This Week in WordPress #215

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 215 entitled AI taking over. It was recorded on Monday the 4th of July, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined as always by some special WordPress guests. We have Remkus de Vries, Birgit Pauli-Haack and also Mark Westguard. It's a WordPress podcast.

So guess what we're gonna talk about? But WordPress, first of all, the fact that the 650 word camp us tickets went on sale and disappeared as if they were rock concert tickets. All of them gone in a very short space of time. There has also been a new pluggin, which will allow you to create block themes from inside the block editor.

That should speed things up for a lot of people, we get really into the weeds of the five for the future discussion and talking about what ought to count as a contribution and gain new props in the WordPress community. And it seems like it's more than just writing code. Gutenberg has got a new page where they show off what you can do with the editor on the website.

I've produced a podcast episode with Daisy Olson, and we briefly mentioned that. And then we also get stuck into the whole AI debate. Yost have partnered up with bertha.ai, and we talk about the ways that we've used AI in the past classic press seems to be on the rocks, but CMS share for WordPress is going through the roof 64.2% and going up, 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 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/WP Builds.

Hello? Hello. Hello, episode number two. Is that right? 215, 215 of the, this week in WordPress show by WP Builds.

Look at what the caption says. The caption says, go share this stream. So you better go share this stream. The the best way to do that is to send people to WP Builds.com/live. But if you were there anything more than about literally 20 seconds ago, the chat won't work. Now it will cause I fixed it whilst the music was playing.

I'm not sure if it's actually gonna work or not, but let's see. But hello, nice to have you with us. I'm in the bottom right hand corner because my tech is failing about three minutes ago. My Mac crashed and it will probably will do it again. And I'm blaming reus because he is responsible for all the things that go wrong during today's episode.

Hello Remkus. How are you?

[00:03:02] Remkus de Vries: Hello, sir. How are you?

[00:03:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, really good. It's it's to be honest with you this show, it's on at the same time as Wimbledon and I'm finding it difficult. It's just a ball going back and forth. It's not just a ball going back and forth. It's a lovely, beautiful yellow ball going back and forth.

All right. And there's a chap on the court of the minute called Nick C, who is just, he's watchable and unwatchable in equal measure because he's quite a character. Anyway, there we go. How are you doing reus? Shall I read out your bio? Reus is a WordPress veteran and performance specialist scaling your WordPress plus WooCommerce sites and business over at truer than north is truer than north a URL, as well as the business name.

Yes, it is. And how's all that going, cuz obviously, a little while ago you were you were working for a hosting company and you've yeah. Stepped away from that. Life treating you.

[00:04:03] Remkus de Vries: Life's treating good. Life's treating me good. It's there's so the site, as it is now is still not the version I want it to be or what it should be really.

So there's a lot of stuff happening in the background. But I'm taking my time for it. There's no immediate urgency to have it the way I think it should be. So my goal is to have it done and ready by the the reboot after this summer Essent.

[00:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. It's very nice having you back on the show.

Really appreciate it. This is the only bit of pointing that I'm gonna get, cuz it's beer getting she's directly above me on my screen that bit's easy. The whole left, right? Thing's difficult. How are you? Beer get

[00:04:49] Birgit Pauli-Haack: well, hi Nathan. Thank you for having me again. And it's good to see. Reers again and Aramco weekend and meet mark.

I'm good. I'm well, and I enjoy the summer and the little quieter month. Everybody's in vacation. So the slack is yeah, not

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: karma where you are. I'm guessing you are in America today, cuz seen that the background before. And you were there. I think once you're having you're working on 4th of July, which is like national holiday.

[00:05:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Getting on your shore is not really work. It's actually a great pleasure. Nice to come.

[00:05:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh that's very kind of you anyway, let me do the proper introduction. Beard. Powerly hack is the publisher of the Gutenberg times. She's the cohost on the Gutenberg change log pod podcast with Mary job.

She is also a full-time develop a contributor to the WordPress open source project and a WordPress developer advocate sponsored by automatic. And we had the pleasure of meeting one another for the first time in, in real world. In fact, oh, I've met reus before, but I hadn't met BI get before and I hadn't met mark in.

Oh, look, I can't what there. All of you try and point at mark. See how easy. Yeah. So yeah, you got it. You got it. Easy reus. Just point at mark for us quickly.

Ah, that's it'll so fresh in a minute. You working your way up, Nathan, this is not gonna go well, is it? This is Mark West guard. Hello, mark. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing Nathan? Yeah, really good. Mark is the founder of Ws form. You should check it out, really go and check it out. It's amazing.

It's a powerful WordPress form plugin that allows developers to rapidly develop forms in a no code environment. He's also a proud owner of a WP Builds MOG. I had forgotten about that. Got it's probably in the dishwasher, but , hadn't read your bio. That's hysterical. He's a page builder summit sponsor, and had the pleasure of watching Nathan enjoy sushi.

I'm not reading any more of this sushi world can be you. I kind embarrass myself a bit. We went to this WP engine event. And I absolutely love sushi. And when I like food I really like to concentrate on it. So I shot my eyes and get into it. And it was a bit like that scene out of when Harry met Sally, the one in the, you enjoyed it.

Yeah, I did enjoy, did you do the restaurant scene? It was a bit like that fault now,

[00:07:30] Remkus de Vries: Lord and I was at the same thing. So why didn't

[00:07:35] Nathan Wrigley: I hear that? You were, luckily you were elsewhere. Yeah. we've got so many nice people coming into the comments. Hello everybody. Cameron Jones all the way from Australia joins us every week.

Thank you. Once again, Cameron, for joining us mayor from GoDaddy. Hello everybody. She's given us some good vibes. Hello? It is working. Andrew, I'm guessing you are meaning the chat. Thank you. That's good. It must be working cuz lots of people coming in on YouTube. He's also saying this is Cameron.

He won't be here long, just watching while I'm at Maus on the way home from a concert. Oh nice. Now I hope you enjoyed your concert and then Steve. Don't remember Steve before. Hello, I'm a regular listener in the car, but the first time here live. Oh, you're gonna be sorely disappointed. but stay the course.

Stay the course. Steve, I appreciate that. I just love your positivity there. I know. I know. And ha happy birthday. Who's got a birth. Happy birthday.

[00:08:34] Remkus de Vries: Oh, it says Monday, but the United States

[00:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: has a birthday. That's I dunno why I read it as happy birthday, but you're right. Happy Monday. They do have a birthday.

That's gonna be a real interesting show. yeah. I'm not gonna be with all the brains. yeah. Hello. A beautiful morning in Connecticut USA. That's from Peter Ingal anyway, let's get on with some word Pressy stuff. Sure. How you doing? I don't know how I do it either. We have actually got some legitimate word Pressy stuff to talk about and I've got it on the screen here.

So let me just share it with you. First thing is if you try to get word camp us, I'm probably gonna say word camp EU repeatedly, cuz I just keep making that mistake. If you tried to get some tickets this week, I hope you managed it, but seemingly they were not only were they in short supply, but ran out really quickly.

The limitation has been set at 650, which I think is an event. Venue thing. I think they've decided to go for a smaller event, very deliberately. So they've picked a venue and 650 is the upper limit. I went out, no, I don't know to do like some gardening or something came back in fully with the intention of getting a ticket.

No. All gone. I'd like, like all the violins to come out at this point. So I, at the moment as things stand, I shouldn't be going, but did any of you three manage to get any tickets? If that was the kind of thing that you were looking to do? I managed to snap up a couple of them.

[00:10:05] Mark Westguard: A couple. Yeah. I'm actually, I'm taking my wife

[00:10:08] Nathan Wrigley: for the first time.

Oh, okay. That's all right. Then I was gonna say, you're not like domain squatting. Are just bought yourself? No,

[00:10:17] Remkus de Vries: no.

[00:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Calling them on quite a bit now. you could sell them on, but you managed to get a couple. Okay. So that I genuinely felt that I'd gone away from the screen for like just a couple of hours. Did you have the same experience? Was it like, were they disappearing fast or very quickly. Okay.

