This Week in WordPress #177

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 177 entitled, I let out a bit of liquid. It was recorded on Monday the 6th of September, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'll be joined by my cohost Paul Lacey, but also this week by Rob Cairns, who was on the show for the first time.

There's an awful lot to talk about as there always is. First stop beaver builder has got a 2.5 release update. There's absolutely boatloads going on in there. So if you're a beaver builder user look out for that also automatic has acquired from entity. It seems that they've done it for the people so that they can invest their time into Gutenberg's UI / UX. We discuss a Justin Tadlock piece over at WP Tavern about the need to market your plugin. If you have one. How the Guttenberg team contributors are getting organized about their block based navigation. We also have a bit of a plugin Roundup. We talk about a new plugin called social ninja. We also talk about cadence being updated and elemental.

They've got some nice new features for you this week. And then we go on to show some of our pick of the weeks. Mine is all about animals and how funny they can look Paul's is all about the largest console controller that you can possibly have. And Rob is showing us editor, plus it's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress.

This week in WordPress was brought to you by a B split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time, 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. Hello one small. What day is it? It's Monday the 6th of September. It's always Monday when we do the show. I should know that bit, but it's the 6th of September.

It's this weekend. WordPress number 177 as always joined by some lovely people. Paul Lacey as is usual. How are you doing Paul?

[00:02:37] Paul Lacey: Doing all right. I'm too hot for my heart today. It's hot here. Oh, I'm going to have to, fortunately, I've cut my hair,

[00:02:46] Nathan Wrigley: cutting that hair so well for so many years now, for as long as I'm there and a really stellar job during the haircut, it's not that hot here.

I have to say, I can, I could easily get into a complaint about the weather, but I'm not going to because we've got better things to do. For example, one of the better things to do is to introduce Rob Cairns is joining us all the way from, I actually don't know the town or city that you live in Rob.

So where are you?

[00:03:15] Rob Cairns: Toronto, Ontario, Canada. So

[00:03:19] Nathan Wrigley: I did know that I'd completely forgotten. I don't know if you want to do an introduction for us, Paul. I don't know if there was anything in the show notes. There, there is go

[00:03:29] Paul Lacey: for it. Date. Yeah. So I know Rob mainly from Facebook and Twitter and and this is the first time we've spoken in voice mode or video mode or anything, which has probably long, long over to you and really pleased to meet you Rob properly.

And so in terms of who you are, according to your bio here, you are the chief creator of amazing ideas at stunning digital marketing and the host and creator of the SDM show podcast. And so could you tell us what does SDM stand for? I'm guessing the M is marketing, but

[00:04:05] Rob Cairns: STM short for starting digital marketing podcast.

[00:04:09] Paul Lacey: Well, that makes sense. Doesn't it?

[00:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we're off. We're off to a great start. We've already talked about the weather.

[00:04:21] Paul Lacey: Oh, just on fire today. It's going to be a day.

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: It is going to be one of those days during the, like the. The preamble to the show before we click live Rob's Rob's connection dropped in and out a bit. So we'll be mindful of that.

If if Rob has to disappear for a minute, he knows that he can come back, but we'll carry on. Regardless the chat is going absolutely ballistic already. That's why it's never normally this busy. I wonder if somebody has accidentally put their cats on the return key and it's just constantly putting stuff in, but there seems to be an awful lot going on before I get stuck into that though, a few bits and pieces bits of housekeeping.

We'd very much like it for you to make comments, or as we talk about things during the show, if you're in our Facebook group, which a proportion of you I'm sure will be, you need to go to chat.restream.io forward slash F. And if you go there, you can give restream, which is the platform that we usually give them permission to to let us know who you are.

It'll show us your avatar and it'll show us your name. Otherwise you just come across as this anonymous Facebook icon, and it just says something like Facebook user. So I would encourage you to do that. And if you want to make a comment, just drop it in there. We'll show a proportion of them. As the hour or so goes on, that'd be really nice.

And I see who's in the house already. Yeah. Here's a perfect example. This is a we've got a Facebook user here and I can't see who you are. That's curious. I I can't make some of these go live because they appear to be just made up of icons. So somebody is sharing like cats, emojis, and things like that.

And it would appear if there's no text in your message. That's a new one. If there's no text in your message, I can't show it. Um, let's have a look who have we got here? It looks like Devinder might be here. Devinder where or thumbs. I don't know what that means. Maya, Maya, long car from GoDaddy. She's joining us.

Thank you very much. I made a comment. Paul's have earlier. And this Facebook user is is enjoying polls here. But anyways, I feel like a whole bunch. Oh,

[00:06:28] Paul Lacey: he's not enjoying my hair and says, ah, they can't, they're struggling to cope without the cap. So if I did this without help, and you could just imagine that it's there.

[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So what bull's done for those of you listening to this poll has just moved his camera so that he's cut off at the eyes. Anything above the eyes is off the screen. Yeah, that's better. That's fine. But if you feel like going and getting your hat, that's fine. This is a nice comment. It just says, Rob is stunning.

One nice thing for somebody to write whoever that is

[00:06:59] Paul Lacey: that someone else has said, Rob is. So there's definitely some rub love coming here. Good

[00:07:05] Nathan Wrigley: grief. Great. Let's get stuck into the news for this week. If that's all right with you guys, as I said to keep the comments coming, actually, if you feel like it just whilst you're doing whatever you do.

And I imagine most of you are watching this at the same time as doing work in the background. And so on. Just pause what you're doing for a second. Take the link. WP bells.com forward slash lifeguard. Chuck it in Facebook. If you can get a bunch of other people to drop into our chat, whilst this is going on, we never say that.

And I always think at the end, I should have said, go and share it whilst we're actually live. But I'm not very good at marketing. So there we go. Let's share the screen. This is our website. WP builds.com. If you fancy keeping in touch with the stuff that we do go to this little box here, fill out the subscribed box and we'll keep you abreast of everything that we produce each week.

We do this. Podcasts on a Thursday and a few bits and pieces as the week goes on sometimes as well. We've got a load of stuff via this week more than is typical. So we'll try and get through as much of it as we can. We've cherry pick what we think are the finer bits of WordPress news for the week.

And the first one, it probably should go to the top of that piece. I'm going to throw this one straight in Paul's lap, because I don't know if anybody, I don't know if Rob, you notice this look, Paul gets an actual mention in this piece. So I might look, his name is in this piece right there. Cause he, yeah.

It helps. It helps the beaver builder crew with this stuff. And this is all about beaver builder. What's going on here, Paul?

[00:08:33] Paul Lacey: The first one was just laughing. Matt, Dave comment, I feel really sorry for Paul's head needing glasses. Didn't realize you could have follicles that struggled with their eye vision.

And that is for the people listening. That's cause I had the glasses. On my head like that. And

[00:08:49] Nathan Wrigley: That character in the mafia it's called Skeeter. I think he was called Skeeter. He had glasses, which contained his eyes. And if he'd moved his glasses up, his eyes, were there any other eyebrows attached above his glasses?

He looked a bit like Skeeter for him minute. Yeah.

[00:09:04] Paul Lacey: Thanks. That's that's a real compliment. Thanks for that. For anyone who wants to check what Skeeter looks like. Okay. So yeah, so there's a new update for BeaverBuilder. They've been working hard in the background on version 2.2 and there's a few things that crossover with some of the other tools that we cover on here as well.

So the first one the first thing that they're announcing in this post on the BeaverBuilder Derby beaverbuilder.com website is the new thing they're calling the outline panel. And this is something that you'll see on some of the other tools. I'm pretty sure elemental has this or something similar to it.

And I'm pretty sure oxygen has this. And Gutenberg has something similar to this too. It's definitely worth if anyone is using BeaverBuilder going to this post and just checking like the two minute video on how this particular thing works. I was using the beat at the alpha and the beach of this from the beginning, from when they started working on this.

And it seen so many improvements while it was in the alpha and the beta phase. Just the ability to drag things around what you can't see in this screenshot. But you do see in the video and obviously using it is that you can collapse different things so that you can really make it so that you're just focusing on what you're looking at in that tree structure there.

You can also just click on any of the elements there and the page will scroll to where that element is in the page. So it's really good for finding some, some of those things, if you're not sure which one that you're looking up, I never think that you can do that's really cool is for any of the rows or the elements, you can give them your own labels.

So for instance, if you want. Instead of it, just over the top, just saying row, you can tell, you'll hear Obana row or whatever you want to do in there, your page title, all those different things, key image. And if you've got some hidden items as well, you can label them as hidden and that kind of thing. So you can really organize your page nicely in there and drag things around.

So I think that's a really welcome addition for BeaverBuilder users. The thing that I've been working on, which has mentioned next in the post is a new set of templates in BeaverBuilder. Now beaver builder, isn't a plugin. Their team actually doesn't want to put hundreds of templates in the beaver builder plugin so that it doesn't end up being a big file and bloated with lots of stuff that, that you don't need.

