This Week in WordPress #212

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 212 entitled Lord of the tacos. It was recorded on Monday the 6th of June, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined by my two guests today. Firstly, my cohost Michelle Frechette, but also all the way from Australia, back after a hiccup with technology a few weeks ago, we've got Cameron Jones.

There's an awful lot to talk about as there always is in the WordPress space. First of all, we start with the big story of the week, which is the fact that delicious brains has sold most of its plugins to WP engine. So that's things like ACF as well as many others. What does that mean? What does it mean for existing customers?

What does it mean for the ecosystem in general? Also a fabulous product called instant WP has acquired some seed money from automatic. The idea is to click a button and instantly have a WordPress website ready to try out five for the future program. It's got some new guidance about who can contribute and who can say that they have been a part of that program.

Jetpack has decided to split up all of the bits and pieces into separate plugin. The museum of block art is open for your submission. So if you're into blocks and you're into making art with them, this is the perfect thing for you. And then we have a long conversation towards the end about how amazing WordCamp Europe was this year in Porto, Portugal.

It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain SSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me forward slash WP Builds.

Good morning. Good morning. Good afternoon. Depending on where you are in the well Cameron. Tell us Cameron, what salutation should I be doing for you? It's

[00:02:22] Cameron Jones: 10:34 PM. So

[00:02:26] Nathan Wrigley: maybe, yeah. Okay. Good evening.

Where where this weekend WordPress we're back again. Episode number 212. I think this episode is going to be called we're all tired because Cameron's tired for good reason. I'm tired for a different reason, which will become obvious. And then I don't know if Michelle's died because presumably six, seven o'clock.

It's 9:00 AM. That's not so bad. You're not fired. Two of us are tired.

[00:02:55] Michelle Frechette: I live in a perpetual state of tiredness.

[00:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yes. This week in WordPress is episode number 212. We're going to talk about the WordPress stuff. I have to apologize to our guests. Typically I would share the show notes like at least five, three or four days in advance, but I had to throw them together at the last minute, this week.

So I guess I'm probably less prepared than they would otherwise be, but hopefully this is going to

[00:03:22] Michelle Frechette: be a

[00:03:22] Nathan Wrigley: free for all. Oh yeah no. I'm not that badly prepared, but yeah. So we were going to talk about the WordPress news from this week, largely to do with the sort of WordCamp Europe event and say it there's a sale of a plugin.

Several plugins and various other bits and pieces. But before all of that, I should probably introduce, I guess Michelle is very often here, but it's lovely to have you back. Thank you. You're very welcome. Michelle is the, she is the director of community engagement for Stella WP, which is at liquid web.

And in addition to her work at Stella WP, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP coffee talk. She's the co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com. Creator of WP career pages.com. President of the board for big orange heart.org, director of community relations and [email protected]. She's an author business coach and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events.

She lives in Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer, and you can find out more about [email protected]. There you go. I'm now horse it's it's you always do in a lot. Does anything ever get added or do you ever, okay, let me ask this question differently. Do you ever take things out of the in-tray?

Do you ever decide I'm not going to do a thing anymore? Cause it always seems like there's just more things that Michelle does. I've

[00:04:50] Michelle Frechette: been getting better at saying no. So it's more like not adding to the. Working with the status quo as it is right now.

[00:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's good. I'm pleased to hear it.

Look after yourself first. That's even an idea,

[00:05:06] Michelle Frechette: other supposed to build a website for a chicken farm and I just had to, I literally had to say I can't

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: do it. Yeah. I think that's a fair one to decline, but of course, I've got Cameron, Cameron joined us. Oh, what is it now? Cameron, about six weeks ago, maybe more than a couple of months, something like that.

And and he had real problems with his internet. Basically, he was unable to participate in it about a third of the way halfway through he, he bailed. So really great to have you back Cameron, despite the fact that it's stupid. O'clock, I'm really sorry about that. But Cameron is a professional WordPress developer.

He's the founder of the plugins store. Mongoose marketplace is the maintainer of the official Kofi plugin and developer at pixel palace, which is an Australian brand growth agency. He lives in a little beach town called Victoria Harbor in Australia. You're going to have to help me with the geography. Whereabouts is Victoria.

Oh, sorry, Victor. It's not Victoria. It's Victoria. Yeah.

[00:06:07] Cameron Jones: So Victor Harbor is, it's about a hundred and a hundred K's south of Adelaide. So Adelaide's the capital city of south Australia where you've got Australia, you've got the great Australian Bight where it looks like someone's taken a bite out of it.

Yeah. Yeah. So in the middle of there, and then you find Adelaide and you go straight south for about hour and a

[00:06:28] Nathan Wrigley: half, what's it called? The great Australian Bight as in bit? Or is it B I G H T like bite is a different thing to a bite with them. I think it's

[00:06:38] Cameron Jones: B I G H T. Yeah. Goodness. So going back to primary school geography there.

That's

[00:06:43] Nathan Wrigley: right. It's the curvy better? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine tipping the apple logo up on its side and the little yeah. Thank you really appreciate you joining us today to tell us a little about the Kofi plugin. Cause I, I didn't honestly know that you did that. And I stumbled across with the help of a friend stumbled across Kofi platform.

It's a bit like a rival to Patrion, right? You can, you set up a page, it's a SAS product and they, unlike Patrion, if I'm right, they don't take a cup, whatever you receive. As a donation you get, is that right?

[00:07:22] Cameron Jones: Yep. Yep. Yeah, you're right. It's a Patrion country competitor. It started out more as just a simple donation platform, but it's grown to add a membership onto that.

So yeah, they don't take any fees for their donations. Like there might be a merchant fee or something that just comes with the payment platform, but yeah, they don't take a cut like Patrion do. But they're like, then they've got it's called a gold tier, I think it's okay. And so you get extra features for your membership.

You as the creator pay for and that's how they

[00:08:02] Nathan Wrigley: make their money. Oh, okay. I see. Typically I think patron is more for people that are producing content. Isn't it? So like podcasts and things where Kofi seems like a good fit for basically anybody who wants to take some sort of donation. You can, it's not boundaryless.

Product or a thing. You could just say it out loud on your podcast or give people the URL at the bottom of your website or something. And you can do recurring and you can just do a one-off. It's great. It's really cool. Oh, Bravo. I didn't know that I have a Kofi page somewhere, but I never mentioned it.

Defeats the point, but let's get on let's crack on today with the WordPress stuff. Just a quick one before we begin, this is our website. If you haven't earned me droning on about it enough, I'm going to drone on about it a little bit more. It's wa it's WP Builds.com. As you might expect, it's a WordPress website.

It just basically contains all of the bits and pieces that we make. If you go to the live page linked here. This is where we're broadcasting right now. It goes into a Facebook group and I'll have you, but it's always encouraged to go to the webpage itself. And we've got a subscribe link here. And if you want to fill out that there's a form on there, we'll keep you up to date with the bits and pieces that we produce.

Typically, it's two bits of content a week. We've got a website podcasts that we do, WP Builds podcast, and then there's the show that we're doing now. And very soon at about an hour and a half from now, both Cameron and Michelle will also be made to wave in a humiliating fashion towards the camera, just like this.

So they're the sort of two bits of content that we produce and yeah, WP Builds.com is our thing. There's a couple of comments coming in. Always like to share the comments before I do that though. It's just tell you how you might do that. The best way probably is to either go to our live page, which has said WP Builds.com forward slash life.

Or you can go to our Facebook group. WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook. If you leave a comment there, hopefully it will come through onto our little system here, but on the Facebook end, you need to do an extra step. Otherwise you'll be anonymized. I think you only need to do it once until you clear your cookies out, but you need to go to chatbot restream.io forward slash F B chat dot restream dire forward slash FB.

And that will allow us to see your lovely face. And if you feel like sharing this stream, Put the coffee down, just set it down one side and go to WP Builds.com forward slash live copy, and paste that URL and bang it in all the places where there's an option. And it'd be nice to have some more friendly faces.

Speaking of friendly faces the ever so close to me, Elliot sours B who I've never yet met, but he lives. I could throw a pebble and it wouldn't hit his house. Cause I'm not that good of a thrower, but I could still throw a pebble in his direction. Cause I know it's south and it's not that far Elliot one day, you and I will meet probably on a beach somewhere.