And

[00:10:38] Mark Westguard: somebody told me that they were on sale. So if I hadn't had received that Twitter message from somebody I wouldn't have. Purchase one. Oh, you got lucky and I totally forgot that they were coming on sale. Are you able to get a ticket as

[00:10:50] Nathan Wrigley: a, as a media partner, Nathan? Yeah. So there are definite opportunities there.

I believe that when the article was written by Sarah, there were also some micros sponsors packages still available, but they're obviously more expensive and there's a commitment to what have you. But I think there are certain caveats yeah. Around things like if you become a media partner then yes, I believe you get tickets also, if you're helping out at the event, you're a contributor or a speaker, obviously that goes with the ride as well.

Yeah. But at the moment I am not because I haven't wanna get the ticket before all of that, but I have applied, so we'll see how. See how that goes. See if they'll have, I'll have to see that.

[00:11:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. David BI I think did a check on how fast they're going and he clocked it out at 82 minutes okay.

An hour and a

[00:11:44] Nathan Wrigley: half. So that is basically the amount of time it takes me to mow my lawn, which soon. Yeah. how many acres is that? It's a couple of square meters. I take it very leisurely. Those tweezers. They don't do it quickly, one blade at a time, but it looks magnificent at the end.

We are so off topic. Anyway, there you go. Reus. I know big proponent of word, camp events, obviously you and I had a right old matter the other week and released it as a podcast for the Tavern. Yep. Do you go to the us one at all?

[00:12:16] Remkus de Vries: I have in the last couple of ones, but not this one.

[00:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: You, did you even try to go to this one or did you just.

No. No. Okay. So well

[00:12:24] Birgit Pauli-Haack: is a work of

[00:12:26] Nathan Wrigley: Netherland.

[00:12:26] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, it's a September and we have work of Netherlands pretty close to it. So I think I technically could make it but I have no interest in making that sort of flying back and forth as a racing, like an idiot

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: to it's happen a long way us.

Isn't it? It's so San Diego

[00:12:46] Remkus de Vries: is what? 11 hours flight.

[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. If you get a direct, I was looking at the flight and it was 11, basically from London. Yeah. And I

[00:12:53] Remkus de Vries: can't sleep on an airplane, so that's pretty exhausting for me. Okay. So I went I'm just gonna let this one pass. I'm waiting for them to return to the east coast.

[00:13:03] Nathan Wrigley: I suspect that world camp Netherlands will be bigger than world camp us

actually 650, still quite a big. That's about size of London and we have the

[00:13:17] Remkus de Vries: potential to be up there. Yes.

[00:13:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no. Interesting for the first time, maybe anyway, the point being, if you were looking to buy some world camp us tickets, they basically they're sold out. I suspect as mark alluded to, I think there's probably gonna be a few people who have bought ones that maybe they don't need, they've bought two or three and then decide that other family members don't wanna go or what have you, but they've all gone.

[00:13:46] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I would would definitely suggest to watch the tickets page itself when they come available and. You can also subscribe to their notification. I think they are planning to send out when more tickets are available. Again,

[00:14:03] Nathan Wrigley: Cool that it's that popular though. Like it sold out, akin to a concert, somebody famous people are actually, and it's just this software, yeah. Pretty unique

[00:14:15] Mark Westguard: attendance figure for us. The

[00:14:18] Nathan Wrigley: normal is about 2000. Okay. Yeah. It's quite typically smaller. Yeah. Oh really much smaller. They, Sarah Gooding writing the piece that I just had on the screen a minute ago, she said it was kept at 650 tickets. Organizers said that this was to allow for adequate social distancing and to give the team better flexibility in case changes are necessary.

It's happening at a place called the San Diego town and country resort. And it actually looks really nice. I gotta say it looks like a really, cuz it's not an event arena. It's just like a resort. So you know, could be an interesting angle. Yeah, you'll be there. Mark. I'm guessing you are going big it,

[00:14:56] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yes.

I got a ticket. Oh. And for me it's not only 11 hour flight, so it's merely a six hour flight

[00:15:06] Nathan Wrigley: I was thinking I might do a combo of swim and walk if if I did get a ticket, but I probably need to set off about now. I'd say. And yeah. Wouldn't.

[00:15:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. From what I hear from the organizers.

Actually they there was still a contract for St. Louis, but they didn't want to let them out of the contract. So they had to cancel that contract and then they were in in competition with everybody else in the United States. Yeah. Once to do. Yeah, a big event again in 2022. And so they didn't get the flexibility in maybe canceling when there is an up rise of something.

So they went with a venue that were a little bit Le had more leeway in their contracts and as I, yeah, so I think that was where the cap comes from.

[00:16:05] Nathan Wrigley: I don't organize, I don't organize any word press events because I was chatting to somebody that, that does and if this is for a London event and he was saying that the price of just hiring a place for an evening for a WordPress meat up is now literally mouthwatering.

Your jaw is on the floor. I think that they, so just absurdly expensive. Literally you can't make it up. It was in the order of 40,000 pounds for an evening. . Yeah, that's just, yeah, exactly. So what just come,

[00:16:44] Remkus de Vries: just come to the Netherlands, September 15th and 16th, you'll have a fun.

You'll have a lot of fun. Just skip all that. Come over here. We're doing it in a zoo oh, it cannot get

[00:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: any cooler than that. Now, hang on. You can't drop that bombshell and then leave. What in a zoo actually in a zoo, in an actual zoo.

[00:17:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: How does that? Now you can interview some giraffes about reference me

[00:17:15] Remkus de Vries: I don't know what their knowledge about this topic is, but yeah, you

[00:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: could

So what just, is that just to make it just a unique experience? I'm guessing you're not literally near the animals, there's probably some sort of conference bit or

[00:17:30] Remkus de Vries: so you're you actually have to walk through the main entrance. You actually have to walk to the area through the zoo.

So yes, you are literal literally inside the zoo amongst the animals. And then there is a sort of so they have a restaurant and a conference center type thing in the middle of it. And it's large enough for us to hold a very decent workup. That's

[00:17:58] Nathan Wrigley: absolutely spectacular. You've really raised the bar there.

I'm gonna suggest that next time London is organized that do it underwater. I'm not happy with the, you in it to the zoo. I think we'll take the experience level. Yeah. The qua, so Aqua workup, nobody understands the thing, but it'll be fun. Anyway, work comp work camp, us tickets gone.

Keep your eyes peeled if you fancy getting some of those, this is a nice piece of news. Actually. I think this is really cool. Again, on the WP Tavern, Sarah Gooding, writing WordPress theme team releases, new plugin for creating block themes. The title says it all really. There is now a plugin.

Which you can download and it uses the block interface, actually there's quite a lot of the settings, which are not inside of there, but if you are the kind of person that wants to tinker with creating a block based theme, it's pretty tricky stuff. It's quite a lot of new tooling and things that you've gotta do differently.

And so now we have this new tool which I've when my computer crashed earlier, it is taken the link away. There it is. It'll probably be that one there block is called create block themes by wordpress.org. It's got three, three weeks under the belt at the moment, 40 installations. Only at the moment I confess I haven't played with it, but I'm gonna guess that bigger that you have.

[00:19:26] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I actually have not played with this one, but I played with the three other ones that are already available before this one came out.

[00:19:35] Nathan Wrigley: What's the difference? Why this one were the other ones just by done by just development houses or

[00:19:42] Birgit Pauli-Haack: One was done by Carlina Nemar of course.

Yeah. At full side editing and she set it up a little bit differently because she's on educator and she wanted you to have the experience to either download an empty theme. And a regular theme with a few of the features in play. And then she also has an advanced theme builder where you can actually, when you're downloaded, you also have block patterns and some block variations and styles.

So it's more like an educated system and has a few things. And this one here is more for those who want to design themes and then give the files to the developer to make it our round. And also yeah, it uses the full site editing. Placed, but it also combines the changes that are in the user database.

So when you change a theme, like those styles for certain things they are stored in the database as a user system. But when you want to export the theme, you need it all in this theme, Jason, in the settings file, if you wanna upload it to someplace else. So that does that as well. And you can actually have an empty theme.

The only thing that I find missing, and I'm not only one, I think Sarah said that in her article as well, is that you can upload a screenshot. Oh yeah. So you can download a full theme and it you see it from the other themes in your yeah. Yeah. But yeah. And Jamie Molin, he did nice little theme development thing as well.