They have a different idea on how to deliver templates, which we'll come onto in a minute. So I did recently, one of the things I did with them was a bunch of templates. There was about 20 or so templates and they chose 10 of those to put into the latest version under the process. As I built these templates, I've seen a little bit about them and built them to be.

Very much pages that you would need in everyday situations. So the two landing pages that you've got there as a home and a landing page, or Nathan, if you could just scroll down just slightly. So I can remember what I actually did. And then other pages, for instance, like services about page contact, page FAQ's case study page, regular page webinar, special offer download.

So you've got things like all the sort of templates that you typically use in a funnel so that you would be able to just modify those and reuse them for whatever styles that you wanted. So there's a bunch of templates in there now. I don't think that there'll be, even though I'm working on templates with beaver builder, I'm working on those more for the assistant plugin, but they're they're coming up.

Another nice little feature in there. If you remember recently in WordPress in the media library, there was a feature whereby you could press a button. It would copy the URL of the of the, the media item that you were looking at, which I've found really useful actually beaver butter have put something similar into this whereby I've skipped on here.

I'll come back to that. Duplicate one, actually. So they've, they've put a feature in here so that if you're creating safe rows or save modules, and you're viewing that in the backend, you can just press a button that copies that short code, and so that you can use that short code in any of your content to insert that saved module, which is super useful actually for me anyway, because I'm always forgetting what the exact syntax is for the shortcodes and having to check the documentation.

So now we don't need to, we can just copy and paste that. The thing that Nathan is looking at the moment is the new duplicate page or post functionality. I don't really understand the full need for this, but for what I believe, what am I, what I'm led to believe is that most of the. Duplicate post or page plugins off often have problems with page builders.

Yeah, they do. Yeah. I'm not exactly sure what those problems are, but apparently they do. So BeaverBuilder created their own duplicate page or post functionality. It doesn't matter what taxonomy or custom post type you're in and it will copy them. It will duplicate that post in a way that works perfectly with BeaverBuilder.

They've also done a kind of fallback here so that if you are using another duplicate page or post plugin the button that you press, when you, when a page is done in BeaverBuilder, we'll use their functionality rather than the other plugin that you've got installed. So if you're using a good Sandberg post, it will use the Yoast duplicate post plugin, for instance.

But if you're, if you, if that particular thing that you're duplicating is a beaver builder layout, it will override that and use its own functionality there. How

[00:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: would that. Yeah, that's really nice.

[00:14:23] Paul Lacey: Yeah. Also, also they recently I'm employed, I'm a content creator for youth, for their YouTube channel. The last couple of months they've been pushing out a YouTube channel every week.

The person that was hired is it was a YouTuber called Jennifer Franklin. Who's a designer in a YouTube where she's been pushing out tons of videos, which they use in primarily to begin with, to put into all their documentation. Beaver builder is quite well known for its good documentation. So in addition to the text-based documentation, Jennifer is doing these little videos that go with that, but obviously they're going out on the YouTube channel as well.

And I think that once the documentation is complete, then they'll start doing more, how to videos for everyday use and more workshops and that kind of stuff. Then finally, a couple of things they've updated. Some modules, some key ones of now is the menu module, which within BeaverBuilder was probably not as good as it could have been.

And it, it, what we found is when I was doing these templates, some of the templates I've been doing for assistant are full site templates. So they have headers and footers, and obviously those headers and footers include menus. And then using that, I found. Without CSS. I couldn't achieve some of the simple things that everyday users would need to do so myself and other people were able to feed back.

And the menu module, as a result has been vastly updated to have all the mobile control you need. Everything's like sub nav, wherever using the menu in the footer or the header, having appropriate settings for those different places or sidebars, et cetera. So that's been vastly improved. And then finally, the other one that's worth mentioning is the pricing table.

And one of the nice things that's been added to that it's been brought up to date with the styling options, with the more modern modules. And secondly, a really useful feature that people ask for all the time in pricing tables is that kind of switcher. So you can say, Hey, I want to show what the prices are in monthly and yearly or whatever.

The two different options might be daily or weekly or whatever. You've got a toggle where you can have different settings for different different things. So that's the BeaverBuilder update. Then the other big update that they're mentioning is. Assistant pro is launching very soon. It's probably not worth mentioning too much about it because when they launch all the information they want to release will be with that.

But they're just mentioning in this post, that assistant pro is coming soon. They figured out the pricing that they want to do. They're happy with the stability of the pro version of the plugin and more on that later. And then, sorry, there is one more thing in this post. It was a really big place by beaver boat, actually.

Just some stuff on the success that some of the people have been having with the performance tests on BeaverBuilder. So cloud ways recently did a blog showing their platform with different page builders, but you've about did quite well with that. And then they do credit, our friend, David Walmsley.

Who's been doing a series of YouTube videos about performance, specifically with BeaverBuilder showing how you can hit those. Top scores on mobile and on desktop, on Google page speed insights, without even using things like the caching plugins and all of those plugs, all those kinds of things. He's, David's been showing us how to be honest.

You could apply this to any page builder as well. How to get the good scores by doing good practice, no matter what tools you're using, but specifically with BeaverBuilder. So I think that's it from the the BeaverBuilder updates. So it's a big one, sorry. If you're not using beaver Berta and you have to sit through that, but anyone who is then it's the 2.5 is out and it's definitely worth checking out the new stuff in there.

Yeah.

[00:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: There is a lot in there isn't there and also really nice that you've got the inside track on all of that nice looking templates, by the way. Somebody

[00:18:16] Paul Lacey: said they've got some great stuff coming up. Honestly, I can't say much about it. Yeah,

[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: that's okay. We understand we'll try and trip you up and make you say extra in the course of the podcast, but whoever that is, Facebook user is saying awesome work.

So great. I am very excited about the whatever that thing is called. The outline panel that seems to me like really amazing

[00:18:41] Paul Lacey: addition. The thing about that. It would be really worth the Gutenberg team, looking at this, looking at the oxygen, one, looking at the element or one that I believe exists and seeing what's right about them using them and seeing what feels good.

Because like I say, when I saw this in the alpha version, it wasn't that useful. It was more of just a visual guide to what your page look like. And then by the end, there's collapsing, reordering, duplicating you know, click one of those elements and click on the settings, straight into the settings.

We happened to find it on the page, all this super useful workflow stuff that the beta testing team, which isn't an official team, it's just volunteers who are interested feedback and put those improvements. I don't know what the state of the one in Gutenberg is at the moment, but I'm sure there's some good stuff in here that they could look at to get some

[00:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: there's a few it's been updated recently.

Hasn't it? It was a lot more than it once. Did. I don't know if Rob is a user of peop of builder or if that was all just you know, just going over your head or do you dabble in, but

[00:19:46] Rob Cairns: I got pull in a little bit, Nathan, it's not my page builder choice. I tend to lately either flock to Ella mentor or oxygen, but as we're talking in the pre-show, I'm actually all in with Gutenberg right now.

So I'm throwing all my time in that spot. So I'm not using it as much as.

[00:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: That's good. Yeah. There's a lot of improvements going on in there, but I like it. And it's also so nice Paul to see you cropping off in the actual news that we're talking about. That's cool. That's really nice.

Constantly as well. That's that's also really. Two two people who WP builds massive. Apart from the fact, oh, you don't get mentioned anywhere and never will in all likelihood that we're

[00:20:31] Paul Lacey: going to mention you, but I told them to leave you with that as well. Thank you. That was very good.

[00:20:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Okay, so that's great. Low to beaver builder news, big release, and a rejoice. If you are a beaver builder user, there's tons of you for you to go and check out. You were talking earlier about whether or not the Guttenberg team can make use of things like beaver builder. And we'll get to a piece in just a moment.

In fact, right now, which might link into that, because this happened during the last week, the guys over automatic have acquired from entity, which which was a sort of react based framework for building out. It says here it's a, an source framework for building. Press themes with react.

And what's curious about this is they've in the piece that I'm looking at here on WP Tavern. There's no mention of how much money changed hands or anything like that. It's just that these guys have been bought and then instantly repurposed. So they haven't been bought to carry on working on front entity.

In fact, for entity, as we know, it has gone to be an open source community driven project, no longer being driven by the two guys on the screen. I should mention their names. Their names are Pablo Castigo and Louie harems. And. And they've been taken on by the automatic team and instantly deployed to at the Guttenberg UI.

And it kind seems like Paul, you and I have been banging on about Guttenberg and the UI and whether it's any good and dieted, I just, it's like a scratched record. And and one of the things that we keep saying privately more than publicly is wouldn't it be good if they just hired some real experts and put them to the, got them to sit on the wheel and grind it out.

