This Week in WordPress #181

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 181 entitled 15 out of 10 for peskiness. It was recorded on Monday the 4th of October, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And this week I am joined by Michelle Frechette, Rob Cairns and beer get Paulie hack. There's plenty of WordPress news to talk about as there is each and every week, we start off talking about Gutenberg 11.6 and the global styles UI, and the addition of child theme support.

We then move on to the new API for locking up blocks. Should you wish to do that? There's a new service by the guys over at hero press called WP podcast, which tells you about all of the WordPress podcasts out there. We then get into WP Hans, which is a new service. It's a bit like product Hans, but for WordPress specific things.

GoDaddy you have started a new payments option. It's a bit like square, but a complete rival. And we also talk about a piece in which awesome motives marketing strategies are taken to pieces and analyzed, give WP, have their new peer to peer fundraising, suite, and Michelle dwells on that. We show you a couple of new sites, gravity forms and castoffs have opt dated their websites.

Aren't I think they're rather nice. And we also talk about a hamster, which is trading better than just about anything else just by running around. On its little wheel. 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 blockhead. Go check it out and get a free demo at AB split.

test.com. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello. It's episode number 181 of this week in WordPress. That makes us about, oh, what is that? It's like three years old or something. That's a bit bonkers. And, um, and I'm joined well, first of all, I should say there is no Paul Lacey, the tear, the tear comes out of his eyes. Oh, weeps betrayal is what I kept saying.

Last week. I had a hashtag, which I kept putting on the screen. Paul Lacey betrayal. Um, no, as, as you may know, if you've listened to this regularly, he's, uh, he's decided he's going to take a break from the show. He's going to come on periodically and maybe that'll be every number of weeks, but he's got, he's got other things that you need to get along with.

So, Paul, if you listen, I will never forgive you.

It's the sense of humor that we share. It's quite nice. He, he, he takes it in good measure, but, um, so you will be joined by a different collection of guests this week. And, uh, first of all, I'd like to introduce all three of the panelists today. We've got, uh, Rob Cairns and we've got Michelle Frechette and we've got big gets poorly hack now.

Um, I do have, uh, some biographies here. I don't know if they're kind of up to date, but I'm going to do the ones that I've got, which Michelle kindly stepped in at the last minute. So I'm going to get Michelle to do her own, but I'll, I'll do Rob's. Rob is the, the chief creator of amazing ideas at stunning digital marketing and the creator of the S D M podcast, which we will actually be featuring a little bit later.

Cause we've got some podcasts news from the WordPress space. So how you doing, Rob? How are you? I'm doing

[00:03:55] Rob Cairns: great. That Nathan, thanks for having.

[00:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: You are more than welcome. Where are you coming from today? Rob,

[00:04:02] Rob Cairns: from when or the university? I call it Toronto, Ontario,

[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: Canada. That's great. From a different center of the universe.

We've got bigger and bigger joins us today. She can tell us where in a moment, and I'm just going to read her biography. It says big. It is a WordPress developer advocate sponsored by automatic. Congratulations on the new job. She is the creator curator at Gutenberg times on the cohost of Gutenberg changelog podcast together with Greg.

Um, and I'm not even going to try Greg's name. You can, if you like before working for automatic bigot, ran her agency for 19 years and built websites and online solutions for small business non-profit organizations and artists. So I think this is the first time we've had you on the show since your nice new shiny job.

So congratulations well done. Well, thank

[00:04:51] Birgit Pauli-Haack: you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm totally excited about that new job and. So, so grateful to automatic that they offered me the job. Um, and it was really, um, doing what I did for the last four years, like with the Gutenberg times and the shares, um, to do it now for paid. So that's, uh, and do more, of course, going into the deep end of Gutenberg with the developers.

So, you know what

[00:05:16] Nathan Wrigley: that, isn't that just the loveliest of stories, you know, you just do something because you like it for a really long period of time. And then suddenly the people that you're doing it about suddenly turn around and say, Ashley, do you want to just carry on doing the exact same thing, but we'll pay you for it that,

[00:05:34] Birgit Pauli-Haack: uh, only had to ask because I had these, um, positions yeah.

On online for developer advocates. And I said, well, that might fit the bill. So I put in an application and, um, yeah, it went all

[00:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: good. I'm really pleased for you. It's amazing. So that's, that's big it. Where are you?

[00:05:53] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm in and the other center of the universe, Florida

I'm in Sarasota, Florida.

[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I appreciate both of you. And of course, Michelle, for getting up at probably what is B you know, you should also be still in bed, I suspect, but, uh, the third one in the tri-factor is Michelle Frechette. I don't have your, um, your biography written down for reasons. I'll explain in a moment, but, um, do you want to just tell us who you are?

I'm sure many of us,

[00:06:25] Michelle Frechette: almost four years, I've been the head of customer success at give WP. I am also the. Board president at big orange heart. I have a podcast called WP coffee talk and another one called underrepresented in tech. Um, I'm going, I'm also contributor for post status and we'll be, um, filling in for Corey.

Most of the time on the get hired podcast going forward after the first five episodes have aired and, uh, you know, at every once in a while I show my face.

[00:06:55] Nathan Wrigley: You never stop. Uh, Michelle, it's really remarkable, incredible, incredible amount that you put out the, I just want to dwell on Michelle for a moment.

I'm sorry, Robin. I'm sorry. Big it because, um, I just, we've got a few little bits and pieces to share in Michelle. Yeah. Okay. We haven't kind of finalized any details yet, but when Paul stepped down portrayal, the, um, says that just really should stop. It's just stuck with that. A lot of you, it's not funny, is it the, um,

[00:07:26] Michelle Frechette: the, every time you save a trailer, I'm going to say,

[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: um, anyway, because Paul's not here anymore.

I kind of was racking my head, um, scratching around a bit and thinking, I wonder, I wonder what I should do with that. Should I just do the show myself and, uh, carry on in that manner? Or would it be good to have a, another co-host or something like that? And then the thought kind of occurred. That's, it might be kind of nice to have like a round Robin of regular co-hosts.

So every, I don't know the numbers haven't been finalized yet, but every, let's say 4, 6, 8, whatever number of weeks we ask the same people to keep coming back. Because I think one of the nice things that I had with Paul was we built up a rapport over time and, you know, obviously I can use the word betrayal and he's hopefully going to laugh at it because we know each other really well.

And I think that kind of thing. Uh, not, not that I call people at betrayer, they cope with it, but that you just have that nice rapport. And Michelle has been on those show loads of times, we've worked together a lot of times before in a lot of different capacities. So I reached out to Michelle and I said, do you fancy doing that?

And she was kind enough to say, no chance get lost.

She was kind enough. Not only to say yes, I would really like to do that. But, um, but also how about I go out and find some like-minded people? Um, I think it's fair to say, Michelle, we haven't quite nailed that list down as yet, but that's the plan, right?

[00:08:57] Michelle Frechette: In conversations with quite a few people right now.

Um, we have some meetings this week with people to kind of finalize what that would look like for them to give them some opportunities to make, uh, make decisions. And if anybody knows me, you know, that I've, I've tried to put as much diversity into that group as possible too. So it's different experiences, different backgrounds and different perspectives.

[00:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it has to be said you were considerably better at that side of things than I am. So I appreciate it. Really appreciate

[00:09:23] Michelle Frechette: it. Further up on the, uh, on the little tree. Are they? Oh

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, hang on. I believe, I believe we can do that. Look,

that's a new feature that was possible before. So celebrity squares, we can play around with those celebrity squares as a game show in the UK where they did exactly that the, um, I've had a lovely couple of comments, first of all, just a few coming in. Um, Uh, it says Chris from the UK mayor from GoDaddy saying hello as well afternoon says, uh, Jordan.

Hi there, Jordan. Congratulations. That's nice. Yeah, it definitely not in the U S it's stupid. O'clock there. Congratulations. Big it. I don't know if you know Peter, I'm sure you do, but if you don't, he's here most weeks. That's really nice. Uh, Marcus says, what does Marcus say? Hi everyone. And congrats. Big O big again.

Getting the love this week. That's nice.

[00:10:23] Michelle Frechette: Or Marcus Marcus, if you're listing, I'm looking for the link that you have put out with all the timestamps for word camp us. If you could put that in the. The chat. That'd be lovely for

[00:10:33] Nathan Wrigley: us. Thank you. Oh yeah. Thank you. Um, and there's a little bit of an ongoing joke in that every week, Cameron shows up and writes a really long comment.

And if you post that comment, it sort of covers up the person that the bottom's face

covered and saying, whose face do we get to cover up now? Actually it's it's Cameron and also, oh my goodness. Who is the other one that does it? There's somebody at anyway. There's somebody else who comes in each week and arms us with a massive carbon, just for the sake of just the sake of the sake of covering people up.

Um, few bits of housekeeping just before we begin, if that's all right, if you would like to not be anonymous, if you're in the Facebook group and you don't want to be anonymous, please go to chats.restream.io forward slash F a B that's on the screen. It will then give you an option you can decline, or you can accept, and then Facebook will send forward your avatar, a name.

