This Week in WordPress #217

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 217 entitled. How to cool your legs? It was recorded on Monday the 18th of July, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'll be joined by some special guests. First off we've got Michelle Frechette. We've also got Zach Stepek and Christian Raiber. What are we talking about?

Mostly WordPress, but we start off talking about misogyny. Michelle produced an article a few weeks ago, which delved into the whole subject. And so we spend quite a lot of today's conversation talking about misogyny in the WordPress space. And then we move on to other subjects. We talk about the new wordpress.org homepage and how you might be able to contribute to making that Gutenberg 13.6 has got some new model patterns for custom post types.

We get into the performance team and how they are giving you options for the, your persistent and full page cashes stackable. They've got a new block for maps, and we talk about a really nasty intrusion possibility with the famous WordPress five minute install. There's loads more that we talk about as well. And it's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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

Hello? Hello. Hello, episode number 217 of this week in WordPress. And it is pot in the UK. That is the news. It's never hot in the UK. It's always a bit rubbish the weather, but today we have heat and. I am not prepared for it. , I'm just gonna be this incoherent mess during the course of this show, but luckily I've got some people on who are gonna prop me up and keep me going.

The first of whom is Michelle Frechette. Hello, Michelle.

[00:02:29] Michelle Frechette: Hello? Hello. It's good to see you. I just realized that as I'm very short person, all it says on my t-shirt is the future. Yeah. Nice. Just if I stood up, it would say the future is seller, but I feel like that's my pro wrestling name now. Is that just like the future?

[00:02:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Michelle from the future? There's a lot more to Michelle than that as we've heard in the past, but I'm gonna go through the resume. Michelle frache is the director of community engagement, a stellar WP at liquid web. In addition to her work at stellar WP, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP coffee, talk.com.

Go check that out. Co-founder of underrepresented in tech creator of WP career pages, the president of the board for the big orange chart, director of community relations and [email protected], business coach, author, and a frequent organizer at and a speaker at WordPress events. Michelle lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she's an avid photographer and you can find out more on her website, meet Michelle.

Dot online, meet michelle.online. Very nice to have you with us. Once again, Michelle. That's nice. And we got a yeah, I really appreciate it. And we got a couple of new guests today, new people, new blood. Yay. And the first of whom is Zach, how are you Zach?

[00:03:47] Zach Stepek: I'm doing really well. Thank you.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Yeah. It's very nice to have you on the show. Zach has a has a much more pithy introduction. So I shall just go through that. Zach is the CEO of mighty swarm. He's an expert in WooCommerce site optimization and performance, and we'll be using that knowledge later and a professional concept photographer.

So Michelle takes photos of wildlife. You take photos of co like that. That's a career. That is a thing you can make money taking concert photos. That's cool.

[00:04:18] Zach Stepek: It's possible to make money doing it. Not a lot of people do. But yeah, it is possible. I actually shot a show last week. Mud vein, the hard rock band came back for their first

[00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: tour.

Do you get into a niche of the type of band that hire you? Like rock you're a rock photographer or I don't know, an orchestra photographer or something like that.

[00:04:45] Zach Stepek: Yes. Generally you'll cover something that you are passionate about. So for me, it's hard

[00:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: rock and metal. You like to be near the mosh pit, taking photos of all that with the strobes.

And I do,

[00:04:56] Zach Stepek: I do.

[00:04:58] Michelle Frechette: Photos are amazing too. Like you should unearth a, you for us share a link because

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: could you put a link in the private chat and and I'll share it a little bit, cuz I genuinely will love to see those. I they're phenomenal. I am a, I love taking photographs, but only with my phone, I, I love taking photographs, but I don't like to contrive them.

All I'm about is taking pictures of my family. But I do it habitually, I probably take 20 or 30 a day and I've always wanted a real camera and I've always wanted to be like, have a grown up experience with photography, but I've never got to it. So I've got no excuse now. Thank you for joining us sec.

I will share that link in just a moment. And we are also joined by Christian Reber. Hello, Christian.

[00:05:44] Cristian Raiber: Hello

[00:05:45] Nathan Wrigley: everyone. Hello? Christian has just informed us that, where he lives the part of the world, where he is the surname and the first name interchangeable. So I wouldn't introduce myself where Christian lives is.

Nathan Wrigley. I would be Wrigley. Nathan, the family name comes first and the other, what did you call it? The given name or something? No,

[00:06:06] Cristian Raiber: it's the family name. So in your case, I'm gonna assume Wrigley is your family name that's right. Nathan is your first name right first. So it's based on the spelling.

So if you wanna spell it in, in. My part of Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. You write it with family name first, and then your your given name. I think it's name is family name. So it's

[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: a confusion here. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit like those pesky dates where the Americans always put the month first and then the so confusing the day of the month.

