This Week in WordPress #214

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 214 entitle. Divide and combine it was recorded on Monday the 27th of June, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined as always by a panel of expert WordPress guests. We have Jess Frick. We also have mayor long car and Bernard Grano, and we're gonna talk through what's been quite a busy news period.

We took a week off because of the page builder summit. And so we're covering kind of two weeks worth of news. The first piece of news is probably one that you've heard elsewhere. It's the fact that there has been a bit of a toss between Matt Mullenweg and GoDaddy. We get into all of that. Then we talk about a new page builder called break dance from the creators of oxygen Elementor a week or so ago, decided to lay off 50 or 60 of.

Mainly marketing staff, but they also acquired the static WordPress host static. We talk about some new features in Gutenberg and the fact that generate blocks 1.5 has come out with new dynamic data options. Tool set seems to have put the breaks on development for the near future. And then we get into all sorts of GDPR weeds, Google analytics, and Google fonts, all under question. It's all coming up next on this week in word.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage 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.

Hello? Hello. Hello. Wherever you are in the world. It's episode number 214 of this weekend. WordPress WP Builds here. Thank you. If you're joining us live bit of a request if you fancy making this show, have more of an audience right now and joining in the comments, I have a URL for you to share.

Go to your favorite social network and share this one. It's WP Builds.com/live. It's the tiny little tiny print in the yellow box there at the bottom. I should have made it the big one, never mind. WP Builds.com/live. Go share it over there or just, get on your Twitter, get on your, whatever it may be and share it.

And let's see if we can get the conversation going. We are joined by three very fine guests and one dreadful host. Let's start with the fine guests. First of all, we've got Jess Frick all the way from pressable. How you doing Jess? Super

[00:03:00] Jess Frick: excited to be here. And yes I am joined by dogs.

[00:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Can we dare we see the dogs.

Will the dogs be making an appearance later?

[00:03:08] Jess Frick: They're very excited to be on the show today. I'm afraid. They don't say much, but this right here is Snoop. He's a rescue. And he just celebrated his first birthday. Oh,

[00:03:21] Nathan Wrigley: nice. Swear joined by canines on the show today. We need some canine related content at the end.

We'll just show pictures of dog biscuits and get him all excited. perfect. Let's do the proper introduction because Jess is the director of operations for pressable which is a WordPress managed website hosting company. She's an iced tea, Conor and a proud member of the post status community.

Yeah. Thank you Jess, for joining us. What time is it where you are?

[00:03:52] Jess Frick: It is 9:05

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: AM Nathan. Okay. I don't feel too bad in that case sometimes depending on where people are in north America. It's a little bit earlier than that. So thank you for joining us. We're also joined by Maya LAN. How are you? Hello, everyone.

I'm good. Thank you. Yeah. Maya is in marketing and business development field since 2004. She's currently enjoying meeting global hashtag makers of the web at conferences and meet ops globally and promoting wide WordPress education. As a host of the goad ePRO E M E a meetups. You might want to consider talking at our events.

Where do we actually find out about that? Where would we subscribe and enlist our support?

[00:04:37] Maja Loncar: If you just go to events.goad.com, you will get, you will go. You will land directly on the page where we have various chapters, which you might wanna join, and then, get some good knowledge. Thank you for mentioning that.

I, we are very proud of. Of meetups and the type of knowledge

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: we share. Thanks. Nice. Thank you so much for joining us. And lastly, he's got like several cameras going on. I'm getting a bit of visual dissonance, something changed on the screen and I suspect it was Bernard. Bernard never leaves a biography when, because there's a little, there's a little bit in our show notes where you can leave a biography and Bernard always just leaves a blank space.

So it's up to me to make it up. Each time Bernard works with pods he loves beaver builder and he makes chocolate how's that

[00:05:25] Bernhard Gronau: getting better.

[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: you need to make more of it, but okay. But anyway, nice to see you. Very nice to see you. You're in, are you in Austria? You seem to be ting about all over the place last times you've been on mostly

[00:05:39] Bernhard Gronau: yes, we sold our property in Hungary.

So it's only Austria for now, but Yeah.

[00:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: Only Austria for now. Okay. Let's see if we've got any comments coming in. If you would like to leave a comment, please do. If you've got something you wanna add or say, or get us to talk about, that's brilliant. We've got Elliot, SAS bay who lives just down the road from me where yet to meet.

But there's no, excuse Elliot. I dunno. What's going on here. And we've had a fine week of weather in the United Kingdom, although it's actually chalking it down right now, but hello, Elliot. Very nice. And also, oh, Courtney Robertson says, hello, Jessica's pets. Aw, she's made up, we've got some waving.

We've got some waving emojis from sh shoey toda. Hello. That's very kind of you to join us and we've got Cameron Jones who always joins us. It's always very late. He's in Australia and it's like, Bonkers are clock. And we also have Adam Warner from go daddy. Hello, Adam. Nice to have you with us.

Let's get stuck into it. Shall we, before we start, I have a few little caveats, right? Because I've gotta get this out the way it's important. First one is no matter what happens today, I want you to know that may Maya was coming on the show anyway, right? Because we're gonna get into the thick of all that conversation a little bit later.

So that just so that, Maya was gonna be coming on the show. Anyway, another couple of caveats that I think is important for me to deliver, just so that where I'm coming from, because, what's, what do they call it? Where you get everything out and you air your lawn.

Okay. Disclosure disable disclosure that'll do nicely. Goad was in the news today as was Matt Mullenweg, not today last week. And it's important that that this podcast is sponsored by GoDaddy, pro . And also it's important for you to know that I do another podcast for the WP Tavern.

And for that, I am paid by Audrey capital. So now that all of that, you can basically. Everything that I say, no don't do not do that. We try to keep it calm on this show. We pride ourselves on our politeness and we pride ourselves on not making things in century and chucking grenades around because what's the benefit of that.

Nobody gets anywhere if we're just shouting at each other. So we're gonna talk about the things that occurred last week, but we're not gonna shout and we're not gonna stamp our feet and get all cross. But. Let's not start there. That's the third piece for this week? Okay. Here's the first piece. It could not be avoided.

Last week we had a thing on Twitter. Shall we say it was written up by Sarah Gooding, who you might like to know is also on the payroll of WP TA. And the article was called Matt Mullenweg identifies GoDaddy as a parasitic company and an existential threat to WordPress's future. Now it's important to note.

It may be that after a little bit of thinking about this, Matt decided that the storm, the controversy, in fact, there was a phrase that he used much further down. He said something along the lines of, sorry for the commotion, I believe was word. He used he deleted a bunch of tweets. So maybe there's something to be said there.

Maybe it wasn't intended to be quite so inflammatory as it was, but it was really, this whole debate was around the five for the future. Now, if you don't know what that is, five for the future is the intention. And it is an intent. It's a request that companies who contr, who benefit should we say in the WordPress space, they commit 5% of their time in order to help the WordPress project go forward.

And there was some dilemma where Matt obviously felt that GoDaddy weren't doing the this. And so he called them out on Twitter. What was quite interesting. And, we could go into the particular debate about this. Just go to the article, you can read it for yourself and make up your own mind. What was quite interesting was that obviously caused a fi some people in agreement, some people not in agreement, but a couple of days later.

So that piece came out on the 24th. Actually, it wasn't a couple of days later. It was the same day. I apologize. I've got my dates wrong there. The reaction quite on a. Sarah Gooding says in a change of what would've happened a few years ago, there was quite a lot of people who came to GoDaddy's defense and said, actually, do you know what?

It's not quite as plain as it would see, we've had very good experiences with GoDaddy. So again, from my point of view, I would just like to say that we are sponsored by GoDaddy this podcast, literally won't be happening unless we get sponsorship and GoDaddy have stepped up for an entire year.

They also helped events like the page builder summit. And I know they help out things like word Fest. So really this whole debate is around five for the future. So let's concentrate on that. I'll open it up. What did you make of this? This just seemed like the perfect WP drama as if WP dramas needed any more fuel throwing on the fire.

What did you make of this? Should we start with, let's go for Jess. Have you been watching this story?

[00:11:04] Jess Frick: I have Matt left a comment. And he said, I think it means we can just blame Nathan for everything. And

[00:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: I think this is the now I

[00:11:15] Bernhard Gronau: get talking.

[00:11:16] Jess Frick: Nathan, I agreed here, Nathan, for sure. Yeah.

