This Week in WordPress #192

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 192 entitled peak Wordle. It was recorded on Monday the 17th of January, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined today by three guests, firstly, by Jess Frick and also Devinder sinned, Keynes and bet Hannon. We're going to be talking a lot about WordPress and there's a lot to talk about the field guide for WordPress 5.9 is up for discussion.

Will the customizer be around in the future where block themes are going to be the normal open source? Is it time for a bit of a rethink about the way it is governed Martin? Rand Hendrickson certainly thinks so I'm going to be joined next week. Live for a UI UX show with peach and Larry. We talk about how you can get your own website inspected by her.

If you have concerns about each UI and UX. With always being notified for everything by every app. Twist is a new platform, which we look at very briefly and it has notifications all switched off. What about word camp? So you're going to be going to those in the next few weeks months, possibly this year.

In which case do you want to have some different guidelines about COVID measures? There's a proposal to change those extend. If I have got a way of getting the block patterns into your posts and pages, and we discuss that and we. Talk about the craze, which is sweeping the internet Wordle. I don't really get it, but it's everywhere.

It's all coming up next on this weekend, WordPress. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello. Hello. I say hello a lot at the beginning because it takes ages for the audio to second. I don't know why, but that's why I do it. I say hello a lot. So more hellos. Hopefully the audio is by now. Settled down. Very nice to have you with us.

It's episode number. I think this is episode number 192 of the show this week in WordPress. We do it every Monday at 2:00 PM, UK time. Each week, we feature a panel of interesting people. And today we've got a returning member of the show. We've got Devinder coming back. I'll introduce him in a moment properly, but we've got some new people on the show.

We've got Jess Frick and we've got bet Hannon very, very quickly. I'm going to introduce them one at a time. They've written me a little biography, but let's go. Let's go. Let's go with Jess. First. Jess is the director of product at nexus. I'm sure you've heard of nexus before, where she's focused on bringing the best web applications to consumers with the best performance possible.

Although she's been building websites for nearly 30 years, she fell in love with WordPress in 2008 has been devoted ever since. And she's not obsessing about all things, digital, digital, you can find her enjoy quality time with a family, bringing a Saifai series, watching roller skating or dog videos, or brewing some ice tea.

Very welcomed to you, Jesse, how you doing?

[00:03:06] Jess Frick: Doing great. Doing great. I figured that roller skating and dog videos were very important to the bio. I think it's a good positioning

[00:03:13] Nathan Wrigley: statement. Yeah. Now I'm feeling a shame because I don't do either of those things. I feel there's a significant lack of dog skating and roller icing.

[00:03:24] Bet Hannon: No, the crossover, if we can get dogs on rollerskates

[00:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. And drinking ice tea, this one, I feel Tik TOK is the place for this not a podcast about WordPress. Jess, your, your video seems to have adjusted to a sudden stop. We can hear you well enough, but if at any point you struggle with that, just click refresh and I'll let you in immediately, if that does happen again.

We also have with us Betts, Hannon and bet is the founder and CEO of Beckham and business websites, which is a full service WordPress agency with a specialization in web accessibility. Find out more about that in a little while. She's also been a contributor on the WP support team, a WordCamp volunteer and is the co-organizer of her local WordPress meetup in bend Oregon.

Very nice to have you with us, but. Yeah, very nice. You you expressed concern about your your broadband capabilities today as well. So hopefully if one of us keeps refreshing, we'll get you back in. If anything goes wrong. Very nice to have you. And finally returning, I don't know how many times you've been on the show.

Devinder but it's definitely more than one Devinder since case probably doesn't need too much of. I mentioned to people in our audience, but I'm going to do it anyway. Devinder is a creative who loves to create online spaces, powered by WordPress in the ecosystem for 15 plus years, focused on creating websites, digital products, courses, coaching, and consulting to help online businesses grow in the right spirits, direction and profits.

Hi, Devon, how are you doing?

[00:05:00] Davinder Singh Kainth: I see how much time I spent. Drafting that introduction.

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So it sits in a Google docs over and just get whipped out from time to time. Very nice to have you all with us. We've we've got a lot to talk about. We always drone on about WordPress. That's the intention towards the end.

We stray off topic a little bit and go off in different directions depending on what Ali or the contributors have brought today. Welcome back, Jess. If it goes wrong again, just do exactly the same thing and we'll we'll make sure that you pop right in. Okay. Let me share my screen. Feel free guys, because I know that two of you have not been on the show before.

You might feel that you need to constrain your comments or when. Don't worry about that. Just interrupt. If you feel you've got something to say, I have a total case of verbal diarrhea often, and I'll just keep talking. So just like those

[00:05:54] Bet Hannon: videos of the British government thing, where they all just talk over what

[00:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: exactly do that do exactly.

That's what I'm used to do. Exactly. That. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay. Before we get stuck into the WordPress news, this is WP bills. This is our website. If you want to go there, feel free. There's a few links at the top to the subscribe link. Just here is probably the best one. If you want to stay up to date with all the bits and pieces that we do, there's some newsletters, YouTube.

Blah. But yeah, if you want to go there, that would be really nice. Another thing to mention is if you want to participate in the chat for this, you are going to need to go to a special URL. If you're on Facebook, it's chat.restream.io forward slash F B. It's actually in the, what's it called the little post at the top.

It's there already, but if you don't want to be anonymized, you need to do that because otherwise we just see a little generic avatar and your name doesn't appear. If you're on YouTube, you need to be logged into Google and probably the best way to find this is to go to WP builds.com forward slash live.

Can I recommend that while I introduce the first topic, you just open up a new tab, go to Twitter or Facebook and just share that out. Let everybody know that's what you're doing for the next 20 minutes, even if you've got it on in the background, and maybe you'll be able to drag some people in to contribute to our discussion today.

Okie doke. Hello, Peacher. How are you doing? She's the first one to make a comment today and it's nice to see you. We'll be talking about you in a minute. Your ears must be burning. Okay. So let's get stuck into the first bit today. This is over on wordpress.org. If you follow WordPress closely, you will know that WordPress 5.9, which was supposed to come out before Christmas.

It was postponed for a variety of reasons. It's big eight is a really big update. I would say probably one of the biggest updates to WordPress since I've been covering WordPress stuff. Absolutely huge. And Marcus cause meerkats, he does a great job here. There's a thing called the WordPress 5.9 field guide where he breaks down all the bits and pieces that are coming.

He's broken it down into things like what the block editor is going to build. And boy, there is a lot in there. There's a lot of performance-related things there's quite a lot concerning the core API and internationalization and themes and customizer. Probably the most important thing that is on the tip of everybody's tongue is all to do with blocks and full site editing.

And I just want to open this one up. If any of you are following 5.9 closely, I was just curious to know. All of this piece that Mike has put together, sorry, Marcus has put together just wondering what your most exciting features are for 5.9. Anybody want to interrupt?

[00:08:40] Davinder Singh Kainth: I think with this release it's like blocks will become almost like baby page builder to build layouts rather than just create data content.

I think the two specific things that caught my attention was obviously the navigation blog. Because again, you need navigation. If you're going to use blocks to build a proper website, and the other one for that would be really game changer for agencies wanting to adopt blocks with locking blocks.

You can lock the blocks with the capability of certain editing level and templates. That will be really cool.

[00:09:14] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know of, you've been

[00:09:16] Bet Hannon: able to do that in the code. As an agency, we found how to do that from the very beginning, but it's going to be a lot. Easy to do that, I think going forward, and that certainly will be the case and not just agencies, but large organizations.

So you have a big university that's using WordPress. They definitely will want to lock things down from so they keep people on brand.

[00:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: I've put a bit on the screen about that. It's here, it's locking blocks in WordPress 5.9. I'll just read it in case anybody who's listening to this didn't know this was coming.

There is more, you can continue reading over on the page itself, but it says to continue to facilitate better creating better patterns and templates. WordPress 5.9 comes with a new block level locking mechanism that works alongside template lock. Instead of applying a lot to all inner blocks, you can apply selectively to individual blocks via the lock attribute.

The block level locking would supersede the inherited template lock value. I confess I knew this was coming, but I don't really have any insight into what the granularity of that is and how much you can lock out and which bits, whether you can lock. I don't know the color picker, as opposed to the ability to edit text or the ability to change font size.

And I just don't know what the

[00:10:34] Bet Hannon: fonts, the layout, all of those kinds of things right there with the change, the style, and then you get to deal with the con content.

[00:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's really exciting. So the block locking caught the vendors attention, full site editing, Jess, anything to add to that,

[00:10:53] Jess Frick: actually going to say the same thing taco said, Chad is internationalization.