Yeah.

[00:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: Was that from WB engine as well?

[00:21:33] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Okay. WP engine. That goes really far. Yeah. They're all at

[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: it. Everybody's at it. Yeah. Yeah. But this one looked really nice. Yes. In interesting. See it, I'm just gonna read quote, it says today, a group of eight full-time sponsored theme team contributors.

So I dunno if that means that they're dedicate full time to this as a thing going forwards or that's just the, the amount of time that they spend in a typical week, full time. And the idea it says is that users can design their own themes using full site editing features and then export their finished creation as a theme that can be installed on any other WordPress site.

As I said, the settings are currently in a, in the current WordPress UI, but at some point the intention is to put all of these settings into the block editor and it all done there. It does say I can't remember who made this quote, but they said it's used. Useful for sharing your designs between multiple sites or users.

But if you're just use, if you're just building a site for yourself, you probably don't need it, but worth exploring

[00:22:39] Birgit Pauli-Haack: on that. Yeah. Yeah. That comes from an article that is on the make blog by Ben Dwyer. Who's on the theme team. Yeah. Yeah it's a nice little tool. It's great. That it's is actually an official repress plugin. There's some future way that it will be expanded. Yeah. Future

[00:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: it's nice.

It's just making it much more straightforward for everybody. Isn't it? Mark or

[00:23:07] Mark Westguard: anything. Yeah, I think this is gonna be great for just accelerating the number of themes that were available. Block things that are available. As a I come from the classic theme development background writing from scratch.

I would use a kind of a bootstrap theme and. Right code on top of that, but the fact that we can now use the block editor as a means by which to design our themes and then export them like this, I think is just gonna make things so much easier. We're not gonna be started from scratch and work it our way up with code this.

This is just gonna make building these block themes a lot quicker, and hopefully this will accelerate the, the number of block themes that we see available in the library. So I'm all for it. I think it's great.

[00:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I am so nervous to click this button to share my screen and not share my screen, cuz it literally did make my Mac reboot a minute I'm and I click it.

Wow. We're in luck. It works. Yeah. Don't count your chicken

[00:24:13] Remkus de Vries: this time. Anything on that reus. So I think the what mark said is essentially what what my feeling is that it. This is one of a couple of solutions in this direction. Like beer get mentioned I've played with the studio press version.

I'm aware of this one. I hadn't played with it yet, whatever the type of implementation is, it doesn't really matter what what mark just said, though. If this brings in more people starting to new way that's a hell of a step forward because we were severely lacking anything like this for the last couple of years, since we've had the block editor.

And I know a full site editing is just, it's still semi beta, whatever they're calling it. But it. It's one of those things people need to have if they are to understand the potential of all these different elements that we have, right? The patterns, the blocks, the full site editing experience itself, which is unfortunately still to be hashed out on many different components.

But if most people work very visually, if they can't create something and have something to start with some sort of boiler plate, some sort of framework, some whatever, that, something that's, that kicks off there from zero to something that's going to help everybody understanding what the potentials of this are.

Cause theme Jason is a wonderful solution, but if you are having to do that in code and you can't translate that into what that looks like, what that means, what that offers, what that builds. You're just punching code and punching code is not exciting.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: That whole great speak for yourself.

Very good point. Yeah, no,

[00:26:05] Remkus de Vries: I'll rephrase, just punching code and not understanding it's consequence is not exciting because you're in your silo and you do what you think is right. But you have no way getting feedback in you, while you're doing it, nor is the chance very high that at the end of what you've done, the end user will go Hey, this is what I want it.

[00:26:27] Nathan Wrigley:

I I would imagine that there's a lot of people out there who would be quite interested in creating themes, who just would completely put off by the old way of doing things and the new way of doing things equally. Yeah, and because they're just, they don't have those skills.

They don't wish to learn those skills and it's too much of a staring up a cliff face. Whereas now hopefully the cliff face has just got a, quite a bit smaller and it's more of a visual thing. So maybe it'll just bring in a whole raft of new people. You can just see, you can see a kind of an industry opening up here as well for people who they've got the real flare for design, but they don't really want to code and they can put together a cracking theme, or at least they hoped that they could.

And now for the first time, maybe this is in reach. And so maybe a new career is op is opening up for people who previously would've just run a million miles away because it wasn't up their street.

[00:27:20] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. At the very least we get a hell of a lot more people experimenting with it. Yeah.

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: That's right.

[00:27:25] Birgit Pauli-Haack: That's right. And in that notion, there's a second piece from the design team that also will probably help with that process in getting more people interested in it is the open that they open design the themes that you can open open source, the design of themes now through Figma and the WebPress space on Figma.

There's on make, do webpress.org/design. The first article I think covers that You need to know how to use Figma, but you can export those designs as well. Yeah. From, so I know that automatic and some other theme designers have open source there designs there. So even if you're not a designer, yeah.

You could still, with those two components start out with a theme,

[00:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: Creation. I'll just quote at the end because there's another piece to be added into this. Sarah says Anna quote, the create block theme plugin makes designing and authoring a WordPress theme, more approachable than ever before.

That's what we were saying. It has the potential to rapidly increase the number of block themes available. And then she goes on to say the training team. And I know we had, I dunno if we still do, but Courtney was in the comments, the training team is currently working on a course for learn WordPress, learn with the capital L that will teach people how to create block themes using this plugin.

So whole tight, there will be some. Tutorials coming around. If you are, if it's, still a bit too far, if you like the idea of learning with some materials, as opposed to trying it yourself, then hold on tight. And hopefully there'll be some stuff coming through soon. You've got something there for me.

Reus. Is that the, is that yeah, that's the link to

[00:29:13] Remkus de Vries: the opensourcesourcing team

[00:29:15] Nathan Wrigley: designs. Okay. I shall pop that on the screen. Let's add that in da, duh, make dot WordPress dot orgs. I'm not gonna read that out. it's gonna take me too long, but there it is on the screen. Thank you for that. I'll add that into the show notes for tomorrow.

Perfect. Okay. Very cool. Very cool. Sticking, I'm gonna press the button again, everybody. Let's see if it crashes Nathan's computer. Here we

go. No worry. Very good. It was actually re it was getting reus onto the show that crashed my computer. We'll leave reus there. We won't fiddle with him in case that goes wrong again. So this may not be the most exciting piece of news. I think it's called Guttenberg landing pages launched.

Best thing to do is just to show you, so this is now the, what you'll see. If you go to wordpress.org/guttenberg. And here it is, and it's basically a WordPress install with, and you can start to fiddle with it. And, if you wanna change the text, you can start to do that and you can make things calm.

And, you can add in, look at the blocks and see what the inspector over here tells you and start to get an idea basically of how these things are put together. So for example, maybe if you've not played with Gutenberg before this little configuration of icons and texts, you might be curious how would you even do that in the block editor?

This is how you would do that in the block editor with cover and some groups and some columns and some stacks and some images and some paragraphs underneath. And it just shows you how you might lay things out. And not the most adventurous page in the world, but at least it gives you some sort of head.

And, or is it the most performant one say again, is it not? No, it is absolutely not. Let me click refresh reload. That's yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It took a little while there, your give us some stats on that in a minute, you go away and run some lightning tests on that and you can tell us what it's like, but just a really nice idea.

I do like the idea that you go to a webpage and the tool that you are being sold, if you like, is there right there for you to use. So for example, I don't know if you went to web flow or something. I don't know if you can do that on the web flow website, or if you have to launch some kind of demo.

It's just the idea that there it is right front and center, start to fiddle with. That's very cool.

[00:31:44] Mark Westguard: Yeah. The only problem I had with this is I started editing it and then I wasn't able to read what it said in the first place. So

[00:31:55] Nathan Wrigley: somewhat annoyingly. I'm finding this rather annoying because what, I just wanna deface this page, and then publish, but sadly, the sadly for reasons that I can't possibly understand the published buttons been disabled. Can you imagine what this page would look like within two minutes, if it was left, was there that would be any thoughts on this big it Remco mark carry on.

[00:32:24] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I find it really interesting and it the new design is really marvelous. Yeah. They did a great job. Job on it. Because it was four, four years was really stale and this is really showing off newest features on the block editor. But it also shows that you can actually use the block editor outside of a post or a template editor.

