just a couple of bits that have actually, I'll just do this one very quickly because I think it's worth mentioning, I don't know if anybody was had any problems with this, but just so we're moving away from WordPress for a minute and then we'll come back with something Michelle wants to talk about.
And this is Akamai. It's not a company that I really have any familiarity with. I know the name and they're a great big supplier of infrastructure throughout the internet. They had a. Outage over the last week, which apparently took down almost like the whole of, I think it was Denmark's bank.
It's just what, what was it Denmark or the Netherlands? I can't remember in this post, essentially, if you were a somebody in whatever country it was, and I think it was the Netherlands, then you couldn't do banking because this company had gone down. Just think this is so fascinating that we've let it come to this point.
And I was thinking it was a slightly more big thought. I was thinking, crikey, imagine my host just goes out of existence or they have some sort of global outage, almost everything that I rely on to make my life function is dependent upon other people and the infrastructure.
And I don't know what it is that they are using for their infrastructure and what it is that they in turn are using for their infrastructure. And it's like a house of cards. And all you have to do is have the little Akamai card at the bottom go and everything. Yeah.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:15:20] Kinda like when went to pick tanker in the Suez canal, just it has.
Totally shook up all those transport businesses and, and stuff like around to the health later, a guy for medical supplies talking. And he said, even after it's worked, it was very difficult because then some ships went around Africa and the rice at the same time. Which like that, the chemical, the Suez canal.
So now the next bottleneck was the hydrocolloid half. And the, the, the bore that the port, because then they had too many ships at the same time to, to unload and reload. It was a nightmare to get stuff delivered on time. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a good thing that we are so reliable.
And then just in time and just when you need to stuff, and I think the same is happening with poplin it, because if you have an issue with clot flair or any major CDM or MSM, or whoever has an issue, Whole networks can go down. Even if you, not many people know that, but in the end, the internet isn't that one peak net it's many, many, many, many smaller and picker companies running their servers and connecting them and pick routers in between M one wrong comfort configure router.
Chem can cut off whole countries. Yeah. So it's it's it's it's amazing that it doesn't happen more weird shit. Yes. It's redundant. And there are many different connections, but still it's a very fragmented system comment. That
Nathan Wrigley: [01:17:04] that's the thing that I got out of this article is just the, how fragile it all is.
And obviously, companies like Akamai, presumably they have some seriously clever people who are well paid to sit there, watching screens for the moment it goes. And the red lights come on and things start spinning and, helicopters, land, and the SAS jump out and all of that. But I'm still, yeah.
Somebody like me sitting there, it didn't affect me in any way that's discernible. But if I was in, I'm going to say the Netherlands again, it probably wasn't. And I suddenly couldn't use my bank for a seriously long period. I think it was like a whole day or something. That's a big deal because this company in some far remote part of the world, I have no relationship with has a problem.
I think Michelle, I interrupted you on three that's.
Michelle Frechette: [01:17:46] Okay. I, I'm going to coin a new term now I'm going to call it internet Jenga. So it depends on where you are and what piece gets removed and how it gets put back on the top, whether your effected or it's the key. Topples everything.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:01] It says that it, the Coles have it walls.
Where has it gone? Let me just go and find, it says in GTM service that experienced an outage that took down some of the most popular websites in the world, bringing banking, gaming, and news websites to a stand. Still. The reason for the outage was a software update that caused the bug in the DNS system, a system that converts, names to IP addresses.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:18:26] It's like for them, not that technical people, it's like the telephone book of the internet holodeck. I like to put it to you don't remember your telephone number. That's like the P address. But you remember the main name. Uh, if those services go down, almost everything go down because your browser asks for, I don't know, with the bills there is no answer.
Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: [01:18:53] And Cameron Jones probably just just registered internet, jenga.com.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:18:59] Yeah. If I was on this call, I would have done that.
I'll be off in a few minutes with all over it. Block pans or
Because everything is so atomized and I really don't have an understanding of how the food in my supermarket got there, but just know that I am able to walk in and purchase it with handy bits of paper or not even that anymore. I just go and some ones and zeros pass over a line that maybe is operated by Akamai, that I just no insight into how this sort of stuff is all tied together.
And in the UK at the moment we're experiencing it's the specter of, there's a lot of talk because we have this app and if you've been in proximity of somebody who has a very high chance of having had COVID, it will ping you on the app. And then currently you're legally obliged to go into isolation.
And there's been a lot of this happening because we freed up society more. So there's no coincidence that more people are getting these pings. And they were saying that something like a hundred thousand holier. So truck drivers, I don't know if you use the word haul. Yeah. A hundred thousand journeys per day are not happening at the moment.