They're giving us a language picker when you log in, which is fantastic. One of my favorite plugins that I've been watching very closely as we got, I don't know if you guys have played with it, but the way that they make it so easy to bring different languages into your website is fantastic. Seeing WordPress core.

Take this step into that area, I think is just going to make things even better for our global.

[00:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry justice. The addition of the comment from TECO has actually completely obliterated your image. This is a problem systemic in the platform. There's not much we can do about it.

[00:11:34] Jess Frick: We get to see his pretty icon and

[00:11:37] Nathan Wrigley: that's right.

Please click the link show notes. Yeah that's a really interesting point. I did wonder when this all happened in 5.0 and one of the four stages of the block editor was going to be internationalization. I did wonder what the business model for companies like and WPML, I did wonder if they were quaking in their boots that there, the shelf life of their product was going to be.

Smaller, in five years time, everybody's just going to be using the core components to do this. But again forgive me taco, I don't have a lot of detail on this in my head about what it is that this is going to be able to do, whether it's going to be a really basic implementation and things like WPML and week-long, which have all sorts of amazing things, including the ability to send your text off, to be translated, and then just injected back into the post and page.

I don't know if it's going to have any of those kinds of capabilities in it, so have to see for me, it's definitely the full site editing navigation block. That's the kind of thing which has tweaked my interest over the near term, but okay. If there's nothing, we'll

[00:12:43] Bet Hannon: just see improvements and kind moving us toward PHP eight.

It's getting more of that kind of ready prime time.

[00:12:55] Jess Frick: Yeah, it's terrible to say, but I feel like I'll believe

[00:12:58] Bet Hannon: it when I see.

[00:13:03] Nathan Wrigley: 8.0. Okay.

[00:13:06] Bet Hannon: No, th the

[00:13:07] Jess Frick: performance improvements they're promising with 5.9.

[00:13:10] Bet Hannon: You know, that just depends on what you've got going on a particular site, right?

[00:13:16] Davinder Singh Kainth: Because people can ruin a website made on blocks. Also just make a website and blocks and add. Now we have so many blocks add on, right? If one doesn't have that module, get another

[00:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: one, right?

Yes. We're going to have the tyranny of 74 different block packs and no conception of what was used. A friend of mine recently took over a site and I believe he said that the site is dependent upon, I think he said eight, eight different suites of block packs. The commercial block packs were available.

I think this website at eight and it was built in such a way that it is bound to them. It's going to be a really big job to unpick all of that and go with just simple core blocks or something equivalent, building your own blocks to satisfy the needs. So this is definitely.

[00:14:07] Bet Hannon: It sounds like your friends doing the Lord's work over there.

[00:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: That is

[00:14:13] Bet Hannon: untangling. Those is not

[00:14:14] Nathan Wrigley: fun. Yeah. The link, the link to this piece though, is over on make dot WordPress. I'll just, I really it's pointless putting it in the in the, anything other than the show notes, which will accompany this, but you can find it here. It's make.wordpress.org. It was released on the 10th of January and you can see that Marcus was the author.

So you can probably track it down in that way. We've got a few comments coming in. Little shout out to, to make Fen. Hello. She says very nice to have you with us. She was so she was trying to comment on Twitter live fee, but I don't think, oh no, Meg good point. I don't believe that Twitter gets consumed by this platform.

We use a platform called restream and whilst it's very clever, I believe it can only consume Facebook and YouTube comments. So thanks for making the effort so to go elsewhere. And she says, great to see you again, met several years at word camp. Oh, nice. We met again at WordCamp London. Paul Lacey podcast.

Getting the comments over the face. Something that Paul Lacey used to co-host the show. Unfortunately, he decided to stab me in the back and become a traitor and believe me no. It's okay. Everybody looked so shocked when I picture he's the first one to laugh. What I say that there is no bad blood there, but his face used to get blocked out.

Deliberately. People used to write deliberately long comments so that when we'd put it on a, I can't remember who that was. But several people did. Oh, Meg would like you, Meg would like to invite you all to Twitter space. Four 30 UK time. Does that today, Meg if you want to drop something in, please feel free to do that.

And now Paul getting me back says took all his money. Don't regret it. Thank you, Paul. Great to have you with us. It really is. Okay. Moving on. Let's change tack a little bit. So 5.9 full site editing, block themes, and all of that jazz. This is a piece by Justin Tatlock over on WP Tavern, where he is expressing the thought that quite possibly in the near future, the customizer will become a bit redundant for most people in a scenario where you are using a block theme.

Basically the, there will be no way of getting to the customizer, unless you sort of type in WP dash admin forward slash customized dot PHB. He points out in this article, a few shortcomings off the top of my head. The three things that you mentioned are missing at the moment is that isn't like a full way to implement a site favicon, which is, of significance.

The custom CSS box is on available and there's no draft process before switching to the block thing. This to me, this third one is the absolute killer. Cause obviously in the customizer, you can add in the, the, the ways that you can do that, you inspect what you're doing and make changes.

And then if you're not happy, you can back out, the way this is implemented. That seems not to be the case. So he's essentially, he's saying a boatload of stuff about what he likes about this, but also the fact that there's a few gotchas at the moment. So tread with care. If you are thinking of swapping over to a full block based theme, I'm going to open it up to the floor.

If they've got. Oh,

[00:17:44] Davinder Singh Kainth: I won't be surprised if all these three options goes into the main settings of the WordPress, because these are very important. And if they lie there, they can just consolidate everything. But customizer has already lost importance. If you ask a hardcore page builder user, how many times do they go there and change things, they do everything in the front end. So yes, customize a will go away once. Full site editing is more, I think graduated as of now it's still in kindergarten state, so let's see.

[00:18:16] Nathan Wrigley: Indeed. Okay. But just nothing. Okay. All right. Okay. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. It's okay. No worries. Let's move on. Okay. I feel this piece is going to dominate a goodly proportion of the show.

Okay. This is over on Morton Rund Hendrickson. I hope I've said that. I was stumbled over the latter part of your name, the Hendrickson, but incidentally, what a great URL. More 10. You can't make it up. Can you? That's absolutely brilliant. morton.com. Now, before I start getting into this topic, I literally don't know where to land on it.

It's a very important topic. It just, when I read this a couple of weeks, like a week ago, when it came out, I had to reread it and then I read it again. I think I read it a total of three times and then read it again just before we did the show, because I can't distill my thoughts. I don't know where I land on this, but essentially Morton is trying to wrangle the open source problem.

And if you guys don't mind, I'm going to spend like a minute paraphrasing what he says, just to give it some context so that we can all jump in. And I would really appreciate anybody's comments on this. Just to help me clarify my thoughts. Okay, here we go. Morton is concerned that the, the, the notions behind open source whilst once rarely perfect because they were in a time maybe like 15 or 20, 30 years ago, even they fitted what was going on at the time.

Fast forward to now we have a lot of open source projects, which underpin large proportions, not just the things like WordPress, which underpin the very fabric of the internet. So we had a few instances, rarely with log for J. I think that's right. Where an open source project. And I believe there was a few people who had their hands on that, that, that had a critical problem.

And where do people like government go to if critical parts of national infrastructure are going to fail because the internet is failing because a component of the internet is built on an open source project. Where do we even go for that? And turns out that you need to go in many cases to open source.

So that presents a problem. We've you've got volunteers doing a lot of work. You've got companies who offer the back of that free work are able to create billion dollar enterprise. When a problem occurs on like a national level, let's say the, in the United States, the American government have a problem.

Who do they go to? Where do they go? If they suddenly need a critical fix to a key component of the internet, which is breaking. And really all they've got is to call up private business. So they call up the big blue chip companies who they think run the internet. They can't fix the problem. Where do they go?

They in turn, go and try and lean heavily on the open source contributors who turn around and say, I've got stuff to do. This is what I do. I just do it for a better fund. This is a hobby and so on. So this is the key problem. Nobody's getting paid for a lot of this stuff. We've got big business making billions off the back of free labor and that's the knob of the problem.

What do we do? How can

[00:21:43] Bet Hannon: the open source projects. Our have legitimately concerns when big business comes and wants to put their fingers in the pie of controlling how the project is unfolding or what happens with the project. It's sort both and right. We, we legitimately have concerns. If a big company comes and wants to control how the project is getting developed or what happens next, or the

[00:22:09] Nathan Wrigley: government.

I feel I didn't do justice to that. Morton, I'm sorry. In my one minute spiel there, that there was a whole lot of other stuff brought in. So for example, he talks about the. Certain key players in the scenarios. And I think in some cases he's talking about automatic you know, th these there's a lot of profits on the commercial side, but that doesn't seem to feed back necessarily into the open source side of things.