And there are quite some additional implementations for that, for instance, the page the pattern creator on web.org to submit your own patterns also uses the block editor for a different purpose yeah. For a different custom post. And I know that Tumblr and day one two products from automatic are actually implementing block editor for their apps.

So there are quite a few ways to do that. With outside the WordPress or outside the editing the post edits or site edit context. I really like that and I hope you see more examples of that. I know that some of the plugins actually do it as well. There is quite a bigger idea behind it.

Yes,

[00:33:53] Nathan Wrigley: I am. I'm showing my screen on a really tiny dimensions and it all starts to look really cramped on my screen. But I think if you are on anything, half decent monitor size wise, this list view isn't quite so annoying as isn't here, cuz it just tend to misshape the website when I invoke it.

But yeah, it's nice. Really nice. Yeah. Very cool. Nice

[00:34:22] Mark Westguard: to see the The block editor has developed this far, that they're confident enough to now share it on the front end of the website. And I think that's Testament to the work that's gone into it. I love that you can just immediately start, like you say, you're hacking the page and you are using, you're using the block editor and, you realize how easy it is use now.

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: It's very minimal implementation. Isn't it? They've gone for text and some icons and a few buttons, which is quite a nice way of doing it. If they'd have gone for really complicated overlapping layouts, it would've been yeah. Yeah. Really difficult time. I think that works as well. Yeah. It's nice.

So I think the vast

[00:35:00] Remkus de Vries: majority of people now jumping to. Page builders are fully not aware that this is actually possible that you can actually build it for a very large percentage already inside the block editor. And I I really liked it that this particular iteration of Gutenberg demonstrates that.

But like I said I would love to be it more performant.

[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: Tell me about this particular page. Did you go off and run any stats on it or did you,

[00:35:32] Remkus de Vries: I just ran the performance insights the network tab information and the lighthouse on on it in the inside of Chrome. And the easiest one to share on on on lighthouse is the performance is a 78, which is Orange with red letters.

So I think that gives it away.

[00:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I wonder what the wonder, what bottleneck there is. Cuz I've been building a variety of pages and you can easily get a hundred. I just would that,

[00:36:09] Mark Westguard: would that be expected with the actual layer edits of running alongside a regular good

[00:36:14] Nathan Wrigley: point, right?

That is a good point. We could somehow matter. Oh, doesn't matter because it's disabled.

[00:36:21] Remkus de Vries: yeah, it's the output that is saved and you're not doing anything with that, but it's the first content 10 full paint and speed index that are essentially the slowest ones.

[00:36:35] Birgit Pauli-Haack: You're actually loading the editor itself, like the admin page and not the front end of the editor.

Yeah. Let

[00:36:42] Nathan Wrigley: see if we could click on this. Does it take you anywhere? Oh, just back to WordPress. There we go. Yeah.

[00:36:49] Birgit Pauli-Haack: But yeah it could be faster, certainly. So

[00:36:52] Remkus de Vries: I'm mentioning this because one of the complaints about the Gutenberg editor is that performances hasn't been the heart at the heart of its development yet it's starting to, in certain areas, it's still not just first thought.

And I think it needs to be first thought. There's just so much optimization that you can do that needs to be part of the core of how Gutenberg and all of its elements from patterns to, how they need to be develop. And I would like to see the challenge being met in terms of if we're demonstrating what it can do.

And for me, that's an obvious thing that you also need to be including.

[00:37:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: When I look at the other page field as I , and if I load them in the admin yeah. That take ages in compared to Gutenberg. That is the comparison that I have. And on the front end, I have not seen any considerable slowdowns from, but that's just me doing normal page stuff.

Yeah. I,

[00:37:55] Nathan Wrigley: there's not, I've not seen any considerable

[00:37:57] Remkus de Vries: optimizations either. Yeah. So slow downs. No, you're. If you're very, let's say if you do a relatively light build in the page in, in, in Gutenberg, then you publish it. It'll be relatively more performance than any page builder. That is correct.

Yeah. But that's still not to say that there's still missing out on a lot of stuff that should be automated in in favor of performance.

[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's still an just .

[00:38:30] Remkus de Vries: One of the stats that we're going to discuss is is the percentage of of what WebPress has of market share. What WordPress has the percentage of CMS is running sorry, the percentage of sites running ACMs and what percentage workers is having in in that.

So if you take that in mind, we have a huge impact on the web and every single kilobyte is pushed over that line. And just because we have broadband now for the most part. And I do mean for the most part. It doesn't mean we get to not care about that. Cause it still has a huge impact. Once you start translating every single thing, a site loads, how much of it loads, how many times it loads when it loads and all of that is an impact, which you wanna minimize always,

[00:39:24] Nathan Wrigley: Hey mark, with with, so I'm gonna press the button again.

It's fine. It's living. You did it. Yeah, we're fine. The, so this is the Guttenberg site, right? And we're all thinking. It's a really nice idea. Would you ever cuz there's your website, there's Ws form. If that's the homepage, would you ever, cuz you've got the video of somebody doing exactly what the Guttenberg page that we've just been looking at could be is that the kind of thing you would ever throw on a homepage at your site?

Like a sales page, like here it is, start playing with it implementing,

[00:39:58] Mark Westguard: I have a demo at the top right. Where you can spin up Ws form actually in a WordPress environment. Got it. So that's a better way for us to do it only because we have a lot of integrations that we demo.

And the WordPress admin is just, pretty heavy in itself. It's not something I would want on the front. We're about that loading admin around it, which on a home you wouldn't have. And. Our editor, although it loads incredibly quickly it's milliseconds to download it and run it.

It's nothing like these site builders, but it is still introduced some slow down. So very conscious about my, my page speed scores and things like that as well throughout, throughout the website. We actually don't even load that video on mobile. It doesn't even download just to make sure that people on mobile aren't downloading video, but we just find that's a great way of demonstrating what the product can do, because there's so much it can do

[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

The video is nice, cuz it just shows you the best version of it as well. Doesn't it? I think as opposed to, if you stray onto the GBO page, you could, you could, and I

[00:41:13] Mark Westguard: think there's always a danger with having a product. Demo like that somebody may just find something tricky that they don't understand without it being explained to them or without them looking at a tutorial and it could deter from the product.

Yeah. That, that may be a downside to that Gooden bow page. I don't know, but I, I enjoyed going to it and just playing with it

[00:41:33] Nathan Wrigley: and yeah. Having a little bit of a play. Yeah, that's right. Just the idea. You can just fiddle and see what, see the way it was made. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on a little bit.

Cuz last week we had bit of a story about Matt and it was all centering around the five for the future thing. And this is not new by the way, just so that this was released on may the 20th, but I thought now would be a time. The dust has settled a bit on that story. The idea of defining what the five for the future pledge would look like.

So if you don't know this story basically five for the future is the idea that you would give up 5% of your companies. Let's just say resources, time, whatever it may be. And you would push that towards the WordPress project. The intention being that 95% of your time there to be, to turn a profit and what have you, and 5% would be giving back the idea.

That if everybody did that, then the project could be pushed forward, much more rapidly. The problem is there's no kind of like solid definition of what a contribution that qualifies is. So the word that Jafer here is using, she talks about props which it's not really a word that we use much in the UK, but I think it basic props basically means thumbs up kind of thing.

Doesn't it? It's yeah, well done. You've done. I give you props. But just the idea of let's figure out what gets the props and what doesn't, what falls within the purview, because it's got to be a lot wider than writing code and committing to work.org.

[00:43:20] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, this very much sounds to me like all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

[00:43:29] Birgit Pauli-Haack: In that, go ahead. Yeah, no, I

[00:43:32] Remkus de Vries: was gonna say, cause where does props start? Who gives props? Who is the keeper of props? Who is the recorder of props? All of

[00:43:42] Nathan Wrigley: those. I'm nominating you remers frankly. I think you, you should be this, you have all the props to give away.

[00:43:51] Remkus de Vries: Don't make me swear on this podcast.

