This Week in WordPress #193

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 193 and titled open source is tasty. It was recorded on Monday the 24th of January, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And today I am joined by two guests. We have got Taco Virto well, his name is actually longer than that, but regrettably. Cannot seem to pronounce it.

He's from Yoast. And we've got Gustavo board who is from the events calendar as always. There's a lot to talk about. We get deep into some topics this week, first up a very brief introduction to Gutenberg 12.4. And then there is a quiz from Robert Jacobi called how WordPress are you? We then talk more about why it is that block themes don't seem to be being created.

There's only 39 in the repository at this point, some new events coming around, WP careers, summit. That's going to be happening later this year, as well as some webinars. And I'm going to be doing more. This week. In fact, if you're listening to this on the day it came out, it'll be today. That's WP builds.

You are UX show with me and pension Neri, fluent forms. They've got an update. There is a fabulous plugin by wicked plugins, and it's a WordPress block builder. You should check that out. And then we get into a whole conversation about open source and the way it is maintained, it is a deep dive and it's really interesting.

It's all coming up. On this week in WordPress. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello. Hello. I'm going to say hello a lot of times because the audio takes a few moments to settle down. So if I say hello a lot, it settles down. So hopefully it's all settled down by now. Hello, this week in WordPress episode number 193.

Very glad that you've joined us today. We're joined by two guests this afternoon. Both of whom have never been on the show before. I don't know if you've picked up, but over the last few weeks, since Paul Lacey has decided he's he's moving on, we've decided to get some sort of panel of co-hosts and we're joined by one of them today.

And it just occurs to me Taco. I have never tried your surname, so I'm going in blind, but God, let me have a go. This is this is Taco Verdun shot. Close enough. Okay. Really? Actually, yes. How should it be

[00:02:32] Taco Verdonschot: called?

[00:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's nothing

[00:02:33] Gustavo Bordoni: like what I said,

[00:02:37] Nathan Wrigley: Harvey, Larry batteries or whatever it was guardians of the galaxy, but thank you so much.

I will improve my pronunciation of your surname. He's joining us over from from Yoast. You've probably come across Taco and I'm going to read his little biography out. Taco is the manager of community at Yoast. He's the community deputy at the WordPress community team GTE for the Dutch WP polyglots team generalist in WordPress, not really being a developer or designer, but a more of an advanced user.

He's a father of two daughters, husband to one. I like enjoys a motor and trail bike trail. Wow. Enjoys motor and bike trail riding in his spare time, but he isn't any good in it. And he's still trying to get rid of his trip. Dutch bluntness. I confess Taco. I honestly didn't. I have no preconception about the Dutch being blunt.

Is that.

[00:03:33] Taco Verdonschot: It is a thing I learned getting into the WordPress community and having more international conversations. Let's put it that way.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can be as blunt as you, I have the I have the power of the on off switch. If you say it's really nice for you to, I'm so pleased that you're joining us and hopefully you'll be joining us in the future lots and lots of times as well.

We're also joined by Gustavo who's surname. I tried it beforehand and I think I've got it right, Gustavo Bordone is that. Good enough. Okay. That's perfect. And Gustavo is the engineering manager and principal engineer at the events, calendar, and developer behind Fakher press PTE for plugins in Portuguese, Brazil, husband, and soon to be father let's come back to that in a second.

And on the spare time he enjoys woodworking and Olympic weightlifting. Did I just read that Olympic weightlifting? What

[00:04:32] Gustavo Bordoni: I do? Yeah, I, yes, I like it quite a bit.

My form of exercise.

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: I've never met a weightlifter. We quite often have REMCOs Reese on who is a formerly from Yoast. And here I can see he's often lifting heavy weights. I sometimes call them out on Twitter. It's quite funny, but father too soon, you tell

[00:04:59] Taco Verdonschot: him

[00:05:00] Gustavo Bordoni: March. So yeah, a little boy.

It's gonna be, it's gonna be quite the new endeavor.

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: That is nice. But thank you anyway. Thanks. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. That's, that is a really nice thing March. Hopefully we'll have you on the show at some point as well in the future, and you can tell us how that's going and hopefully I'll be able to stay awake during,

oh, we know how that goes. If you want to make some comments, if you're dropping in, we would really appreciate any comments that you want to make. Just a few little quirky things about the nature of online systems. These days. If you, depending on where you're watching us, you might be able to automatically get your name and avatar across.

But if you're watching us on Facebook you'll have to go to the thread and click the little link, which is at the top. You have to go to chat.restream.io forward slash F B. Otherwise you come through as just some sort of anonymous user, which is fine. If you want to do it that way, we don't know who you are.

Another thing to mention is if you wish to share this and I would enjoy that very much. If you want it to just step away from the computer, pick up your phone. This is the URL it's WP belts.com forward slash in live. We'll be here for the next 85 minutes or so. And. What else, if you've got any comments, just drop them in and we should be able to see who you are.

Let's have a look. There's a few people come in and Courtney. Hello Courtney. She says she's super excited. Gustavo sharing today. Oh, nice. Okay. That's good to know. Rob Cairns. Hello, Rob. Good morning, WordPress peeps. This is not going to be, this is not going to be a fun and exciting week. Oh, okay. Yeah. Is this not?

Oh, I didn't read that. It's positive. Yes you are, yeah. I was going to say Rob Cannes is always very positive. This is going to be an exciting week where actually. We're not going to talk too much about 5.9, but obviously there's a lot going on. Courtney's back Taco too. Hey Taco. Hey and thank you very much.

Oh, goodness me. They're coming in faster than I can cope with them. Good morning says Michelle Frechette. Good morning, indeed. Good morning from mark Wescott. The Ws form is Mark West guard. Somebody, whoever you are, you haven't done that link thing. That's absolutely fine. I use the events calendar a lot.

Yay. Greetings and salutations from Peter. I'll tell you what I'm going to, I'm going to S I'm just going to let you read the comments for yourself guys, and we'll take those off and get stuck into the show if that's okay. But thank you to anybody who has made a comment. I appreciate it. Okay. So this week in WordPress, there's a lot to talk about.

The bulk of it at the beginning will be more towards WordPress. And then we stray off into events, things that are happening in the WordPress community. And then towards the end, we just go totally random. And we'll talk about web three and things like that. But first piece up is WP Tavern.

This is just in Tatlock over there on the 19th of January. And he was talking about 12.4. Gutenberg gotten both 12.4, all of the nice new shiny features, which are going to be coming along. He's done a deep dive as C so often does. And and he's got some points to raise about it. He he mentions that the I'm going to paraphrase, but some theme related blocks have been relocated inside the inserter.

There are accessibility improvements. There's a button been added so that you can always close the block inserter and various other bits and pieces. Essentially. It's broken down into these sections, the broken site editor. There's a fault that he's picked up on with the, with with a broken part of the site editor.

It creates a bit of a usability issue, but what I'm going to recommend is that you go to this piece, have a little look around and see what you make of it. You guys do you use Guttenberg. Are you excited? It as a project quite often when we've got guests on, we've had this conversation over and over, but because you guys are new to the show, we haven't, I use it all the time now for pretty much everything.

And and I'm quite excited about what's coming in 12.4 over to you. Okay.

[00:09:21] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I have one side still on Elementor. But everything new is block-based so

[00:09:31] Gustavo Bordoni: that's pretty exciting. I just like, so it was doing like a meetup here for the new, like New Jersey. Like meetup. And I was like, I wanted to integrate like with, as, with a block, as much as possible.

And it was pretty cool to use cadence one of the other products from stellar, but it was really interesting to use that as my way into the blocks that are like full on. And then now I'm using it on my blog and it just moved on this weekend to it. And then now I'm like playing with creating some patterns and some stuff to to get my feet wet on some of the more like theme related parts since I've been so much into the, like the plugin for the past, like two years,

[00:10:22] Nathan Wrigley: I am.

