This Week in WordPress #188

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this weekend. WordPress episode number 188 entitled the day before Thanksgiving, it was recorded on Monday the 6th of December, 2021. We're here of course, to talk about the WordPress news. After all the show is called this week in WordPress and I am joined by two lovely people to do that.

Very thing. Firstly, I am joined by Rob Cairns and I'm also joined by Tiffany Bridge. As I say, there's loads to talk about. We start off by talking about what is open verse. I did a podcast this week over on WP Tavern, and we talked about just that and we get into what it is. It's a bit like CC search was only now the custodians of that are wordpress.org.

So you can find out about that. We also get into a couple of WP dramas this week. Firstly, delicious brains have asked people to pay a subscription model for a lifetime deal for ACF, which they bought earlier in the year. And also we talk about ocean WP on that ongoing. All to do with emails being sent out, which shouldn't have been sent out.

We talk about the ask the bartender article, which Justin Tadlock wrote on WP Tavern this week. Should you be using a page builder anymore, or is it time to move over to Gutenberg? We also get into the new tool that Kinser have got, allowing you to be able to send your clients over to a new account without the hassle of having to download the site, send it to them in a zip file.

You can just transfer it simply in the kins. The dashboard $280,000 has been donated by several companies, including automatic to keep PHP going. And we also talk about a lovely story all about how a client email just before the end of the working week can destroy your weekend and Tiffany and Rob share some of their own stories.

It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress. Hello? Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Wherever you are. Whether it's the morning, the afternoon, middle of the day, middle of the night, who knows? Very nice to have you with us. We are on this weekend working with episode number 188. It's the kind of the middle of December.

It's getting cold in the UK, but we're going to warm your hearts today with some lovely WordPress news. And to do that, I'm joined by two people. It might be three later, but we just have to see how that goes. But first of all, a warm welcome to somebody that's never been on the show before, but I'd like to introduce you to Tiffany bridge from nexus.

Hello, Tiffany. Hi. How are you? Yeah, really good now because I don't, I haven't really met you before. I don't have a bio prepared. So I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind spending just a few moments introducing yourself.

[00:03:02] Tiffany Bridge: Absolutely. So I am the product manager for WordPress e-commerce at nexus. So basically my job is to think about the entire experience of using WordPress on our platform and particularly using WordPress for your business and figuring out how to make it better, faster, stronger, easier.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's what. Thank you very much, indeed. And you're based in the United States, whereabouts in DC. Okay. So it's not ridiculously early, but it is early morning Monday. I appreciate it. It's first thing Monday morning. Yeah. It's still a tall order. So appreciate it. That you've come along with us today and also joining us for you've been with us many times before now.

I think, Rob, how are you doing Rob Cairns? Doing

[00:03:45] Rob Cairns: great, Nathan. Thanks for having me again this morning.

[00:03:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're most welcome. We've got some news that you've got towards the end of the show. But before that, just a couple of quick things, if you are joining us live and you want to make a comment, you can do that in one of two ways.

Probably the easiest way is to go to let me do this one first, go to WP belts.com forward slash live. If you're logged into Google, that's fine because you can use your YouTube comments over there. On the other hand, if you want to go to Facebook and comment over there, you can go to WP belts.com forward slash Facebook.

That'll take you to our Facebook group, but if you do that and you haven't authorized restream, which is our platform, then you need to go to chat.restream.io forward slash F the ever memorable URL chats.restream.io forward slash FB and click the button, which allows us to see. Oh, feel free to drop some comments in as the show goes on.

We'd really appreciate them depending on where you are. So maybe that's a good way to start whilst we natter a little bit at the beginning about open verse. Maybe you could drop into the chat who you are, where you are and so on. That'd be really nice. We've got a couple of comments that have come in so far that Mia long car is she's always making comments and always joining us.

Appreciate it. So excited to see you, everyone in this year. That's from mayor. Thank you very much. And then we've got some anonymous user on Facebook saying, Hey folks, and I don't know who you are. Like I say, if you want to say hi with your name, go to that URL. I've mentioned just a moment ago, Courtney Robertson.

You must be listening to that pre chat conversation because Rob has been mentioning your name already. And Chris Hughes says, howdy. Chris is in the UK, so I know where he is at least, but Not quite so sure where you are in the world, but nice to meet you. As I said, it's this weekend, WordPress, this is our website.

WP builds.com. If you want to go there and click that subscribe button on the page, then we'll be able to keep you updated on what it is and when we do it and we'll kick off today talking about this thing. This is a podcast episode, which I had with three lovely people. You can see them in the picture.

I had bigots, Paoli hack. I had Zach, do you know what? I'm not even going to try and pronounce that surname because every time I tried to do it on the podcast episode, I butchered it, but we had Zach and Marcus on the podcast. And we were talking about what was in WordPress 5.9 spent quite a long time talking about that, in fact, but that's not what I want to mention today because we often talk about 5.9.

I feel we've probably done that. About half the podcast, the latter half of the podcast, I was talking with Zach about open verse, which is an automatic project to enable the likes of you and me to get free media in our WordPress websites. And I'll just make it obvious where you go to get this. If you, for example, let's say that you have a website and you need pictures of cats.

You could go to wordpress.org forward slash open verse and typing cats into the search box. Let's actually see if open versus gone any images of cats. As you'd expect lots and lots of images of cats the point being that they took over CC search, which was falling into how to describe it.

A state of disrepair, they weren't confident they could carry the initiative forward. And so wordpress.org have taken it over and it's now freely available. Now the most exciting thing for me is that in the future, at some point the difficulty that you've got at the moment is if you want to upload things to this project, there isn't a direct upload option.

You have to upload it to things like flicker or other places which CC search was scraping. But at some point in the future, if you upload things to your WordPress media library, Then you're going to have the option to tick a box to upload it and make it freely available to anybody on the web. So this is open verse.

You can also go to wordpress.org forward slash open verse forward slash about. And I just wondered if Tiffany or Rob, if you had any thoughts on this, I just think this is a really fabulous initiative making, making what could be difficult to find and hard to figure out licensing easier to understand and easier to find.

I

[00:08:12] Rob Cairns: think it's a great idea, Nathan, but I think on the automatic side, one of the things they've gotta be very careful to do is to vet the images. Somehow they get around all the copyright problems because we've seen it before on free sites where an image will get uploaded. It sits on a free site like Pixabay, it's copyrighted.

And then we know where the legal stuff goes from there. So we, the one thing automatics gotta to do is be very careful how they vet the images that's, but I think it's a great idea.

[00:08:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:08:44] Tiffany Bridge: what I think also on that point, anytime you have user-generated content like moderation and community standards are going to be really important.

Because I can absolutely imagine people trolling by like tagging things, cats, and you know, uploading all kinds of questionable imagery to it, right? Like things not a cat in the way that you are probably thinking of it. And so I think that's something that is really challenging.

I think that's something that automatic in particular really had challenges with as they when they bought tumbler, suddenly community generated imagery and things like that was like, and online safety became a problem for them in a way that it really hadn't with wordpress.com because wordpress.com is a different product.

So I think you know, like keeping the directory, like safe and clear of. Colorful pranks, revenge pour. And that sort of thing I think is going to be a real a real challenge for them because this project its profile has been raised by its association with the WordPress product project.

And so that means there's just going to be more attention on it. And more attention always means some portion of it only takes a few people to be really like antisocial to to really make the, make things difficult for the rest of the.

[00:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And one that kind of hadn't occurred to me that then the nice thing is that WordPress themselves are not hosting these images.