Neither of us will recognize each other, but at least there have been some serendipity peach and Arie says, hello. I was in a bar with peach and area. 36 hours ago. And it was absolutely fabulous. Wasn't it? Peach or if, oh, so nice. We had delicious things including delicious olives. And she's saying, ah, so nice that you got home, Nathan.

Yeah, I did. I managed to get home despite the fact that my train had been canceled. I managed to do it. And Tucker, I've got a photo here taco I'll dig it out in a minute of me and I think it is no, I'm not going to find it cause it's historically finally I'm intrigued. Oh, it is good. I'll do it.

I'll just say what tacos at first he said so happy to see your co-host Michelle today. Nathan knows what? Yes, I do know why. And Peter Ingersoll says hello on this morning from beautiful Connecticut USA. And right now that I've done that, I'm going to find this photo, whether it kills me on. Give me two seconds talk amongst yourselves.

I can't do this forever, but if I don't find it in the first oh no. I'll tell you what was one of the first articles been read out. I'm going to go through this mound of paperwork that I took the word camp Europe and and I'll find it and I'll show it. And I don't know which of us comes off worst taco, to be honest, but it's favorable to no one, but WordPress news for this week as you very well may imagine.

In fact, I would more or less guarantee that anybody watching the show knows what's coming. It's this. Yes. It's WP engine who who in the past had been on a bit of a buying spree while they managed to acquire five things in one time, because they have bought out delicious brains. Delicious brings a course is I think it was founded.

I don't know if it was co-founded or maybe there was a whole bunch of them, but I certainly know the name, Brad twos knob. I believe they're Canadian. They're a software development house just for WordPress and they've got an absolute slew of products. Some of them incredibly popular and famous. But they're all WordPress plugins except this one quirky thing, which we'll come onto, which they've actually kept hold of.

But yeah, they were founded in 2012. You can see all this on the screen and that WordPress plugins range from ACF, which they acquired from Elliot Condon about feels like 18 months. I'm going to say something like that, roughly speaking. So they pulled in much, much more recent than that. W was it rarely, when was that exactly?

Okay. Okay.

It was

[00:13:46] Michelle Frechette: after our acquisition of G give WP. So

[00:13:48] Nathan Wrigley: I knew that. And,

I wonder if there's some sort of I wonder if there's a coincidence then what, I wonder if there was some source of non resell clause for a year or so, we'll get into that. ACF brought along 2 million customers, so it more or less doubled everything.

I think that delicious brains were doing at the time, but they've also got these, they've got WP migrate, which is a, it's a backup and migration solution. WP offload media gets all your files, your videos and your images over to. SES and various AWS, I should say in various other places. Oh no.

That's that one WP offload SES. That's the one of, for doing your emails and better search and replace. Anyway, the point is Brad, in this article paints a picture of the team getting a bit overstretched in this year, since they bought it, they've gone from 10 to 34. Brad felt like his life had been transformed into being a manager of managers.

Whereas actually what Brad seems to like to do is develop. And so he thought to himself, wouldn't it be good if I could get back to being a developer, what's the quickest route to doing that? And it turns out it's, let's flog. Most of our things, what they haven't flogged is spin off WP, which is basically.

How to just say it's a little bit like many of the other platforms that you've come across before, where you click a button inside the platform and it spins up a version of WordPress almost immediately. And they've decided to keep that and keep developing that. So all the things have gone except up WP.

And also quite a lot of the staff have been acqui hired. I won't go through all the names. I don't actually know many of the people, so it would literally just reading out a bunch of names, but quite a lot of the staff have gone over to be WP engine employees. And obviously the people that were critical on keeping spin-up WP have remained at, and all the team looks like I, I don't really know what to make this.

It's amazing for Brad and the team, the whole. The only thing, which I think is interesting, shall we say let's put it that way is the people who've been on ACF, who now have had to think about the fact that they've now gone through two owners in a short space of time when Brad took over ACF, there was a bit of a PR misstep because he questioned whether they would keep their lifetime deals going.

And then he had to iron out that PR hiccup, which he did and it got fixed. And now of course, then everybody was like, okay, breathe a sigh of relief. All my thousand websites that I've built are contingent upon ACF. I can relax. Now maybe the same questions remain, or maybe not as we'll discover in a minute, but Cameron Michelle, it's another of these stories.

We've had them hundreds of times in the past. This one seems like a big one though. Let me take that off the screen. So I'm going to let you, I'm going to let you to thrash this one out whilst I look for this photograph.

[00:16:47] Michelle Frechette: Was working for a company that has done a lot of acquisitions over the last 18 months.

I say, Hey, congratulations. I know that I don't know what the situation was for the employees before, but oftentimes when you are an employee at a company that gets acquired, you have access to more things like benefits and maybe a different time off schedule. There might be paying increases things like that.

And so oftentimes. As fearful as I was when I first heard, give WP was being acquired last year was the first thing you'd think is oh my God, do I even have a job right then? But they reassure you and they're doing all of these great things. I think that somebody has tacos just linked you to the the image of,

[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: okay, I'll do it that way.

Appear to have lost it probably out of shame. Anyway, sorry. Carry on. We'll do that.

[00:17:46] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, no, that's okay. But oftentimes people talk about what it means for the companies and that they've growing there, there's this big growth patterns, which is incredibly true. But they forget to talk about the employees in these situations and.

If you're doing it right, you're doing such a good job that the employees that come over to you with the acquisition or the merger decide that they want to stay because it's a safe environment to continue the work that they do.

[00:18:15] Nathan Wrigley: You went from give WP as a standalone thing, right? You, it was give WP and they were just their own thing.

And then Stella WP took it over. I remember we had that conversation at the time and you were really like, properly delighted with the with the things that had come your way that give WP couldn't do they didn't, maybe it was the budget or the amount of staff, but like things like healthcare and all of those various benefits.

Yeah, it's interesting. If you look at it from the outside, I'm imagining that WP engine, because they win lots of awards for being a good employee. Don't they, or least they seem to tout that. So hopefully those employees will be happy with. Exactly.

[00:18:53] Michelle Frechette: I just, I did just a share an art, another article on the private chat, something that I wrote.

And reshared this weekend from post status about remembering your employees when you have been acquired. And so that's, I think it's all great. The fact that you have deeper pockets usually to continue to develop a software and a less over, overworked way for your developers, because you've got now this, this bigger group of people you can rely on all around.

It tends to be a good thing, but you do have to remember your place and make this not only a good transition for ownership and that kind of thing, but making it a good transition for your employees and going from give WP to stuff. Last year, which is part of liquid web. It was a really positive experience for me and most of the people that I know or have talked to about it.

Yeah.

[00:19:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's

[00:19:44] Michelle Frechette: on camera and I just took the, like just took the floor on that one, but I'm going to turn it over to you now for your

[00:19:49] Cameron Jones: I'm used to it after, the giant via that. No one could

yeah.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about it. Like I do with all acquisitions, like obviously I think it will be a good thing for the products. Obviously they're now going to have a much bigger team behind it, so more resources bugs will get fixed quicker, more features will be added quicker, I would assume.

And it's, it sounds like most, or all of the team that was working on the. Before is going to carry on. That's always a good sign. It's not going completely into new hands. It's the same people that are going to be working on it. But you're having had mixed experience with WP engine at times, there's, some concern there.

So yeah, it's. No mixed feelings about it, but what I'm really not looking forward to is, one day logging in and running my plug-in up dates and finding out that I now have Genesis custom fields in Genesis migrate DB pro and all that on it. Cause I've I would not be surprised if they rebrand them all under the Genesis branding.

[00:21:23] Nathan Wrigley: That's interesting because a few things have been taken in that direction. Haven't they? What was it? Was it called atomic blocks when that there was a block suite block. Yeah. And it got called Genesis blocks if I'm right. No block lab.

[00:21:37] Cameron Jones: Was what they did to have custom blocks. Oh yeah. There was something else.

Yeah. There was a

[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: couple of smells. It wasn't a sweet, yeah. That got rebranded. So yeah. We'll have to wait and see whether things get rolled in. I guess that's a real concern though. Isn't it is the, at some point. These things do get morphed in some way and changed in some way. And with a big plugin, like ACF, which I'm Cameron, I'm guessing that you've used ACF before.

I use it pretty much on every site. It's one of the few things that just gets dumped in right at the beginning, even if I haven't got a use for it, because I suspect that sometime that will be a use and, occasionally it gets on installed, but mainly it's just sitting there in every single site.