I confess that I'm still hitting brick walls with the block editor in areas. For example, I never particularly used elemental, but I did spend a long time using beaver builder and basically the way that looked in the back end. And I'm sure the same would be true for all of these page builders genuinely looked identical by the fact that, there's a few little pixels of blue or something surrounding the component that you're working with at the moment I have yet to experience that in the block editor, anything that I've done looks cool.

There's always a little bit of padding. You accidentally hit return and you insert a paragraph block and you didn't even know that you did it. And there's that tiny, faint bit of text, which indicates you've done it. And if that's in there, it breaks your rows, but I feel that we're getting there and obviously projects Gustavo, you mentioned.

Cadence and the blocks that you've, the PLOS pro suite of blocks that you've got over there. Plus the theme itself this week is going to be a big week. I think once full site editing has been switched on things, that's going to start changing rapidly, but we're not there yet. Interesting. Yeah.

Okay.

[00:11:27] Taco Verdonschot: I think it holds a lot of problems the future. But like you said, in the intro, I'm not a developer, I'm not a designer and playing with full site editing right now is frustrating because I can do about 60 to 70% of what I want to do. Yeah.

[00:11:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And it is frustrating when the things that you are absolutely have on hand in element or are unavailable.

I know what you mean. I do know what you mean. It's like a slow and steady, isn't it? It's a slow and steady burn, but we are definitely getting. Like it's really

[00:12:06] Gustavo Bordoni: important. I think anytime someone mentioned that, I think it's important to remember that, like we spent how many years to get WordPress, to like the state of like of like stability that it is, and that you can rely on its tools.

And a lot of the things that happen, like Gutenberg in the pro that piece of the project is huge. And just it's an infant in terms of the project itself for open source and all that kind of stuff. The promise like Tacos that is, is the thing, the promise for the.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'll just quickly go back to to Justin's article.

So basically it's a little incremental push there's a few bits and pieces that have been updated most notably accessibility. But also this categories reminder, which Justin thought was quite an ingenious, unnecessary thing, essentially, just as your in your editing, in the editor in the way that you normally do and categories may be a crucial part of your site, it might be an essential part of your workflow.

I don't know. Maybe you've got some sort of template attached to a category which will display it correctly, depending on what it is. And if you miss it, things might go wrong. And I think probably most posts these days need some sort of categorization and you just get this sort of like little nag saying his suggestion.

Do you want to assign a category for it? And seems like quite a useful thing. I have a little checklist, which I have in a Google doc for when I published posts on WP belts. And I just go through a bullet pointed list, but if I could put something like that inside of a post, like check categories, then I think that's quite useful.

Yeah.

[00:13:45] Gustavo Bordoni: That's where I think it's going to be super cool having these, the side panel things coming from plugins, like Yoast can be like, Hey, don't forget this, and this. Or for events, us being able to, Hey, don't forget that this is has a ticket. That's not for sale or something along the lines of that.

That's

[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: beautiful. There's a project called publish press, which I've seen around a lot, but I've not actually used it. And I believe that. Enables this kind of thing, you, you must add a category before the publish button is usable and you must, I don't know, you must add some text over a thousand words or whatever it might be, and there's a whole laundry list and you can set it up so that your team cannot publish things until those criteria have been met.

And yeah, I guess if I don't know how the Yoast platform works, but I'm presuming that those kinds of hooks would be quite useful, have you checked your settings in Yoast?

[00:14:44] Taco Verdonschot: There is a pre publish filter available where you can as a plugin, just call bots and add your own information.

And yeah, like you said, just know CEO's doing, that's already. If your post isn't fully optimized, it says, Hey, are you sure you don't want to update this before publishing?

[00:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's nice. I think that's a nice, and so you can back out, you can say yes, I'm sure. Leave me. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's good.

Interesting. Okay. Okay. There we go. Go and look at Justin's piece on the Tavern, the links, of course, as always, we'll be in the show notes, which I'll publish tomorrow morning at seven o'clock in the morning. Next one. Okay. Next one. This is a, this is Robert Jacobi. Just being, having a bit of fun with this.

All here is of course the head of WordPress over at cloud ways. And he's got a little quiz for us, right? I don't know if you guys managed to get a good score. I'm gonna say everybody good to go. Okay. 12 or more so I didn't get full score that's for sure. There was a few that I genuinely didn't know.

So anybody listening to this score yourself appropriately? Firstly, how do you spell WordPress? So you've got three, three options. Is it w O R D P R E S with w and P capitalized. Is it all lower case? You can get three points. If you don't spell it correctly, he says, he's going to haunt you on social media.

I think we all know how to spell WordPress. Dang it. Don't we

[00:16:16] Taco Verdonschot: definitely

[00:16:16] Nathan Wrigley: one. Okay. We get a point. All right. So w O. D P R E S with capitals on the w and the P if question two is when you ask the bartender at the WP Tavern. So this is just in Tadlock. He just, this regular thing called ask the bartender and he answers a fairly complicated question.

Do you feel number one? You're kidding. Right there. Isn't a single useful recipe to make this quiz enjoyable. Number two. Why won't they just call it WordPress Tavern? A number three, if you don't know Sarah and Justin, you might as well just use Wix. Which one are you going for? Obviously three. Yes. Okay.

I'm going to go. Yeah, I don't know why they don't call it WordPress. The Tavern, actually. That is a good question. I wonder if that is out of bounds

[00:17:08] Taco Verdonschot: to trademark violation.

[00:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's what I mean. Okay. All right. So number three let's just do one more just to keep it brief reading this quiz.

Oh no, actually let's go to the last one. Cause that was the one that I don't even have a clue. I just don't even know what this is. Question five goes like this. This one will separate the true WordPress's from the wannabes. What kind of tree are you? If you think you're a tree number one, did my internet just get hacked?

What the heck? Number two. Definitely not an Elm. I don't know what that's about. Number three from my branches. I democratize publishing. I'm guessing it's through.

[00:17:52] Taco Verdonschot: I will. Anything that democratizes publishing. So I'm going to go

[00:17:58] Nathan Wrigley: for three branches. I'm guessing he's talking about, like repos and things like that, but I don't know. Anyway, thank you, Robert, for keeping us entertained, I actually did enjoy doing the other, shared it with a few people on social media to see how they did, but thank you.

I

[00:18:13] Taco Verdonschot: really liked the scores.

[00:18:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Okay. So let's go for that. Okay. Yeah. Spotted. So depending on how you do on this quiz, again, links in the show notes, zero to five, you lost, you have lost how did, how do you get zero? It doesn't matter. You obviously clicked the wrong link and wound up here. Thanks for visiting numbers.

If you got six to 10 S Y SOP, someone built your WordPress site, thank you for supporting the ecosystem 11 to 15 drinking body we've mapped, but I can't remember your name. Like we got 16 fork. You know who you are, you fought to be to cafe log. So is the idea that only Matt Mullenweg or Mike Little could have scored full marks?

I don't know what the question in there was that prevented the restaurants from getting it, but anyone. A bit of fun. Alrighty, let's move on. This is actually, I think a piece of concern. I don't know what you guys think, but so 5.9 rolls out this week. We've got full site editing. We'll talk more about that in a minute.

It's coming down the pipe in order to make use of full site editing in its entirety. Then you're going to need to have a block based theme and you may be very skilled and be able to not run up by yourself. And that's brilliant. But I would imagine that in most cases, people are going to reach out to the repository in order to get one of those themes so that they can do their, or I don't know, let's say navigation blocks and things like that and make their site complete just by using.

WordPress Matt Mullenweg at the state of the word said that he really would like there to be like something in the region of about 5,000 such themes, because obviously the theme directory at the moment, it has huge numbers of plugins and themes. So why not try to make it like that, but at the moment of release 39 block-based themes are in evidence.