Otherwise you just come across as anonymous Facebook user. If you've got any thoughts or questions, I do try to drop a few of them into the, uh, into the show as we go along. But I can't promise that I'll get to all of them, but I do try. And what's the other one to mention? No, nothing really. I think that's probably it.

So if it's all right with you through. We'll crack on with the show. I'll raise my, my screen, make the screen, come up. There we go. Um, this is our website WP builds. I've lost it on my monitor. There it is. We, we dropped content each week. Thursday is the regular podcast episode, which is this week. You for undo David Wamsley.

And I've been going through the, a, to Zed or a to Z, depending on where you live and we've got to the lesser you, and now we've got all sorts of episodes to do with really difficult letters, what we're going to do with that. But we're racing through nearly at the end of the alphabet. And then we've got some new ideas.

And then what else did we do over here? We do a subscription thing. If you want to sort of sign up, I don't mean a subscription thing. It's you subscribed to our email and we'll send you information about when we produce content each and every week. That's about it. Um, I would like to probably just quickly mention that there is an event happening it's on the 18th of October, this year running right through to the 22nd of October, it's called the page builder summit is what the are wrong arm.

That's so basic. It's not one. There's the finger. Um, it is running, um, 18th to the 22nd of October this year. And look, we've got some lovely speakers get past that ugly chap and let one of them, one of them will look at that. Somebody there that was big. And that's Michelle, we've got a load of people talking this week.

I'm running through the content as well on dovetailing, this podcast episode in with all of that. And it's looking really good. It's should be really good, but if you want to be a part of. It's totally free. If you want to show up and watch the sessions, you can watch them for the 24 hours after their ad.

Um, and then there's an upsell. If you want to keep that content, click on the spot and sign up and you're on page builder. Dot com if you want to know more about that, right? Enough of me blathering on with adverts and things, let's get onto the, the main stuff I think big at you're going to feature a fairly heavily in the first few articles because you are a resident block editor, Gutenberg expert.

Um, I'll quickly introduce this one and then drop it in for anybody that's interested to talk about it. This is WP Tavern, just in tablet. Once again, producing a piece of great content it's called Guttenberg 11.6 improves the global styles. You buy ads, child theme support. And whilst at the beginning, he sort of says, it's a fairly, it's a fairly pedestrian release, shall we say?

You know, there's there's he has, there's not a lot of high, high drama items. He does say it's quite nice for a really once in a while to just be without fanfare and just, just hunkering down and making things work very well. And he goes on to talk about the global styles, the UI, and the fact that. We'll be able to have these nice representations of how everything will look on the backend.

If you're looking at the screen, you'll be able to see that there's some sort of typography setting where you're able to see what the background will look like, what the font will look like and so on. So that's quite nice. There we go. See it in action and. Other item. Well, do you know what I'm under ever to beg at that point?

Uh, and just ask her what she makes of the whole release 11 point X, particularly around the global styles update.

[00:15:03] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It gives us, um, a short preview on, um, for the first iterations of the global styles interface. What is the global status interface? Well, uh, in 5.8. Uh, we're plus life and eight, we had the theme, Jason file kind of be introduced, which is a configuration file for developers, a theme developers to configure and, um, put some, um, uh, settings into one file instead of how it, um, distributed all over the functions, PHP file and to, uh, introduce the custom colors.

Um, yeah. Make sure that, uh, custom colors are no, um, uh, uh, custom color palette, brand palette, so to speak, but switch off the custom color, um, set the font size that the font styles that some, uh, margins around some, yeah, a lot of, um, um, settings that were done, um, scattered around the functions. PHP are now in one, and that was the first step.

The second step is now with this one where a user who has to permissions can. Change those settings, for instance, the color palette, if they wanted to, or, um, the, uh, um, yeah. Backgrounds and all that, um, for, um, a full site. Um, and it's something that, uh, will be. It's aimed to come into WordPress 5.9. So we need, um, the, uh, we are having it in the plugin.

It gives, uh, more users to test it and see how it's going to work. And of course I'm Justin padlocks and input is always very valuable and will be, uh, definitely read by the team. Um, so that's the custom Stalin's part. Um, the other part is that if you have, um, so the theme, the theme is just about, um, usable now, um, with about 17 themes that do this in the repository.

Um, but what do you do when you want to change a few things? And the wordless way is to have a child team. And now, um, the block theme also supports child themes. In basic things. I have not tried it out yet, but you can overrule the parents seems settings or styles or, um, um, patterns if you wanted to. And, uh, without, um, being, um, left, uh, left out for updates of the parents seem as it was the WordPress way.

They, the team just, um, catch us up on, on that, uh, feature.

[00:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: It looks like a really nice step in the right direction of basically on covering this for everybody and having it stored in just the one place. So if you, if you save something on the front end, it saved to the themes dot Jace on file. And then it's th that's it.

And the developers of themes. Can, can you utilize that? And then no matter where you take it and what you save it, it's global. And it just works all over the website. It's really nice, nicer, quite like this implementation where it's just real simple. It says the letter a in capitals, and it says the letter a and small case.

And then there's this little icon next to our little circle, which gives some sort of indication of what other colors might be in use. It looks really nice. I've got to say it looks really nice. Any, any thoughts on that? Uh, either Michelle or Rob.

[00:18:32] Rob Cairns: No, I, I think it, I think it's a step in the right direction.

Many, many people know I'm in the process of moving my website from a page builder to Gutenberg. And I've been working on this for awhile and I think this will make some of the styling a little easier. So I'm a played with it much, but it's, it's on my radar. So I think the WordPress team is moving us where we need to go personally.

Yeah.

[00:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:59] Michelle Frechette: I think it looks great. Yeah, no, I'm excited about, I love all the changes. It's just a matter of finding the time to play with them so that I can become more for.

[00:19:06] Nathan Wrigley: Right. I think that's a really important point. You know, it's probably out of bounds for most people to allocate the time to, to fiddle with this kind of stuff.

So seeing, seeing Justin putting together these articles every, every so often, and also obviously the stuff that beer gets producing and various other people producing is really helpful, but it, it, it's not something that you're going to be playing with in the next few days, unless you deliberately go out and play with it.

Um, big it with your sort of automatic hat on what's the best way for people. If they want to make their voice heard about these changes, what's the best place to make their voice listened to. Oh, there

[00:19:45] Birgit Pauli-Haack: is a full site editing outreach program in the WordPress slack, FAS F S E dash outreach program is a channel.

And, um, yeah, there's um, some discussions about. How about when you started, when you start testing things, um, what you find, but, um, of course the best way to reach the Gutenberg team is a vector slack in the core dash editor channel. Um, and, um, yeah, postings there another, um, it depends on what the issues is.

Um, it would be a good place to get it in front of all developers that are not yeses, um, in the channel when you post it is too full. Um, write an issue on the get hub repository. Um, it's actually fairly easy to do it, even if you're not a developer to get an account on GitHub. And then, um, the issue, um, Just either a fish, a feature request or above or work.

Um, yeah, I I'm, I also call them annoyances that you find. Yeah. Um, put them in the GitHub repository, um, and, uh, walk through the, because that's where it's all together where, um, the product managers look, the, the device developers look, the designers, uh, um, they are all in that, um, get up repository and, um, where their work is actually updating.

[00:21:09] Nathan Wrigley: Another, um, another quick one to mention is just find and McCarthy on any social channel that she's like, oh, of course. Bega. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:19] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And certainly develop, send me a DM on Twitter at BPH, or send me an email to [email protected].

[00:21:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Prob and curious, why did you, what, what, what may, what forced your hand, what was the moment at which you said, actually, you know what, I'm going to start using the block editor instead of what I've been using.

Well,

[00:21:42] Rob Cairns: I I've been contemplating it for a long time for speed reasons for trying to keep up with the times for client reasons. And for two years, I've put it off and I've put it off. And then I sat in on a webinar that Spencer foreman did about a couple of months ago, and he threw this neat little utility out there called editor plus, which is ads, editor styling.

The minute I found editor plus that was the end of it. And now I'm my, my biggest problem is I've got over 140 blog posts, unfortunately, not in the classic editor in my page builders. So I'm in the process of converting that mess over. Then I'm going to move the site to a staging site. I'm almost through that phase.

And then I'll start working on the content and I've actually used it. It's worth mentioning as a time to do a content. And get rid of old content and put in things like 3 0 1 redirects when need be and stuff like that. So my tip can anybody is, don't just move here. Do a content audit at the same time and see what's relevant and what's not.

[00:22:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's nice. That's a good point. Um, I built a couple of sites over the last couple of weeks, just out of curiosity with, with the block, edit, to just see where I was at. Uh, man, it's fast, the end, the output on the. Just, you know, I did, I used speed vitals. I don't know if it's dot com or.io, but I was very happy with the output I was using generate blocks just for the container block as much as anything else.

And it was really great. It was good experience. Okay. That's good to know. Thank you, Rob. All right. Let's let's move on. Next piece is also on WP Tavern. We often feature WP Tavern a little bit less so than this week than is often the case, but there's this a piece by Sarah Gooding, um, and the long and the short of it is that there's a new API for.