They are, it is just a search feature, which is designed to help them scrape all of the other content outside. But yeah, you're absolutely right. If people in their WordPress media library upload things, which. Let's say tagged as a cat, but are clearly not a cat that could be very difficult and end up, really causing anxiety and trouble and basically things being on the internet that nobody wishes to see.

I'm guessing that in the future, somebody like automatic will have the capabilities to do some kind of AI. Interrogation of those images and try to figure out if they are potentially flammable the other nice thing to say about this project, which is somewhat unexpected, is at the moment it's limited to the usual kind of content that you might expect.

So for example, it's limited to things like audio and video and animated gifts and all of those kinds of things, but in the future the initiative will be to take all things WordPress and make those. Part of CC search as well. So for example, if you had a block pattern, you could upload that block partner and anybody else could download that block pattern, or if you had some sort of, I dunno, custom theme dot Jason file, that you were really pleased with the new, wanted to share it to the world that also, and the intention, of course there is just to make WordPress a much bigger, easier to use ecosystem because you've got this one central repository for all things, and it should be easy to do in the WordPress admin.

Anyway, I just thought it was a really curious. Okay, sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. The next one up is I should say we've got, I've got three URLs for that. The first one, like I said, is open vers.org forward slash sorry, wordpress.org forward slash open verse. There's an about page. Just add about to that as well.

And so there you go. You can find those. And the piece that I did on the WP Tavern was if you just go to search on the podcast icon in the menu, then it's episode number 10. It's the latest one? That mark December the second. Okay. So you can hear about all of that on. Okay, the next one we've got some WP drama is we don't often do WP drama on the show, but this one seems to have just landed perfectly for us.

I'm going to try and navigate a path through this so that we don't end up annoying anybody. That is my intention anyway, but this is a piece that came out of an email that delicious brains dropped into the inboxes of owners of ACF. Now, if we rewind the clock a little bit earlier in the year, Elliot Condon decided he was going to sell ACF and he found a home in the the delicious brains team.

And it was, it all seemed to be a really nice match made in heaven. Obviously, a very capable bunch of people with a heritage. Producing fabulous WordPress plugins. However, there was some cause for concern at the time, because if memory serves correctly, I think it was a tweet to put out by a delicious brains at that time, at the time, just soon after they'd bought it, which kind of had the implication of it was that they were investigating models whereby lifetime deal owners could possibly be charged in the future.

And they were wondering what. Might look like there seem to be some pushback at that point. And so again, we're going back several months ago. The guys that delicious brains seem to walk that whole thing back and say, yep, it's fine. We will in fact honor lifetime deals. So that whole discussion went dormant for a while.

And until this week, and then an email dropped, like I said, in the inboxes of those lifetime deal owners and the implication of the email seems to be along the lines of look, we're still actually interested in getting you guys on a, on a contract, on a subscription plan. Email, really sort seemed to create the usual Twitter storm.

There's a few people, for example, notably Paul Charlton from WP. Felt that this was a little bit disingenuous. He felt, I think the words that you described it, it left a bad taste in his mouth or something that they see thought that essentially, if you've bought a lifetime deal, that's what they should be honoring because they knew what they were getting into when they bought it off Elliot and various other people seem to agree.

And of course there were then the other people on the other side, who were having the opposite thought process saying, look, this is going to be an expensive thing to keep going. We need to be able to pay the guys at delicious brains. And the only real model for that is a subscription model.

They can't keep the support going if nobody's paying for it. Anyway. So that's where we're at this time, this week. And I was just interested to know what your thoughts are now. If either of you want to just jump in and get all political, that's fine by me, but I'm staying out of it.

[00:15:19] Rob Cairns: Yeah. From Nathan.

And so my take on this one is very simple. If you're buying LT. You should a company that offered an LTD, you should honor it. And I'll give you an example of a company that's done. That is automatic male poet. They bought male poet last year, right after black Friday when male poet ran a massive LTD and they've honored that 100% that said the LTD model is not sustainable down the long run.

So these companies gotta be really careful because you honestly need reoccurring revenue to improve development of the product and improve the support of the product. So it's a cross you're splitting hairs here, and I'm not going to get political either, except for the fact that I think we just gotta be really careful in this space when we all say, oh, LTDs are wonderful.

And my question is, do you want the company to be there in three years? And I'll leave it at that and let you decide.

[00:16:21] Tiffany Bridge: I agree, but I think there's another dimension to this. And I'm saying this to be clear that I'm saying this isn't I'm an employee of nexus. My paycheck says liquid web, right? So people are very concerned about consolidation in the WordPress space and little indie plugins getting bundled in with bigger companies and how do smaller plugin authors compete.

And I feel like part of the way that smaller plugins compete is by fixing their business model. Like you said, LA. Ludicrous to me, like just absolutely astonishing to me that ACF went 10 years having an unlimited lifetime license. Like is that possible? You know what Elliot sold the program.

So maybe it wasn't all that sustainable. And I think that if we are concerned about having a flourishing and diverse WordPress ecosystem, we need to give a little grace when especially these smaller companies are trying to fix their business model. Delicious brains should have offered something when they were asking for the money.

That's like rule number one, right? If you want somebody to do something for you offer to give them something in return. But aside from that, I think we need to think about people are concerned about the overall health of the WordPress ecosystem. Like delicious brains is not a large company it's got like what 24.

They can't, they, if they are thinking that they can't absorb this forever, let's, you don't have to pay the money that you don't know them, but you could at least give them a little space to figure it out. That's what I think about it.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's really interesting. I think my guess is that the reason Elliot was able to do it for 10 years is because it was an absolute runaway success.

And so year on year, he was still generating a livable living wage from it because, each year there's the people paying the lifetime deal model was enough to, to, to allow whatever standard of living here decided him and his family needed. But then he produced, it was probably a couple of years ago.

So long along, probably before the, he even got into discussions with delicious brains. He produced this chart on his website where he showed the amount of subscribers and this line went. Fairly it wasn't very steep. Shall we say now, actually, if you'd have put the X and Y axis on a different projection, it probably would have been pretty steep, but it was put next to support requests.

And the support requests was just this logarithmic curve that was almost extending towards infinity. So you had subscribers just going up a little bit support requests, just going up to the point where it was obvious, there was a mismatch and, five years ago, those two lines were much close together.

And as each year went by, they just got further and further apart. So I'm con my assumption is that maybe the support was just taking away from the ability for him to actually code it. So he went lifetime, but he managed to get the delicious brains guys to agree to it. And I'm just wondering now, if there's an element of regret that costly, the argument would be.

You've paid for your lifetime deal. That is the deal that you got. And I D I'm not a lawyer. So I don't know if that contract moves over to the person who bought that company, but other argument would be they could just stop developing it. They could just say, actually, do you know what the support for this is ridiculous.

We're hemorrhaging money sad to say, even though we've invested loads of money in buying it, we can't carry on doing it unless people reach into their pockets. And so my feeling is that we're somewhere there. They've got a load of support that they can't sustain. So they're looking, maybe scrambling is the right word.

They desperate to find a model that works. So they reaching out to people, maybe some of whom will think, do you know what I get it? I am now going to subscribe. Certainly the reaction this week initially went to the, there was a lot of volume saying this is ridiculous. We've already paid, but there were the other people as well, who were saying, we need to be able to support this.

So let's reach in. So I'm curious to see where this one will go. Sorry. I felt like I was on a massive diatribe there. I'm sorry. I spoke for ages. Ah it's

[00:20:38] Rob Cairns: okay. Now 10 time will tell, where we saw this in the community about five or six years ago was with headway themes and anybody remembers that tobacco they had, and I was a headway user big time, and they had a lot of LTDs that were lifetime licenses that were cheap and they couldn't sustain the revenue and their support costs.