So for me, things like this do actually matter. However, let's give WP engine a little chance to shout about why they think they're good custodians because this piece that I'm showing now was on WP Tavern and Sarah Gooding. She elucidated all of the various bits and pieces and she explained why Brad wanted to sell it.

Of course, there's other side. Which is the WP engine side. So they've got a blog over on the w P engine.com forward slash blog site. I'm guessing it's probably a recent piece. Maybe there's a couple of some get down a little bit lower, but it's called what WP engine's acquisition of delicious brains products means for you.

And I'll come to this piece highlighted at the top in a moment, but they basically go on to say in fairly it's like a Q and a, they have posed potential hypothetical questions that customers might want to ask. So for example, will delicious Springs products only work on sites powered by WP engine, which you can imagine the sites will always work D regardless of whether you're on WP engine or not.

So that might put some people's mind at rest. WP engine will, will continue to support and invest in all the five delicious brains plugins. And as they've said that to keep releasing things. It says regular updates, regular testing, new version releases and so on and so forth pricing. The big misstep that I was talking about earlier that Brad went through was there was a bunch of people who for years, Elliot, Condon, who created ACF at the beginning for years and years, he had it available for, I believe 49 us dollars.

For an unlimited lifetime license deal, which was fabulous. And of course those people that have got it, we'd like to protect that. What is a very modest investment and WP engine have got out ahead of this? Probably I would imagine Brad has said, look, there's one thing I need to tell you. You're going to get hit with PR nightmares if you don't get in front of this one.

So they have said explicitly copy and paste it and stick it in an Evernote somewhere in case you need to whip it out with the lawyers at some point it says, basically they're going to honor all lifetime licenses. Lifetime license holders will get all the ACF software updates. They won't be required to pay for version six or any other major or minor release.

And essentially they've written a bunch of questions to which they can see. Of Paul's. What would you expect? They're not going to write a bunch of questions when say actually we're not sure about that, but if you find the WP engine marketing machine quite interesting, I love this little bit at the top.

Just let me read this out to you and see how your B takes it in dear listener. This is right at the top. It says they've just gone on to say that they've acquired five plugins, as they say these powerful plugins already play a pivotal role in the way developers build WordPress sites today and together with local and Genesis, they represent, and I quote the preferred way of building WordPress sites for the foreseeable future.

That's all I'm going to say about that. So anyway, they got out ahead of it. I would imagine the one thing which could have exploded. They've literally knocked it down. So I think on the whole Bravo, it's good to see them do that.

[00:25:44] Michelle Frechette: A rollout of like the Dewey, the press behind the acquisition.

Isn't the easiest thing to do, right? So the blog posts that has to be written the E the emails that have to go out the press release stuff. I've handled that for a couple of our purchases learned dash, and I caught it over at last dollar to VP, and it's a delicate balance putting it out there.

And I think they did a really nice job of portraying. This in its best light and getting ahead of things and answering those questions so that there would be less panic that there is sometimes when acquisitions

[00:26:20] Nathan Wrigley: happen. Yeah, because it's essentially, those are the questions I think that people want to ask and it really does boil down to, will I get updates?

Will you honor the pricing that I've got and will it be confined to WP engine properties in the future that I think probably is the, pricing, people can probably use. They can argue about that until the cows come home. But the notion that at some point only WP engine properties may be able to use ACF would have been would have been a catastrophic thing for a lot of people and probably would have been a wise

[00:26:53] Michelle Frechette: decision.

[00:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: And although nobody, they wouldn't never have done that. That would literally be a suicidal move. So why not stick it in a blog post and address it and what have you, so that's good, but

[00:27:06] Michelle Frechette: I'll tell you what they're getting questioned. The questions they're getting now, because those have already been answered are, so what are the new updates you're going to do that now that you have a bigger development team?

Can we expect to see all of these things we've been asking for all of these, all of this time, because. So that's that, those are the questions that come next.

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: And I know that. Oh yeah. Okay. So then, okay. Yeah. And that will be interesting because obviously Elliot did, my understanding is that Elliot basically did all of it forever and ever.

I think most of what, yeah, I think towards the end he did hire a support person, the coding was all done by him. I understand. I think Cameron's right. Most of it, and we're probably into the high 90%. And then so handing it over to the team at delicious brains. I actually haven't really been following their change log and any modifications that they've made.

But nothing really jumped out. And as I followed the, it won't be

[00:27:58] Michelle Frechette: making any modifications right away. They're going to, if they're smart and they. I know this to be true. This is a good company with a smart people. They're going to do a lot of research. They're going to make sure that they're doing things the

[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: right way will be actually with that in mind.

Maybe this is a really good idea. Maybe this is a really good time to stick your feature requests in because you had imagined that the air, the ears are open more in the next few weeks. And they will be for a long time to come because of the team are trying to figure it out, trying to work out what on the roadmap should come first.

And yeah, that's an interesting thought now okay. So go and submit your support requests and they'll be like, oh, we should never afford ICF, just so needy.

[00:28:39] Michelle Frechette: Excellent. Except that they didn't buy a blind. So they did a lot of research before they made that purchase. They already know what the audience is looking for.

If they're smart and we know that. They've been all over the Facebook groups. They've been all over Twitter. They've already done the research of what people are expecting to come down, be handed down next, as far as features and updates. In order to know that they were buying a product, that they could continue to provide the service to

[00:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: the, I guess at the end of this, Bravo to

WP

[00:29:07] Nathan Wrigley: engine for acquiring it, but really Bravo to the delicious brilliance team for making what was probably a really difficult decision.

And Brad was the person portrayed in the WP Tavern article as the person who decided that it needed to happen. His role as a founder, presumably he gets to make those decisions. And it's great. It's great in the WordPress space when you hear of somebody doing. Yeah, really great job selling what it is that they need to offload.

Hopefully it's been profitable for them, but also he now gets to concentrate on the thing that he really wants to do, which is the spin-up WP which having seen it in the real world, I can only describe as brilliant. So if it if it comes to pass that it gets better and better. Nobody's arguing with that.

Okay. Shall we try and find this Twitter photo now? Shall we let me see. I don't even know if I can make, I can't actually click can anybody copy and paste that into our private chat, either camera on that. Michelle, because for some reason, the way, my way my system works, if I hover over that, it all, it gives me the option to show it on the screen.

I can't actually,

[00:30:18] Michelle Frechette: I got it.

[00:30:20] Nathan Wrigley: And now you realize why my humiliation is complete. Let's see if I can make this come onto the plate. So this is about, about, I don't know, about 36 hours ago, something like that. This is the after party. There's taco who we know often sitting and sitting in the space screen yet.

Okay. Don't write. Here we go. I'm afraid. That's why Michelle. This is the taco king taco there look dressed this was such a sublimely cool event. The after party was great. We won't probably get into it, but I just, by coincidence happened to walk outside and it gets dark much earlier in Portugal and then they'll see it.

So it was about, I don't know, nine o'clock, something like that. And it was pitch black and imagine a forecourt it's like a hundred meters deep, several hundred meters wide empty of people. And there's a ramp, right? So as people come up the ramp, you see their head first and then you see their shoulders.

And so on up the road. Comes about 50 Yoast employees. The majority of whom are dressed as the Dutch Royal family, all with flashing lights. It was honestly, it was pretty surreal of course say, taco, right at the front, leading the way, dressed up as a member of the Royal family.

And the tweet here is what is it? It's finally, we finally established a relationship that this week in WordPress podcasts will never be the same again. And there's me groveling with on bended knee Sacco is looking very demure and very Royal. Anyway, that was fun, but it was more about, I thought it was a

[00:32:05] Cameron Jones: wedding.

[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Oh, I hadn't even thought that I can go. Yeah, it's always in my possession somewhere, but I do appear to dropped it. I dunno,

[00:32:17] Michelle Frechette: it's a possession of the internet now and it

[00:32:19] Nathan Wrigley: will live on forever. Anyway. It was cooler than my brain. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:25] Michelle Frechette: Sorry if you're watching this at home just right. Click save

[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: and yeah, it was great. It was really WP Builds. Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. Anyway. All I'm now going to stop being read and we'll go back to some normal WordPress news. This is cool. I swear, I'd never heard of this thing before. It's called Insta WP and it is a plugin which enables you to basically spin up a WordPress website.

