This Week in WordPress #184

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 184 entitled darlek audio. It was recorded on Monday, the 8th of November, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And this week I'll be joined by a new cohost. You've seen her before. It's Michelle Frechette. She's got some information for us this week. We are actually going to be having six rotating co-hosts on the show from this point on, and Michelle is one of them.

I'm also joined by Bernard granola. Ben Townsend each week, we talk about the WordPress news and each week we managed to discover lots and lots to talk about this week is no different. The WordPress community gift exchange. It's a bit like secret center where you gift something to somebody in the WordPress community and the run-up to Christmas that's up and running Birmingham in the U S is going to be the first location for word camps to return.

Since the pandemic began WP career summit, Michelle is involved in that. She's going to talk about what it is and when it's happening in 2022, the WP awards is taking place. You can vote for your favorite plugins themes, and it turns out podcasts as well. So go check that out. Jetpack has also acquired WP scam, and we talk about what this means for WordPress users.

Word Fest is coming around and they're looking at for some sponsors. As some speakers. And also we have a block theme revolution quietly happening just in deadlock, tells us this week. We also look at two black Friday deals pages. One of them from WP builds and one of them from our guests, Ben, we also point you in the direction of the WP Tavern podcast, which is all about Tara king and her new role at automatic.

We've also got a few bits and pieces thrown in at the end. CSS scanner have released a new tool to allow you to create buttons quickly. There's also a new quicks kick starter, I should say, which is helping. Sort out your smart lights in your home. It looks like a lot of fun. And Ben shows us why he's using Lara gone.

It's all coming up next on this weekend. WordPress. Hello? Hello. Hello. Good day. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Wherever you are in the world. This is the WP bills this week in WordPress show. Thanks for joining us again. Episode number, it says 184. I never know, but I'm going to rely on me being able to add.

When I created the show next, hopefully that's correct. Number 184 as always joined by a fabulous panel of WordPress interested people. I should start by Michelle. We did we'd even get into this last week when you were here. Did we even get into the new co-host arrangement? Shall we do that now?

[00:02:54] Michelle Frechette: Let's do that.

Let's introduce our guests first.

[00:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: Let's introduce them. Can I introduce you first? So this is Michelle Frechette. She is, as you're about to find out a, a new co-host for the WP builder this week in WordPress show, Bern has given you the thumbs up in real time, which is really nice. But of course I'm joined by Bernard.

Bernadette is with us absolutely lobes. He he. Well, Bernie, do you want to tell us about yourself? That'd be nice.

[00:03:21] Bernhard Gronau: This time doing herself, so I'm helping out with parks and all the development around pots and they don't get a promotion. I built a add on that integrates pots into people, build a slash steamer.

And on the private side, I'm having a little company doing software development, using those tools. And of course we sell the gym hot chocolate and Mason will never get one because it doesn't,

[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: I don't want to try your hot chocolate. So pat, can I ask Berlin, have you got a new camera?

[00:03:55] Bernhard Gronau: I have a new iPhone and I'm using the

[00:03:57] Nathan Wrigley: iPhone currently.

That's nice. It's coming out really clearly. It's it's whatever you've changed it to is a significant step hop. It looks really lovely.

[00:04:07] Bernhard Gronau: I'm one year up there.

[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Still it's very nice. Anyway. Nice to see you. Thank you. And we're joined by Ben from layers layer. W I keep saying layers now.

I know I'm so sorry. Cause it goes the wrong way. Totally. Doesn't it. So Ben from layer, WP, Jordan, introduce yourself. Cause I don't, I didn't see any sort of bio

[00:04:28] Ben Townsend: that you wrote. I like the air of mystery. Jeff said to wing it on Twitter. So let's now I write I've written from people about WordPress.

I'm not a developer, I'm just a, just an average user, but I'll just write useful, I think, useful stuff to help other people. So just have fun with it really. And that's it. That's me in a

[00:04:49] Nathan Wrigley: nutshell, that'll do nicely. That sounds like the perfect use case for WordPress to me. Anyway, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on.

So Michelle, do you know what I'm going to, I'm going to do that. I know it's controversial. I know it used to be the show in the United Kingdom called celebrity squares. Or what was it called? Celebrities. Anyway, it was something like that. And people used to literally be on top of each other and below one another and things like this.

And I the people who were on the top always felt slightly smug and superior. And so I think it's only right that I go down there and it goes up there. Don't Ben, I'm sorry.

Yeah. Your burden would be the first person that somebody would read if they were reading in English and then you'd be the final thing in their memory as they turn the page. So Michelle, tell us about your, this new thing that you've

[00:05:51] Michelle Frechette: so Nathan reached out to me, I don't know, almost a month ago now, I think.

And so we're thinking about doing something, Paul had stepped back from being the regular co-host here and he said, we're thinking about doing something like every four to six weeks where we would have, different, co-hosts cycle through so that you wouldn't have to be co-hosting every single week.

And it'd be less of a burden. And not that it's a burden, but that's I think how you described it and then wanted to know if I would be one of the people that I, of course said yes, because I love this. And I love Nathan. I, it's so funny. I've somebody friends I've never met any of you in person, but maybe someday.

And then he said, do you know anybody else that might be interested? And of course I've made it my mission to find other people. So we have a great lineup of Cohoes. You had, you already had a few, so Paul is going to stay on as one of the cohosts and then we have will be another. Kathy Zant will be coming in as a cohost.

Let's see, Ken Elliot from the U S side of things over here, so that I'm not the only yank on the team. And then taco vendor Scott from from Yoast will also be one of the co-hosts. So there'll be six of us. Nathan will be the constant and the rest of us will be flitting in and out on a weekly basis.

[00:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: We'll be the thorn in the side. And it's not, it's not like a, it's not guaranteed. We'll just see how it holds up over time. And but that, that will be really nice to see how that just pans out. But this is the. I suppose last weeks was the first one, but I, for some reason just failed to mention it.

So here we are mentioning it now. So you'll see a different person on each week sort of cycling through one every six weeks and obviously we'll still have our regular guests as well, and that'll be really nice. Good grief is the only words I can say. We've had many comments, mucho comments. Wow.

It's never normally like this. Okay. So let's just go through a few of those quickly. Hello Mohammed. That's very nice to see you. Where is everybody watching from? Says Daniel. I'm, I'm in the UK. You're obviously in Tampa, Florida. Where are you Ben?

[00:08:06] Ben Townsend: I mean, Royal Wootton, Bassett.

[00:08:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So he's in Bonnie, old England as well.

Bernard, are you in? I know you're in you're usually in Austria, but wherever they

[00:08:18] Bernhard Gronau: come to near Vienna. Okay.

[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Nevina w w blues music should have used some blues. Oh, sorry, Michelle. Yes, I apologize. Are you actually in New York, like Manhattan, New York or the New York state?

[00:08:33] Michelle Frechette: I'm in New York state.

I'm in Western New York, actually. I'm about a six hour drive from New York city.

[00:08:38] Nathan Wrigley: Whenever anybody says New York, I immediately go to city for some reason, even though I know you got New York, state's probably like the size of India. Yeah, she's a bit ridiculous. What else have we got? Chris Hughes is saying hi.

Thank you very much. Hi, Michelle. You got lots of highs. Look the Daniels all Devinder Devindra stir and it's been nervous. Only. Ben can answer that. He can answer you later and it says, go Ben from Todd. That's really nice. Yeah. Three awesome people. Michelle Frechette. Ben Townsend's had Bernard with master goodness from naked.

Honestly, I thought that sentence was going to go in a different direction,

but that's surely Todd Ben Ben's bio on Twitter. Oh, cool. Okay. I like rainbow sunshine on my do venture WP hunts. Do you know Ben? Can we talk about that later if this time as well? Okay. So Ben, if. Please make me remember layer, WP dedicated to WordPress. We are going to mention something else, but Ben is doing as well.

I don't want to read that one out cause it's embarrassing. Good morning all the way from Toronto. Hello, Rob. Nice to have you with us recorded a podcast with Rob this week. It was really nice. What does this one say? That's the same thing. I'm going to move on to vendor. Sorry. He's in the UK and

[00:10:07] Ben Townsend: still live in slammer.

[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't that? Where the office was filmed, like pretended to be filmed. Okay. Okay. When does the hunt begin? Should we come to that later? Is that part of the WP hunting? Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. Thanks for dropping in so many comments, it appears we've got a fairly sizable audience today.

That's lovely. Let's get stuck into what we're doing. This is our website. WP builds.com. If you want to be making any comments, you're probably either on this page, WP belts.com forward slash law. And if you are there feel free to log into Google and you can make comments over on the YouTube side of things.