And and it appears, that's what they're doing. So for my part, this is really good news. We've got a couple of guys who've now got the responsibility to go out and figure out what is next for Guttenberg. How should it all look? What should the UI be? Like? What should the UX be like? And it seems like they've got a real track record in making things like this work.

So there you go. Fascinating news. I'll Chuck it over to Paul first, Rob, if that's all right, cause we've been going on about this for so long, we're just wanting to get his thoughts.

[00:22:52] Paul Lacey: So what, what is a frontier? It is above my pay scale. I've no idea what it does. I've read what it does, but I don't understand how I would use it or anything like that.

So what I'd take from it is that the two, these two chaps are very clever and very skilled and a fantastic addition to the team at automatic to work on the Gutenberg project. And like you said, Nathan they, I just get the impression that they are going to fill some skill gaps in terms of they are using react to create.

Real world websites at a high level. I think that there, I think fronted powers, Tik TOK or something crazy like that.

[00:23:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So you tip top community channel somewhere, isn't it? Yeah, I saw that.

[00:23:47] Paul Lacey: Yeah. I think, uh, a lot of the comments that I've seen online attending to say, this is more of a person acquisition rather than a piece of software acquisition, because automatic have said that they're gonna turn entity into a community project, which I think means probably more or less the end of frontier T as it was because you just taking the two kind of geniuses behind it.

And, but again, that's, there's a certain element of my own ignorance into understanding who has worked on front of T. And what happens if you take those two people out now? What's interesting though, is I've seen zero pushback on what my initial reaction to something like that was going to be, which would be.

My initial reaction was, oh my gosh, they're shelving front city. And taking the people. There's going to be a big, a lot of people upset about this and all I've seen is positiveness about this, about the two chaps who've moved to automatic and basically, achieved their goals and become hugely successful as a result of this.

And it will now get to be lead players on a really big project. So I think it's super good news for the Gutenberg team as to what they're going to be working on. I wouldn't be surprised if they're working on things like we're commerce. I know that it says working on the Gutenberg project, but I feel like they would be, they seem like people who would be wasted to not be working on things like WooCommerce blocks or things like when when automatic acquires things like it's a blog thing that they acquired.

Oh tumbler. Yeah. Tumbler. So you can imagine kind of app type frontend themes that are not for brochure websites. They're like functional web apps using the Gutenberg editor. So I could see that kind of thing that they're working on, stuff that we don't really know about yet, but like I say, the nice thing about it was that there was no pushback.

It was all good wishes, even on Twitter where you would expect to see some cynic cynicism. But there was none. Uh, good acquisition of skills by automatic there, I think.

[00:26:02] Nathan Wrigley: But it's now very important that you are very cynical about this because just to give it some balance, no, you must be delighted if

[00:26:13] Rob Cairns: I ask.

I am delighted because this is a, this is definitely a people acquisition for knowledge, more than anything else. So I agree with Paul that a, that they acquired fronted T for the people involved and in the tech space, we acquire people for two reasons, for people or technology. I think this is a people by changing the UI for me is a big deal in Gutenberg.

So I personally think we're process and automatics headed in, in the right space with this. Now, a lot of people are going to be cynical and say, here we go again, automatic and matter, acquiring more things to take more control. But I think what we're seeing is some maturity in this space with all these acquisitions going on.

So I think this is a really big deal and a good deal for automatic because.

[00:27:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm just going to quote from the, the piece itself might as well put it on the screen while I do that. It says so this is coming from the guys from front-stage after a series of conversations, automatic offer to sponsor our team to work directly on the WordPress open source project in particular to contribute our expertise in developer experience, front end tooling, performance, and UX to the WordPress core itself, instead of only doing it for an external tool.

Yeah, I think we're fairly confident that is what's going to happen and then further. Not in the article. This is also worth a mention of some more. So this isn't people being acquired as such. This is people who've been given work in and around the Gothenburg projects, because we now have a new head of developer relations.

Hopefully I'll have her on the podcast at some point very soon, but also friend of the podcast she's been on the show, a number of times big at poorly hack has been taken on to, uh, she's now become a part of the automatic team. And it says here is also sponsoring automatic is also sponsoring her curation of the Gutenberg times publication and the change log podcast, which is just great.

So that publication can keep going and she's been taken on as well. So Bravo, congratulations, well done. That's great. So all in all, it looks like the thing that we were saying we wish would happen. Paul investment in the, the Gutenberg project seems to be

[00:28:34] Paul Lacey: going on. Yeah, they need that the project needs an injection of UX knowledge and skills.

And the fact that those guys have that plus they are also expert developers in react is can only be a good thing for WordPress as far as I can tell. This

[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: is curious as well. The frontage, he hasn't been around all that long, but already they had already received 1 million euros in funding. Which is 20%

[00:29:03] Paul Lacey: of that was from automatic as

[00:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: well.

Yeah, I think it was 20. Yeah. 20 something. Yeah. You're right. So anyway, there we go. Nice bit of news. Let's let's

[00:29:12] Paul Lacey: crack on just one thing before we move on, that seems to be like a pattern of automatic kind of almost donating money to tech. And then later on acquiring them, I think the same happen with cancer.

I dunno. Did they acquire customers or are they just

[00:29:31] Nathan Wrigley: they and they invested in customer

[00:29:33] Paul Lacey: actually. So that's not a trend they

[00:29:36] Rob Cairns: invested in Paul. They invested in cast us in the podcast. Yeah. They, they acquired what's pocket,

[00:29:45] Paul Lacey: right? Yes,

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: of course, which is my tool of choice for listening to podcasts. I actually subscribed for the first time I've been using rival services, subscribed to Spotify and started using that as a podcast interface and then quickly realized actually I prefer pocket car.

So I was right back to pocket costs within just a matter of weeks. And it's just great. It's just really great if you've not used it pocket gas for the win. I think they've got premium version, but I think you can download a free version as well, worth checking out. Okay. Next piece then is, Ooh, where have we all gone?

There? We are back on the screen. This is just a piece. I just thought it was really interesting. More WP Tavern stuff. This is just in Tableau, just found this fascinating Sabrina. And I got so most of the way through a series of podcasts Sabrina's down. And I got through a series of podcasts last year, where we were trying to talk about how it might be, that you would promote yours.

You're plugin. And I just thought this was a really interesting piece just in writing this week, a piece finally finishing a piece that he's had in the draft folder of WordPress Tavern for many months. And he's finally committed to publishing it because of some things that happened in commentary that came in.

But I see this quite a bit, plugins languishing in the WordPress repo that do a stellar job of whatever it is that they're designed to do. But also when I say languishing, you know that they're there, they're doing what they're supposed to do, but nobody really knows about them. And I feel a little bit in some respects that there are so many plugins because it does mean that if you put something out there and haven't got the capacity, the time, the interest to promote it, it is quite likely that it won't be discoverable.

So that's what this piece was all about. He linked up with with Bridget, Bridget Willard to sort of talk about. Might publish your product, your plugin. I don't really know if anybody's got anything to say about this. Probably not, because I don't know if Rob's our plugin, but I just thought it was a nice little piece worth mentioning.

If you are producing plugins is essentially, it's saying don't put it in the repo and say enough, I'm done. If you want it to be successful, you got to get out there and market it. Paul Rob, I don't know if you've got anything on that.

[00:32:02] Rob Cairns: I would say a Nathan, sorry, Paul. I would say you can't market anything, not just a plugin.

You should jump out and market it properly and not just throw it out there. That's really my take on it. Yeah.

[00:32:18] Paul Lacey: Yep. I agree. Actually, I think the biggest takeaway from this post is Bridget were lots book, which I've not read. I've not got any plans to create a plugin, but the fact that there is a guide rather than nothing.

Out there that if you launch a plugin that you can follow, because there's all sorts of guides out there for how to launch a course or how to launch a digital product, like a book or some digital book or something like that. There's plenty of guides to that. And if you've ever seen them, then you know that they're quite structured.

For instance, a friend de Foy, he, is very successful course creator these days. And and I was there at the beginning with him when he was creating his first course. And Nathan, you were there as well when he was showing us the process he was going through. And I think I've said it before that I think a lot of us in this little mastermind where we all used to beat together with myself and Nathan and day four and a few other people.

All had this idea. Yeah. I'm going to make a course. I'm going to make a course too. We're all going to make a course. And then we saw what Dave Foye actually did. None of us wanted to make a course anymore. And I think that it just shows that there's a lot of hard work to going into marketing these things.

I know, uh, Rob you were well to the whole personal brand thing because you've got a very good personal brand. So I assume you're into the whole personal brand thing. And it goes back as well to the previous item where, bigger, not Bridget but big has landed a position at automatic after being, uh, a very kind of popular podcast within the whole Gutenberg and the Gutenberg and blog project space.