You go to install WP. I don't even know if it's dot com or whatever it is. Google Insta WP, I N S T a w P. And you can immediately. And I, when I say immediate, like really quick, like a second or more, a second or less, sorry, and it gives you a WordPress website, which you can then play with for about eight hours.

We mentioned that arrival product called tastes WP, which does something similar. It actually gives you a little bit longer if you two days. So there's, there's a slight difference in the way it works and various other things, but instead WP is obviously attracted enough attention that the guys over at automatic think that it's worth.

Investing mommy in because they've received a seed round and S as far as I'm aware, none of those numbers have come out. I'm always a little bit unsure exactly what a seed round means. But my understanding really is that they've been given some money in the hopes that products and the team over instead of the GP will be able to work on some kinks that they couldn't otherwise have done without a little bit of financial assistance and bring it to market in a slightly different way.

Apparently they've got an agency plan which is available to the learn w for learn WP, which is cool. So I'm wondering if in the future, if you're over at learn WP and you are trying out a particular article, and you want to try a particular thing, you be able to click a button and it'll a website will be spawn up right there.

And then that you can. Fiddled with kind of cool. Yeah, I've got 23,000 sites running at the moment, but they've got plans for like a premium to they've got that going or not. I'm not sure, but anyway, they've received some seed money, which should last for the next 18 to 24 months, which means that they need to stop worrying about, sales and marketing quite as much as they would ordinarily do and concentrate on the development and bringing it to fruition.

It's a cool little product, right? I like it.

[00:34:58] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Liquid rubber already has that. It's called WP sandbox.io. So we like it too.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: So very similar, same idea. You click a button and you're off. So why would this one, because I know of that, like I mentioned, I know it tastes WP and yours is called WP sandbox.

Does, is your WP sandbox, is it a proprietary thing? In other words, do you need to be like liquid web customer or is it freely available out there in the world? Yep.

[00:35:28] Michelle Frechette: I pasted the link there for you. It's WP sandbox.io. And we're doing a lot of work on it right now to make it even better.

[00:35:37] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder why then I wonder why this received that sort of same level attention from automatic, maybe it's because they figure that, your version of already has the backing of a company that can afford to bring it on and they see something about these guys.

I don't know. Yes. That's all it takes. Yeah. If that's all it takes to get seed money from automatic, I'm going to ask soon as this call's over, I have some seed money, please. Okay. Let's have a look at your warm, then let's put that on the screen quickly. So this again, WP sandbox.io. Let me click accept.

So I'm sure I do get started now. Do let's see what happens. So you have to enter name, email, password confirm. So this is slightly different in that the the Insta WP let's follow their process. Shall we let's click on their website? Try WordPress sunblocks. And as far as I'm aware, you don't need to enter anything.

You can give it a, like a S like a sub domain, if you like, but you click launch and let's go do. Now give me like three seconds we're in. So there's no like barrier for surrendering emails or anything, which I think is a nice feature. I'm not sharing any of this on the screen.

I might, it's just occurred to me that none of that was being shared. But look, there you go. Whilst you were watching me and Cameron and Michelle, I was clicking buttons in the background and there's the site that happened almost immediately. Whereas the WP sandbox one, I had to fill out an email address.

And our password and

[00:37:11] Cameron Jones: just getting the podcast edition earlier and then, everyone

[00:37:15] Nathan Wrigley: else will that's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It must be torture listening to this show. I truly sympathize with anybody who gets through an hour and a half of this on audio. I do apologize. I listened to quite a lot of audio podcasts, which obviously have visual content and they've been made by like the twit network or something.

And they do a much better job than I do actually explaining what's on the screen. They actually stop and go okay. For the podcast listeners. And then they explain. So anyway, sorry. So there we go. Any thoughts on that? Cameron, do you use that kind of those kinds of tools or are you more of a local dev man?

[00:37:50] Cameron Jones: Oh I do love my Cortez, but no, I've I'd, fakely heard of it. I was aware of its existence. I thought it was more a hosting platform than it was. Spin up service. I learned something new today. But yeah, I use tastes WP for that sort of thing. Then I quite like it, but yeah, I might have to check out in CWP

[00:38:16] Nathan Wrigley: Before

[00:38:17] Cameron Jones: tastes of your peer peered, I was using poopy.life.

If you remember

[00:38:22] Nathan Wrigley: that's a thing. It was,

[00:38:27] Cameron Jones: I can't remember who owns it, but it was, the same sort of thing. Like it got a big promo on the Tavern at the time. And then It became a proprietary thing and okay. But yeah.

[00:38:41] Nathan Wrigley: So one of the, yeah, I think so because the sort of thing that you dip into once in a while, I guess it's, if the, if they can figure out a way to market it, and it looks to me like at some point in the future, the intention with, instead of the UPM sort of reading slightly between the lines of the article is they're going to reach out to potential hosting providers and provide like a one-click install service.

So let's say that you've been using it for a few hours and you've built something that you think is half decent, rather than having to replicate all those steps. Again, you could click a button, like a stellar button or a WP engine button, or whatever you like button. And then we'll just throw all of that over onto their servers.

That seems like a real. Obvious play and and quite powerful, if you've spent time actually building something, which is half decent on their environment and you can click a button and move it somewhere else. That seems like a really nice idea. A bit

[00:39:42] Cameron Jones: like Softaculous is

[00:39:44] Nathan Wrigley: C panel site. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Oh, I'd forgotten about that. It's been so many years since I've been inside of a C panel or those were the days okay. I'm now trying to find a tab which has nothing to do with Insta WP. Here we go. This is a sort of community-based piece. We're back at the Tavern, Sarah Gooding. What was this 3rd of June five for the future program set to adopt official definition for pledges and contributions.

Michelle, I feel like you would do a better job explaining five for the future than I do. Is there any truth in that? And if so, do you want to, do you want to explain what it is?

[00:40:22] Michelle Frechette: I don't know that I'd do a better job, but find for the future is pledging 5% of your company, whether it's the human resources part of it, or actually monetary contribution to forwarding the source project.

Can I get that camera and you look like you had you'd look confused. And I said that maybe I was getting it wrong.

[00:40:46] Cameron Jones: Headphones start again.

[00:40:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh no. So you can get it. You literally didn't say it, Michelle. That was the problem. So yeah, that basically sums it up for me. The intention is to get as much.

Let's go for the word companies, but for companies read any entity really to commit to yeah, that's right. Freelancers agencies, bigger companies, whatever to commit, to offering 5% of things. And again, my understanding is that could be 5% of 5% of time. As well as it could be, excuse me, 5% of things like revenue and what have you, the thing is there's no real, there's no real clear definition about what things are acceptable to be brought into that

system.

[00:41:31] Nathan Wrigley: And that raises the question. Why does that matter? If people are giving 5% of something? Sure. It's all just going into the pot and everybody's getting help. And I think the reason it matters is because there's been talk about getting something back in return. So some sort of accreditation.

So in other words, if you can prove that you are a five for the future, if you genuinely did commit and see it through, then there's going to be some kind of quid pro quo. In other words, maybe you'll get some kind of official thing that you can throw on your website, or maybe there'll be some sort of other arrangement way.

I don't know. Maybe you'll get at a discount for sponsorships or word comes or something like that. No idea. But that being the case that needs to be some mechanism to say, okay, this qualifies, this is five for the future. And this isn't five for the future. So I'll just quote the article again, like I said, but it's Sarah Gooding on the Tavern.

She says, WordPress is. Future program, an initiative that encourages organizations to contribute 5% of their resources to WordPress development is poised to adopt an official definition for what constitutes pledges and contributions. And a couple of weeks ago, just after Hayden, Sean posi proposed the program, gives some clear definitions to the ecosystem and it goes like this participation in five for the future means consistent effort by an individual or a company via a make WordPress team.

That's quite important to directly support the WordPress open source projects and the projects, current big ideas, rather than the sole benefit of a company or individual simply put five for the future exists to collaboratively, invest in the health, the WordPress project ensuring its long-term sustainability and success.

In other words, if you're doing something, which is just about making your company successful. So let's say you're a plugin developer or a theme or a block developer and you put loads of time into that. The argument goes well, that's helping the project. Surely anything that makes WordPress's ecosystem bigger and swells it that is helping well, no, not according to this definition, plugin developers, theme developers, and so on.

