This Week in WordPress #176

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 176 entitled a professional boat of rapids people. It was recorded on Monday the 30th of August, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'll be joined by my cohost Paul Lacey, but also this week by Remkus de Vries from serve bolt. There's a lot of WordPress news this week, and it's a little bit different because we get to talk a little bit about our own experiences.

Our own thoughts during this episode up first is the fact that the classic editor plugin has been given another year of life. Lots of people chiming in, in the comments deciding what it is that they think about that whether it should be supported or dropped or whether Guttenberg should have been here at all.

Then we go on to tell our personal stories about how we started using WordPress. Each of the three of us have a different tale to tell, then we're talking about whether or not WordPress contributors are actually listened to by the people who created. WordPress code. We talk about the gallery block refactor, which is featured in WP Tavern.

Then we move on to the fact that Google has had to create some interesting workarounds because people are trying to gain lighthouse scores with the websites. And finally, we discussed the fact that Google with its a wing project has dropped a hundred thousand packages to users in Australia. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress, this weekend, WordPress was brought to you by AB split test.

Do you want to set up your AB split tests in records? 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 tests. 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. Hello. How we all doing? Nice to have you with us once more. This week in WordPress episode number 7,604 or something less. Probably less. I think it's 176. Yes, it is. It says in the show notes at the top of the episode number 176, we're here always 2:00 PM.

UK time WP builds.com/live. If however, you're in the Facebook group, then you'll need to go to this URL. It is chat.restream.io forward slash F B. If you want to make comments and you don't want to be anonymous, you may want to be anonymous though. But that's fine up to you. If you do want to drop some comments in, feel free to do that, we'll try to respond as, and when they come in, but enough of this introductory nonsense, it's important that we we announce who's here today.

Paul Lacey's here as always. How you

[00:03:03] Paul Lacey: doing Paul? Doing good. I've got a new dog as well, so that's cool. We got a new dog yesterday. Fleur

[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: council. Is there any chance during the. Lolly, if that we get to see the dog,

[00:03:18] Paul Lacey: it was in the room. Yeah, she wasn't here earlier. I don't know where the dog, Ellie, the other dog is normally here as well.

I don't know. I don't know where she's gone. Actually. She might be reflect, but if she does come in, then I'll put her on the razor off.

[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I've seen pictures. You showed me pictures of them.

[00:03:34] Paul Lacey: You did? Yeah. She's settled in really nicely as well. Cause she's the 10th animal in this house now.

The chickens, the chickens and rabbits in the house, but

[00:03:45] Remkus de Vries: just for clarity, does that include

[00:03:47] Paul Lacey: No, no it doesn't but yeah. It should, they should do. Cause I, Yeah, those animals are probably cleaner and have better manners than I do.

[00:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know how to segue in any way, politely to REM Custer racing joins us. Um, well tell us about yourself. Cause we know about Paul. We know about me tell us where you're from and what you do. And all of

[00:04:14] Remkus de Vries: that. I am from the beautiful province called free salon inside of the Netherlands.

I work at circled head of, uh, customer relationships and partners. And, um, yeah, I don't know. What else would you like to know? Cause I, if I start down this road of explaining. Whereas there's more than one

[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: facet yeah. Okay. Uh, well, we'll go with serve bolt. You can, by the way, just to give him a pat on the back, you can go to serve bolt.com and check out their hosting offering.

It is a hosting company and they like to do things a little bit differently, actually. Speaking of which let's just have a quick look here. If you go to the WP builds.com podcast and you go to the podcast archive. One of the things that you'll find is this little episode number 243. And it's a Remco it's him talking about?

Why why circle a different and so on. So go and check that out. Search for episode 243 on WP belts got competency. What Ram cos has got to say all about it. I'm getting a little bit of an echo. I don't know if Paul, you can hear it. I'm wondering if it might be on Rimkus side. I don't know if you've got some headphones there.

Cause if not worry, not, or just turn us down a little bit, just turn us right down because honestly we're not going to say much. That makes sense. Anyway, so you can probably just interrupt as you see fit. Got a couple of people making a comment. Thank you so much. We've got Ben Anderson. Hello, Ben.

I'm not sure that I. I've come across Ben before if I have, I am deeply apologetic, but nice to see you from Sweden. Very nice. And we've also got Cameron, who's always making comments to the mountains. I was going to say, I'm looking around. I'm thinking,

[00:06:05] Remkus de Vries: I suppose that's a compliment.

[00:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: I think last time you

[00:06:13] Remkus de Vries: literally. 10 centimeters longer than I am taller than I am. So I'm not quite there yet. Okay. That's also a tad

[00:06:21] Nathan Wrigley: tad stronger. Okay. Okay. I'm going to be very polite in that case. The Cameron's always here and I suspect that the last time you were on, we ended up going down a rabbit hole of like your weightlifting and you, there was a video of you picking something up and walking along, that looked basically heavier than anything I've ever tried to lift.

Oh, look, it's a Swedish invasion. We've got, I am sorry, but there is no way that I'm going to pronounce this name correctly, but I'm going to say mans, which I bet is wrong because of the accent above the AE. And then I'm going to say, sir sorry. Um, okay. Okay. I don't know what REM has said. That's probably not.

That would be my educated guess, but thank you for dropping it. This is lovely. We've got some new people. This is really nice. And first time live from Ben. Okay, great. Thank you for joining us, Andrew Palmer as always nice to have you with a strong work guys, working on a bank of, I know it's a bank holiday REM because in the UK we shouldn't be working.

We'll get in trouble later. And mans works. Okay. Mom's is more correct. Okay. So monsters. Okay. Thank you. We're not here though, to exchange these nice comments. Nice though. They are. We're here to talk about the WordPress news and what's going on this week. Just a quick plug for us if that's okay.

WP builds.com. That's our website. If you go over there, you can find all the bits and pieces that we do, podcast that you can see here every week comes out on a Thursday and over here, this is what we're doing now this week in WordPress, every Monday, but we release it on a Tuesday. If you want to keep up to date with all the things that we do hit the subscribe link, and then fill out probably this gray form is the one that interests you most.

And then we'll keep you up to date as, and when we produce content, we we've got a lot of WordPress news this week, but today feels a little bit different from previous episodes that we've done, because today it feels more like we're going to, we're going to talk more about ourselves and our opinions and our thoughts about stuff, because there's a little bit of a slow news week.

Although there was a lot of stuff that came out, so expect there to be personal things this week a little bit more than normal. And the first one. This isn't particularly personal, but curious to get your thoughts on this so long, long time ago, rewind back when Guttenberg came out in WordPress five, it was announced that those people who didn't want anything to do with Guttenberg or the block editor, they would be able to use something called the classic editor plugin.

And the classic editor plugin would basically insulate you and protect you from all things. Gothenburg. There is actually a plugin called disabled Gothenburg, which goes a step further, but this allowed you to carry on using the classic editor. And it was said at the time, look, don't worry, guys, we're going to support this for five years.

Believe it or not, those five years are about to end. By the end of this year. So December the 31st this year, classic editor support is going to end. And so it has been decided, it sounds like a, sort of a discussion between two people, just Cepher Josepha, Haden, John possie, and Matt Mullenweg made the decision to, to give us another year to allow people to, just sort basically carry on using the classic editor.

This piece explains that it's [email protected], but then there was a much longer piece over on WP Tavern written by Justin Tagalog, which goes into more detail. And the thing that I find curious here, it's the same story he explains what's going on, but I don't know if you follow the Tavern very regularly, but you don't often see a Tavern piece getting 63 comments.

And so this is a really hot topic. I'm never using the classic editor. I don't disable Gothenburg. I'm totally using the block editor. Then we know where I stand. Let's go to, let's go to poll first, if that's all right, Paul, where are you on this? Cause I know that you flip and flop a bit, don't you?

Yeah.