It's very confusing, but they say it that way. Don't they say March 3rd, whereas we say 3rd of March. So we, yeah, we're both doing it the correct way around, but it's very confusing. Yeah. Especially when both numbers are below 12, if both numbers are below 12, it's like what. I don't even, is this happen in February or what?

Anyway, Zach, let's do your proper introduction. Zach is the [email protected] Christian has been working with over 10 years and has built or acquired a collection of plugins that are being used by over half a million active users all while managing a remote team.

He loves talking about anything, business, WordPress investments and product management, time of day, and Christians best known plugins are modular image gallery, strong testimonials, and lastly, download monitor. It's an absolute pleasure to have such a really cool panel today. We just got a few little quotes and things to get through first, if that's alright, because we like to make sure people are sharing this.

If you wanna go share this stream, please feel free. Swell the numbers share WP Builds.com. Forward slash live. I'm gonna say that again. WP Builds.com/live. Put your drink down, get the keyboard out, gone just quickly off you go rip in that URL. Come back in a moment, share it on the tweets or wherever you do sharing.

I think it's supposed to be Twitter these days. Isn't it. If you are joining us and you want to make a comment, lovely, please do keep it clean. And if you're coming at us from Facebook, you'll need to go to chat.restream.io/fb. Otherwise you'll be anonymous. I suppose if you're anonymous, you can write what you like, cuz we won't know so there we go.

So go and do that and thank you to those of you who have already made a comment. I really appreciate it. Let's just highlight a few of those quickly. So Courtney Robertson, thank you very much for joining us. Oh yeah. Hot rainy clapping. No, sorry. Tea, rainy clap. I've got all just three sons. It's just some.

Sun, glass of water, sun. That's what my emoji stream would look like. And hello, Cameron. Cameron. I do believe it is hotter in the UK than it is in Australia for the first time ever. Ever. Yeah. That's yeah. Stella stellar. Libra is the future says Courtney in response. No doubt to the teacher. Oh, love it.

I love it. Love Zach. Cameron he's an Australian developer. I dunno if you've come across Cameron before, but he loves heavy metal music say day seeker and thorn hill over the weekend. That means nothing to me. Yeah. It's a type of, oh, I saw, oh, I see. Okay. Saw. Okay. Couple greats. I have never heard of them.

You'll have to coach me and Peter Ingersol says hello. Hello, Peter. Before I turn into a Sultana of a human being, just like this little alien shell, because of the dehydration we should get on with it. So let's crack on with the actual WordPress yours. Let's put the screen on, this is our website.

WP Builds.com. If you fancy subscribing, there's a well, that's handy. It's called subscribe the link at the top. Click that you'll go to a page, fill out some forms and then press submit. That's all you need to do. Good. Glad we've done that. Let's start with some controversy. Let's start with an really interesting, an interesting piece that Michelle wrote, actually, Michelle wrote to me about two or three weeks ago and said, I've written this piece.

Can you mention it in the show? And I said, I can mention it in the show, but I'd rather wait until you are on next. So it's not exactly a new piece, but it is an important piece, but we thought we'd have Michelle on it. Now it's all about misogyny. And just let me point out that there's three. Of us three males and there's Michelle.

So first of all, slapped wrist for Nathan for not doing very well on that point, but this piece,

[00:10:36] Michelle Frechette: at least ISN, at least it isn't four white men. So at least I here.

[00:10:41] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. There is at least four white

[00:10:43] Michelle Frechette: men talking about misogyny is really a misstep yeah.

[00:10:48] Nathan Wrigley: This though, right? I had to read it a couple of times because honestly, Michelle, I didn't get that this sort of stuff was going on.

So you've written this piece in response to basically the volcano has erupted. It sounds like you've been like this swelling of misogyny going on in the word press community has been bothering you for a while and eventually the dam burst and you've included some what I can only describe as horrific things that you've seen online.

I will post the link in the show notes, but it's [email protected] and the article is called it's called misogyny in WordPress is real and just post that.com/and then that title with hyphens in between the words basically. Yeah. And, oh my Lord. Our first thing I've gotta ask Michelle is this.

Is this like fairly typical.

[00:11:42] Michelle Frechette: So yes and no. So obviously the examples that I've put in, I put four examples in the post and those are probably at the level of the most heinous that I've seen. Okay. If I were to write a post and say, oh, this guy said he, instead of they, or he, instead of she, everybody's just gonna roll their eyes oh, get over it, Michelle.

So if I bring to you and there are more than four examples, I limited myself for the length of this article, it isn't there's only ever been four examples of men behaving this badly. And quite honestly, there are women who are misogynous as well. I will say that quite out loud, there are women who have defended this kind of behavior.

There are comments on the blog by women who are like just learn to live with it, I think is what they said and just ignore it and move on. And if I want to leave this world a better place for my daughter and my nieces and, whatever pro comes after then I can't just put up with it and move on.