That's not going to be included on the umbrella of this. So you, you will have to, you have to find other more traditional routes of displaying your chops. So I just think that was actually quite probably quite a needed thing because without that clear clarification, it would have been quite easy for a lot of gray areas to be consumed and people to, to benefit from that.

Whereas this is all about making the WordPress. Projects bigger and better. Okay. I think I'm done, but I'd like you to chime in if you want.

[00:44:23] Michelle Frechette: I think it's a great, I think it's really great to have a definition. I think it really helps companies understand what they're contributing to and what is being asked of companies for sure.

I'm individuals as well. I don't mean just the big corporations, what I don't understand. And maybe because I haven't read the whole article yet, and I don't know if it mentions that there is, how does WordPress know whether or not a company is doing that? Is there like a form to fill out? Is there some way to say, Hey, by the way, for years I've given all kinds of time to organizing word camps working on the marketing group.

I definitely do a lot with community, that kind of thing. And just curious, how has that been counted? Has it been called?

[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: So there is, yeah, there's a little paragraph. Come on. You go. I believe it's,

[00:45:15] Cameron Jones: self-reported in your wordpress.org profile and you just, there's a checkbox to say whether you're a sponsor or not.

And if you check it, then there's how many hours a week you do. I think that's how they track it, but then obviously that's not verified by anyone, wordPress team saying, oh yeah, they're actually doing it. So I feel like that's probably the next step is they'll have some sort of verification process

[00:45:41] Nathan Wrigley: and yeah,

[00:45:42] Cameron Jones: I agree.

Having this definition is needed and a step forward. But yeah, I think it's all self-reported so, bit of gamification maybe, or the a system it might be happening,

[00:45:58] Nathan Wrigley: There was just this little paragraph, which is the best fit for what you want to know. Michelle. It may not answer your question perfectly, but the very last paragraph is, and I quote the pro programs activity is tracked on get hub where discussions are open on everything from stats to budgets, to tracking, meet up attendance.

Many of these are technical issues that require building charts and dashboards. It will be interesting to see how the community and Mehta teams tackle these challenges to track contributions across teams, feedback on contribution tracking. It's still open in the comments to the post. So it would seem that it's TBD to be decided still, but it looks like, yeah, that's going to be some mechanism for the tracking,

I guess with the nature of the project that we've got, because most of the people who are going to be tracking their time will in no way, shape or form be connected to, let's say for want of a better word, automatic, there's going to have to be some trust isn't there and there's going to have to be people saying actually that thing that I did there took me six hours, which represents I dunno, which represents 5% for my entire month or whatever it is, who knows.

I guess there's got to be a little bit of trust, but your right camera. And if if it starts to be game of Thrones, And people start to use it because they will. Isn't that enough? That's inevitable. There's going to be some people who, as a benefit will see that as a thing to massage up a little bit.

But thinking

[00:47:27] Michelle Frechette: about the fact that the opposite is also true, right? So there are a lot of people who contribute and had no idea that there's a way for them to, let somebody know that's the case.

[00:47:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it'd be interesting to see what kind of power any of the let's call them badges, the sort of certification, if you like the comes out the other end, what kind of power that has in the industry?

[00:47:50] Michelle Frechette: I tweeted my badges the other day and there was a lot, I just, cause I was like, oh, this is cool. I've got to do badges. Cause I've on the photo team. I have a lot of badges and like I contributed a plugin to the repo, those kinds of things. I was like, I have developer next to my name, which is just the funniest thing ever.

I have the ability to learn. But I tweeted about it. I made a nice little image and that kind of thing. And there was a lot of activity on that particular tweet. People are like, wow, this is great. I want to do more. Somebody said is your profile for sale? Because they wanted all my badges.

[00:48:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Just go and copy and paste them and add them into your profile as a fancy graphics. I said,

[00:48:33] Michelle Frechette: oh no but I might be able to will it to you when I die.

[00:48:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Taco who, as we now know is like the duke all I've come off. I think I've come up with something that I'm going to call him the duke from now on.

He obviously is from Yoast. It's a plug-in company, big concern, right? Hadn't really thought about it from taco's point of view until just now he says, why is contributed? Sorry, why is contributing a theme or plugin, not a fight for the future contribution, but a contribution to open versus, and I hadn't really given that enough thought tacker, but it's suddenly occurs to me.

There's a bit, there's gotta be a gray area here. Because as we know. Yoast do an incredible job of contributing back that back their time. But they do that in terms of developer time. So they contribute to core and all those kinds of things. Presumably that piece gets the credit, but the, all of the time and what have you for the free plugin, doesn't get the credit.

So it, you're not the only person who was talking about that. So let's just put a couple of comments up on screen. If you can see it, there was a comment from Adam Warner, who is the WordPress he's the WordPress is our let's say at go daddy. He says, I can't help, but wonder about the argument to be made that the creation of themes, plugins and blocks that are made freely available are also contributions that move WordPress forward.

GoDaddy sponsored contributor, Adam Warner said, and Yost spawn contributor. Yvette. Now taco apologized to Yvette for what's about to come out of my mouth. If at Sunbelt. Said the term gray area has a negative connotation because gray area is the bit that they're describing as all the pieces that we don't quite understand in this argument.

And the, all the activities are essential to keep the software and the community healthy and thriving. I fully understand that these are harder to quantify. She said, I'm going to use a, she, instead of trying to butcher her name twice personally, I agree that themes and plugins brought out under creative commons licenses also help software and the community thrive and should be included in the efforts that help project sorry, help the project move forward.

Yep. Let's see. I presume that yeah, the likes of taco and the Yoast grew and all the other crews that are contributing and giving away their software in some way, shape or form freely they'll wish to get their voices heard. So this article, just so that you can, oh, that's big 500. Program sets to adopt official definition for pledges and contributions as you'd expect from Sarah, there's all the links to the various and pieces.

Okay,

[00:51:20] Michelle Frechette: Talk us says your pronunciation of sauna valve is actually pretty good.

[00:51:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. W that's, it's probably not true. He's just trying to be, like a decent landlord, a decent, I'm never gonna live this down. I'm going to have to get sick. Do you know what I need? I need some, attacker, what we need right.

Is for you to immediately go and get an icon made of that. Just like the Yoast icons of me. Supplicating to you. That'd be hysterical. Let's see if we

see a that's brilliant. Okay. Thank you. Taco, did you get home safe? I'm guessing you're at home now. And if not, what the heck are you doing watching this? Here's another interesting one jet pack. Every time you say the word Jetpack, the WordPress community either tend to like to have an intake of breath or they're quite all right.

And I have to say, I have never really been a user of Jetpack, but I've been, I've definitely been swayed in hearing everybody. And typically my, when I say that most of the people. Listen to speaking about Jetpack, don't seem to have a very good opinion about it. And I actually tried it properly for the first time, several weeks ago.

I like it. I actually like it. I'm using the comments and that's pretty much all that I'm using, but for that piece alone, it's very helpful for the WP Builds website. Cause we're getting people sharing and following inside of that little bubble that never happened before. I quite like it.

Anyway. Jet pack goes modular. So as Sarah Gooding again, bless Sarah is all I can say since Justin has left, she's been she's been given the responsibility to write all the pieces. Hopefully that will be solved soon cause there's jobs available for writers at the top. And if you want to apply, Jetpack goes modular with more features now available as individual plugins.

So the Leviathan that was jet pack, we'd like 406. Billion different features. It's been split up into jet pack, backup jet pack. Protect. Can I just stop saying jet pack at the beginning? Can I just say what it is? So every word I just about say substitute jet pack at the beginning, backup, protect, boosts, social.

CRM. And you'll be able to get those separately. Apparently if you're a user and you've got everything just honky-dory at the minute, you don't need to worry or change anything, but they've decided to split it all out on camera and you made an amazing, cool observation just before we, just, before we went live, which was.

[00:54:02] Cameron Jones: I've found it a little ironic that a lot of what's in Jetpack is other plugins that have been acquired by jet pack and then merged into the main jet plugin. And now they're splitting them out again, like the Jetpack CRM, I believe a year ago was zero BS, CRM

[00:54:24] Nathan Wrigley: or something like that.

[00:54:28] Cameron Jones: And then it was Jetpack and now it's being split out again.

It's, it's almost as if it was done right the first time.