And I went into the supermarket yesterday and I saw the result and it was oh, so that's the result of an app. A phone app did this. It just prevented us all from getting food and so on. And I just thought, wow, the stores finally
Bob Dunn: [01:20:31] have a good excuse for being out of something. Now they just say, it's just, things are slowed down.
I'm moving.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:20:40] Um, Cameron's he says, cause he says he got me. He was there. Anyway. I just thought that was fascinating. How much we rely on all this technology, but probably in the most part, don't really have a clue as to how it all works. Michelle. It is over to you. You
Michelle Frechette: [01:20:56] put this one so excited about this.
Yes. Text to give is now live as part of give WPS offerings. So it does require that you have a Twilio account. So that you can tie into that texting and you have a number through there to be able to text, but text to give us something that now anybody who's using give WP with a basic plan can can use a text to give it's you text into the number that is assigned to your organization, the number of the amount of money that you want to give.
And it prompts you through the rest of how to give that money and make that donation. So text to give us something that's live now. And we launched this on Thursday. I have not heard of anybody having difficulties with it yet, which is always a wonderful thing. When you have launched something brand new you do have to have Stripe and Twilio as it says there, but it makes it as long as somebody has a phone signal and they have texting on their phone.
So out of the older flip phones, like my stepdad still has probably won't work as well.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:00] Give them the conversation. Do you initiate the, so you linked Stripe and Twilio together in the backend of the plugin, I'm guessing. And then you initiate a conversation through a text message. So you text this number and then does it say, okay, how much would you like to donate?
And then you put a number and it confirms back to you. You
Michelle Frechette: [01:22:18] actually donate, you text the number. So if I want to give a hundred dollars during, let's say that word Fest life had been used. Yeah. At the time, which of course we hadn't implemented. It only came out the day before, but had we done that?
Somebody could have said, honey, they would've just texted to the number 100 and they would have initiated that a hundred dollar donation.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:22:37] Okay. So sorry. I'm still confused if I th there's a number that I need to put into, like I text to that number and then what immediately follow that with the number of dollars or whatever.

Michelle Frechette: [01:22:50] So I put in the top, if I was going, if the phone number that I'm texting to is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Yeah. I would put that at the top and I would just text the number 100 to give a hundred dollars. I don't have to initiate anything else. I just put in the number and that will initiate the process by which to confirm the donation and what I'm put you through that process of
Nathan Wrigley: [01:23:12] really interesting, just from the point of view of let's say, both well, Bob, myself, and Michelle, we all create content, which is largely driven by audio.
And you really do have to. Get people to go to URLs to go through forums. This is something which I can imagine. People who produce podcasts, I mean is not going to be me probably, but that they could put this in their messaging at the beginning of their podcast, support the podcast, text, whatever I'm going to,
Bob Dunn: [01:23:44] I'm going to put it in every five minutes, by the way.
Did I tell you this,
Michelle Frechette: [01:23:50] the hackers Patriot and I don't want them having any part of it. It's just all about me and my work
Nathan Wrigley: [01:23:58] in the north. In north America, you have a real heritage of making numbers into words. Don't you? I remember being an American phone numbers would be made into words so that, the three letters.
On the number one fan for a, B or C and so on, we literally don't have that. I've never heard any business do that. So we would still spell out the actual telephone number if you want people to do it. But ah,
Bob Dunn: [01:24:27] I'm thinking that's a home market because really when you think about it, if any nonprofit, this is a market for podcasts that you're not even thinking of. And that's a good point, Nathan, because it's a pain to get people to, whatever. But if they're, are saying, Hey, let's go ahead and fundraiser or something or, we want to, I'm thinking of my podcasts.
I would have, I could have used this to say, Hey, in the middle, why don't you text this and give some, do you know?
Nathan Wrigley: [01:25:05] Yeah, because, sorry.
Michelle Frechette: [01:25:08] Anytime you have a group of people in a room, right? So it's one thing when everybody is on your website, they don't need text to give when they're on your website already.
But this is think about churches. For example, everybody's in the room. Nobody has money to pull out of their pockets, to put in the plate. Now they can just text to give during collection time, they can send a hundred dollars to the church. Let's say you know, I belong to the Rochester women's network and we have two big events every year.
Instead of writing out checks or trying to come up to a website, make a donation. All I have to do is pull out my phone, on the slide show at the bottom, it says text to give, text this number to support the Rochester.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:25:47] Honestly, I think this is really. Rarely. Great. Just one thing off the back of, let's say that somebody donates $1 billion to to WP Builds.