[00:10:16] Paul Lacey: Yeah. Um, I think we're all gonna have a different opinion today on this and it just shows, and it probably bleeds into the, one of the other articles about that we're covering as well about feedback and all that sort of stuff. So I know I had to even write notes for this one. So I've got a couple of things, a couple of points that I just didn't want to get wrong because it's so fragile at the moment.

So I feel like first of all, this is good news for everyone. I can't see the the, the practical outcome of this news is good for everyone. As in, if you. But if you're already into Gutenberg and that's what you're doing and stuff, then it doesn't make a lot of difference. There's something that, if you're, if you're not, not using it and don't want to use it, then it's good news.

If you're a product maker and you haven't yet figured out the best route to go, then it's good news, et cetera. But that's a, that's probably where the good news for me ends as such. And this definitely won't be a run, but there's some points. I just think the, the, the way that things are coming across is just being.

Misinterpreted a lot by end users. So there was one of the things in the article that talks in this is in the the Tavern article. Somebody, I don't know when they said it, it could have been a long time ago and I'm trying to find the name of the person who said it's one of the core contributors and they work for blue host.

We think,

[00:11:48] Nathan Wrigley: oh, it's not Gary Pendergast.

[00:11:49] Paul Lacey: Then just destroy is

[00:11:53] Nathan Wrigley: destroyed. Oh, Jonathan does Rosie. I don't pronounce that either, but is the name anyway, I suspect

[00:11:59] Paul Lacey: this is the same, nothing critical. Of what he said, basically he quoted a theory called the theory of diffusion of innovations. And apparently I'm just going to read this out.

That there's a theory called the diffusion of innovations that looks to explain how why, and at what rate new technology spreads, it separates adopters into several groups based on when they are willing to take the jump innovators early adopters, early majority. Late majority and laggards. And it says, I truly think that we have seen a good portion of the late majority beginning to move towards the block editor.

This can be also confirmed by the plugins in-store growth, which is talking about the classic classic editor plugin, which has being slowing and plateauing this yet. So a few of us in the comments weren't too happy that we were finding ourselves categorized as laggards, which is where I sit.

So I think the, the problem that I have, and a lot of other people have as well, is that we're sometimes arguing about the wrong thing. Okay. So to me, it's not the case that somebody like me who is probably never going to fully embrace the block. Editor is a laggard. I'm just waiting for a different scenario that fits me better.

I think that is one of the things that that we'll come into later that people get annoyed about is that this narrative of you need to jump in all in, on blocks and Gutenberg. Otherwise you're going to fade away your, your, your product would die. You'll be irrelevant as an agency or whatever it might be.

So here's the thing, right? I'm not a laggard, I'm usually an early adopter. But the things I'm waiting to adopt aren't there yet. And I don't think that they'll ever be in the block editor. I'm looking at my notes at the moment. What I think. Is going to go away is the classic screen. So you've got the classic editor.

It's tiny MCE. It's just one part of the classic experience. You've got the classic screen, which had, the, the, the editor had space for metadata, meta fields, like ACF fields, all that kind of thing. It had all the SEO stuff was in there, all the different plugins that had something to do with making a post or a page.

All that stuff went in there. And it w it wasn't great, but it was accommodating. So ACF could go in, their pods could gain their SEO, Prescott going there. Yos could go in there. Everything can go in there. The alternative now is the Gutenberg editing screen, which if you are using blocks is great. But it's very unaccommodating for everything else.

So whether or not it's ACF fields or pods fields again, or SEO stuff and those kinds of things. What I'm seeing, the narrative to me is saying that classic editor is going away. If you if eventually it's going to go, you got another year, you log odds. Otherwise you're going to be in, you're going to find yourself suddenly needing to adapt.

And I just fully disagree because I'm seeing innovation. In other ways, I'm seeing products like SEO, press creating an interface purely on the front end and saying the classic experience. Wasn't great. The Gutenberg experience for we'll plug it in and doing a CA metadata is worse and doesn't look to be getting any better.

Hi, let's put things where people expect them. Here's a page. You press it, icon you're on the front end, your SEO settings come up and you edit your SEO settings on the front. Same thing. ACF could do it. ACF was just acquired and they tried to charge people, there were, they were coming around to the idea of potentially charging people and they are looking for a way to make some more money.

Here's a great opportunity ACF, right? Take your metal fields and have a little icon on the front end. You click it. And here's all your metal fields. Take them out of the Gutenberg editor. If you want, take them out of the class to get it to place. If you want, put them on the front end, like SCA press is doing.

Then when you get people like me who want to continue to use BeaverBuilder or DV or element or whatever they want to do, because that is an experience that is designed for them. And as an experience that is democratized by the fact that real users feedback. And if they don't follow that feedback, the sales go down, right?

The sales go down. And then to me, I can see a future that is different than the core block editor. And it's just an alternative route. And it's, you can use your page builder and all your matter stuff is on the front end, all that stuff around pages and stuff like that is on the front end. Now, if this doesn't work out for me and it turns out I was wrong, then I will move to another platform in the same way that somebody who goes all in on Gutenberg, if it doesn't work out for them, they'll go to another platform as well.

So the thing that's got me and a few us are agitated is this. You have to go with this way, otherwise it's not going to work out for you. And we're going to give you another year. Or you're a lifeguard. And I know that Jonathan didn't mean to call me and other people are laggard, but the opinion that is held by many, that is what you are.

If you don't go down, this route is irritating. And I simply don't agree with it. I think I'm an innovator and I'm going to go down a different route of innovation. I think that might switch, but that's where I stand with this at the moment. So I think I've covered all my notes there. Yeah.

Until the next one.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: Very good. Thank you. That was a really nice in-depth for those of you that don't know Yost have put this kind of like little bubble in the UI, it sits bottom left, I think by default, sorry, not Yoast SEO press. And you click that and just this little panel just pops up from the bottom.

Doesn't it? And it's about, I dunno. 2 53 fifths of the width of the whole UI and all your settings are just in, then you can just dismiss it so you can just do it right from the front end. It's very ingenious. I really like it.

[00:18:09] Paul Lacey: Done that as well

[00:18:11] Nathan Wrigley: because I misspoke. I meant to press, okay. Let's go to REMCOs who I think has a different opinion to both of us.

[00:18:23] Remkus de Vries: Do I, um, so I think Paul is actually touching a different question. I think Paul by the sound of it, you don't like to be added in the category of laggard.

[00:18:40] Paul Lacey: Did you get that

[00:18:41] Remkus de Vries: a little bit? I also think your point is more about uh, whether there should be the option to have a different.

Editor experience then the one default provided by workers, which in this case, the default I consider to be a good Enberg. The fallback is the classic, and then there's the variations in different types of page builders. And I don't disagree there. I agree. Um, I don't think, I don't see you as an a, I'm a, I'm aware that you're using uh, beaver builder extensively.

I don't see that category of users as laggerts. To me, this decision is more about, should we continue to support a archaic editor that is limited in so many ways after the period of five years, that we've said that we were going to do it, and my opinion on that is pretty straight forward.

I don't think we should.

Stop in December,

stop in December.

Yeah. It's

[00:20:04] Remkus de Vries: I'm going to warn you don't do this. And then once they do it, there's no consequences. What does that mean? Yeah, we're just postponing. What's going to happen one year down the line. If at all, I have absolutely zero trust in that being properly phased out in let's call it a

[00:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: 15 months.

Yeah. That's a curious

[00:20:31] Remkus de Vries: thing that I object and I get all the arguments of why we should, but come on. We've had five years of prepping them. And now it sounds like no, we actually didn't have a plan or we've had a plan, but new reasons, this is more important now

I don't see it if this was in two and a half years, three years. Sure.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: You're getting some agreement from Andrew Palmer who says, yeah, there should be an end date. And absolutely agree. I guess the end date has been pushed forward, but yeah, we're quite close to the original end date for it to be extended.