[00:54:35] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that was beautifully done. I'll read it. I think I've read that a little bit. Apparently three of the ones that I've just mentioned of those, what is it? 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 were already as available a separate backups. So that was the back.

Sorry. It's separate plugins. So that was the backup, the CA. And the boosts, but now you can get them all separately. It says here, the idea on a quote to the idea behind splitting out more features, individual plugins is that Jetpack users will be able to install only what they need. Instead of assuming the overhead of the all-in-one plugin.

This is also a strategic change for Jetpack attempts to market its bulk license options for agencies. I don't honestly know much about that, but it does make sense to me that if you strolled across Jetpack and you were mulling it over and you saw that it did this, and this, if you only need one of those bits, you were probably always going to say I don't need all the other bits.

I'll go and find some other WordPress plugin that. So maybe it's just to address that, just to address the fact that, we don't need seven things when it can be done as well. Michelle, anything on this?

[00:55:43] Michelle Frechette: So I was a jet pack user way back when I first started building sites for other people in my freelance days.

And I used it primarily for Cameron, are you sitting down? Cause you're going to cringe when I say this part, but I used it primarily for the carousel feature that was built into it

[00:56:02] Nathan Wrigley: and I'm still okay.

[00:56:05] Michelle Frechette: He's just going to let me

[00:56:06] Nathan Wrigley: know later

[00:56:08] Michelle Frechette: but in, in my early days that place was on every single website I ever built.

[00:56:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. They

[00:56:17] Michelle Frechette: were big back then. And the other thing was when when designing for mobile first came. You ha and everybody was scrambling to change their websites so that they would be able to appear on mobile phones.

Jetpack had a feature where you could just flip a switch and that site could be displayed on mobile without, with it, scaled it down, weighed. It got rid of a lot of images. It Denis those things, but it was accessible then on mobile phones. And so it was a beautiful stop gap. If you had 20 customers, who's all whose sites all needed to be redesigned for mobile.

You could at least in the meantime, flip that switch and those sites could be mobile. It wasn't pretty, but the information was all there. And so that was another way that I was able to, especially for my customers who didn't want to Pay for a new website. I just slipped it over and they got what they got.

So

[00:57:15] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle Facebook user who, I don't know who the Facebook user is, regrettable. Pretty sure that's probably taco. Oh, okay. Especially for you and Michelle, should I use a carousel.com?

[00:57:26] Michelle Frechette: The answer is always, no, let's

[00:57:28] Nathan Wrigley: see. Just how to be circled. Is there a use case for this? No. Is there always it okay.

[00:57:37] Michelle Frechette: It's just as no, basically.

[00:57:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Should I use a carousel.com forward slash no is what you get when you go there, but yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I would imagine this is a decent PR move. They, they can split things out and have less people moaning about. One of the, one of the curious things that I saw in there that I hadn't heard about was that they've got this new thing.

I think it's still in beta inside jet pack, it's called boost. And like you said, Michelle, where you can toggle a button to in the past, you could toggle the button to bridge the gap between responsive and not responsive. They've got this kind of core web vitals toggle feels like that's what it's for.

And it goes out and tries to automatically compress your CSS and JavaScript and defer things that I don't really know what it does, but it seems like almost a, too much of a magic bullet. So I haven't toggled that switch to shit. But anyway, there it is Jetpack boost. It says to improve speed and SEO for free in just a few clicks don't know, let's see how that works in the future.

Next one is going to be very brief just to say that and McCarthy's museum of block art is now open for submission. She launched it a little while ago and she had some, I guess friends and colleagues put various bits and pieces in there and you can find it at Goodman. Oh no, not good and bugs.

That's a screenshot. Isn't it. Here we go. No. And to museum, how do we get to it? There we go. You go to, oh, my word. I'm going all the way down the wrong article. Here we go. It's block-museum.com. I was looking at the Gutenberg times article there which looked very similar. It's their block.block-museum.com.

And I didn't think you could submit things, but apparently now you can. So if you're a budding artist and you like the idea of trying to create what you might term as art inside of blocks, then it's now open for submissions. Really. It's just a place to go and be a bit voyeuristic and curious, and you can see all the different things.

We've mentioned this in the past. There's a few new ones on there, but if you, I mean that there are pretty funky or that one in particular, I could totally imagine that being on a, a wall in a gallery or something, it really is cool. And it's all made out of blocks. There's loads in there.

Some of them are a bit silly and some of them very sensible, but what you can do. I'm actually in brave. And so it likes to make it look like a readable article. You can have a little look at what it is and then you can go down and you can simply copy and paste the code. If you want to have exactly what you're looking at on the screen now, which looks a bit like, I don't know some lines with lots of shadows on them.

It's very cool. It looks a bit like a blind has been pulled down in front of a window. You can just go copy and paste the code. I guess the intention is a to look at cool things, but B to figure out how those cool things were made and all the code is just right down below. And, it might not come as any surprise to realize it's all done in cider blocks.

Very cool. And I think on that,

[01:00:54] Michelle Frechette: I just think it's really cool. I love the fact that you can copy the the code behind it and use it yourself. Okay.

[01:01:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. It's

just,

[01:01:03] Nathan Wrigley: they're totally not hidden from view. Just, just looking at the bottom. That's all. That's the only thing you got to do is scroll down a little bit and figure it out and just on picket, really, you, if you're curious and you think how on earth did they achieve that particular thing?

I didn't know. You might never have learned how to do a curve or something like that. And suddenly you can realize that you can actually do that fairly straightforwardly. Very cool. Cameron, anything, or should we move. Yeah. Just had a thought,

[01:01:29] Cameron Jones: Like mainly regarding the copying of code. I wonder what licensing that is conforming

[01:01:39] Nathan Wrigley: to cause

[01:01:41] Cameron Jones: the contributing from WordPress and extending WordPress is GPL, but this is content.

So

[01:01:49] Nathan Wrigley: do you mean in terms of the images or do you mean in terms of the, the S the CSS, for example? Yeah just the guide in general,

[01:01:59] Cameron Jones: Yeah. Is it going to be GPO, like the rest of

[01:02:01] Nathan Wrigley: what versus I'm going to click the contribute. Let's see if, let's see if we give up rights to all of that, as we go, if you'd like to contribute to the directory, here are a few guidelines using a block, blah, blah, blah.

Use the latest pushing the boundaries are. So that's just guys on what they want it to look like a small group of volunteers. No, there's no caveat in that. They just want a high resolution screenshot, the HTML markup of the blocks or social media account that we could link to for your submission and a title for your piece of art that doesn't at least on that form appear to be any thing, which says I surrender anything.

So that's an interesting point. Yeah. Maybe that's something that needs to be addressed, but Yeah, because presumably you, you should own the images and what have you. So there was an image in there it's a test stop, my staging website.com. I'm assuming that's one that has knocked up somewhere or she's got from somewhere.

Maybe it's possible. She's linked that the image is from on splashed. So I don't know, Cameron, that's a good, that's a good point. Let's see if any,

[01:03:12] Cameron Jones: not the wisest idea to just Willy nilly.

[01:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: Copy code. Yeah. Good idea. Yeah.

[01:03:19] Cameron Jones: It might be something for them to think about.

[01:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. That's a really good point. Let's change. Totally change gears. And talk about the most astonishing thing that's happened to me all last week. It was word camp Europe. Look on the screen is the super Bock arena. It's like a football. Soccer ball that sort of had two thirds of the bottom of it chopped off.

All I can say is that picture, does this venue no justice. It was absolutely massive, much bigger than it looks there. You went inside and it was honestly, I reckon you could easily have, I don't know, watch a tennis match on the inside, with thousands of people surrounding you. In fact, I think at some point it was actually a sports stadium and then and then it got acquired.

It got turned into seats, got put in so that it could be pulled in and pulled out and so on. And it's called have a guess why it's called the super bowl arena. Let's see. See what you can come up with Cameron first. Why super Bock,

[01:04:28] Cameron Jones: honestly don't know, like the first thing that's coming to mind is Springbok, which is no, the south

[01:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: African rugby team.

It's got nothing to do with that. No, Michelle.

[01:04:42] Michelle Frechette: I have no

[01:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: idea, beer. It's a brand of beer just throughout Portugal in the same way that in the UK, if you go into a pub, there's always one or two beers, which are just absolutely ubiquitous. Every place that I went to in Portugal get a beer.