Blocks, which I just think is a really nice addition. If you're looking at the screen, you can, if you're watching us live, you're able to see the, what the UI for that actually. Well, what the proposed UI for that actually looks like, and basically it boils down to three states. There's, there's the unlocked state where you can move anything anywhere anybody's is up for grabs.

Anybody can grab it and push it wherever they want. On the, on the piece of content. There's a locked state, which looks like a padlock. There's a little icon, which enables you to just clearly see that somebody at some point, possibly you locked to this and they would like it to remain there. But if you want to unlock it, you can and then move it about and lock it up again.

And then finally, there's the sort of systems. Which I think most developers would be most interested in the state. Whereby you can say hands off, you're not getting, you're not being able to move this at all. This is just completely locked and you don't even get the option to move it the little six dot icon, which we're all familiar with in Gothenburg, which, which then enables you to drag things around.

That's gone. It just doesn't exist. And so I can, well imagine, but I don't know what the permissions model around this is going to look like exactly, but I can, well, imagine that anybody building a website at some point, if they've been using a page builder that fine granularity never existed, you don't want the clients touching this bit, but this bit's fine.

You're allowed to touch that bit because that's accessible, but we want to, we spent ages getting this bit, right. Leave it alone. Um, and so I just think this is a really nice development. We're obviously still at the development stage as the uncle says, it's a new API, uh, Gothenburg 11.6, as we've just been discussing.

Um, I'm going to go to beg again, first, if you've got any thoughts.

[00:25:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I think that should really relieve a lot of fear from theme developers and site builders. Um, because up until now, there were not really, um, any, not a whole lot of mechanisms there to lock down, um, the, the theme or content, um, in the block editor, uh, apart from, um, uploading images.

Yeah. Which only editors could do, but not contributors and all that. Um, following the model of permissions, like administrator editor, author, and contributor is probably the first step for that, um, to, um, make sure that those things are, uh, um, manageable through the, or just not at all. Um, because the theme, not that down.

Um, so I think that's alleviates a lot of fear and, um, helps, uh, site builders to actually accommodate clients with. To, um, not have editors mess about the design that they paid so much money for it. Um, and just to, um, yeah. Stay with the content that they are allowed to do. So I really like that. And it's good to be that early in the stage, um, of, um, yeah, it hopefully goes also in breakfast 5.9, um, when the global science comes in, because those two go hand in.

[00:26:44] Nathan Wrigley: I'd be curious to see what the permission was, especially in terms of like nested blocks. So for example, could I pick a parent block and just click the lock and then everything that's nested beneath, it becomes a locked or indeed, could I, you know, then go into that, those child blocks and say naturally that one's all right.

So for example, I might have a covered block and I don't want the background image to be replaceable, but I do want the text to be replaceable. And obviously that's a component of the block itself, you know what I mean? Just sort of different granular controls, interested to see how that goes, but I can see this being useful.

Um, Rob, let's go to you if you're, um, if you're building client websites, giving permission or not as the case, Ah,

[00:27:24] Rob Cairns: I love this idea because it means I can lock clients head to moving stuff around. And I can't tell you how many calls I get. Oh, well, I moved this around and now it's your problem. So try and fix it.

And everybody's laughing here because we all know this drill, right? And it's like, somehow it's never the client. Sarah. It's always about the core designers there. So this will solve headaches past belief is, and I'm curious to see what the implementation is too, from, from what you were talking about Nathan, but, uh, it's a step in the right direction.

[00:27:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: There was quite an interesting use case. Nathan. Thank you. Think about that. Yeah, because we are now, um, also grading some test instructions here to kind of see how that all works. Um, for.

[00:28:14] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, what else would be good is a log of who clicked the on lock icon? I promise it wasn't me. It was no, it was you, you click the button.

I would be ready for an argument. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Michelle, you're going to use this interesting.

[00:28:37] Michelle Frechette: You know how to, but I think it's really helpful. So I've recently joined the post status team, as I've mentioned. And first I was an editor and then it was like, we're going to give you the keys to everything.

You're an admin on the site. Well, nothing is scarier than being an admin on a site like that is. And so like being able to block me, I mean, I know that I'd probably be able to unlock it, but it would be like a visual cue that maybe you shouldn't touch this one, you know, especially because I'm writing mostly, I'm doing.

Um, and so, you know, I see they put different blocks at the bottom and things like that. And, and I, it's nice to be able to edit and fix my name if I need to spell it or something like that. But on the other hand, um, it's nice to also know what you should just kind of back away from it. It's like when you, is it a cat or is it a skunk, right?

Oh, it's a skunk. I'm just going to back away.

[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: I see a couple of points further about this. It does, it offers a feature which anybody that's been using a I'm going to get, ah, wrong finger. Again, anybody that's been using a page builder for any length of time, these kinds of features have been an integral part of it.

And so it feels like it's, you know, we're, we're getting a bit of feature parity back, which is quite nice. And the other thing to say is that I'm sure. You know, you could toss a coin in the air depending on what the client would actually want. I would say when I was doing more client websites, 50% of them wanted really to be locked out of anything that could, they could possibly break the other 50% wanted absolute access to everything because they, they felt they paid for the ownership of it.

And, you know, they just wanted to be in there and getting their hands dirty and they would figure things out. And what have you, but a good proportion, like I said, it was probably about half, really did want this kind of control over what they could do so that they couldn't be responsible for actually clumsily doing something which costs them time and money,

[00:30:26] Michelle Frechette: uh, word camp, talk a few times about how to client proof your site, but give them access at the same time.

And the bottom line came to when they, when they required that you give them access to cause they paid for it. Just like Bob Ross is that happy little trees and happy little accidents. We're happy little opportunities to make more money off your clients who refuse to stay out of their own website.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: That's right.

[00:30:51] Rob Cairns: I'm laughing. I'm laughing at you, Michelle, but it's, it's so true. I mean, you know, I've got one client where he sent me an email recently and he shall remain nameless. And he said, you know, my contract says I own my property. And I said, okay, here you go. And then he's made a mess event. And I said, by the way, Having you heard the word of, out of scope for your maintenance agreement?

[00:31:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah, I can. Well, imagine that that'd be a real clamor for this, from the client side for some clients and being able to implement that and give them the reassurance that you can't mock it up. Don't worry too much. And anything that you are now allowed to move on. Minutes to fix.

So don't panic. Just raise a couple of comments before we move on. Cause it's quite nice to see some new faces. This is, um, hello, Daniel. Cosmin. He says hello from Brazil first time, uh, live listening. Uh, thanks for the awesome show. And Paul will be missed. Yes, he will be. Yeah. Thank you for dropping in Daniel.

We'd certainly love for you to come back and offer any comments that you've got. That would be really nice. And, uh, Cameron, on the point of lock-in content down, he says, it's a very welcome addition until now. You couldn't have a layout that did something as simple as force a page to have a hero at the top of that as, um, has not been great and should have been including earlier in his opinion.

So yeah. Nice to see that comment. Thanks Cameron. Okay. We're going to move on changing the subject away from, Guttenberg just, um, a few kind of community bits and pieces. I suppose. They're not all in big sections, but this is, uh, this is a project that I wanted to, to mention. This is a tofa to Rosea and Kate who've launched a new podcast project within the WordPress community.

It's called WP podcast, which is just about the best domain he could have possibly wished for. And if like me, you enjoy listening to WordPress specific content and you like WordPress podcasts. Uh, you'd really have to go to Google to discover who they are, where they all were. And you know, what the URL is for them, where, and the shows and all of that kind of stuff.

Once you found them, you're okay, they're locked into your podcast player for life. But until that point, it was a bit difficult, but now tofa, and Kate have gone out of their way to make this website, which as you can see is it's like basically a. Curated list of all the podcast episodes and the most recent ones chronologically in time.

We'll feature on the front page. That's how it is at the moment. So no matter which podcast network it's coming from, whether it's WP builds or women in podcast, or do the world will WP cafe talk on all of those great shows, there'll be on the site now. And you can filter search for different subjects, search the whole lot.

And Bravo is all I can say, tofa this is right up my street. So, uh, I'm really pleased about this. So I'm going to go to Michelle first on this cause look, Michelle's like icon appears so many times on this page.

[00:33:47] Michelle Frechette: So I, I was, um, I was pleasantly included early on in his decision-making about this because he wanted to know, would podcasters be upset?

Would they feel like their content was being hijacked? And I said, absolutely not. I mean, the fact that you included my podcast makes me feel very happy and the fact that people can. Subscribed to my podcast right. Through your site and not have to find my site, um, is also something that I think is very good.

And so it's, it's great. I mean, I did notice a hallway chance comes first, but you know, I guess that's their prerogative.

[00:34:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. But really nice, really nice initiative. And I think you're right. Maybe if we were into some sort of proprietary technology, we'd probably be a bit sore about the fact that our content was being amalgamated in this way, but I think it's great.