I genuinely don't know what the answer is. I love the open source ethic. I love all that it stands for, but I am confused when open source is being implemented. As an example the very things, the thing that is the conduit between us for talking is largely built upon open source platforms, not the software that I'm using because the software in my browser is commercial, but the bits and pieces, the stuff that connects the internet on a sort of backbone level, the software running there is often derived by open source who fixes it, who maintains it?

Do we need some sort of governance? Do we need some. I don't want to say it, but company, some sort of organization, which oversees all this stuff. So there's my confusion. And it's open to when it gets

[00:23:27] Bet Hannon: to be in control of that. Right. How do we maintain that sort of lovely ethos of what open source represents in terms of volunteers coming together to work on something.

But when you get start getting people paid and company, then there's control. Who somebody has to be in control in charge, right?

[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I have my own intuitions on this, but they seem to fail me because my intuitions on this tell me that all ways, the open way is the best way, because in almost every touch point of my experience with open source, it's it's me in control of something that I wish to control.

So a website or a server or a computer that's in my house or jurisdiction or whatever it might be. But when you get to the, the bigger piece, the backbone of the internet, the fact that all of that is built on open source software and it could so easily fall to pieces. W genuinely I don't have an answer.

It feels like open source ought to be the way to do it, but how do we maintain that going forward? So again, I'm just going to throw that back at you and see if anybody's got an intelligent. Answer, which we'll fix it for everybody please. Oh,

[00:24:41] Bet Hannon: No. I'm with you. I think there's a lot of both end and a lot of uncertainty about how to move forward.

I would just throw in, there's another piece and that is that we haven't, I don't think more than deals with, but maybe he did, but there's the instability of you can have volunteer projects that fall apart because people no longer have time to maintain them. And there's the potential for projects like that to get basically, taken over by folks that are more, want to be malicious with them or, there's ways that they can get subverted.

And so there's some danger there that we haven't really quite figured out how we're going to address.

[00:25:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think in

[00:25:32] Davinder Singh Kainth: perspective, there's always been this talk of, what, press.org and wordpress.com. There's very little distinction. We all know it because we are into the backend of all things, but press, but ask someone who is coming new to the ecosystem, they will just go to wordpress.com and get started with it.

And again, there's also the problem of rewarding the contributors. Like how do you reward it now, either you become the employer of automatic or you become an employee of a company that sponsors and participates in that 5%, give a contribution to automatic. Now there has to be some other way to, reward people within the community.

Okay. I know it's a tight rope walk because finding who contributed how much is another question, but open source has benefits because it's, it lowers the entry barrier. Almost zero. It brings in more people, more eyes can find more bugs. It can help develop the whole ecosystem. Again, it's easier to, pinpoint someone like Matt Maluma.

Oh, he's sitting on the throne and all that. Let me tell you, sitting on the throne is not an easy thing. It I'm sure he has got tons of problems

[00:26:43] Bet Hannon: himself. So defender, when you talk about rewarding, are you talking about giving financial compensation?

[00:26:51] Davinder Singh Kainth: Absolutely. Absolutely. Every need everyone needs money, right?

[00:26:56] Bet Hannon: Yeah. We all have to make a living at some way. But there are certainly a lot of people right now that are volunteering that that's still volunteer. So we have people who work for automatic. We have people who are part of the fight for the future who are being compensated essentially for their work in open source.

But there are a lot of people still who are volunteering for,

[00:27:17] Davinder Singh Kainth: but it is the pace of volunteering, or number of people entering the voluntary mode enough compared to how much press is growing now.

[00:27:27] Bet Hannon: I don't know. That's, that's a good question. And it's getting more and more complex and it is the, is the system with the various contributor teams that we have, is that the best way to approach it?

[00:27:42] Davinder Singh Kainth: And all this talk, I think emerged when blocks was introduced and everyone's saying, oh no, there was certain section of, what community like, oh, he doesn't listen to us when I say he it's Matt Malone was right. And the other section, oh, it's a revolutionary things. Again, it depends on who you ask.

Now, open source is harmful. COVID is harmful. Even COVID vaccine is harmful. Now it depends on who you ask.

[00:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: One of the, one of the points that Morton makes is that increasingly we find ourselves in a situation where again, catastrophic example here where something terrible goes wrong and the, the governments and what have you, they have to go and find an answer and basically find somebody who is accountable.

They have to have somebody to blame and somebody who they can turn the screw on and get them to fix it as quickly as possible. The, the fear that I think Morton might have is that in the future, a lot of. Corporations will inject themselves into the projects and pay for seats at the table if you like so that they can steer the agenda in the future.

And that agenda may prove to be nefarious, given 10 years from now, if corporations are driving the agenda of the direction that WordPress takes, I wonder if it will be the same project with the same field,

[00:29:04] Bet Hannon: But certainly toward their own profitability, as opposed to caring about the individual average user of the product.

Right or caring about all the users of the project. We're trying to, I think that's one of the things that w for WordPress, as much as some of us who are developers chafe at it, the, all the enormous amount of care for backward compatibility, things like that, where we've really made a commitment to trying to bring users along, as opposed to.

A business that just would make the change on everybody has to buy the new version and update, right?

[00:29:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm going to, I don't often do this, but in order to distill the ideas on this, I'm going to read a little bit out loud of what Martin said. Cause I think he expresses it much better than I do.

And so he has a preface to this where he says, we keep quiet about a lot of this stuff, and then he goes on to make the. These four points plus some more after that, but he says, let me say these quiet parts out loud. Most of the online services rely on. We rely on for everything from social media to banking, to healthcare, depend on software written by unpaid volunteers.

He keeps coming back to that point. And when something goes wrong with that software, the responsibility of fixing all those fall on those same on paid volunteers. Can you imagine what that would feel like if you were a custodian of a crucial part of the internet and you suddenly had to fix it and you literally were on holiday or something like that?

Just the world runs on open source, but with a few exceptions, there are no meaningful. Governance structures in place to ensure oversight or accountability within the open source community. And we touched on that a little bit. Open source software is a multi-billion dollar industry. Yet the vast majority of open-source developers and contributors never get paid a cent for their work, which kind of goes back to the vendor's point.

Meanwhile, corporations built on top of open source software, have billion dollar valuations. That is the cognitive dissonance that I have a problem with. It's that chasm no pay against billions of dollars. That's the bit where I most find it difficult to reconcile in my own head. And finally, for now there is more on the website.

Nobody speaks for open source. So when business or the businesses, organizations, governments, and world leaders need to talk to someone about open source, they have no choice, but to turn to venture capitalists and large corporations whose financial success hinges on being able to steer open source projects in directions that are profiting.

For them to, for advice for advice. Okay.

[00:31:40] Bet Hannon: And Peter has a real great comment in the chat and that is it's one of the real challenges right now is the volunteers come and go. And it's really easy to stop contributing because there's no financial reward or when you have you, you have to make a living.

So your attention, time and attention need to get placed on other work. And so it really is hard to maintain a kind of continuity of of leadership to

[00:32:04] Nathan Wrigley: that. There is also this notion that if you contribute enough, you'll gain your seat at the table. Do you know what I mean? If you just put in hours and hours and hours and hours, eventually those contributions will become recognized, oh look such and such a person they've been doing this for you.

Maybe they need a seat at the table and that's difficult. Peter in the comments says a challenge with volunteering and open-source projects is how people come and go giving time and attention for free can fall low on the priority list. I'm sure. Totally true pizza. I'm

[00:32:32] Bet Hannon: not sure that's really true.

That, that's the kind of always the carrot that's held out. Like it, you can earn your seat at the table if you're around long enough, but I don't know that happens all that often. I think it has happened for a few people. Yeah. Not for a lot. And that

[00:32:48] Jess Frick: just means the barrier to entry is even higher because it's only left to those who can afford to play the long game.

[00:32:56] Bet Hannon: And

[00:32:56] Jess Frick: so we have, as Martin said, a very particular group of people who can make the decisions because they were in such a position to be able to contribute and get that seat at the table. Now that's not to say that WordPress isn't inclusive, we hear about the high barrier. Technically speaking to getting into WordPress.

And I think that this is another barrier that's important to expose

[00:33:20] Bet Hannon: and to look into.

[00:33:22] Jess Frick: And then one other point, we were talking about how they have to turn to these billion dollar companies to ask about WordPress. It does go the other way though, sometimes where we'll are going to see an exploit

[00:33:34] Bet Hannon: and then people will blame WordPress

[00:33:37] Jess Frick: as opposed to their own thing.