Now this piece was published. What five days ago, maybe that number is incrementally, crept up a tiny little bit, but I imagine it might be 40 or 41, but it's not going to be a lot. I don't know if this is a cause for concern that here's the thing. If you are a theme developer, this article is basically saying, look why are you not making the effort to put block-based themes out there so that everybody can try it?

And there was quite a few, whoops, let me just share the screening. And I just took it off accidentally. There's quite a few. Points that theme developers are making. And I think highlighted three or four of them on the screen, which I think is really useful and they illustrate why people haven't yet taken to this.

So I'm just going to read a few of them out and then we can have some commentary from us at the end. And it says, for example users cannot take advantage of all the new features without a block theme. That's why WordPress 5.9 is introducing the new default theme 2022. So if you stop and you can't think of any theme to choose, go for that one and take it from there.

But why aren't they being created by these authors? And so here's a few quotes from various people. You can see them on the screen. I don't actually know in all cases who they are, but I'll just read them out. I asked some local agencies here in Cape town and some of them indicated work. In their agency, we're extremely efficient at creating sites with their theme and making a new block theme.

What are you into profits? Automatic thing, development team lead Jeffrey peer set. So there's one point, which is, look, we've got our flow down. Pat. Everybody knows where everything is located in our thing. We can do it in seconds. Why waste time? So that's one option. So here's. Somebody else who says there is a learning curve, but I expect more and more people will start building and submitting block themes said, WordPress consultant, crust, slur, slough off.

I apologize if I butchered your name, I'm personally eager to experiment and learn, but since it's totally new way of building themes, we all need to pay the bills first. So it's a similar approach. Really. It's going to use op time development, resources, hours, and so on. So that's one thing. We definitely plan to switch to full site editing, but there's a lot for me to learn and experiment with before I'm confident enough to use it in a production environment.

So this is a slightly different argument. It's not the argument about money. This is the argument about technical expertise and the idea of not really knowing enough to be confident that what you've got up on that website is totally Bulletproof. And then finally, we just can't keep up with the changes.

CSS, igniter co-founder shirazes in mov. The alarm mill loss. I'm so sorry about the names. It's miles away from offering something other than dead simple themes. There are too many inconsistencies to streamline. So there's a range of thoughts. 39 only are going to open the floor to Taco and Gustavo. What are your thoughts on this?

[00:23:12] Gustavo Bordoni: so I here's how I see this, right? Like whenever, like I think it's the thing about the, like the speed in which things are coming on creates a problem for the S like the other thing that That I forgot whoever who else mentioned that there was like no knowledge, like there's still a a knowledge to be built on the topic.

And the speed creates a problem for the documentation team and in people that are involved on that to actually put out the knowledge, put out knowledge bases in create documentation on how to get some of that stuff done. And for the other parts of WordPress, non block related like non FSC related there's years of knowledge out there, thousands of blogs talking about how to do things snippets, a lot of these things won't work anymore.

Like the way, like the template hierarchy doesn't necessarily work the same way anymore. In a lot of that stuff now poured it over to JavaScript. So I think that is where to the money is that is there's a. Like the actual tool is moving really fast and it creates a gap of documentation behind it.

In, in, in there isn't there it's really hard to report. No matter how much, no matter how much is a wrong word, but if you pour a lot of money into it, you can catch up the documentation, but it's always a catch up situation. And WordPress is the rest of WordPress has that documentation already.

So I feel like that's a big portion

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: of what I think. I don't know if you can speak Gustavo on behalf of, the cadence alarm of Stella WP, but obviously you've probably that arm of the business has probably spent an awful lot of time creating the documentation for that. Header block, not block their head, a system within the customizer and their footer system within the customizer and all that kind of stuff.

And it it must jar a little bit having got that and perfected it and I've played with it. And it's a really nice implementation the idea of then pulling that out and saying, what does this other way of doing it now? Which you can try it, it maybe isn't quite as useful to you.

Certainly you're going to have to learn something new. I don't know if there's any friction say, no, we're just going to stick with what we've got forever and ever. Amen. I

[00:25:47] Gustavo Bordoni: don't know. So I haven't talked specific. This is actually something that I really mean to do sometime soon because the events Kellerman itself is trying to figure out how some of the integrations that we are going to do for blocks.

Like in the next little bit in talking to the people in cadence that have a lot of experience on that, I want to like. Poke people's brain around that, that topic, but I can't speak to what, what is their like their path forward.

[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But it creates a problem. And tack over on the Yoast side.

You're, you guys do a just a breathtakingly, good job with your documentation and blog posts. It right down to the point of creating custom artwork for just about everything that you do, it's darn impressive. Do you foresee this as a bit of a problem, creating the documentation, are you having to rewrite and jettison a whole load of stuff?

[00:26:48] Taco Verdonschot: I don't think too much changes for us in terms of documentation. Definitely some things look different in the block, out of there and especially with accuracy but not all that much because most of the analysis. We do now in Yosef, geo is still on a per post or per page or per custom post type and not specifically per block.

So the technology behind it will absolutely have to change with WordPress on the documentation side. Not so much. I think

[00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: the, sorry you carry on.

[00:27:34] Taco Verdonschot: Apologies. Yeah. So I was thinking is we shouldn't really be surprised that it's only 30 something block-based themes right now because the people that are adopting the.

Parts right now. And our early adopters, they're the people who are willing to go that extra mile to figure out that that system. And once we, they have a few good sites up and running and people see, wow, so this is possible with after C, then the rest will follow and then people have something to look at and say I want to build something like this.

And then we'll probably see a big increase, but I don't think there's a reason because WordPress has a brilliant, pretty much brilliant backwards compatibility. There's no reason for any agency to revisit the site. They built earlier to say, Hey, let's throw this around and build it on efficacy. Other reason to redo that.

[00:28:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point. I guess it's one of those things where a client might come back to you every two or three years, because there's just, it just looks wrong. Now the website has become out of date and looks out of date. Maybe there's some big moment in time, like Google have done some sort of thing to the algorithm, which means actually we need to start over or whatever it may be.

And maybe that's the time to dwell on this kind of stuff. So just to put something back into this the context of this, Sarah, is that Sarah makes Sarah Gooding makes that there's there's quite a lot of people who don't even use the block editor, there's 5 million WordPress users who haven't transitioned to the WordPress block editor.

She says still using the classic editor that is jolly big number. This experience is obviously not the same, but there's a lot of people who aren't literally will be, it will be unavailable to them. Yeah, I just thought it was curious that given the opportunity to create a load of block-based themes and.

Deadline for want of a better word being this week, I was anticipating that there would be more than 39. And I guess that Sarah's point is that people have got good reason. I wonder if this will open the flood gates, because it will be in core. Why not from tomorrow onwards basically.

Let's just see how that goes. Actually has

[00:30:09] Taco Verdonschot: a very good comments on that. Courtney as well, definitely props to the docs team. We're sure. Peter saying smart things as well.

[00:30:19] Nathan Wrigley: So Peter Ingersoll, thanks for joining us. He says FSC and so block-based themes is intentionally being released in a way that allows developers to ramp up as they experiment and learn.

Lessons were learned in 5.0 all is well. Yeah, Joe, Cepher went out of her way. Didn't she? After the kind of to figure out what went wrong with 5.0 and where the w where the listening failed. Should we say anything? I think that was

[00:30:43] Gustavo Bordoni: beautiful from coming from a plugins perspective, like both me and Taco work for like plugin companies in, we are integrating with it from a from a tangential point into the theme.

But the thing that's like beautiful to see is that even though, there's in compatibility with like tons of plug-ins widgets on FSC, it's still like a. Huge close beta feature that is like ramping up over in. I think the major thing is you were saying you use the word that line as being the five dot nine.

I think it's, I don't know. I think it's more the beginning of the race, like that's like the feeling that I get is like now the F five dot nine is out, begins the race for which one of the free themes will reign the, like the, like a Vada or auto themes do on the, like the premium side, with their own block editors

[00:31:54] Nathan Wrigley: of.