I think it's absolutely

[00:34:39] Michelle Frechette: that's. I mean, that's the point of podcasts is to be heard. Right. And so every place we can find a way to be listed and have people listen to us and subscribe to us is something that's super important. I also just gave to you in the chat there. Um, Nathan, uh, I'm running Twitter for seller WP.

And so I did also based on what, um, what hallway chats has done here and what I hear a press has done here, create a Twitter list. For, uh, under stellar WP, if people want to be able to follow the podcast on Twitter. So I kind of put that together there. Yeah. Oh,

[00:35:13] Nathan Wrigley: so I'm showing on the screen now. So this, do you know what Michelle, what I know about Twitter can be written on a postage stamp.

I'm hopeless at Twitter. That's yes. Thank you. I need a very basic school boy. A Twitter list is, is, is this you curating a list of things? How does that work?

[00:35:33] Michelle Frechette: So this is under stellar WP. So under sellers website, or under spellers, Twitter account, if you were to hit up there. You would see that there are 19 podcasts now that are WordPress type podcasts that are in there.

Happy to add more later, you can also tell it. I did it very recently. There are zero followers. So if you click that button that says follow you'll be the first one

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: logged in over here. So, but I will do I'll do it over there in a minute.

[00:35:59] Michelle Frechette: Oh, very good. So what this does is anything that's tweeted out from those different people.

Those different accounts will show up here. So you'll see, we've done quite a bit of tweeting, um, today from w builds. Right? So you'll see that showing up first, if you screw up, continue to scroll down any other podcasts, that's putting out things to do the woo there's coffee talk, you know, and so those are all going to show up there.

So if you're interested in what, what the WordPress Twitter around the, from, from podcasts is you follow that list and then anytime you want to see what's going on, you could go to that list and also was a good place. Ryan fed information.

Yeah.

[00:36:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this is great. So two podcasts, you things to feature on the podcast.

What I wasn't expecting the WP stellar list. Yeah. Oh, I see. Okay.

[00:36:45] Michelle Frechette: Okay. Got it. And their Twitter, their Twitter activity. And so I put this kind of as an adjacent to what your press is doing. Do you

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: know if it's possible, just Twitter, not do embedded audio, like for example, could, there is no way to listen to a podcast on Twitter.

You'd have to create it as a sort of piece of video content. Would you

[00:37:03] Birgit Pauli-Haack: audio content? Yeah, you can upload

[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: it. Okay. But it isn't pulled in automatically, um, into Twitter from the feed. No, it's just that the Twitter account doesn't do that. Okay. Sorry. Forgive my ignorance.

[00:37:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Spotify, when you have your, um, you can share the link on Twitter and it was a. And also, um, I'm not sure if it does with podcasts, but it does a song songs. And the other site who pulls in audio is SoundCloud into Twitter. Yeah. So if you post those MP3s also on the other sides, um, you can

[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: share it on Twitter.

We use, uh, for WP bells, I use a service versus a bit of a plug for them, I guess, and it's called repurpose.io. And you can tell it that you have a, let's say YouTube channel or a, or a U or a, um, a podcast and it will scrape your own audio and then create a video out of it and then put it onto your YouTube channel.

So it's kind of like an automated, um, service to, to put different pieces of content into different contexts. And it it's really good. I would highly recommend it. It's called repurpose dot I O and it's done by Hani Mora. Who's a WordPress plugin developer as well. He's done all sorts in the audio space.

Anyway. Thank you, Michelle. So that's the WordPress podcast list at stellar WP, no spaces, no underscores, no nothing brilliant. Now I don't want to close the wrong tab. There we go. But we're back with a hero presses version, WP podcasts.com. You must be pleased about being included on this as well, Robin.

[00:38:48] Rob Cairns: Yeah, I sure am. I think any way we can get our content out, um, to, for podcasters is a big deal. So my take has always been, I don't like podcasts that are Spotify exclusives. Um, I'll tell you that now they don't make my podcast catcher, which is pocket casts, which automatic owns now. And I just, if it's a Spotify original, I'm probably not going to do it.

So from my standpoint, being a podcast, or I like to get my content into people's ears as easy as possible. And that means going to where they are. So this just helps you. Yeah. Yeah. It's,

[00:39:30] Birgit Pauli-Haack: it's definitely the, the sensing how podcasts is actually perceived as pluck us on our RSS feed. And the more it's distributed, the better it is for the audio to be heard.

Um, because the audio itself is always pulling from the feed, which is from your website where you publish it. So, uh, I think that's brilliant, but it's also the, the epiphany of the open web, so to speak. And you can't really harvest that, um, unless you really, um, make the, uh, the sound your own and kind of publish it under a different name, which yeah.

Why would they do that? Um, but, uh, uh, yeah. Um, that's why there are so many podcasts directories, and I really appreciate this one, uh, because it's just so. Oriented. And there are quite a few podcasts mushrooming that I probably will never see. Um, unless I go to the WP podcast site and see that there are new new episodes out of something that I don't didn't

[00:40:35] Nathan Wrigley: know.

I'm curious to see if. Sort of language distribution, you know, maybe there's a German podcast that I've never heard of in the WordPress space and all that I would struggle to. Yeah. Although I would struggle to consume that in its native German, just fascinated that it's there and, uh, I would never have found that kind of content otherwise, so that's great.

Oh, and there is one in German, for example. Great, lovely. Um, Cameron, back again, he says he refuses to listen to podcasts on Spotify. I actually have re recently got a Spotify account. I was using a different service until recently, but for various reasons, it ended up going over to Spotify. And I was, I was really surprised that they were Spotify, exclusive things.

Um, I found that really curious, but, but I've, I've ditched it. I'm still using Spotify for music, but I'm still over on PocketCasts, which was my player of choice as well. I'm using that for all podcasts. Nothing goes through Spotify, but I think things like, um, for example, the G the G I think it's Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, his show is enormously popular along with some other ones.

So it, I guess from Spotify point of view, they're, they're creating value by, um, by, by putting these big shows, um, in there. But it's not for me, not for me. I mean, the

[00:41:52] Rob Cairns: interface isn't as good with Spotify as far as I'm concerned for podcasts, twisting for music. It's okay. But for podcasts, one thing I don't consider very good.

And so I would agree with Cameron, the other big one that's on Spotify is Michelle Obama's podcast as a Spotify exclusive. I like Michelle. I like Michelle, but I'm sorry until they release it. And these. One of the concerns I have, by the way, in the podcast industry, when you got podcast servers buying up podcasts houses like Wanderly was bought by Amazon sometime ago.

So one of my concerns was with all the Wonderlic podcasts become Amazon exclusive to give one delay, an Amazon credit. It has an app that way you can still get one podcasts everywhere. So that's the other thing, as the industry shapes out, we got to watch where these deals start to go, depending on who owns what Terry was very similar to what we're seeing in the WordPress space, except it's happening in the podcast space right now.

[00:42:58] Nathan Wrigley: I've got an exclusive for you. I have not been approached by either Amazon or Spotify, any of my,

[00:43:10] Birgit Pauli-Haack: the podcast, a rejuvenation, so to speak or Renaissance, um, partners. Popular in 2005, 2006. And there was actually exclusive if you podcast wasn't on iTunes, you wouldn't get any listeners. And then now it's after 10 years or so, it actually changed. And now there is a big appreciation from podcasts and mushrooming, um, uh, shows, uh, that you need any additional apps to listen to it with the mobile world.

Yeah. And I, I really appreciate that, but I remember that I had to build on. The podcast administration interface for a new site where they had, um, radio hosts doing podcasts for aviation. And it was such a interesting world because there was nothing out there. Yeah. We had to really build it from scratch.

And, um, yeah, I remember those times, but you had to have the feed for. ITunes, otherwise it wouldn't go up.

[00:44:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okey-doke let's um, let's just round that one off. Just one more quick plug for this new service WP podcasts.com. Okay. Go and check it out. If you're into WordPress podcasts, I'd be, that'd be worth doing.

Okay. The next one. Um, I don't know if I'm going to dwell on this one. Um, unless any of you three would like me to, but this is a very, very quick one, just to say that WP Tavern, once again, has, um, under the auspices of Justin Tadlock produced a piece called a web font API, possibly coming to WordPress. And this is kind of the idea of having, um, a system whereby you can, NQ all of your font scripts natively inside a WordPress.

And the idea to me just seems like total common sense. It's um, it's, you know, w we are at the point where it's just a thought, but, um, we've probably all had different ways of doing fonts in the past, whether we download them or we'd link to Google and so on. So the idea of having some one place that would link to the work that's been done over on the themes side with theme dot Jason seems like a really sensible idea, but I don't really have a lot to say about it.

If any of you do bought in, otherwise I'll move.

I'll move on. Okay. Yeah, that was, that was good. That was a good, a good period of silence, which indicated perfectly, no, nothing to say here. Okay, perfect. Let's move on to this. This is Ben Townsend. He was actually on the podcast. This show a little while ago, probably quite a long while ago, actually. And although I don't know anything about product hunt, I keep seeing references to it.