And that's what caused them to go under actually was a direct result to two LTDs versus support. So gotta be.

[00:21:09] Nathan Wrigley: Couple of comments about that. Chris uses saying that he thinks lifetime deals do work as a business model. For example, he says Pippin and others have made it work for a long time. DB oh, delicious brains knew what they were buying into.

Yeah, that's an interesting point. I would assume that delicious brains knew the exact numbers of lifetime deal subscribers at the point of taking it over, you would imagine that would be part of that you diligence they would have done. Yep. That good point. Thanks Chris. And Peter Ingersoll. Hello.

Peter says he would think that delicious brains knew what they were getting into. They probably should have been more careful with their promise of everything will be business as usual. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, from one dog, sorry, Tiffany, you carry on. Sorry.

[00:21:55] Tiffany Bridge: Pippin just sent was business too.

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he sold it. Who did he sell it to? Come on the collective hive mind. I've forgot. Awesome motive.

[00:22:07] Tiffany Bridge: What I'm saying is before we say, oh yeah, of course it's sustainable. No, the people who are doing that are now selling their businesses. So I don't know that I would assume that it is actually sustainable forever.

[00:22:20] Rob Cairns: So it becomes an exit strategy more than a sustainable strategy.

[00:22:26] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you Courtney. She says also motive. Yeah, it wasn't beside wasn't awesome motive. So it's interesting. So example, Peter of sorry Christopher, Chris Hughes, the example of Pippin who knows? Yeah. Maybe he got out at the right time as well.

And we'll have to see what SIADH can manage to pull out there. I would imagine the guys over it, or some motive though, I think they've probably got slightly deeper pockets and it feels to me like that's a bigger play. Like they've got this much bigger ecosystem to play with where I dunno, it just feels like that's now one part of a much bigger wheel.

And Maya saying lifetime deals in other industries don't bring long-term prosperity. They should be limited to a couple of years. Long-term. Just a number of problems later. Do you know? That's interesting. I was reading and I don't know if it was about a WordPress thing, but I was reading some alternative where instead of offering lifetime, now you just offer a really nice long license instead.

So instead of saying literally lifetime, in other words, the lifetime of the product, you just give a real generous five-year deal or 10 years or whatever. And then at least there's a moment in time where that deal is going to run out. And everybody that's bought that can come along for the ride and hope the product succeeds.

So there's maybe some other models to be suggested there as well. Okay. So that was the first WP drama of this week. And that we've got this story, which just keeps on giving. I've had to convert this into an Evernote document because it came in an email and I've stripped out all the all of the, the personal links that you might be able to click.

If you read it in the show notes. Just to paraphrase. Oh dear. Last week we had some news about ocean WP. The current maintainers of ocean WP were a bit annoyed because the former owner of ocean WP had started to advertise that, that they'd fallen out and essentially stopped using ocean WP because they don't really want to maintain it.

I was the original founder and author. I stepped away and I'm basically launching a new product. Please don't use ocean WP. I want you to use my rival and I've now even forgotten what it was called. That's how long a week is. And and now we have the in the ebb and flow of this new story, the guys have come back.

Accusing I believe his name is Nicholas, the founder of ocean WP of essentially logging in somehow hijacking their email delivery service and logging in and actually writing a promotional email. To the ocean WP subscribers. Now, presumably when he sold it to them, he sold them the rights to have this, but whether, I don't know why they didn't lock him out and you know, dis disabled his account so that he couldn't do it anymore.

Anyway. So this is the drama that keeps on giving. We'll probably be back next week. There'll be some, the Cecil will have tipped in the other direction, but I just, again, I'm just trying to stay out of it a bit, but it does seem like a curious story. I think what is happening here though is what do they call it in?

Like some mutual. Something destruction, they're basically ensuring that they're both going to go out of business the longer they carry us on the more ridiculous it seems. There's no hope of anybody on reveling, what the truth is anymore. And all that I get out of it is complete distrust from both to both sides.

I don't know if that's me being a little bit on just, but that's the way I'm feeling. They're both accusing each other of things. I can't unpick it. So I'm just going to think I don't know who to trust, so probably I'll just stay away from anything anybody does. But again, I'll, I'll hand it over to you guys to mull it over.

[00:26:14] Tiffany Bridge: I'm first of all, I don't know why the first thing you do, isn't change all your passwords. Yeah. You know what I mean? Every job that I have ever left, I have stood there and watched my manager change all the passwords that I was always leaving ride because if something like this happens like, I want you to know it was not me.

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. That's exactly it. Yeah. Just lock me out please. Before I leave the building, take away my physical keys, take away my digital keys, make it so that I can't do it. Yeah. It's harsh, right? It's a real moment in time, especially if you are fired for want of a better word, but still it locks you out.

You can't come back. That doesn't seem to have been the case. And it seems to have been there on doing, sorry, Rob. You were about to say

[00:26:57] Rob Cairns: it's okay. I, if it were me, I don't know if I trust either one of them, because as Tiffany said, they didn't bother changing the password to new. You got to wonder how much of this was.

Colluded between the two of them just to create this stupid mess. And and frankly I'll add to it. We have enough drama going on in the WordPress community that we don't need more. So this would be a red flag, stay away from both of them and just.

[00:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: The curious thing about this is just going a few years ago, maybe two or three years ago, I had a really high opinion of ocean WP and I confess I have never actually installed it and used it, but from everything that was coming in the WP belt, Facebook group and all of the commentary, a lot of people were saying, yeah, it's really stable.

It's really lean. It works really well. And the fact that the original founder just sold it very quietly and didn't seem to tell anybody that he'd done that and then left a bunch of developers to carry the torch and then came back a bit later complaining about it, all. It all just seems a little bit silly.

I'll tell you what, if any of the guys involved want to get in touch and want to set the record straight? You're welcome. But we'll, we'll have to moderate it, I think, and make sure that we're not being horrible to each other. Yeah. I'll say is, from my perspective, nobody's getting any benefit out of this story is only making everybody seem like like, you that there's something to be avoided.

Okay. Let's move on. Anyway. I'll put the Evernote link in the show notes. If you want to read the email under, try to figure it out for yourself. If you can be bothered. Okay. Next one then. Let's go to WP Tavern. Once more, this is just in Tetlock's piece is called it, ask the bartender is his little regular series where he takes a question or a, not just a one-liner, but a more in-depth question.

And he tries to answer it from his developer and theme builder perspective. And this week, the question paraphrase goes like this. Should I use a page builder or wait for block themes? And we develop that question by saying, I'm a page builder user. I like page builders, but I can see the promise of the group.

Project and full site editing, but essentially I'm frustrated by how slow the development is taking, how long it is taking to get to the point where it's going to be useful or certainly an equal of a page builder. And the two which were mentioned in the piece where elements or pro and oxygen, of course there are others.

And then Justin comes back and says, yeah, it is frustrating how slow it is. And obviously I'm running a summit all about page builders. I'm really bullish about them. I really liked them equally. I'm really into the Gutenberg editor. And I don't know if either of you two have got any thoughts on this, actually I know Rob's thoughts more than I know Tiffany's so maybe we'll start with Tiffany.

I don't know if you're a page builder user, or if you're like fully into Gutenberg and what your thoughts are on where we stand right at the moment, which will keep using.

[00:30:05] Tiffany Bridge: With the caveat that, so before if we, we talked about this before, there's four, I was in my current role. I worked on the special projects team and automatic, which is the team that Matt Mullenweg dispatches when there's a WordPress site or a site that he thinks should be on WordPress to help out.