So it does go both ways.

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's just such a fascinating subject. I just, I love the way he wrote it. I love the fact that he's brought it to everybody's attention. There were a couple of anciliary pieces, which we're going to follow up with, which kind of tie into it in just a minute. But because people have made some comments, I think right to share them.

First one is picture who we'll talk about in a moment. She says Martin has been writing extensively about this, and I agree with him. If I'm not grossly mistaken that he eventually left WP, partly because of those issues. I'm not sure. And then she goes on to say, when you look at the WP project, there are lots of key players who were employed by big companies.

His point is that source is supported by those who can afford to contribute and the afford to contribute, but is not to be underestimated. If you are, it's hard to carve out an hour a week that you could usefully be spending on your own business or what have you. That is a difficult thing.

And then of course, you've got projects like five for the future, which is difficult. If you are just staying above the bread line, just keeping your head above water. But I guess for companies who have larger margins and can work this stuff out into the future a little bit more, maybe that's a little bit easier.

So thank you for your.

[00:35:00] Jess Frick: Everybody's shaken up right

[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: now. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Good point, Jess. And then Andrew didn't realize Andrew had written a blog post about this, but Andrew Palmer, Andrew working, you find it. If you want to drop the URL in the comments, if you're still there he says he just wrote a blog about this open source contributors need to be rewarded in some way.

I don't have the answers. But it is something that needs to be seriously looked at. I had not read Martin's blog prior to writing my, yeah. If you cross reference your points with his, that would be a really interesting notion. If you came up with some of the same things that he did and then moving on to stick around because.

Feature your Twitter thread in a little bit. We held a small Twitter space is called WV dos. I think that might be the one. No, I don't think it is actually. I'm not sure this Thursday great discussion and everyone agrees that there needs to be changed, but no one has the magic answer. This is the problem.

We don't have the magic bullet in core corporate structures. There's, there's policies to look back to and this things to be followed and procedures and people can be hired and fired and moved around. And we're not quite the same Maui. One of the points that Martin raises says, Courtney Robertson has been also elevating in the, is that the news right now is corporations plus a us government.

Clearly we need a more global take. Yeah, that's a good point. Okay. Where did we go from there? I think I did those Courtney was also saying that She's talking about Peter Ingersoll who made the comment. We mentioned a moment ago. He is a contributor to the training team learned WP and a meetup organizer.

And Courtney is being very nice and saying, thank you to Peter for doing that. And and Peter replied in kind, okay, I'm not gonna be able to get this URL taco because it's it's not available to me. It's just almost like an image on the screen at the same time. There's a wordpress.org article mentioned there a year in core 2021.

You can see that one of the biggest contributing companies is advisees Enso, which is a one person company. Actually. That is interesting. We did mention that it wasn't it like in third place behind Yost or something like that? I think it was automatic Yost and then them, maybe it was fourth.

I can't remember, but it did show what one person can do and given. Was it fourth? Yeah. Yeah. And Andrew finally, he's got his URL. So this is Andrew palmer.com forward slash all these words are hyphenated. Another word, camp postponed F COVID

For not not succumbing to leaving that in the URL, making it unacceptable for all sorts of virus filters. It's mixed with COVID and word campus moments. Okay. Yeah, we heard the last week that word camp Birmingham had been pulled because of that. Okay. Wow. Not so nice because I knew this would get a load of comments because it's just such an interesting subject.

It's something that we're all deeply interested in, but unfortunately it's always just out of reach. Isn't it? It's just the answer somewhere over there. And then the next week you feel the answers over here. That's why, but, okay. Let's get. The next piece is a video. And I can't show the video for fear of getting told off by all sorts of people, but this is.

It's a video over on YouTube, and I know nothing about American news media. So I haven't a clue where to sit on this piece. I don't know if this is a well-respected news channel or if it's just a sort of small parochial one, but it was just an interesting given everything that we've just said from Morton.

It was an interesting piece where this this gentlemen, Mullen Raker was the co-founder of WordPress was put in the hot seat, trying to justify the way that WordPress works and the new. Of the problem was that Matt is sitting on top of a kind of billion. I could be wrong in this, but I think that it's likely the automatic is a billion dollar corporation.

Forgive me if I've totally grossly misunder misrepresented that, but it feels like it could be. And he sits on top of that. And so he sits on top of the pyramid of this. Obviously a lot of the stuff that he does over on the.com side will help WordPress have trickle down effects. And he sponsors an awful lot of people in the WordPress project, but the point was made in the interview that how does he.

How does he work in his head? The idea of open source, and yet at the same time running a for-profit company. And I'm going to, I'm going to throw that one. Devinder I hope you don't mind me throwing it at you. I don't know what your thoughts are on this. Whether you feel that this is a big debate that goes on, whether you're happy with the status quo, or maybe whether you think like Morton that we need governance chair.

Okay. Someone

[00:40:00] Davinder Singh Kainth: has to rule, right? Whether it's open source or a capitalist company, someone has to be there to control things. So Matt monologue is the person who is doing it and he was doing pretty well. But again, we talk it from the bottom up approach. Just imagine how he looks at things from top up, not just, he has to balance the.org project.

He also has to balance the balance sheet of.com. So it's a tightrope walk and a lot of people did accuse or so-called, Kim forward like blocks was just too, so that WordPress can compete with Wix and Squarespace and all that. Even I felt that way in the beginning. I didn't like blocks, but now I think blocks was the right direction.

Some people need a little time to see things clearly like me,

but yes maybe people will come down if wordpress.org gets. Someone else in the top leadership and he controls the.com or he heads the.com then only. And obviously there's been talk like there should be difference in, Ken wordpress.com can be just marketed as say automatic.com and not WordPress because WordPress by default means WordPress for us.

It's like downloading.org version. So yes, there is confusion, but then this conversion is beneficial to both of them. Org as well as.com.com gets all the goodness from.org and dot or gets all the money flow. Sizable money flow from.com as well. So it's a good relationship, but obviously people do question this relationship.

[00:41:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. But, or Jess, if either of you have got anything,

[00:41:47] Bet Hannon: Any time you have, I think the vendors, right? A lot of times you do need leadership, but the question is, you know, whether it's a business or whether it's an open source project, you need someone to offer leadership. The question is, what's the quality of that leadership?

How much are they really listening? How are they paying attention? How are they looking forward? And you know, I'm I'll, I'm gonna I'll just leave it. Yeah,

[00:42:13] Nathan Wrigley: this is a really difficult one, right? Because there's, it's I'm with Devinder. I think that the, I think you probably need some kind of a for-profit structure in the background that's, that is creating a path, not

[00:42:31] Bet Hannon: non-profits structures have leadership systems, right?

So it doesn't have to be a for-profit. It just needs to have some clarity about leadership, but quality of the leadership and how that gets implement things get implemented is

[00:42:45] Nathan Wrigley: important. Nice.

[00:42:47] Davinder Singh Kainth: And regarding, the quality of leadership, because it depends on who is looking at. And who is questioning because there are people who will just look for diversity.

There are people who will see where this person is coming from. Again, it's a very tight rope walk. It depends on who you are asking, because I'm still trying to understand how the U S things work in terms of different types of people. Because again, we have more different types of people here. So yeah, because again, it depends who you ask.

[00:43:18] Nathan Wrigley: I

[00:43:18] Jess Frick: guess I always when this conversation comes up I just can't help. But to think about Magento, they had a wonderful open source community, and then they sold the for-profit part to Adobe and the market's not growing anymore. Shockingly, when they made 1.6 plus billion dollars off of it, people don't really feel great about giving their time for free

[00:43:46] Bet Hannon: to it anymore.

[00:43:49] Jess Frick: So, you know,

[00:43:49] Bet Hannon: I think right now, it's right. To be asking the

[00:43:54] Jess Frick: questions to what we said earlier. There's obviously no nefarious intent here. I think this is organically grown, but I think we have some cautionary tales from elsewhere and open source communities to see where we don't want to go.

And you know what, like maybe we do want to go there. Maybe we should. But that's a question I'm really glad

[00:44:16] Bet Hannon: isn't on my desk

[00:44:16] Nathan Wrigley: to me. That's right. It's easy for us to pontificate about all these kinds of things should be very difficult. I just, as with anything, with any sort of structure, it doesn't matter what it is.

There's going to be pain points and there's going to be bits where retrospectively, you could look back and say, do you know what? That was less than optimal. And and I think that there's bound to be chinks in this armor, and I, I really don't know where to sit on that. I don't have any ax to grind at all.