Being somebody who really cares about human beings, I want to leave this place a better place. And so pointing out that this behavior happens is one way of helping others realize that it's everybody's responsibility to create a safer space for everybody. And that of course includes women and non-binary people.

And WordPress is. I will preach all day every day, how amazing WordPress the community is, but that doesn't mean we're perfect. And that doesn't mean that there aren't, as I put in, I'm gonna the first line in the article, I think is what got people

[00:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: posting it. Oh yeah. It's really good. which

[00:13:28] Zach Stepek: is,

[00:13:29] Michelle Frechette: I love the WordPress community, but a few of you are assholes and I did go to Kate, to Corey and Lindsay and say, is it okay if I say this?

Cause I could change it to jerks. They're like, no, keep it. It's perfect.

[00:13:42] Nathan Wrigley: There's another line, a little lower down, which I'm just currently gonna highlight, which I also like it you then go on to say the WordPress community is, it's a good community. It's prob maybe not as bad as other places, but then you say, and yet some of you need to have a house dropped on.

You preach it. Say it how it is. Anyway. Sorry, Terri.

[00:14:04] Michelle Frechette: I do it's a good turn of phrase, of course. You read these things for so long. You can sprain your eyeballs, rolling your eyes back in your head, or you can put yourself out there and make a target of yourself. Like I did.

And say we're tired of it. And if other women aren't in a position to be able to speak up without retribution, then I'll be the person to do that. , I jokingly, but also realize that there is a kernel of truth in it. Say that within the word press community, I'm gonna say it sounds so funny to say this about myself, but that I have a level of, let's say belovedness people like me in the WordPress community.

And I think the majority of people in WordPress know that I have altruistic intentions. I give a lot of time, money and effort into the WordPress community to make it a better place for every. And so for me to take on this as somebody who very few people are going to attack me for this, they might be saying it behind my back, fine, whatever.

But people aren't, lamb basing me on Twitter. I haven't been canceled. I didn't lose my job. And by the way, I did share this with my job, my day job with stellar. I shared it before it posted because I wanted them to be aware that if there's backlash, they might hear it as well. And so I did everything with my eyes open put on my, my, my big girl panties by , my square squared, my shoulders, and hit publish.

The evening before I was on a panel with Josepha Courtney and Ebony about the all women non-binary release squad too, by the way. It worked at Montclair. Yeah. So it's, it really happens. There are really people that are this horrific in the world with these ridiculous concepts of what women should be and should do.

And we need to do better. And the goal of my article isn't to change those people who are die hard misogynists, they are, I'm not expecting that they're gonna change. Would it be great if they did? Absolutely. But I'm sure their behavior has been pointed out to them over and over again. My goal is that Nathan, Zach and Christian might not see it because it doesn't affect them.

Yep. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, right? You, I don't see things that don't affect me either, unless somebody points it out. And when somebody points it out, I'm, absolutely appalled on their behalf. And I will do what I can to make safer spaces for people by pointing this out. I'm hoping that people like Nathan, Zach and Christian can see.

More of these kinds of things happening and help make the safe, the space, a better and safer space for all.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna, I'm gonna paint some context cuz quite a few of the who consume this podcast. Won't be watching it. most vast measuring to it tomorrow. And let's just give you some flavor of what Michelle is talking about here.

The first one that you mentioned that you screenshotted I'm guessing is in Facebook, it looks as if it might have been, it is. And somebody had noticed that in a, in the sort of admin panel for a popular word, press plugin, they had said super admin, he has full capabilities. And so they reached out to the developers and said, look, it's, there's a bit of, there's a bit of something going on there.

Could we just really think about that? And somebody who is on the screen, you can see now basically just thought this was ridiculous. The idea that this language was toxic to them was abhorrent, just leave it as it is and stop complaining essentially. But then it got really nasty. And this person essentially said at this point, I think if that kind of stuff offends, you.

You really ought to be getting sticks, poking your own eyes out, which it okay. Fine. Whatever. But it's incredibly Ince to write that kind of stuff based upon the solution which had been proposed, which was harmless to everybody changed the

[00:18:14] Michelle Frechette: word he today. Yeah. To they. Yeah. And yeah. And can I just say, if you go back up and at her original comment, women often couch things with humor.

If you go all the way up to her original post Kathy's post. So she's actually trying to make it funny because women get attacked all the time for saying these kinds of things. So she says help my eyeball muscles, please for having to roll in my head. And I try and say this, she's trying to make it like, Hey, I love it.

This is great. And, we always try to couch things, humorously oh my gosh, it was, I'm not a dude or we say things like that, that because otherwise we just get attacked. So she even tried to make it like, oh, this is so funny, braiding my eyeballs, blah, blah, blah. And then he comes in and says, your eyeball hurt.