And part of our core mission was to. Advanced and evangelize Gutenberg, so apply whatever grains of salt you need. To my opinion, I don't care for page builders at all. We did, we spent a lot of time rescuing content from page builders because the content goes into the database with all of the, like the page builder stuff in it.

And we had to do a lot of extracting it when we wanted to change the site's design. And I think one of the great things about WordPress out of the box is that the content is really independent of the theme, which I think is something that the page builder experience breaks. So I'm not a huge fan of them to begin with.

I understand why they exist. I understand the value of them. I understand the value of them to you know, freelancers and small businesses that maybe don't have that really can't spend a ton of time, like developing custom themes like my team did. But I love the direction that this is all going. I think.

Like Gutenberg and full site editing or the future of WordPress. That said if I were getting into freelancing today, I don't know that I'd be using, I certainly wouldn't be using full site editing on client projects just yet. I'd wait at least a year before I consider those things ready for production on clients.

I, my personal blog uses a full site. Editing theme uses a block theme, but like it's extremely neglected and I don't don't care if it breaks. And that's still where I think FSE is. And I think that's where it's going to be for about a year before. We're really, before it's really ready for.

[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. I'll just reiterate some of those points actually, because they are the article. Justin goes on to mention that there are obviously an increasing those small number of block-based themes. I think there's something last time I checked it, it was 28 and then it went up to 60 something.

I think block-based themes and the repository is pretty small, but he does draw out a few that he thinks he would like to draw attention to. He's talking about the SKL theme by and as an RN and also Tov as well. I think that's how you pronounce that, but then he has special mention for the new default.

Six, sorry, 5.9 theme, which is going to be called 2022. And he seems to be very happy with the way that works. And it's got 60 custom block patterns and, there's a whole bunch of stuff bundled into that. And so I think for Justin, at least where we're at a tipping point, if you are the user that is wanting to do things with a point click drag interface, page builders, they totally do the job.

And maybe they would be the quickest way, right this second, but by illustrating things like 20, 22 and these block themes that are coming around, maybe the Seesaw is starting to even out a little bit more. Yeah. Anyway, sorry.

[00:33:15] Rob Cairns: So my take on it is if you're comfortable with page builders, user page builder, if you're comfortable with Gutenberg use Gutenberg, I'm not a big fan of saying change the tool because it's shiny.

Now that all said, I'm all in wood Gutenberg these days. And I think where you need to reauthorize is Gutenberg out of the box that automatic wants you to run is not ready for prime time. The only way to run Gutenberg is go do a good bird based scene and go to a good embrace block. Add on. So my choice sets, cadence all the way, cadency and cadence box, and then toss in something like editor plus by extended.

So the problem with doing this. What you Vanessa has done is created a customized page builder. Whether people want to call it that or not. And folks that automatic don't shoot me because Gutenberg is a page builder. I'm sorry. So there you go. So is it any different than going out and getting Elementor or BeaverBuilder and buying ad-ons it's the same thing just in another ecosystem.

And everybody says if you pull out the advantage of Gutenberg is you can switch to FIM. As long as you'll use an ad on the minute you pull out cadence add on, or you pull out X editor, plus anything you put in that's dependent on. That's not going to work. So what I'm going to tell people I've played with them for four months is it's the same issue.

So if you I've gotten that way as a learning experience, but if you choose to go that way, 70 online issues of page builder are still there. So be real careful.

[00:35:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I would say that Justin right at the end mentioned fabulous plugin, which I confess I'd never heard of before. And it might be worth checking out.

It's called layout grid block by automatic. And I'll just quote Justin here. He says, if you do need some heavy work, having worked with layouts, there are several block-based grid plugins. When I have needed such a tool, I have almost exclusively relied on the layout grid block by automatic performance, this one job and does it well, I'd never heard of it to be honest, but when I'll put it up on the page, you can find [email protected] forward slash plugins forward slash layout dash grid.

It looks pretty good, actually. It was last updated a couple of weeks ago. It's got a hundred thousand active installs you know, not too many ratings, but nevertheless, it, it has that capability of customizing the layouts. And you can go and explore that your own pleasure,

[00:35:58] Rob Cairns: but both need can not to be critical.

But why is it the layouts built into the core? And I'm coming back to what I was saying here we go. Building ad-ons on and we're and I think it's great, but we gotta be really careful. We're building a page builder close to experience just for a automatic product instead of a beaver builder and Elementor or an oxygen process.

[00:36:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I know what you mean. I remember that was one of pole Lacy's biggest gripes about Gutenberg. Is that it didn't right from day one. Literally day one. It didn't have some sort of concept of what the layout would look like in the background. And I guess this is triaging that.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. I do know what you mean. I suppose it doesn't limit you to horizontal. Rose, which is what page builders do you know? Everything's got to be in a certain way. They're overcoming that with Flexbox and things, but anyway, yeah, an interesting discussion.

You can go check it

[00:36:55] Rob Cairns: out. The ghost of Paul did

[00:36:57] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. He never failed keeps coming back. He keeps coming back. The, the article was called, ask the bartender. Should I use a page builder or for block themes? It's over on WP Tavern. Okay. Next one. I'm raising this. I should say it's just occurred to me that we were supposed to have Rimkus to Reese on the on the podcast today.

And he was supposed to be in his car, which I thought was going to be a really fabulous and witty thing to have happening, but I don't know what's gone wrong. He's he's not here, but. So I will take this one first to Tiffany with her nexus hat on consider this week. Very, seems to be a very well-respected managed WordPress hosting company.

They've got this nice new tool, which I thought was brand new. I honestly did. I thought I'd never seen this before, so that's why it's ended up in, but I think Tiffany's got some news for me there, but they've got this tool whereby if you are on canvas. And you wish to transfer a site to somebody else, either within the platform or somebody who doesn't have a constru account, you can now simply go into your dashboard essentially click a few buttons and you renege ownership of it.

You hand it over to somebody else from that moment on it becomes there's. I could see this being really useful. If you're wedded to can start really great to, you offload it to somebody they're taking over your, you don't any longer want anything to do with it. It's a nice, easy way of doing it rather than having to download it and uploading it to a new hosting environment.

If they're on Kinser, that's easy, obviously, but if they're not on kin stir, then they just end up going through a different funnel and it introduces them and steps them through the process of setting up a consumer account. I thought this was totally brand new, but I think I'm wrong until a Tiffany

[00:38:45] Tiffany Bridge: well, WP engine has transferable.

So sites that can transfer between one account and another. And I think what the difference here is that this seems to have like an affiliate payout baked in, which is cool. If you are somebody who makes your living, building WordPress sites and then handing them off it's cool that you can then get affiliate dollars from signing your clients up to , which is great.

And I'm not sure, and I just don't happen to know off the top of my head. What kind of like what does the WP engine version of the tool have in terms of supporting people getting signed up? Presumably there's a flow for that, but I don't know how much WP engine leaves it to the agency to sign their clients up.

Whereas kids there really seems to have thought about that.

[00:39:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That'd be interesting. I'd be curious to see what the workflow was. If you had. How to consider account and they detected that you were a brand new customer. What does that workflow look like? Are they going to make the assumption that, almost nothing about hosting and we're going to walk you through the 1 0 1 of hosting, here's, here's what your WordPress website, where it is.

Here's your URL, here's where the database lives and all of that and teach you what's happening as opposed to somebody who's already got an account clearly has been through that before. It's quite interesting. Yeah. Okay. What about you, Rob? I thanks for the comments, by the way. I'll come there and grab the comments after we finished.