In fact, almost every service that I sign up to, no matter what it would be within a couple of weeks, they're telling me that they want me to go over to products on some click buttons and make them popular. And, and I never do because I don't really know what products on tests, but my understanding is that if you own something, you can put yourself up on product hunt and then people for.

Downvote write comments and so on. And thereby your reputation is, is, is swelled. Your numbers of users go up, people get eyeballs on your product and so on. And obviously the opposite could happen. The whole thing could collapse on you. And, uh, you know, it's just a disaster, but Ben has clearly decided he wants to do this on in the WordPress space.

And so I guess this is going to be well, he says specifically, he says, WP, Hans is an alternative to product ons, but purely for WordPress products, themes, plugins, hosting, and maybe the old tool I'm guessing we could throw blocks in there as well. And, uh, and I just thought that I would give him a shout out.

I don't know if you guys feel this is needed, what with having the repository and what have you. But, uh, here it is. I think it's

[00:47:03] Michelle Frechette: pretty cool. I think that the fact that, um, not everything's in there pository, so anything that is premium only is not, is none of their pository. I remember as a new user, people kept telling me, um, you know, 10 years ago, oh, you should be used to gravity forms.

And so I kept looking in the repository for gravity forms, but gravity forms doesn't show up there. Right. Because it's, um, it's just a premium product. And so being able to have premium products that don't have to begin as free, uh, free products in their pository is probably a good thing. Especially if you're talking about ad-ons, you're talking about freemiums.

So you're looking at things like, you know, like gift WPS, newest peer to peer that we're going to talk about in a little while those kinds of things could show up in product hunt that wouldn't necessarily be part of their repository or show up in other areas.

[00:47:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I get it. Um, yeah, that's a really good point.

Obviously there's the whole side of the premium marketplace, which, which Ben can facilitate. It looks like there's two sides to this coin. You've got a developer product owners sign up form, which is shown on the screen. You can find this on WP haunts.com. It's just on their homepage. Um, and with that, obviously it creating, um, a form so that Ben can know that you wish to be listed.

And then it looks like there's the other side of the coin, which is the user's side, which you would need to create your own account so that you can go in and click on things I guess, and vote things and down-vote things, um, bigger.

[00:48:28] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I think it's, uh, um, apart from it's a very good service and I, uh, um, yeah, I'm, I'm glad that, uh, Ben is, uh, found something to, to build.

Um, he was always looking for something to do, uh, something for the WordPress. Um, and he, he started out with raffles. He started out with, uh, um, the, uh, set, uh, trying to sell copy, but I think this is a very good service, um, that putting both sides together and getting notifications there. And he has a very good take on, um, finding those are new products and maybe getting in contact with, uh, the owners and get them up on, on the site.

So, um, I really appreciate.

[00:49:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've got to think that if I was, if I was a product owner, there's no way you're going to ignore this for now. I mean, let, let's say that, uh, I dunno, maybe it won't be the success that everybody was hoping for, but for now, at least you're gonna definitely go over there because it may well work out.

And it's perfect. The idea of having this little ecosystem of just WordPress stuff. I'm constantly looking for WordPress plugins, even though I don't need any, I'm just constantly, well, that's interesting. That's curious. I wonder if there's a and then going out and Googling it and uh, and so if I could then get some sort of measure.

Of how it all, you know, what people think of it and how they value it and how they rate it. I guess Ben is going to have to concern himself quite a lot with making sure that the proof is real. In other words, that we don't get what we get on Amazon, where you read the reviews. It's just, I have no idea if that's true or not.

I just feel it's, somebody's gaming the system. So a Ben, I guess we'll have to be mindful of that. Rob, any thoughts?

[00:50:14] Rob Cairns: No, I, first of all, the tackle something you just said about gaming reviews, that's the, unfortunately that's reality, the online world. So we just gotta be careful about, about that. I mean, people game, Amazon reviews, people game, Google, my business reviews, the game, everything, um, that moving forward, I think it's really good addition to the WordPress space.

It kind of consolidates all the WordPress stuff in the one spot. So I, instead of looking all over the place and that can be really handy for somebody who's more novice or intermediate to get them to find things, because I find they often have problems finding stuff in our space because they're not used to the multitude of things that we are on the panels.

So that's a really good step in the right direction. So, yeah, and

[00:51:02] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I just remembered Ben was also the one who had this very satirical post about the. The listical kind of pumps. Yes. You get a list of the 20 best plugins to use things, and they're all affiliate links and you don't know what it was all about.

And it's probably about getting more money out of the affiliate links, but the writer probably hasn't used them and there's quite a few, uh, and that has proliferated, um, uh, in the WordPress blogging space. So I think that's, uh, also one, um, concern that he had that, yeah, there is no source of truth, so to speak.

Uh, let's see if WP hunters hunts is gonna turn out that way, but with Ben on the helm and having. Uh, keen, um, awareness of that problem. He might be able to pull it off.

[00:52:00] Nathan Wrigley: I remember that piece that was quite, that was quite nice. It was that it was quite, quite, quite vociferously. Let's use that word. He was very keen to get his point across.

And so it seems like the right person to do it. If he's fed up of reading those articles, just a couple of things. Um, what have we got here? Um, Todd E Jones saying that he, I don't know. Uh, hi. Yeah. First of all, like, I don't know. In what context are you saying that he used it? Uh, for the copy of his website copy framework.

I wonder what that content.

Oh, I see. Okay. So Todd, curious to your thoughts, would you, are you going to be, um, getting yourself involved with WP hunt and filling out that form as a, as an owner of a WordPress product, I'd be fascinated to know if you see value in that. This is, um, Spencer foreman, who we got, who got, I mentioned a little while ago.

Um, although he's Facebook, usually hasn't clicked on that link. I can see that that's actually Spencer and okay. Yeah. Todd's popped back in and said it's product. And finally Marcus is saying, he's got to run. Thanks for the, thanks for the show by by Marcus. He's probably already gone. There we go. Okay.

Right back onto the news where we close it closing in on the hour. So we've got about 30 minutes left. What have we got next? Right. This totally took me by surprise. This is go daddy. We've all heard of GoDaddy. I'm sure. Um, you know, for their, um, GoDaddy pro that they have, and also for the hosting that they do, but now it looks like they're, they're leaping into a really different new space.

I don't know if this has been talked about a lot to elsewhere or if I'm just late to the party, but there's a new service. I think it's new that they've got called GoDaddy payments. Maya was in the comments earlier, who is with GoDaddy. So maybe if she can just give us some insight into that's up to you, Maya, but, um, they're launching essentially imagine Stripe or Braintree.

It feels very much like that. In other words, you can have, uh, uh, the ability to pay online. Or you, oh, and by the way, you don't need a website. They go to great pains to say, you don't actually need any kind of web presence already. You can just have this terminal online, but you can also have the physical terminal.

In other words, you can have the handheld thing. I don't know what that looks like, but it does say here, uh, with online pay links, you can accept online payments in minutes without needing a website. Um, oh, and it, sorry, I apologize. It's it says virtual terminal. So forgive me. I thought he said terminal as in something that you hold and it says with the virtual terminal, take over, take over the phone or remote payments quickly and securely using your computer smartphone and tablet.

So it's putting GoDaddy right in the right, in the market of say a Stripe. Everybody will want to know what the fees are. And it says the pricing for this service is 2.3% plus 30 cent per transaction. I actually don't know where that puts them in terms of the competition for stroke. My memory is that Stripe's 2.9 or 2.4, or I don't know if anybody

[00:55:12] Rob Cairns: to 2.9 now, can I jump in for a sec, Nathan, this sounds more like a square competitor to me than a direct strike competitor.

So square for those who don't know, serve is a service that offers a virtual terminal or a dongle that connects via Bluetooth or into the headphone Jack to swipe the credit card. And I think this is a little cheaper. So there's two sides to this service. Uh, one I'm not surprised GoDaddy's gone. Too. I think there will be a pile of people who won't use it because it is GoDaddy.

I hate to say that there's still this connotation in the WordPress community of weather going here, GoDaddy stuff is good or bad. So I think you're going to get some split that way. But the other thing to remember is GoDaddy is the world's number one domain. So they're going to pull in business that way.

So it'll be interesting to see where that shakes out. To be honest with you.

[00:56:14] Nathan Wrigley: I am, I use Google. I have done in the past use Google's domain registrar, and it's quite interesting when it started probably two or three years ago, it was a very simple process. And you went in, you bought a domain and that really was it.

And over the last couple of years, they've just added on all sorts of things. So now they're pushing the, the, you know, the G Gmail, the Google workspaces stuff. They're PR they're pushing, um, different hosting options and managing Google docs and all of that kind of stuff. And, uh, loads, you know, advanced DNS settings and things like that.

And you're at the point of buying it out. You're at the point of getting a domain. And so all these little things for another $2 here and another $4 there, it's kind of. Yeah. All right. I'll just chill. So you feel that if GoDaddy, as you described Rob, I didn't actually know that fact if they are one of the, or the biggest, let's say, um, domain registrar in the United States, the option to just throw in a virtual terminal.