If your eyes hurt them, pluck them. Out's ridiculous. Yeah. Ridiculous. Yeah.

[00:19:05] Cristian Raiber: Yeah.

[00:19:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So there was that, can you imagine being that triggered also, can you imagine that person doing that in the real world? Exactly. You have a license to do this online because you know that you will never in all likelihood meet this person and have to actually face them face to face and justify your your, the words.

Also that, there's no context of what was going on in that person's life on that day, but still inexcusable. Then we had somebody I dunno where this is. It looks like it might have been Twitter. Who were basically saying women shouldn't code, which will get onto in a minute, Kathy Z obviously had something to say about that.

Basically saying that women are incompatible with coding because at some point they might have children and if they have children, then their career path will be broken. They'll come back and let me quote they, after nine months maternity leave, they come back, obsolete and outdated okay. And then it goes on to obviously use the common tropes of this isn't discrimination. No, it defines discrimination. I'm sorry. It's ridiculous. Just stand down. You can't you claim that something's not true merely by claiming it's not true. The moon landing didn't happen because I say so.

And then we add, you know what, there's more that I could say here. There's more pieces that you. Who wrote this one in particular, somebody was just basically saying in a Facebook that they apparently in a Facebook group, about 33,000 people. They only wanted to speak to the men. So they used a common phrase, which I guess comes outta people's mouths all the time.

I confess I've definitely used this phrase, gentleman it , it comes out

[00:20:52] Michelle Frechette: point men's mouth. It doesn't come outta

[00:20:54] Nathan Wrigley: women's mouth, but they then double down rather than saying, oh yeah, that was a stupid thing to say. I should probably just have written nothing there. Just delete words.

Sorry. Call something. Yeah. Yeah, exactly which most sensible people would do then went on to essentially claim that this was right. Don't worry. I was only talking to the men and that's fine. So now I'm all angry. I'm gonna pass it over to Zack and Christian, the way this show works, Zach and Christian is if you wanna interrupt at anytime, feel free to do but's the only way I'll get a word of edge, right? That's the only that's right between me and Michelle. We're gonna talk for an hour and a half. But I dunno what your thoughts are on this. This I'm just,

[00:21:32] Cristian Raiber: Ugh. I have some thoughts that maybe could contribute to the big picture of this entire thing so I can get why they think like this, because I come from a country that's very misogynistic as.

Underdeveloped in this specific area. I'm not a misogynistic person myself. I did catch myself like the five first five minutes we had before we started the show I joined and I was like, Hey guys, because this is the phrase not being a native English speaker. This is the most common phrase I been used to using to say hi, when I enter a room, it's not generally inclusive. And I realize that it's, it can be offensive. So different cultures of the world have different perspective on men and women's role in society does obviously I'm not accepting that I'm not okay with that myself. Just putting a bit of BA.

I have context into this and explaining why I think these people think like this and act like this, obviously it's not, it's never a pay to act like I have my vision and this is how the entire world should be shaped. Like I have my thoughts and women should be only, won't only stay home and give birth to children.

That's it's been the common conception, like up until a hundred years ago. That how was how the majority of our society was defined. But nowadays, equality is everywhere and a lot of people are fighting for this. And again, I know why they think like that. I'm not okay with it.

I just think that it's gonna be impossible for them to change their points of view, no matter how much anyone tries, it doesn't matter. It's a woman. Even less if it's a woman cuz they won't listen. Even if it's a man, it's just a cultural thing. And until the entire culture around the changes, they won't accept this change, different cultures, different ways of looking at life and the society around us.

I won't name cultures around the world that I know specifically are very misogynistic, just one name them, but I know they exist and hopefully, you know exactly the cultures I'm

[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: referring to. That's a really interesting point, maybe one to develop at another date, but I'm gonna pass it over to Zach for his thoughts on this.

[00:24:01] Zach Stepek: So it's really difficult for me to see things like this because it's so not who I am. And. I try to be as inclusive in the language that I use as possible. And I slip up I say things that are, more gendered than I intend or or I just say dumb things sometimes that happens. But it's very difficult for me to see something that is so pointedly just rude to, 51% of the the world.

And this isn't the only area where we see this kind of gender discrimination in tech. It's not mentioned in the article, but equal pay has been a giant fight for years and so much so that there have been there have been things up to, and including lawsuits in the community for this, . And so it's really, it's a really important thing to make sure that as company owners, as members of the community, as people who have a voice that people listen to, that we use that to make sure that we bring the community together and not tear it apart. And so comments like this like these that are mentioned they serve no purpose, but to further divide.