It was interesting, a fascinating point. That's got nothing to do with the topic at hand, but where's it gone? It's Courtney who says that it was just bizarre. Wasn't it? That M C N B C. Oh, so CNBC. I don't know what that stands for, but it's an American news channel they, they mentioned that he was the WordPress founder, which of course.

Slightly true is 50% true. Mike Little of course was the other co-founder and and yeah, usually when Matt says those words, he gets it right, but I don't suppose he can be responsible who put that lower third up as he was just about to speak. That interesting point. Andrew Palmer making lots of comments.

He said, it's not about the money. Generally. Automatic owned jet pack will commerce and a few other things. The simple fact that these plugins are in your face when you hit the dashboard, there is just not a loving level playing field

[00:45:42] Bet Hannon: and your face, but they won't go away. Yeah. You install

[00:45:46] Jess Frick: WooCommerce and the entire setup process is a sales pitch for other things that

[00:45:50] Nathan Wrigley: Automatica.

Yeah. Which is the perfect segue as if luck would have it. The next piece is Daniel. I said to Daniel, stick around. I hope he's still here. That would be nice if he was because. I don't know. I don't use Twitter very much and I certainly don't really know. I think this is a Twitter thread because it says thread at the top.

And forgive me if I'm getting all the nomenclature wrong here, but Daniel put together a really lovely Twitter thread where he, it sounds like almost for the first time or at least for the first time in a long time, he went through and started to make some comparisons between the sign-up experience, the beginners experience, if you're on the.com side and if you're on the.org side and I confess I do not ever, never, ever go to the.com side and play around, it's just not something I do.

If I want to interact with WordPress, I'm going to.org and I'm going to download it and dump it on a server somewhere. And so some of the visual descent dissimilarities were quite amazing. So he starts off with the fact that, as Devindra said earlier, wouldn't it be. Quite likely that if you want it to find, have a WordPress website, you are going to hit.com.

If you're an, a novice, rather than the.org side of things, you're probably going to hit the.com cause the.com is the thing that you hit, right? Everybody goes to the dot gob. So there's that. And then he goes on to describe the onboarding experience. And in almost every case, Daniel feels that the.com side.

Slicker better? More well presented the pixels look nice. There's a, there's a party going on over there and there's a lot of thought and time and energy been put into how it all looks. I will of course, link in the show notes to his Twitter thread, but his name is Schultz Smith, which is S C H U T Zed, S M I T H.

And you can find this Twitter thread. I don't even know what date it was created, but it's. Yeah, you can see on the screen, it's at the state of WordPress. It begins. And I just thought it was really curious because I never go over there. He talks about how theming is easy to do. The biggest one for me was how posts and page administration just looks really nice, so much nicer than the setup we've got over on the dot side, which I never thought was a bad thing.

But now that I've seen the.com thing, I'm thinking, oh, I want that. So I think basically the long. Please, sir, could we have some of the.com UI into the.org side of things? It would be so nice if we could. So I infrequently

[00:48:38] Bet Hannon: go to.com, but every time I do, because almost all of my experience has been over on the.org side.

I have a lot of frustration and a lot of who moved my cheese and where did it go now? Kind of moments. But I do think that you're right, there's some nicer things over there, but, and if I were only in that, if I only saw that it would probably would be you know, a more intuitive experience, but.

Yeah, I feel the same about blocks sometimes too. It's ah, I used to know how to do this in the classic editor. I know

[00:49:13] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to, I'm going to show the incredibly memorable, easy to type in URL that you need to you need to achieve, if you want to see this thread, I'm not gonna read that out. It's a shame.

There's no kind of like permalink structure that you can. Can you do that on Twitter? Is it possible to say I want

[00:49:30] Bet Hannon: this, he could pin it to the top of his

[00:49:32] Nathan Wrigley: profile, Daniel sorry. Go and go, go and stick it to the top Pinot and then we won't have any problem. Anyway. I just thought it was a really nice enterprise.

A nice endeavor. Go and check it out. You might be surprised if like me, you never use the, the.com side of things and you're always using the.org. You might think to yourself. That looks nice. Could we have that? Anything from Devinder or Jess

[00:49:58] Davinder Singh Kainth: make a blog post out of it and make it a community post so that all of the changes that I find or someone else find let's make it a big one.

And then ask question, Hey, why it's different,

[00:50:07] Nathan Wrigley: Daniel to you, if you're still watching this, I am curious, actually being such a WordPress person. Why did you choose to. To write this, was it because you've got an audience there and you just get the feedback straight away. Cause to vendor's point I, as I was reading it, I was thinking, this is fascinating, isn't it?

Because you've got to lump your whole set of thoughts into little tiny boxes. And then I presume you have to click, enter, send that tweet and then follow it on from another one. And I was just curious as to why you did it over on Twitter, as opposed to in a blog post that you then linked to. It certainly got me reading it, so it worked so well done.

But, but yeah, Michelle keeps saying, she's going to teach me Twitter. Nobody's going to teach me Twitter, Michelle. It's honestly you, you can try on, I will fail just get Twitter, but thank you. I appreciate your endeavor. You constantly try, but I constantly disappoint. Okay. Moving on. This is the bit where I get to tell you about Peacher.

WP builds until about, I don't know, about a year ago, we were doing a monthly UYUX session with peach and area. And if you don't know peach and Irish, she's a UI UX expert. She's in the thread. Look there. She is writing comments like that, and we've decided to resurrect the format we're going to do it each and every month we're going to do one user contributed website.

In other words, if your expertise is not UI and UX, and you've got something which you believe is nearing completion, but you would like a critical eye to look over it. Somebody who really knows what they're doing, then pitcher's going to do excuse. One of those each month. And if you would like yours to be the one that's featured, there's a simple little form.

It's got the minimum amount that I could think was useful. And it's a w P builds.com forward slash you R WP builds.com forward slash U R and then Peacher will stick those into, a spreadsheet or something, and she'll try to go through them. But the intention really is that picture. We'll put it on the screen and then she'll go through and look for bits and pieces where she feels that this is excellent and done brilliantly.

And perhaps also go through things where she thinks you could maybe do with a little bit of help. We're also going to be going through a list of her bits and pieces. She's going to bring along some sites, which she thinks exemplifies. Practice. So it's not just about user submitted stuff. There will also be some things which pitcher is bringing along to demonstrate.

So I'd really, if you want to go and share that you are LWP builds.com forward slash UI, that would be really nice. We're going to do it. The dates, as you can see on those Tuesday, the 25th of January 3:00 PM. So it's about now ish in what is that like? I know eight days time or something like that, right?

Sorry to hijack the show, but I thought that was a really useful WP builds.com forward slash UI. And she's put a comment what she said here. Peaches said to be clear, we'll only do one submitted site per session. Yes. I don't know if I made that point, but I'll make it now. Yeah. We're going to do one user submitted sites.

This gives us time for another piece of content. Hopefully. Great. Fantastic. I don't know about you. I have switched off all the notifications everything. My Chrome installed doesn't notify me of anything. My phone doesn't notify me of anything except text messages from my immediate family.

They get through everything else is on a need to know basis because I was basically, I'm sure some of you can, get what I'm on about. I was a slave to the notifications to the point where I would literally take the phone out of my pocket at a meal, because it went Bing bong. And what's that all about really?

I should be spending time in the moment with the people that I'm surrounded by. So switched them off. And there seems to be a bit of a trend going on at the moment for platforms coming along, where they are not promoting the always notified, always in sync with everybody. There's a lovely, beautiful platform called zip message, which does asynchronous video.

So you shoot a video, send it to somebody when they have the time they shoot a video and reply and the idea isn't I need it now. It's just, whenever you feel you've got the space to do it. This is a, an app that I've come across called twists. I haven't used it. I'm just letting you know. And it's a bit like slack, but with all of that, how to describe it, FOMO, all of that pressure is deliberately stripped out of it.

I don't really know what that means, but I just want it to open a conversation. The vendor, Jess, who's guilty of like slave to the notifications. And if that's the case, Do you want to stop that in your life? Or is that something you relish in your life? Anybody just go for it.

[00:55:23] Bet Hannon: I wouldn't, I wouldn't say a slave to the notifications, but I think we do both in our agency.

So we, we have times where we let one another know I'm in a meeting or I'm head down in this project is you might, it might be a bit before I get back to you. But then there are other times where we really do, because we're a totally remote team. And we have been since the beginning where we really are expecting one another to be fairly rapid with the replies, because we can be bottlenecks for one another on projects.