Cause there's YouTube comments embedded in that page. On the other hand, you might be over at w sorry, Facebook, Facebook group, or page, and if you wish to remain anonymous, that's lovely. But if you don't, you'll probably have to go to chat.restream.io forward slash FB to make yourself known. It's totally fine if you want to remain anonymous.

But if you, if you want to remain anonymous, if you don't want to give restream that permission, what some people sometimes do is just write their name as the first part of the comment. So you can do that as well. Okay. Let's crack on first bit of news this week. I honestly didn't quite get what this wasn't until.

Michelle explained it to me a few minutes ago, but I was drawn into the idea of it. So this is the WordPress community gift exchange 2021. And because Michelle, it feels you know, the most about it. Would you.

[00:11:45] Michelle Frechette: Sure. So it's basically what we've. I think a lot of us have called a secret Santa before.

And so everybody gets thrown into the mix. It gets randomized and you get assigned a person to gift and somebody else is assigned you to to give to you. And it does incorporate wishlists. So you can, if there's a wishlist that you have on Amazon or some other platform, you could incorporate that too.

So that if it's somebody that doesn't know you well, they could get an idea of some of the things that you like or are hoping to receive. And there is a budget, so you shouldn't exceed the budget. And it's exciting because at some point a package shows up and it's exciting things for you and hopefully things that you will.

[00:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: So just to be clear, this is a, like the secret center in my head is where you are a alive, you are basically given a name and you buy them a gift and you give it to them. Usually it's like an office thing or something, isn't it where you exchange it and put it in a box and everybody gets that out.

Their thing out of the box. So in this case, how does it tie into WordPress? Are you like gifting a license or something like that to some product? Cause you've got anything to do with that at all.

[00:12:55] Michelle Frechette: It's people in the WordPress community.

[00:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. Right, right, right. So you just decide and then it gets sent anonymously.

That's cool. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. An Elfster that's a SAS platform. I'm guessing that's nothing. It's not particularly wedded to WordPress. It's just, you could set this up for your own office or whatever. Yeah.

[00:13:16] Michelle Frechette: Correct. It's just already existed. It works very well.

[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: My, my guess is the best thing you're going to do to surface this would be to go to a Google I'm guessing and type in Elfster WordPress community gift exchange, 2021.

And obviously that'll take care of the the fulfillment of all that. And that's really cool. I like it.

[00:13:38] Michelle Frechette: You can find a Mike's tweet or if you are completely lost just DME on Twitter, and I will hook you up with a,

[00:13:46] Nathan Wrigley: You are, you are very good. Thank you so much. Okay. That's the first bit of news.

Second bit of news is all about the the community. And this is just to say that it looks like certainly for now, things are returning to something akin to normal in that there's a, an actual word camp taking place next year, the 4th of February to the 5th of February, if memory serves. Oh yeah, right at the top of that, there we go in downtown Birmingham, but why do you don't say Birmingham, DIA, you say Birmingham.

Birmingham. Okay. Okay. We'll say Birmingham, cause that's probably the correct pronunciation for you guys. On the fourth of the,

[00:14:25] Michelle Frechette: they actually call it word camp y'all instead of word camp Birmingham, which I think is awesome.

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Cause that's like the greeting. If you live in that part of the world,

[00:14:36] Michelle Frechette: they're definitely in the south.

Yeah.

[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So fourth to the fifth, I guess you can apply in the usual way to become a participant and get tickets. And what have you the really interesting thing for me, obviously we all know most of us I'm guessing, know what a word camp is and how that feels. And we've been stifled, unable to attend anything like this for a couple of years.

The, I really liked that the venue itself has protecting the organization though, because right at the bottom of the piece, it says that you can buy your tickets. The, the deposit for the venue itself will be refundable in full right up until one week before the event goes live. And for me, this is the point of concern, not only things like getting on a plane and all of that kind of stuff, but the idea that you would, and I know it's a trivial amount of money for each individual person, potentially.

It's not a large amount of money because it's supported by the foundation, but still it's money, time, commitment and all of that. And you would like to think that there was a way of backing out of that. Should things go pear shaped again? Okay. So

[00:15:39] Michelle Frechette: interestingly though, Nathan is that the, there is no longer a global sponsorship for word caps.

So every camp is responsible to raise all of the funds that it needs in order to exist. So the there's no more global sponsorship. Global sponsorships are now part of the meetup organization of WordPress, but they're not part of working with,

[00:16:01] Nathan Wrigley: I did not pick up on that in the. What they've just autumn, let's call it automatic for want of a better word.

Have they just pulled the plug entirely on all events for a finite period of time, or is that if they just ended up there?

[00:16:15] Michelle Frechette: I don't know all of the answer to that. I just know that word camper. I was speaking with Nathan Ingram from WordCamp, Birmingham, and he was saying that they need to raise the entirety of their sponsorship to pay for everything.

And stellar WP, I'm filling, I have filled out the information and we will be sponsoring where to camp Birmingham, which means hopefully I'll be down there at my first word camp in person. And I'm actually writing a post for this Friday. That'll be on the WP minute website about a word camps in person, word camps, the good, the bad, the.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: WP minute isn't that rival organization, that the betrayer Paul Lacey has gotten,

[00:17:00] Michelle Frechette: as a matter of fact, Paul is the one hounding me for my deadline. So yes,

[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: I love it. I love it. I just, he and I exchanged Don since every day pretty much. And I always read them about this. It's just open. He, and hopefully everybody else knows that.

None of that, I'm so pleased for him. It's great that all that stuff's taken off, but I've got to say it cause it's just funny

[00:17:25] Michelle Frechette: and I love the emojis coming over.

[00:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. You all get it? It's just a joke between friends, the right. I'm going to go around one at a time and ask whether, I think I know Michelle's answer to this, but I'm going to ask Bern at first.

And then Ben, are you going to show up to any events in the foreseeable future? Are you ready for that?

[00:17:48] Bernhard Gronau: I don't care w we have none in our insanity. It's not really an option anyway. Maybe that makes the world world computer up, maybe. I've I think I hope most of us are already vaccinated and in the end, I think everyone at one point will get sick.

So it's like a flu or something else. So we're at a point in in, in totally Widing everything just because you could get sick. Life is a risk, so it's always the question how much you take. So I would go, if anything is in BNO or why not? You can always keep the distance and wash your hands.

I think most of the stuff people have just forgotten to do. I don't know.

[00:18:43] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's fine. That's a totally reasonable position. I think it's just curious as to whether Ben shares that, what would you do, Ben?

[00:18:51] Ben Townsend: I've never been to one. So I I, I, it's not that I don't like in person events, but I echo what Bennett said is that there is a level of complacency at the moment now that people, because things seem to be back to normal to a degree, I think people do forget to do the common things and it only takes a few people to do that and event.

And next thing everybody's getting ill. So me personally, I'd probably give it a couple of years before I even go. So I've gotten, I've had, even if it was in the UK or abroad, I'd probably give it a couple of years cause he's going to be around for a couple of years and it's just the way it is down downfall.

[00:19:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, my, my sort of concerns are that the events have been, let's say that a particular event has got 500 attendees typically, and it has done for the last five years. And so they've got this, they've got this expectation of what the venue they need to hire and the amount of meals that they need to put on and so on and so forth.

And whether, or not now, especially in light of what Michelle said, they've got to organize the costs for themselves, somebody in the comments. And I forget, I can't see it right now. Oh yeah. Daniel, thank you. Daniel raises the point. I wonder if now that it's been separated, if they can actually start to charge different kind of pricing obviously they'll need to cover the cost because a lot of it was subsidized previously, but anyway, so the point being that if the footfall is less, does that make the likelihood of the event happening or to the same quality for want of a better word?

Being the case and Michelle, tell us your opinion.

[00:20:23] Michelle Frechette: I was hoping that when things started to get back to in-person, they would become hybrid events, so that we would still be able to attend remotely, but we're moving the global sponsorship with you would have to raise even more money for the production cost of that.

So I'm not certain exactly what will happen as far as hybrid events goes. I am very much looking forward to seeing people in person. Again, I just got my booster vaccination this weekend, so that I'm triply vaccinated. And you know, I have a plethora of masks in my possession as well as gallons.

I hand sanitizer. So I will be attending in-person events and taking all the precautions that I need. And I also take so many vitamins every day that I'm probably, probably like overdoing the vitamins and just, I have, as they say, very expensive urine mouse. So

[00:21:23] Nathan Wrigley: there is no doubt what is going to be the title of this episode. That's brilliant. Somebody write that down, immediately. Put it in the private chat.