My disclosure I work for possible, which is owned by automatic. We report to ultimately Matt. I have to temper what I say, but I will say that I was a go daddy customer. My customer number is six digits. Like I've been around forever. I have a lot of friends over there. I was surprised by the comment.

Even Maya, like I met her because they were sponsoring Adam. So , they're everywhere and believe me, I keep trying to sponsor podcasts and they get to 'em first. Sit down, Adam, you're killing me here. but they give so much back and I was on another another. Discussion where I was even praising their page builder. I think that they're doing a lot of really interesting stuff and obviously the page builder has nothing to do with WordPress, but some would say that's part of the problem I disagree.

There were some comments made that say that our real threat are these other page builders WIC, Squarespace, Shopify. And I don't even know that I would call those an existential threat. And this is obviously just my personal opinion. But I believe more competition in the market is a good thing and it helps us strive to be better and to do new and interesting things.

But I do understand Matt's ultimate. Ultimate point was not even just five for the future, but also, the payment processing, GoDaddy's payment processor is killing it right now. And I don't necessarily think it's because GoDaddy's forcing people on it. I think it's because they have done a really good thing with their product and they've made it easy.

[00:13:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So that was a piece that I earmarked. And then my software, which allows me to look at all the highlights that I've made failed about 20 minutes ago. So I'm gonna be winging it today more than I normally would. The I'd forgotten that piece. There's the whole payments gateway, which if I'm right in saying is cheaper for the end user to use than let's say it would be if you just went with regular old Stripe Meer, I dunno if you can comment about that or if or if Adam in the comments can comment, but there was that piece thrown in as well.

That piece of the argument was was mentioned. Let's go to Bernard.

[00:14:05] Bernhard Gronau: It's tricky. Because we don't know what happened in the background because I'm sure something triggered this excavate or whatever you call it. I doubt it was done in the best way possible, maybe too much emotion in it.

But it rose an important topic and all the discussion around it because I have just read few of the comments and the comments from others and stuff. GoDaddy's support of the community of podcast and other stuff in the end is part of a marketing. So it's not only contributing to WebPress, but it's making advertisement for themselves.

So some might say they contribute less because they don't have so many developers working on WordPress because the beta share the numbers with quite low compared to other companies who talk less about or talk almost nothing about the rest. So it's difficult to touch because I feel missing a lot of pieces than the other hand is we're losing so many open source tools.

For example, pots use users, WordPress. So should we contribute to WordPress? Do we, it gets tricky to only collect numbers and they're really doing too much or doing too less. So it's difficult. The thing of the payment processor is for sure how S and then WordPress or automatic behind it.

I don't know. It's always the if too much emotion comes to a topic it's difficult to then say, okay, who is to play and who not? I think it's important to talk about it. How do we use open source? How do we give back? Because in the end many businesses rely on striving getting better, whatever.

Yeah. So it's trying times.

[00:16:02] Nathan Wrigley: Maya, just before I come to you, I'm just gonna raise a couple of the things that will come up in the comments, because as I was expected, this was gonna get some commentary going. So that's quite interesting. First of all yes, I would agree, Cameron, my existence is indeed a conflict of interest.

Then there was map from the map report who said, I think it means we can just blame Nathan for everything. honestly, I'll take that. I'll fully wear the whole argument. And if it just pours water on the flames and it just goes away, I'll hide next door for 12 hours just. Consume it all and then we'll make it go away.

But yeah. Thank you. thank you. What else have we got? We had a couple of other bits real

[00:16:44] Jess Frick: quick. Nathan. I fact checked it and you are correct. As far as United States processing, and I know everybody's all around the world, but just in the United States, the GoDaddy payment processor is 0.3% less money.

Yeah.

[00:16:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that was my understanding. I dunno if that covers places like the EU and so on. B BBA and Adam who again full disclosure, Adam is an employee of GoDaddy. And he says for further context of this is back to the payment processor. Our Godad payments is much more than just WooCommerce.

That's interesting cuz I, I didn't know that piece, Adam, so that's that throws in some interesting stuff as well. Cameron says five for the future. In my opinion is a fancy way of Matt saying build my software for me, GoDaddy contributes so much to the WP community that doesn't fall under the banner EG sponsor.

Here. Okay. So that's an interesting piece, cuz I don't actually know the ins and the outs of what five for the future means. Does it, can anybody correct me on this? Does it mean literally 5% ideally of time committed to WordPress core or do the other pieces, the community be at the sponsoring, the podcast, the sponsoring, the word camps and so on and so forth.

D do they, if you could show that 5% of the hours that our people are doing was involved in other WordPress things would that help and indeed would that change people's opinion of it as well? So Maya, I'll let some more comments D in I'm gonna leave you with the caveat that obviously, you've got certain constraints around what you can say and we fully understand those, but if you've got anything to say about that, maybe you could tell us what it is that you do from a goad perspective, what it is that, that you are involved in, something like that.

Well,

[00:18:29] Maja Loncar: after what I've heard, what Bernard and Jessica said I have nothing to add. This is the human point that we all took at this at this matter. So it's really let's just move, after this because the time is moving economic times are different. I think that our work pressures actually need to spend more time on on learning some business skills, in the times of the, economic times, which are reaching our favors.

From the point of view of contribution, we, as a team who, all of us, we are all committed to contribution and we contribute to the maximum that we can. I contribute to workplace and I'm, and I don't code you. But I found other ways like to do some translations, and I'm saying hello to the poly lots team there and to help with accessibility and knowledge sharing.

And, from time to time being in meetings, in marketing, helping out, promoting their efforts, and many different ways hosting translation, days in meet up sharing knowledge. So it's about, it's what I felt in WordPress as a community is you can really express yourself if you'd and this is what empowered me, now to be able to contribute to something great as WordPress is, I don't know about anyone else's experience with contribution and how much time actually allows you, but I'm sure you all actually enjoy.

[00:19:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. My contribution tends to be around promoting content in the WordPress space. My, my contribution doesn't involve writing code or anything like that. I've dabbled in various different teams, but I've never quite settled on anything that I've liked. I've dipped in and I've dipped out and never really committed to anything.

So this, I suppose in a certain sense is my contribution, which I guess wouldn't really count under the auspices of the, the things that were coming into the comments let's go to. Let's go to Bernard. What do you contribute? Anything?

[00:20:35] Bernhard Gronau: I mean to WordPress directly, not much, I'd say, being guessed on the show yeah, but in indirectly with working on pots and doing stuff over there, it's part of the bigger community around WordPress.

I'd say, because pots is used for many people, but like any is still used. It would need some updates, but time and so I think everybody, every contribution should count, but it's easier to count developer hours or I don't know, contributions from developers versus. Those non-measurable stuff like spreading the word, educating people I don't know, helping out answering in the forums.

It's so many different translations, like you mentioned. Yeah. That's so it's difficult to track and that's the reason why I wondered why this post by met was triggered. If there was something happened beforehand, which we all don't know about some stuff in the background or with numbers, because I'm sure there are numbers why he came to that conclusion.

That GoDaddy does not support like the short, I don't know. So I'm not a fan of the way he did it. but it's Matt. I think we have had similar incidents earlier where he just shouted out something and maybe sometimes it. The best way to get attention to something stupid. He's not the only one

[00:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: interesting

[00:22:14] Bernhard Gronau: approach. Maybe he did had visit from Ellen Musk. I don't know.

[00:22:20] Nathan Wrigley: let's not even go there. Yes. Anything to add in terms of contributions from your side?

[00:22:27] Jess Frick: Yeah. I'd just like to say that, even though we're owned by automatic when I joined the team at pressable, we started officially contributing to five for the future.

Eh, there was a discussion after word camp EU, where they were talking about what types of contributions count toward five for the future, and which ones don't necessarily count to that, but it was acknowledged that all are obviously important. But the reason that they're talking about this is because they're gonna start giving credits for releases to people who didn't necessarily.

For example, people who are translating could be acknowledged as core contributors and so forth. It's a discussion. And I don't know that it's been fully resolved yet, but I just wanted to throw that out there also. I think there's a misconception that Matt owns WordPress and that is not true.

So that the comment about developing Matt software for him is not true. That's actually everybody contributing so we can all use it. The stuff that automatic makes their money on are like wordpress.com, WordPress V I P obviously WooCommerce and those sorts of things. But when it comes to, contributing to WordPress, I do it because I've been working professionally in the WordPress field since 2010.