I'm going to, I'm going to assume that what Robert's saying here is true, and he's saying that he agrees with Peter for a start, but he is saying that cadence, for example, they've issued a statement saying something along the lines of just leave FSC switched off for now. And let's see how things go.

It's a bit like me, but I don't update to a point release of WordPress for like at least 24 hours after it comes up just in case something goes wrong. Yeah. W why not take that approach? And this is interesting, Jordan, thanks for joining us. He says he's actually in the process of starting out creating a block-based theme.

We can use at the agency, I work out that's fascinating and he's got a lot more to say. We only start it now as all the review. I oh, you've reviewed one of the block-based editor made it seem like it was not ready. He also noticed a lot of people that use Gothenburg had other plugins like oxygen, for example.

Yes. That's a good point. Wow. Writing loads. Thanks Jordan. I'm very much looking forward to moving forward to block-based themes and see how far this can go. And finally, for now, my other favorite about block-based themes was the speed on how much bloat was inserted. Jordan, thank you for that. That's really enrich this conversation.

We expect number 40 to be in the theme, direct sheep. Should we give you this time tomorrow? But thank you for joining in the conversation about that. It's fascinating. And I'm curious as to why you've jumped in now. I wonder if it's just because of this article made the point of the flood gates will open in the next few days, and this seems like a good point to start it.

Brilliant. Okay. That was a nice little chat. I'm going to mention a few events. I know Michelle Frechette is on the line and. She has got an event with post status coming up in the near future. It's called the WP careers summits, and it's open for registration. Open the calling for speakers and sponsors.

I'll just give you the headline bullet points of what this is all about. So the WP careers summit is a new event hosted. Host status community that will take place on the 8th of April, 2022, highlighted a little bit back down here. The call for speakers and sponsors is now open. Jonathan wold, who's been on the show is managing the sponsorship aspects of the event.

And post status was he has hired Dan maybe from big orange chart to run. The tech part of the conference. Organizers are looking to looking for speakers who are particularly adaptive job hunting, or who are knowledgeable about how to recruit and hire talent selected speakers will share their expertise, 30 minute recorded presentation.

So that's an anxiety busting right there. You get to record it in advance and you will get a $200 stipend. WP career summit will be a virtual event and we'll have a 15 minute Q and a following session. So if you're in. Arena you're in WP and a thing or two about jobs, hiring, positioning yourself for being a good candidate for a job.

And so on. This is probably for you. This is a WP Tavern article, but if I just click on this link oh, can I click on that link? Yes. WP career summits.com, no hyphens or underscores, just all as one word, WP career summit.com. I'm going to totally switch gears and move to this piece. No, I'm not. I'm going to switch Peterson move to this piece because that just seems like the segue that ought to be this is Yoast.

They've got a few jobs over at Yoast and they've just recently redesigned their their, what's the word that them, the methodology, the way that they're doing this site over the last few days, I actually had this piece. Forgetting the Taco was going to be on the show today, but you've got a few jobs go in, tell us about the site and the jobs that you've got coming up.

[00:35:50] Taco Verdonschot: So we I'm saying we, but I didn't do anything because they don't let me touch code anymore, which is good. But no we did a redesign of this page because it used to be a long list of jobs with no easy search. And as you can see, you've now selected the filter developer. If you lack that you should be able to see probably even more jobs because yeah basically we have been ever since I joined company which is eight years ago.

So I'm not the right person to speak at the w Korea summit because I haven't had

[00:36:38] Nathan Wrigley: a job

[00:36:41] Taco Verdonschot: in eight years. Yeah. I've got nowhere to go to because I'm home so well, this is definitely a but yeah, we're looking for a lot of people and as you can see with all the job ads, you'll see either a vegan or a hybrid because mostly due to the pandemic, we decided to expand on what we always did because we've been saying we have a very strong office culture.

We did, but after two years, working from home that has changed and that reflects in our hiring. So if you're from a fairly close to. Western European time zone. Then while we'd be happy to have you onboard and it's called hybrid to not remote because we expect you to, as soon as things are possible again, around travel but travel to the office regularly.

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Nine to five every day, but frequently and fairly often. Yeah.

[00:37:46] Taco Verdonschot: A week, a month or something.

[00:37:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. 13 jobs over on the host website. So yeah, whoever is in charge of the yolks jobs really probably wants to be signing up for the WP careers summit looks like Courtney is going to be part of that as well.

That's not the comment that's got to do with Korea summit. I'll put the correct one up. There you go. I'll be assisting on the career summit as well, specifically with connecting employers, with training providers. So go to w yoast.com forward slash jobs. And you'll see there's 13 there at the minute.

And if you're in the time zone fairly close to the Netherlands, then then one of those might be for you. What have we got? Senior developers, JavaScript developers, software architects, lead developers, QA engine Q, a engineers, CIA engineer. The list goes on 13 jobs. I think that's a boatload of jobs.

[00:38:38] Taco Verdonschot: My chance to say that if you apply then do mentioned that you came through me because there might be a nice bonus in it for me.

[00:38:49] Nathan Wrigley: I love it. That's so good. Oh, I see. I see what you mean now about the Dutch I go. Yeah, that was good. Dump that yoast.com forward slash jobs. Let's can we stick with Yoast for a bit as you're here and we've kicked off the Yoast stuff? Why not? This was big news, which we didn't thoroughly cover because I actually said, I know that Taco's coming on in the future.

Let's just wait until Tacos on and get it from the horse's mouth for want of a better word. So a weeks ago Yoast and I confess it totally took me by surprise. I didn't, I had picked up no news that you were developing something for the Shopify side of things, but the. The Shopify experience has now been updated.

You can download, I don't even know if it's called a module or a plugin or an extension or whatever it is, what it, what is that? Oh, okay. So there's an app available on Shopify for Yoast. So how's it going? Has it met your expectations? Is it going off the shelves like hotcakes? Is there a free version?

Is there like a premium upgrade? Like we have on WordPress? How's it all going?

[00:40:01] Taco Verdonschot: So there's a premium only I just, we've always said if you make money off of your website, that's the point where we can make some money off of you. And obviously if you're running an online store the least you should be doing is making money.

So there's premium only for Shopify at just $29 a month. It's very similar to the WordPress products, but. Obviously adapted to the fact that it's an e-commerce platform. Yeah, and the launch was a fantastic, it was so much fun as you can see in the screen, if you're following his life today, then we had an event, an online Yoast con a conference that we held a few times before, but then in person this time it was online and focused on basically e-commerce and mostly Shopify.

And I'm super proud to say that we had some of the biggest names in SEO speak at our conference. So that's definitely that was so much fun last Thursday.

[00:41:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really, it was not been out that long. Has it? The the. Because we're WordPress. We like to, we really on the whole talk about WooCommerce and, we talking about north commerce and other different solutions that were coming along, but let's not forget that a lot of people are building e-commerce websites on Shopify, a huge amount.

The learning curve is very minimal. The technical debts that you need or, sorry, the technical expertise that you need is basically zero and the fees are pretty modest as well. And I know for a fact that a lot of people who I speak to on the podcast who have agencies, they just use Shopify because they find that whole process to be less fraud.

Obviously the customization is more different. If in some cases I imagine it's much more straightforward on the WordPress side, but yeah, clever move. I'm really pleased that that it's taken off and and obviously delighted that it's on the platform and working as expected, it was good.

[00:42:28] Taco Verdonschot: It's going really well. And it's new for us because we never had a full SAS before which is technically is so we did a release today and no one notices it just updates. There's no harassing users to install the latest update. There's, it's all super fluent. It gives a lot more data on how people are using your product.

So it's a whole new world for us. But all the learnings that we do in Shopify, we take. And also use those to improve the products for WordPress because the base of both is the open source, Yoast, SEO JavaScript framework that does the analysis for both readability and SEO. So all the learnings from the one platform are transferred to the other.