And I think it was Matt Mullenweg awhile ago. He got criticized for it, but it was taken a little bit out of context. In some ways we're saying. If you want to get into a particular area, then contributing to the open source side of that is a good idea. And I think bigger is an is a, is an example of that because she's landed a great job, but ashamed she's very happy about, and she wouldn't have been in the situation to get that job if she hadn't done the contributing and building up her personal brand in the meantime.

So I'm not sure what Bridget's book talks about if it talks about personal branding and stuff like that, but I bet it does. And I think if anyone is launching a plugin and a note that some of the listeners and viewers do have plugins, it's probably worth the $10 for the digital version of that book or the $20 for the printed version of that book.

Just to see if there's a kind of, a route that you can take to, to try and launch something and maybe one day get acquired and cash out.

[00:35:16] Nathan Wrigley: And it was Sabrina who is in the comments now that's nice to see you Sabrina. She mentioned that there's the link. You, you have to just take that off the screen.

I'm afraid you can't link to it. Or if you're in the Facebook group, Bridget will our.com forward slash how to market your plugin, all hyphenated. So there you go. Yeah. Nice piece. All right. Shall we move on? Okay, doke. Let's go to this one. Ah, now, then I think this is quite an interesting piece. So again, harking no, because I'm going to show you the spreadsheet.

The we've, we've been going backwards and forwards. Paul and I about the, about the WordPress community and how last week we talked, there was a piece where, you know it's difficult for people to contribute and people in the piece that we mentioned last week were saying that only those people who've got the time and the energy can push the project forward and so on.

And I just found this piece really interesting. So Sarah Gooding is called Gutenberg contributes. Contributors get organized to them to move block-based navigation forward. And honestly, the block-based navigation. Isn't the reason I pick this, although it's an interesting subject and you can figure out what's going on with the block based navigation.

It just sort occurred to me how much stuff goes on in the project that you never ever see, unless you're part of it. So just a little bit of the way down after Sarah mentioned the fact that there was a whole. The hangout meeting where people try to reinvigorate what was basic dead projects.

This block-based navigation had totally fallen out of favor and people weren't weren't doing anything about it. They decided that they needed to resurrect it. And so they put this meeting together and then they threw together a public Google doc, which I'm now showing on the screen. And this to me is a perfect illustration of the level of detail that is going on in the background in these little slack channels in these little these little community gatherings, this hangout that people did.

And this is people addressing. What needs to happen to get the block-based navigator nation work. And this isn't what we're going to do. This is more right. Here's where we're at. This is us prioritizing in the future, what we're going to do. And it's all of these little things that I don't often see because I don't contribute to core or what have you.

But there were, there's all this kind of Gutenberg's not doing what I want it to do, um, nobody's listening to us and so on. And this just for me, exemplifies people are listening. If you've got the capacity to join in. And you know, when these meetings are happening and you can cope with the channels that they put these meetings out in.

So Paula, did I trigger you? Sorry.

[00:38:18] Paul Lacey: Gutenberg triggers me genuinely.

I'm proud of love resistance. You want it?

[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: Do you see this as to me, it's really demonstrative that people are trying ever so hard to make it all work. It just doesn't seem to fall out the way that, that, the, our page builders have managed to do it with such a plum over the last

few years.

[00:38:45] Paul Lacey: I think, uh, it's great. The the effort is going into communicating with the doc, the Google doc and all that sort of stuff. I did put a comment on that post and just in Tagalog did agree with me in his response. And all I said was that the it would be great if the approach to navigation was.

Not beginning with let's. How do we do this in blocks? So it doesn't necessarily have to be in blocks. Sometimes some elements on a website are better if they're pre produced in an appropriate user interface. So for instance, you wouldn't try to make a YouTube video of blocks. You would clearly make the YouTube video using video editing tools.

I noticed as an extreme example, but, and then you would put the video, the finished video inside the block. So my comment on the pace was that I don't know if they're struggling through trying to put a square peg in a round hole for the navigation. That said, if they do manage to pull it off, there's some really good reasons that would benefit having navigation as blocks.

And those are things for example which we'll come to in the elemental posts in a minute, let's say you've got a navigation and then you want something like a mini cart at the end but it's got some good functionality in it. Then if the whole navigation set is built out of blocks, then if their block exists, that is a mini car that can go in any navigation, then it can go in that navigation that block-based navigation.

So they are, they seem to be going towards you know, the idea that you could do, almost anything with navigation, which is a good thing to aim for. But I think they're really fighting a difficult battle trying to get block-based navigation, working properly. Yeah, good luck to them. I hope they pull it off, but my comment was just, it would be cool if you had the conversation first, whether is this the right thing to even do and to give them due credit, whoever they are.

Maybe they maybe they did have that idea, but I do tend to see with the Gutenberg project that it's right. How do we do this with blocks? And I feel like if you went to, I know it's a distributed company, but if you went to like automatics headquarters, if they did have one, and there was a machine where you could buy chocolate and crisps and chips and stuff like that the interface, that'd be trying to make that interface are blocks as well.

I say so. So I just, as little bit of, I see why they're doing it, but it's just because from what I've seen of the block based navigation so far it's kind backwards. Yeah.

[00:41:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. They were the controversial, there's a block for that mentality, which is going to pervade in the future.

Maybe some things are best left, not as blocks. Any thoughts on this one,

Rob?

[00:41:52] Rob Cairns: Yeah. I tend to agree with him, Nathan. I, even though I'm all in with Gutenberg, I think there's some things that are better with box and some things that are not as good with box. And I think navigation really at this point in time, doesn't fit well into the block model.

So I'm in a wait and see mode with this one personally. So yeah, that's where I see it.

[00:42:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alrighty, we got another one for you. We're going to go and do a little Roundup of some plugins. Some of them brand new we don't, you usually do it this way. We don't normally feature plugins, but there were like quite a few bits this week.

There were five or six that I thought, ah, this is interesting. It's quite a lot of updating going on. So I thought I'd just mentioned in a plugin section at this point, we should have some sort of jingle, which says plugin section or something really terrible like that. I challenge anybody to come up with a plan that was about as badly done as it could be.

Nevermind. Let's press on. So first of all, Is this is a new one it's by the guys who do fluent forms. And what's the other thing, fluent fluency are Emma. They've also got a fluent SMTP VRR. Elegant is yes, this one's called WP social ninja. So they're dropping the fluid fluent bit and and it's not out yet.

And it's it's exactly what you'd expect. It's a social media posting thing. You can show your social feeds. You can embed a social chat widget, which, something like Facebook messenger, and all that kind of stuff. And and it appears that they're looking for people to subscribe to what will then become an email list of offering you a lifetime deal.

I, I, I don't really have one plugin that does all of this kind of stuff. If I do social posting, it tends to go out to SAS apps that do all of this. But anyway, I like those guys. They, I really like the stuff that they've produced in the past. So when this came into my inbox, I thought I'd add it. It's WP social needs.

Dot com and there's nothing there yet, but they've been a pre-sale at you into a lifetime deal. So that's the first one. I don't think anybody's going to talk about that. Are they except me? So I might as well just push onto the next one.

[00:44:05] Paul Lacey: I quite liked this actually. Yeah. I'm just, I've looked through the website and I'm always interested with what that particular company are pushing out because they always seem to do a really good job of looking at stuff that's out there, but could be improved upon.

And then they genuinely improve upon it and they seem like they have a really stable set up for, managing bugs and support and all that kind of stuff. But I think when I saw this announced, I just thought, is this just another social sharing plugin? Is it another one? And it's actually not it's it's probably got social sharing in it.

I couldn't actually see anything about social sharing. But social sharing is where you got your website content and you're pushing it out to social media, but almost everything on this is about pulling social end. So for instance, you've got reviews from all sorts of different places, Google reviews, I think I forget what's the what's the one where you hire houses, what's that called Airbnb.

I think Airbnb might be in there and TripAdvisor. Yeah. Pulling in different feeds from YouTube and eventually Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram chat from different form. So messenger, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and telegram. So some seriously powerful engagement tools that we often see as SAS apps, but within WordPress and we don't know how much it's gonna cost.

I'm sure it is. I'm not in any of those Facebook groups anymore where everyone's got an inside track on that. I don't know how much it's going to cost, but it looks pretty powerful. And I'm interested in, I've put my email address in there. I think this sort of thing probably does exist, but probably in places like the Invitae networks, so which are tends not to buy plugins from those sort of places.

Um, so if I was going to get something like this, these guys would be who would be happy to buy it from interested. See what the cost is. Yeah.

[00:46:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anyway, you'll, you'll find out in your email. Do you ever use anything like this? Rob is your streets kind of thing you'd submit your email for?

[00:46:23] Rob Cairns: Yeah I do sometimes Nathan, I tend to go to more SAS apps. Doing multiple posts. So that's been my take, but I really liked the guys this group at uh, you know, the ninja guys and I really liked the type of stuff they do. So I would probably check this out. It all depends on what the pricing is going to be.