And it's literally given me my livelihood to raise my kid. I feel indebted to it. And so I do it voluntarily. I'm not exactly sure what caused that particular response to Jeff, but I can tell you and this is not me making excuses. This is just how I roll. I also offer grace, and I think Matt backed down, he apologized, what was said, you can't UN ring the bell.

I'm not saying that we should brush it under the rug, but I agree with Maya, we gotta keep living. Everybody is gonna write articles about this on every single WordPress blog. There is in the world and everybody wants to talk about it and dissect it and honest to God go, daddy is doing awesome stuff.

And I think the best thing that they could do is just keep being awesome. And sorry. Give him some grace. Honest to goodness who on this call and everywhere else has not said something stupid at some

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: point oh, saying what? Matt? Couple of minutes. Yeah. I'm not saying what

[00:24:59] Jess Frick: Matt said was stupid.

I'm not saying what Matt said was stupid, I remember there was a controversy where go daddy had an issue and we all had to show grace and love then too, because honest to goodness, like you said, in fighting does no good at all.

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So here's a thought that occurred to me whilst we were talking about that the whole five for the future thing would be if it was codified just as you were describing Jess and everything was known and everybody knew what fell under the auspices of that and the discussion coalesced around translations count sponsorship of word camps, count committing core to code.

Counts writing a plugin, which goes on the repository, all of that counts, then we'd be in much better shape wouldn't we, because it would be clear where the boundaries lay, but also it's curious because it, we've got this expression, carrot and stick and the carrot is five for the future. If you contribute to FA for the future, that everybody's gonna be happy with you, you can go out and tell everybody that it's something that you've done and that's good and you'll help the WordPress project, but does it feel a bit like maybe over the last week there's been a bit of stick, the stick came out just for a brief moment and got wielded around a little bit, and then the stick got put away.

And now we're just in that period of kind of calming down a little bit okay.

[00:26:23] Jess Frick: Yeah. Real quick. I just wanna say, I'm not like trying to Gaslight anybody into saying that this was okay. We're just gonna pretend it didn't happen. I was more agreeing with my friend Maya that, yeah. At some point we gotta.

[00:26:38] Bernhard Gronau: It's a tricky thing, because I think that the issue for many people is that Matt doesn't own WordPress, but he for sure has a very big influence on the project. Yeah. Like you can read in the comments and he's on the one hand. Talking about WordPress. And on the other hand, on the other hand, he has wordpress.com and all his businesses that evolve around WordPress.

So it's sometimes a little bit tricky to dissect his personality, which is talking for the open source stuff and his personality talking about his own business and maybe having an issue with his competition, not doing as much as he thinks he does. So that's maybe another angle. Why some people reacted harsh more harsh than they ha could have reacted because yeah.

In the end it's competition, he's talking about,

[00:27:28] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Some days it's harder to run this show than it is others. I would say this is about the most difficult that it's ever been. Largely because I'm trying to read the comments as they come in and make sense of them and pick the ones that go on it. But I'm so keen not to drop what anybody's saying.

So I'm just gonna quickly raise a couple that came into my headlights here. Adam, again, we've mentioned what Adam does. He mentions training community, WP diversity, and many Bo more contributions. And that goes to Jess's point about codifying and locking down what five for the future actually is.

And if we had a Bible for that, all of these things count, all of these things don't count.

[00:28:07] Jess Frick: But to Adam's point real quick. Yeah. As it stands now, those were not. Included necessarily and that's part of the debate there is that they should be. Yeah. Pods does a lot of work for a lot of people, but plugin management and delivery, even if it's free, doesn't technically count.

Yeah. And so that.

[00:28:26] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. No, that's fine. I met Maya two years ago, says Courtney in the marketing team. So there you go. There's a proof positive of mayor's Maya's contribution camera. And again I'm a developer of a completely free open source plugin that use is used on tens of thousands of sites.

I don't expect my users to be contributing back. Thank you. That's an interesting comment. The idea, he goes on to say the idea. That anyone is obligated to contribute is entitled and ridiculous. Okay. So that's quite an interesting point as well. Isn't it? If the carer is five for the future but N but people don't wish to contribute, is it fair to castigate them or is it more just leave them alone?

They just don't get mentioned, they don't get the notoriety that comes from that, but anybody that does, who knows Matt Madeira, again, I think that big org should call Matt's bluff. Okay. This will be interesting. I think the big org, I think the big org should call Matt bluff and actually spend 500,000, I guess he means dollars to $1 million a year on salaries to commit to core if two or three major hosted that we might see a different product and community.

Okay. So Matt's calling for a full on kill them with kindness approach, just blast upon me at the problem from some of the big companies I guess Adam is saying empathy would be a good goal, always. And on all sides, hopefully that is what we try to do here. I'm not sure we always succeed, but the idea is never to let it get too Ince and feature.

I think the conversation is wider and it relates to the fact that open source. My foot, what did she mean? There don't know, open source. My foot big companies are expected to contribute. Independence are rarely sponsored without return, usually queued us. Okay. So that's another thing, isn't it? It's about the fact that those who can afford to can contribute and we've had that.

We've had that discussion a lot. Okay. So we've spent basically half an hour on one story, which is pretty unusual. I'm sure you've all got your opinions on it. Depending on whichever side of the sea saw, you want to sit on, go and have that argument somewhere else. Because from now on, we're going to turn our attention to other things, however, We've made Bernard go away.

He's obviously head noise. He's back. He's cleared off the word that I might use for this particular episode is the word division, because division seems to be a theme for this last couple of weeks. And and here's a couple of examples. So let's move on. Let's leave that story behind us. Go onto this one.

This is okay, so it's not. In a sense, but it is in a sense this is a new product that I wanted to bring to everybody's attention. It's called break dance. And as if you didn't need it, it's another WordPress page builder. However the kind of interesting piece in the story here is that this is created by I wanna say the theme, the team, but I don't know if it's all of the team or a bit of the team.

My understanding is like four of the nine devs or something like that over oxygen. And so what they've decided to do is they've decided to make another page builder, which is basically a lot easier. I saw a video from Louie, the founder of Soly, which is the company behind oxygen. And he kept comparing it to Elementor.

Over and over again, you would say, it's like Elementor. So I think what they realized potentially is that their oxygen. Page builder whilst excellent was actually really quite a bit more difficult for the sort of audience that Elementor use. Obviously Elementor is doing really well will come to that in a minute.

And they wanted a bit of a slice of that pie. So here it is. If you go to now, goodness only knows how much they had to pay for the URL breakdown.com in the year 2022. But I bet it wasn't $10. They've got the URL breakdown.com and you can go and check it out here. Gotta say hand on heart.

[00:32:32] Bernhard Gronau: It looks.

Pretty

[00:32:35] Nathan Wrigley: good. I quite like their mission here. It's got a lot of modern things in it. It's got a lot of cool things. The workflow seems super simple, but here's where the division comes in. What on earth do you make of this? If you're a paid oxygen user and you discover that for the last three years, the company have been building a product, which they haven't been talking about in the public and diverting resources from the page builder that you would hope was using all the resources on your page builder of choice.

And so there's where the division angle comes in. I look like I'm going into heaven. I'm gonna spend a moment or two adjusting my settings so that it doesn't go all white. And I'm gonna throw out that I'm gonna, can I Chuck that one to Bernard first? Cuz I know that he's like super massive on page builders and probably has something to say

[00:33:20] Bernhard Gronau: mean I didn't test it yet that it just take a quick look.

You can't blame, you can't blame companies for developing new products. That's my point of view. We don't know if they contributed their money from oxygen to breakdowns or if it's just an entirely separated. Project. So it's maybe not the best thing to assume. They took money from the one side and push it over to the other.

Still it's it feels a little bit off to have two page builders in one company and it would need to take a look if it's how much technically overlap you have. If they did a new project, what do he do with the old one? Yeah, personally, I don't like his personal style, but maybe that's that's nothing business related.

[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: he's quite a character. Should we just say in his in his videos he's quite an interesting chat with a very forthright approach to marketing. Let's just say that

[00:34:23] Bernhard Gronau: Yeah. It's kind spoken.

[00:34:27] Nathan Wrigley: like I say, no grenade to you.

[00:34:32] Bernhard Gronau: I wonder where there's always is leading to because yet another.

Page builder. Yeah. We have seen with four plugins that there's always room for a new one, but it's kinda getting very crowded out there and with good work, getting better and better. I wonder what's. The idea or why go there with another product? What do they think they do better than all the others?