And I'm guessing that there's no ongoing fee, they're just taking a cut of whatever it is that you sell online through your terminal or virtual terminal on their web interface. You, um, why not? It's there, right? It's there at the point that you're signing

[00:57:22] Michelle Frechette: up they're their virtual terminal is 3.3%. Yeah.

So, yeah, I've just seen them that running on the virtual terminal than they are just done online

[00:57:31] Rob Cairns: payments. Whereas yeah. Whereas squares, Michelle is 2.9%. So, you know, they're all in that ballpark. I mean, what people have to remember is when you take your visa card or your MasterCard into a merchant that MasterCard and visa take a percentage to off that transaction.

So people, people say all there's none though. The recent payment processors do well, versus in my opinion, versus a company going and getting their own terminal through somebody like chase or the bank is. They don't have the high volume of transactions to pay for the terminal rental. So they go to a virtual terminal.

That's where they save the money.

[00:58:17] Michelle Frechette: I'll be interested to see if they have a lower price for non-profits like a lot of the other payment processors do. You know, so drive is 2.2%. PayPal is 2.2% if you are a registered okay. Nonprofit organization.

[00:58:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's, that's a really good point. I don't recall reading anything along those lines, but maybe it's just something that they've yet to address.

It's curious, actually, thank you, Robin, for pointing out that, um, stripes, not the best analogy square is I don't, I don't really have any familiarity with square in my own life and never, never used it, um, apart from, as a customer. But I, it is interesting that those types of terminals from square and the competition, they really are clear cleaning up the marketplace.

It, you know, the, the, the old cash registers that we used to have on the separate little, little handheld thing, um, where the way of doing it in the past, but more and more, you're seeing something that basically looks like an iPad with a tiny little tray underneath, which comes out in the cash, goes in and.

You know, thing that they hold up nowadays, especially since the pandemic, the, the, the ability to pay with NFC, you know, with the apple pay or Google pay or whatever you just about, everybody seems to be doing it that way. And, um, and obviously, you know, you've got to do your calculations, go and work out if go daddy or square or whatever, it may be end up working out better for you.

But just curious that they've just jumped into. Presumably giant marketplace where the rewards must be enormous.

[00:59:51] Michelle Frechette: I think

[00:59:53] Rob Cairns: where they need to make inroads. Nathan is somebody now from GoDaddy needs to build a plugin for WooCommerce to integrate the virtual terminal into WooCommerce. Um,

it's already there. Square's already there. Stripe's already there. Woo.

[01:00:12] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Commerce is already there. They have. Yeah, they, um, uh, speaking of late, Nathan, uh, WooCommerce has their own WooCommerce payments since May, 2020, uh, 2020. Uh, they came out right in the middle of the pandemic window. The, the wave hit the e-commerce, um,

[01:00:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Do you know what? I had forgotten that? And we definitely mentioned it at the time. Um, the fact that we haven't talked about it a lot since I wonder if it's just chugging away very quietly or if it's a barnstormer success and it's just not being mentioned a lot, but yeah, we definitely did cover that at the time, but, um, I'm not a heavy WooCommerce user in fact, barely at all.

So it doesn't, it's not something that ever crops onto my radar, but you got to feel that this is a, this is a huge, huge marketplace. And if you can take two point X percent of everybody's transactions, so, so much, uh, okay. I think we've exhausted that one let's move on. This is Michelle. This is Michelle's thing where, uh, we're going to talk about give WP.

I feel like we mentioned this before, but I don't feel that we did it justice. So another, another round let's let's do it properly. This is announcing the gift WP peer to peer fundraising suite to tell us all about.

[01:01:33] Michelle Frechette: So we have this peer to peer fundraising suite. Now I'm going to send you another link so you can see it, and actually what it looks like.

But what this means is that if you have an organization that is fundraising and you want people to be able to fundraise on your behalf, they can now spin up a fundraising, um, group, or even just individual form and raise money for you. So for example, for big orange heart, we had, we, we did a, kind of a self grown version of this at the last word Fest, based on some other things that, um, that had put out in the past and how you can kind of create this for yourself, but it was very clunky and it was just creating a form.

If you click over to the link I just sent you,

[01:02:23] Nathan Wrigley: you'll be able to,

[01:02:24] Michelle Frechette: you'll be able to see that the interface is so beautiful.

[01:02:28] Rob Cairns: It is.

[01:02:30] Nathan Wrigley: Audio echoing in my head. One second. Let me just click. There we go found it there. Another tablet mysteriously opened itself and it was me talking, but about four seconds behind. So that was a bit annoying. Right? Okay. Here we go.

I found the link, uh, is it this chili cook-off and then

[01:02:45] Michelle Frechette: it is Phil. Amanda created that because we have actually had people in the past, wonder how they could do chili cook offs. So if you scroll down this, so let's say that you were doing this giant chili cook off and you want people to be able to have teams.

You can see that people have donated. So we've put the, you know, the recent donations, there's a top donors there. If you scroll down, you can see the different teams that have forms within that. So, you know, Ronan, Amanda, um, if you scroll down ones, that's not my picture, but that is my old name. Um, so there is, she she's prettier, but that's okay.

So it's the idea is that you can have people, um, create these forms and fundraise for you for your organization. Um, and so it's, it's really great, right? So you think about the fact that maybe you're having a 5k and you want people to be able to fund. 'cause they're running in your 5k and not have to have everybody channeling through the same donation form.

You can see person by person and team by team, how much has been raised. So this has been something that's been a want by our customers for a very long time. It is a very, it's a behemoth of a, you know, a development behemoth, if you will. It's it was a very large undertaking. There's a lot of code behind this.

A lot of people, a lot of hours that have got into this and, uh, for us to be able to release it, it was released last week and it's doing very well. People are very excited.

[01:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. I was just thinking of in my life, the, the example that Springs to mind for me would be, uh, primary school that the school that my children went to, where, you know, they've got this one overall goal of raising money for the school to provide X, Y, and Zed, and yet, and then they've got like 200 little, um, sponsorship forms, all going out.

So all the children get one and they're all doing, uh, something completely different. They make up what it is that they're going to do in order to raise money for the school. And then it all goes back into the pot and you see the, you see the total going up on the thermometer. And what have you, that kind of an example where you're trying to crowd source lots and lots of donations, but there's one overall goal.

Yeah, that's lovely. That's really nice. I'm pretty excited

[01:04:48] Michelle Frechette: about it. And it's, it seems to be. Being, if people are enjoying it and being able to implement it very quickly, which is nice.

[01:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: If you want to, um, find out more about that. The blog post is called announcing the gift WP peer to peer fundraising suite.

It was written by Devin Walker and it came out on September the 23rd. So that should get you where you need to go. Okay. Thank you, Michelle. That was great.

[01:05:10] Michelle Frechette: I see Todd had some questions, Tom. I'll follow up with you later.

[01:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. So he's, uh, I might as well just raise them now in case it resonates with anybody else.

I have a site where I would want to do that for others. Michelle, can I do that? Can, can he do that?

[01:05:24] Birgit Pauli-Haack: He can do

[01:05:25] Michelle Frechette: that. So that the raising on behalf of others is always got some extra layers in it. So you either have to be able to connect directly to their payment processor. So Stripe or PayPal, for example, or you have to collect the money yourself and then donate it to that third party, um, on their behalf, in which case all of the money that's raised.

Through you, if you are not a 5 0 1, C3 is not actually going to be tax deductible because only when somebody is making a donation directly to the third P to the nonprofit organization, um, is that money tax deductible.

[01:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So,

[01:06:02] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah. And if I understand this, right, this is for organizations to put on their website and then give out the link or, and then people who want to fundraise for that organization, sign up on their site, and then you get a link to the fundraise that they can then share.

With, uh, Facebook or Instagram or whatever. Yeah.

[01:06:25] Michelle Frechette: Although I'm sure that there will be more use cases to it. That's the primary use case. I know that people will come up with a million different other ways to use it, which I think is wonderful. And I will probably start to think about some of those to write articles about myself.

[01:06:39] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I'm, I'm really glad that the give WP is doing that because two years ago there was only one product who was actually making that available for, for weapons non-profit site. Um, and that was, uh, I think the name was charitable and only was an additional layer on that and it was quite complicated.

So I, um, I really admire that you went the route and put it right in there with a gift WP. Thank you. Thanks.

[01:07:06] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, we didn't rush it. So we wanted it to be perfect right out the gate. Yep.

[01:07:10] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep. Sorry. I need to find out the pricing.

[01:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: I can't see that right away, to be honest, but to go

to do, I'm going to scroll, I'm going to keep scrolling, going to escape. It's not on that piece though, but it'll be on the website. I'll put the link in the, um, I'll put the link, sorry. Uh, bigger. I'll put the link in the, um, in the chat. I apologize if you can't see it, but, uh, I've tried to put it where I can on.

I think you should be able to get that link. The, the other one may have just popped in and said it is lower. I presume she was may as from GoDaddy and, uh, prism. She was she's maybe listening a few minutes behind where we've got to. So that was probably an answer to some question that we had a little while ago.