Yeah, I

[00:40:14] Rob Cairns: think it's a really good idea. Especially if you have an exit strategy, if the client says to the developer, I don't want to work with you anymore. This is a nice, easy way to transfer the site, which is a client's property back into their names. So from that standpoint, I think I can see some big use for this.

We've all had it happen where the client says, I don't want, give me a backup. You give them a backup. They have oodles of hassle restoring that backup depending on whatever mode you use and they don't follow instructions and their new developer doesn't care. And this is an easy way for the the service provider to provide an exit strategy and say, here you go, here's your site.

And if you don't do it, that's on you and move on. I think it's a great.

Yeah.

[00:41:07] Nathan Wrigley: I remember when Google the Google domain registrar, when they provided an option for me to just, I don't know, I think it was all through g-mail. You could pass your domain registration over to somebody. And I thought that was quite novel at the time and really interesting.

So the same idea over here. Yeah. I think you've hit the nail on the head for me. It would have just been an easy way of saying to clients who no longer need what you're providing, they might've stepped out of your care plan or will never want it to be in it in the first place. You can just send them the email and say, it's yours. Great. Have a nice day. We'll we'll see you soon. And okay, so we've got some comments about this comment through firstly, let's step back a bit and go to the previous article where we talked about page builders. Peter wants to add something. It would be interesting to review the evolution of WordPress and see how many times improvements first came through plugins and eventually found their way into core.

True, good common Peter, something tells me that would be. I imagine that would be quite a significant amount of things, which ended up in core because somebody created a plugin which did one thing and did it really well. I don't really have any insight off the top of my head, but yeah, that's a really good point.

We often, Chris likes to likes to trumpet the Ken's the news constant news. And he says that this is something that flywheel did. You made a site on flywheel and put it put in the customer email address and let them sign up. And you've got an affiliate program. Ooh. Okay. So there is flywheel doing that or was flywheel doing that as well?

Courtney says she would love something like this in the plugins theme, SAS space. Ooh. I'm going to read the rest and easy way for dev builders to get the basic sell for a client and hand over the accounts for support and renew. I am curious to know more about what you think there. So are you saying basically like a templated site that you can then just hand over and say, get on with it?

So it's like DIY. Build while you just give them the bare bones and they're off to the races. That really is interesting. And in fact, is that not what this does? If you just set it up with the, and you just chop the plugins that you want in and then hand it over, would that do the same thing or are you imagining something slightly different back to Chris with Finsta, you had to create a site into your account, get a customer to sign up with an affiliate link, then transfer the site from your construe account to their account.

Okay. Thanks. And this, he says cuts all of that out. And finally, Chris, you are being prodigious with your comments. Thank you so much. The beauty of this aside from the affiliate payment is that it's less confusing for the customer to, they just get an email with a link to create an account pay, and then their site is already in their account for them and they don't need to worry about, and I'm guessing you're talking something else as we as we speak, but we'll pause there, but Courtney, if you want to develop that.

Quite interested to see where that goes. Yeah, that sounds cool. I think

[00:44:00] Tiffany Bridge: to Courtney's point like licensing for plugins and themes, because if you don't want to be on the hook for the renewal for whatever it is for the duration of the, of your client's site, you have to get them to go to the website and buy the license and send that information over to you.

That's that's

[00:44:19] Nathan Wrigley: a problem. And Courtney's immediately chimed in with the exact same thing. You've just been saying, Tiffany, she says she worked for the events calendar for four years and we often had customers seeking support and they didn't create the site. And presumably Courtney, presumably weren't in titled perhaps to the support, which was that.

Based upon a licensed home by somebody else. Yeah. Okay. And then she carries on handling over, handing over the licenses for customers would be really helpful if there is, to my knowledge, there is no clever way of doing that. It was always a case of the only way that I've ever gotten used to that was the plugins, which provide you the ability to disable the license on the sites, which you initially built.

You hand it over and then you just tell them, look, you've got two weeks to just make sure everything's working and then you're going to have to go out and buy these licenses. I'll give you. In which time I will support it. If there's any support requests, I'll deal with them. But after that week, that two weeks, whatever I'm going to nullify your license, you won't get any more.

You won't get any more updates, but I've never found a perfect way of doing that. There's a third-party SAS platform in this. And

[00:45:30] Rob Cairns: Nathan Long, long time ago, I made a decision in my agency that I was not going to provide clients with licenses at all. I just don't do it. And I don't care if it's a page builder.

If it's a plugin, the client buys the license and I will help them guide them through the process to buy it. And even with my care plan clients for security, I buy. Be on the security software that does the backup and locking down the site. I don't buy any licenses to contract said that's not in the client's responsibility, not mine.

And then they 100% owner site and they're free to go

[00:46:10] Nathan Wrigley: wherever they want. It's a messy business, isn't it? And there really is no perfect way of doing it. Curious though, Rob w when you're in that process and you're in the discussion with your clients, how do you literally say, go out into the marketplace, find something that you think you'd are you making recommendations?

I suggest that you use this for that problem and this, for that problem, because I've used it before. So you're recommending what you hope they will then buy a copy and paste in the license key for you.

[00:46:40] Rob Cairns: Yeah. I make a recommendation. I'll even give them the link. I, I will help and guide them through the process all the way.

And the problem is though, is it's the ownership thing. And one of the decisions I made as an agency owner is I want my clients to own their stuff, and I want them to own their site. And I want them to own the ability to post and make page changes to their site. So I actually empower my clients. So when the way you empowered them is to make them buy the stuff.

Now they'll look at it and say, but now my cost goes up a bit and I say, but you're protecting yourself self, because if you want to go somewhere else, you can like, so that's been my attitude for a

[00:47:27] Nathan Wrigley: Long time. Yeah. Yeah. It seems sensible. I am really deeply into Tiffany's idea of this being solvable and a, and if somebody can do that and just some it's almost like escrow for license keys someplace where you can dump a license key and it transfers ownership over to somebody else.

That would be nice. Let's see. Let's see if anybody can run with that idea, but it won't be me. Okay. Let's move on. So that was the Ken's to piece now. Aw, this is some good news. Some really nice news. This is WP Tavern. Once again, this time though, Sarah Gooding, she's written a piece entitled PHP foundation gains momentum with $280,000 estimated annual budget on open collective.

Now I'm sure all of you realize that WordPress and lots and lots and lots of software, as much as 40%, I think of the top might even be more like 60% of the top one, 10,000 websites or something are running on PHP. It's in this article, large amount of the internet using PHP. But the problem is it relies on a very small number of people who are largely given their time for free.

And of course we have the. Terrible problem that if any of those people step away or are on able to contribute any more than what, what seemed like a healthy basis for all of our websites suddenly becomes a bit more shaky. Things don't get updated and perhaps things become vulnerable. And we don't get the, the new features that a lot of these other platforms are doing.

So it looks like some people have reached into their pockets to try to help mitigate this problem. And we hear about automatic Laravel Acquia, zenned, craft, CMS private Packagist tied ways PrestaShop symphony and jet brains. And I think JetBrains is the largest of the contributors they together have put together this annual budget of roughly 200 now.

Thousand dollars. So just over a quarter of a million dollars with the intention of moving the project forward, I think this whole story came about because there was a long time prolific as Sarah writes, she says the loss of longtime prolific contributor, Nikita pop-off, who was moving away to work on LLVM, which significant, significantly less time on PHP.

He was one of the major contributing factors to the formation of the foundation. I do remember this story from a few years ago where essentially a really tiny number of people, if they were to just step away from the project, PHP basically would have ground to a whole development of ceased. And I don't know how many people, a quarter of a million dollars or $280,000 equates to how many man hours that actually means.