That's great. I love stuff like that. The, I think what I'm going to do if I ever go back to live event is I'm just going to take a nice long stay. Like a Catholic broadens, come on, stay away. No, in all honesty, there's nothing going on in my area at all. In the United Kingdom, as far as, oh, that's not true.

There is a bit Bristol I believe is happening. And I haven't attended that one before anyway, so I doubt that that would happen for me but the

[00:22:02] Michelle Frechette: Leanna is looking for a site. So the BPM will be, is expected to be back in-person beginning of the year. Rob. Karen says Michelle TMI.

[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: What does the acronym TMI stand for too much information? No, I thought that was great. That's lovely. Certainly raise the laugh. It got more laughs than my Paul Lacey joke, which is the pole by the way, if you are watching and you are in the comments poke fun at, betrayal, the betrayal hashtag forgive me please.

[00:22:44] Michelle Frechette: He's actually using the show to find out if I'm finished the article for him yet.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: That's brilliant. That's great. His comment, if you've finished it yet, or Michelle?

[00:22:55] Michelle Frechette: Not quite, but I promise it will be done by Friday.

[00:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: All right, let's get back to the WordPress stuff. Michelle features quite a lot this week, actually.

And I can, I can honestly say that I put these articles together by myself without without the input of Michelle. It is pure coincidence sometimes. No, no, no. I know it feels that way. It's when we get 17 articles from automatic in a row, then you've got to start worrying the this is the WPA WP Korea summit.

And did actually tell me a little bit about this a while ago. Tell us about it. What's the intention, when's it happening? Or give us all the deets. Sure.

[00:23:39] Michelle Frechette: So the website is not up yet because I have meetings this week with the designers to get that up and running. But the WT career summit will be the first of its kind to have a full day of helping people.

Hired within the WordPress community. So the idea came to me a little about a year and a half ago, I was sitting at home and I had to take days off because, you had all these vacation times, but it was also locked down. So I wasn't going anywhere. And I created WP career pages that com which is just a place for people to find job pages on different websites.

And so from that, I started tweeting out job opportunities on Wednesdays that I found just to try to help the community. And as a result of that, I am now writing and working with post status about jobs and hiring and HR practices. And from that came the idea that we could have a summit on helping people get hired.

So there will be two tracks. One was going to be seven sessions. As you see there for jobs speakers. Secrets that should say seekers.

[00:24:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. I was thinking an interesting category.

[00:24:52] Michelle Frechette: My own typo there I'll fix that later and then we'll have a separate track for employers. You know, best practices for finding a job best practices for hiring.

We'll have a Jitsi room set up for the sponsors. Sponsors will be able to talk to people about the jobs and why they might want to work there. They could even set up, like see, receive resumes and set up interview times, things like that. The sponsors will have recorded commercials, which should not be about selling their product, but about selling their themselves as a place that you would want to work.

Why would you want to work at those different places? There's lots of speaking opportunities, the job fair and networking.

[00:25:30] Nathan Wrigley: It looks like a it looks like you're on the lookout for some sponsorships as well at the moment. So if you want to become a speaker or if, or a or a sponsor of the event, you can reach out the dates are on the screen now, but it's April the eighth next year.

So April the X 2022 for one day, It is a one day event. Yes. Okay. Yep. I think attracting an audience to something like a summit can be quite hard. I've done the page builder summit three times and you have to try quite hard, but I think you might be in a really unique and interesting position here, because if you think about the typical job these days, you hear about thousands of applications for each and in each individual job.

And many people just being turned away and going through the interview process and so on with one or two final people getting. So it feels like you've got a ready, made audience for this people who are interested in looking for work, but haven't quite got the expertise to fill out the resume or whatever it might be.

Nice, nicer. Thank you, Bernard Ben, anything on that?

[00:26:34] Ben Townsend: I don't think it's a great idea. No more. You can tell you is to help people you know, to be better ons when you're going for a job. You know, it's a really uncertain time. I think for pretty much, everybody, is a real air of uncertainty around and the having having something like this and the fence where you can get tips and learn from people what to be what's expected of you and anything that can help you get up the ladder.

Roughing is great idea. It's brilliant.

[00:27:01] Michelle Frechette: Thank you. Yeah,

[00:27:03] Bernhard Gronau: I'm excited about it. Good Google.

[00:27:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. The the like, like Michael, sorry, Daniel here says Michelle is true. You have a very, a huge cornerstone of the community right now. So we'll probably have some more Michelle things shortly. But for now that's great.

The only way to, yeah no, no, it's good because you put a lot of work. It's not like it's not like we're trying to find things that you're doing. It's because you are actually doing from them and they're valuable the currently the URL that you want to be looking at. And obviously Michelle says the website at some point will be on the way, but you're looking Google post status.com WP career summit, save the date.

And as we said, you might just want to go and pause this and go and put it in your calendar. What was it again, Michelle? I can't now scroll to it. Was it, there we go. April the eighth, 2022, between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM. CT is that central.

[00:28:00] Michelle Frechette: It's central time in the U S so was think of Chicago and what time it is in Chicago.

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yup. Yup. Okay. Thank you. Great. Okay. Let's move on. This is all the vendors in the comments. This is, yeah, this is nice. So vendor that w the WP weekly fame has thrown together a lovely idea. I really like this. It's a, it's the WP award. 2021 and the URL is pretty straightforward to mention it's avert WP weekly.com forward slash awards.

One more time. WP weekly.com forward slash awards. And it is a, an option. Basically you get all these different categories. So look, have a look here you can see on the screen WordPress themes page builder. Foreign plugins, dynamic data, plugins, Gutenberg ad-ons and forgive me the vendor. I probably just won't go through them all because we'll be here for quite a long time, but there is lots and lots of categories covering virtually everything in the WordPress space.

Many of them are to do with things like hosting, plugins, themes, that kind of thing. But then towards the bottom, you get to some slightly more bizarre categories. Like for example, WordPress podcasts and look, what am I clicking on there? What's this? What am I doing? I'm going to click on that one.

Or maybe, oh, I didn't know. Anyway, the point is you go through, you enter your, you can enter your email and email address and name at the top. In fact, I believe that's mandatory. And then you. Something for each category or you select a no choice. If you don't have an opinion on each of those, and then you click submit your vote and whichever one wins, I don't know what happens apart from receiving a nice, shiny award and presumably a badge to put on your website.

I don't know. Maybe Devinder can highlight it. Either way. I just thought it was a nice bit of fun to divert yourself for five minutes, go and think about what your favorite things are and go and vote. And just so that, the podcast category is category number 17 and WP belt is right near the end.

Just say that

[00:30:16] Michelle Frechette: right next to WP coffee,

[00:30:17] Nathan Wrigley: talk this one. Oh yeah. Okay. All right. I'll vote for that one.

[00:30:25] Ben Townsend: Is there any way you can scroll up a bit because what press books. Yeah, a second one down from the right. If you don't,

an email address

[00:30:41] Nathan Wrigley: for as well. The vendor vote. You'll have to go and expunge that one. Now this is lovely. What a nice thing to do. And obviously.

[00:30:51] Bernhard Gronau: It's obvious just to get it in.

[00:30:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Number four is dynamic beta plugins. I'm guessing burden wants me to pick onto the politics. You see how much fun we're having just by messing about with this.

And I'm guessing that that the intention would be that, you, you promote it on social and you create a bit of a stir about it and have a bit of fun with your community and get them to go along and vote. Yeah, one more time. The WP weekly.com forward slash awards is where you want to go.

And Devinder has defender. I don't know if just shiny. Okay. So he said, thank you so much. Just shiny awards, no automatic funding with TTS. Yeah. Yeah, that would be nice. But honestly it was. Really go and vote for whatever you feel is the best. That would be a, yeah. That's right. Don't do peoples go vote for pods.

Subliminally. Ben, if you keep just saying that under your breath, every like couple of minutes, you'll probably get no votes at all, but it will be funny for you to be doing it. All right. Let's carry on. So that was nice. Unless you've got something you want to add any you three, you want to say something.

[00:32:02] Ben Townsend: Definitely. It's a great idea to get people involved, pilots, stuff that perhaps people haven't seen before, what different dislike he always comes up with stuff and he's, it always does. He's good like that, but I'm offering this great idea when he told me about to keep it hush.

But yeah, I thought it was really interesting idea, love and get to do well very well.