I don't know. Did you see anything Nathan, that stood out for you? Something

[00:35:06] Nathan Wrigley: special there were, do you know, there definitely were a couple of things and I honestly, off the top of my head can't remember what they were, but they, it was layouts and flex and all of that kind of stuff. And honestly, I wish I'd written it down.

I did and then my note taking app decided to die on me. But Davinder's basically echoing your point. Davinder hello? Davinder thanks for being in the page builder summit, by the way, like great timing release a page builder during the page builder summit, that was quirky gasping for oxygen, he says is the existing oxygen user on hearing this announcement.

Yeah, that was my point another page. Excuse me. Another page builder. Why not? There is enough par pie for everyone to have a grab. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't know if Jess or may, if you've got an interest in this particular piece, but if you do shout out now,

[00:35:57] Maja Loncar: I think innovation is good.

I think I think this is how actually changes are done. And nobody likes changes and everybody says changes are painful, but I think maybe I think that competition generally is good because it brings out the best from companies products, so that's my take on it.

[00:36:20] Nathan Wrigley: I should point out that it's still in alpha.

It's alpha two at the moment, I believe last week it was alpha one, but I think basically the idea is that it's gonna be dead simple to use. You could give this to your well, your dog, Jess. And it would be able to quickly or whip up a WordPress website, , but it's supposed to be easy to use.

There's less technical difficulty, because like I said, at the top the page builder that they built, the oxygen page builder, I think there was a bit of a learning curve, shall we say? And maybe that put a few people, few of the elemental crowd off, if Jess, anything on that,

[00:36:58] Jess Frick: I would like to give my time to some of these comments.

There are some really good ones in there.

[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Let's do that in that case. Duh, let me go to the top. Okay. Seems oh, were we talking here? You say about, oh, I think we're back. I think we might have been, yeah. Let me go back and let, I meant more yeah. Okay. Let's start here. So Adam, thank you for commenting.

This oxygen and breakdown was interesting and concerning news for existing customers. Okay. That's the point, right? If you've, for me sitting on the outside, I don't use oxygen. I don't use breakdown. It's an interesting story and nothing more, but if I am an oxygen user, I am starting to think. That's curious. Do I start to have concern? Do I think three years down the line, things are gonna be a bit different and, okay. So this adds more context. Shea says breakdown's another nice page builder. Okay. It's got you on the hook. That's probably all that was needed. That's great. Lovely. BBA, BA Scott Kingsley Clark saying hi.

I noticed It was you in Twitter this week, Scott? Let's say them all. And reality check reality, check the end users hardly know Gutenberg mostly, most don't even know WordPress, but they would know what is element or okay. Thank you. There's there was a mention in some comments suggesting that oxygen was built on tech that wasn't future proof.

Not sure how that is though. Do you know? I have a memory that oxygen was built on top of something else, but I think I'm wrong about that. So I don't really wanna say one way or the other what else have we got on the dates? So this is from Suay it says on the date we release ox a breakdowns 1.00.

Good point on the date that we release breakdowns 1.0 all oxygen users will be given a free one year license for breakdowns on the official site. Maybe they, the developers had a hard time updating. Okay. So this is really good point. Oxygen has always been lifetime and we know how that goes. If a product lasts for several years you are either, you've got a log, a rhythmic curve of users.

That's just endlessly going up so that you can support it. Or you go to subscription. That just seems to be the way everything goes. And they are still on lifetime deal pricing. And Louis did make that point in the video. He said, looking back, that was the most ridiculous decision, why did we do that?

So they're gonna give. No lifetime deal ever. He said, it'll just be a subscription. And if you've got an oxygen license, you're gonna get a year for free. Okay. So that, assuages quite a lot of the comments there. Doesn't it? That's quite interesting. BA I think that's probably all that I want to say about that one.

Thanks, Jess. Sorry, Jess. Your face is totally hidden by the comment there. . You're okay with that. OK. But

[00:40:01] Jess Frick: that usually happens on

[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: here, I think. Oh, OK. No, but look, I think we can move you around. Hold on. Look. Let's it's OK. we'll no. I'm going there. I did it wrong. I did it right. Look, there we go.

No, it's me. I'll just

[00:40:14] Bernhard Gronau: want, say we are missing all this that

[00:40:18] Nathan Wrigley: we're not missing. Paul are we let's be this. We're not . We are missing Paul. We want Paul's gonna come on the show at some point in the future, whether he likes it or not. Okay. Let's change direction. This is not new news because I took a week off cuz of the page builder summit, which was last week.

Thank you. By the way, if you were in attendance at the page builder summit, I hope you enjoyed it. We had lots of nice commentary in our Facebook sorry, in our feedback form. So that's always nice to have Elementor last week laid off. Oh, actually the week before they laid off quite a lot of staff, this is an interesting development because really in the WordPress space element or that the chart really has been log arrhythmic, it's been going up and up.

Last time I looked at statistics, which seemed like about a year and a half ago or two years ago. I think they had 130 employees when this piece came out, they had 400 employees. So that is really staggering rate. Taking on employees, but they have decided that they're going to lay some people off 50 to 60.

And my first reaction was, oh boy that's not good. That's trouble. And I read the piece and it seems like they're taking a cautious approach to the well, the financial impending recession let's call it that. And they're stripping away the bits and pieces of their business, which at the moment they feel are not gonna assist them.

So a lot of that has gone through the marketing. There's been a lot of people in the marketing department who've been let go. And I think most of them were there, but the R and D team. So the guys who are the guys and the girls, I should say, who are developing the plug in itself they're still there.

So whether or not that gives you comfort or not, I don't know. But it's a big change. And I wonder if this is a trend that we're gonna see more. So I don't work for a big company. It, I don't know what people are talking about in boardrooms, but I would imagine that in tech, if you look at the stock prices of tech, they're all going in one direction and it's not north.

I wonder if, for example, the likes of GoDaddy and pressable and all the other companies, gravity forms and all that. I wonder if they are starting to look at their accounts and say let's have a little bit of a rethink. And the biggest, probably the biggest thing is gonna be payroll.

So what did you make of this when you saw it? Anybody chip in? Ooh

[00:42:53] Jess Frick: how I wish we were hiring for marketing because a lot of really good marketing people lost their jobs. And that's never something you

[00:43:04] Nathan Wrigley: wanna see don't you think they did a really great job. Like they had some of the most slick TV, like marketing. That was the one thing that always got me about their marketing was how it looked like a you could fully put their stuff on the television, their 15, second YouTube bad.

You could put it in the super Bowl's a bit of an exaggeration, but you could put it in the main mainstream telling and you wouldn't think that's weird. It just looked really professional. So you're right. They had a lot of really good talent.

[00:43:32] Jess Frick: But our good friend, Davinder made a great point.

They absorbed employees from Strat. So they have good marketing people too, but yeah, there's tons of praise for the people who helped make Elementor who they are today, as far as marketing's concerned.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And on that bombshell from Jess, look at this, it's very rarely that I get to trumpet some sort of scoop type thing, but yeah, we got him on the, we got him on the podcast.

We got Miriam Schwab. From Strat and we had Amite gap from Elementor and this, we literally recorded it. And then 24 hours later, the news story about the layoffs came on. So I thought, oh, it's one of those examples where I put the episode out and then instantly thought, oh, it was the wrong story.

Wasn't it? Nevermind. But that's true. So I believe Strat had, if memory serves, I think there are about 17, 18, something like that. Employees who went across, and this is another really curious story for me, because. Element or already have a page builder cloud. So you can already get your website, your entire website built off the element or account you log in, you can fire up your element or cloud hosting, and you're off to the races.

And now they've acquired Strat, which is a headless static WordPress hosting company. And I did think that was really curious. So if you like me are curious about it, you can go and check this episode out and you'll see why they did it. And the answer is for the moment they're keeping the two things completely separate.

The Strat team are just gonna keep firing as the Strat team. And there's not gonna be any sort of implementation of elemental right now. That was the giveaway. But curious story acquisitions have been the thing for the longest time. I would imagine we're not gonna be doing too many of these stories in the days, weeks and months come, I could be wrong.

Gonna take some water

[00:45:37] Maja Loncar: for me, it's very interesting here. The fact that the whole approach to recession has all somebody had to announce. And I was, trying to investigate how this recession and everything will function. So I found a quote, which says it says I've heard about recession and I've decided not to participate.