And I just, I can't stand

[00:25:51] Cristian Raiber: that. And quite the voices basically try to shut them up. Cause they don't think they're trying to use,

[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: valid. Yeah. Okay. So a couple of things that I want to add in at this point, maybe three, probably two, the first one is tech Michelle. And I'm gonna ask you, because I think you've probably got a broader perspective on it is tech uniquely bad.

So as an example, if I walk down the high street where I live and, shops left and right left and right, it would appear that the balance there of people working in those kind of environments, it seems more or less to have balanced out over time. And I'm sure that a hundred years ago that would've been a different picture, but I wonder if tech is curiously imbalanced for reasons that I don't understand.

[00:26:40] Michelle Frechette: I think tech is imbalanced. I think it has a lot to do with our stem majors, our steam, so science, technology engineering, right? Math areas that have typically been encouraged for men, but less so for women, I graduated high school in 1987. I graduated 21st out of 321 people. And yet my guidance counselor discouraged me from going to college and told me I should stay home and be a mother.

[00:27:08] Zach Stepek: Right.

[00:27:10] Michelle Frechette: And that was a woman telling a young woman that in 1987, and you would think 1987 is not like the dark ages. It isn't, oh only women could go to typing school nursing school and be teachers. I've got a master's degree, all, but dissertation on a doctorate.

I clearly. Have what it takes to be an intelligent person working in any industry that I choose. And I am by far not the most intelligent woman. I know. So it's just, it's asinine is what it is. And it's, I think it's been a gate keeping attempt to make sure that men are the ones that profit men are the ones that control.

It's always about money and power. And if you keep money and power with white gentlemen, then they will continue to have the authority in government. They will continue to have the authority in business and they will continue to have the authority in those homes that believe that. And so it's definitely a, an issue beyond technology, but the tech industry, think back to.

The, making cars, technology, isn't just computer technology, right? Technology is everything. Realistically. Technology goes as far as, making vacuum cleaners and kitchen gadgets, and the fact that women aren't even traditionally, haven't been part of those things, even though we've been the biggest consumers of them because of the way that our society groomed women and young gentlemen should go in opposite paths growing up.

It's just, it's crazy. I don't even know what else to say about it.

[00:28:49] Nathan Wrigley: I've got a few anecdotes to throw into that before I'm gonna ask my second one. And the first one is that we have a family friend who has just, I say just they're a year in they've they're now doing a computer science degree at a really prestigious UK university.

She is the only. Female on the course of many hundreds. And we talked to her about this, and if you rewind, it goes lower. The you've gotta you go back a few years before the university application process, she was the only one doing the combination of the sciences that would get her onto that course.

In other words, there was some filtering happening at the school level , which meant that the, that there were very few females who wished to go into those sciences and she knew for a fact that a lot of her friends and colleagues would enjoy this kind of career, but it just got filtered out until.

There she was by herself. And I think as far as I know, enjoying the course, having a great time will come out incredibly well, qualified , but the mechanisms of society seem to have made it such that it would've appeared less interesting so that there was that thing. And then the other thing I wanted to ask was, I wonder how much of this is like a social media thing.

So we are talking about it because of these horrors that we're reading. I don't mean that the problem is a social media thing. The fact that it's been, people are willing to say this stuff. They're basically willing to say things which are unsayable in the real world, because they know that they live behind that prism of well anonymity.

Basically, I have no idea who those people are that you've mentioned. I'll never see them. They'll probably never get to say this stuff to your face. So there's a couple of things there what's really

[00:30:32] Michelle Frechette: interesting is that there were a lot, there are a lot of comments on that blog post. There were a lot of comments that we didn't publish because they were published and I.

Not publish them because they were antagonistic. I clearly you can see, I published antagonistic comments, but they were [email protected] They literally anonymized themselves. Yeah. Yeah. If you're gonna attack me at least say your name. So not only are you misogynist, but you're a wimp. Yeah.

[00:31:05] Cristian Raiber: They're afraid of the potential backlash of the community.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, then

[00:31:09] Michelle Frechette: they should keep their mouth shut and stop typing the things they wanna type, say who you are or just go away.

[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the curious thing about this is there's obviously no way that the four of us sitting here talking about this is gonna solve this problem, but I just thought it was a really interesting article.

And Michelle, you said right at the beginning that you three and I am definitely, you were absolutely spot on. I don't see this stuff for reasons that I don't know those kind of comments never make it my way. I don't tend to associate in the real world with people who would behave like this in the real world.

And for some reason, the way that Facebook serves things at me and Twitter serves things at me, I don't see it. So I was genuinely surprised by the level of IA and stupidity, frankly, that was visible. And I hear it all the time, Twitter's poison, but I don't see it because I ju it just.

Somehow doesn't get through to me. So that was a point. Made a couple of comments come through about this. The first thing was Daniel, schul Smith. Hello, Daniel saying that he enjoyed your article and he thought it was great. Getting back to the original he comment right at the beginning when we started talking about it.