[00:32:22] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what a suddenly occurred to me is that it might well be a route in for previously undiscovered things. So for example, I'm, I don't know, I'm looking through the security section now, just that's where it's landed.

And there's a couple of things in there. I've not really heard of I don't really know much about shield security as an example, and SEO plugins. I've not really heard of smart girls. So each of the, I should probably put the screen back up because each of the each of the little options. It came on and then it went away again.

There we go. Each of the options has got a link out to the website in question. So I guess as much as anything else, it's quite a nice way to go and to surface things that you possibly hadn't heard of in, in different areas of the WordPress space. So there we go. All right. Okay. Let's crack on. This is.

Re I think really important. And we've had a lot of hilarity so far. This is dealing with something probably a little bit more serious. This is WP scam who have been acquired by Jetpack WP scan has been in the business of protecting WordPress. Not so much protecting, but creating a database of.

Vulnerabilities in the WordPress space and Ryan , who was one of the co-founders and I forgive me, Ryan. I forgotten the name of your co-founder, but it is in this piece somewhere. Here we go. Ryan do Hurston Irwin, LA Rosa, or Roseau. I don't know how you pronounce that. Thank you so much.

Thanks Michelle. For saving me. They've been doing this really just for the love of it for many years. And I, my, my understanding is that quite a few other. Plugins have also used the database as like the backbone of everything that they do. Created, a way of kind making a little bit of money out of it just to just a few years ago.

I think sort made limitations on the amount of times you could call their API so that if you went over a fairly high threshold, you were obviously some kind of user that wasn't a typical user and maybe they needed to generate some revenue from that. But it's been a real labor of love for years and years.

And it's got acquired by Jetpack. I don't really know what this means, but the Twitter stuff that I saw around this was very positive. Lots of people saying, well, if it's gone into Jetpack and then potentially we can have this over on the.org side, as well as on the.com side. What, what harm can it possibly do Ryan and, and.

I think have both been taken on over automatic, so their endeavors are going to continue and just seems like a sensible thing for Jetpack to a board, really like it again over to you guys if you've got anything.

[00:35:13] Michelle Frechette: I I've heard, a lot over the years about Jetpack getting bloated and acquiring a lot of these.

So I am absolutely on the edge of my seat wanting to hear what Ben has to say about this

[00:35:26] Ben Townsend: who me

[00:35:33] Nathan Wrigley: she's. So she's so set you up there.

[00:35:36] Ben Townsend: I just want just for one second there, I dunno. I think it's, it's been a lot of acquisitions and stuff like that. I'm not a huge fan of jet pack. I'm not as a company or anything like that, but installing jet pack and all the different modules that it comes with and all that sort of stuff is I tend not to use.

I would, however, be tempted to use that if it's got scanning functionality into it, because site security, sign Portland or upset somebody, and next thing you know, you're getting, get any website attacked or something like that. But yeah, I don't disapprove of that acquisition. I think it's actually quite smart.

I'm surprised they haven't really done something with security before. I would have thought that would have been one of the first things you do with a company of that size, but it'd be interesting to see how it affects. The rest of us, the self hostess, or what have you to see how it's implemented and put into there, but I'm not adverse to it.

I think it's actually quite a positive step, actually, to be honest with you, ladies expecting controversy there

[00:36:39] Nathan Wrigley: and sorry, honestly very well containing your that's good. No, that's good.

[00:36:48] Michelle Frechette: I'm expecting a DM from bed later today.

[00:36:54] Nathan Wrigley: Here's what I said. Here's what I should have said. The comment from Rob Cairns or someone in the security space.

This makes me look at Jetpack more. I think that's the point, right? If there's a lot of people who really don't like Jetpack and Ben sounds like you're one of them and maybe, maybe this just gives you an opportunity to look at it again. Maybe it gives you an opportunity to, to have more, more concerned.

Cause it's more things bottled up into one little ecosystem, but nevertheless, I'm so pleased for Ryan rock. When I spoke to Ryan on the podcast he genuinely came across as the most kind and thoughtful person. And whilst it's very easy for me to say that I do honestly mean it. You just gave up so much time every single week.

All of those words were hyphenated by the way. And the, and he did it for the labor of love that it was. And he really helped all of us out over that long period of time. So for it to come to this kind of fruition for him on a personal level and his founder, co-founder Bravo well done. That's great. Here's a, has maybe a slightly different take on it.

Maybe an answer to this jet pack, move patch, stack launched a free security plan to, or I didn't see that Devinder is that was that like today or last week? So patch stack, formerly web box. They've gotten gone. They've gone to a free route have they this week. Okay. If I don't know if all of a sill is watching, if he is let us know let us know what's going on there.

If it's something new, I'll stick it in the show for next week. Anything on this burner?

[00:38:29] Bernhard Gronau: Oh, not really. Change is obvious. We discussed, I think the last time I was on with us, this cast. Exactly those changes. Let's see how it goes on from there, because you can touch it only a few weeks, months after stuff like that happen.

If they continue to work or if I don't know changes are happening, which aren't for the better regarding the pitch stack stuff I have, I bought pet stick back when it wasn't a few years ago. So I'm loving that they are still there and progressing and doing good work.

[00:39:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm going to quote from the article, it says automatic has sponsored WP scan SES, Steve CR Jetpack product engineer leader, automatic, not only are we big funds of their work, we actually use it to power to help power Jetpack scam.

So maybe in a sense, Ryan had been being helped by automatic already. And it was just a, it was an easy transition to make, to go to there, for it to be bought by them. And. And for them to take custody of it. Anyway again, Bravo. Well done, Ryan. Very pleased for you. That's great. All right. Let's put the screen back on one more time.

I'm really struggling to use this toggle switch this week. This toggle switch. What I click it now. Yay. That time it works. It seems to be temperamental this week. I should write a bug report. This is big orange house. Michelle is a big proponent of big orange charts and they're launching what amazes me about this is the amount of organization going on.

I know. Hard it is to put these summits on. Well I say that this particular Sonic word first is significantly more complex, I would say, but I know what's involved and word Fest has wrong twice now and they're going at it again this time in 2022. And I'm just amazed by the amount of forward thinking going on here.

In other words, this isn't happening for another, what are we on? I'm going to have to actually read them on. So in my head, November, December, January, February, March, I get five, five months March the fourth, 2022. That's a lot of forward planning. And I know that it needs all of that planning. Anything you want to tell us about this particular version of the.

[00:40:52] Michelle Frechette: It's just always going to be getting better and better because we learn from every iteration as we go forward. And we have more people joining us on the organizing team this time. So we, and we've got more things that we're thinking about as far as organization, so that we can make it a better experience for everybody going forward.

The call for speakers is going to be open and posted today. I'm not sure if it's up yet, but it will be soon as if you're interested in speaking. Please take a look at that because we want to make sure all the speakers are selected before the holidays begin so that we can give people as much time as possible to record their sessions and give us a little bit of a break over the holidays.

[00:41:34] Nathan Wrigley: The speaker's call goes out today. You I'm actually on the big orange art blog, which is a blog dot big orange shot.org. And you can find the posters called announcing word Fest live 2022. The call for sponsors has already opened. So if you're into making this event happen from a sponsorship point of view, you can click on that link as well.

But I can tell you having been like involved in the backend only a little bit, I have to say not anything like a proper organizer or anything. It is unbelievably well-organized. And I guess it needs to be because of the technical complexity of what they're putting on it is there is so much going on so many cogs, so many wheels, and there's just dozens and dozens of people in the background making it all happen so that it's faultless on the day.

Yeah. I did definitely want to give them a shout out. All right. Let's move. All right. Okay. I don't know if anybody's going to be particularly interested in Sino. Michelle. You've already opted out. You're not too bothered about the theme, the whole theme thing, but this is WP tab. Justin Tatlock, Scott, a piece this week, all about the WordPress block theme revolution is quietly picking up so far.

There's been a real paucity of WordPress block-based themes, really a very small handful. And so it kinda makes it hard for people like me to get excited about it. People like Justin to get excited about it, but I think that the scales are finally tipping for him. And if they're finally tipping for him, I suspect that he'll probably concentrate some more of his efforts on them in the future.

But he, in this article, he basically talks. The w the way that he's getting more excited, this new 20, 22 theme, I like that for a sexy, isn't it nice really nice apologies for those of you who are listening, but there's this well, I won't even try to describe it. It's just a super minimal, beautiful, massive type biography black website with white with white characters and it just looks absolutely gorgeous.

It's super minimal. The point that Justin's trying to make is over time, a couple of. These block-based themes have come out, but they really have been beautifully designed, but not for him, beautifully designed for somebody that's not him. And eventually he's found one or two that seem to fit his way of doing things.