[00:46:03] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, I wish it was so easy.

[00:46:07] Maja Loncar: So how I see this and what I think elementary actually trying to do is to optimize the scalable tools, right? So I think this is the time now when you don't have already, but then you really try to find and arm yourself with the scalable tools that help you, your business grow with the same amount of people.

And understanding like the critical economical factors and market moves, where you see your opportunity. So like this scalable tools and plus some market knowledge, I think would help any leader of a company to understand how this crisis could be driven. And I wasn't surprised that Elementor and static merged.

I think that's a really an interesting merge and additional value to WordPress.

[00:46:57] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Anybody else on that? Or should we crack on. okay. Thinking. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Let's crack on. There's certainly no shortage of stuff that we've got on the rundown this week. Okay. Let's go back to just like normal WordPress news for a bit.

Shall we? That sounds good. Okay, so this is nice. This is the sort of thing that I really like. This is Gutenberg Sarah Gooding writing about Gutenberg on the Tavern Gutenberg 13.5 adds featured image, placeholder support for cover block cleaner pasting into other apps. Okay. So there's this kind of like minor thing whereby they've fiddle with the UI for featured images so that if you've got, oh, I don't know.

You just want to have a cover block and you want the featured image to go there. They will, now they will now visually show that in a slightly different way and the menus that you've got to select and so on have been Jed around, but buried in the article right at the bottom is the bit that I'm interested in at.

I don't know if any has anybody ever tried copying and ING text out of a WordPress blog post anybody? No. Clearly not because it's an absolute catastrophe. Basically you end up with this mess. Look, could you see that you get all of the comments, you get all of this craft. So even if you just want to like copy and paste two paragraphs, you have to do them one at a time.

It's quicker to do them individually. So click it, click on the mouse. Click copy. Go somewhere else paste, go back. Select the second paragraph click, copy paste. And you do this backwards and forwards because deleting all of that nonsense takes more times than that. Anyway, it's. It's going finally, you'll be able to copy your paper.

Now, this may not seem like a thing which is important. Oh yes, it is. It is for me. I do this sort of stuff all the time. I'm copying and pasting content from one part of my site to another, or taking it from a post that I've already written and putting it into an email autoresponder, something like that.

And this is gonna save me. In the whole year, probably 12 or 13 minutes, but it doesn't matter. That's 12 or 13 minutes that I could use on something else. So I think that's really cool. Nice little feature, probably something which only me cares about, but. I think

[00:49:24] Bernhard Gronau: that's no, there are agreements in the jet.

[00:49:27] Nathan Wrigley: this is an awesome development. Yeah. Adam's with me, Adam, have you felt that pain you felt the pain of copying and pasting. That's exactly what I've been. That's exactly what I'm doing now. And I've been moaning for hours. Okay. So there's three of us. There's three. You're

[00:49:45] Bernhard Gronau: not alone. I'm not alone.

[00:49:47] Nathan Wrigley: It's I literally don't understand it though. I can't understand quite how that UI shipped, because it really does look on the front end. Doesn't it just looks like a Google doc. It looks like paragraph. And we know why, because there's all of that stuff so that the paragraph can be identified by the block editor and so on and so forth.

But for the life of me, it never made any sense for that to be copy and pastable and it's gone. So thanks. There you go. Many times says Adam, and it's a great feature. Okay, good. We're in agreement. It's a hundred percent. This episode is no longer called division. It's now called agreement. yeah, we turned it around.

We turned it around. okay. Let's see if we can keep going. Next one. Okay, important really important stuff. There's a couple of GDPR things this week, which you've got to know about really important stuff. wordpress.org. This is Sarah Gooding again on the Tavern wordpress.org, strongly urges theme authors to switch to locally hosted web fonts.

Why does this matter? It matters because, and I quote in light of a recent German court case, which find a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google hosted web fonts. WordPress dot org's theme team is updating its recommendations for hosting web fonts. Most theme authors have been in queuing Google fronts from the Google CDN, which was such a good way of doing it.

When Google fronts came out, it was quick and speedy and reliable and always on. Brilliant. But now if you do that and you are serving European users, you are potentially going to be facing a big, fine and buried somewhere in this article. I believe it was in this article was some person I can't remember where, who had received a letter from a disgruntled user saying, if you don't sort this out, we're gonna, we're gonna take you to.

And the numbers are eye watering, the kind of fines that you can face. So basically go and check with your theme author. I would imagine most theme authors by now are taking this into hand. The themes that I've been using more recently is a little checkbox. You go tick and all the theme, all the Google fonts get downloaded and they're distributed locally.

So big news. And I'm guessing this is gonna be one that Jess might wanna talk about just because of the whole GDP. It feels like over in over where you are on that side of the pond, Jess, all of this seems like it's crazy European talk, and maybe it's something that you wouldn't even think about. But do you need to think about this stuff now from your side of the

[00:52:32] Jess Frick: pond?

Oh, absolutely. We had to just program a special cookie banner so that we can handle what GDPR needs versus what's in the United States. , I remember when Canada passed the email regulations and we had to all follow those too. But here's the thing I believe it's just a matter of time before California implements this and then the rest of the us has to do it too.

Okay. So I I would not be surprised that this becomes a local issue, speaking personally as a member of team lado which is a Google font, by the way, the best one I will have, ,

I'm gonna, I like that one. I do like it. Yeah. I'm gonna have to personally do some work to bring myself into compliance. Don't Sue me.

[00:53:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah no, but you've gotta, you've gotta imagine. You've gotta imagine. And may maybe less so on this side of the pond, cuz litigation. Forgive me if I've really misunderstood this, but it does feel like in the us in particular litigation is far more of a trigger, which is pulled more often in this part of the world, certainly in the UK.

I genuinely, I don't know anybody who's suing anybody else never have. I would imagine it's quite likely I'll get to the end of my life and it never will have happened. But if it's as easy as there's a law which needs to be implemented and somebody decides to go after you, you haven't really got a leg to stand on.

Look, the WP Builds this week in WordPress podcast has told you, so now, Bernard, you were wanting to speak. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's tricky.

[00:54:19] Bernhard Gronau: We are now slowly getting there that people realize why Google stuff is free because they do something with your data and. It's a twofold thing, because if I don't know what's happened in the background, then this data is misused and we, haven't not only the Google phone stuff, it's Google analytics.

It's I don't know financial data because there was another big issue now not a team related, but using the Europeans with data which has been forwarded by the government in the us. So it's stuff that's tricky because. In a singular case. I don't care. They can do much with my data, but if they get all of that and combine it and whatever, and then on the other hand, we want to have free stuff.

So it's gonna be interesting how the future looks like if they can't monetize our data anymore. Does Google shop on services? What happens? I

[00:55:22] Nathan Wrigley: don't know. You gotta say props to Google though. They put this service out long before anybody thought it would be a thing, and they've been given away fonts for forever in a day for absolutely nothing.

And then this stuff comes along and maybe you've been able, you I've probably have been able to download them forever anyway, but there is a total work around. It's not like any of this is going away. It's just, you've gotta download it. And like Davinder. He mentions Astra, but for Astra replace any modern WordPress theme, I would've thought tick a box basically to switch to locally hosted.

And you're good to go. So really this is a, this is

[00:56:01] Bernhard Gronau: one. Yeah but is the future? Yeah. Do we then get supported Google funds or the school will stop the service because they can't monetize

[00:56:09] Nathan Wrigley: it anymore. Ah, interesting. I dunno. I'm gonna I'm what I'll do is I will speak to Google directly to Google.

I dunno who that is, but I'll just go straight to the Sunar. That'll do, I'll go to Sundar and say what's going on somehow. See if I get a response. But I, anyway, there's a trip wire. There's a trip wire you've now gotta know about, and this is it. And it's hosting Google fonts. However, Totally related to this now.

Good grief. I here we

go. That's an, we had Google fonts already. Google fonts are not illegal, but the implementation of them in the EU is breaking GDPR. But. What? Okay. Google analytics is now declared illegal in the EU, according to this website that I've never heard of before called Tutter notar. Okay. It was linked to, from a prominent website.

So I'm going to assume that what I'm about to say is true. Apparently. Apparently there's been a law case, this guy, max Shrems, who appears to quite like going around finding things about big tech that ought to be changed. And then just making it happen. He did the same for, I believe it was Facebook or some other giant corporation a little while ago successfully made them change their ways.