Can you imagine Peacher says Cher, Mary, hello picture. If she had been used instead. Yeah. That would've been interesting. How that reaction she showed me. yeah, it would've been interesting cuz then it would've been portrayed as a, you're bending over backwards to be politically correct or something like that.

No doubt. Still don't oh, are we on we're onto the music there? No, technically, oh, this is the

[00:32:39] Michelle Frechette: one who said that tech lead was the person, the at tech lead was the person that said that women shouldn't be coders because they might get.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. And then Daniel carries that on tech lead was fired from Fang, which I've never heard of for his abor rhetoric and being a bad developer in general.

Okay. There you go. He, I can only make a name for himself by putting others down. We know that characteristic in life. Don't we Courtney word camp 2009 one of only four women present. Okay. So some sunlight possibly because she says then we've come so far, we've got a long way to go. So I'm guessing Courtney, that, both you and I were at a word camp recently, and there were definitely more than four, although I'm not sure what the balance of that was.

And then Peter Ingersol, it's one thing to make a mistake, learn from it, try to do better. It's a completely different thing to double down on the bad and be offended and defiant, empathy and learning should not be so hard. Yes. We live in the 2022. We ought to try just to be, it still

[00:33:41] Cristian Raiber: boils down to culture, right?

If you're not. Empathy towards women. As you grow up, you're gonna keep repeating that same mistake without, even thinking about it. Second, guessing your intentions behind it. And you understand your ground every time someone challenges your opinions on the matter you're going like, no, this is the reality of grown up.

This is the entire world. I know he looks, he, or she looks up the window. And she, or she, he or she, sorry, sees his concepts being applied to his society. The society he lives in. It's almost impossible to force these people to think about stuff they've never seen. It's you're trying to force them to imagine something.

Just by using your words, something they've never seen or experienced in their lives go outside. They see their view of the world being applied in their area of living. And here's someone online, who's writing a message and it's selling them. This is not correct. They're gonna be expensive almost immediately of that idea, cuz they've never experienced this.

Otherwise women are on them. Don't talk to them like this.

[00:34:56] Nathan Wrigley: That's a curious point. And one that I hadn't really figured on too much. And Michelle and I probably both live in culturally very similar. Countries. I would imagine that, there's slight differences around the edges, but broadly speaking, the politics is quite similar and the ability for people to yeah.

And the legislation surrounding this is quite slim similar. I'm imagining it's the same for Zach. So good point Christian,

[00:35:24] Cristian Raiber: add a note to this. So the entire thing revolves around more developed societies where, if you look at, as society's needs as a pyramid, you've fixed all the ones at a bottom, which are usually have access to clean water, clean air equal jobs for everyone.

Good. You can live above the poverty line on minimum wage, and these are bigger problems for certain parts of the world. Like Eastern Europe, specifically, the part I'm coming from is Romania, where people don't even have time to think about these. Like they haven't even been able to fix fix, fix the basic problems at their level they constantly focus just on getting by every single day.

Right.

[00:36:21] Michelle Frechette: But those aren't the people who are actually taking to Twitter and attacking women. So it's entirely different group of people.

[00:36:29] Cristian Raiber: Yeah. This is my culture. But what I'm trying to say is yeah. More developed countries have started thinking more and more about being more inclusive, sorry, because they've already managed to fix.

All basic problems. So they're that they're now moving up a tier, right? I've moved from Romania to Liman Portugal and in many ways, Portugal is so much more developed than UN inclusiveness, way more developed. In other ways it's surprisingly poorer than Romania, but in so many ways, it just proves that even though they're poorer and they might not have access to higher education, as much as Romanians, do they still manage to live a happy life and just be overall friendly and understanding and patient people around them because their culture is very D.

Than the one we have back in Romania. So that's a huge difference. Steve grew up entirely different.

[00:37:31] Nathan Wrigley: And one of the is family, sorry. Yeah. I think that's a really interesting point that we've never really, that has never really permeated into my head before the whole culture thing, because obviously, to some extent you are a product of your environment and I get what you're saying, Christian, in terms you're not excusing it.

You're just basically saying this is maybe if you look back, maybe this is a cause of it. And yeah. It's curious, really interesting. Anyway, I was deeply annoyed by the piece. Oh yeah. Don't get me wrong. It's annoying. Yeah. Really annoying. And there's a couple of people in here making some fairly.

Thank you by the way, Fang. Okay. Fang F I should have spotted it. It's an acronym. Of course. Fang, Facebook, Amazon, apple, Netflix, Google. I get it. Facebook user, whoever you. Christian has the most soothing calming voice. Of course he does. He's got a company called WP chill. It's obvious now I get it.