What I'm curious about. And I know that my friend, David Walmsley, he keeps track of like plugin installs and how many, the classic editor has gotten all this kind of stuff. And I'm just thinking, I want an art, but I don't know those numbers off the top of my head, but I'm just wondering if there was just no choice about this.

And what I mean by that is there was so many people still giving terrible ratings for Gothenburg and lots of people choosing to use classic press. I presume that just suffer. And Matt just felt that their hand had been forced. Somewhat obviously that doesn't chime with what REMCOs was saying, rather than just said, it's

[00:21:42] Remkus de Vries: been five years, you've had five years to develop a strategy, to find different ways you've had at least year one, two, and three ample opportunity to come up with a different strategy if numbers were saying or showing.

And I, I personally don't believe in the fork called classic press. I just don't see the point of that.

[00:22:03] Nathan Wrigley: And as you say that Dave Toomey drops in and just says, fuck anyone there you go. Yeah, of course we

[00:22:11] Remkus de Vries: can. But this is, um, this is this is the discussion much larger than this particular.

So right now companies that do that have, plugins or even themes that. Are extending WordPress now still for another year, have to extend their functionality to work with two different scenarios. And I, I just think that's a wrong way to do software development. And so if you have an installation based such as Yoast it makes sense to have a fallback.

I'm sure. I don't know their stance on extending. I don't know, but I can imagine there'll be reasoning in terms of, this is forcing us to get yet continue supporting all the cool stuff we're doing in Gutenberg. We still can do in the classic, but we still have to find a way to integrate.

So that's postponing, maybe some innovative stuff they had lined up. I don't know. But if you're a smaller outfit, it's even worse. Because then the strain is much harder on, the few developers that you do have. I just think this is going about it the wrong way. Uh, yeah, like I said I agree with you, Paul, largely.

I just think the, on the specific topic of classic editor extending, are we doing this should be doing this I'm on the no side of things.

[00:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: It was really curious in the WP Tavern article. You, you, like I said, you don't get this many comments usually, but lots and lots of comments falling on both sides.

There's David, our good friend. David's saying that he feels well, I won't speak for him. He can, you can read his comment if you like, but lots and lots of questions. It is what's happening though. You now have until December 20, 22 if you're using the classic editor and go and read David's comments, go and read Paul's comments as well, because they're quite interesting.

Paul you're advocating that you wished Gothenburg had been a plugin, but it also had occupied just a smaller amount of,

[00:24:23] Paul Lacey: yeah, I'd probably flip flopped on that now, though. But after, after, commenting on this article and thinking deeper about this I was thinking about this all the way when I was driving like an hour to go and collect this dog, and then an hour coming back, I was on my own collecting this dog.

And I was thinking through the whole thing on that. And I think first of all, Dave, Tammy. Hi Dave. I I'm, I'm not really also in support of the classic press fog. I think it's a great idea and everything, but I think that the classic WordPress is outdated and we do need a new thing. But what I'm looking at is just an alternative new thing to the way that is sort of prescribed to your question bank projects on the block editor.

And I think that the main problem that needs to be solved before this deadline is what does replace tiny MCE, because there's all sorts of tons and tons of different places where tiny MCE is used in form builders in WooCommerce for things like short descriptions, ACF. Uh, full, for a Wiziwig, fields, pods, wizard, fields tools.

That was a big fields. I think all of those different places. I think that the, a lot of the bigger product companies, like the elemental wars and the page builders and stuff like that have been sitting, this is just a prediction. I think they've been sitting back and looking to see, can we use Gutenberg?

Can we actually use it within our product. And I think that the answer will be knowing a lot of cases and they have two options in a way. Do they make it so their product ships with classic, the classic editor, tiny MCE, which was, would be silly because lots of plugins would need to suddenly ship it like foreign plugins.

And this would only need to ship this tiny MC editor or do each of them think, do you know what it's time for us to, if that's going to get removed from core, so we can't just hook into it and it appears in our place, then we'll replace it with a more modern text editor that is perfect for little snippets, but formatted texts, whether it's marked down or something like that.

So I think that because we know it's going to go away, those big products will either decide to integrate with the Gutenberg for the little spaces where texts goes, or they will use a different type of text editor. I think that's what I'm waiting to see what it will be. I don't really know what those, what the other options are to tiny MC, but I can't see, for instance that you pop open element or BeaverBuilder and the editor and the editorial textbook that you edit in there is a good Sunburg instance inside the page builder.

If Tanya MC goes away, something has to go there and I don't know what that is. And that's why I'm, that's the one missing link to what I'm not sure is going to happen. And if any of that made sense, actually, sorry, gone.

[00:27:30] Nathan Wrigley: REMCOs

[00:27:34] Paul Lacey: oh, you're

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: muted. You are you're muted. I think you've maybe muted yourself or

[00:27:39] Remkus de Vries: someone was entering the building. So I had to get myself.

[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: I play. Yep.

[00:27:43] Remkus de Vries: Thank you. I agree with that. But that's an area that still needs to be solved as well. There's lots of places all around WordPress that No, I don't need a full blown editor, but need someplace to have some texts that you can at least from a wasted week point of view do, do, do stuff with

[00:28:06] Paul Lacey: take, take commerce, for instance, I don't think that we're commerce will try and recreate its product screen.

Eventually we've, we're using the class, not the classic, the new block. I think that they'll go. Do you know what the best way to edit a product is like this, you th th the text area is one of 20 ingredients on a product description, so I think that they will find more interesting. I don't know which route

they're going.

[00:28:33] Remkus de Vries: But in, in, in, in all honesty, I would have expected them to have a better integration with Gutenberg at this time.

[00:28:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Very much. Yeah. I'm gonna just call time on this one article, cause we've done. Crikey, we've done 35 minutes on it, but I'll just, we'll put a couple of comments in, cause it's quite nice to have these coming through.

Cameron says I'm not sure of the classic post editing editor experience will ever go away. The block editor requires the post type to support the rest API and to get rid of it. They'd have to remove that setting and make every post type publicly assessable accessible in the rest API, which would go down like a lead balloon.

Thank you for those thoughts. We've already mentioned that Andrew Palmer is back saying the problem with the good Gutenberg is still in beta. It's just not ready, hence the extension. And he also goes on to say, we're also not looking at it from a user perspective. We're looking at it from a developer's perspective.

If you're a user Gothenburg is easier for general publishing. Yep. I'd agree with that. Especially just takes pictures. So good. Plus Gothenburg is not compatible with whew, that's a biggie. Finally, um, Peter. Hello, Peter. Nice to have you with us again, WP core. Following a path doesn't prevent plugins from being developed by others to maintain the classic experience.

And there's a classic editor block. Good point. You wonder if in the future, somebody will come up with something perhaps even commercially available. That's the classic editor experience meat being maintained by a third party developer. You never know. Let's let's press on if that's all right, we're gonna move now to, like I say, there's a sort of thread running through this and obviously we allow it where we're allowing ourselves to express our opinions more in this episode perhaps than we would normally.

And here's the time for some stories from us all. This is on on a bash, just personal reflections because this week again, just in title, no apologies. I'm going to mention just in title on the Tavern an awful lot this week he was mentioning, he was linking to a Jeff tumbler post on WP mainline, where he shared his journey.

How about getting into WordPress. And so we just thought, time though, I wrote a piece telling everybody why I got into WordPress, highly encourage you to read it, but that's not the point. Let's go over to us and see why on earth. We cause obviously, here we are we get into the conversations.

We love WordPress. We moan about it from time to time and things that go wrong in the community. And so on. I'm just curious, I'll start. The reason I use WordPress, I was using Drupal. I was building everything initially out of tables, way back when then CSS came along, enjoyed that, got into that. Then somebody introduced me to, I think it was Joomla.

Didn't like it found drugs. Loved it got fed off of the fact that Drupal would force you to base basically reinvent everything. Every time they went through a point release. So when you went from three to four, four to five, five to six, you had to get to do it. And when Drupal eight came along, I'd had enough.