And now he's done it with Google okay. So the last one, the Google fonts thing, easy solution, right? Everybody finds a theme, downloads the fonts locally job on not a problem. This is much bigger because. I feel like everybody uses Google fonts and I know there's commercial alternatives, and I know that you can download all sorts of different ways of doing this, but it does feel like it's the default.

If you don't have any better way of doing it, just go for Google. Just install, Google fonts, stick the analytics. Sorry, not fonts, stick analytics in copy and paste. Tiny snippet code. You're off to the races. That's now changed. What does this mean? This is really big. So if you're using Google analytics, you have to stop.

Do you have to just curtail it? Do you have to, I don't know. What do you do? How does it work?

[00:58:20] Jess Frick: I just did a quick search. And of course someone has already registered is Google analytics, illegal.com.

[00:58:30] Nathan Wrigley: darn it. That was what I was gonna do. As soon as the stole was over damnit,

[00:58:32] Jess Frick: I don't think it's illegal everywhere.

I feel like I would've heard about that.

[00:58:36] Bernhard Gronau: No, it's that the problem is like with the Google font is the tracking behind it. And since the safe Haven stuff between us and Europe is not no longer in effect anymore Google could use the data acquired in Europe and could be compelled by the U us government to share those, that data.

And that's the problem. and I'm quite sure they will find a workaround because you have already, because in companies I think Microsoft does it, they store European store it on European service. So they those service don't fall under the jurisdiction for the us government. So they can't acquire the data.

And that's the key problem, the area. And I'm sure Google will find a workaround or whatever solution cause they want to have people still using their stuff and sell their services. Can

[00:59:34] Nathan Wrigley: you imagine. How much money Google make off the back of their analytics product, not directly cuz it's free, but indirectly, can you imagine the data which is being so up about all these websites, all over the web and again, Bernard to your point, if you're not paying for it, then you are the tool and more or less, if you're using the Chrome browser or the not chum Chrome, you are giving them a ton of stuff.

And if you are looking at more or less any website on the planet, you're probably giving them a ton of stuff. So it's quite interesting. Maya, anything about this?

[01:00:12] Maja Loncar: What to say? Yeah,

[01:00:14] Nathan Wrigley: I can say no

[01:00:16] Maja Loncar: yeah, nothing on my just a brief observation again, regarding, since I preserve WordPress from a business angle mostly.

So I just think I'm just actually trying to understand how much will that affect e-commerce and. What are the now new paths to success and how do you track your customer? And where's the data ,

[01:00:44] Nathan Wrigley: Elliot has mentioned fathom. That's a name that's come up that I've never, I've heard of it.

It's come up as a very favorable product fathom analytics. He says he's recently used as a replacement for his website's really liking it. Privacy focused and fairly affordable. When you say privacy focused, does that mean that it is all on your WordPress website? Does it bring other headaches?

Let's say you've now got the GDPR of taking care of all of that data on your own servers, which I suppose is a, is another thing, but he makes the point it isn't free. Okay. So maybe the free ride on analytics is gonna be going away. Anyway, the point being we've told you about it. Look because. It might really trip you up.

And I guess there's gonna be some fun lawyers. just going ambulance chasing around this kind of stuff just because why not? Okay. Right enough about Google. Let's do some nice news about generate blocks. Woo love generate blocks. 1.5. If you haven't come across generate blocks. Go and have a look it's so such a great little product, five or six.

I think it is now little blocks, which allow you to build more or less any layout. It's really fabulous. And one of the big pieces which was missing was the ability to add in dynamic data world. no more they've they've got their new query loop block, which enables you basically to create fairly complicated, but not tremendously complicated queries.

So for example, you could show buttons now with the. Linking back to the post. You could show a featured image and you could have those showing the featured image from all the posts and linking back to the post. And there's loads of different parameters. You can offset them and so on, but also they've added in because they had to a image block and that image block enables you to style with all of the different features of generate blocks.

And yeah, basically hap tip to Tom Osborne, fabulous release. I believe it was in beta testing for a while. I've put it on a couple of sites and I've gotta say so far. Works perfectly. So I'm very pleased with this. Anybody else? Probably not. Jess was nodding, but I dunno if she's a generate blocks user, but it's dead.

Good. I think they edit

[01:02:59] Bernhard Gronau: it to the free stuff, right?

[01:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, let me look down. I was only looking at read something

[01:03:07] Bernhard Gronau: because that's I think I read it somewhere, but I can't find it. So that they moved more stuff to the free version, which is always great.

[01:03:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is good. This is quite a nice feature as well.

It's called the me panel. it's not called that it's called panel memory. And because generate blocks is using the block editor, it looks like the block editor, but there was that whole problem that if you clicked away, everything would collapse and you wouldn't know where you were now. It remembers where you last were.

So if you go back to a certain block on the page, it'll open up at the setting that you were last using. So if you are fidling with the background color, and you just needed to go off and do something else with another block quickly, when you come back to that particular block, it'll retain where you were.

So it's got state, which is really quite nice. And yeah, just go check it out. A different story. What do we think tool set very similar kind of product in the sense that they've moved into making blocks, let's see what you all make of this tool. Set, put a piece out week or so ago, 14th of June, basically saying that their project, which I've been aware of since I moved into WordPress, it's one of those really long lasting projects it's had to move with the times when the block editor came out, they needed to adapt the whole UI.

They say and quote, in the past months, the tool set project and its team saw a number of important changes that we want to share with you. The biggest decision, which was extremely hard to make is to pause the development of new features for now. However, we are well aware that thousands of sites rely on tool set and there is no way we will let them down.

This is why we'll definitely keep working on Bo fixes compatibility and stability improvements. Basically they appear to. Uncertain about the way Guttenberg is gonna develop. And so rather than inject a ton of resources into stuff that they don't know will take off, they're slamming the brakes on and saying, Nope, we're gonna do the bug fixes.

We're gonna do the updates, the compatibility, but that's it. If you want features, wait, now you don't see this. Do you, does anybody, can you remember any other company saying we're just gonna pause for six months a year, no more feature requests while things settle down. And my concern is that whilst that comes from entirely the right place, if you were a user of tool set, would you now be starting, would cogs in your head be going?

I need an alternative. What do you think? Tricky.

That's that's your commentary? Tricky. We'll go with that. Yeah, I

[01:05:57] Bernhard Gronau: dunno. It's it's like a two full two sided story. If you tell your users say people, we are there developing this product anymore, that sends kind out the message. Move on the other hand, to being honest and saying, okay, let's be honest.

We don't have new features coming, but we are keeping to project alive. It's it's it's it's honest, but it leaves. If I were a user tool set, I would say, what's next is the next step then just only, I don't know, keeping up and making, keeping it running and not going down and down because to, we attract new users and.

[01:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: What's the future for the project. Do you know what? This is the first episode where all of us have had to have caveats because I've had a caveat because of the thing at the beginning and so's Jess and so's Maya, but now Bernard needs a caveat because he's one of the developers for pods.

It's whoa, what are you making of this? Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because pods like fully, they are like, really they're heads against you. Aren't they're a complete commercial rival of yours. So I imagine you took more interest in this story than, than most.

For

[01:07:23] Bernhard Gronau: me. It's funny because we talked before the show. It's one takeaways for people who ask, always ask yet, but it's only open source and where does it go? And now I can say, yeah, a business can stop too. So it's helping and kind set because it's bad for the users because if we have used it 10 years, 12 years, we don't know how long, I don't know how long his tools have been

[01:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: around.

Oh yeah. Like years and years, like a decade or more, at least I would've thought. Yeah. Yeah. Then your

[01:07:54] Bernhard Gronau: business is built around it maybe and kind, now it looks like they might not have new ideas and it's tricky because the whole Berg business is going interactions. Nobody knows what really will be at the end of the road.

I'm still not a big fan of it, but that's another topic.

[01:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: Pete Peter ING caveat. Peter Ingersol is literally reiterating your comment. He says it is tricky. Because some plugins do this without making a point of it. That's a good point making the statement raises questions that might otherwise only be quietly raised.

Yeah, I have to say I've had a M ser on the podcast. I think three times thoroughly. Nice guy, very clever. And I'm going to put my flag in the sand and I think incredibly honorable. I genuinely think that he came across as a, just a thoroughly decent person. And if this is the right decision for their business, look what we are.

We're just not prepared to waste the money better to get out ahead of it, than have six months from now, everybody saying you haven't done anything in months what the heck are you doing? Now, we're just biding our time. We're being cautious tool set. Peter goes on to say has been a bit inconsistent with how they've communicated.