So we're wanting to avoid that sort of bottleneck of I've got to wait until I hear back from this person before I can move forward. So we do a mix of both, and I think we try to do a good job of communicating that when new people are coming on the team, that there are things that are, these are things that it's okay to be asynchronous about.

We know not in any rush about these are things that we need to have a little bit more priority response.

[00:56:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, no, that's a bit of both that works. My, my problem with a bit of both for me is that the little bit of both always ends up consuming the same amount of time that all of it would have taken up.

You know what I mean? Just, I can't segment it segment in my life. Okay. That needs to come through. It's the mere fact that I hear the Bing bong, I just drop everything. My attention is destroyed and I go back and I genuinely cannot get back to where I was five seconds ago. I really, I have to tell myself, where was I? And I find that is, is so disruptive to my, and

[00:56:57] Davinder Singh Kainth: do things differently. Like instead of DAMing the phone to stay in the internet, I just don't know if the internet. It's not the time to do things other than so that's how it happens. Like when we are like, even during family time, the internet is off at home.

So no one, even if you pick up your phone, nothing work, or even you're supposed to turn off the internet on your phone, the virus goes off, you just spend few hours without the internet. That's how it is. I don't know if it works in other household, but here it works perfectly. And everyone actually talks to each other.

That's very important. Actually, the problem is

[00:57:32] Bet Hannon: that, or how old

[00:57:33] Davinder Singh Kainth: I have a seven year old daughter. So yeah, she does complain, but again, it's complaint. It's what parents who can, because we are very strict on how much time she spends on her iPad because it's a pandemic in among kids, honestly speaking, like how much screen time they have it.

Like we control it really well. I think I'm proud of it. Oh,

[00:57:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's really nice. I do think that if that's. It's like anything, right? If that, I guess if that was the, that's just the position. If the wifi goes off five minutes before the meal begins and it's going to go off for the remaining two hours, and that's just the protocol that's just the way the house is run, and even during,

[00:58:17] Davinder Singh Kainth: Here, we have this habit of going for afternoon nap during everyone goes to sleep during the afternoon.

So during that time, everything is, I put my phone on airplane mode. I don't want to receive anyone's called because when you're sleeping. Even if it's for just 30 minutes or one hour that's how I do it. I just killed the thing right at the bottom.

[00:58:39] Jess Frick: I think for me it's not so much the notifications as much as it is messages coming from everywhere.

And it's really hard to manage it all at our work people don't realize this, but LiquidWeb has over a thousand employees. There are a lot of people doing a lot of things and there's a lot of engagement. But you know, I've watched the evolution from when you know, productivity experts told us to check your email twice a day, no more to slack coming in and then HipChat for those and remember HipChat.

And then there was slack and now slack is often used.

[00:59:16] Bet Hannon: In lieu of email.

[00:59:18] Jess Frick: And so people are sending important things through these messaging platforms where you have to keep track of your notifications. You have to keep track of where these conversations are happening, or you just lose these important requests.

And I'm not sure that another tool is the answer. I think we can continue to try to technology our way out of bad behaviors, but ultimately I think it's going to come down to everybody agreeing to just don't do that.

[00:59:44] Bet Hannon: A combination of just don't do that, but also then some self-discipline about getting over the I've got to answer every ding.

Yes. I just don't and sometimes, and then there's a balance in there somewhere because there's text messages that come in that are family things that I really like, I'm catching up on, two hours of Snapchat things. Young adult kids. So

[01:00:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I just find this whole thing is absolutely fascinating and I love Jessie's face.

We're going to technology our way out the towards the out. So I think that was brilliant. They, one of the things which is like red rag to a bull to me, which kind of lights the blue touch paper is if. If somebody like come round to my house you know, I've invited the route, their phone goes off in my, or they just talk on the phone, they just cut me right off and they just start talking to

[01:00:36] Bet Hannon: the phone.

Oh

[01:00:38] Nathan Wrigley: no, put it down. Stop. I don't have wifi for them to vendor. If I had a kill switch at that point, I'm going to try that defender. I am going to try switching off the wifi and then I'm going to Holly because I will be hit with all sorts of projectiles.

So,

[01:00:56] Bet Hannon: you know, we talk about this as if it's as a, kind of a static pattern all the time, but things go up and down, right?

So you have a big project that's happening. I'm paying more attention. I, I'm in Illinois right now waiting for the birth of a grand baby nearby. So I'm paying attention to the texts and things right. In a different way than I would maybe you know, at a different time. And so I think things do change depending on what we have going on at work and at home.

And you know, that, I don't know, finding a balance somewhere in there for you. Yeah.

[01:01:30] Nathan Wrigley: That is tremendous news. Obviously if the text message goes off during the show, we expect you to answer that message and clear right out of it. Yeah, no,

[01:01:40] Bet Hannon: I put it, yeah. For this. I put it in airplane mode, my wife was sitting right over there and I would know if something,

[01:01:49] Nathan Wrigley: Taeko beautifully sums up how utterly, I flip and flop on this.

He says, the reason that I hear is oh no, I've picked the wrong one. He says, the reason that I'm here is because you sent me a notification on Facebook to let me know that you started the live stream. Guilty as charged. Absolutely. I'm just so bad at this. And then he says, Nathan, what you can do is at an open wifi network.

That's not connected to the internet. That's ingenious people phone will connect and not get any notification. Yes. They'll think they're connected. But in fact they won't be, I'm not getting any new emails. Doesn't it? Does it not say, is there not some indication on the UI at the top there, which has a little cross next to the wifi signal or something like that?

Yeah. Yeah. I get what you mean. My, my thing is that it's binary. If it pings, I'm instinctively drawn towards it. I find it very difficult make. Okay. I'm having an hour off. Ignore it. I need to put that phone under a cushion and another.

[01:02:52] Bet Hannon: Perfect conditioned thing. And you can figure out a way to figure out a way to get deconditioned, though.

[01:02:59] Nathan Wrigley: I need to move to like the Gobi desert or something. That's probably watching the social dilemma two or three more

[01:03:08] Bet Hannon: times. You just of start letting it

[01:03:10] Nathan Wrigley: go, right? Yeah. Have you does a really good podcast actually around this topic? I'm just going to quickly look on my screen, do forgive me, but I do think it is worth dropping in what is it called?

It's called on divided attention or your on divided. Yeah, your undivided attention. And it's a podcast where each week, or slightly more frequently than that, they drop an episode. Describe going through this entire process about why this is happening and how you can mitigate it and what the tech companies are doing, because they're very technical people.

What the technical companies are doing in order to make sure that you are disengaging as little as. Because you can bet that there's billions of dollars resting on your, and my engagement every minute of every day. Anyway, there we go. If you like asynchronous, it's called twist. Maybe go and check it out, but certainly check zip message out.

Andrew Palmer says he's a user. It's brilliant. It's so good. Go and check it out, right? Okay. Let's get back to some news. Oh, so this is a sad thing that we have to cover a wish. This news didn't exist, but it does. We mentioned earlier that word camp berming, I think you can pronounce it.

Birmingham, don't you in the United States, our equivalent, which is spelled the same as pronounced Birmingham. Okay. So word camp Birmingham got canceled. Weak. And obviously, there's reasons for that largely to do with COVID and restrictions on movement and things like that. And so this is a piece by Harry Shanker are entitled by the way, it's on make.wordpress.org.

And it's, he's proposing that there are some mandatory safety measures for in-person events for 2022, as I said earlier, totally undecided as to whether I should go to word camp Europe, largely because I don't want to be stuck in a, in another country. Not sure of what that would mean. Should I test positive for COVID?

Would I be allowed back? Would I have to isolate at my own expense, would I have to buy a second airplane ticket and all of those kinds of things? And and he's saying, what about if we, we made the best of what we've got and try to come up with some sensible rules, which would at least minimize things.

Some of them I'm sure are very sensible. So saying things like mandatory masks, like every year. Just if you're in a word camp, wherever you are, you wear a mask. It doesn't matter whether you're in a corridor or in a speaking room or, queuing up for lunch. You just wear a mask that would be one recommendation.

More prominent messaging over on the individual websites about the fact that these safety procedures are going to be in place. And please respect them because I suppose there's always going to be a bunch of people who would turn up and have contrary opinions to that, and then would be able to say, but I didn't know.

And if it was made clear that you have plenty of opportunity to know mandatory temperature checks. That's interesting, those that those in the UK have seemed to have ground to a halt. We're now doing all these lateral flow tests where you prod things in your mouth and what have you the temperature check seems to have gone by the wayside.