[00:43:28] Nathan Wrigley: Absolutely amazing and nice that you've got it all bundled up in assess. Okay. One last Yosty related thing. Let's see, this is just a shout out this, honestly, this was all supposed to be at a different point, but I've just bought bunched it forward because we started talking about various different things and it seemed to seem to come in.

There is an event tomorrow. If you if you're into Yoast, they've got their SEO Yoast news webinar. That's tomorrow you can find that, stock com forward slash webinars forward slash SEO news, Jan 2022. But the thing that I found interesting was that there's going to be a portion given over to Sebastian Vanderlande.

Who's got word proof, which is a plugin, which we had him on the podcast like 18 months ago or something talking about it and we'll come to blockchain and all those kinds of things. But if you're into the idea of. Having a ledger, which makes things immutable on your WordPress website, it might be store transactions, or I don't know, you might be a lawyer or something, then go and have a listen to Sebastian Vanderlande.

And also the latest WordPress SEO news from the Yoast guys

[00:44:38] Taco Verdonschot: might even be an announcement for.

[00:44:43] Nathan Wrigley: There might be a nice announcement for something as well. There's definitely certainly an announcement for something new. Ah, okay. That's good. Where are we at? Where did we get to? We did that. I'm going to skip that one out nother event onto mention.

I was reached out to by the guys at body works. They had a webinar which was very successful a couple of weeks ago. And if accessibility is your thing, then tune in on February. The second. If you go to bodyworks.com forward slash webinars, this is the latest one is called how to design accessible websites and you can register.

Now. It's a five. On February 2nd, so quick, shout out to them and a hat's it. And the last one to do with events, I think unless I'm wrong, there might be another one later is I am doing a WP builds UI UX session with peach and every tomorrow at about 3:00 PM. So more or less now, if you're not sick and tired of me droning on about WordPress, then come back again and have some more, it won't be me droning on about WordPress.

It will be peach and airy instructing you about UI UX. The intention is on each episode, we're going to have two websites on the screen. One of them is a user submitted website. So fill out. This form to tell us about a website that you want her to look at, she will then do it, take it to pieces from a UI UX point of view, what she thinks is good and what she thinks can be improved.

But then she's also going to bring along a website, which she thinks offers outstanding UI and UX and critique that and explain why she believes it's so good. She's a brilliant exponent of this. She's a total expert. And the URL for this is WP builds.com forward slash you are and you can go and submit your form, but you'll be on the same life pages we're on now.

So WP belts.com forward slash live and off of me, promoting myself as promote somebody else. Fluent form. This I don't know if you guys have come across fluent forms before, but this is a, from WP managed ninja. They rocked the forms world about two and a half years ago or something that this fabulous for lifetime deal.

And I think they managed to swell the numbers of their subscribers on off the back of that. I've been building it out ever since then. They've got some really nice features coming up. They have conversational forms, which they've had for a while, but conversational forms are now going to be able to.

Take payments, which apparently you couldn't do before. They've also got checkable field grid in there. You'll be able to upload files and image uploads as well. They've also got the option to migrate. So if you're coming from another forms, plugin there, the options that you've got, gravity forms called AeroFarms forms and ninja forms that go, it's nice auto-complete field for Google maps.

I don't know. Let's say you're selling a widget and you want to know where to deliver it. You can get somebody to click on a Google map and that's where you need to deliver. The widget is pretty neat and it works out the box. They got discord integration, sales flair, which is CRM H capture. That's the.

Capturing everybody's attention. I know that was w I need a button, which goes when I do something like that. That was your moment to be blunt Tucker, past that one.

[00:48:17] Taco Verdonschot: I want to be nice. This is my friend

[00:48:21] Nathan Wrigley: and a bunch of other stuff. So props to them. If you've not looked at it, how about WP?

Fluent forms? 4.3 is the latest version. This is so cool. I have no words for this. This is wicked plugins, just in Tadlock. Did a piece about their block builder. So maybe Gustavo, you can tell us how difficult it is to build a block. Cause I've never done it. It sounds like Tacos not going to be doing it anytime soon.

My understanding is it's pretty darn hard.

[00:48:58] Gustavo Bordoni: I think it depends on where you're trying to do like everything, but in all honesty, I think these are the kind of like back in the day in WordPress, you had like people sharing snippets and like you would copy and paste that kind of stuff into your functions at PHB.

I feel like that's the version of that, that we're going to see quite a bit now is like people being able to build blocks without having to necessarily know how to do a lot of the code. Similarly, how we used to do snippets in the kind of earlier days of WordPress all of that certainly doing more react base blocks can get very complicated, like fast that's has much.

Bigger curve for learning than the, than WordPress had before. One of the template hierarchy and everything else like that.

[00:50:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, everybody that I know who's attempted, this has come out a bit bloodied and bruised and they may have crossed the finish line, but there's been quite a lot of, oh boy.

That was not as easy as I was hoping. It would be certainly, it wasn't as easy as the sore PHP way. Maybe if you're just coming out of college or something, and this is the way that you've always done it, is that, what are you on about? Fine, but but I think there's going to be a whole range of these kinds of tools.

So wicked plugins, we've got this gooey tool where you can build blocks and Justin Tatlock had him on the the Tavern. They did an interview with him and Dave, Justin has reviewed the plugin and seams and Justin, I think has got a very fair mind and he points out things that need improving and he shouts about things that are worth shouting about.

Everything. When I read this, it shouted, this is good. And so I went and had a play and I managed to follow along. I confess I wasn't building a block for any particular purpose, but I downloaded the plugin. I installed it. And I followed along with their tutorial and I was able to build basically like a card plugin, a card block, where you upload an image and it instantly appears on the website and you type in some texts and it goes into an H one tag and, it's you out, you drop in some CSS and you can do what you like with that and make it horrible.

And all of these kinds of things. It was it totally worked and I could instantly see, man, I could build a simple little plugin to just display data. I don't know. Let's say I'm a real estate agency owner and I build WordPress real estate sites. I could have a little block for that up and running and in half an hour with this plugin.

So just props to wicked plugins for the great work for their UI. My understanding is there are rivals, I didn't know that there are other commercial offerings, but this certainly seems like worth a look, go and read the article, see what Justin says, maybe give it a download. And and I've actually got WordPress haven't, it's not WordPress dev and that contravenes all sorts of things.

I've got a WP Tavern podcast episode coming out in the near future with the founder. And yeah, you'll be able to learn more about how it works and why they built it, anything on that guys.

[00:52:24] Taco Verdonschot: It sounds like something I should definitely play with. Oh yeah. It's a, this is for non-developers, right?

Yeah. Like I said, I'm an advanced user. This is my area. Give me a UI and I will build something.

[00:52:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. If you like element or you will like this, but basically if you've ever used something like ACF to construct advanced custom fields, it's a lot like that. So you set up the bits which are going to receive the data, let's call it that the attributes, and then you go to the F, then you pair those up with the display.

And then there's an option to have how it would display on the backend on the front end differently, because that's a thing. If you don't set, the backend will not, it will take the front-end as the backend, and then you just go and play with it. And so here's a field and it appears in the block and it's for the house image.

Here's another field. And so think ACF, except with a block a is set with an element or style builder with buttons that you drag in and you can reorder everything and you honestly you'll have blocks half an hour. If you follow that tutorial, you'll have your first block built on it and you'll be so pleased with yourself.

I feel like that's

[00:53:44] Gustavo Bordoni: a, sorry. I feel like that's a huge impro, like the huge thing for for the thing that we were discussing earlier on about the FSC and the themes and the more we see I did this or these kind of tools that enable people to. Like people that are not like, like a very seasoned developer or something along the lines of that to build something that they feel proud of.

Just like on the early days of WordPress, you'll feel proud about building like a small little widget like changing how the title of your post shows, that kind of stuff like made you proud of oh, I got it. That's even though like you're working with Stephanie, someone else started crafting in, you're taking over from there.