Really good, not so good. That makes it harder to feel so confident. So there you go. Thank you, Peter. Just for a bit of fun, right? Bit of silliness you three. Ready? Okay. We actually, it's not you three because Jess, we know I'm gonna ask you. You've got no time to think about it. You've gotta say it immediately.

Jess. We know it. LA favorite font, quick Bernard favorite font.

[01:09:44] Bernhard Gronau: That's not an answer. That's not a font I have is not a font. My, my designer, she's awesome. And she picks the fonts. It's not my, my ah, you,

[01:09:57] Jess Frick: yeah he's making up the. But his favorite font is actually

[01:10:04] Nathan Wrigley: Papyrus 12. Yeah.

Either that or comic sounds. Yeah. May have you got a favorite font very quickly? Oh, look, Cameron's done it. He said comic sounds right away. it's had to be, it had to be may have you got a favorite font even if you don't know, just say I don't violin. Oh,

[01:10:25] Maja Loncar: I just

[01:10:25] Nathan Wrigley: love this font. Yeah. I'm gonna say something which is gonna get me in trouble with picture cuz she, I know she doesn't like it.

My favorite is Montserrat. I love Montserrat. I think it's the best peach is gonna crucify me. comic. Sand is not so great. Is it? But the but the one that really gets me when I look at it, I always go, Ooh, Cooper black. Do you know that one? It's all all wide and yeah. Yeah. Cooper. Anyway, there you go.

If anybody wants to throw into the comments, their favorite font, go do it now. Same. What's going with Montserrat. I don't know. I love Montserrat. It's the best. It's better than Lato.

[01:11:10] Jess Frick: No, that's where you ask me. but you lost me, but

[01:11:14] Nathan Wrigley: they're very similar. They are. Do you know what I think is really similar to Lato have you come across railway?

I have

[01:11:21] Jess Frick: quite, I have, but I'm one of those people that like downloads free fonts when I find them elsewhere on the internet,

[01:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: Don't bother with that. What you need to do is link to Google's CDN. We've got this fabulous at my end, and then especially make sure that your sites are available in the European union.

That's the you that's the gospel there. Okay. Completely. Oh, look Shacha is saying, ah in all serious Cameron saying XO never heard of exo, never heard of exo. And it funny how we take to those kind of things and something about it just feels like comfortable. It's a bit like decorating your house.

Your house is different to everybody. Else's, it's just that arrangement of things that you like. And reservations about Montserrat. She said reservations says feature have reservations about Montserrat because the letter forms are super wide. That's what we like though. Feature. Everybody wants a super wide font.

Don't they. I have no idea. I didn't know. They were super wide. Okay. Silliness coming up. We're gonna do a bit more that

[01:12:22] Bernhard Gronau: The important comment gets lost. Scott Kings pot lead developer. Oh, said it's that the tool set built one of the coolest block integrations.

[01:12:34] Nathan Wrigley: I did miss that.

I'm sorry. I'm too fascinated. My fonts this morning tool set. One of the . Yeah. Do you know what? I honestly thought Scott, like 8, 16, 18 months ago. I thought they were gonna skyrocket cuz I thought their. Their sort of blocks were way ahead of their time. Weren't they? You could do all the kind of views stuff inside of the block.

But anyway, they've decided to pause. So we're going back in time. Okay. Bit of silliness. This doesn't matter at all, but it's quite fun. New York times crossword this week. What word do you think came up in the New York times? Crossword. It was the word monster. No, it wasn't.

It was the word press. And apparently that means word press is now finally legit up until this moment. It wasn't important. Now it's important enough that, if it's going in the New York times crossword, which apparently I'm told, has got like the most viewers of any crossword on the earth, if it makes it into there, that's pretty cool.

[01:13:36] Jess Frick: And which, which means my dad might finally understand what I do for a living.

[01:13:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But I'll tell you what, eight down, he's got a big blank. On his crossword. He might understand me. It's what is that? What is it? The clue was what was the clue? It was something like, oh, I dunno. Something like major blogging platform.

Okay. Here we go. The clue was popular. Blogging platform. S Q U a R E S P a R L. That doesn't fit .

[01:14:11] Bernhard Gronau: Now Nathan has his goal set where the bills that's

[01:14:16] Nathan Wrigley: right? No, I was gonna

[01:14:17] Jess Frick: say you can start a spinoff podcast. Squarespace

[01:14:21] Nathan Wrigley: builds. No, he couldn't. No, that's not gonna happen. Okay. All right.

Okay. On a similar note being frivolous, right? What word, if you were given the New York times crossword to make, and they said you put a word in the New York times crossword. What word would you put in? I think I would probably go for the word. I don't know, squidgy, I quite like the word squidgy, so that would be my word Bernard.

You know what squidgy, even

[01:14:56] Bernhard Gronau: just other words,

[01:14:57] Nathan Wrigley: It's like a sponges squidgy. It goes like this. You can give it a squeeze. So go on favorite word that you'd put in a podcast sorry, not in a podcast in a in a New York times crossword, I think to,

[01:15:10] Bernhard Gronau: to, to further how do I say it? Feed your fears of my my.

My hobbies is or stuff like that. I would just use elephant

[01:15:24] Nathan Wrigley: elephant is a good word. But what would the clue be famous character used in the PHP programming language, for example, or? Yeah. Great big thing with toss. That would be Mya, anything,

[01:15:39] Maja Loncar: 54 down. I would have it like, all we need is, and then three thoughts and then that would be the solution 4 54 down.

[01:15:54] Nathan Wrigley: What it, what would it be? What's

[01:15:56] Maja Loncar: the word? All we need is all we need is love.

[01:16:00] Bernhard Gronau: Oh.

[01:16:07] Nathan Wrigley: And then the apple company, not the apple company that make technology, the other apple company come and Sue you for quoting the lyrics. Jess's favorite word to go in the New York times cross.

[01:16:19] Jess Frick: It would have to be 53 across and it would say best host ever. And the answer's obviously pressable ,

[01:16:29] Bernhard Gronau: can I do that?

You

[01:16:33] Nathan Wrigley: get, can I do that? You can do that. You can

[01:16:36] Jess Frick: to Adam and I need to meet at the flag pole now. Like

[01:16:42] Nathan Wrigley: no, that's great. Yeah. Okay. I will tell you

[01:16:44] Jess Frick: though, funny enough monitoring our brand name is so interesting. The things that come up with pressable because principals actually also apparently there's an urban dictionary thing for it. So you you get to see some interesting stuff on Twitter.

[01:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: Because it's it is a kind of regular word. Oh, okay. Let's not develop that. I'm gonna, yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. Keep it clean. We'll keep it clean. family show. It's family. Oh

[01:17:15] Jess Frick: man. Courtney's coming after me

[01:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: now, too. look. She's you're dead. I know I said

[01:17:21] Jess Frick: go. Daddy's great.

[01:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: Early there's a really, there's a fabulous book.

Have you all, have you heard of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, that, that book? He the guy behind that book did you is called Douglas Adams and he wrote a really good book called the meaning of lift L I double F cause it turns out li is a place in the UK. And what he decided to do is he wrote a whole book and it's like a dictionary and he just went round the British Atlas and he just took place names.

And then he gave them what he thought they should actually mean if they were real words. And it's really funny, like it has no business being funny, but it is cuz it's Douglas Adams okay. Moving on. We are 10 minutes away. Can I just say stop, just stop what you are doing right now, right? and just go.

I have no words to express how fun this is. Go. Google flop O Tron 3.0, okay. Let me just put that in the little chat thing here. Hold on. Let me see. There we go. Flotron 3.0, and you're gonna find it at this URL. It's silent.org dot.

I don't even know what to say. This guy has more time on his hands than anybody that's ever lived. And he's obviously a nerd. He's got something like okay. You remember if you're old, like me, you remember putting the old floppy discs into the disc drive and it would

go as it read it, it would make noises just like that. And he decided, wouldn't it be good if I got hundreds of these and made them play music now I'm not gonna play this because I'll get a takedown notice, which I don't really want to deal with. Because Google have lots of good lawyers and I don't, but just go and have a look at it, come back to us and just go.

Yep. Okay, I get it now. And it plays that D

and he's got flatbed scanners doing the base notes. He's built a ton of custom hardware to handle the queries. It uses 1.3 kilo Watts of power. And because it's draining so much power, he's got two emergency stop buttons on it in case it catches fire guys, a lunatic, but has to be commended for his lunacy.