Obviously sonnet, sanitizing, hand sanitizer, and all that kind of stuff. Maintaining social distancing. I feel that's the one which is going to be the hardest because. If you want a socially distance venue, you're going to spend a lot of money, especially in cities like London or New York, a big room to accommodate a hundred people is going to cost you a ton of money and contact tracing have something whereby prior to the event you've just handed over all of your contact details so that who have you met with in the last week or what have you said that those kinds of things can, those authorities can get the ball rolling.

There's nothing here I disagree with. I don't know what side of the fence you're on with all of that, but I think all of that makes sense to me.

[01:06:59] Bet Hannon: I think besides the social distancing really is a lot of our word camps really have had eating and drinks. They're part of them. Yeah. And then it's hard to you can't run mass.

So how do you distance and seated for a meal?

[01:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[01:07:20] Jess Frick: I was going to say, that's why I agree with everything, but the contact tracing might be tricky.

[01:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Especially if it's international, it's going to be more or less.

[01:07:29] Bet Hannon: I went to a conference back in September in Portland. Everybody had backs, we did a little pre-check thing.

Everybody, people were really good about wearing masks, except while we ate lunch. And then after event one person tested positive, but they, I think part of it was the culture of the organization. They just let everybody there probably a hundred people there. They let everybody know so-and-so has tested positive.

He thinks he was seated in this part of the room for most of the day. You might not even know who that person was. You might, if you didn't meet them face to face. But he was in this section of the room for the seating and the lunch and blah, blah, blah. And, I thought that was really handled very well.

And so it's possible that. Not saying anybody at a word camp

[01:08:18] Jess Frick: would do this, but I saw a tweet that said, if this pandemic has taught me anything, it said somebody y'all would 100% hydro Somby

[01:08:24] Bet Hannon: byte.

[01:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And everybody's

[01:08:33] Jess Frick: going to come forward and be like, hi, I was there. I have here. And that's not, there's nothing to be embarrassed about, but that's yeah.

[01:08:41] Bet Hannon: Especially, especially now that we have this on Cron, that's so contagious, it's like you could be, and we're seeing more and more cases where people did exactly the right things.

They got vaccinated, they got boosted. They'd been wearing masks. They've been being careful and they still got it. And so I think that lowers the stigma in some ways for a lot

[01:08:59] Nathan Wrigley: of us now. So yeah. I just think that in order to bring these events. Even if it doesn't have substantive differences on the actual capacity to catch or Macron, because it sounds like basically if you've, if you're standing, downstream of somebody, who's got arm a chronic, it is a significant chance that you're going to catch it.

Even if you're in the air, the being seen to be making endeavors to do these things and messaging, encouraging people to, take the advice that's on offer and all of those kinds of things. And then enforcing things like if you are going to say you got to wear a mask, that's, that's the way it's going to be in this event.

Thank you very much. Okay. So Devindra anything on that?

[01:09:44] Davinder Singh Kainth: It's not going anywhere. Like we had normal November and December. I attended a lot of events with more than 500 people without mass, nothing happened, and we didn't have any cases here. Like they were like two or three cases in whole city, but last two weeks, The cases has gone like this own new bearing.

It has gone back to 20 X times. Like we are at the same case level, like last year. But the good thing is hospitalization is very low. Like even though people are getting infected, they are not landing in hospital with oxygen and all that stuff. So because most of them are vaccinated. But then again, there's a lot of discrepancy.

Like people say you need to get vaccinated, but vaccinated people are also getting COVID. So I don't know who's making money or who's making full of water. That's the reality.

[01:10:31] Nathan Wrigley: I think the only solution is to hide in a box and just stay there for the whole of 2020. So if,

[01:10:39] Bet Hannon: In some ways it's kinda, that's what we're having to do, right?

We go from Oregon to Illinois to be here. We quarantined, we test it. And now we're just kinda like in this bubble because newborns and toddlers can't really get back later.

[01:10:51] Nathan Wrigley: I failed that anybody that's lived through this period, we'll have a really there'll be stories to tell about this and you will all look back on this.

Do you remember what grandchildren we like? What sounds horrible? All we lived through that, we'll have our own little stories, but anyway, there we are good on I forget the gentleman's name. I do apologize. It was Harry Shanker. Put those suggestions together. It's a proposal. Put that together on 10th of January.

Seems like sensible stuff to me. So we'll see. See what we see where that goes. We are quickly running out of time. So just a few quickies before we get onto our silly stuff at the end, that's got nothing to do with WordPress. Extended family. Sarah Gooding is writing in WP Tavern this week.

Extended file. I have launched a. Yeah. So there's a free version of their pattern library. W I don't need to tell you what patterns are. You can basically click a button if you're in a post or a page. And the button is up here at the top. I'm sort of, if you're listening to this on audio, where the button is going to be, it's near the it's on the left hand side, but where, you know where publishers, but over on the other side, you click that a modal pop-up window comes up and their extensive library of patterns, appears you can get, I think it's five a month for free.

If you are on the free version from.org, but you need to presumably plug in some kind of API key to unlock that. It sounds like it's $49 50 for one website for a year. If you want to get access to all of it, you'll have to be fairly judicious with your downloading. But if you're into patterns and you see this as the way forward, maybe it's worth.

Shelling out a few dollars to see what you make of it. There are some other rivals that do this kind of stuff. Things like stackable and cadence. I know they have their their own different patterns. And I don't know if it's called patterns on the cadence side, but certainly they've got a library just like this, and you can download the different rows and what have you.

But anyway, so this is interesting. You can read the piece on WP Tavern, extend defied launches, new pattern library. It was on the 12th of January, the exciting times, all this pattern library stuff, it just makes making websites drop dead easy. Doesn't it? We're all going to be out of a job. No, no,

[01:13:08] Bet Hannon: because people can have the the access to do stuff, but they can making it look pretty and be effective and still they'll need help.

Yeah.

[01:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. All right. All right, moving on then. Devinder, I'm going to throw this one right at you because you put this in the show notes. This is security. Yeah.

[01:13:31] Davinder Singh Kainth: The articles is that the one polities have gone up by 142%. Like they were 10,000 plus last year, 20, 20, 20, 20. And in last year prior to that, they were just 2000.

So it clearly indicates even though it looks like the vulnerabilities has gone up, I think it's people who are detecting those vulnerabilities that has gone up and now people are getting more serious about the security stuff. And a lot of people have started using security services, which is really good, especially on the agency level, like earlier not many people would use it.

They will just install a security plugin, which is different than security service. Yeah, it's a good change.

[01:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: It's sounds on the face of it to be a startling increase, isn't it? 143% or 142% increase. It sounds like a lot, but I guess it's just a product of WordPress being the the big player. This is where

[01:14:27] Davinder Singh Kainth: this has gone up from 33 to 43 now 3%.

So yeah, bigger pie bigger, bigger goodness, bigger money and bigger problems.

[01:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it came out of the article, but there's this idea of a scoring system. I think it's called CVS. That's certainly what I'm seeing on the screen at the moment. There's this sort of dispassionate scoring system from naught, up to 10, where 10 is literally the sky is falling.

And I think log for J was in fact the first 10 because it really wasn't that bad, but most according to this most WordPress vulnerabilities, because of the nature of it's to do with, your own personal website they generally tend to score pretty low in the sort of five to seven region, which is not the sky is falling and it's uni to get this fixed for yourself kind of thing.

But still, like you say, Devinder interestingly, you could do right bet over to you.

[01:15:31] Bet Hannon: Yeah. So we do a lot of stuff with a web accessibility, which is making websites, usable, functionable for people with various disabilities. And web accessibility is never a one and done thing. And anytime you add new content to your site, you can introduce accessibility issues.

And so we launched a. Kind of new year's resolution themed campaign before the first of the year to try and help people with website accessibility. There's a post here in the show notes about that has some great free resources. If you're just starting out with web accessibility, there's a kind of a handout guide ebook.

And then we have some best practices posts, and we're offering some discounts on accessibility audits during the month of January. So starting to really help people get resources and learn about accessibility during the month of

[01:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: January, a little bit tight on time. But tell us about the audits. What do you do?

What happens if I approach you and say, look, I've got this project. I'm almost finished. I just want to make sure that I've ticked the accessibility boxes and I approach it. What do we go through? So base

[01:16:35] Bet Hannon: our audits playing. We have three different levels of audits based on the number of URLs or views.

Like sometimes the URL would stay the same, but the view would change that you want us to look at. So we could start with just one URL and that would get you a lot of the theme-based things. But if you have a lot of different templates that might be different. So we do one, we do a 10, we do 25 URLs.

Go up from there and we do, what's called, that's a sampling audit. So we're not looking at every page of your site, but we're looking at you know, that's usually enough to get what you need and extrapolate to the rest of the website.