So also Daniel's saying Christian, the folks making these comments are from industrialized nations are no better. This isn't a culture thing, and I'm not sure Daniel that's the point that he was trying to make. I think he was trying to make the point that in some cultures it is more difficult even though in these cases, these individuals are.

Ignorant and inexcusable aren't they? Yeah. Anyway, I'll let you, and Daniel fight that out on Twitter. anyway, I just wanted to mention that Kathy's aunt was she was in awe of your piece, I think is probably the best way to describe it. And I want to raise a a piece which came from it.

It was called women should code and it's Kathy z.com/women code, which. Sorry. Zant I apologize. Yeah, just Zant what a nice URL she got there. Oh, how I would love to have wrigley.com. I suspect a large chewing gum manufacturer bagged that long before I got it. Anyway, she's written this piece about the fact that she has noticed similar trends and the fact that she's been the recipient of this and makes the point that she's just as capable anyone else stand down basically, but go and read it in its entirety because like the friend in our they're a friend of our family, she's an epic, epic, epic coder by all accounts.

And yet is, faced with the problems that the industry is going to give to her. Let's draw a line onto that one and move on. So totally different subject. Now we're back onto WordPress, the code and the software, and so on wordpress.org, it needs a homepage redesign and they are looking for some ideas.

Apparently hasn't been changed since 2016. See a lot has changed in WordPress since 2016. That of course, I think. It was long before Guttenberg was even like the kernel of an idea, but now that's all baked in. And I just wanted to mention it. If you're interested in this, you can go and give or give your opinion about it.

There are you basically, you can get involved. They've got some ideas around what that new design may look like and so on, but some curious idea jumped out and this I think is cool. One of the people commenting, I can't remember whether it was on this piece or a Ary piece over at WP Tavern written by Sarah Gooding, but somebody suggested wouldn't it be a great idea.

If the homepage featured a bunch of patterns that you could then just use on your own website. And I thought, yeah, that's that's cool. Just show off. What's possible. So the page is looking a bit out of date. If you're interested in getting involved in that you can, and I will put the links in the show notes for tomorrow.

I dunno if Christian, Michelle or Zach you've got anything you wanna say about that, but if not, I'll just move on.

[00:41:13] Zach Stepek: I think the interesting thing about the. Project kickoff post is actually Matt's comment on it.

[00:41:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, right at the bottom. I saw that. Yeah. At the bottom a couple of days ago.

Do you wanna read jump? Shall I just read it out quickly or yeah. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. So he said, this should take a week or two to launch not months. And the most interesting part will be the stats and the feedback after launch and the subsequent iterations we make from there not a long process before the forward slash news redesign took criminally long.

I thought that was an interesting choice of language. We have a lot of.org to redesign and a lot of accumulated CRAF for example, the navigation right now, we can't take too long on any one part. Carry on.

[00:41:56] Zach Stepek: So I just thought it was very interesting that was, his take on how quickly these things should be done.

I think he's right to a point, but I also think that planning makes things take two weeks rather than the other way around not planning makes things take longer sometimes . So I was curious what the rest of the panel here thought on that if he's right or if we just need to plan and do this, the longer, yet possibly more effective way.

[00:42:34] Nathan Wrigley: I'm imagining just very brief thoughts on this. I'm imagining that doing it quickly without a lot of thought would, there's gotta be a lot of SEO on that page. A lot of real solid years and years of things built up and just quickly throwing something out and iterating on it is maybe not what I would be doing.

I'd wanna really make sure that we'd crossed all the I and dotted the Ts. But yeah, I do the idea of moving things quickly, but two weeks, two, two to three weeks seems really quick for a property such as wordpress.org, which, it's gotta be in the top couple of hundred website visit visits on earth.

I would've thought. Anyway, sorry, Christian or Michelle?

[00:43:15] Cristian Raiber: Michelle please.

[00:43:17] Michelle Frechette: Clearly it's not like they just thought this up on the 16th and are going to implement it in two weeks. So there's been some forethought already. I don't know what that is and how much I won't say planning since clearly.

That's not the word we're using, but there's definitely been some forethought about it and what should go into it. Also I am a strong proponent of done is better than perfect because if you are seeking perfection, it will take forever. And we know that we hate when things take forever in WordPress, especially.

I love Cameron's. Cameron says, I'd be curious to know when the last time was that Matt actually built a website, but I, two weeks ago, apparently. Yeah, apparently I I like to build a website overnight. I'm one of those people that'll just sit up and take 12 hours, finish it and be done, or at least mostly done.

And I could see some of the benefits of that.

[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Christian.

[00:44:08] Cristian Raiber: I just think that you can feel Matt's frustration with how slow things slowly things have been moving in this, with development, like all the plans they had for Berg are way delayed right now. And he's been, popping up on Twitter or anyone anywhere, basically public in the past few weeks with kind

[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: of bit of harsher

[00:44:35] Cristian Raiber: comments.