And he's saying that as soon as you hit that one theme, as soon as you stumble across that one theme, where you go, oh, I could actually use that as opposed to that's pretty, but I can't possibly make any use of it. Then he feels the penny will drop. And so he talks about this clove theme, which he thinks is beautiful, but you didn't feel you could make use of he's talks about one of these and there's Noren themes again, beautiful kind of quirky and fun, but he didn't think you could make use of it.

And then he finally came across this one, which is called by B a either by theme, by seed webs and he thought. That's it I'm in, I'm hooked. That's the one that I could make use of. And as a theme developer from the past, I'm still doing a little bit of that. I think Justin's basically making the point stick with it.

Just because there's nothing there. Now keep checking back and I don't know. Anybody's got any comments to that, but there we go. That was the piece Bernard maybe.

[00:45:01] Bernhard Gronau: Oh no, I wouldn't start a rant again.

[00:45:06] Nathan Wrigley: Burnett, if you'd, if you've never been on the ship, if you never watched the show before Bernard, isn't a big fan of Gutenberg or you'd burn it

[00:45:12] Bernhard Gronau: well that there are use cases for it, but it's you're told it's just not for everyone, but I'll be honest.

It's always the same story. The There are great things. But for me, that works in so many cases, we have structured content templates. I need to look to have every entry look the same and that's not really working well in Gutenberg is about at all, or will be tied to that. I'm not sure why some of the stuff is happening there in that way.

It does, but maybe it didn't click with me that maybe the thing about a protest now, a Gutenberg blocks. So you can use ports for those shiny new teams.

[00:46:00] Nathan Wrigley: A friend in Jordan Bernard, he says, I'm with you burned it. I'm not a fan of Gutenberg. I keep saying Guttenberg but it's supposed to be Gutenberg. I understand.

I actually was. I can't remember how I came across this fact, but it's essentially somebody from Germany said, no, that's how we pronounce it. It's gluten. And I just thought. Okay I'll call it Simon from now on, in that case, but yeah, Steve Simon, Derek, maybe I dunno, Simone, perhaps the Simone at is the,

[00:46:37] Michelle Frechette: I think that was his real name.

[00:46:41] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. That's no easier though. Isn't it?

[00:46:47] Bernhard Gronau: That's not a charm.

[00:46:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Johannes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What about you Ben got into,

[00:46:56] Ben Townsend: I actually like it. Okay. I know I'm going to be the unpopular one. I'm used to that, but I like it. I like it. I think from a writing perspective, it makes you think hell of a lot more about what you're doing and the ability to move content or think, oh, look at looking at the flow of it and you think.

This is rubbish, wanting to change. This needs to do that when it comes to building, understanding people's reactions, aren't the best. So it, because it is cumbersome, the slow. If you use a couple of different plugins, when you really can do something completely unique using Gutenberg, we have to rely on blockaded plugins and a thing that allows you to get rid of certain elements like headers or photos and that sort of thing.

And there are a few outlets that will do it. I've played around with a 5.9 and foresight at the end. And it's still a bit clunky at the moment, but the principle like Bernard was saying about having set templates of blog posts, that template pages and all that sort of stuff, it is entirely possible.

In, in the new version of Gutenberg and especially with the block-based themes, I had a decent play around with it. I was quite surprised. I even short crew their congos out to create my own block-based thing, following the tutorial or somebody put on online. And I was able to actually do quite a few bits and pieces, but the main issue many set in whips.

Problem. You've got with Gutenberg at the moment. Is you can't really set responsive whips for mobile and tablet versions. And you can't say right, don't display this block on mobile devices because it could be a call to action. It give you an email subscribed box. You know, I put it down the bottom, so it's not in the way to content and that sort of stuff, but it's not quite there yet from that perspective, but you give it a year, I think, and if they can make it, so it's easy for users to understand cause this it's,

[00:48:49] Bernhard Gronau: If you're talking about current editor, there is no question.

It's beautiful to write and have headings and texts the. I have the most issues with is that everything which is related to that article, like any fields to fill categories, all that stuff is in the small site or in them or articles. And so if you have what the free from content plus some fields, what type it is, or what it's related or stuff like that's all hidden away.

And I don't know why we went with, cause we had to also make the boxes or decide that below. That's what entirely is missing in a easy way for not experienced users to use because the current editor can handle the classic, filled it out with brackets way, way down or some in one tab on the right.

I don't know, how'd you fix that, but I hope they came up with a better user interface.

[00:49:56] Ben Townsend: There it'd be nice if they came out with an interface that you could actually model and you, excuse me, you can model in your workflow. You know, in a similar way that you've got widgets for sidebars and that sort of thing, it'd be really cool.

If there was a way that you could only input the stuff that you want on the sides, it's actually relevant to specific pages or posts. So you'd have a selection or drop down of different interfaces that have got all the tools you need. So if you're building a page or I need to have these specific blocks in there, I need to have this, that, and the other I, a blog posts, you might just want the right interface and the ability just to put in some images, you don't want war and peace everywhere all the time, especially when you're looking for something, you can't find it.

But the one thing I noticed in the new version of Gutenberg is asset customizers. Now we've all been asked to get used to. The customizer may have customizer. Everybody's got used to it. We've all used it. We know our way around it. Now it's gone, it's disappeared and it's all templates and parts and headers.

So not only you've got to learn a whole new way of doing things, if you want to keep up with the game. I'm quite keen to do that because it helps me understand more. And it helps me come up with ideas about writing, but I can understand people's frustrations. I do think give it a year, a couple of years, I think.

Material and often it was starting very well

[00:51:12] Nathan Wrigley: for it. So yeah, I guess it's a case of how much collateral damage happens in the meantime, whilst we do the transition, the Ben, did you comment if you ever come across? Oh goodness. I had it in my head then w oh my goodness. Oh, it's a plug. No yeah no, no.

It's a plugin it's hiding and showing blocks. That's the one. That's exactly the one. Yeah. I don't know if that would be of any use, but maybe

[00:51:40] Ben Townsend: that there is that, and I've played around with that and it is very good. And also some of the look at it and stuff like Gerrick blocks, sorry. From dropping names, they actually allow you to hide blocks based.

I think cadence allows you to hide blocks based on. Which is really handy. So if you want to build a membership site, we don't really have to use a membership plugin per se. And like you can hide on mobile devices, set Putin, which cause that's my biggest bugbear. And I think I was talking to Paul about this Paul Lacey on sweater a while ago.

And the biggest bugbear were Gutenberg, especially using it as a building tool has been able to set custom whips of pages and that sort of thing. And of course I have a theme that what gives you that flexibility. So then, it's not really good and buck is, it is.

[00:52:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. You've ended up bolting on a load of extra tools to make it behave just how it always used it.

Yeah. That's interesting. So getting back to the name of Gutenberg, we have a possible rival here, Johnny guts. I quite like that is now called Johnny guts, which I think is great. Ben, you have a new best friend in Daniel, which is nice. Nice to know. And we've got Peter. Hello, Peter. If drag and drop placement is improved on the management of metal boxes includes things like panel placement and sizing that will convert so many more people.

Yeah. I think you've summed up Burnetts and I'm going to get it right? Yes. And Ben's problems all in one. So that's the mission for 6.8 or something like that? No doubt. It looks like. It looks like Rob is using cadence blocks, as you mentioned. And also it looks Ben like Daniel's joined you in the journey to try and make a theme.

He's tried to make full site editing theme, really not possible for custom post types. As far as I know, I think I actually know the acronym. Wow. That's gotta be the first. Couldn't do much with it at the moment using block base as the starter theme, I'm going to guess that says full site. It feels like years or for professional development.

Yeah. All being, I will be doing a, I shouldn't say that. I'm not going to say what I'm about to do. Cause I don't know if it will come off. So I'll show up and carry on. No, really. It was nothing. It genuinely was nothing of any excitement or impulse. Yeah, no, don't worry. Okay. Let's change tack a little bit and move away from themes and let's move on to black Friday shenanigans.

I have put together a page. If you're interested, you can go to WP builds.com forward slash black. If you're interested in sponsoring this page, by the way, you can fill up these, you can get in touch with me and and we'll fill up these little gray and black squares, but it's a sort of searchable filterable list.

You go here and click buttons. It's an admin plugin, or it's not, it's a, I don't know something to do with e-commerce and essentially there's I dunno. There's probably about. I'm guessing it's probably about 40 or something on there at the moment. If you feel that I've missed your plugin or theme out, you can just click this button, add your deal.