Cause it was a really big change. So I stepped into WordPress at that point because yeah. It was easy for me to understand. And it looked really nice. I think probably that's the reason I came is because when I first installed it, it looked a thousand times better than what I was used to with Drupal. I still feel that at the time, Drupal was a better CMS out of the box.

It had way more capabilities, but I just couldn't cope with the fact that they weren't doing the backwards compatibility thing, which WordPress wasn't. So I could hook into that and think, okay, this site that I'm launching today will still be fine in four years time. Whereas with Drupal, I couldn't, that's my story.

Who should we do now? It's just the running costs next has meant to poll first, last time. Tell us your story.

[00:32:21] Remkus de Vries: My story. So I started building websites around 2002. Mumble, uh, if you don't know what was the precursor to Juma sort uh, it's it's one of those. So I had a few clients sites, 15, 16, 18, I think.

And then the whole Joomla thing came and I looked into upgrading, I did two or three and I just did not like Joomla. I didn't like the upgrade path. I didn't like, it still gave me the same problems. And I'm like, what is the benefit here? I got frustrated real bad and I had a fun blog at the time around 2005.

That fun blog was on work. And as I tweeted about it last week as well, I will not share the URL to that phone. Blog is not necessarily my proudest production, but once I figured that and this was end of 2005, eventually I think, or early 2006. So the pages being added to WordPress, I had a revelation I'm like, okay.

So instead of moving the rest over from mumbo to Juma and still being annoyed by it, I can move all of them over to WordPress. And I'll happily do that without charging the client, which I ended up doing. And the rest is history. I

[00:34:00] Nathan Wrigley: That's fascinating. So for me, it was the way it looked for you.

It was pages. What about you, Paul?

[00:34:08] Paul Lacey: So I always use in tech, a CMS code, text pattern, which some of us might remember, which is back then was quite similar to WordPress. I've just checked. It's still going. It's still a thing, text pattern. And then I was on, I went on this funded courses when the government had lots of, there was lots of European funding to run flying around.

And I went on a course a fi no, it was a two day Joomla course, actually. And the result of that course was I met someone in the course and they were like, it's not that good. Is it? And she was like, have you tried WordPress? And I was like, no, I've seen it, but it looked a bit basic. And she was like no, it's, it's improving.

And so I so I was on text button. Did the Joomla course and graduated from the junior course. You WordPress? Yeah. And just instilled that and yeah, and it did cool things that I couldn't do. And, back then we were building commercial sites in a sort of agency sort of scenario. And we're doing things like putting all the texts into the, to the classic editor, because it was still there.

That's still the same one. And let's say there was an image in the classic editor. We'd write some PHP that would search through the entire string of content and grab the URL of the name, the first image it found to use as like a, of the feature image. Sorry. And as Nathan, I made a comment in WordPress.

WordPress is forums somewhere saying, Hey this is what I've been doing so I can get an image like on the news. So you've got an image, then you've got the title. Then you got the text and you click through to the article. Could this be a feature? Could we have an image of some, turns out it would be a feature image and someone replied back going no, that, that's plug-in territory.

We can't have anything like that. And then about 10 years later, some many years like Jeff Chandler replied, I don't know if he was doing like one of those days when, you know, where you contribution day or something, just replying to all threads. And he just replied to that one just to wrap it up.

This is.

[00:36:25] Paul Lacey: Yes. After I knew it was in core. Cause I've been using it for years. No, it's the feature which was there.

[00:36:31] Nathan Wrigley: Paul is single-handedly responsible for the featured image in word claiming the claim that yeah, we've got Dave to me saying plugins, basically plugins for him. Good point. Yep. Yep. And and max, hello, max saying that tax and camp was the same thing for him.

I was, I was sat on a similar course. I w one of my clients paid for me to go on this proprietary CMS course. I can't even remember what it was called, but I just started using WordPress and I sat through the entire date totting. It was like, oh, this is so bad. Why don't they just convert it over to WordPress?

Here's a game, right? If there's anybody still in the comments, just in one word, one word, what's the reason you use WordPress. So for example, to me would be plugin. There he is. Oh, I've put the rude one up instead. To me it would be plug-ins. I would be, I don't know Drupal, or pretty. You might, I dunno what your Joomla

[00:37:36] Paul Lacey: is.

[00:37:38] Nathan Wrigley: If there's anybody still in the comments, stick one word. Let's see if anything comes through from that, but okay. There's all little stories on. Nice. Nice, nice. Wow. Look at the time we're already at quarter two, we used 45 minutes already. Next thing. Okay. Now this is going to get us disagreeing. I suspect because we've been talking about the community.

We've been talking about the fact that, nobody listened, like classic press was needed because Gothenburg got chopped into core and nobody wanted it. And so it goes, we've had that argument so many times. This is again, Justin Tatlock, Justin, you are doing so well this week. He wrote a piece all about the fact that he, from his perspective where key sets looking through track tickets every day, you look through WordPress slack every day he's in get hop every day.

He he he's really bullish about the fact that essentially people do listen. He says, if you contribute and you commit to the project. Then the people will listen to you. And that's what this piece is all about. It was, it came about because when he was having to, so I don't know if but if you, if you submit a comment to the word for, to WP Tavern, it doesn't automatically go on the site.

They all get inspected. And somebody had put that. What was the point in commenting? It says here, I doubt that many Wells since I'll start from the start. When, how do you say it? REMCOs. Mathias. I always say Mathias. When Mathias and Justin respond to comments and asked the commenters to supply more details about the problems they mentioned.

Yeah. I doubt that I doubt many will. Since many of us already know that WordPress developers just don't listen to us. They may pretend to listen, but the evidence shows that they do not. As one other commenter mentioned, we are all suffering the tyranny of the minority. In other words, nobody's listening.

What's the point in getting involved in WordPress, because it's increasingly obvious according to this person, Christian Nelson, that nobody listens anyway. So just in fires back with this piece, which he didn't intend to write saying they do listen, there's people for example, picks out Mathias and he picks out Ann McCarthy saying, they've got a fantastic track record of listening my take on this.

I think that there may be a perception that they're not listening. And I think that's largely to do with the fact that it's difficult to get the messages to them because you've really gotta be committed. To sit through through WordPress slack or get hub or track, you've really got to dedicate some hours to make sure that you're up to date with things.

And so that's where I think the disconnect is people do listen, but it's really hard to make your voice heard. And I know that REMCOs disagrees about this. I say, I know maybe he's changed his mind.

Uh,

[00:40:33] Remkus de Vries: so I, I think there's actually two answers. And which is why this has been a discussion for as long as I've been part of the WordPress project, which is so when I switched my clients over, that was end of 2005.

And then pretty much in 2006, I really jumped into the community. But I I've heard those arguments from them. I hear them now which you know, is more than 15 years. That you would have to conclude that some of it is part of the community of the ecosystem. So in, in part I think that sentiment is about very valid sentiment, especially if you are experiencing, experiencing it.

Um, there is a, the other argument which Justin makes and saying that, uh, you can, and they listen and they they pay attention. Then there's also your argument. Maybe you're not using the right channel. I think it's a combination of all of those things. I think there's uh, I think I also think it gotten worse since.

Yeah, because that particularly is a project that has been injected into the workforce ecosphere with not necessarily the cleanest way of starting and going about how to solve this thing. There's not, not been a lot of input from the get-go. There's been a lot of attempts to steer it in the direction of the multi user and, role perspective.

So I think, I think from that perspective, it's a really very valid argument to think that you're not being heard. I don't think it's necessarily literally the case, but the experience is valid. So then, you what is then the solution? I think the solution is just not as simple and clear cut as we would like it to be like, here's an idea.

I created a track ticket or something on GitHub, and I explained my problem. I see the solution. And then you have the committee by many which. Either gets traction or it doesn't. And if it gets traction, it's most likely because you're possibly more active in other facets of WordPress as well. Maybe you've gotten some of their core developers or core committers of WordPress.