Yeah.
Bob Dunn: [01:26:02] I'd have to keep texts large on my phone to make sure I'm not having an extra one.
Michelle Frechette: [01:26:09] Somebody gives me
Nathan Wrigley: [01:26:13] spices and he don't know. Let's say somebody gives me $10. Is there a way off the back of that relationship can be created? I can capture
Michelle Frechette: [01:26:24] emails. Yeah. It's going to be in your website. So you're going to have, it's still going to be in your list of donations and donors and things like that. So you're still going to be able to have that relationship marketing relationship with donation, donor relationship with your donors.
Absolutely.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:26:38] I really feel this is a cool, cool thing. And it's going to have loads of unexpected. Ways of it, because it's so easy to say that out loud. And I think podcasts and YouTube does that kind of thing. And the nice thing is you've already got that thing in your hand and you might be consuming the content on that thing.
Or you might be looking at the content on the thing in front of you and that device is just right there. And I dunno, I just think it's a nice, everybody's got a number
Michelle Frechette: [01:27:08] and because we're excited about it. We are actually offering a 15% discount to make a purchase of one of our plans right now.
Um, I think I sent it to you, Nathan. I don't remember off the top of my head actual the actual discount is, let me see. I've got it here too. Texts. Yes.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:27] Sorry. Is it in the show notes?
Michelle Frechette: [01:27:29] It is text the number to give the number 15. So text me get 15. Do you use that? Yeah. So if you say, if you use that discount code at your checkout, you'll save 15% off your first year of using it.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:27:45] There we go. There. It is. Give texts, text to give and discounts, text with the number to give with the number 15. We'll get you 50%, 15%. That's very cool.
Michelle Frechette: [01:27:59] If I can tease one more
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:00] little thing. Oh yeah. But I put it up. Did I do it? Nope. Nope, Nope,
Michelle Frechette: [01:28:04] Nope. So this one isn't in there. But we are actually in the final stages of peer-to-peer giving.
And so we will be soon having an add on for peer to peer giving where somebody can enter from the front end of your website to create their own spin up their own donation form on behalf of your organization. For example, like right now, St Baldrick's, which does, shave your head, raise money for kids with cancer, to make wigs, things like that.
You can have your own, donation form with saying, I'm trying to raise $200 and the gold bar moves across the bottom. We're creating an add-on forgived WP that will make it possible for people to do that on your
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:43] behalf so they can embed it in their own domain.
Michelle Frechette: [01:28:46] It will be on your website, but it will have its own dedicated donation page.
So if your organization is abc.org, that'd be abc.org/ Nathan's fundraiser.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:28:57] Nice. That is nice. Yeah. Yeah. You're ready
Michelle Frechette: [01:29:03] to get myself on your calendar again for the show that comes out so I can show
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:08] now you'll be some revolutionary new product. That's great. Well done to the guys. Okay. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: [01:29:14] Our developers are brilliant.
I can't say enough. Good things about them.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:29:18] Yeah. That's absolutely lovely, great stuff. I have one pick of the week. I don't know if anybody wants to quickly think of something fun for this week, but I'm going to throw one in. It's got nothing to do with WordPress or technology or anything like that.
This is just the best photo I've seen in a long time. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to zoom in here. So this is somebody who took a picture. And can you see that just yet? Can you see the face there? And the article is entitled. Neptune is in the waves during storm and new Haven. So what I'm showing is a picture and just right here if that isn't a human face, isn't that cool.
Charity. Yeah. Good. Isn't it. So somebody who just by pure coincidence, managed to capture the 10000000th of a second, when all of the bits of a crashing wave on a pier aligned to make it look as if there was a face, just pushing itself out of the water. It's like something out of Lord of the rings or something.
but I think it's real, too little eyes just there in their little nose. And I'm the top lip and a bottom lip and a bit of hair at the time. A little bit of
Bob Dunn: [01:30:37] mustache there too, maybe.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:30:39] Yeah. Yeah. That's a mustache.
Bernhard Gronau: [01:30:41] You can see a little bit of your, if you have a fantasy.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:30:44] The the nice thing is you can all see it a few.
About a year ago, I was browsing the paper and there was a photo of somebody who had a, who'd created a muffin, they'd baked a muffin and they took it out the oven and they said, it looks like mother to raise her. Honestly, I turned that page upside down every which way there was no mother to raise her there.
It wasn't just the muffin. Whereas this definitely there's depth to there. Any of you, three, one, I mentioned anything from this happened to you this week. If not, we'll knock on the head and say, yeah. Okay.