But anyway, this seems all like good news people dipping in and helping the project out. What are you guys.

[00:50:23] Rob Cairns: I think it's good. They're sending money to help the project out and keep it going as good. Does Synnex again, argue, I'm sure the big money and investment will change control. Like we've already seen that with a number of projects, but I, in this case, I think it's really good.

[00:50:41] Tiffany Bridge: Yeah. And I think there's enough. The interest in keeping PHP going is distributed enough that I don't think it's going to become, like too centralized in one company, which is great. But I think like I'd love to see like a contributed, like a sponsored contributor program for PHP, like we have for WordPress.

Like there should, PHP is too important. People should be getting paid to work on a full-time

[00:51:08] Nathan Wrigley: the, it don't seem like a lot of money. It's a lovely piece of money, isn't it? $280,000. But when you actually equate that to development hours, it suddenly seems like that's not too many manual workers know exactly.

And the, yeah, so we'll have to see. And again though, Tiffany, I think you highlighted my concerns. The fact that I was able to list off, I'm going to say 10 or 11 companies there gave me a little bit of a little bit of assurance. Cause if it had, have been two or three companies, you immediately, my brain is thinking what, why.

Nobody else's, what is it they're going to get out of it and they'll they gonna make the project go off in one particular direction, which suits the project that they've got. There's a whole load of stuff there. Automatic, of course, WordPress queer is Drupal craft CMS. So another CMS platform.

So there's three CMS platforms in there, plus Presta shop. I guess argue that. CMS. So yeah, it should be good, but my hope is that this amount of money is going to be enough. I'll just put the screen back up. Cause there's a nice quote here. It says by continuing to fund on a quoting, sorry, by continuing to fund full-time and part-time developers on the PHP project Zen to sup to ensure the ongoing prosperity and modernization of the PHP language and continue to its continued use for mission critical application development.

We were progressing rather allegedly thinking that the problem was not critical. However, Nikita's decision forced us to intensify our work on the foundation. So that. Yeah, good luck PHP. Let's hope it carries on, but I think you're right, Tiffany. It would be nice to see somebody being succonded directly out of the WordPress project just to work on PHP.

Right next one. I love this piece. I have no idea where this came from this week. The a, this came into my Twitter feed or something like that. So we're going to share agony stories. This is, I've never even heard of this website before, but it's a beautiful piece. It's on the B two tab advocate.com.

I don't know how to say that. The B2 to advocate, I think is how you'd say that. There's a piece that they've got there called client patient patiently waits until 4:55 PM, Friday afternoon, to request another revision to the project. This is not news. This is just something quite funny that in the piece, they basically say that they've got a large and it feels like kind of an enterprise.

They're obviously building websites and at exactly 4 55 sounds like knock-off time is five o'clock. So everybody's getting ready. I imagine lots of bags were packed. You are literally at the point where the computer is about to be shot down. You're just hovering over the shutdown, like gone and in coms.

Gigantic laundry list of things, which you need to achieve on your maybe major client website. It's very vague. It's very difficult to achieve because they don't give you any indication really of what they want. There's no assets to go with everything. They want things to be altered that you've already done.

And so it goes like this. A client has thoughtfully waited until the last possible moment to request a massive revision despite having all week to answer an email. There's the key point all week to an answer, an email Titled urgent. The email has always roughly three pages long and highlighted in excruciating amounts of changes to the point where it was borderline fickle, as well as vague direction and no reference materials for graphics, which gave the designer nothing to work with.

Those though, these requests to make the pink font one shade lighter, and to change the word great to fantastic were relatively easy to fix the client. Also added that they forgot to mention a competition that they were running. So tomorrow we have a competition running this weekend and we'd like some graphics, social media campaign.

And ideally we want at least 100 people entering. Is there any way we can get a customer email address to a banner for the website would be good too. Like maybe they could click on it. Yep. Okay. It's a banner. And I know that those keyword things aren't meant for SEO, but I don't think it fits with the brand at all.

So please, can you remove all of those? As for the black dress campaign graphics, I don't like them. It needs. Wait for it. Wow. More to come. Just, this was just lovely and it just prompted my, it just prompted my memories of those moments, where you are desperate to get away from the computer and the email drops.

And so I was hoping Tiffany and Rob, your, maybe you've got a story tucked away, no names. Maybe I

have

[00:55:56] Tiffany Bridge: way like a trauma reaction, right?

[00:56:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's not just beautiful, because the temptation here is that while we didn't get email, we knocked off. We shot all of our computers down. And we didn't see it.

Honestly. I promise you. We didn't see it. It didn't come in until one minute past five. And by that time we'd already left. There's the temptation. But imagine they are your major, big client. You can't, can you let this go? I don't know. Anyway, Tiffany you go first.

[00:56:26] Tiffany Bridge: Oh gosh. So this almost this exact thing happened to me.

Last year. The day before Thanksgiving in the U S at 4:30 PM Eastern time, I'm the owner of a fairly large website that you've probably heard of emailed us asking for urgent major changes to his theme, because they were going to run some sort of promotion for black Friday with an advertiser. And and the thing about the special projects team with automatic is that we don't, we didn't get to have lead batteries.

We didn't get to say no to people. And like we weren't allowed to talk about being out of the office for holidays because it's a globally distributed team. So I was watching the inbox that day. So I had this request and I had to make it happen. And I did with the help of my Canadian and Indian colleagues who were not taking the next day off of work.

But yeah, that absolutely did happen. And you cannot pretend that you didn't see it on that team because you never know who has matte cell phone number. It is.

[00:57:33] Nathan Wrigley: That's it like that is a glory story though.

[00:57:37] Tiffany Bridge: Like you knocked off for two days and you come back, you find out that your team lead has been in DMS with Matt all weekend about where you work,

[00:57:43] Nathan Wrigley: because Thanksgiving is like, it's like Christmas, right? It's everybody shuts down and off you go. But you, so I'm curious about this actually, because I've never worked in an environment where there's that level of what's the word, you've got an SLA for example, and it is literally 24 7.

Nothing is out of scope. You can ask for anything at any point. So literally if any email came in from anybody at any time of day, it has to be actioned at that moment and dealt with that is.

[00:58:14] Tiffany Bridge: It was, there there were always practical constraints. There's always let me see, what's feasible on this timeline.

There, there was, there were ways to set expectations and manage expectations of course, but you know, the culture of the team was that like we're the team that says yes. So we did a lot of saying yes. And that meant a lot of you know, just working in that globally distributed model.

Like I once launched a website in 37 hours because we were handing the project off from one time zone to the next and to have to work literally around the clock to get it done. So like India would come online and we hand it over and then India would go offline. Then hand it back to you that.

[00:58:58] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

That's pretty impressive, but just the idea though, of this laundry list of things coming in. Okay. I want to delve deeper into this story. Did you dare I ask, did you actually give up your sort of Thanksgiving or did you manage to get some of the holiday? Oh, good. I still had some

[00:59:14] Tiffany Bridge: holiday because like I said, I had colleagues in countries where Thanksgiving isn't a holiday and they were working on it, but I did check in and we got them what they needed and to the client's credit, they were extremely grateful and they completely understood what they were asking for and how little time they had given us.

They were very gracious. But yeah we did it, we made

[00:59:35] Nathan Wrigley: it. I guess for most agencies that are based in a particular geographical location. So in my case, the UK, you would need to have some boundaries around email communication. And it really, this is only going to ever happen to you once 4 55 on a Friday that you're opening, you're already going to make that mistake, right?