Um, mayor, if you'd want to reach out and let me know what it is that was concerning. I will try to make it whole. Okay. Right. Moving on very quickly. We are really pressed for time and there's some at the end that I just absolutely have to do. So I'm just going to do this one and a couple of other shoutouts for some nice shiny websites.

And this one is over on get ellipsis. This is Alex Denning. Who's written a piece of this week, which seemed to resonate with quite a few people. It's a very long piece. He's obviously done a lot of put a lot of time into this one and he's, um, he's analyzing how it is the awesome motive who last week acquired, um, some tools development, so easy digital downloads, affiliate WP, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

How it is that they've got this really effective marketing system, Alex himself is really into figuring out how WordPress plugins market themselves and, uh, and so on. And, uh, all, all I can say really is read this piece is it's fascinating. And it kind of boils down to the. We've got this. They've now got so much momentum on all their different properties and I'll probably just show a quick graph.

I'm sure you've heard of these properties before. They've got. QP beginner. They've got WP forms, opt-in monster monster insights, um, blog, tyrant, seed prod. And now obviously from this moment on anything to do with EDD and, uh, WP affiliate, WP, and so on, and just how they reflect the marketing back in. So if they put something on WP beginner, which is a huge website with, I think he said something about 2 million visitors a month or something along those lines, which is massive, how they can cross promote.

And now the other properties they've got. So WP forms and so on. They're also, they're also big enough now that they've, they've been doing the SEO content stuff for so long that their audiences themselves are well worth, um, investing time into content creation with. And so they then cross-promote back.

So he's saying. That easy digital downloads and all of those things being sold into the awesome motive family instantly make anything to do with awesome motive, bigger, um, and more effective as a marketing machine. Honestly, Alex, I'm sorry. I've really butchered and minimalize. What it was that you were saying hoops, a heaps rather sorry of graphs and data and statistics to back up what you're saying, but it was a really fascinating piece.

I don't know that any of us are going to get grips with that one, but I will open it up in case anybody wants to jump in.

[01:10:28] Michelle Frechette: Well, I will say that having been acquired by liquid web has give WP and under the stellar brand, you know, we just added learn dash, um, to our family of brands. And, you know, we're up to, I think, seven different plugins.

Now it's interesting to see what he's done successfully, so that. So we can follow, follow the lead and, and start to capitalize on some of that. What's interesting too, is that, um, the majority of our products have the owner, the previous owners are now the GM's of those products as well. So, um, you know, the, the success that began could continue and now we have this really great hive-mind, uh, people who have grown wonderful products.

So it's, it's, we're still in our infancy. We've just been accumulating, um, you know, plugins a lot this year, over the last, over the last 12 months. And so I'm looking forward to seeing how we can grow that under stellar WPS. It's

[01:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: curious that, and again, Alex makes the point that if you were to look at any one of these products, you wouldn't really know that they were owned by this larger entity, because they've got nice individual branding.

Uh, you know, the whole thing just looks different, different websites, different branding, different iconography, the whole lot. Um, but it's only upon further inspection that you realize that actually this is all under one brand. So I'm curious, is that, do you know Michelle, is that the route that Stella WP are hoping to go with as well?

Or are they hoping to have Stella WP is the big thing

[01:11:55] Michelle Frechette: created seller WP. If we had expected that we were not going to, um, to show the, the fact that these are interrelated products and then also. Be working on ways that our products can actually work together. So it give WP, people are always asking us, well, how can I make this into events?

And now we know we have the event calendar. And so looking at ways that we can work with our sister brands to be able to accomplish some of those things,

[01:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: um, if you're watching the show, the reason I keep waving is because of. I have a fly. And if I had to award it a mark out of 10 for pesky illness, this flies totally gonna get like 15 out of 10.

It's the most pesky flyer, super pesky. It just keeps coming and just dive bombing me. And then clearly you probably can't even see it. It's such a tiny little speck it's so, anyway, apologies for the way you say

[01:12:46] Michelle Frechette: that this leg goes

[01:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: to 11 that's more than that. This has got Peskin coming out of its legs. I don't know what flies out.

Anyway. There we go. A lovely piece. Thanks Alex, for, uh, for committing so much time into that this week. It's really great. Couple of shout-outs if that's all right. Um, maybe there's commentary about this. Maybe there's not two web properties that we've all heard of before. Well, certainly the cast us one. I have gravity forms.

I'm sure we all have, this is just nice new website designs. This is the nice new gravity forms website, which I got to say. I like it. This is right up my street. I'm sorry if you're listening to this on the audio, it's really lovely. It's just a really nice design. I can't quite put my fingers on it. I don't even have the vocabulary to express why I like it, but Bravo guys just lovely, lovely website.

And the other one that I want to point to is castoffs, who is the hosting platform that we use over at WP builds to host our audio file. They've got a nice WordPress plugin. Um, Craig Hewitt, do you know what I think most people do use it in the WordPress space. I,

[01:13:57] Rob Cairns: I, I do. I, I moved over to, Casto said a couple of weeks ago there, uh, oh, their web design is amazing and their support is probably the best in the best.

[01:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they really did need a bit of a refresh. The old site definitely looked as if it needed a bit of a refresh and dumb props to, um, Mike Oliver, who, um, is a designer who is actually also on the page builder summit. Um, this year he's built this with generate press generate and generate blocks, which is right up his street.

And it's really, really nice little site. He's got material that he puts out on YouTube regularly to show you how you can build stuff pretty quickly and easily inside the block editor with the four, I'm going to say, uh, plugins, which come with generate, sorry for blocks, which come with generate blocks.

And it, it really is one of the sites. Like I said earlier, that I was trying out this week, I use generate blocks and it was just so straightforward. Their

[01:14:56] Michelle Frechette: most recent blog post is mine. I wrote for them. Yeah.

[01:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: Ooh, come on. Let's have a look. Where are we? Where's the blog. Where's the blog. Okay. I'll blog

[01:15:12] Michelle Frechette: international podcast day. That's that's

[01:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: you that's cool. Look at that. Yeah, that was, um, that was the thing. Wasn't it? This week? Happy international. Yeah, I confess, I kind of like, there was things going on that I needed to attend to on that day and it never really got my, uh, got my attention, but anyway, beautiful new site.

Congratulations to the team, both at gravity forms and, um, Castile's well done. Great. Okay. I'm going to miss that one, but I am going to go to this one because, uh, big, it mentioned this. This is over on wordpress.org. It's a new, well, it may be a not new. I apologize. It's a plugin by Marcus Kazmir Katz. Uh, it's not right.

I'm so sorry. Chasm media. Zach. I'm going to say that. I'm sorry, Marcus, for butchering your name, it's called templates and big it. Why have you, why have you chosen to surface this on the show?

[01:16:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, blood patterns are really big now in the repor space and, um, there's a, um, there's a site with blood patterns that you can, uh, get on the repository and the themes are putting, uh, plenty of block patterns in their new block-based seams, but the.

Persons that who was not gonna be able to do block-based um, uh, blood patterns is the user and this plugin fills that gap. You can create your designs with a block editor in the editor and save that as a block pattern, uh, and then reuse it over and over again, it's not so much a reusable block. It's more like the reusable block is for content.

So when you change continent, one block it's propagated over the whole website and block pattern is that you have, um, a fully designed section of your website, um, that has an image, a headline, um, a different design. And, um, you don't want to recreate it over and over again because it takes maybe a half an hour to grade, but then you can store it and then reuse it as block pattern and as a user.

So this plugin is relatively lightweight. He also has, um, uh, Marcus has on his blog, uh, M cast. M K a z.blog, um, an author that says using block patterns as content content templates, and that's what the, um, the plugin is helping you to do. Um, and it's surprisingly lightweight. It speeds up site building considerably and hopefully, uh, the features I'm, I'm really hoping that the features make it into the poor editor sooner or later may probably data because it's kind of an add-on.

But, um, there are a few things that I miss as that the pattern show up in the, uh, in the. Um, and then that's a preview in the inserter and that I can make modification and save that as, but, um, it's a, it's a great way to, for a user that was site owner that doesn't have any coding knowledge to, uh, make their own.

[01:18:22] Nathan Wrigley: So this is I'll give, give you the full URL. It's wordpress.org forward slash plugins forward slash templates, which is T E M P L E T S. You'll know that you stumbled on the right place because there's a little icon it's black. Um, it looks like a bunch of rectangles, sort of all jiggled together to make a square.

And it says templates adds a new custom post type that allows for creating block patterns. Any new template post will be registered as a block pattern usable in the block. Editor using templates provides an easy way for authors and content creators to create patterns. Yeah. Nice. This is it's still confusing.

I think to most people. What, what reusable blocks? Oh, pesky, just go away. Super pesky. Um, sorry. That was me talking to the fly. The

pesky it's right there. Right in front of my face. Um, I've completely lost my train of thought. Now over to you, anybody

[01:19:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: you were saying that, that it's quite confusing. The difference between reusable, slugs

[01:19:24] Nathan Wrigley: and bluff,

[01:19:30] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that was so long, there was only reusable block and reusable block also got a new interface and all that until. Um, and I think that was part of the confusion because people created a work around about reusable blocks and then they stored it as were usable blocks and they have a button or a reasonably re-usable block has a pattern where you can say convert to regular blocks.