And anyway, so if you want to have quite a lot of the things in the WordPress space, it's WP belts.com forward slash black. However, this is the WordPress community and it's all about sharing. We've got a, we've got a rival, which is significantly funnier than mine because it's got Scott pictures of cats and Ben.

Oh, Ben, I don't know when I saw this. I'm sure there was more of you on the page. Is it just the west? Oh, is it not you? I thought it was you. I

really did. I totally thought it was you. Oh, that's even funnier now. Ben has put together a similar sort of page look Got you go to here and you fill out what it is that you want your deal to show. So on and so forth. What's the actual link page itself then

[00:55:35] Ben Townsend: I'm looking at it now in your browser.

Submit hyphen WordPress, hyphen black hyphen Friday, hyphen deals, hyphen 2021. Oh

[00:55:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Can I can't remember that. Can you drop that? Oh, is it in the, is that it there? Yeah, I'll stick that in there. Here we go. And

[00:55:53] Ben Townsend: it's actually on the main page. If you go on there, it's a menu item

[00:55:57] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Let me find it.

Let me find. Okay. So is it, is have you got the deals on a page yet or is it

I'm still

[00:56:07] Ben Townsend: taking them. I've had which is really cool. Actually, I had 45 and I haven't actually approached anybody, which, I I've, I've just left it for them to come to me. Cause I thought, look, go off to the usual ones and everyone's doing the same thing.

And I thought you know, for do things a little bit different, you might get some different stuff. What you said earlier about what the vendors doing. There's some plugins on there I've never heard of before. And I thought doing things this way. And I was 20 buckets. I've never heard of before, have approached for, to go on there.

It's great. It's great for me because I'll get to speak to them and, it's a good networking opportunity, but also there's stuff on there that probably people never heard of before. Might lots of give it a go. So yeah. Was that really?

[00:56:50] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, the URL layer, not plural layer, wp.com submit WordPress black Friday deals 2021.

If you fancy, especially looking at pictures of cats, which is dead cool,

[00:57:03] Ben Townsend: what's going to be a dog at one point, it was a

[00:57:05] Nathan Wrigley: vampire. I think you made the right choice. Nobody's arguing with the cat. I just love the fact that they both seem to be staring towards the title in shock. It's really great. Anyway, there's your WordPress?

Sorry, gone, Michelle take

[00:57:21] Michelle Frechette: a look at the link. I just sent you that. I made a mean for black Friday.

[00:57:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. It's coming. It, nothing weird about it is that we're all going to be fine. Okay. Are your offerings Michelle's posted on Twitter? Are you offering a black Friday cyber Monday deal this year?

I've compiled a list of where to submit them. I'll post it in a thread hat tip to learn with Matt C for several of these. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. As always, you're promoting all of us and it's kind you, right? Where are we at next? So that was the deals let's go here right now. Bernard's up set a stage for Burnet. Bernadette, as we know, works with pods a lot, and there's a 2.8 feature release, which has come out, which gives him the platform here to tell us about it.

What's all this about. What's in 2.8 that's of significance Burnet,

[00:58:23] Bernhard Gronau: Much stuff has happened. I think some of it has been cooking about six years. So it's like we've opened lot or sometimes things get postponed and stuff happens. And, we lost the funding from automatic at some point the some bad things that didn't work out, but we got out because

[00:58:44] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to have to pause you.

Sorry, burner. I'm gonna have to pause you. I don't know if it's just me, maybe Ben and Michelle. Your audio is almost, yeah, basically you sound like you're in a, on the water or something or crackly try again.

[00:58:59] Bernhard Gronau: Okay. Yeah. Let's switch microphones, maybe test one two.

[00:59:04] Nathan Wrigley: And that seems stable.

Yeah, try again. Okay. Sorry.

[00:59:07] Bernhard Gronau: 2.8 is, is a major part in the background happening preparing many other things to come in the future. Some of it has been happening over the last six. And what else to founding from automatic and all that stuff. So it's, it's good to be finally got there.

Especially the admin has gotten completely overhaul. We have no field groups, the interface was changed. It, you now, can you find the groups in the interface and even displayed in the backend, in different groups? For some, for example, one, one for just editors or one for admins or whatever. So it can also structured content can be fully customized and lots of fun to do.

I could talk an hour about it, but maybe that's for another time.

[01:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. The audio has gone again, Bernard. So I think you're either going to have to switch, try it yet, or another microphone or or. We probably won't be able to continue with that one. Cause it was almost ineligible.

No. Significantly because I can hear myself now really, really loud,

[01:00:30] Bernhard Gronau: fresh connection or

[01:00:32] Nathan Wrigley: something. It, what I'm going to do is I'll say, we'll come back to this in a minute. I'm going to mute you because you're creating a lot of background noise. I'm just going to move you for a second. And then that was very pleasant.

It wasn't, it suddenly there was silence. We'll come back to you. Burned it in just a minute, if that's all right. I'll go onto the next piece. Then we'll come back and we'll pray that the audio gremlins had been fixed. If we were the BBC, we'd have some sort of professional swoop into the background and try to, fix things and pull cables out and they'd be a total pro we're just winging it.

So maybe burn it. It'll come back. Maybe not we'll find out in a minute, right? Let's move on to this one, then this oh, good grief. This is self promotion. Sorry. Apologies. I promoted myself a minute ago and I'm promoting something I did now, but I do think this is of interest to everybody in the community.

This is a piece that I put together for the WP Tavern. Jukebox podcast. And it's Tara king. If you've never come across Tara king, she's recently been acquired by automatic to lead a team including people like Anne McCarthy and her job is to go out and find out why people don't like Gutenberg and what they're having problems with.

And then to report that back to the developers and community leads and all of that kind of thing. Now, the job description is broader than that, but this is basically what we talked about. And I just found it really curious that automatic who's obviously paying for her role have decided that this re this role was needed.

If everything had gone smoothly and everybody had gone, Ooh, Gutenberg, brilliant. We're going to use it for everything. Then this role probably didn't need to exist, but now. And I would say that if you have a problem with Gutenberg, a noise, you, your inconvenience by it, you find it completely unacceptable.

Whatever it may be, Tara is now I would imagine your point of contact. The E her email address is actually in the show notes. I won't read it out, but you can go and find it in the show notes. And so is her Twitter handle, and she's totally open to having conversations with everybody. And so this was about that, about what her new job is, what the permutations for that all are.

And so those of you in the comments who are thinking, Nope, Gothenburg, not for me. Then please reach out to Tara and see if there's any way that the bridge can be built between where you're at now and where Gutenberg might allow you to get in the future. It's at this point, we're going to try and bring Bernard back.

Yeah. Hello, Bernard

[01:03:13] Bernhard Gronau: Test

[01:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: 1, 2, 3, so far so good. So far so great. In fact, I'm finished. I finished my little bit about the next article. So I'll go back to pods. We got, as far as you were talking about field groups and those kinds of things, and at that point, it started to break up a bit. Okay.

[01:03:33] Bernhard Gronau: So th the field groups are splitting up the interface to group your fields and even apply rules. Like it's only for editors or authors or whatever to can best handled content and who can edit. What part of it? Then a big thing is of course, besides of field types and stuff like that, the pots block for Gutenberg, and there is even an API to create your own block.

So to make it easy similar to the stuff that ACF has. And alongside with that, this is the new rest API. So you will have additional endpoints to configure parts. That's what development oriented, like the CLI commands and stuff like that too soon, configurations or something to something like that.

The, the big thing is this opens up future staff, which can be built now far easier. And hopefully in a very short timeframe, like a super repeatable fields that you can repeat content within a pot. So for example, if you had to add social media stuff, then you have a repeatable field, like for Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

At just those things, then more developer oriented stuff, like a Fike based configurations. So we can easily move our pots between different websites, especially if you think about a preset theme, maybe that it's just a configuration file and you're ready to. So much has happened. So maybe give it a, try again, look at it.

The documentation has been updated to, especially around all our fields and how to use. And we are exposing additional stuff to feel like you can now display the label of the parts, or you can have dynamic templates where you have just field, name, and content. And if you change the field name, change overall, everybody on the website, for example and so much more, I don't know where to

[01:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: stop it.

Yeah. This is the problem with a huge project like pods, isn't it there's literally, look at it. There's absolutely loads that you could talk about. And probably each one of the bullet points on the screen could occupy 10 minute video but that's a nice overview. I do want to point out pods is free, but I also want to point out there is a route to helping pods, which is friends of pods.