One there was super Bock. It appeared to be like brown in Portugal. So I guess that they sponsored the whole arena and their logo is a circle. I guess if you look at it from a certain angle, if you looked at it from above the Superbowl arena would fit that really perfectly.

It was a three-day event. It went from Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Thursday was the contributor day. Here's a nice statistic. Although it was probably a very difficult thing for the organizers to cope with. Apparently something in the region of about 500 people had registered in order to do contributions on that day.

But 1,200 people turned up and you are supposed to have ticked a box on the form. To say and w but are you ever going to turn away somebody that shows up to do contributing? The answer is no, but we were all asked to eat less food. Yeah. The biggest concern genuinely was, it wasn't like go away.

There's 700 of you too many. It's we're not going to have enough food to give to you all. So they they just were very thoughtful and said, please just put only what you want on your plate so that everybody else can eat, but that's really cool. So more than double the amount of people who thought they would contribute, did contribute.

I confess at that point I was doing a different thing, so I wasn't really able to engage in any of that. So I didn't really see it, but friends tell me it was really useful. And then on the main event itself, 2,700 people were in attendance. I don't know if that's attendance or registered of which check this out 60%.

So 1007, 1,600 had not been to a word camp. Oh, that's awesome. And the reason that's awesome is, cause I think it's fair to say that in the last few months, not only has the whole COVID thing been worrying people in terms of, should I get on a plane and go to Portugal? Clearly enough people thought, yes, I can do that.

But there's this slight concern in the community that engagement with the project has taken a bit of a hit, how many zoom calls can you sit in front of? How many meaningful things can you do on a zoom call? The real world events are just better, more gets done more ideas of guest generated more quirky unexpected things happen because you bump into somebody and you just get chatting and who knows what comes out.

But some of the my understanding is some of the biggest projects in WordPress have come out of coincidental meetings and corridors and so on. And so that's a really cool thing because if 60% of people turned up were brand new, that's fresh blood. And it was, yeah, it was just really good.

Really great.

[01:07:55] Michelle Frechette: Are you somebody that enjoys the swag? Did you

[01:07:57] Nathan Wrigley: pick up swag? Do you know what? I didn't pick up any swag and I didn't order any swag. The two reasons for that number one. I didn't request it because I don't want. Needed if you know what I mean? So from the environmental, that's my bet. I'm not blowing any trumpets or anything.

I just think I don't need any more t-shirts I really don't need any more t-shirts but also my luggage allowance is really tight. So even if I'd wanted to do it, I would have been really jeopardizing the ability for me. I would have paid a lot to make the luggage heavier going back if you know what I mean?

So there's that piece as well, because I took some camera, not cameras microphones and recording equipment to do interviews like this. And and it bumps up the weight really quickly. If technology weighs a lot more than clothes. So I was bumping up against really bumping up against the weight limit, but there was lots of swag.

They presented them really nicely. Or at least I think what I saw. So instead of just giving t-shirts away they, they gave him away in these lovely little tubes. So you almost like if you bought a really nice bottle of port or something like that, it comes in a tube with a lid that you can prize off the top.

So you've got something to keep that you could put things in some sort of useful little like storage device. And I saw tons of people in the airport wearing their t-shirts. So yeah, it was, there was lots and lots of that. There was a fabulous after party. It went from about I don't know, about eight 30 til guests when it finished.

5:00 AM, all okay. Yeah, you're right. But I'm used to them finishing it like sensible o'clock, like one o'clock or something like that, but no 5:00 AM, which is pretty extraordinary. It was a queen tribute band. So depending on whether or not you like queen would have really affected whether or not you like the event personally, I'm on the side of let's go somewhere else.

Shall we? So we, we did it for a little while and then me and Peacher and a couple of others just broke away and went to the bar with love the olives that I mentioned, but an absolutely magnificent event of which I saw almost numb because I was in a basement with no windows you can guarantee that's true.

Isn't it a sort of basement down in the bowels of the superblock arena which was quite hot. Put it that way, but rarely nicer than. Honestly, I'm going

[01:10:24] Michelle Frechette: to, if talking, if you're listening, I'm going to DM you my mailing address, because I want those stroke waffles that I saw at the

[01:10:30] Nathan Wrigley: oh, Bacco.

My kids have already nailed one of the boxes of the strobe waffles or whatever they're called. And there's another box which is waiting just for me, tacos advice. This is how you eat them. Get a nice coffee and dip them in the coffee. Are you

[01:10:48] Michelle Frechette: set them on top and let them let the heat of the coffee? Come on then.

[01:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, what literally on top.

[01:10:58] Michelle Frechette: The steam of the coffee comes up and it melts the Caravelle and things in there and makes it just ever, so do you know,

[01:11:03] Nathan Wrigley: maybe that's what you meant? I wasn't really paying attention. I was too busy, just bowing and scraping at the time. I was on a knee. If you were king tack a king taco.

That sounds cool. It sounds like a really big thing that you got a restaurant, doesn't it? So there was that was a really cool thing. Oh, by the way I am in the, I'm going to take you to the the community bit. Let me see that. Where are we? The home. Let me see if you can find it. Cause I want to show you the picture here we are.

Here's the picture of everybody on contributor day. Let me just put it on the screen. Yeah, there it goes. And there's all the, the good people. And they're just right there. That's done. Maybe is really bit the next one, this little gray head shot right at the front. So that was just the best beautiful to connect.

Beautiful to be there. Lovely venue. Wonderful time was had by all. And hopefully lots of learning was done. Not that

[01:12:12] Michelle Frechette: I thought I had, I thought I had made amends with my FOMO for this event, but now it's even worse.

[01:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: I wish I'd been there next. I so wish you'd been there. Little thing, little moment of concern though, on the Saturday.

So the last day an email went out, I don't know how this is going to play out in the days and weeks to come, but a few people at the event had got COVID. Let's be honest, that's totally inevitable, right? There's just no way with three close to 3000 people that it's going to be an event free of that side of things.

But they, I presume they felt unwell because there was no sort of mandatory testing going on and they remove themselves from the event for the remainder of the time. And anybody that had been in. With them that they knew about it was contacted and I was one of those people. I was in real close proximity to somebody that was positive.

And so I was given a test, which I did, and then I did another one before I got on the plane. And then I did another one this morning and touch. Somewhere, there's some wood, there's some wood touch wood. I seem to be clear at the moment, but I'm put putting it down to tacos, touching of hands laying on of hands, just like healing me.

So where's it. Next time you don't get it. That's right. Yeah. This time tomorrow I'll be laid off. How does it work? Where are we next time? Do you know? Do you know where oh,

[01:13:44] Michelle Frechette: grace, that's so

[01:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: exciting. So WordCamp Europe, 2020 to get the dates in your calendar after miss grace actually could one or both of you Google whilst we're doing this, what the typical temperature is at about this time in Greece, because that would be really curious.

Portugal was a perfectly balmy sort of 22, 23, 24 degrees centigrade. So much to Michelle, is it just to camera and I'm you're in centigrade, right? Cameron? Yes. Yeah. So really that's a nice temperature. I've got a feeling that Athens is going to be a little bit. A little bit warmer

[01:14:22] Michelle Frechette: 85

[01:14:27] Cameron Jones: average 29. I lower 20, which is quite nice.

Yeah. Not much rain okay. It should be middle of the summer over there.

[01:14:34] Nathan Wrigley: More or less. Yeah. So what was that in Fahrenheit 18. 85 high, 68 low. Okay. So to me that's like anything that begins in a three is starting 30 degrees. That is, and I'm guessing anything beginning with a nine, like a 90 you're straying into the, for me, at least anyway, I'm straying into oh, it was a bit hot.

So I'm pleased to hear it starts with a two as the high. That's pretty good. Which is good here too. Yeah. Yeah. So basically really nice time of year as well. So get it in your diaries. Eighth to the 10th of June 20, 23. I would imagine that the venue I don't know anything about, but I'm sure it's been booked.

And we'll see you in Athens next year. Hope to go. That would be really nice. And there's a nice little promo PC. It's a Europe dot word, camp.org forward slash 22 in T3. But anyway, beautiful event. It was really nice. Thank you to the large amount of people who who I was able to hang out with.

It was absolutely lovely. Thanks to a whole load of people who enabled me to go to some of their events. There was a lot of really nice events and I was really pleased to be able to attend some of those. So that was lovely, including, by the way, Michelle, I'm going to embarrass myself here. The Stella WP crew did a sushi evening and turns out that my favorite food in the world is sushi.