Absolutely. Love it. Go and check it out. The the Flotron 3.0, okay. We're next. Let's go here, mayor. What's this all about. You've got an event here.

[01:20:04] Maja Loncar: oh, thank you for promoting this. One of the, when you enter work trust, and you are actually able to see how your, what your impact could be, and since I'm not a very code oriented person, I'm trying to give my contribution in a different way.

So I patched up and just before and during the VCU I met Anne and then Anne and I, we spoke about creating this, meet up with a, with za za was the third panelist where he, and he's visual totally visually impaired. So what we did, we tested couple of websites with him. Actually he chose couple of websites to, to show how even the great design and knowing everything about accessibility still, there are things that are being improved and overseen when it comes to testing.

So of any page for the accessibility. So we came up with a couple of, with a checklist actually of things, which in addition to what already scanners are doing, what should be checked as well. So if. If you'd like to meet za, he's a first visually impaired person who is doing the motivational talks and he's more than happy to help you out with with the accessibility of your website.

And he is there to promote our efforts. And then Andrea he's my colleague, he's the guy who actually created a game for that can be played by both visually impair and normal people. Each one of these people in, but in addition to him being a great website website page builder himself.

So I just wanted to, showcase this not being a good specifically, but actually the type of learnings, what we share. And I'm sure that I access, it's never enough of accessibility points,

[01:21:58] Nathan Wrigley: that is a super cool. Panel that's really interest like genuinely. Cool. So this is called accessible website, architecture and UX, and you can find [email protected]

I'd be really interested to hear particularly Laars comments about that, that just that would open such a, my, my view onto a world that I genuinely don't have too much insight into. When are we looking 20th? Sorry, say again,

[01:22:35] Maja Loncar: it took place so you can watch the recording

[01:22:37] Nathan Wrigley: last. I see. I'm sorry.

I thought we were into the future. So this is about going and back and looking at the event that's already been included. Okay. Thank you so much. Yeah,

[01:22:45] Maja Loncar: but I just thought that accessibility needed a big shout and people in the accessibility team as well. Thank you very much for everything you're doing.

I'm also facing some accessibility issues myself as any other person. So this is, was just like to show a little bit what we're

[01:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: doing. Yeah, thank you. We had a talk by HEZ in the page builder summit, and it was not only was it very well attended, but it was really appreciated cuz I feel it's still one of those topics where a lot of us aren't quite as up to speed as perhaps we need to be and ought to be.

Okay. That's brilliant. And yeah. Sorry. I mistepped, I thought that was coming up. Okay. And all right.

Can

[01:23:27] Jess Frick: I just do a quick hot take on that? Yeah, please. So I attended a go daddy event some months ago and I get the emails now and I swear to God you guys have a good event, like every three days. What are you doing over there?

[01:23:40] Maja Loncar: Yeah. It's did you see that? I mean thank you for for letting me know. I wasn't sure if you are on our list or not, but yeah. Oh, I. Yeah, we try to come up with really good content that would help community, not only workforce community, but business community in general, also. So good. Kudos to all our teams.

Thank you very much, Jessica. I really appreciate your

[01:24:00] Jess Frick: work. Yeah. You guys are doing a great job over there with this stuff. Yeah,

[01:24:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That is nice. And that one in particular is of great interest and I think really important picture says, oh my God, the F Flotron is amazing. I know but try putting that in your, try, putting that in your rock sack and taking it anywhere.

It's just Nope. Nope. It's he's got a dedicated space somewhere. He's renting a massive bit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Adam pros helping pro. Bob Don sneaking into the comments at the end, just like that. He, he said, alright. He says late teaser, Nathan and I will be starting a new podcast soon.

It's true. But I'm not telling you anybody, what it's about what you can't do that? No, the details. No. There's no, there's nothing secret. It's we just haven't really figured it out.

and when we release, when we tell you what it's called. You will then understand because it, yeah. It's

he had a hint with it. Just like one little hint. No, not a leave in a tiny little hints. Tiny Bob can tell you in the comments if he, but dog Bob don't say Courtney sh he's been spilling the beans okay. Last little piece. Is this one from me? Love.

Oh my God. WP. I am

[01:25:33] Bernhard Gronau: perfect. who's

[01:25:37] Nathan Wrigley: Cameron. Yeah. Cameron gets a pass though. Cuz every week he's here without a WP old FARs. that's great. That's okay. That's now what it's called. It wasn't gonna be called that, but that is now what it's called. Brilliant. No. Here we go last piece for this week, which has been particularly hilarious.

I think we've had a good time this week. Might have a small addition. Oh, okay. Let's do this one quickly. Then we got three minutes before to put your piece in as well. That's great. This is so important, so needed. We're all gonna make use of this. This is a rollback feature, which is in need of testing.

Courtney contacted me. She's in the comment. She'd literally like 25 minutes before the show started said, can you include this? So I haven't really had time to read it, but the takeaway is in the past, if a plugin has failed, then it's just a failure. Wouldn't it be nice. If there was a way that you could, let's say, click a button in core WordPress core and roll back to the previous version.

I dunno how it's gonna be implemented. I've been very lucky in that most of the WordPress sites that I've got, I update things and nothing goes wrong, we've heard these stories. Very nice option. So you have a button to just roll back to the previous, presumably. Stable version, but the feature needs testing call for testing and the URL.

It's not easy. And I won't, if I put it on the screen, it's gonna be, yeah, thank no, Nope. Just Google rollback, feature testing, call to action. It was Andy Frain. Frain something like that. 15 hours ago. So on the 26th. So yeah, Courtney, I'm sorry, I couldn't do that justice, but I just didn't really.

Have time to read it. Okay. Yeah. And then what's this, do you want me to mention this for you quickly then? Yeah. I'll just put it on the screen or do you tell me all about it? It's just

[01:27:29] Bernhard Gronau: a download link because somebody make an announcement post for it. But there is a better out for pods. 2.9 repeatable feeds, maybe take a look or not.

It's hot. It's fresh. It's baggy, maybe but that's what are for

[01:27:49] Nathan Wrigley: it's hot, fresh, and it's full of bugs. Go and check out. Okay, so that's pods 2.9. Yeah. I will put, can I link? I think I can, I'm gonna link to, you could be

[01:28:01] Bernhard Gronau: Able to link to Kitab to their release page. And

[01:28:05] Nathan Wrigley: then yeah, there we go.

I'll put that on the screen. github.com/pods framework slash lots and lots of other things. 2.9 hip I'll put the, I'll put the link in the show notes, that's it? Yeah, I think, and we managed to sneak it without Bob mentioning anything. I'm working on an announcement post. Okay. So there we go.

That's Scott Kingsley. Clark. Okay. Scott, when you get the announcement post, will you send it to me please? And I'll make sure it goes into next week. Perfect coverage. The goal is awareness and feedback. I should put that on the screen. Thank you, Courtney. That was the intent. It do this each week.

Courtney, just send me stuff just before we go. I was gonna say, yeah,

[01:28:47] Jess Frick: another hot take. Can we just have a moment to honor Courtney? I'm telling you she shares all the important news. Everybody needs to know through social media and post status. Yep. She is

[01:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: amazing. That page is basically what I need every week to do this show.

If Courtney. Stopped working I'm gonna give up. It's not happening. Thank you so much, Courtney. And thank you, Scott. That's it we've run out of time. We're totally out of time. Anything you wanna say quickly? Say it now. Just interrupt each other. Go quickly. Speak anybody you wanna say anything?

Goodbye. goodbye. All right. Okay, go on.

[01:29:31] Jess Frick: I was just gonna say I loved having this conversation with y'all.

[01:29:34] Bernhard Gronau: Yes.

[01:29:34] Nathan Wrigley: What's great. I know. I know. And we had a, I think we had quite a fun episode. There was a bit of blend of fun and silliness. Okay. So we've reached that point where we've gotta do the the humiliating wave.

Everybody get both hands and just shake. Give us the wave in my head. There we go. Am I the wrong hand? Try just out of interest, right? Everybody move. Move the hand on this side of your face. You now you see , it's not, that

is it. You try to move on and the wrong one goes, okay, we've done it. Thank you so much. Appreciate all your comments. Really appreciate it. We'll be back next week. With a different panel of guests, hopefully equal in caliber to this lovely bunch. We'll see you soon.