What's the what's the quickest URL to get to. Make the project happen the page. Okay. So friends.pods.io, if you want to assist. Yeah, it's a massive update. Thank you for doing that. I did coincidentally notice that the the audio seems to start going wrong. The moment you say the word Gutenberg, which is curious, I don't know what's going on there, but seems to be some definite connection technology that's right.

This anti Bern Bernard strike is unwarranted. I do apologize. I apologize on Facebook's behalf. And Peter says, he's looking forward to connecting with Tara. This is Bernard for your benefit. This is the article I was mentioning whilst you were off the screen and important role. Indeed it is. And if you've got any gripes, please make use of her.

Cause that is what she's that's what she's going to be, trying to help people through. Next one up. This is courtesy. This is coming through from Michelle orderable. Now I caught sight of orderable a little while ago, and I think I caught sight of it. Maybe when it was a Bita plug-in or something like that.

Didn't really, oh,

[01:07:16] Bernhard Gronau: one thing I want to add, I want to add one thing, because that's a thought it's important. You can, with the new interface in the admin for pops, even at labels and text, which is displayed to the user. So if you have a section and you want to explain what to do there, you can now add a field, fill it in.

And the user is okay, that's a password place you will spout. And then there is the password field below it. So you can really design easy to use forms for the user in the past.

[01:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. No, no, no, that's fine. Yeah. You didn't say the word Gutenberg and nothing happened with the audio. It was

no, I didn't see the moment that then near the comedy was not on the floor. Perfect. Let's go, let's go back to this. Thank you burner. This is orderable. I was just about to say that this came across my radar a little while ago, and then it dropped off the radar because I think it was in beta and now it looks like it's ready to go.

This is something Michelle knows a bit about. Tell us about it,

[01:08:22] Michelle Frechette: Michelle. So orderable is one of the stellar WP brands and the pro version is launching today with the ability to do restaurant ordering through your WooCommerce plugin.

[01:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: So is it's a sport, it's a specific adaptation for WooCommerce specifically for menus and ordering food in particular.

Not like it couldn't be adapted to anything else. It's just for.

[01:08:52] Michelle Frechette: Oh, it could certainly be adapted to other things, anything that you want to be able to order with, you some level of specificity. So for example, you order a pizza. Do you want pepperoni? Do you want cheese? So you're looking at different options within the items that you're ordering and the ability to specify exactly what it is that you would, but then it's also in real time.

So you're not waiting for somebody to get an email and perhaps look at it tomorrow. It's something that you can implement and do expediently.

[01:09:27] Nathan Wrigley: This is actually quite cool. And also it really taps into that moment in time. The pandemic came along and everybody that wanted to order food was suddenly doing it.

Every restaurant on the planet, more or less had to at least think about this. And so it's got a lot under the hood. Just take some of the things that are on the home page, the sort of UV PS it's got, the option to create different product or menu layouts. You can do all the bumps time slots, quite important.

You can schedule holidays order management, timed products, custom checkout. So there's a lot going on. This is [email protected], but it's a it's specifically for WooCommerce commerce. It's not a standalone thing,

[01:10:10] Michelle Frechette: right? So when, when the pandemic hit, so I have a couple of holdover customers of my own from my freelance days and their restaurants.

And so when they wanted to start doing online ordering, they had to look for. Something outside of their WordPress website to be able to do that. Heartland is a, is one of those kinds of things, implementing Grubhubs, those kinds of options with orderable, you're not giving a percentage of every sale to an outside organization.

So that's really one of the nice things about it is that you get to, yes, of course you're paying for a plugin, but you're not paying a percentage of every order to be processed by another company outside of your everyday.

[01:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: And is this just launched then?

[01:10:55] Michelle Frechette: Yes. Today is the official launch day of the pro version.

They're probably listening right now going, but we haven't quite finished everything.

[01:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's right. Two options currently, you've got a free version which has obviously, limited a more limited arrangement of figures. Pretty robust, actually. That's pretty good. Then the pro version 1, 4, 9, 4 1 sites, if you do, there's a lifetime option as well, a five to four currently and yeah, Audra.

Dot com and in all honesty, I'm staggered, that URL was available in the 2020s.

They was either very expensive or just no, it's available. Grab it. Yeah. That's amazing. Good job. So thank you for raising that, because that would have been missed by me. That's

[01:11:49] Ben Townsend: I just had a quick play around with that. I just had a quick look at the demo. That's actually really, it's pretty inefficient.

Actually. It is quick, very quick. I can see because in the UK I'll probably agree with this or not that the pandemics is hit the restaurant industry super hard that we round the corner from. We've got a pub that used to do loads of food. So like you sit down in a restaurant and during a pandemic, we had a food truck out.

And they were basically, you have to ring up and order what you want to add. You'd have to get a fly through the door, or what have you, or something like this, you could be up and running the next night. So I'm not losing any fees, the lights, whatever. So that's

[01:12:29] Nathan Wrigley: really good. Yeah. If you married this to a real world kind of strategy of putting flyers through doors, which is the way it works, where I live as well, for fly comes through the door, then I've heard about you.

If I, if a fly doesn't come through the door, I haven't heard about you because that's just the way it works. And and so that's cool. Now we have, though Chris Hughes drops the bomb. It is a $24,000 purchase of that domain. That's why it's available because it costs 25,

[01:12:57] Michelle Frechette: every petty

[01:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: penny. I'm sure. Yeah, yeah.

That's nice. But cool. Very cool. And Ben, that's nice that you had to play as well,

[01:13:06] Ben Townsend: so yeah, that sounds good.

[01:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: We have we're moving away from our WordPress based stuff for the last 10 minutes or so. We're just going to mess around with things that have got nothing to do with maybe they do, but this one doesn't first one's from me.

This is our sort of like picks of the week I came across this CSS scan. By the way, if you haven't got CSS scan, it's a browser extension for Chrome. I suspect it might be available for Firefox and it enables you to just, do the inspecting so you can do color picking and you can see all the CSS.

And I just thought this was a really nice little thing that they put out this week. It's a get CSS scan.com forward slash CSS dash buttons dot example. I'll put the link in the show notes for tomorrow, but it's just, I think it's 85 different buttons of every conceivable shape, size and dimensions.

And it's all you do is you click on it and it copies the CSS into your clipboard. Then you just go paste it in wherever, on your website. You need it to be pasted in and stick it in. And I would say I've pretty much got everything covered there that I think that's cool. Look at all these there's loads of different, nice options.

It's got really

[01:14:16] Ben Townsend: nice effects on that. I like that. Whoa. That's cool. Isn't it?

[01:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, cool. I'm never going to use it, but it's nice to look at

[01:14:27] Bernhard Gronau: stuff like that

[01:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: now. It's not amazing. I've got now look at, unfortunately I can't show you what the CSS output is. Cause I don't, I'm showing this window, but I bet it's quite interesting.

What's going on there anyway. Totally free. And I'm sure that if you mix and match bits of these different buttons, you could come up with more or less everything.

[01:14:46] Bernhard Gronau: Better button.

[01:14:49] Nathan Wrigley: Say again, look at you. That's why everything's going wrong because you are in fact a gremlin. That's so weird playing with the the fences on his iPhone.

That's great. He he made himself. For those of you that are watching and listening, right? That was my one. Next one up is Ben's one. This is the Lehrer gone.org website. Now that word rings a very big bell, but I confess I've done nothing with it ever. Why have you why are we looking at this? Ben, what have you discovered?

[01:15:24] Ben Townsend: I was on Twitter the other day and it was, I was, I can't remember who mentioned this, but I've used local WP and deaf Ken Starr. And I've used womp as well for local development. Cause I do a lot of reviews or just test plugins out for people and that sort of thing. And you know they're quick, but I'm always looking at new ways to speed things up when you're doing a review.

As you probably know, especially if you're recording your screen, you don't want to get any lag or anything like that. So you don't really want to do it in the life domain as such, but this is. Fast it's terrifying. And I instilled it, downloaded. It, installed it, spin up an instance of where a person is at about a minute.

So get from set up. And I was in and messing around with pages, Korean stuff, installing plugins in a heartbeat, and it was brilliant and stuff still got it on my desktop now. So I do all my testing and that sort of thing, using this. And you can upgrade the PHP version. It runs on Apache. It's not engine X, it runs on Apache.

So for people that prefer to work with engine X it's not for them, but you can add all different kind of I'm not a developer, so I can't remember the names of off of them, but you can have different PHP extensions on there and stuff as well. It's really cool. It's just thought people might like to give it well, give it a try, but so far I've really

[01:16:42] Nathan Wrigley: impressive it, when you set up.