But that's one point

[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: point though. That's I had totally, yeah, I completely side stepped in my mind. I had that. I hadn't even occurred to me really. Yeah. Good point. And that's one

[00:44:02] Remkus de Vries: part. The other part is where does it start? Cause those people that are, so the way I got into WordPress contributing was translating the Dutch translation at the time was a, was an absolute mess.

I figured out how I could take over to streamline it. I did that. And then I started doing that. So a lot of what I was doing was partly at that time we still had to manually create the the translation files put 'em in SVN. And then the next release bill would release a version of those included.

Now that's all automated, but that time was never registered. So was I not contributing? And then if you're actually doing the translations, anyone putting in a, maybe an hour a month putting in some dedicated time contributing in languages, does that net contribute? Cuz you don't get props for that.

Yeah this is, and that's, it's examples, this just example there's hundreds of examples of this, which you can't record, which are undoable, but are they dis this dismissed now? Because

[00:45:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, if big, do you mind if I just add to that quickly? Go ahead. Yeah. Thank you. So couple of thoughts on that, the first one is, yeah, I'd missed that piece.

So that was good. Thank you for that re cuz yeah. Who gets to dish out the rewards, if you like other thing I suppose there's gonna be proportion of people who don't want the props as well. I'm just throwing that in, who just doing it and they're doing it and they actually just wanna stay under the radar and do it.

because they've realized that it maybe they're scratching their own itch, or maybe they're just doing it because they, they see the need elsewhere. But I guess when you get up into the sort of corporate level, the big companies and what have you, there's there's probably gonna be quite a lot of hours going into it.

And I imagine there would be a bit of quid pro quo there, they would want to potentially be seen to be doing the right thing. And so figuring out what these things are, whether it's translating, organizing a word camp, whether it's I don't know, the list could literally be thousands of things along it is figuring out what they are and do they all have the same value?

Is it like some sort of egalitarian system where if you commit to WordPress a core, that's exactly the same as doing and one hour of that is the same as doing an hour of translation or does the happen. So that's,

[00:46:34] Remkus de Vries: That's a can of worms. I don't want everyone to see opened. Yeah, no, but you can argue that if a country doesn't have sorry.

If a locale doesn't have a translation of WordPress, it will never be successful in that locale. U three English is most likely first language that you use on a day to day. Yep. For you. It doesn't matter if something stays untranslated for Dutch people, we're relatively okay with English, but there's a large portion that still would like to see it in Dutch.

And we're very comfortable with English as a country. And then the scale goes down very rapidly into languages, locals, countries, regions that just are not comfortable with WordPress. If you don't have translations there, it's never going to work. It's never going to grow period done. I'm just using translation as the example, which is the easiest to grasp.

Cuz we have an international audience here, but. That whole approach of quantifying what a contribution is. Again, I don't wanna swear on this show,

[00:47:45] Nathan Wrigley: but so go on.

[00:47:49] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think that the it's not any contribution that is qualified in that because the, it just ever wanted to distinguish between the self sponsored contributors or the contributors that do it on the side to those who put the five for the futures on their flag, the co corporations that put that on their flag.

And that's one thing the other, so it's not which contribution is more or less it's more Those who volunteer and are not sponsored are equally or even more valued in my thing because they do it on their own time. Yeah. And it's and that article was not about that. Yeah. That is something that I wanted to put there because I know that a lot of contributors were hurt in seeing what's meant to be a accountable, meaning a a record keeping about it or not, that values their contribution on art.

Every contribution is valued. Very. And especially those that do it on their own time, on their own weekends, on their own. Yeah. At night when the kids are asleep what the fight for the future is that corporation like Jos, like GoDaddy, go daddy, like blue host or now new fold are also putting that on their flag that they're contributing.

And that contribution right now is only counted as core. Contribution. So when you see the some John PA did a review of the 6.0 contributions to core and you see the bubbles, I don't know. You probably have all remember graphics. Yeah. And then there is an agency that has 20 people has as much contributions to 6.0 as goad with 8,000 people.

So that's the topic about it. It's not what the what some a translator who has been translating for 10 years into Japanese is not valued just because they're not talked in this organ in this article. So that's one thing. The other part is that wordpress.org only has a few hooks.

Where those contributions can be counted. Yeah. So when you look at your activit on your profile webpress.org or profile webpress.org, and then your username, there is an activity point and you, there are the forum posts in there. There are your plug-ins in there and all your themes. And right now there are all if you contribute to photos that is counted and then there is also what was the other one?

Oh, when you get props and that's also defining props means there is a channel in so props people get props for contributing comment to a track ticket. So there are somebody reported a bug and somebody, and there's a discussion about how to figure that out. The commit person. Creates the patch gets the pops on the release, but they are also co-authors for it.

And those are the commenters and they're also getting props for the release. But they're in a line in a yeah, in a text line, it they're not recorded in this activity tab. So it was more, a more, a technical kind of thing that that SFA was pointing out. What are the things that we can record on web.org that can be CA so it was not so much the intrinsic view of a contribution.

It was more the, okay. There are other Touchpoints of contributors on WebPress dot core that can be counted. And the meta team is trying to figure that out. Yeah. How

[00:52:26] Nathan Wrigley: I, that I'll oh, I'll share my screen again. It's worked so this I think was a bit that I took away. It was this sort of trying to figure out what a contribution for five for the future is.

And it, it was mentioned about gray areas. The fact that we've got these things, which we're not quite sure where to put that box. So for example, I'll just read, but other contributors are in it or I'll go back. Some contribu, some contributions are easy to sort through and agree on. We see them happening.

Props are given with them already, and we understand how to make that work better. So for example, contributions of code to core amongst other things like, wait, you can see them on the screen, but other. And I'm down here now, but other contributions are in a gray area for those it's important to look not only at whether to move WordPress forward, but whether it helps the community of contributors work in a sustainable way and whether the contributions can be done consistently over time.

So for example, would these things be included, maintaining wordpress.org word, camp.org, the Rosetta network adding or deleting official documentation, training, communication, speaking at WordPress meat, tops, word camps, maintaining or moderating official repos. And it goes on and so this was the bit that I took away from it that how on earth do you quantify all of that and how do you figure out well when is it time for you to get the prop or not?

And Courtney's put a comment in here. Let's have a little, what she says for context in the Ts of props. I got a value of one for over 60 hours efforts, specifically to 6.0 release as a person that made a typo correction on a Guttenberg. Plugin change log props. She says props or value for contributing needs to extend beyond core.

And presumably some of the things that I just mentioned written in that article might fit the fill. Yeah. Think

[00:54:14] Remkus de Vries: I do too. So I think this whole question, what makes a contribution of a five to the future contribution? I think the question is what does the mechanism that we are calling currently five to the future?

How should that work needs to be entirely separated from what is contributing? And right now it's the mix of two, which makes it which is why I said what I said. Yeah. Because it's now conflating different approaches and ideas and things, which , if you glance through it, you'll go so if I speak it's now a, if I speak at a meetup, it's now a question. If that's a contribution or not, what does that mean? No, that's not a.

[00:54:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: But you can, there is no record of it. There's no record of, there is the meetup has a record, but you cannot have 700 volunteers keep track of all their speakers for 12 meetup and put it somewhere in data entry.

So not manually. Yeah. That's there's some technology involved and there's some sure, some volunteers, but that's a different discussion, but I totally agree with you. Yeah. That. Fine for the future contributions should be separately, tallied up. Yeah. But the tally also is not so much how much hours it is.

Yeah. And then Courtney also got the documentation team badge. Yeah. That's, there's a whole set of badges that are also there and it's it's nothing of it will be completely. Yeah. I worked for a nonprofit and was the president of a nonprofit and volunteer contributions is hard to value.

And the person who, who went for the first time to the process and got represe account, got a UB account changed the typo on the that's a whole process that if you don't do it once the first time, you will never be able to. Start out your contribution and is that higher or less? Of course the hours paid.

But on the other hand yeah, I, as a full-time contributor, I get paid, so it's not a volunteer contribution. It's my job. Yeah. Yeah. It's a total different angle there. Yeah. That people. And what we, what I see on automatic is that we are doing some things that volunteers will never. Yeah. The day to day administration of certain things.