Yeah, the other thing I had to be really careful of is the whole LTD model. I hate to go here, but I want, I'm going to, I want this plugin to be sustainable. And if we offer too many lifetime deals in the long run, will it be sustainable and will that run out of money to develop it? So we gotta find a balance here too.

So that's a concern of mine all the time.

[00:47:13] Nathan Wrigley: Curious as to how much of this product exists. If you know to me, no, So how much of it is, this is what we're going to build. Based upon the amount of lifetime deals, subscribers that come along, whether the lifetime deal people are in effect paying for the first, first round of development to get it done.

Shahar gin, Jill will probably be able to tell us, I don't think he's in the show at the minute, but you never know. He might somehow be able to reach out to us and let us know. But yeah, really very confident in their ability to pull this kind of thing off, they do have a history of doing a limited time lifetime deal.

So with the fluent forms, they, I can't remember how long it went on for, but the pricing was pretty good for several months and then they put it to subscription. And I think it continues to work very well as a subscription model. So maybe it's just a mechanism for getting some cash, but it's interesting.

I think I never make use of any of these things. You were mentioning, like the Airbnb on the TripAdvisor, if you're in that niche, if you're, I don't know, you're willing, I don't know. You want to rent your house out for the summer holidays and you happy and be as the way that you've decided to do it.

And you've got genuine reviews on there which can help you out and sell it for those period of time. This sort of stuff's great.

[00:48:30] Paul Lacey: And that business, that any agency, for instance, a freelancer that's working regularly with companies that are small B to C type companies, cafes, restaurants service industry, that kind of stuff.

This feels like a really good set at all. So people, but I totally agree with Rob as well about the lifetime deal model. And I'd probably even build on what Rob said, just that it feels being um, seeing what's going on in the industry a lot from studying the news and everything and the acquisitions and everything, it feels like there's never a time.

The, now that it's been more important to be mindful of the things that you're buying and the plans that you've got to do with those tools that the industry is a little bit volatile and that there is the problem with not pricing. These products high enough starts all the way back at the repo where you have these, developers creating plugins for free and not really knowing how to market them.

And it takes a different type of mind than the kind of minds that come up with these kinds of products sometimes to market these products really well. You look at a success story would be someone like Vito palak who had, he's now got his guys products after him. And, he, he was, he got into web development, but prior to that, he was a rock star and he was marketing his own rock band.

And so he got some skills before that and he knew how to. Get street teams going and marketing his product for him. Not everybody knows how to do that. So when you see these products coming out that sometimes not saying this one, but you do see a lot of copycat products recently, and this is a pretty unique product, but you see a lot of copycat products released and you think, oh, that's a great deal.

That's cheaper than gravity forms or whatever it might be. But that product just simply might not exist for a while. And then Brian gardener, who we've had on this plugin, the show, this show a few times, I listened to a podcast with him recently saying that it genuinely is a thing in the industry now that if you're building a plugin or a product within the WordPress space, the majority of people that are doing it with new products and launching it to actual the pro market are doing it to try and get acquired.

So a lot of the time they don't even have a longterm plan for sustainability. Rob was talking about. They're hoping that somebody just buys them out. And if that doesn't work out for them, They probably moved to another product. And again, not saying that Durfee managed ninja do that. I don't think they do.

I think they've got, I think they're an exception. I think they have got a good business plan from what I can tell. But it's just like buyer beware time at the moment. I would say it's

[00:51:26] Rob Cairns: a scary time, Paul. I think we're at a point right now where we're watching the big plugin shops and I think of guys like liquid web and look what they're doing right now.

They're running around, buying up people and we got to start being really mindful of that because I think we're going to end up with. Six big plugin, super shops, not like that. As you were talking about people building stuff in the repo for free, I think we got to get off this mode that everything in the WordPress community is for free and we got to start charging what we're worth.

And I mean, not from developers, designers and plugin developers, we're all undervaluing our services and it's not doing our industry any good as a whole, to be honest, it's actually hurting us in a big way. So that's my 2 cents that, to that.

[00:52:14] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. A couple of comments come in. Firstly told sassy, like a jingle.

I wouldn't hold your breath. Told that it would be mediocre in the extreme pose to do that. And it in fact might hurt your ears. So let's pretend that never happened and move on. The next one is, I think this is Devinder actually if it looks like this is vendor, forgive me the vendor.

If it's not you, he says that it matches that ninja tables, plugin. Do you mean to say that it matches, like it's got what, the same sort of UI UX or matches as in you feel that the way that they're launching it? Yeah. In the same way, that did they do a lifetime deal? Maybe that's more what you meant.

And and here we go, Todd, again, saying that he thinks that WP managing injuries is in it for the longterm. Yeah. When I bought their fluent form plug-ins I didn't know much about them. So it was a bit of a Pontus actually. And now that they've been around for, let's say several years, I'm more and more confident in their team's abilities.

And I think they're going to be around for a long time as well. Ah now you're talking, get veto palak to do the jingle. Okay. All right. I can feel it.

[00:53:34] Paul Lacey: Yeah. If you got to, I recommend see if you can find some of odd, uh, band official videos on YouTube. They're brilliant. X-rated

[00:53:46] Nathan Wrigley: but yeah, I've seen, it was like full on metal, wasn't it?

It was the real deal. Yeah. Okay. Okay. We'd have to go for some sort of heavy metal plugin. The mediocrity

[00:54:01] Paul Lacey: is it suits us so well,

[00:54:04] Nathan Wrigley: the mayor thought Rob's just disappeared at the thought of that his screen has gone black. Hopefully he'll come back in a minute. His connection is a bit spotty on the inside of the platform.

We can, I can see, I don't know if you can pull, I can see like a green bar status of how the signal is. And yours is five out of five minus five hours. Bouncing up and down. So Rob, if the quickest way might be just to click refresh, if you can still hear us try that. All right.

[00:54:32] Paul Lacey: Todd, uh, James has just made a comment and he probably made it almost as a joke because he does have a product, which is about how to make a good about page.

But it's also not a joke as well. Cause I totally agree. It's it says, I will say these plug-in makers need an about page. And I think that's absolutely true because it is the case that people look that the savvy shoppers now do look on the about page and try and figure out, okay, what's the history of this company who are they?

What's their credentials and that kind of thing. And a lot of the time they don't have them. I know our friend, David Walmsley, he won't buy anything. He won't, David is a real savvy shopper and he won't buy anything unless he can figure it. If these people have been around for a while, if they've got some track history and stuff like that.

And if you don't have an about page, you don't have a terms. Conditions don't have privacy policy. It gives off the wrong signals. So I think I'm plugging creators outlet. Should just make sure they're taking care of those little details as well on their

[00:55:35] Nathan Wrigley: websites. That's a really interesting point because I know that of David as well.

In fact, he was the person that put me on to that whole mode of shopping. In other words, if you let's say you click on a random link or somebody drops a link in a Facebook group or something, and you click over there and your initial impression is actually, this seems okay. I'll spend a few more minutes on this website and poke around his first port of call is the about us page.

And he wants to see what your credentials are and whether you're in it for the long haul or what you've done in the past. And you are in effect, to use a phrase, which is commonly brought out. You're leaving money on the table. If you don't do those things, because a certain proportion of people are only going to be buying your stuff.

If they believe that they can trust you, it's not about showing off how great your product is. It's more about showing off how trustworthy you are.

[00:56:25] Paul Lacey: Yeah, things like checking the terms and conditions are, go ahead.

[00:56:31] Rob Cairns: Yeah. Remember Nathan people by, and I'm sorry, Paul, I didn't mean to cut you off.

People, buy who they want to work with and not the product. There's five different products out there that do everything. You choose the product based on the team you want to work with today. And I always say that when you're marketing and the guys have put food forms, ninja with fucking, they do a really good job, but marketing there to be fair to them, a lot of plugin developers.

Market really well, and this is where they get into problems. And the about pages, odd talks about quite a bit is part of their marketing. And they don't see it that way. So they need to start to say, okay, this is why you need to buy me. This is what differentiates me from all those other guys. And that's, if he come across and say, oh, another social plugin, people just gloss over, then say, here we go.

We don't want to be in that space. And to be honest with you, you gotta stand out and the about pages one way to do that. So

[00:57:36] Nathan Wrigley: nice. I don't actually know having said all that. I don't know if this page has got a,

[00:57:43] Paul Lacey: that's what I'm checking as well. We do have an about us page and it goes over to that.

There's social. Yeah. So it pops out. You can see the team. There's not much, they've not put too much about themselves on there, but so I'm sure Todd thinks that they could definitely improve that quite a lot. And I agree as well because um, Juul, who's the founder of AZ is really out there and, he's been on this show twice at least.