Is there complexity to say, no, you said it was up and running in a minute. Is it a, like a, do download, like an executable on windows?

[01:16:52] Ben Townsend: Yeah. It's an executable. You stole it and then it just gives you you can do command line stuff with it. Like I said, I'm not a developer, so I don't really get involved in that, but there is a graphical user interface for you to go through and check things a little bit confusing at first, because one of the fields, I can't really share my screen at the moment, but one of the fields says settings and it's slightly grayed out, so you'd have to have a tinker around with it.

But once you get used to it, you just sweat it's, one-click installs WordPress, click that, and it'll go away and do this thing. And it'll be the latest version. I believe. I think it was 5.8 0.2, whatever it is a month.

[01:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: Pretty good. So it's a bit like a rival to something like.

[01:17:32] Ben Townsend: Yeah, probably in a bit the best way to put it.

Yeah. But it's, I know a lot of people have had issues with various local not local itself, but local environments. But for me, I'm on windows 11. This one's like a dream.

[01:17:47] Nathan Wrigley: That is cool. Yeah, that's very cool. So Largan, let me just get it right. Lara gone. L a R a G O n.org. Highly recommended by Ben.

So go and check it out. Nice. And the last thing I've got for you today, that's not the last thing I've got for you today. I don't know where the last thing I've got for you today is gone. I'm going to find it here it is. It's this one, this is a Kickstarter project, which Burnet has brought along as his pick of the week.

What great. Okay. First of all, I took away the sort of slightly alarming, initial image that you get, but let me just see if I can find something. There we go. That sort of sums it up. There's a picture on the screen. It looks like a nest thermostat. The bit that you've got bolted onto the wall, it's like a desk circle.

And what does it do?

Is Bernard muted? No. No. Okay.

[01:18:40] Bernhard Gronau: Just for the sake of getting up. Yeah. If you scroll down a little bit, this there's a better image. If I remember correctly in the out that's a button which you can push. So like it's you can try it. It's like you can use it for example, to dim your lights or to switch between different scenes.

They have even integrated 12, like a clock, small ease around the patch. You know which one you select to have 12 options or they can display if a device is on or off the selected. So it's fully configurable and it works with home kits, with Alexa, with whatever homocysteine and stuff you use. And then you ha even have their own little hub to connect all those Bluetooth devices.

And you can then do fancy things with it, like tablet push as the one thing and think to press the other. So it's if you're coming home and nobody knows how your house works, you have at least a path you can push to turn off the lights or on them. And you can do advanced stuff too. I have the patterns I have for switching off and on lights or groups of lights or stuff like that.

So it's quite an easy, smart. But in a fully operational with home kit or whatever you use.

[01:19:57] Nathan Wrigley: So you set up, so it's all about lighting, right? You set up at I don't know if you have,

[01:20:02] Bernhard Gronau: You can do can in the end use every whole kit or connected.

[01:20:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you can do you could do curtains if you want it to open and shut your curtains and you've got smart curtains and why you would want it.

But I don't know if you had a smart tap, for example, you could electricity and water.

[01:20:19] Bernhard Gronau: For example, and you have to try designing a light switch, but to exchange two lights with smart lights. So you don't really want to use the switch anymore, or maybe the switches in the wrong place, because back in the days nobody thought about that.

We have several lights around the house. Get one button right beside your bed like I did. And the precedent, it stuck in the room. But to get up to, to switch off the lights on the ceiling, or I don't know, you can start the music or the coffee or whatever, use it as a doorbell there. It's just a connected device and you can define what happens on push, what happens on double push.

And stuff like that this is missing or often very expensive.

[01:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: It's called flick twist FLIC twist. And I will endeavor to put it into the show notes again, but the it's dead. Cool. Do you know, what do you know? What I want out of this is disco mode. That's basically all I would want from this set up a ton of different lighting options and then just cycle through them every half second, just

[01:21:35] Ben Townsend: play Russian roulette when you come in with that could be, yeah.

[01:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Also I'd probably go around to my brother's house and set it up and then just love everything set up as dark and then take the switch away. Yeah, it's fun. Do you burn it if you bought this then? Bolt it in the sense of you've bid on it on Kickstarter. Oh nice. Yeah,

[01:22:03] Bernhard Gronau: because I read in some of them and they work and play with Kickstarter.

If they already did a campaign that has a company that have broken stuff, most of the time it's works out.

[01:22:15] Nathan Wrigley: That's good. Because everything I've ever been for on Kickstarter was a complete disaster. Okay. Then, then you have

[01:22:20] Bernhard Gronau: been unlucky or you didn't choose poorly.

[01:22:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's definitely the latter. Yeah.

Without a doubt, I have no judgment whatsoever. Right. Okay. I lied. I lied because I said that we finished and I was wrong because we forgot to mention w WP haunts look, who's that handsome chap.

It is honestly, I swear that it is, you

[01:22:55] Ben Townsend: know, there's was a mistake on the website off. No, go fix out fixed. Oh, okay. Oh, I'm sorry. Floating in the air for, at the moment.

[01:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you are like, yeah. Yeah. Look at that tiny little bit of padding down. It actually says something. Yeah, it's

[01:23:14] Ben Townsend: on. Oh

[01:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: boy. Oh boy. Sorry. I should probably shouldn't have highlighted that.

So tell us about WP Hans. This is officially our last piece.

[01:23:22] Ben Townsend: Yeah, no. Thank you for this. I'm still working on it. I did want to get your finished butterfly festival. We'll talk about, but time is not a good friend sometimes. And other things happen. Basically I want is to create a platform for people to showcase their plugins services, newsletters, that sort of thing to do with WordPress and tools as well.

And I know pro product hunt exists and it's very good. It is brilliant. I go on it and I look for new stuff, but what I found with the WordPress, again, this is probably going to be an unpopular opinion. I find that WordPress for me sometimes can be a pace of play atmosphere. And I don't, I don't know, waste.

Controversy now

[01:24:09] Nathan Wrigley: you can be controversial.

[01:24:10] Ben Townsend: I know a few people who charge for listing products on their websites and blogs and stuff like that. You know, they'll say you can be part of a list. It's going to cost you $2,000. Nobody's got $2,000 as a new developer to do that and trying to get return on that after 12 or 24 hours.

It's not going to wrap him really. So I thought why don't I create a platform where developers or business owners can submit their products and users can vote on them. So you can share what the plugin, the actual plugin or whatever it is does people can vote. They can offer deals and all kinds of stuff.

So at the moment is going to be. Potentially three or four tiers, it'd be a free tier for members. Obviously there'll be a free tier for those that just do work. First of all, plugins or free themes that are not freemium, then it'd be a couple of others that will allow developers to showcase deals that they've got on that particular products.

If they want to do a launch, then they pay X a month to be able to do that. But there won't be any affiliate links on there at all because I want this to be a trusted resource for people. And I actually want to help develop as a sounds altruistic, but it's true. I see it. I hear a lot of their struggles and it infuriates me because I knew if I was a developer I've been in their shoes.

So I want to make something that is actually going to help them. And fingers, fingers crossed. It should do.

[01:25:36] Nathan Wrigley: Ben, that is really cool. I sound like I'm being glib, but the sad fact is I know Michelle's got a runaway in about 30 seconds time we have to wrap it up, but sure. It come on another time and we'll talk about it some more go to WP, hans.com, especially if you've got something that you would like to surface in the WordPress community.

And it sounds like Ben is doing this. Like you said, altruistic reasons, trying to help the community out and a greatly appreciated Michelle. I don't mean to sound awful about this either, but if you need to run whilst I wrap up.

[01:26:11] Michelle Frechette: I am the president of big orange heart. And I have a board meeting now, so I will wave now.

[01:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: Let's do a, let's do a very quick wave. Everybody wave. There we go. We'll Photoshop that later. I'm in the wrong place now. How am I? Oh, it's cause Bernard is, cause burn had left earlier and had to pop back into the burners. Really look at that. How does he manage to keep his hands like that?

Your hands were right halfway between one wave and another bone that repaired. Take it easy, Michelle. We'll see. But yeah, I'm going to wrap up and say thanks guys for joining us. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Burnet. We'll definitely have you all back off another time if you're willing to do it.

Thanks for attending. If you've enjoyed it, don't forget to spread the word. It's WP builds.com. Let me do this every Monday, 2:00 PM. UK time, come and join us. Bring your friends, families, and cats. If you've got them. Okay. Elephant. Yeah. He's got many elephants that man. We are going to knock it on the head.

So I'll say take it easy guys. Bye-bye for now.