Yeah. Or what coordinators? Yeah. The day to day administration on the training team there are things that no volunteer will ever do or shoot themselves in the head when they have to do it. Yeah. That also need to be distributed. And I, it's hard to quantify those because they are not counted. They are not discounted, but they are not in the same value or in the same realm of additional effort by the person who gives them.

[00:57:15] Nathan Wrigley: I've decided now mark should be in charge. Sorry.

Mark's now where you're. Cause he's been sitting there very patiently just taking it all in. I have been taking it all in. This is hard, isn't it? Eh,

[00:57:29] Mark Westguard: it is it's a tricky one. It's opened up a can of worms, I think. Yeah, I remember when Matt for I guess it wasn't the first time, but he was talking about five for the future at the state of the word.

And it made me check myself and I was like, am I contributed to this by, I have a free light plug in of Ws form. Is that me contributing? And then I started doing some photography contribution, and then I got a little badge for that and I thought, oh there's one way I can contribute.

I can contribute. For me personally contributing. Comes more from sponsorship. I try to sponsor events as much as I can, and honestly, really don't get an ROI from it. It's more about sponsor contributing to the community and giving back that way. But that's really not contributing to core or anything like that.

I think that, sorry, go ahead.

[00:58:28] Remkus de Vries: Re no, I was gonna say that's the whole contributing to core is what it's called for most people. It's what it's contributing to the WordPress project is what it should be.

[00:58:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's subtle. Yeah. Dramatic difference. Isn't it. If we just and just saying contributing to WordPress, doesn't cut it either, because I think the default assumption for that is the code.

Right? Everybody thinks, oh, that's the code as opposed to project. Yeah. I like your definition there, whatever it was contributing to the WordPress. Project or, yeah.

[00:59:03] Mark Westguard: I would hope as a sponsor that I enable contributor today, we, we enable the fact that event can take place. And as a result of that contribution takes place it's the sponsors that are paying for the for the venue.

And as you said, that's can be incredibly expensive. A small part of that compared to the bigger sponsors, but it's all relative, we give what we can. I, for me personally, I don't really need a five for the future badge on my product in order for right.

Yeah. I know for other companies that would be a lot more valuable to show that they're giving back. Yeah. But I do think the. Don't know. I think the sponsorship, the amount of money, some of these corporations pump into these WordPress, these work camp event is absolutely a mess.

[01:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hey, here's a random question and please don't take this as me.

The way this may sound what would like this show would. Be a like, would this absolutely.

[01:00:14] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Absolutely.

[01:00:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. I, no, I genuinely interested cuz I, enjoy doing this, I don't really know if it's, we're

[01:00:23] Remkus de Vries: having a discussion. We're talking about topics that are in direct relationship to the workers project.

Yeah. Okay. And maybe there's not a direct line of some words came out on Nathan and oh, look it. Now the project is better. no, that's never

[01:00:37] Nathan Wrigley: gonna happen. Thank you.

[01:00:40] Remkus de Vries: But what it might spark is someone more intelligent picking that up and going, oh, I can really make this work. Yeah,

[01:00:48] Birgit Pauli-Haack: it didn't understand what Nathan said, but I understood what mark said.

[01:00:51] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you what, there's a whole raft of people who are more intelligent than Nathan. This,

[01:00:58] Remkus de Vries: Bit will get a clip from the final version, right?

[01:01:01] Nathan Wrigley: You can hit that bit down. Okay. So may has sorry. Always get your name one, one.

Dunno why I can't decide on one way to pronounce your name? She has said it's not about the count. It's about the effort and positive intentions. Very nice point and contributions. She goes on to say, should be considered as gift. It's not about the value, but the time spent to do good. Ah, that's interesting.

I, I didn't intend for this topic to dominate, but it really has actually, we spent quite a long time on it. That's it's not gonna coalesce in the short term. I would imagine. And the scope is gonna be vast, but it would be nice to like to have a box to put if you're working on core, it goes in that box.

And if you're working on making blog posts, it goes in that box and, just figuring out where you fit in the piece and it could be done. I'm sure.

[01:01:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah. What gets me most of the time in that discussion is that the one that are heard by that discussion, because they don't seem to be valued or the freelancers that are self-employed that are that are contributing yeah.

Outside there, or those that are that's the contributing is not their paid job. Yeah. They feel they're not doing enough. And let me tell. Yay. You are enough. The five for the future discussion is never about the volunteers that do go beyond their normal day to day operations. It's about the companies that make profit of the open source work that is being done.

And the giving back is something that would help sustain the project. And that's where this is about I'm not talking as an automatic person right now. I'm I have been volunteering or working, contributing to WordPress in seen and unseen places. For six years before I actually was hired by automatic to be a full-time sponsor.

But that was on top of working with client that was on top with Anything else, but I was never really yeah it, the fight for the future is the idea that anybody who makes profit off of WordPress could contribute back to one of the teams. Yeah. And help team, organization, or team just cont do the work on the team.

And it's, but it's the companies that all, yeah. Be it new form. Be it go to Arabia, be it WP engine, be it automatic B Jos in some of the agencies 10 up or human made, they all contribute back. But that is to sustain their own business. Yeah. That's the mindset around should be a mindset around it.

It's not so much what is counted. It's it's my job to To, to keep it sustainable. Yeah. So I'm not quite sure. And yeah if that's understood, I, I. Really, it hurts my heart to see people who have been doing their own business and they're contributing to WordPress and they're hurt because other people they don't see their, it's a discussion that they are not enough.

And I really wanna tell people, yeah, you are enough. You do what you do. And it's very valued.

[01:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Courtney has just said, as a team rep, I want to elevate the contributions of the whole team more as a sponsored person. If we have a value established, is my contribution measured fairly versus other contributions?

Tricky. I think that's the, that is the tricky bit. It's trying to figure out scales tip, is a contribution in some form worth, I don't know, two X of a different kind of contribution. And as soon as you open up that kind of worms, then that's impossible to circle to square, I think.

But thank you. I didn't intend for this bit to, for so long. It's really interesting. We did it previously, but we never went into it on that level, but I just think that was a really topic to cover very quickly. I did a, an interview with Daisy Olson In much the same way that I did with reus.

If you haven't heard that episode, 30 of the Tavern podcast is with reus all about word camp, Europe. And then we had one with Matt last week, couple of weeks ago. And then we've got this one this week with Daisy Olson and it fits beautifully into today's discussion. Cause we were talking about block themes.

She BA basically tries to make the case for why now is a good time to start playing. She doesn't make the case for now is the time to only use block themes. It's dip your toes in the water. See what's what, see how it's built. And. Maybe you can start to use them in the near future if it's mission critical, perhaps not quite yet, but have a play.

So that was a nice podcast episode. This one came across my radar this week. This is, oh, sorry about that. This is to say that Yost and Bertha, we had Andrew Palmer on not that long ago and he's behind Bertha which is an AI. It's a plugin, which inserts it think Grammarly, I think is the best way that there's like a little icon, which goes everywhere.

You can type text in WordPress and you can pick what style you want for the writing to be, whether you want it to be long, short kind of advertising. I think they've even got like pirate and all that sort of silliness in there as well. But the point being that you can help. Yourself. And they've collaborated in a sort of media deal, I believe with Bertha.

And to be honest with you, when the whole AI writing thing started, I was thinking that the SEO companies wouldn't probably want to go near it, cuz my assumption at the time was that it's not gonna create things which are authentic, which people are going to want to read. And so on. I've reevaluated that now the more I see people using it, the more it feels to me like people are using it as a building block, like a starting point.

And instead of saying, okay, Bert a write me 10,000 words and I'll publish it. It's more Bertha. Give me some ideas of the style that I might like to adopt. So anyway

[01:08:02] Mark Westguard: This is something that I recognize very early on with Bertha. That would be a good implementation for it. People hate writing content for SEO behind the scenes, meta descriptions, titles, and things like that.

And this gives you a great starting point for that. And think there was initially a lot of pushback with AI in writing and people thinking, oh, this is gonna take over my job and I'm not gonna have to write blogs anymore, but really it's used more of a tool just to give you a foundation to work with.

And then you

[01:08:36] Remkus de Vries: on that. It's an enrichment, not a

[01:08:38] Nathan Wrigley: replacement. Yeah. Yeah. I think, and I think that's my mistake, right? At the beginning I thought that these things were being touted as a replacement and now I see it for what it is it's so there's versions

[01:08:50] Remkus de Vries: of AI that play with text that have the potential to replace.