Your policy is from that moment, I'm going to say midday Friday, or whatever it might be is going to be the cutoff point or that you fall into a roster or something like that. But that is utterly fun. That's amazing that there is a team there that essentially will act upon anything at the moment it comes in and say, yes.

Yeah, I can. I can only imagine that must have been quite.

[01:00:19] Tiffany Bridge: It could be, it really could be. I'm not there anymore,

[01:00:22] Nathan Wrigley: so make us not what you will. What about you Rob?

[01:00:27] Rob Cairns: The worst one and I've been through this multiple times, I spent 25 years in tech support with the large Toronto hospital and I was a team lead.

So this stuff used to happen all the time. But I'll share with you one that happened this year and actually it wasn't even a client. It was a former client and it was around Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. He decided a couple months before to move his website to another developer for a care plan.

The other developer managed to screw up the website and screw up his only backup and he was not a client. And he reached out to me at five 30 on the Friday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend in October. And I very politely said to him, and by the way, his e-commerce site was making 30 to $40,000 a day.

Okay. And I very politely said to him, I'd like to help you, but you're no longer a client. So you need to provide me with a bank draft for X dollars. And by the way, that X figure was a five figure amount. And without a bank draft, I'm not helping you. And he said I'll send you a credit card. And I said, and how do I know you're not going to just dispute the charge when we're done.

So I insisted on a bank draft knowing he had no way of getting that bank draft till Tuesday morning at nine.

[01:01:54] Nathan Wrigley: So it's actually you saying no.

[01:01:58] Rob Cairns: Yeah, basically the Bates said, no, I didn't

[01:02:00] Nathan Wrigley: say no

[01:02:03] Rob Cairns: career. Me and I had that bank tractor in my hand by 10 30 on Tuesday morning. I should tell him,

[01:02:10] Nathan Wrigley: there's a, there's another whole rant, traunch of stories about ex-clients, how many times.

Has an, have you been jettisoned for want of a better word by a client and they've moved on somebody else and that's fine, it's okay. But that really does seem very cheap. The service that they're offering and then you just white.

[01:02:31] Rob Cairns: And now what, now, what I'll tell you is he is this particular individual is now a client and a mid five figure client.

Because if you're making $30,000 a day, then you can afford X dollars in

[01:02:44] Nathan Wrigley: support. Yeah. Yeah. They won't make that mistake again. Played though. I think that was you sort of held you in of there and yeah,

[01:02:52] Rob Cairns: but it happens. We've all been there and, unfortunately the more you're in the support role and we've all, when I worked in healthcare, I can't tell you the number of times the director would call me.

Cause I did VIP clients had two minutes to five and say, I need you to stop by my office on your way out the door. And the minute I heard that I knew that was two and three hours later. It happens all the time. You just

[01:03:19] Nathan Wrigley: I'm problem. I've already left. I'm on the way home. Okay. Anyway. Lovely. Thank you for those stories.

They were there. We were going to have a piece of that. I'll wait, I'll hold off because REMCOs, didn't manage to join us. We were going to talk a little bit about serve bolt, but I won't mention that we're now firmly into the realms of no WordPress. We will come back to WordPress right at the very end.

But first of all, a few weeks ago, the way this is just lovely. If you weren't watching or listening to this particular show a few weeks ago, we told you about Mr. Gox, Mr. Cox is a well. It's no longer true. Mr. Gox was a mouse and and he became very famous. He became some sort of like minor intellect, internet celebrity, because his owner had constructed a cage for Mr.

Gox and the cage enabled the mouse to make financial investments based upon where he ran in the cage. If he ran through tunnel a, they would buy, if he run through tunnels, see they would sell. And then the amount of revolutions of the wheel would determine how much to buy and how much to sell.

And just to show, just to show how nobody knows what's going on in the financial markets, Mr. Gox outperformed, just everything. Mr. Gox has completely random approach, more or less throwing the dice. It outperformed just about every single financial institution out there. The sad news that I have to announce that I'm not meaning to sound funny, but that story was funny.

Mr. Gox has sadly passed on and you will no longer be able to watch his cage and make your millions from his amazing decisions. Anyway, that's on Twitter this week. So rip Mr. Gox, that was fun. A lot of fun whilst it lasted. How interesting. And then also on Twitter, Tiffany's brought us this now I confess I have no idea what's coming because Tiffany showed it to us like four seconds before we had live.

But you thought this was worth bringing to bring into bear to the show today. What's this.

[01:05:32] Tiffany Bridge: So this this person, Alison Roselli, missed her flight at O'Hare airport and was stuck in the airport overnight. And rather than having the reaction that I think most of us would have to that situation she decided that no I'm gonna make, I'm gonna make an amazing experience out of this.

And so she just went exploring in the airport and to live tweeted her experience. And full like joyful thread of look at all of the cool art. I found look at these, like I found this weird, interesting hallway that would be a cool place to hang out. And I'm going to ride these moving walkways over and over again and stare at this like neon art on the ceiling.

And it's just incredibly joyful. It's a beautiful it's just a beautiful way to get into the holiday travel season. I can't recommend this threat enough. She, there's a big dinosaur skeleton at the O'Hare airport and here's what the dinosaur skeleton looks like from underneath.

Like just generally just treating it as like a personal amusement park. Definitely recommend to read.

[01:06:38] Nathan Wrigley: So essentially it's from adversity, something positive comes a beautiful story of somebody looking could have said the grass is always greener and said, actually, I'm on the right side.

This is going to be cool. I'm going to make something nice out of it. Have. Random question, Tiffany and Rob, have you ever met somebody in your life who like displayed that characteristic in abundance where you just thought, whoa, wow. You're different. You are incredibly abusive and incredibly sincere.

I once met this. I was backpacking, sorry, this is going way off message, but I was backpacking and I was in Memphis. And I met this Polish guy and he was a bit like this person, you have plenty to complain about, but he never complained about anything. And he just kept telling me how great life was.

And I spent about three days with him and it was a relentless Torrance of positivity. Every minor thing that I would just completely ignore. Like I bought a sandwich and he goes, this is wonderful. Look at that. All you had to do was hand over paper and this guy made a sandwich for you and you didn't have to even make it.

And you got a sandwich and all you did was give him some paper. And that is brilliant. Isn't it? This kind of thing. And so I was really, he's stuck in my head and will do until the day I die. But have you ever met anybody like that?

[01:08:09] Tiffany Bridge: I've never met anybody who could be like that all the time?

[01:08:12] Rob Cairns: Not all the time.

[01:08:13] Nathan Wrigley: No. I hear airport. Where is that? Chicago?

[01:08:19] Tiffany Bridge: And Mr. Court

[01:08:21] Rob Cairns: and scribing, I used to play in O'Hare once a month for business. And I've been through there like countless times. And I can just picture this lady and what she's doing.

[01:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: Good. It does look cool. I mean, if you'd have got stuck at some sort of regional tiny airport, I wonder if Alison robot Shelly would have been quite so it's usage, but getting stuck at O'Hare.

Yeah. You could totally freak out couldn't you and start to complain about your life and how it sucked. And you, weren't going to get back to everybody that you want to see and all of that, but instead go off and wander and enjoy the pleasures that the, and from the photos, it looks like she is literally the only person there.

She's got the run of the place. That's cool. Yeah, that is cool. Okay. Thank you for that. That's really unexpected. And Rob, you've got a couple of things for us this week, the first one, nothing to do with WordPress, but the second one firmly in the WordPress community. Let's do this one first or. Water thing.

[01:09:17] Rob Cairns: So they started advertising this thing, Canada. Oh, I guess I'm on T on regular TV about mid November. It released on Disney plus November 25th. And I'm about, oh, I think I'm about six hours into the nine hours of footage give or take. And what I look back on one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time.