[01:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: So is it with a human touch as opposed to some kind of accessibility software, which yes.

So we'll

[01:17:18] Bet Hannon: use some automated testing, but this is with our, mostly with our non-disabled especially trained developers, but then we also we don't guarantee that a disabled tester will be on your site. But if our our folks have a question and usually it's about screen readers about how a screen reader user will handle a particular thing on on a page, then we bring in some.

Disabled testers as well. And then we also produces a 25 page PDF that gives you all the information about what we tested and what we found and recommendations for going forward. And then we do an hour of consulting after that. So we'll walk with you, help you understand that. So a lot of times people will hire us to do the audit, and then if they have a regular developer they're working with, they'll bring that developer to the consult and ask all the technical questions.

Then we can see available to do the continuing con consultation, but it's included in the audit is

[01:18:08] Nathan Wrigley: north American time zone, or you're open to anybody video. We're

[01:18:12] Bet Hannon: open. I think we could be open. We haven't done a lot in other places yet, but we could be open to that. Oh,

[01:18:19] Nathan Wrigley: great. Okay. So the URL is B H M byte, sorry, biz site.com.

Sorry. I apologize. And then all with hyphens resolve to have an accessible website in 2022, I'll endeavor to put that in the show notes as well. Brilliant. Thank you for that. Okay. We're going to move on to the non WordPress related stuff, just as something which, eh, ground my gears this week. And I just find that this is this kind of, for me encapsulates the human condition perfectly.

This is Lufthansa. I'd love to answer the airline. That's how much it's got to do with WordPress. We're talking about airplanes. Lufthansa confirmed that they had flown 18,000 flights in a recent period with the planes completely empty. This of course is the well-known problem that we're all thinking about each and every day of the week.

I'm sure about the fact that if you're an airline company and you want to keep a particular route open, if you fly from New York to London and you want to keep that slot, you've got to fill that. You've got to put the plane in. Basically. And if you don't put the plane in the air, then they take the root off you and give it to somebody else.

So loved ah, 18,000 empty flights. Is this, is it me? Am I over here to resist is pure madness. Isn't environmental, isn't the environmental thing. Enough of a problem without flying empty planes. Just so that somebody can say, yep. Tick that box. Say over what time period. That was. It did on I've forgotten.

There we go. can't remember. I think it was last year, but I forgotten I have forgotten, but just bonkers. It's just the sort of thing that you'd try to, if you, if your three year old child came up and said to you, daddy, can you explain why this happened? You'd be like, ah yeah. Okay. It's because we're human.

That's about all I'd have. There just seems to be no logic to this and with the tiny amount of time, which remains to us. Just don't even get this right. I am seeing this everywhere. The I go onto Facebook and I go onto Twitter. There's these little arrangements of squares, seemingly mostly white with a, quite a few green ones.

And then I see something I four slash 206 and I go, okay. That's. You've got some squares. What the heck is Wordle who put this? Who was this? It's me.

[01:20:49] Davinder Singh Kainth: It's so easy to play. And you know it really. And I usually played when I'm walking up to my lunch. So I

know I'm not walking on the road as this. In the garden and all that. So it's just, I do it for five minutes and it just recharges your brain to think. You know, and really it's not about English test or something, it's all about figuring out the word and it's very simple. Like you just press, you just make any word, a five letter word.

And if it comes green, that means that alphabet that's right position in the final word. So you just try for two, three times and you finally find the word, if you don't

[01:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: then try again. Okay. I know nothing about this game. There is on the screen. Tell me very quickly, what do I need to do? There's a keyboard.

There's a grid of empty squares.

[01:21:50] Bet Hannon: Panic.

[01:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: P a N I C center enter. Oh, that was deadly. Okay. Enter. Okay. So just for those of you that are listening, the P a N and the C of that went to gray and the, I, for reasons unknown went to brown,

[01:22:13] Davinder Singh Kainth: I would is I alphabet is there in the final word and all other words are not there in that.

[01:22:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So this final word on the grid has an, are you here?

[01:22:25] Davinder Singh Kainth: No. It can be anywhere if I was green. Then it means that the, I was under, total. Okay.

[01:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan? No, I confess, I didn't. So if I type in early, Ooh. Oh, okay. So I can see why it's addictive. I got a nice feeling at

[01:22:50] Davinder Singh Kainth: the top, that will give you a better idea gear icon at the top.

Okay. Click on that. That will give you the exact you know, Not that one

question mark on the, okay.

[01:23:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So if it's green, then that needs it. It's in the exact spot. So it's in the first place in the final one. If it's brown, it features in the final word and if it's gray, it doesn't feature in it. So I know that my final word contains an E and R and an eye, but not necessarily in those places.

Exactly. You've

[01:23:29] Bet Hannon: learned the other letters.

[01:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: I've got it. Okay. Right. It's fascinating. But why every body, I think I am the only person who doesn't play. No, I don't play it.

[01:23:42] Bet Hannon: I played it once

[01:23:44] Nathan Wrigley: Bravo,

[01:23:45] Bet Hannon: but I love puzzles. I do Sudoku is all the time. I do logic puzzles, but I'm terrible at word things. So this, and, cryptograms and all that kind stuff.

I hate these. So I did it once, but it is a kind of a thing that I think people like that it's fairly quick. It takes 10 minutes at the most, and it's a once a day it's limited and then everybody can socially share it.

[01:24:09] Davinder Singh Kainth: Okay. Like I asked my daughter and she said, isn't an app that I can install and played.

I said, no, this is old school. You have to go to the website URL and then play

[01:24:20] Nathan Wrigley: there really. It's not even an app. Oh, that's it. Okay. So

[01:24:27] Bet Hannon: I can't imagine doing this in a language. That's not my first language.

[01:24:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I don't know. In a five letter words in at least it's not four letter words,

[01:24:37] Davinder Singh Kainth: a lot of languages are first language.

So English things are different here, like in terms of languages.

[01:24:43] Bet Hannon: Yeah. Yeah. I know everywhere, except in the U S we, I, I did read an article yesterday that the guy that invented this invented it for his girlfriend, living partner, as a kind of a way to amuse themselves on the pandemic. They very carefully did a lot of research.

So it's, there's no accident that it's five letter words and you get just six chances. If you get to the bottom and you don't have all green, you don't win that day. But but they've got six chances. So that's it. And then that he has put in all of these words, and it's not every five letter word.

They took out some things that are obscure. And I did learn by doing it that if you try to put in something, that's not really a word, it will wait. It doesn't extract.

[01:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: You just said something. Is, does everybody have the same grid onto the

Okay, now I get it. Cause like I could just play this all day and I wouldn't get any satisfaction. So the idea is you're you are trying to beat everybody else on the same day and get a bet. Scott, I

[01:25:50] Bet Hannon: get it. You only get one chance per day. You don't get to play it all day.

[01:25:54] Nathan Wrigley: Not even if you clear your cookies.

Yeah. You can do the TV. It's always a way. It's always a way. Okay. But Jess quickly, before we finish, have you got, give us a five letter word? Let's see.

[01:26:06] Bet Hannon: Gosh, see, I gotta think about

[01:26:15] Jess Frick: that. There's a Dutch version.

[01:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[01:26:19] Davinder Singh Kainth: S H O w S

[01:26:23] Nathan Wrigley: taco says he's had to move to Twitter to get rid of all those squares. Yeah, that's the problem it's taken over. And also Peter says Wordles or. Look well, they've got the most covered stuff. Going back to the previous subject facts out on the back for you, from Michelle for shit.

She said that you did a great job, your team, and you did a great job with the underrepresented internet

[01:26:50] Bet Hannon: accessibility audit for

[01:26:51] Nathan Wrigley: them. Yeah. Okay. I can't think of any five-letter words either. So we're going to round this episode out on abject failure. In fact, that's what this episode is going to be called.

I'm going to call it abject failure, episode number 192. I appreciate. You guys been with me today, that's been quite a lot of fun. Thank you very much for joining us each week. 2:00 PM UK time. I hope I know Jess will be coming back and I hope that button, the vendor will fill out the form and come back.

I would really appreciate that we do this slightly awkward thing at the end where we have to wave and the waving is just so that I can get a nice piece of thumbnail art. So if you could just slide your hand in just giving a little bit of wave that's perfect. Thank you. If you've joined us and made a comment, I really appreciate you guys coming in as well, but still waving.

She's totally in on the whole, the waving and we will see you next week. Hopefully it'll be out published tomorrow, but thanks for your cooperation and Alex for joining us. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye

[01:27:54] Bet Hannon: bye. Thanks. Bye bye.