And you know, they could be showing how active they are in the community on there, and just giving people even more reason to think. I not only think this is a great product, but I feel like I know the people who are doing it. And yeah,

[00:58:28] Nathan Wrigley: I, she was in that. I was using their SMT people again, actually this morning and I was configuring it to work with Google workspace and you've got to go through their cloud, you have to do the OAuth stuff and all that.

And and I was watching the video because it was easier for me than following the documentation. I much prefer walkthrough video than following documentation for something which can be done in five minutes. And I think it was Joel actually doing the video. I I'm pretty convinced it was him and I just thought, wow, that's cool.

There's the CEO of the company making the little how-to videos about about the product when they release a new feature. So yeah, totally committed. And and they go on holiday with the team, if you've seen in their in their Facebook posts recently they're all on holiday, somewhere taking in the views.

It's really nice. Especially if you've

[00:59:18] Paul Lacey: got a really good personality like Juul does. I'm not saying that they don't, but just in any scenario, any company, if you've got someone in your company, who's one of the leaders who happens to be a really likable personality. Just make use of that asset, because it is a differentiator for you and 99% of the other products that you need to increase them with.

[00:59:43] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. As if to corroborate everything that we've just been saying, Peter, hello, nice to have you back, Peter. Very true. I pay much more attention to developers I like and have invested in and have proven their ability to deliver. Yeah. The difficulty there is, of course is just making that first bridgehead.

Isn't it? I guess if you're just starting out you've really got to go the extra mile and do the about us page and all that kind of stuff. And then over time, as Peter says, the trust builds and your yeah. Your your client base is probably made up of largely the same people when you release a new product.

Maya says, about pages, the second most important page on the website. Yeah. Nice. You would definitely have a friend in David Walmsley. He would heartily agree with you. Wow. That conversation about that plugin went off in a really interesting direction. Didn't it? That was cool. Let's go. Let's go to cadence next.

Let's just do this quickly. This is cadence blocks who have introduced a conditional header. So you can now essentially puts with this thing here. The conditional had a what do they call these? Are these like little Adams? I think they're called pro Adam. Oh yeah. Associate pro ad-ons. There's a new conditional header toggle.

And it enables you to, say things like if the page is this Heather, it's the sort of thing. Pro you've been able to do with a page builder for a little while, but you can now do this inside of cadence blocks. That was really all. I want you to say. It's a nice little update. Interrupt me if you wanted to mention that.

They've just

[01:01:21] Paul Lacey: made it very easy to do. Which is, which is which is good. Cadence is a theme that really embraced the customizer. And I like, I love the customizer. I know that often it's talked about this thing. That's going to get phased out. I personally love the fact websites that the themes are web-based names that do this, because you can see if you were, if you're looking at this, you can see one of the screens within cadence, where you can turn on the different modules that you want.

And then when you've done that, you head into the customizer and you can literally start at the top and work your way through the customizer to set up your whole site. As you want to get an understanding of what options you've got and what options you don't have, and then figure out what you need to patch with other plugins and stuff like that.

And I think that's a really nice the customizer to me when it's done well, it's almost like a wizard. And I think for anyone who's using, a theme like cadence to run things like multiple domains pointing to one site for different landing pages. This is going to be a really welcome.

A really welcome addition to this particular theme. And like we say, we've been able to do this with other tools like Elementor and BeaverBuilder for awhile, I'll be for FEMA necessarily, I would say. But, but not everyone knows about these, those sorts of things to that level. And this is putting this functionality right there in the customizer.

So well-done guidance team. They are in touch with our audience and doing good. Nice. They are, they

[01:02:54] Rob Cairns: are actually, they're part of my good merch stack. So as somebody who uses this cadence box, I'm really happy to see this change come about. So it's a step in the right direction. And the more we start adding features like this, the more people will be resistant to moving the Gutenberg.

So well done. Geisa cadence. Good job. Yeah,

[01:03:16] Nathan Wrigley: it is. It is really easy now that you mentioned it, I've not actually tried it, but the way you just described it, Paul, I was really able to just follow along what the process would be. And I think the process in beaver builder for me is almost second nature now, but that took a little while to embed itself.

This seems like it would be much more straightforward for somebody who's just familiar with.

[01:03:36] Paul Lacey: I think it's not quite as powerful as what Peter Thema has in terms of the conditions. However, The majority of people that need that extra functionality would be the kind of people that would know how to do it a different way.

Anyway, so this is putting this kind of tool in everyone's hands. So let's say for instance, here's a really nice use case for this. So you've got a website, we've a digital product. You send them to the digital product landing page. And what are you going to do? Are you going to hide the NAF? Cause you don't want them to click on the different links.

You could do that. And maybe that's what you're going to do. And then create one landing page that has everything on there. Or you could put a conditional header in the, using the cadence is very powerful header builder, right? And have a anchor links down your landing page, or break up your whole sales section for your digital product into a micro-site within your own site.

Keeping that user within those sections, those bunch of pages. So it's a really powerful feature for. Anyone creating websites in a smart way. And this is why I struggle with things like the block-based navigation. I think it's I'm being, short-sighted for sure about this kind of blocks and navigation like that, but I'd like, I just liked the way that you do this in a customizer and you do it almost like a wizard in it's almost asking you questions.

Do you want to have conditional headers? I don't yet, but next week I do. So I'm really glad I found out about that, so, um, again, just a really good, a good update for the cadence. Yeah.

[01:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you very much. Last little bit on the plugins section, right? Just make a note of that.

That was one hour and five minutes. We'll have to edit that out. The the next, the next, oh, Rob's gone again just as soon as soon as I sing, I can barely describe it singing as soon as I do that thing that I just did. Rob disappears, come back to us, Rob. Last one on the plugin section element.

It seems like, we, we had a period a year or so ago. Do you remember Paul? Where every week there was something new coming out of elemental that seems to have slowed down a bit. They seem to be concentrating on stability and refining the, the code that's output and all that kind of stuff.

But we've got something new for you. They're mentioning introducing extended e-commerce capabilities. They always do it. You video over at Elementor and they've got nicer here. It's I think it was, I can't remember how long, but it, you can watch it in just a few short minutes and it shows you all of the nice new features they've got.

The, the main event really is this kind of hovering, floating many carts. I think they called it a mini cart, which you've seen all over the place. And and that was the main thing over there. There was there was various other bits and pieces, but you can also customize it inside of elemental to make it look exactly how you'd like it.

And they've also, that was it. I think there was a few other things in terms of you can place this here was the bit that I thought was most interesting. You've got dynamic elements that you can put anywhere on your website. So if you've got, I don't know if you've got a product, which has. Elements to it, we think of custom field and there's bits of that, that you want to put on the website.

You can now do that dynamically and insert if you like shortcodes and whatever the product is that is being shown, you'll be able to show those little things. So it won't just be the product title. It'll be any aspect of that configurable product. Rob, I think has done a runner. So it's me and you.

What do you think?

[01:07:17] Paul Lacey: It's a really good update actually by a mentor. And do you know the thing I enjoy about this the most are the more I see Ben Pines in these videos, the more I realize I'm starting to understand his sense of humor and. He's a funny guy. He's, he's, he's in this, he's in this video and he makes these little jokes that are almost purposefully, almost purposely bad, but they're funny when you know, when they start adding up that you've seen three or four of them on different videos and he's clearly aware of it because he's smirking to himself every time that he makes one of these jokes.

These products, and I think the videos are worth it. But if you know that Ben Pines is introducing one of the videos, then I think it's worth watching. I know we've Devi. I forget the name of the guy who is the CEO of DV, but he's always doing the update videos and they're very serious and stuff like that.

And very professional. But yeah, Ben's videos are great, really enjoy those. And I think what we've seen here with the Elementor is they have this theme called the hello theme, which is, which basically does nothing. It's like a page builder theme whereby it's great if you're using elemental for building full sites included, including headers and footers, but they're reducing the need for someone they're reducing the friction to someone jumping into that kind of theme.

So for example, one of the updates they've put out here is this micro mini cart that goes in your site navigation. It's lovely, and it's pretty powerful as well. And it's got a bunch of options and you will find that kind of functionality in themes like cadence and generate press and boxy and those and Astra and those sort of themes.

So a lot of people won't jump into using the hello theme and they won't use the headers from elemental because they're lacking some functionality there. So this is clearly a couple of updates they're doing here. Remove that friction to even need to rely on a theme that has Uh, of, of other functionality that they're slowly building into the page builder and making it a full site builder much like what oxygen is.

We all, we all suspect the elementary is going for a cloud version. So kind of, it's still making sense going along, those predictions still seem to make sense.

[01:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: Rob, I promise not to sing again. Cause every time I was seeing you, you'll just drop off the call.

[01:09:40] Rob Cairns: My Internet's being stupid life in the cloud today.

[01:09:44] Nathan Wrigley: It's no problem. We were just talking about the mini cart and the customization options coming out in the new version of element, or I forgot to say, I think it's 3.4, I think is the point number. And we also touched upon the fact that you've got this mini cart, which you can customize, but also the fact that there's dynamic product elements, which you can drop anywhere in your element or website.