[01:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: So for those of you that are listening rather than watching this is I believe it's yeah, it's Disney plus, I'm pretty sure.

[01:09:50] Rob Cairns: Get back by the

[01:09:51] Nathan Wrigley: Beatles. Plus it released stay a series of three, three hours. I think that's right, again episodes where Peter Jackson, who was the director of Lord of the rings and the Hobbit and various other things, he somehow managed to get him get hold of 90 hours or something of previously unseen footage.

Yeah. At the end of the Beatles career. So really just right on the cusp of when they were finally decided to call it a day. And it's just really interesting because the, it changes my feeling about how the Beatles all ended, because everything that I ever read say that it was all a bit of a calamity and everybody fell out and this doesn't feel like that at all.

It feels like they were mates and happy and jolly, till the bitter end. Yeah.

[01:10:40] Rob Cairns: I, it sure does. It's a totally different luck. And I think what makes this series is none of this footage has been shown before none of it. And so if you're a Beatles fan, if you're a rock and roll fan, if you're sixties fans.

You go get Disney plus for at least a month to watch this cause it's well worth the.

[01:11:00] Nathan Wrigley: Really? Yeah, it is. It is really great. I don't know, TIFF, I have no idea if you like the Beatles, Tiffany, but Rob managed to push all the right buttons. The Beatles are my favorite band of all time. So I apologize if we've dragged you into something you've done.

I, I'm always interested in these kinds of stories, whether I'm interested in the particular of the particular artist or not, I enjoy the Beatles, but I'm interested in the story. I love that kind of stuff.

It is just spliced together footage there's in that, in the three hours that I watched, there's no commentary of any description.

It is literally just the first scene is them talking and it just carries on. And so there isn't really a story there's just their lives on folding like that.

[01:11:46] Rob Cairns: Nathan it's all like that. Yeah,

[01:11:49] Nathan Wrigley: absolutely. Brilliant. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. Really nice find. And then the last one is also a really nice.

We'll find is the wrong word, but for those of you into the WordPress community and wanting to find yourself a home where you want to plant your feet and call yourself home Rob Scott, something for you. Rob, this is over on LinkedIn is called the WordPress product community. I hadn't heard about it until you gave me an invite just the other day.

It's currently, it's got like nearly touching nearly 8,000 members, 7,693 members. And I thought plumbing at Rob you've done well, you put this together over the weekend. That's not the case. You know,

[01:12:32] Rob Cairns: What happened was Lincoln, has decided to take control. We all know the problem with LinkedIn groups.

They can be spammy, they can be awful. So they've now gone out and created all these product communities. And one is a WordPress product community, and they, after came after myself and my co admin is Courtney Robertson. Who's in the chat I Courtney and. They've asked us to run this group for them. So what we're trying to do is create an all encompassing LinkedIn groups.

So this is not for designers or developers, which are many of the Facebook groups we sit in. This is a, you're a WordPress user. You're welcome. You're a WordPress one to learn. You're welcome. Anybody's welcome. The biggest thing that Courtney and I are trying to do with this group is to is to keep the spam down.

So we're, I'm in a process and we'll talk about it probably later today or tomorrow of writing a what's an appropriate post policy for the group. So I'll tell you now, we're not going to allow all out individual promotion. If it benefits the community. Great. If it's about buy my product, it's probably not going to happen in that group.

It's not the place for it. We want to make it a good place for everybody, because one of the things. I care about, I know Courtney cares about, I know Tiffany cares about, I know you care about Nathan and our friend, the trader cares about Mr. Paul. I have to work him into it because Paul and I did this amazing podcast that turned in to be all about community.

And you know, what we got to do is stop worrying about all the fractions in the WordPress community and start building it. And this was just another place that we can go to to build the WordPress community. And that's what they care about at the end of.

[01:14:35] Nathan Wrigley: I am I confess I don't really use LinkedIn too much.

I find myself more in I did find myself a lot in Facebook and I'm slowly starting to make that a less important part of my life. And, and, but I've, it's a Seesaw as Facebook has died, Twitter has got Twitter taken over. I really do need to make more of an effort to not spend like a quarter of my day on social media.

But yeah, this looks great. It's called the WordPress product community. It's a listed group. LinkedIn, I will endeavor to put that into the show notes that I put out

[01:15:13] Rob Cairns: and I can everybody's welcome. We just, and if you've got ideas, you can throw them at me. You can throw them at Courtney. You can, like we want to hear them.

So you know, we really care about you guys and that's what matters at the end of the day. So it's a really, it's been a fun weekend. Yeah.

[01:15:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'll buy a brand new brand, new adventure for you. Where do you hang out? Tiffany? Do you, are you like a social media person or are you trying to step away or never go in or

[01:15:43] Tiffany Bridge: I am, I spend way too much time on Twitter.

That's way too much time on Twitter. Like I need to extract myself from Twitter. It's not good for.

[01:15:54] Nathan Wrigley: I have this I, everything that I've read about Twitter and every complaint that I hear about Twitter is how incendiary can be my addiction. My increasing addiction is totally the opposite. I am just because it's full of it's interesting stuff.

My Twitter feed is not reactionary. It's not triggering my sort of, my desire to get retribution or to reply. Snarkily I'm just seeing over and over again. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's curious. And it's, I think it's basically because I only follow WordPress people. I'm pretty sure that's a hundred percent of the cases I'm following WordPress people.

And so I have a really positive experience over there and, but you wait two years from now, it's really I need to extract myself

[01:16:43] Tiffany Bridge: a number of my interest areas are on Twitter and I follow all of them from the same account. And that's part of the.

[01:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Courtney's here. Rob, she says, I want to start into areas that skew towards 20 somethings as well as the future of WordPress.

Well, I shall be joining you in the 20 things. I think I qualify there. In fact, I'm like 20 somethings twice, maybe even three times over. So I, I'm a shoe-in right. Okay. That's all we've got. I think there's no more unless either of you have got something that I've missed.

[01:17:17] Rob Cairns: No I'm good.

And by the like, Tiffany I'm with you, I spend way too much time on Twitter too. So I'm there.

[01:17:25] Nathan Wrigley: Like

[01:17:25] Tiffany Bridge: my Twitter username is Tiffany because that's how long I've been there.

[01:17:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, wow. That is it. Do you know what? I saw that when I was putting the show notes together, I saw Tiffany and I thought, boy, she either paid for that.

Or she's been in for absolutely ages.

[01:17:41] Tiffany Bridge: I have been there that long that I've got my first name.

[01:17:45] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know?

Has the Twitter handle BPH. She's got a three-letter Twitter handle, which is her initials, and it's she must have been sat next to Jack Dorsey when he pushed the button. Pretty amazing. Anyway, thank you very much. I really appreciate you joining us. We will be back next week. Hopefully at some point Tiffany, I nearly said Switzerland

it's hopefully Tiffany will come back at some point in the new year and certainly Rob, I'm hoping that you will as well, really appreciate it. If you've got any comments, leave them over on the WP belts.com website. You can find this it's this week in WordPress episode number 188. Tiffany, you don't know this is coming, but we all, you don't have to.

I'm not going to make you or anything, but if you feel like waving, we use the wave in the album art. If you give us a to stick up that hand. There we go. We got it. We got it. Perfect. Thank you very much. We will end it right there. Thanks. Very much guys. Appreciate all the comments coming in. And Courtney, last one, it's almost 20, 22.

Yeah, we've got 1, 5, 2, 2, 2 final episodes. I think of the show before the new year, but thanks for dropping by everybody. See you later.