If that's how you get like younger and new people to feel like they're building something of their own. And then it allows the future of WordPress to be like, to be this like similar to how it was. I imagine for all of us. In the days where like hacking your function dot PHP file with the way you would do most of the things I'm still doing.

[00:55:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I really am still doing that. No, it is brilliant. It's really good. And it just gives, gives me a bit of a window into what's going to be. Plugins tools, the end users like me and Tacos are going to be able to use in order to create these kinds of things. And like I say, you will be up and running really quickly.

There's quite a lot on the roadmap. For example, little things like you don't get an icon in the block, insert you just get the generic little brick thing. So they're going to add an icon. There's conditional logic applied. If this field isn't filled out this one, doesn't materialize on the F on the backend, on the front end, it's brilliant.

Just go and have a play in. And if you like it, let me know because I'd like to connect you with the plugin developer, because he's a really genuinely nice going okay. Right here we go. This is going to rev up the conversation. We've got two pieces in close succession, which are really interesting to me.

First. We had a piece from Morton that we featured a couple of weeks ago. I'd love if anybody knows Morton, can you connect me with Morton? Cause I wanna know. I wanna get him on the podcast or something. That'd be really nice, but he he's. Okay. Web three kind of comes into flavors.

And I didn't know this, if you write web 3.0, as in web space, three.zero. It's different than if you write web three, as in web, no space with the number three and web three is all the stuff surrounding blockchain. So cryptocurrencies, NFT and all of that kind of stuff. So that's what Morton's on about.

He's not on about the sort of web 3.0, why debating all of that. And he's put together this piece and I find myself in broad agreement with a lot of what he's saying. I know Taco, you can come in and. Save the day in a minute, but he's essentially saying that he thinks that this is all a bit of folly, that the stuff that's being designed for web three the blockchain is the answer to everything in the future.

Everything is going to be done on the blockchain. But the NFTs are just the greatest idea on, of boiling this article down, he seems to be fairly cynical about this. And he seems to be saying, it feels like a solution of which, which doesn't have a problem to match it yet. Just people have come up with this great idea, oh, look, blockchain.

But the idea that everything needs to be blockchain and in the future, the internet will be blockchain seems to be something that he doesn't agree with. And one of the points which hit home hardest to me was that it seems that almost everybody who is developing blockchain in Morton's opinion is in some way connected increasingly with a large.

Internet giant. So you've got the likes of Google and Facebook and all of these companies rolling in and massive amounts of venture capital. And so the idea of everything being decentralized in the future feels like it's being subverted, but that's the messaging. That's got to be stocked too. It's going to decentralize everything, even though it would appear that it's venture capital money and big corporation money that's seeding it at the moment.

I have really butchered what Morton was saying there. And I tried so hard to distill my thoughts, but go and read the article. It's big. It's going to take you 15 minutes and then probably another 15 to read it a second time, but it's totally worth it. It's just, we're on the cusp of something. And everybody seems to be talking about blockchain, this NFTs, that Bitcoin, this, and he's not convinced.

And he's convincing me that I shouldn't be convinced as well. So right now, Fight back. Yeah.

[00:59:01] Taco Verdonschot: What I do think if you can quickly pull up the article on screen again, I think the paragraph that's near the top of your screen that hopes the, yeah, the, there's not the last paragraph of the the panacea, but the one before he says the mythos around web three is rapidly evolving from the techno utopian dream to a promise of fairness, equity ownership in a post centralized world.

And I think that part of web three, that promise and what we already see happening is that people from typically underrepresented groups stepping into web three. Being more visible on the web, that's a very positive thing about it. And that's also what Morton emphasizes in this article. Because creating that equity online and creating the fairness and everyone giving everyone a chance to participate.

This is what we do in WordPress with democratizing publishing. So it's very similar thinking about an open web then again what he also says in his article is the current implementation is one that is mostly made to make money. Most of the use of web three is based around money.

And then the problem with blockchain is that it consumes a massive and massive amount of energy that we have to produce. And it's not all solar power

[01:00:51] Nathan Wrigley: sleep power. My I came across just before you carry on. I don't know if this is still true, but about six months ago, I came across an article, a very reputable articles.

So I say these words and I'm fairly confident in them. Apparently Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than Argentina.

[01:01:12] Taco Verdonschot: Oh, hi. Yeah.

[01:01:16] Gustavo Bordoni: Rough. So just to riff on a little bit of the energy thing, the Taco was mentioning that Nathan, you brought up it's, that's the piece that like is complicated about, I think the whole like crypto and blockchain, all of that piece of the technology until we solve that energy problem and the problem, or like the energy problem is intrinsically to the technology in the sense of.

Like it's meant to spend energy so that it's not easy to build tons of it. Like it's just like a part of the

[01:01:55] Nathan Wrigley: proof of work. Isn't it?

[01:01:58] Taco Verdonschot: And the

[01:01:58] Gustavo Bordoni: massive thing that I think is a problem is that the technology was built with one intention and ended up being used slightly differently. Like most of the, like you created with one intention, it ends up being used in an art.

I really want to see us like, figure out how to use like blockchain for validation of things. Instead of like more honestly used for validation and something that's you like user-friendly enough that we can do validation of one good. Like for me, me being someone that immigrated to the us and has gone through the visa process and all of that kind of stuff, I would love to see that be something that like my fees or the passport or your ID is something that like, if someone steals my ID, there's still a way to very easily go somewhere and say, Hey, this is the proof that I am, who I am and done.

That's where I think the technology is going to be like beautiful to solve problems of the real world instead of solving problems that we created, because someone wanted to make money in some way, shape or form, which is totally valid. We live in a world where people want to make money and that's part of the world.

I'm not criticizing that. I'm just saying, I would like to see. Both ends of the spectrum being

[01:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: tackled. Yeah. Okay. So I guess a couple of analogies that come to mind, like when Gutenberg that, the Gutenberg machine was first invented the printing press, just such a great thing, right? There's just, nobody can disagree.

That was a great idea. Except when somebody publishes something, which is just horrific then it's been repurposed for something horrific. And another example might be again, forgive me if you're a big lover of Facebook, that's fine. But I think a lot of people increasingly see the, the problems with things like Facebook and social media.

Again, it's not the problem of the internet. It's just, it's somehow gets misused and it feels maybe that's Martin's pieces that the blockchain itself is a brilliant idea. A truly remarkable thought. It now seems that it's been usurped and is being sold back to us by endeavors, which are basically centered around making money and making money for entities that have probably already quite money.

And that's the curious thing, they're making them, they're making these endeavors to be paid in Bitcoin so that they can cash out into us dollars. It's anyway, it's just, it's a fascinating read. Go and check it out. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody got anything else? Cause I feel there's more in that if you want to.

Yeah.

[01:05:03] Taco Verdonschot: So prior to going live, we briefly talked about a work proof. We also touched on it before because of the webinar thingy. But we're. I'm not saying the only useful thing on blockchain, but at least one of the really useful things, because they're using the blockchain to do exactly what Gustavo said to be able to say, at this point in time, I can prove I published this piece.

My terms of service of my e-commerce store have been like this since the moment you made your purchase on my store. But also I'm a news outlets. I would worsen to actually break this news. And everyone else who has the exact same article on their site is just copying mine. And that form of being able to show what's rightfully yours.

Or what, where you were first and the exact state that was in, I think that's a useful use of blockchain.

[01:06:18] Gustavo Bordoni: So here's something that's interesting. So as probably for people that are not aware a lot of the mining and the, of proof of work has been done with the GPU's the Morton GPU's, which is causing a shortage in all kinds of markets for building computers, which is also affecting servers and all kinds of different things.