Yeah. SEO in, in, in some cases allows you to have variances of text and still rank with that. And if it's if the difference between the two is large enough UN, and the separate texts are unique enough, there is AI and Bertha is part of that. That can actually help you write that sort of

[01:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: content.

There was a really nice it's unavailable now, but we had the page builder summit a couple of weeks ago. And Tom Carr from AB split test he came up with a really nice use case for it. And that was, if you just, AB split testing is it's not the most glamorous thing to spend your time doing, coming up with variants of basically the same sentence.

And so he just gave it to Bertha. Yeah. And he just pressed the button and he just looked at it and thought, do I like that? No click again. Do I like that? Yeah, I like that. I would never have written that. And then you just it's there. It's done. And so you can create three or four different split tests, B, C, D, and you didn't really have to apply much thought the AI was.

Totally capable of doing that job, but you, yeah, so you're right. Remco that's interesting. Anyway, Yost, Bertha, AI, quite a nice collaboration. Perfect fit. Really? SEO, Yost, Bertha, AI. We'll see where this goes. Have any of you played with Dali? Okay. When you,

we finish this call, all of you go and Google D a double L space E and it's an AI for creating images. And you basically, so on the website, there's no implementation of it. You have to actually, compile it and put it somewhere. But the principle is that you literally say, make me an image of a frog dressed as Santa holding a spoon.

This is good. And it does it and it totally does it. And then you say, give me four, four variations of the same thing. Give me a handsome

[01:11:06] Remkus de Vries: version of Nathan no, it's not that

[01:11:09] Nathan Wrigley: good.

[01:11:11] Remkus de Vries: it had limits. It has limits

[01:11:14] Nathan Wrigley: it's all that good. But the principle there, it's amazing. And again, that kind of stuff really concerned me.

And then I just thought, actually it's quite empowering on some level as well. Obviously, if you get into the deep fakes and somebody says, make me a video of Barack Obama saying these chilling words, that's not good. But if you en, if you enable a child to be able to create a picture of Santa, I don't know, wearing a Spider-Man costume, cuz they wanna stick it on their Christmas cards or something.

That's just fun. The diff the difficulty, is judging where the boundaries between scary. And cool are, and I'm not sure in my own head, I figured that out. So on

[01:11:59] Remkus de Vries: the AI side of things, there's many solutions already there that are way beyond what I would say the natural boundary should be there's AI that you can you can talk actually, if we were to upload the audio of this podcast, it would pick out our four different voices.

Yeah. And it would generate a voice. Yeah. If I give it a text based input, it would just make that voice, my

[01:12:30] Nathan Wrigley: voice I've done it. I've got an app called script, which I use, and it does exactly that. Yeah. And I will, when this podcast episode is finished, I will send it to script and it will say bit of te here's something who's this.

And I'll say that's mark. And then it will label everything as mark that's marked and beard. It will get labeled and I'm not gonna label you reus cuz you know, I'm just the rest. That's right. I'm just gonna leave it blank. Just that's fine. That's fine here. That's right. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. And then it'll, but you get the point and you're right. You can start typing. So you could say in my voice, hello, there's definite limits on what they allow you to do. There's restrictions. But they're just there. The technical capability is there. Interestingly, I don't know if Andrew is behind beha.

He said it's coming to ber as soon. Andrew, do you mean the image thing? The Dar. Because if that's really interesting to me, if you, or the voice or the voice, I dunno when he added that in whether we'd got, so Andrew clear that up for us, which you meaning by that.

[01:13:41] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay.

And while Andrews here I have a feature request

[01:13:45] Nathan Wrigley: oh, good. Do go for it.

[01:13:47] Birgit Pauli-Haack: One is that I give it a link and it summarizes that. But that page for me, yeah, in one paragraph or two paragraph, depending on what yeah, that would be really good.

[01:13:59] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[01:13:59] Mark Westguard: That would be useful for a meta description.

Right.

[01:14:02] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So that's one thing the other thing would be, but it's right now the plugin is only for my side, but I wanna have a summary from somebody else's oh,

[01:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: I see. Feed any random URL and get a summary back. Got it. That's essentially cliff notes. Is that an app or is that just a term?

[01:14:20] Remkus de Vries: No.

Cliff notes is a term of yeah. So when I lived in the United States and there were mandatory books that I had to read and if I didn't have time, I would buy the cliff notes version, which essentially is the digestive version of what that book is about. It gives you all the details.

It doesn't give you, I would say probably. 85 90% of the gist of it. Yeah. And the rest is just, too long didn't read. Yeah. But but essentially what BI is asking is I want a cliff note any site, any,

[01:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: right, have you heard of an it's an, oh, Andrew's gonna add it.

Andrew's gonna add it. Yeah. He says image manipulation. Great suggestion. Beha. Nice. Very good. Okay. Look, I'm not something actually happened on the show of enormous consequence. That's brilliant. See, this is contribution. There you go. Can I have a prop, one prop, whatever that looks like. Can I have it in physical form?

I want a little cube. What was I gonna say there? I was going to say something and now it's gone outta of my head. Andrew you've made me forget what it was that I was gonna say anyway, there you go. Dead. Cool. No it's gone. It has truly gone right back to things. We got very little time. We got about 12 minutes and a few extra bits to get through no crashes so far.

We're doing good. Yeah. Okay. Let's just do this one quickly, cuz there's not a lot of news about it. It's just a thing. Classic press was a fork of WordPress, which occurred when 5.0 came out. There was a lot of people who. We're very upset about Gutenberg being put into core. So they decided they wanted to keep WordPress with the tiny CE classic editor.

So they created classic press and it's been going ever since then. However, it looks like it's in real trouble. Because there's been a little bit of, let me use the word in fighting. That's probably overdramatizing it, but people having to step down because they now feel that the project isn't going, where it's wanting to go and it's financially doesn't look particularly viable.

So anyway, there's that if you're into classic breasts, it looks like they need your help and support. If you want to do that, this is always, oh, I know what I was gonna say. Reus. I know what I was gonna say. Have you heard of the audio app called Blinkist? Yes, I have. So BA that's your cliff notes in a, you don't even need to read, you can just get a book it's non-fiction book.

So they might take, I don't know, some difficult to understand philosophy book and they'll try to boil it. And I think their target time is about three minutes or something like that. But yeah. Anyway, there was that. Alrighty. Ready? I'm just gonna move on from that one, if that's all right. So this is the piece that we were talking about earlier.

Reca dropped into this piece a little bit, and it's just to say that. Is now it's the 4.2% of CMS market share. We often hear the 42 or whatever it is, percent of the web, but perhaps a more interesting statistic is what people are. So it, it given a hundred percent of the websites that are using CMSs, what are they using?

And it looks like a full 64.2% are using WordPress. It's the green one there that you can see on the screen, just for interests sake. Shopify comes in second at 6.3, which is, I dunno if that's growth or stagnation or decline, but that's still quite a lot considering it's, eCommerce only Wix 3.4 squares space at three.

I seem to remember that wicks and Squarespace were the other way around at some point, jur at 2.5 dril at 1.8, my beloved dril. I was so pleased to use for so many years, which was like at the sort of seven or 8% mark for ages now at 1.8 and then we go down Google systems. What would that be?

[01:18:20] Remkus de Vries: Google

[01:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: sites they had, yeah,

[01:18:24] Mark Westguard: They had their own CMS.

[01:18:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And this one surprised me because I keep hearing about web flow and how disruptive web flow is and how amazing it is. So when I saw this, I was expecting web flows numbers to be significantly higher than just under 1% is not 0.9%. Maybe that's terrific growth. I don't know. But Flow at not 0.9.

So still a reason to be quietly confident. Have you got anything with that or should we just move on? What's

[01:18:51] Mark Westguard: incredible with, this is the marketing budgets behind Ws and Shopify. I'll just immense through the roof. Yeah. If you look at their annual reports and you see what they're investing in marketing and overall as a company and they're just, honestly not scratching the surface with WordPress still, which I think is real Testament.