And if you modify them in the product itself, then obviously they'll then get dynamically changed throughout your website. You did mention that you used elemental, so

[01:10:15] Rob Cairns: you should a little bit, I think the mini carts to step in the right direction. The biggest problem we have with doing wound sites is.

And the checkout process. So anything that streamlines the cart, I'm like, I'm good for, because I think it just streamlines a design and development process. So I think it's a step in the right direction. I think the guys have put, Elementor doing a lot of good stuff to keep themselves. Competitive to like BeaverBuilder and oxygen.

So I think it's a good move along for that reason.

[01:10:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just a couple of extra things, which they mentioned, which I confess I didn't read because to me it was all about the WooCommerce stuff, but infinite scrolling wouldn't shouldn't as well, but I presume that Something that like, you've seen elsewhere before is that with a load more button?

Yeah, it does mention there's a load more button. Is it me? Or did the media library in WordPress? Just get the load more bottom? It did. Yeah. Cause I can't even remember reading about that. And then I was looking, I was in a couple of websites yeah, there's a button there now. It's definitely not just me.

Okay. I'm not going math. That's good. Okay. We've got this. One's for Rob enjoys. I, it sec and we just touched on it lightly. Usually. I don't know if Rob wants to mention this one in more detail we've actually had Dovi who was the founder of redox, which is used in so many different places, but a WordPress Wordfence this week released in a piece about the fact that a 1 million sites have been affected by a Gutenberg template library and redox framework vulnerabilities.

Rob, if you want to talk about this, the floor is yours. Yeah,

[01:12:01] Rob Cairns: I'll talk about really quickly. So a billion, a million sites is big reaching, right? So they give the folks credit at Radix. They patch this right away and they got it done right away. So if you know anything about the way Wordfence publishes vulnerabilities, they give the co the plugin manufacturers in the theme of fractures time to get their stuff patched before they release it.

So they dealt with this really quickly which is good news for the community. It's been. A bit of a tough security week before you came on, Paul Nathan and I were talking a little bit about this. We were talking about a little bit about, I think is also released 67 vulnerabilities last week. And then we were talking about the WC, the WHC host and Montreal that was hacked and their backup server was taken out.

And they've admitted that we're at. So it's been a hard week and all I can say to people is update update your sites regularly. Don't hold back. There's no reason and make sure that you have good backups and those aren't backups at your old states. Those are backups that you take, because if you take those backups and a backup server gets hacked, you can pick up and go somewhere else.

So that's the two key things there. And. I think they did a really good job on this one. So

[01:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I think word funds we're trying to in the language that they're allowed to, which is, this is a fairly serious bit of stuff that's happening, but this little thing here, you don't usually see this in their posts.

They said the plugins publisher redox, that IO replied almost immediately. I don't know what that means, but I'm guessing within a matter of hours to our initial contacts and we provided full disclosure, a patch version was released on August the 11th. So basically this little paragraph here feels like a bit of a pat on the back.

There's a vulnerability, that's always going to be a possibility, but weld-on for you know, Paul, did we last week talk about the, the web hosting Canada thing, the WHC thing. Did you hear this story? No, I didn't. So there's a web host in Canada called WHC and I don't quite know how it didn't make it into the rundown, but it didn't.

They they, during the course of this week, they were hacked. And it very quickly became obvious, not only were there were there websites, a significant amount of their websites were taken down, but also pretty much the backups were gone as well. And so any of their customers who were relying on them to supply a backup with toast, complete toast, and they I just found it almost breathtaking the speed at which it happened.

So you could see on Twitter or whatever it was that whatever platform they were using to, I should probably take this off the screen, whatever platform they were using to show what was going on in real time. You know, websites are down, we're investigating it. And then a few hours later we've been breached.

Then a few hours later we've been breaching. It appears our backup servers have been taken down as well and erased. And then. What they then offered people whose websites had been taken down. And there was no way of bringing them back to life. They offered them an, a service where they could start again

[01:15:27] Rob Cairns: and then, and tied to it more.

They're not taking phone calls or saying jump on our live chat or tweet at us. We're not taking any phone calls. They've got customer businesses down in, you're not taking phone calls.

[01:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know the technicalities of what happened. Maybe there was some optimally remarkable breach that is absolutely brand new and nobody saw calming, but I did find it quite fascinating that a company would inform you more or less on the same day.

Listen, we've your websites died. We cannot give it back to you, but just click on this link and start over. Everything will be fine. Just think, wow, that is that's quite a posture to take isn't it as opposed to massive contrition. And here's some financial reward because of the mess we've created for you.

[01:16:19] Rob Cairns: Believe Nathan, somebody had insight credentials. So don't quote me on that one. Oh, I think it's one of those. Yeah,

[01:16:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What a horrible story though. I hope nobody listening to this was in any way. Can you typically not, but

[01:16:33] Paul Lacey: the the, the rule with backups 1, 2, 3, isn't it like? Yep.

[01:16:39] Rob Cairns: Yeah. So you take, you need one on the host, one yourself, and then one off site. What I would suggest to anybody is the way I do backups is I take host level backups and I take a site level backups. So make sure your eggs are multiple baskets and by the way, test your backups before you need them. Yeah.

I'll often do people take them and never test that they can restore them, make

[01:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: the time. Yeah. The and the cost of storing data is so cheap now. You know, if you've got, I don't know, a 30 day backup regimen or something, it's not going to cost an awful lot for most websites to be overwriting the database backup periodically.

Anyway, there we go. So what I

[01:17:24] Paul Lacey: mean, what, if you're using like a third party builder, like Squarespace or Wix or something like that, Okay. Okay. What, what do you do if something like that happens to a section on Wix or Squarespace? I don't know. I don't think you'd think, oh, no, that surely died.

They can't, that couldn't happen to them. They're too big, but I just don't think anyone is anyway. There's always a risk. There's always a risk. So I think we've I think I was thinking of people who are in their own websites and WordPress as well, small business owners and stuff. They read the marketing of the theme.

They read the marketing or the host. And so far as they understand, they're all sorted, we'll say backups, it will say daily or this, or whatever, the marketing on the sites, it's never going to say, but there could be a really bad disaster because, that's just not going to sell their service.

So I imagine a lot of sites just disappeared and that was the end of them. And it could have been the end. Hundreds of thousands of businesses. Like I can, if you're, if you're small business owners already exhausted and then they're already on the edge, then that happens. I might just say that was a message from above time to pack it in.

Yeah.

[01:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: And if you had a profitable, fairly decent business and off it, it's just gone. It's like somebody

[01:18:48] Paul Lacey: research online or something like that. Some, medical research or PhD stuff or something just wiped. It could be a wiped and tough learning lesson for that, for those affected feel.

Sorry for them. It was making me, it was making my stomach hurt a bit when we were talking about it, because it's just that feeling, when you know, I've screwed up and I've got no way out of this And even when, if I come clean them, I'm in serious trouble. Yeah.

[01:19:18] Rob Cairns: I think part of the problem is fault.

People make bad choices. And I know of one case I won't reveal the client and I won't reveal who, but they came to me and said, your, your security care funds are too much. I'm gone. And three days later they were hacked and now. I've seen that happen. And, you know, and they came back to me and I said fortunately, I still had a last backup before they disappeared.

And I said, I can help you, but there's a cost involved. And they're like, really? People need to be aware that having a website and maintaining that website and securing that website is the cost of your marketing budget and do it in business. And a lot of people don't place a budget on marketing dollars.

So I see that a lot. And that's part of the problem. We got to keep educating people and say, the survive, you got to have a website. That means you got to maintain the website. You got updated, you got back it up. You gotta do the plugin updates. You got did the theme updates. How many times do you look at a new site that you take on is say, Jesus, hasn't been updated in six months.

What's wrong here. You know, I think we got to start to do.

[01:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. They unfortunately the time is our enemy. We're really quickly running out of time. We've got only five minutes or so left. I had this really nice piece that I wanted to mention this frugal web design. Sorry, frugal kind of compute thing, but I think I'll save that for another day.

But I will mention the link it's over. Let me just put it on the screen. It's over at. Oh I can't even read that it's over on GitHub, but basically somebody created a website of get hub. If you're interested in the environment and the cost of computing, apparently computing and the internet runs to about 2% of all energy use at the moment.

So anyway, I was going to mention that, but I don't think I've got time because you know what the world needs. The world needs comedy pitchers of insects world needs straight into the, not WordPress, but useful anyway.

I'm not ashamed to say that. I think liquid came out of my body when I saw these pictures. I really, for some reason, this just tickles my fancy. You'll probably watch this, see these pictures as I roll past them and just be. Yeah. Yeah, that's really funny. But I was in bits as I looked at these pictures and I don't know why.