Just as an interesting thought, I really enjoy how one of the solutions to that has been floated around by people in the, in, in that market and is like being able to. Avoid people that buy in bulk through using allowing you to be able to see who who bought this what's the chain of who bought this, who used this particular like products and be able to verify the chain of custody of tin of custody, but like of the, that particular object or for selling tickets to like a Superbowl or something along the lines of that where you can guarantee that you're buying like the real thing.

Yeah, that's

[01:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: really cool. Yeah. The, sort of the idea of a canonical record that this is, this was the first thing, and your word proof example Taco is just so brilliant. It might even be like ANSI libelous kind of thing. Look, I, look, I did not write that this is, this was changed by somebody and then re posted somewhere else.

And look, mine is older. I can prove it, categorically. That is really brilliant. And the idea that I hadn't even thought of that good stuff, but the idea of preventing the ticket touts from consuming all the Superbowl tickets and then selling them at 10 X. Yeah. All of these, and these feel like the word is I'm going to misuse the word philanthropic.

Cause it really isn't the right word. But the idea of something. That's not profit orientated. It doesn't have a profit motive. It's just, there's just a, there's just some sort of goodness tied up in it. You're creating a ledger to prove something. Not because there's money in it, but just because it's good that there's a reasonable use case for it.

And I feel that the examples that both Taco and Gustavo have told me just then that flips the switch for me a bit. This article now is starting to feel like, okay, I've dwelled on the negative bits that were in it and not possibly concentrated on the positive bits, which Morton does actually mention to be honest, but okay.

That was fascinating. Oh

[01:09:02] Taco Verdonschot: same time. There's also more negative. So when we're talking about, sorry, I really have to go here. But when you're talking about the crypto the, all the coins and everything with cryptocurrency. People are saying, Hey, this is a, so that no institutes can touch my money.

I'm not relying on a bank. I the IRS can see what I have in my possession because it's not tax information. It's privacy.

[01:09:41] Nathan Wrigley: You should've seen his face as he said that,

[01:09:48] Taco Verdonschot: but the problem there is that if someone steals your crypto wallet, where's your insurance. If someone steals my bank card, I call my bank and say, please don't let anyone make payments.

And if they do, they will probably be videotaped because well, security. And then they might even find the person who stole my bank card. Okay. That concept of decent realizing everything and not having a responsible party or not having any insurance in your financial status. I'm not sure that feels like liberation or that's just scary as hell.

[01:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's an interesting idea. Isn't it? In a sense it's quite distrustful that institutions at their heart are bound to be corrupt. You're working on the assumption that the bank is never looking out for your best interests. I actually have the opposite opinion. I think the bank is there to provide a good service and hope that I stick around and keep my money with them.

So they're going to try and provide a good service. And this paragraph from Morton sums it up. It says it's lovely. There's I think Taco, maybe you were thinking of this one with the advent of cryptocurrencies. Anyone can, now it can. Now once again, mint their own legal tender, and try to convince others that the new coin has the value.

And they'll tell you this as absolutely nothing whatsoever at all. Cross my heart and hope to die. Pinky, sweat, anything to do with evading taxes at all. Sure. He says, and I think. I don't want to be in controllable my money. I want to be in control of the bit that I need today, but I don't want to be in control of everything that I've ever earned.

And if I drop something on the floor and I'm a dog stands on it, thinking of a pen drive or something, which has got my, not that you'd be that stupid, but you never know the idea that people in general would want to totally look after every single asset that they own by themselves.

I cannot see that work in our, I don't want to be in charge of all that. I'd like somebody else to do it, but interesting. Especially

[01:12:11] Taco Verdonschot: with, yeah, it will be super expensive if you have to take care of all of that yourself, because let's assume that we're talking real money here and you save that in a safe place in your house, then you have to upgrade the security of your house because there's.

You run a podcast you're rich. So you have a hundred thousand, 200,000 bounds in, in your house. So you want to make sure that say, I don't know, are you married? That's the thing. Then everyone has to have all that security in their own house, which is really expensive by centralizing all of that.

There's a bank responsible for keeping your money safe and you log into their website and oh, this is how much money they keep safe. For me, it feels like luxury, not a problem.

[01:13:14] Nathan Wrigley: The Nathan has a Bentley in his garage outside. Yeah. It's a little toy. It's about this big

I really wish that I had a Bentley outside the, yeah, it's fascinating debate because on the one hand I am a big proponent of, open source things and I love individual freedoms and all of that, but I think there are some points where society is complex for a reason and the complexity and the ability for other people to manage things, which they understand.

And I don't is a good thing, I don't want to understand. Yeah, I don't want to farm, but I am happy to eat. I don't want to bank, but I am happy to spend and all of those kinds of things and it's. It's weird. We're lucky. We're very lucky that we live in a complex society where our time can be given over to a really specific event that will benefit other people down.

Anyway, we got into philosophy, our check us out, right? Let's move on to the next one quickly. This are, I know this has got Gustavo interested. I again, forgive me. It's going off the WordPress theme a little bit, but it's definitely of interest to us. It's Jeff, dear Jeff Galing and he's got a piece called the burner.

Sorry. The burden burner, the burden of an open source maintainer. Please read this. It's so interesting. And it's about a chap, Jeff, who by all accounts is in charge of a very large amount of open source projects. He is a committer to maintains. He says 200 open source projects. He says, apparently that's news to him.

18,000 forks, 42,000 stars across his repose and a whole laundry list of statistics. Is burned out. And the reason I think Jeff has burned now is because essentially people are using his stuff all the time. And as we've seen, I think there's this trickle going on at the moment. It's a very slow it's like somebody just lit a match and that match is still about a 50 yards away from the piece of TNT.

But somebody is very slowly walking that much towards the piece of TNT. And it's this whole open source thing. And the idea that all these people who are contributing are not getting remunerated and getting a bit down a bit miserable, a bit, burned out a bit depressed because the burden of these projects is increasingly.

Like a society problem and he's feeling a bit burned out. He says some of the users of his projects contribute contributors. They take offense when they post a poll request and he doesn't manage to do anything about it for a few days because he's got a life. But yet they are treating it almost as if like walking into a bank.

I want to see the teller and I want to withdraw my money right now. And he's saying, no, my approach is going to be, this is my project. I'm making it freely available, but I've built it for me, primarily for me. And if you want to fiddle with it and I'm got the time, that's great. But if not, please just go and fork it.

And there's more new on sadness, but essentially it boils down to, I don't really have the time to deal with everything. I'm doing everything I can, but I've got to put food on the table and do my regular job and. Don't, don't be too upset with me if I don't deal with you as if you are a paying customer.

And I know that Gustavo, you thought this piece was interesting, right?

[01:17:01] Gustavo Bordoni: It's like very near to my heart in terms of like how much the like WordPress is long been a open source software that has given as a company, like in the sense of like automatic behind we're passing.

A lot of these things have given money to a lot of the projects jQuery. One of the major sponsors of Jacory during like the early days of JavaScript and all of that was automatic through WordPress. And some of that piece is a big portion of why Jacory was so big. And I feel like.

These are under appreciation of how much work goes into certain people around the internet. They maintain pieces of software that are like incredibly obscure to the majority of the people like using the software. And there's this person in the middle of like middle of Europe or the middle of the us, or in Australia in a corner of Australia that maintain it in because they love how much that tool enables people to do things.

And they enjoy their, like that piece. But there's a burnout that happens because there's no money. Like people don't give back. And this is something that we're pressing. Long talked about in companies giving back to their open source projects that they rely on. And if you look at get hub sponsors is one of the, like the kind of, one of the major players, and there's some auto ones I'm not going to be able to name them all.

But there's a couple of tools that allow people to oh, I'm relying on these particular tools. Let me give $2 very much. Like patron is too a lot of the internet and like YouTube channels that are like, Hey, I can only rely on ads because I get censored all the time because I talk about topics that are complicated, on the same sense, the technology that we use creates a lot of burnout and the people that maintain it in specifically for me, I use fake PR I developed faker press plug to create fake data for WordPress faker, the tool behind.