Maybe you're using your clout there. And, um, you it then becomes, a little bit of who do you know, who do you have in your corner possibly. But it also, finding a problem, knowing I fix doesn't necessarily mean that you also are able to convey the actual validity and problem to a level that it's being prioritized.

So it's a very complicated thing to answer and there's no, yes. And there's no, uh, It varies. But the fact is a lot of people have the experience. And that is something that is still a very valid signal, which we're not doing enough with in my opinion. So w one of the things, for instance I seen and I go you know, I would love to see one release a year, just focused on fixing things without introducing anything new.

Because if you're looking at it from that focus, you are looking at all of those outstanding bugs. There's bugs in there. That's been there for 10 years, 10 plus years. We've recently seen solved a few in five eight w why can't we do that? That's also progress. And some of these things are like, like architecturally, extremely difficult to solve, because so much is involved because we have backwards compatibility.

Looking at the whole sentiment behind, there's just too many variables to say that there's a clear cause. Um, yes, this is the case of no, don't, uh, don't get so sentimental when your thing is not being valued. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:45:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I do know what you mean. I think there's just so much, so many people contributing, so you've got to pick the channel.

You've got to be committed to stick with that channel. And a lot of those threads are hard to pass. Cause there's just so much. Coming in at the bottom. And you've got to read back through all the tickets and what have you, it was just thinking about it just now. And I was just thinking, imagine that you were like Bano a U2 concert and you just say to the audience, what should we play next?

And and then you just get like 40,000 people shouting the same song, like their own, what they want to hear next. And Banos got to, okay. What did I hear? Most of they're just not entirely sure there was just too much noise. So anyway, that's my take on it. I think I should probably edit that out because it was pointless.

[00:45:58] Paul Lacey: Paul, you

know, I think that was really important point. I have some, a different view as well. First of all, the quote Christian, I think it was in the tougher question.

[00:46:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'll put it back up if you want.

[00:46:14] Paul Lacey: Yeah, it's okay. Th the choir, I believe that isn't the full version of his comment and.

It doesn't really change the sentiment of the article that Justin is defending the contributors to WordPress and saying they do listen. That's what Justin is basically saying. But when we do have a quote in an article then, and sorry, I apologize to Justin in advance if I'm wrong about this. But I do believe that this isn't the full version of the comment.

And the reason I raise that is because it was only a few weeks ago. Matt Mullenweg was quoted saying that perhaps, going contributing to open source software is a better route. To for education then the college or university career. And basically there was an uproar all about how damn privileged that sounded.

But the quote that was pushed around the internet was just that line and it, yeah. Include the proceeding part where Matt Mullen wag was clearly saying if for instance, you really wanted to get into something like WordPress, then perhaps going contributing to the project is a better route than going to university and doing computer science or something.

Now that completely changed the angle of the, the furrows then came after, but it never got brought back in. It just stayed as Matt Mullenweg said something and how damn privileged he was to, said something like that. So I just, I don't think it makes a big difference on this particular article, but I am on, I am led to believe that wasn't the full comment.

And and that may be some different context might have come out of that. But the one thing, I think one of the things ranker said, I interpret it in my waivers that people have an experience of feeling like they're not being heard, which is true. People feel that, right? Because at the moment I think the good smoke project has been one of the biggest problems for me that goes to my project is what it's done for division within the main part of the WordPress community.

So there was always division, but it was like a bit of a game. So we all loved WordPress, but like maybe I liked element, no, I didn't, maybe I liked BeaverBuilder and then someone else likes element, or maybe someone likes SiteGround host and someone else like cloud ways. And we'd all have a, like an argument about which we thought was the best.

Route to go with that, but we're all generally in agreement that we loved WordPress. It, what it was at the core. And now there's and one of the reasons for that was that WordPress back then was a, a simple framework that you could choose your route of your adventure kind of thing.

So WordPress itself was, was, was like a framework. And then the products were on top of that. Now WordPress has the Gutenberg project, which feels more like a product that you've got to choose if you want it, or you don't. And because WordPress is the product, we're all arguing about the product now.

So within the main area of WordPress, I'm having to sometimes hold back on Twitter or for instance, because I think, Hey, if I respond to that person with what I think that's probably gonna affect our friendship. And it's like, how does it come to that? That's ridiculous now for us or the people who have a feeling that they're not being heard.

I think that, that goes back to the they aren't on board with the direction of the project. So to me, the developers are listening and they are responding completely. But to me, it's almost like they were put in. Including Mateus. The lead of the project include intersex. They were put in a boat down of a set of rapids and they are a professional bunch of rapids boat people.

I don't know what those people are called and you can shout to them, Hey, go left, avoid that rock and they'll go, thank you. Cheers. And they avoid the rock and they go slightly to the left, slightly to the right. And they can, they come to a fork and they can go this way. Or that way, what they can't do is no matter how professional or good dial or rapid thing is, they can't use their puddles to go turn around and go back up a waterfall.

That direction is done. So I think that what Justin is defending is he's seeing good people, like on McAfee, who we've had on this show and Mateas et cetera, working hard and all the other contributors getting criticized. For not listening, but they CA they, they are on a route that they cannot, they didn't set, they were employed or they, or chose to work on that project.

They can go slightly to the left. They can't go back up the waterfall. That's done. We're done with that. Yep.

[00:51:15] Remkus de Vries: I think that's a great analogy. They're called rafters rafting. Yeah.

[00:51:21] Nathan Wrigley: They, I could sense. I could actually see rev costs in agreement. Literally his body language is saying, this is right.

Paul is saying Paul's making sense. Here they are. By the way, every week we can't, we try to come up or I try to come up with, I listen through and try to come up with a title. And Paul you've nailed it. We're going to call this episode a professional boat of rapids people.

[00:51:42] Paul Lacey: That's the second, that's the second one you've put in the private chat.

That could have been the yeah, there's another one. Isn't there. If I got previously, here's where the division gets worse. Okay. So Justin knows some of these people, we know and McAfee for instance, and you've, just have for an on ramp. Cause I'm sure, a bunch of people who commit to core as well and all that sort of stuff.

And it's not their fault that they are working on a project like that. I think Justin is defending them, but in his defense of that, it makes the article look like. It's ignorant of all the complaints. Now it's true that most of the complaints aren't articulated in a way that is correct, because most people were actionable.

Yeah. They see how they feel. And they're like, I don't like how this is going. No, one's listening to me. I've said that I don't like Gutenberg, go back. And now no one can do that. Whereas you do see Mateus and there are people reaching out and saying, what specifically can we change about that?

You know, the HTML attribute of this or the whatever. Okay, cool. That's great. We'll look at that. That's what they can listen to. That's all that they can listen to in their position that they're in. So I think we have to appreciate them for doing that. We still don't have to like the direction they were put on by Matt mullenweg's vision was the right one by anyone's opinion.

And just in Tadlock, doesn't really need to. Stand and defend those people. I would have preferred to see an article that stood back from it, but I feel that Justin, because he's got friends has felt the need to defend those friends, which is a good thing to do. Just a

[00:53:26] Remkus de Vries: different, take a different takeover.

A different type of article could be here's 15 things that could easily be fixed. Because we have the ticket, we have the solution. Why aren't we? Because that's the exact same from the same argument. That's a very different sentiment, which I think also needs to be hard.

[00:53:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There's a nice comment, which chimes with that from Cameron.

He, I said I opened a book report for the block editor when it was first introduced in 5.0, which is a long time ago now with a simple patch, a core contributor effectively said they didn't want to fix it. And so it took until 5.8 to get it in. Obviously, from Cameron's point of view, that sounds like deaf ears.