So here they are. It's on CNN travel of all places. No idea how this came onto my feed, but here we are. Look just funny. Pictures of animals. Great. Looking at it looks like a mop. It followed by.

[01:22:08] Paul Lacey: This is great audio content. It's like a cat.

[01:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's been what looks like. Imagine firing a cat out of a cannon and it hits a window. How did that cat get there? It's spreadeagled against the glass.

[01:22:26] Paul Lacey: Just

[01:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: brilliant. And then that one, not so much as a picture of a

[01:22:30] Paul Lacey: super funny grumpy bird in a minute.

[01:22:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This is what it looks like to what even are they like, they look a bit like they could be like mere cats or something. That's the rock, but it looks like one of them is just fed up and throwing the other one. I don't know what's happened there. There's a fish which looks like it's really surprised.

Like something just got this perfectly round mouth got look at that. Don't like that one, much like this one, it's just like he trying to look all cool. Just lying down, getting in the jacuzzi

[01:23:10] Paul Lacey: just super angry bird.

[01:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember that grumpy cat meme that did the rounds and that there's this cat and no matter how they photographed it always, it just had a grumpy looking face, but takes the biscuit. It's like something out of a science fiction, novel. It's just looks evil. Some polar bears, one of them in the background, like being totally ignored, like Ello over here, I'm drowning a bird coming in sideways and then they're probably less funny from that point on, but I just thought they were lovely.

There's 12 isn't there. There's 12. Yeah. Go and have a look in the show notes, please. I just, they cracked me up right. Let's move on. Let's do polls one. This poll is fascinating. So it's the world's biggest gaming controller, but it's about the size of a bungalow. Why have you put this one in the rundown?

What's this

[01:24:09] Paul Lacey: world's biggest gaming controller or it was created by the ELs from Elvis and Shoemaker fairytale fame, or it's just a marketing picture to suggest that a lot of engineering went into this, a PlayStation controller, which I think it might be that one might be that one. Yeah. And it's got, could you zoom out just for a minute?

I can't remember how to pronounce this thing. I've just put it in as my pick of the week, because I've been playing a lot of PlayStation in the last couple of weeks. I'm normally X-Box player, but I recently bought a PlayStation as well, and I needed a new controller because the one that came with it wasn't very good.

And I researched and found this razor raid. You ultimately. And it's the best controller I've ever used. I really liked the X-Box standard controller. I've also got an X-Box elite controller, just facts. It's here. This is my office. X-Box and got the this is the, this is the X-Box elite controller, but this piece of kit from razor is just so great to use.

[01:25:13] Nathan Wrigley: Why is it great? What is

[01:25:14] Paul Lacey: it? It's just perfectly balanced in your hand. The way the buttons press is just so natural that I think this picture where it's showing these engineers working on it is w is what this picture is saying is that serious engineering has gone into this. This is like the.

As if Elon Musk create this thing, it's just, so if anyone's got a PlayStation or an Xbox, I think, and you need a new controller, check out the razor controllers, they are a work of genius.

[01:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Is that razor, R a Z E r.com. And bizarrely, it's got like the, what looks like the isle of man logo on it.

It's not, yeah. Quietly snakes

[01:25:56] Paul Lacey: or something.

[01:25:57] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask a question? Ignorant. Excuse me. Why, why would you want both an X-Box and a PlayStation? What's the benefit of having both? So they do

[01:26:09] Paul Lacey: games in this house, right? We've got three X boxes in this house, two series ass, one series X. Okay.

There's three Nintendo switches. And, but what happens is it's a bit like, the hosting company is buying other words. Plugins. Yeah. So Sony is PlayStation and Microsoft is X-Box and each of them have certain games that are exclusive to those platforms and those particular games that are exclusive or often the best games.

And so there is a series of games on PlayStation, which is my, not my first choice. I'm more of an X-Box player that I really wanted to play. So I bought myself a second hand PS4 pro because I couldn't get a hold of a PS five. And that, because the second hand, the controller was a bit tatty and I thought I'll get myself a good controller and, uh, and got this.

And I'm really pleased with the games that I'm playing on the PlayStation, playing that game called ghosts of Toshima at the moment, which is so relaxing for a game. Killing people in as a samurai. But it's, it's fantastic game. I'm really pleased with it. And the controller just makes it all the better.

I am

[01:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: Really intrigued. Cause I don't play gaming, but I can well understand that, if something's engineered well and it sits perfectly in your hand, you can just totally get it straight away that the differences I'm sure. Phenomenal. So does it like enabled you to dare I say it play it better or is it just simply it's more comfortable?

[01:27:41] Paul Lacey: No, you should play it better. Why? Because it has some secret buttons underneath that you can map to certain things. So if you can see, like the example is I play a lot of this game called Fortnite with my daughter. She loves playing that. If you go back to the previous picture that one. Yeah. So one of the buttons you often press on fortnight.

On that D in the, on that kind of a directional pad over to the far left, there it's one of those buttons, but you need to take your farm off that farm stick on the left for a brief moment when you do it. And it can be the difference between you winning or losing an entire game. So you can map that button that you want to one of your underneath the controller, secret buttons.

So you never have to leave. You never have to move your farm off the off the main controllers there. So there's little things like that. And so I think all the professional gamers who are in tournaments and stuff like that, they'll use pads like this because it's coming. It's like the, at the level of, the top tennis players, like Roger Federer and stuff here, it comes down to absolute minute details in advantage.

And I'm just, I'm not a professional player, but these little things really help. I love good UX. I love good UX. And this pad is all about fantastic UX.

[01:28:59] Nathan Wrigley: Brilliant. A nice or a nice way to to finish off Paul's stuff today. And then we're back to WordPress for Rob's stuff Rob's pick of the week is edits a plus why you pick this, Rob?

[01:29:11] Rob Cairns: So I invite you to start and find me on Facebook or more Twitter. We'll know I'm all in with Gutenberg. I'm in the middle of changing my agency site over to Gutenberg box and editor plus just makes the block editor a lot easier and add some functionality and it would be something I would not move to Gutenberg without.

So I would suggest to anybody who's complaining about the editor functions inbox and the tech center and stuff get editor plus shout out to Spencer foreman. He's where I picked this up from. And it was what finally got me in the head space to say, okay, I need to move this site. So editor question,

[01:29:53] Nathan Wrigley: we featured it along quite a number of weeks in a row.

I think Paul didn't, we it's Jeff Jeffrey, Karen dang, who eventually went over to extend defy and obviously is rolled into the offering that they have. Yeah. And I played with it right back at the beginning and it did quite a lot then. And he was talking about the magnitude of what he was going to do. So what's the one thing that's great about it.

What one feature do you think is just super cool?

[01:30:18] Rob Cairns: It adds you can add things like emojis to that. It just adds a whole new styling to your texts that makes it easy. And I'm a big one. When I like to do my texts, I style it out. So it just makes life easy. So yeah,

[01:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: those animations, Bhopal, graphy, spacing, borders, backgrounds, box shadows, visibility, shaped dividers icons, more features to be able to.

Cool. So that's press.org forward slash plugins forward slash. It's a plus I always say edited, and it's not a singular thing that it's a plus that rounds out,

[01:30:57] Paul Lacey: Editor plus now owned by the same company that owns Redux. Are they're all the same part of the same, I believe

But don't

quote, their websites look quite similar.

So it looks to me like I'm pretty sure we covered that when it was, we did, when it was acquired. It's gone. Yeah. So yeah, you know, they patch that issue quickly. So it's. Yep. They're on that. They're on the ball. It seems. And yet there's this particular plug-in does fill a lot of holes that Gutenberg isn't doing on the user experience front, I think.

[01:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice pig. Nice pick of the week, three, nice picks of the week. I still think mine was the best, but there you go. Funny insects, right? That's it for this week. We've got no more for you, which we do actually, but we're just going to leave them as floating tabs and they'll never be seen ever again.

Thank you so much for watching. If you want to share it, then do that. If you don't want to share it, then you know, Nour. And if you want to stay informed, go to WP builds.com and fill out the subscribe button at the top of the page, I would like to thank right. For joining us all the way from Toronto.

It's bonkers. O'clock over there at the moment. So I appreciate him getting up. Also, Paul is here every week. Thank you very much. And I'll be seeing you in the flesh on Friday. Yeah. We're going out to places. Nobody will have a clue what that means, but we're going to boggle hole, Paul and I, and a few other people.

So that'll be the

[01:32:34] Paul Lacey: livestream one for a few minutes. Oh yeah. We should

[01:32:37] Nathan Wrigley: boggle whole load fishing. The bells from the fishing boat. Yeah. So we'll see you next week. Thank you very much at this point, Rob, just before we leave, would you mind just giving us a wave? Cause I like to use it little wave as prey.

Nice one. Thank you very much. We'll see you again next time. Oh,

[01:32:56] Paul Lacey: bye.