So to where

[01:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: we are. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that, mark. I'm gonna move on, cuz we really are running outta time. B last week. We talked about the fact that There was a lawsuit in Germany, a German court decided that a website which had used a Google font, which came out of Google's CDN, which therefore consumed the IP address of the, of anybody visiting that website that was unlawful and it broke the GDPR.

And so now we're getting into a discussion of, okay, this needs to be dealt with what are we gonna do? And it turns out that a very easy solution would simply be if you really want to use Google fonts and why not, they're free. There's lots of them. You can basically store them locally and queue them in that way, instead of from the CDN, Google CDN.

And so we need some sort of guidance on how theme authors need to be implementing this going forward in pretty much every theme that I'm using. And there's only a handful like two or three. They obviously saw this problem coming a long time ago, cuz there's just the tick box, somewhere in the settings, which says use local Google fonts and you tick the box and I don't know what they're doing in the background, but presumably downloading it cuz it's free to download the font.

You just go to the website and download it. So anyway, there's that. And then mark hopefully found this which is GDPR friendly fonts and it, again, it looks like Andrew Palmer's face is on here. Andrew, you're getting a right. Airing today. Duh, and mark. Do you know how this works or, yeah,

[01:20:55] Mark Westguard: it's just a piece of software you can install.

And what it'll do is let you choose which fonts you're using on your website. You can choose which what weight of font you want to download. And it kinda does the job for you. There is a little bit of manual processing with it, but I just thought it was a helpful tool to help people get those fonts downloaded, installed on their things.

[01:21:18] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[01:21:19] Remkus de Vries: It's it's something we should have been doing all along anyway, because it's a huge performance improvement. If you store quickly and use that. So the om FG plugin out there does essentially a version of what Andrews, not trying to think away your your thunder Andrew, but just wanna point out, there are more solutions who have been doing this from performance point of view.

[01:21:43] Nathan Wrigley: . O that's. I love it. yes. Great. And there are, yeah. Okay. So anyway, just be mindful. And the article I'll put it in the show notes, which will comment O MGF is it's O OGF. Thank you. This is on mate dot word, press.org. And I'll link it in the show notes tomorrow. Okay, good. B BA big.

It. Yes, tell us. Okay, so quick caveat. Just in Tadlock he's you've got him over on the Koberg times now. Very

[01:22:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: nice. Yeah. No, he not as a full time job or something like that, but we, he had a wonderful plugin just put into the repo. It was is now available in the repair there's one problem that they had with FSE.

And that was a major pain point that he also saw in the support forums. And that was that the legacy widget that you could use on the blog post and page editor was not available in the site editor where you actually wanted to add widgets to templates or template parts. So what he did was write a plugin for that.

So now you can use your the widget that are from third party plugins or from different custom post types. That you wanted to put alls on the photo and the sidebar and the header that you now can do that because even and the plugin developers that haven't switched over to making part of the widgets also into blocks that still you can use those plugins.

And that I think is a great effort to, to bridge the gap or the migration path for people who want to go from classic to a full set editing or to a hybrid. System where they can edit parts of the site, but not other parts. I ask him if he wants to put a little blog post together, so we have it on the good work times and can refer to it.

It's

[01:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: a God send. Yeah. It's such a, in many ways when I was reading this, I was thinking, oh yeah that's a, that's totally needed. That's like a hundred. We're going to be

[01:24:02] Remkus de Vries: in hybrid mode for so long. Yeah. And widgets and navigation, because there's also a block, sorry.

There's also plugin that does this just for the the menu block,

[01:24:16] Nathan Wrigley: Lock you can keep the old menus

[01:24:20] Remkus de Vries: and you want to, because the current system is just not workable. Yeah. Yeah. But this essentially supersedes this, cuz this allows everything.

[01:24:29] Nathan Wrigley: He's very humble, Mr.

Tadlock, cuz he does say he copied and pasted some code. He says, when I say I built a solution, what I really mean is that I copied the code from some existing documentation in develop handbook. Very nice. Played. Yeah. That's just in there. Yeah. Yeah. That's a nice so this is cool in, in many ways, your hybrid Matt, I like the idea of that.

I like the idea of a threeway toggle like classic hybrid and full site editing. That seems like that could be a much needed

[01:25:01] Birgit Pauli-Haack: thing. That's yeah, actually Anne McCarthy was talking about the different migration path and with the theme developers around WordPress, there was also a fourth one it's called the universal theme that does it both.

It does full on. Full set editing when you wanna do it. And it does a whole classic thing when you want to do it in classic and it actually targets on and off also the customizer. So it's the four it's classic it's hybrid that you just have a certain features from FSE, like the theme Jason or template parts or something like that.

Yeah. And then the. Universal theme that can both, and then the full side editing theme. So those are the four, four themes we are talking about right now. And I like that materials actually said on the Gutenberg change log podcast, when I ask him is that the new way and said actually what's going to happen.

Is that. Some of the features at FSE are going to just be opened up for the classic themes. And then theme developers can augment their classic themes to incorporate some of the features of full start editing into an existing theme. And I think that's a better way to do it than say, oh, this is the new way.

And the old way doesn't go in is gonna be discontinued, which is not the case. Yeah. Because there is a backwards compatibility promise there from WordPress and there's also a lot of people will still use it and yeah it's working fine for lot of sites. Yeah. I think FSEs for those who want to design their own websites or are not code based developers and all that.

So not quite a few things

[01:26:51] Nathan Wrigley: Andrew's making the point that mania Kamal is indeed. Doing some amazing stuff around Gutenberg. Yeah. It really is. It's astonishing what he seemingly him can do. We've got very little time. So I'm just gonna raise this one. If you've got $50,000 burning a hole in your pocket, and you would like to buy a WordPress media empire you can acquire WP lift.

Yeah. For $50,000. They have there it is on, there you go. It

[01:27:26] Remkus de Vries: sold for 200 K couple years back. Oh, so it's gone

[01:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: down a lot. Is it? Oh, substantially. I think there's a quiet now button for 200 K if you scroll down oh really?

OK. I I approached flipper about WP Builds and they came, they said about 80 Pence. The seems hard. I thought that was pretty bullish. Actually. I thought that was pretty, I was happy for 20. Did you have a buy now button for $2? It seems a little steep to be honest, mark, $2.

sell it to you for a pound. We'll talk after the call. 50,000 pounds. Yeah. $50,000. Anyway, it's just an interesting thing that is being sold. Yeah. Give you a quid, says mark. Okay. I'll take you a quid. I'll bite your hand off. And then last, but by no means this and I promise I didn't put this in the rundown.

This was mark. Yeah, but it's a good cause. We've got a swag shop over it. Do you wanna introduce it quickly, mark? Yeah.

[01:28:35] Mark Westguard: If you've got, some money to give to charity, give it directly to big orange heart, obviously a great organization, but if you want a WP Builds, mark or cap or T.

Which I did. So I

[01:28:48] Nathan Wrigley: did this. Can I just say mug? And

[01:28:55] Mark Westguard: I did. Yeah I do have a mug and I drink coffee from it frequently.

[01:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: yeah we donate, we don't, we give all the money it's Printful, it's that online service it's what do they call it? So drop shipping type thing. So whatever you make we just forward the Mullar on. So yeah, you can buy mugs t-shirts caps and and we'll give the money to the bug orange chart.

Yeah. We've overrun. I'm really sorry about that. Thank you for doing that. Yeah, that's fine. It just sits there. And occasionally somebody, some mug comes, somebody comes along and buys a mug. Like I'm gonna use that so often. I love that. go on your mug. That's it, that's all, we've got time for we've overrun.

I've got to go and collect children from school ever so soon. So we can't go on for too much longer. Just thank you to okay. Every. We have to do the hand thing we know about this. A thank you. That's brilliant. Give us a smile. That's great. But also, just, I've never done this. Let's try this.

All of us, when I say somebody's name, everybody's got to point to that person except the person immediately without any thought. All right. So are you cheat re serving a practice, okay. Point at reus. Got it.

okay. Point at big yay. And point of mark. I feel pretty proud. There's a nice way to end. We'll be back next week, episode number 216, something like that, but thank you very much for watching. Thank you for commenting. Thank you so much. Good. Take it easy. Thanks.