Max saying there's a disconnect between design of writers and developer get hub type of people and the demands. That's a good point. We all come from a different background and our needs might be different and there may be priorities. That that we don't know about. So depending on what those are, they might come at different speeds, Peter, again, saying, I don't think too many, I think too many don't or can't appreciate how big this thing is thing being WordPress.

I guess it's really big the demands of so many people on the few who are contributing. Most of volunteers must be huge. Yeah. That's a good point. Huge demand. Little supply inherent chaos. Yeah. That's nicely summed up is now. I like that. And this was in response to Paul talking about getting on the roof.

That's already gone over the waterfall. He says that begs the question. Why were they on that route in the first place? I'm guessing Cameron to put words into your mouth, why did they go over the waterfall and not get out of the boat and look at the waterfall first and decide whether they, it is an adrenaline

[00:55:09] Remkus de Vries: rush?

So

[00:55:10] Nathan Wrigley: that's a good job. Good point. Peter wants more saying he likes your metaphors or analogies. Polling thinks they're the best. Just hopping back. We did get two responses to my previous question about what is the one word that made you go to WordPress. I'm going to, I'm going to say that there's a hyphen between these, so it's one word then open source, the open source nature of it kept made you come to WordPress.

Lots of, I think all the projects that the three of us mentioned probably were open source, but yep. Fair play. And Cameron, very utilitarian reply. It was a job requirement needed to maybe to take word for us on for a job. Cool. Thank you for you too. And should move on. But we finished with that one. Okay.

In which case let's talk about this. I really want to do this briefly. This really isn't in, because I think it's inherently what we want to be talking about. It's just more. We've talked a lot about WordPress having to change and put in Gothenburg. We've talked about whether the developers, listen, we've talked about whether we want to use classic press still, or whether that should even be an option or whether it should all be going in December or at least support for it going in December.

And then again, sorry, Justin abusing your amazing articles this week the block editor and the reason that I'm mentioning this is just not, because I think it's important because of the refactoring expected to land in 5.9. That by the way, is the title of the post gallery block refactor expected to London 5.9.

It was just more that it shows. There must be somebody listening because things are changing and things are happening. And that's what this piece is all about. It's about something that just that Justin has played with tinkered with. And the reason that was curious about this is I want you to draw a parallel with something that Paul told me and it wasn't in private.

Was it called the beaver builder thing? That's all right, yeah, I can explain it. So what I was trying to draw out from this article is that Justin found something that he thought could be improved and he thought that there were ways that something existing could be improved because there's currently two ways of doing it.

You can do it this way over here, and another way over there. And it's all about gallery blocks, go and read the piece of yourself and you'll see what he's on about. And then it occurred to me that. Gothenburg has these problems, but so do the other community. So for example, BeaverBuilder has a similar problem where there's, there's one UI to do this one thing over here, and there's another UI to do this thing over there.

In other words, what I'm trying to tease out of this badly is that there is no community where everything is just perfect and swimming along the elemental community will be arguing amongst themselves about what should be happening. So will the Yoast community, so will the, you pick a community there's going to be disagreement and it's about figuring out what the pathways are to get through it.

And so I just thought Paul illustrate what I'm on about with the thing that you mentioned in beaver builder, maybe.

[00:58:05] Paul Lacey: Yeah. So I think when you've got multiple people working on stuff and let's, let's say the gallery, this gallery block here was one of the first ones that came out and then they did a bunch of other cool things that they prioritized.

And then the gallery block was left behind and that some ideas that were in new block. Didn't migrate into the gallery block. So into my beaver builder one, it's basically the beaver builder recently put out a new module for a search form that you could drag in and put wherever you want. And it, the social one has two fields.

It has the search text box and it has the button. And then they had a leg, an older module from the right at the beginning, which was the newsletter block, which also had a text, um, input and a submit button. So they structurally had exactly the same things, but the new one had a much better UI for designing it.

Whereas the old one was still hadn't caught up with some of them. The new UI more improvements that they've done. So I think that's what you're alluding to Nathan is this gallery block has had some fundamental areas for improvement for a long time and now it's been done and it does look cool that you can, I don't know if this is doable yet, but Justin's just showing that with the changes that they're doing to it, as I understand it would mean that you could mix things up in galleries.

So I put a video in the gallery, put a quote in the gallery, that sort of thing. And. I think it's apparent, I don't really fully understand the article, but I think it's something that apparently this block needed.

[00:59:47] Nathan Wrigley: And it really wasn't the, it was just for me, it launched the conversation about the fact that there isn't just this one perfect thing.

Anyway, it just prompted in me a recollection that you said something similar was happening over in the beaver builder community. I'll just pass what this is basically in, in prior versions of the gallery block. You couldn't as example, you couldn't say can we link this image to an external URL?

And can we link this one to another one? And could we link this third one to another one? And that capability is coming down the track because of the nature of how this is being. It means that in the future, you'll be able to do all sorts of other different things. So you can see if you're watching this, we've got a, you can see it on the screen, but if you're listening to it, we've got a three by two row of gallery images.

Five of those appear to be images. And one of them is like a text block, almost like a heading block. And so the idea would be that the gallery block could not just. Images, you could put links in, you could put different headings in and it opens up and it becomes much more usable. But like I said, that really wasn't it was more about it prompted the conversation, which I just thought every time I've been into a, let's say Facebook, WordPress group, it's never, that it's all plain sailing.

It's never, that everybody always agrees. It's, you go into the X page builder group and you get the conversation of, can we stop please? Adding new features and just fix the old stuff. You go into another page builder group. Can we add new features, please? I want a bunch new thing, this new feature I really need it.

Can we? And it never settles. We're never satisfied. It's never going to be perfect. And I see this just as it's writ large in the WordPress debate, but elemental BeaverBuilder Debbie. Once a community

[01:01:33] Remkus de Vries: is expanding, beyond the, the walls. This is inevitable.

[01:01:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's various different,

[01:01:42] Remkus de Vries: different people.

Different tastes to me personally the article felt a little bit cherry picking the same point as

[01:01:52] Paul Lacey: the previous. Do you think he needed something light hearted the week to Ryan? He needed something lighthearted that was just going to get some nice comments. Cause there was two, two controversial posts in one week

[01:02:07] Nathan Wrigley: He needed some time away.

It was yeah, like I said the article wasn't really the point. It was just, it prompted in me this thought that it's never perfect. Wherever you go, wherever there's a community of Rimkus that as soon as you get yeah. Something more than one, they're going to start falling out. And we just, we appear in the WordPress, the whole WordPress community, everything has coalesced around this Guttenberg thing.

And it just seems like it's just such a controversial issue. We'll never quite get it straightened out. We've all got our own opinions. Yeah. Just try to read up and see where you sit on

[01:02:42] Paul Lacey: the fence for the end user though. This is quite a good thing though, because imagine like imagine like a client logo grid where you might want to link some of those logos off to websites or case studies and then have a quote from a client mixed in there or something like that.

This makes. Appealing um, tool for someone like me that builds websites for people. Yeah.

[01:03:08] Nathan Wrigley: Just the idea that a gallery block could be more than just a set of images with links. It could be something a little bit different. Yeah.

[01:03:15] Paul Lacey: And this problem exists in tons of gallery solutions out there.

Apart from, if you go to kind of premium gallery solutions where you can really mix things up. So for something like that, to be in the core gallery, He's great. Yeah, it

[01:03:27] Nathan Wrigley: is nice. Yeah. Here we go. Okay. Right thing because of time. I really, I'm not sure that we've got time further. I want to say Mathias, Mathias, sorry.

[01:03:42] Paul Lacey: Paul drum. .

Flip right over. Okay.

[01:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So I'm just going to say, there's a nice post on this website here 35 seconds ago. And I can't remember how to do Mathias, ventura.com. I'm just going to say it. It's all about theme Jason, and what he sees are the benefits going forward. I feel just quickly.