So you get it out of that content updating mechanism when you change it. So you can. But yeah, we use it as template and that's what, uh, was a crutch that a lot of people used. And, uh, that's why, um, blood patterns, um, now is it so much easier, but it brings you, uh, that confusion.

[01:20:16] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Big. Okay. So I think we, um, I think we five minutes, sorry.

Yeah, I should say I've put a lovely comment on the, uh, on the, uh, the show. It says, uh, the ghost of Paul Lacey is haunting Nathan in the form of a fly. Yeah, honestly, I'm going to get pull Lacey for that. That's brilliant. I love that. I'm also Gary. Nice to talk to makes a comment that Mike Oliver, we were obviously looking at Castile's redesign.

Mike Oliver is the man turned his video in last night. You said, oh, that's for the page builder summit. Y'all haven't had inspired that yet, but, um, great. Check that out. Oh yes. I did see the Twitter thread that you, you had with him. That was lovely. Um, right. A couple of things just before we begin, the first one is another beer.

Get one. She wants to give a shout out for our upcoming webinar. Gothenburg times live Q and a. Now the it's a zoom link that you've got to get to, but because the zoom link is horrific, um, you know, full of just jumbled characters numbers, and what have you, I've created a much more straightforward link.

It's the Gutenberg live Q and a, um, from classic themes to block-based themes it's called. And if you go to Bitly, so bit dot L Y forward slash block dash based dash themes, block dash based dash themes, then you should be able to get it. What's this event

[01:21:37] Birgit Pauli-Haack: bigot. Well I'm, uh, bited, um, Carolyn Unimark, um, Andrus neuron and Ellen, Bella to the show because I know they just.

Published block-based themes. So, um, themes that integrate already with the full site editing, uh, features, and, um, they will talk about, um, the journey that they're made. What's difference between doing it in plus classic things versus building a block-based team. Um, and, um, it's going to be quite interesting because, um, they have all three of them follow the full site editing for the last two years and always, um, and, um, had some comments back, but they are not automatic people.

They don't have, um, uh, Annabel has a very successful. Um, same time, uh, theme studio, and a studio in New Zealand. And the snoring has, was the builder of the defaults in 2020 and has come out with tofu. And then, um, Pearlina Newmark is the, uh, has been on the team for the 20, 21 theme. And she also converted that into a block-based theme called TT one block.

Um, and that's kind of what a lot of people use, but, um, you can also use anal a I N O by M L and Bella and her team. Um, so it's going to be a great conversation and we have, um, Uh, a few seeds left. So I thought, uh, I mentioned it here in the show, um, and it's going to be on Thursday, this Thursday at noon, Eastern 1600 UTC.

And, uh, we will stream it live to YouTube. So if you subscribe to the YouTube channel, you would get a notification. As soon as we go live. So, um, that's another way to get in there and get around this pesky zoom thing. Um, you could also, and if you didn't get the link, you could just go to the Gutenberg times.com and you see it on the front page.

Um, on the left-hand side above

[01:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: the fold. I wonder if you two will be inundated with pesky flies, right? I think, I think from this moment on any, any live that doesn't have a pesky fly, frankly, isn't living up to the promise. If it doesn't got pesky flies, it's not worth watching. Here we go. So thank you for that.

So just to recap, yeah, of course. 7th of October, so Thursday, uh, noon Eastern time, and the link is on the screen. It's Bitly dot. Forward slash no, it is it's bit dot L Y slash block dash dash themes. Okay. With minutes to spare, possibly even just a minute. Oh no. Now I can't make that thing go away. They're there.

Yay. Success. Right? Couple of things that I want to say, just totally out of nothing. The first one is, this is so funny. There's a, there's a guy. I don't even know where the guy is, but there's a guy somewhere, but it's a guy who has put a hamster in a box. It's called Mr. Gox and Mr. Gox being a hamster loves to sort of run around and go in his wheel.

And occasionally go through the little tunnels which have been put into the, into the little box. The interesting thing about this particular little box is that it's linked up to do actual trading on the stock market. And so, for example, if this there's a thing called the intention wheel and 30 stocks have been linked to where he ends up on the wheels.

So if he runs around for a certain amount of time, uh, there are 30 segments to it. And depending on which segment is at the bottom, when the little hamster hops out, that's the stock, that's in question from that moment on, and then there's two little tunnels. And if the hamster then chooses to go through one tunnel that says, sell that stock.

And if, and if the humps that runs through the other, sell to the other one, it's buy that stock turns out this hamster. Brilliant.

[01:25:46] Rob Cairns: This hamster

[01:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: is out performing everything. It's outperforming Bitcoin, it's outperforming the NASDAQ, the S and P 500, um, Barcher and the bank base rates, which just says, well, you know, do these people really know what they're doing? I just thought that was such a lovely piece of Mr. Gox, the famous trading hamster stir inside of his cock box.

Go and have a look at the piece. I'll link this

[01:26:12] Michelle Frechette: over my Twitter accounts.

[01:26:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So to my mind, it just speaks to that sort of fairly random nature of, of trading. But obviously it's not, if you really, really, really know what you're doing, but just thought that was lovely. Yeah. Thumbs up. I want to miss the Gox in a, got with a GOC. I love it. The other one I wanted to point to you only came to me just moments before the show went live.

And so, um, I just thought this was so wonderful. I'll put the link in the show notes, but it's, it's a video from 1900. So 121 years ago it's been made into color and it's been made into 4k. I don't know what voodoo was used to make that happen, but it's a Paris. So this is 120 years ago and it's just, it just hit me really hard, like wow.

Only 120 years ago. Look how life has changed. Not only do. Does nobody dress in this way, but the streets, the streets are empty here, right? The streets are empty. Uh, nobody staring at their phones. It's just how technology has changed our lives in the last 120 years. You know, the streets are follow. We're all interested in our mobile technology.

Can't really speak to why it's going in the show, but I just thought that was lovely. Did any of you, two, three, sorry. Get to see it before you came on. No idea. No, I

[01:27:34] Birgit Pauli-Haack: don't. I, but I re uh, it reminded me of another, uh, little movie that I saw was probably the same AI that colored it or made it, it wasn't. Uh, snow fight on the street where somebody's bicycle through and get all the, all the snowballs and was taken off the bike.

But there was kind of really fun too.

[01:27:59] Nathan Wrigley: This is this lovely bit where they they've obviously got the camera on the Eiffel tower lift and they go up in the Eiffel tower and you can see Paris stretching away into the distance. And what's so remarkable is there's just no traffic. The, you know, there's a few, there's just literally two or three little, obviously brand new cars.

Cause that would have been an amazingly new invention, but makes it mainly just a collection of horses and carts. And I'm not trying to make out that life was better back then or anything like that. Cause I believe it's probably better now, but it's certainly different. And I just thought that was fascinating.

And the last one on today's show is courtesy of, um, Rob, Rob Cairns. You want to tell us about spacecraft swooping, close to markary mercury? Yeah. I just

[01:28:39] Rob Cairns: think this is, this is really cool spaces, kind of back in the news with all the space fights and the people. And I think this is even more compelling to show you what mere Curry looks like.

So, you know, I, I'm just an old time love space, so I thought I'd share that. So look,

[01:29:00] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, not cool. I remember when I was a kid sitting in bed with Carl Sagan, Carl Sagan's cosmos book, I don't remember for the first time seeing that picture from Viking on Mars. And there was a picture and it was a pretty decent picture, you know, but it was just a bunch of rubble and rocks with a sort of red hue to it.

And I remember just saying. That's a lie. There's no way anybody's got a camera on Mars. No way. That looks way too much like earth. And then suddenly thinking, whoa, it is like earth. It's got rocks. Just like we have. It's not some sort of weird thing out there. It's just like us, but you know, with the absence of life and oxygen.

Um, but this is great. Thank you for sharing that one. Look at that swooping past, I didn't even realize they've got all the craters named isn't that extraordinary. Named all the craters. Yeah. Anyway, there we go. Nothing to do with WordPress. We always end on some completely relevant non WordPress stuff.

There we go. We're done. That's the episode for this week. I would like to thank Michelle Frechette, who you'll be fly, pesky fly, be gone. Um, I would like to everybody wait, I would like to thank Michelle. We'll be seeing more of her as the, as the weeks go on. I'm really pleased to have her on as a, as a cohost in.

Yeah. Thank you. Uh, Rob, love to have you back on to explain why you're wearing a hat with Pirelli written on it. That would be good, obviously into your tires and, um, and beer get, obviously we'd love to have you on just cause you taught such common sense about Gutenberg and all of those kinds of things, and it's great to have you on.

Yeah. Appreciate it. Now, what I need you to do if you're willing. Can we all do the wave. Um, you don't have to do the way. It's just really for the thumbnail out at the end. There we go. Got it. That'll do nicely. I'm going to hang it up and say, thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week. Can't remember who the guests are, but it'll be somebody entertaining.

Thanks so much for joining us.