Bob Dunn: [01:31:17] Real quick, Nathan, last time I did I told everybody about the word. It'll find these bizarre little things that are non WordPress.
And I just have to mention this, even though probably nobody will care about it. It's one of the, my old classic movies I love called notorious. And there's a line in that just is priceless. This guy really screws up and everything, and his mother says you are protected by the enormity of your stupidity.
And I thought that is a line that has just stuck with me that just, so that's my ending.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:31:51] I love it. Yeah. That's great. Have you come across the phrase, like the luck of the Irish, the, basically the Irish, the idea that you just can stumble through life and no matter how much you accidentally or deliberately try to mess it up, just good stuff keeps happening.
Bob Dunn: [01:32:07] I have a little bit of Irish in me and that's never happened. I stumbled my fault.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:32:12] I swear. It's true though. I swear in my life, I know people who just have relentlessly good luck to the point where it's like this. This is not a coincidence. This is just unfair. My son, when I played board games with him, honestly, this is not a lie.
He always wins. Like a hundred percent of the time. If we he's quite literally, when he was little, we played snakes and ladders a lot. It was ridiculous to the point where it was. I'm not playing. I'm just,
Bob Dunn: [01:32:45] I've done it again. I was gonna say that says a lot about him, but it also says a lot about you Nathan.
So
Michelle Frechette: [01:32:54] tomorrow WP coffee talk, we'll have a new episode. It's been on hiatus while I worked on word Fest, but tomorrow's episode with Chris Lama will be published. So keep
Nathan Wrigley: [01:33:02] an eye out for that. Thank you. WP coffee talk. And Bob, you must have some episodes coming out. I would have thought,
Bob Dunn: [01:33:07] oh yeah, there's here. And there are people, different people roaming around.
I can't remember who's coming up. Some people that will be on there. I think lemme is supposed to be on there. Yeah. In the future, that again,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:33:18] some time for their feet, here's a question totally unrelated to WordPress, but podcasting in general, I've got a two week holiday coming up and so I'm going to wait.
Do you guys take a holiday or do you work harder before? And that schedule the episodes, I'm, I'm
Bob Dunn: [01:33:32] fortunate right now. I used to never do it, but now I have co-hosts that run the shows. Without me. I do the production step, but they, um, so I just can throw them in and stuff. We just shot
Michelle Frechette: [01:33:50] episodes over social so people can, find them again and relearn people and that kind of thing.
Bob Dunn: [01:33:56] Yeah. There's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:33:56] ways to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I've had this streak where I just don't want to not do it. And so I do the opposite for this show because it's like, we can't go away. It's not possible, but for the podcast when I'm backing them up and making sure that this one is coming out
Bernhard Gronau: [01:34:12] on the beach with a nice backdrop, why not?
That's right. I like the BJ episode a few years with him holding the candle,
Bob Dunn: [01:34:20] a block,
Nathan Wrigley: [01:34:24] I trusted David Walmsley to put an episode out for me. And Scott should be quite funny for the first three minutes. He edited the audio too. And he would ask me contrary questions and he found bits of audio, like the wrong answer or something. They would ask me a question then. Getting a bit of audio where I'd save the complete wrong thing.
And there's
Michelle Frechette: [01:34:48] about four or five minutes Wittenberg and Nathan it's rubbish.
Nathan Wrigley: [01:34:54] It was inspired, but it must have taken him ages. Bless his.
Bob Dunn: [01:34:59] I'm going to do Nathan. This I'm going to send you the file and have you read it on descript? That's
Nathan Wrigley: [01:35:03] sure. And
Bob Dunn: [01:35:04] then the AI will actually create your voice. And I can have these I'll basically interview you and have you answer whatever I want to say a certain way.
So that'll be fun. So enjoy
Nathan Wrigley: [01:35:15] your vacation, then your reputation will be in tatters. They'll just be a sweary. Nathan. That's produced loads of, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I've enjoyed this. This has been a really nice jokey episode. I hope that you guys have enjoyed it. So we'll be back next week. Every two weeks off.
We're not back next week. Oh my goodness. We're having two weeks here in the middle of August. We've got the awkward wave thing coming up. So I'm going to say thank you to Michelle. Thank you to Bob. Thank you to Bernard. We'll see you in three weeks time. Take it easy. Bye-bye.

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Nathan Wrigley
Nathan Wrigley

Nathan writes posts and creates audio about WordPress on WP Builds and WP Tavern. He can also be found in the WP Builds Facebook group, and on Mastodon at wpbuilds.social. Feel free to donate to WP Builds to keep the lights on as well!

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