In 2020 the developer he first swab when I don't remember his second name. He stopped supporting it completely because he was like, Hey, this is a major and endeavoring PHP. And it's not what I'm like. It's not the language that I use anymore. I'm into more rubby now in JavaScript and react. So I'm not going to support this tool.

It gives me a lot of headaches. It doesn't bring me like doesn't put like money on the table, which is hard. Cause I have a family, I have things, same thing that this person is talking about, it's a challenge. Even in WordPress, giving back is sometimes seen as like people complain about the fact that some people in WordPress are like, Hey you should be giving some back.

You make an awful amount of money out of. Because of this platform. And that I know the Yoast does a really good job at donating time from people in some of that stuff. And that's one piece for sure. And I'm like, how can there be more to this like piece, right? Like of engaging people, companies specifically into giving money, to open source projects so that people can actually keep their safety.

The Java thing that was in the news very recently

[01:21:09] Nathan Wrigley: is to look for a J thing. Yeah. All

[01:21:13] Gustavo Bordoni: of that is like a big portion of. Majority of internet runs,

[01:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: so what's really curious about this to me. And I want to do, if you hadn't mentioned it, Gustavo, I was going to mention the Yoast thing at the state of the word that was that chart.

That map pulled up and there was like automatic, as to be expected. And then there was pretty big Yoast circles. So props to Yoast, I don't know who makes those decisions, but clearly, a lot of money has come from the Yoast side of things to keep our project of choice going. But the.

A lot of these things are just totally invisible. You may be using something on your phone, which is reliant. And, if you dig in the menus, you can sometimes see there's a little button right at the bottom, which says, users or, open source software licenses. And there's just a laundry list of nine or 10 little things, which are being used.

But they're just not for want of a better word. They're not sexy. It's not celebrity, it's not the guy on the YouTube channel. Who's saying, sponsor me and I'll do some more fun videos for you. It's not entertainment. And yet they are increasingly the linchpins of a lot of the things which were aligned.

I bet you, I can't say for certain, but I would imagine that our conversation today is happening on, the conduits, the wires, the technology that's allowing us to do all of this is probably held up by massive amounts of free labor. Great, amazing. But it feels like I said, somebody let them match.

They're getting closer to the TNT. I just wonder if the C-store is moving slightly and the open source guys are starting to become a bit kind of unionized and starting to get their pitchforks out.

[01:23:04] Gustavo Bordoni: Yeah. It's

[01:23:04] Taco Verdonschot: a complicated topic actually, because the only thing the open source maintainer can do is stop maintaining their open source project because the nature of open source is that they're putting it out there for free.

So if they stopped doing that, it's no longer an open source maintainer. So that's really hard. Yeah Jordan's definitely rights. But the thing is that even within WordPress An open source project is probably less and less run on fallen through your hours because it gets harder to get into WordPress.

It takes more time. If you create a patching, you have to follow it through all the way through several code reviews, et cetera, and you have to write tests and you have to do all of that. It becomes harder and harder to contribute to even. I'd be curious if someone created overview of the top, so many hundred contributors to WordPress, not just core, but the whole of WordPress.

How many of them are really doing this in their spare time?

[01:24:31] Gustavo Bordoni: Yeah.

[01:24:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it'd be interesting. Who's succonded who is yeah, I agree. I think the interesting thing here is that the stuff that we buy into, so if we buy a plugin or if we use a free plugin, we've got a one-to-one relationship with that.

We we can see the author name and we can understand what's been done. It's it feels to me like this is more the backend stuff, the invisible stuff, the glue that's binding the Linux kernel and all of these things, which just, nobody even knows they're using. And yet they're being used all the time.

And I feel it, on the WordPress side of things, it feels like that we've squared that circle, the events, calendar, Yoast, And there's pro for want of a better word. And so there is a way to monetize that and we've done it, but there is no equivalent in what Jeff Galing is talking about, his projects.

There's no way to monetize that because there's no one-to-one relationship at no point, probably. Are you ever touching an end user? It's just some bit of the internet, which what, why would I pay you for that? I don't even know what it, what does it do? What it allows me to press return automatically. Oh great.

Who knows what the project might do, but yeah.

[01:25:49] Taco Verdonschot: And Jeff's article, he says he has no intention of monetizing it. So that's even one step further. Yeah. Even if he could, he doesn't want to, but people are putting demands on him as if it is. High-paid

[01:26:05] Nathan Wrigley: product. Yeah. And you know that a lot of the people who are get anyway, I'm not going to go into that.

Cause it's a repeat of what we said, a video okay. Moving on because we're running out of time very quickly. And I know there's a couple of things to mention. First one, Taco. I think it was you that brought this up is a it's WP Tavern article, black press and meetup to host meet and greet mixer 27th of January.

Is there anything you want to add to that?

[01:26:31] Taco Verdonschot: I think it's awesome. And I think it deserves a lot of attention that this has happening. It's I'd say another diversity initiative. Deserves all the voice that we can give it in our community. So that's why, yeah,

[01:26:49] Nathan Wrigley: I'll quickly mention the date for those of you that listening.

It says established this year by destiny Fox CarNow and Joe, a Simpson Jr. The black press meetup group will host its first event next week which is actually this week. Now it will be a meet and greet social hour for attendees. The session will run from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM CST on Thursday, the 27th of January.

And they say our goal is to both bring more creators of black African descent into the WordPress community and also provide a community space for those already there to connect, learn, and support each other, responded the organizer for the reason of the meetup. And there's more to be found over on the.

WP Tavern article it's called black press meet up to host a meet and greet mixer on January the 27th. And I'm sorry, that's got such short shrift because we're now basically out of time and the last one for this week, which I wanted to spend loads more time on, but I think we've probably bashed. Google have enough today.

I'll kick the libel to Bob day. Taco just quickly run down the takeaways of this piece. It's on wired called Europe's move against Google analytics is just the beginning. This feels like it's right in Yoast wheelhouse.

[01:28:06] Taco Verdonschot: This is Google analytics. So not really a it's a tool that you can use to analyze the traffic on your site.

And it has I would almost say nothing to do with SEO. But it is interesting because it will define. Where are the weapons going? Because a lot of sites are relying on Google analytics to do their analytics. And Austria has the first to say, Hey, we're not sure this is actually GDPR compliance.

In a few years, we'll know what this leads to the fact that this is now being discussed is a, is it.

[01:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: If you're using a Google analytics, it's a bit drop-in code, you put it on your website. And the knob of the problem is that this particular website in question here is called net to doctor. I don't know much about it, but the, they are being taken to task because essentially data egress is the EU goes and sits in the U S which is legal, but then there's different protections offered, which what can be with what can be done with that data.

I think that's, that feels like that's around where the problem is, is that data going up is the data of European citizens residing in site. The U S going to be treated in a different way. So yeah, watch this debate. I of course live in great Britain, which is, I'm not going to get into the either I think that's it. We've managed to get through it. It was a ton of interesting stuff there. I hope that you enjoyed that. Thank you to everybody who who commented. Of course. I'd like to give special, thanks to Gustavo Bordone from the events calendar for joining us today psycho I'll get a massacre again.

How about if I say Taco and you say,

[01:30:14] Taco Verdonschot: this is why my Twitter handle is Taco Florida, because that's the part people usually

[01:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: get, say that it's talk over though. Gustavo from the events, calendar attack, overdose from yokes, that really appreciate you joining us today. It's absolutely lovely.

If you wouldn't mind sticking on the call just for a second afterwards, that'd be greatly appreciated. We do this thing. This is going to be really awkward, but we have to wave light there so that I can capture the image for the screenshot there. That's great. Thank you. If you've made any comments, there was an awful lot coming in.

I really appreciate it. I know that, especially in north America, it's like stupid o'clock and I really appreciate you attending and giving us your commentary. We'll be back next week. Take it easy. Bye for now. Thanks so much.