It would have been really nice if he'd added some imagery in here. I'm not suggesting that it wasn't a nice piece. I'm just saying if it's like some illustrations of what he was trying to try to explain, might've been really nice. Okay. So

[01:04:19] Paul Lacey: can I say one thing about it that isn't about the article though?

So he just going back to the, do people, listen, I actually had a fairly long for Twitter conversation with Mathias just last week. Yeah. And it was, It was very polite, really listened to each other. And we, what we resolved is that we were really talking about different problems, but we still had a good conversation.

And I, I felt pretty good after that conversation. But seeing this article in our notes, I went over to the website and it's just interesting sometimes to find out things about people that Mathias is actually a film maker and has got, a profile on I MDB DB and all that sort of stuff. And it's just, just, just knowing a little bit about the background of people is useful sometimes to when you kind um, you know, that they're having an influence in your life because they're leading on a project that controls you.

It's good to know a little bit about those people. And I found him. Really open to talk to be honest. So it's back to

[01:05:25] Nathan Wrigley: our piece earlier about people listening. That's fascinating that you got into a long Twitter chat with him. That's really

[01:05:32] Paul Lacey: interesting, right? Yeah, because it was one of those scenarios that the article Justin talked about highlights and the comments are Christian highlights that they ask for specific feedback.

So a criticism will be raised and one of the developers will ask for specific feedback. And the person who raised the frustration gets additionally frustrated because really they were talking about something deeper and it's, it's kind if you've got some uncooked food served to you, here's one for you, Peter in Ingersoll, if you've got some uncooked food served for you and then you complain about it changing the amount of salt or pepper that you put on it wouldn't have made a difference, even if it was perfect, the amount of salt and pepper that you put in, it would have made it.

Perfect. That was awful. Sorry, Peter. But the point was, is that it's, it is going to frustrate people when the feedback is, will tell, can you tell me specifically what you were saying there, but again, like I say, what else can I say. What else can they say? That's how they can, someone complains about saying, what can I fix by the way, I can't go all the way back to the top of the river, but what can I improve?

Yeah. Yeah.

[01:06:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. I'm delighted that you had a nice long chat with him this week as well on Twitter. That's lovely. And again, it does illustrate the fact that they, these people are potentially open to having a chat. So there we go. This one we're straying away from WordPress. The next piece, by the way, if either of you two REMCOs Paul have got any sort of what do I call it?

I call it the. Thing of the week pick of the week or something. I've got one we'll come to in a minute, but if you've got one, if you can think of one, shove it in the private chat, if not, we'll just do mine, but this first one is not WordPress, but it is really just so just follow this almost like folly, actually it's on search engine journal.

The piece is called Google's not fooled by fake lighthouse scores. So we've all been forced to be obsessed by all of the, the new stuff that Google has put in our path. Core web vitals, all of the bits and pieces that make up core vitals. And one of the tools, which I'm sure many of us use in our is lighthouse to, to measure how things go.

There's obviously lots of granularity to this and this. We could do a whole podcast on how that works, but just fascinate. It's a day that people have been in. People live in injecting, JavaScript into their websites, apparently at the beginning, Like se, oh, stop it. Search engine journal, please quit the regularity that you popups come up.

Apparently at the best of SEO people, blackout SEO, people who believe they're going to be able to quickly fix things for you and make your lighthouse scores appear better. Google they've been injecting this piece of JavaScript. You can see it on the screen. And essentially what it does is it says easy or site being looked at under the microscope of lighthouse.

Is it being tested for that purpose? And if so, write clear out everything from that page and start again and just put something really minimal, really quick to load, really perfect for a lighthouse score. In other words, they're trying to fool Google. Now, if I had one piece of advice for anybody starting microphone just went off.

If I have one piece of advice for anybody starting out in web development is don't eat. Just, don't try to fall Google. Why did my page suddenly do that? There we go. Just tell me. Cause they're not that stupid. They'll probably figure it out pretty quickly. So the guys from Google are basically saying, we know this is happening.

We're not that stupid, but I just found it fascinating that, along comes a technology. It doesn't take long for people to try and break it and fix it and give your site a quick SEO hit by rewriting Java script and creating a new Dom in your page. What are, you've got such a heritage with all this sort of stuff you must, maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe I've made me my belief in Google, figuring this stuff out is a little bit naive, but it feels to me as if you try to gain the SEO system, it's not worth it.

[01:10:01] Paul Lacey: History shows that is what happens. Yeah. There's two components.

[01:10:08] Remkus de Vries: Just always make sure that you're on the fastest hosting. There is ways to do that.

Uh, there's some very obvious ways from my perspective of doing that. And then there's that actually three components, get your FA get yourself fast hosting, get your front end output to work as fast as possible for the human experience. And then the biggest one, the most obvious one is write good content.

Yeah. But do not start gaming the system in, in no way. Cause that will bite you in the ass. There's yeah. Like Paul said there's a lot of history as a show has shown us that there's many examples of Maybe even gray hat, but definitely black hat SEO stuff that just, it catches up with you.

And then in that constant race of wanting to fix whatever you

[01:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: screwed up, but you could just imagine some somebody sitting there just like one day thing. Whoa. Whoa, wait a minute. If I did this. Oh. And then discovery actually works, but then not really thinking actually. Okay. So it technically works, but will it work in the longterm?

And but you know, lots of people coming out there and selling this as a service to say, Paul, you, I know you found it quite interesting. Cause I actually saw that you'd you tweeted? I don't know if you saw me put this in the show notes, just this article independently, but you tweeted about this and did you get any responses from that too?

[01:11:50] Paul Lacey: I think I did. Yeah, but I'm not going to name any products because I've never checked the code, but of these products, but there were two products I'm aware of that are very well known in and around performance. One of them is just a general performance tool. And the other one is an image related performance tool.

And from what I understand, they both do this. Um, They, they have code and one of them is actually completely open about it. As a benefit and as even been on podcast, talking about the, sort of an analogy or a metaphor of how it works and why it's a good thing to do. But essentially what is, what we're talking about here is that here's your website.

It looks like WP bills or something, and then you run it through this service and what the page speed tools see is almost, it's not quite a blank screen, but they don't see much. And if the, if a human was to go on that output and have the same things removed, they wouldn't be able to use the website.

I've um, John Locke from lockdown, SEO is also one of the panelists on Derby tonic podcast. I saw him put something out recently. He might've been responding to one of my own tweets actually, but he basically said that Google or Google is just constantly trying to. Understand websites like humans.

So anything you do to try and trick that wouldn't trick a human is not gonna trick what Google. So if you present a broken website that apparently scores really well, that's not going to get used by a human. So yeah, it's a case of be very careful the tools that you use. If you want to know what those tools are, just search around on social media, ask around and I'm sure someone will tell you what those two particular tools might be.

And I'm sure there's others, but it's not going to work. And especially if you're doing this for clients, your not only damaging yourself or deceiving yourself, you're deceiving your clients and potentially damaging your clients. If they suddenly get knocked out of Google,

[01:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: it is quite interesting. Can I just interrupt just very briefly that, cause I just found this quote and I thought this is probably really useful at this point.

So John. From Google, who's often quoted on the side, that's the quote, that's everything you need to know. Really. He says lifetime scores do not affect Google search. That's interesting in and of itself doing this kind of user agent cloaking is a terrible idea. That's fairly unequivocal.

You're just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense. And prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this report it to the CMS poll,

[01:14:44] Paul Lacey: the problem is that there is easy money to be made by con people who are con men or whatever. Using tools that do this and charging companies to fix a bad performance on their websites.

And there will be whole cottage industry created around affiliate, courses to how to do this, how to use this plugin, how to use this service to do that. It just causes a complete load of BS. Andrew Palmer, who may still be listening. I'm not sure. I saw him on Friday on the WP tonic panel, and he was talking about SEO and he was saying that back in the day, he would just for fun, just to show people do something, I forget what it's called, SEO bombing or something.