I always knew this. But I was incapable of speech as I was eating it. It was that good. It was a phenomenally good restaurant. And I was literally in awe. In fact, I embarrass myself quite a lot because I was, I had to shut my eyes to concentrate on the food. It was that good. But thanks. Thanks.

Also to WP engine, they put on a really nice event as did go daddy. They had an event on a boat and I'm really appreciative to all those lovely companies who invited me along so that I could, just embarrass myself by that. Okay. That's the WordPress stuff done. Now we're going to talk about cookies, staying on a food theme.

I don't even get what this is. My son plays something called cookie clicker. I don't get it. So Cameron, this is yours. You're going to have to explain what the heck is cookie.

[01:16:58] Cameron Jones: It's like the original idle games. It's a JavaScript game that you play in your browser. And,

[01:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: but wait a minute, I don't even know what that means.

What's an idle game.

[01:17:10] Cameron Jones: Pretty much the computer applies as much as you do. Like you buy upgrades and stuff and then it automatically generates your resources.

[01:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So

[01:17:23] Cameron Jones: yeah, they released a gigantic update like in the last week or over the weekend or something like that. And yeah, I'm totally addicted to this game and it takes a fun.

And I often look at it with half a developer. I, being that it's written in Java script and it's like the steam version, it's just an electron app wrapper around the browser.

[01:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Have you taken it to pieces?

[01:17:59] Cameron Jones: I try and think oh man, if I'll falls riding, this sort of game and you're like, oh yeah, I could do it like this.

And oh, that's a clever idea.

[01:18:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. My son plays this and he basically has it as a little. In the top left-hand screen whilst he's doing other things. And all I can understand is that there's a number which continually goes up and up by huge amounts every second a billion a second.

What is the point you're just supposed to create cookies. Yup. Yup.

[01:18:36] Cameron Jones: There's about 600 achievements that you can get from, doing certain things and earning so many cookies. So like to finish the game, so to speak as, get all the achievements, which I've got about 50 to go.

[01:18:55] Nathan Wrigley: It's

[01:18:55] Cameron Jones: yeah, it's a lot of fun. Like I got into it, thanks to a April fool's day joke video from a YouTube channel called alt shift X. They do a lot of really good light. Show analysis and yeah it's quite funny. It's yeah. Cookies, just, it takes over the universe. It becomes everything, it's

[01:19:20] Nathan Wrigley: great though, isn't it?

Because normally, if you look, if you get a game it's so complicated that you could never tear it to pieces and have a look at it, but because this it's really just doing a couple of things, isn't it? That's my impression of it. It's just basically, you're trying to, out-compete the rest of the universe to create more cookies at a higher rate of, at a higher rate than everybody else.

And my son is very proud cause he's up to 2 billion, a second or something, but just said, when I told you that you're like amateur,

that's a low number, but it just sits there, but you've been able to take it to pieces and learn a few things. Yeah.

[01:19:55] Cameron Jones: Back before it was on steam and just in the browser. Yeah. I wrote little scripts to automate parts of it and that sort of thing. So it could run even more

[01:20:07] Nathan Wrigley: idle without me. I think they're doing anything.

Did you basically hack it and cheat and make yourself a little more it's so good. Cookie clicker. We're looking at the steam powered version. Steam is of course like a multi-platform gaming service where you can buy and get your games downloaded, but they go cookie clicker not to be missed, especially if you like really big numbers, which change second by second, let's move on to something.

But back in the WordPress space, we had a non WordPress you on there. This is this is Michelle's. That she's brought up. This is a piece that you are now, this is serious because we don't normally feature things from the past, but you've got you got a piece that you wrote Michelle in 2019, October, November called post word camp emotions.

Tell me about it. Yeah.

[01:21:01] Michelle Frechette: Yoast dug this up and retweeted it or tweeted that out over the weekend. Because if we're all coming back to word camps for the first time in few years and th that after events let down, that we sometimes experience after big things like weddings. If you've ever been in plays, we used to call it the Sunday, let down, because Saturday night was the end of the next day.

You're like, what do I do with myself now? Being in those mountain top experiences like you do when you're with 3000 of your closest WordPress funds and then going home to your cat or whatever, maybe your family there are do feel about shit. And sometimes you can't even put your finger on what it is, but sometimes you feel down or you might feel more energized or less energized.

And basically no two people are going to respond exactly the same coming off of an event like that. But it's okay to recognize that has had an impact on who you are and or how you're feeling going forward. Even if it's just for a short while. And so I quit, I put all that in words and then gave you some ideas about ways to move forward.

Acknowledging those kinds of.

[01:22:14] Nathan Wrigley: So you said it's okay to feel down then I'm just summarizing the main things. This is after the word camp. It's okay. To feel energized. Yeah. And I'm not really on that, that, that is not the page I'm on write down everything you want to do. And remember, I didn't really have a chance to attend many talks, so I can't do that one cry if you want to.

There's a bit of a reach out to others. There's a bit of that for me as well, spend time with loved ones. Oh yes. See a doctor, thankfully, not this time around, but I do have a sort of sense of deflation little bit of a been building up to it for, in my case. Not a very long time, just a matter of weeks, but getting excited over the last few weeks.

And there's that thing where yeah. You back to normal life and what have you, and yeah. Take care of yourself, making sure that you've got people around you and things to do. And if you're feeling, if you're feeling it hard, go and check this out. It's called you can probably Google it post word.

Emotions and it was written by Michelle. But and I suspect this will be our last one of the day. Cause we're closing in on the one and a half hour, mark, you want it to just let us know about some learn dash updates,

[01:23:28] Michelle Frechette: so learn dash has released a 4.2 0.0, we'll be announcing it officially this week, but it has dropped including some new features that people have been requesting, like cloning your courses.

So you can duplicate them very easily without having to copy paste, a bulk editing you can do now with added razor pay, which is a payment gateway in India that that people have been asking for. We've we've added by mouse networking. We've added the option to have participant voices.

You can email out to. And then also drip content for all of our stock types. So there's all kinds of things. New features, of course, there's updates, there's bug fixes. There always is when you have a release, but those new features are things that our customers have been asking for and that make it an even stronger, better.

I'll ask for you to be able to use any word from this website.

[01:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: There's quite a lot of updates as well, but there's a really large list of bug fixes, possibly like 30 or 40. It looks like over there, but the race pay one's really interesting. I've not come across razor pay, as you said. I think it's a primarily based in India, but whenever I go into a Facebook group and I see some platform launching, there's always seems to be some clamor to have raised the pay added right from the start.

So I'm guessing it must be, the Indian. So there's a lot of people.

[01:24:45] Michelle Frechette: It's a very big market over there. Isn't it? So you want to be able to make sure that you have a payment gateway that people are able to use. Far or, give them a P has raised her pay as an option as well. So people can donate within India.

[01:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, look at that. We always get some sort of nonsense switch. Yeah. It's just a bond. Just going to get rid of the little bar. I'm sorry. If you've had to cope with the silly comment that comes in all the ways from Twitch. What's that? Are they making you Twitch? Oh, that's good. I like it. Yes, a little bit.

I don't, yeah, I don't even know why we go out on Twitch. There's no audience there for us, but all I have to do is click a button. So we just go out there and see what happens. Bless you taco. He says he says he's energized, says physically he's tired. But he's mentally on a high from meeting or.

The friends. Yeah, the big part, that was absolutely beautiful. Really cool. We run out of time. I'd like to, first of all, say a great big thank you to both Cameron and Michelle for joining us today. Thank you to anybody who came. I realized that, if quite a lot of the audience have probably post-workout but anybody that's listened to it on the podcast afterwards if you want to leave a comment, go to WP Builds.com, search for episode number two 12, and you can leave a comment and it's Jetpack.

What you will, it's time for the humiliating hand wave where we've all got rays. Aren't going to get the camera, get the hands and get them. Why even get them way, even get them Wayman, smile and wave. Thank you so much. Thanks for the show. Folks has taco. I can't couldn't agree more. Thanks for the enjoyable week last week, taco.

Thanks for the . Whatever they're called. I will raise them. Yeah those there. I've got two tubes. And we'll see you next week. Take care. Have a good week. Thanks Cameron. Thanks Michelle. Cheers.