He would do something that basically would show that you could get a website on Google in the olden days. Sorry, Andrew. I don't mean the olden days like that, but in the heart and days of Google and say, Hey, check this out. Look my articles, top of Google in two days, but a week later it was gone forever.

It was banned and that's what's gonna happen. You do these things in your you'll get banned. I feel sorry for the people who don't realize it's happening.

[01:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We've been paid to be duped and be slightly strewed by it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think if you read the 10 probably says if it sounds like snake oil, Probably is snake oil, just don't paint the snake oil anywhere.

It's snake oil. Okay. All right, there we go. Last one. Cause we are running out of time. We've got nine minutes and I just thought this last one was really interesting. So this is my pick of the week. Did either of you put one in? I don't think I did. Yeah, you can do well. Okay. In which case we'll just do mine quickly.

I just thought this was fascinating and I don't know what I think about it. So I'm curious about what you guys think. So in Australia there's a place called Logan and apparently it's like a suburb of Brisbane. Sorry. If you live in Brisbane or Logan and it's not a suburb, that was just what I took from it.

And Google have been trying out this delivery thing called what's it called? And they've been dropping packages of people's doors. So they've got this lovely aircraft. You can see it here. There's actually a much better picture. There it is. It looks almost like a plane with extra rotor blades in the typical configuration for a drone, horizontally as opposed to vertically spinning.

And and this thing has been delivering packages, a rank of knots. It turns out that every 30 seconds in this 300,000 person suburb, somebody has been getting something delivered by a drone. What. 30 every 30 seconds. That just amazes me. But what I just thought right. First up, that's weird. I've never seen any drone delivering anything around here.

They're obviously not testing it, but I would be so annoyed if there were drones coming over my house, every five minutes for that little mosquito noise, which they make. Just imagine if we allow this to happen, maybe this thing's that silent are you

[01:17:49] Paul Lacey: don't get a lot of free stuff if you had a shotgun.

[01:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: No, hang on. What you get, Paul is you get wet because the 10,000 cups of coffee that they delivered will be broken up onto your head. That's 1,700. So I'm reading a list of what's been ordered. Fascinating. What they've ordered 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 children's snack packs, 1200 hot chucks, which apparently is roasted chicken.

12, 2,700 sushi rolls 1000 loaves of bread, but basically it's food. People are ordering food because these things have got a range of about four minutes, apparently. So it can't. So it can't really call down. It goes out quickly drop Chuck it on the lawn disappears. Four minutes is probably wrong.

I probably misremembered that. It's not far.

[01:18:43] Paul Lacey: Can I blow your mind even more? Okay. What if I told you that you don't need to have an Amazon prime delivery to your house every day of the week?

[01:18:55] Nathan Wrigley: Go on, that's it. Oh, I see. Yes. Yeah.

[01:18:59] Paul Lacey: Can you imagine? Yeah. You don't have to, I'm

[01:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: not, I'm not doing it

[01:19:04] Paul Lacey: or you're not you know, day doesn't go past.

Oh, it's Christmas again.

[01:19:12] Nathan Wrigley: Just order a knickknack. No, I just

[01:19:13] Remkus de Vries: totally agree. Yeah. I like new technology. I like what it does. I like what it allows us to do. I don't like this one. I've never liked the whole concept of this drone thing. Like I like it. How you now have more options to make better photography films from an higher altitude.

Love it. I know that they're using them in a, in the film industry and perfect. Because they get to make shots that you normally previously couldn't wonderful. I just like uh, Yeah, I liked like Paul saying that just be a little bit more concerning in what you order when you order it scale back on I don't, I'd go crazy if that, if we were to have drones like that flying by here constantly, like I would find where's my

[01:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: BB gun.

Yeah. The noise, just the noise that these things were crazy. And it's like that Jurassic park thing, just because we created it doesn't mean it was a good idea or something along those lines, whatever. But I just thought it was curious and I was really amazed that in a town of 300,000 people.

One order every 30 seconds still seem like there's a, there is a route to market for this who knows how much extra you put on. But, if you factor in the fact that it might be cheaper than going to dry, I think

[01:20:39] Remkus de Vries: we're going a little overboard with with these types of things. And

[01:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah, yeah.

And when you look at it, if I put that picture back up there, you look at the sort of advertising, real customers, real orders, real, whatever. The third one is real drone delivery. It kind of looks like, oh, this is cool. This is the future. It, my opinion is that it doesn't have to be like this.

We don't have to do this. Just, I just found it.

[01:21:05] Remkus de Vries: This is a perfect example of a consumer society going where it shouldn't be

[01:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: going. Yeah. Okay.

[01:21:13] Paul Lacey: Who, what company is, this is Google. Google is delivering these things,

[01:21:20] Nathan Wrigley: an initiative called wing. Let me get that well, it's not Google. They have, it's alphabet, isn't it?

The parent company, it's alphabet doing it and they're going to start rolling it out. They said in I think we'll launch a new service in Australia. So obviously expanding in Australia, Finland and the United States within six months, the capabilities and technology are probably ahead of regulatory permissions right now.

Yeah. Interesting REM cause this is one of those things where consumers who are rejecting this can really kill this off quickly. Like you said, with just a small little toy garden that you can buy at the supermarket

[01:21:56] Remkus de Vries: and get off my lawn, but it's technically not all mine.

[01:22:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating.

[01:22:02] Paul Lacey: Anyway, there you go. That's my political angle. I've seen. Commentary on this kind of tech being the greedy corporate companies response to government's forcing minimum wage increases. It's yeah. Okay. We'll accept the minimum wage. Check out these new drones. Yeah. Yeah. There's self-checkouts so self-driving cars.

I'm like, we're going to have a problem. If we keep replacing jobs, we've tech the, the, removes the ability for people to buy the products. It's just more, it's just more separation of the You know, the wealth, isn't it? I think.

[01:22:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Paul, it looks okay with three minutes to go. Paul, you've dropped one in.

Thank you. This is great. I'm glad you've mentioned it. I've forgotten to over the past WP, mainline.com. Tell us why you pick this. This is Jeff Chandler.

[01:23:02] Paul Lacey: Yeah. See, I'd never apart from the comment that he did on my forum posts in the wordpress.org site, I never really read any of his articles or listened to his podcasts or anything in the past.

So I don't really know of the old Jeff Chandler before we had a bit of a hiatus. And so he's come back with this podcast and he has is it John James Jacoby on sometimes and then some other people was his cohost and I've just enjoyed it as a new podcast. That's come back with a refreshing look.

On what's going on at the moment. So if you looking for more podcasts to listen to I particularly enjoyed this one in the last couple of episodes.

[01:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: Jeff was the, the person who founded of course, WP Tavern, and then it got bought by automatic. And then he moved away a couple of years ago and obviously Sarah got.

Justin stepped in. And and he was doing w WordPress a weekly, every week. He would do a podcast episode, obviously that went away as well. And now he's come back. It sounded for a while. Like he, wasn't going to be in the WordPress space for a bit, but he's back. And yeah, here it is. His latest offering is main WP, mainline.com.

Go check it out, Paul. I really should have mentioned that prior to this, but the reason,

yeah, fabulous. I completely agree. Right. That's it, we're done. There is no other things for us to say, thank you for joining us. It'll be coming out tomorrow. If you go to WP builds.com forward slash subscribe page and click this little bar you know, fill out that form, then we'll keep you in touch with what happens.

I don't think there's anything else that I need to say. I'm just gonna, thank you. Paul has always thanks so much. We've got some news in the, not too distant future about what we're doing with this week in WordPress, but I don't know when we'll let you know about that, but we'll let you know about that soon.

And thank you. for joining us as well. Do you mind just giving me a little wave, just like that so that we can record it as our podcast album art. There we go. I've got it. And we'll end the show now. Thanks for joining us. If you're in the comments, really appreciate it. We'll be back next week on Monday.

Take it easy. Bye-bye

[01:25:22] Paul Lacey: cheers, everyone.