And it's it feels okay let's ship this. Let's do a basic version first and iterate on it based on feedback, which is the it's my personal Mo way of doing things as well. First we break things then we ask for apologies. Right? Move . Yeah. Should first ask questions later.

Totally out of context. I know just. The idea is like they've spent so much time in the past iterating asking for feedback, and at the end they just shipped a version that the community was not happy with. And they, they had a lot of pushback from the community and yet they were like, no, yeah we spend so much time on this.

Let's just, just keep it life like this. Instead of that, like how about we spend less time in the initial phase, just ship it and then do small increments, small update, small updates on a page based on community feedback. So at least we are hearing their ideas and thoughts and actually working on this to make sure everyone's you.

Not everyone's but points. Yeah. Actually matter

[00:45:45] Nathan Wrigley: are being more more waterfall and sorry, more agile than waterfall. Exactly. Imagine the the stakeholder on the sort of agile product, maybe just like one or two people in a committee room, this like millions of people with their own opinions on what it should look like.

I'm sharing the design aesthetic. If you've looked at, I think, if you've looked at like Jafer Blog and various other places like Gutenberg you'll see this creeping in this blue and this font. And I have to say I really like it. I think it's really nice. It, it definitely looks different to anything else I've seen, which in this day and age I think is really hard to achieve.

The first time I saw that blue and that font on a WordPress site was a bit oh, okay. That's curious. So I think they're going in the right direction, but yeah, for my part I always like to slow things down to get this right. But yeah, Christian, let's go for the agile approach. Let's throw it out there and see what the see what the community thinks over here.

We've got somebody Facebook user. I'm not sure who you are, but two weeks is too short in my humble opinion. It sounds rushed. And it will most likely be in that case. Yeah, it doesn't mean it's gonna be bad. Yeah. Yeah. Just just quicker. Yeah. Like you say the fact that Matt used words criminally, it took a criminally long time.

I think it is pointing to the fact that he would like things to more faster go quicker because yeah, the timelines are definitely getting pushed back a little bit. Okay. Thanks for all of your thoughts on that. That's the same piece, basically. Okay. Very quickly. Nice new feature. Guttenberg 13.6 has now got a patent model.

So basically when you create a new custom post from a new custom post type, then you're gonna get the opportunity. In Gutenberg 13.6 to choose a pattern from a mobile, like a full screen model that pops off, which is nice. I like this way of doing things. I've always liked it in things like Elementor and all those page builders where, start a page, click a template in you go just seems like a really nice way to make a quick start.

So that's coming soon again. Sorry. I'm rushing. Cuz I realize how much time we've got left. If you've got anything on that, just jump in. If not, I will move on. It's moving on time. Okay. Anne McCarthy got in touch. She wanted me to mention that the full sighted call for testing has arrived. It's number 15, category customizations, and I'll quote, to keep it brief.

This call for testing focuses on what on the surface feels like a common task you might have done in the site. Editor, creating a new template and applying it to some posts as you go through the tasks. You can read that bit for yourself, but basically if you're interested in testing out the full site, editing they're onto categories and what templates bound to categories might look like.

So in other words, if you go and you have a post with a category of WordPress, you could create in full site editing, hopefully in the near future, a template which will deal with WordPress categorized posts, and they wanna check this out. And there's a whole bunch of instructions, the process she wants you to walk through and then give feedback to on the end.

I don't suppose anybody's got anything. So I'm just gonna crack on, right? Okay. This is Zach's wheelhouse because it's about performance. The performance team, adding persistent object cash in full page cash to site health checks. Whenever somebody says object cash. I faint. So I've managed to get through fairly easily.

At this point to quote in the near future, WordPress may be able to provide better cashing recommendations for site owners because the performance team contributors are proposing two new site health checks for persistent object cash, SW and full site page cash. The performance lab plugin, which is a version 1.2 0.0 has both in a state.

The team says is ready for merging into core, quite a few comments on this piece, but I'm just go, okay, let's just hand it over to Zach. Zach, tell us what this is even about, and then tell us whether it's a good thing or not.

[00:49:44] Zach Stepek: So really this is about letting you know if the site that you are running the, the site health check on is.

Properly cashed, both object cashing and full page cashing. The comments are an interesting thing on this one. Because what they've done is they've added hooks that or filters that hosts can use that news that allow replacing some of the notes with the preferred. object cashing or even page cashing for the the host that you're working with, which I think is actually a good thing.

But people are saying that they don't think that hosting companies should have the ability to change anything that the site health checks say. That'd be great if all hosting was the same, but it's not, it's just not.

[00:50:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think that go on, sorry, please carry

[00:50:51] Zach Stepek: on. I think that them being able to go in and put something there that helps people on their platform, if it's called out as being a recommendation from the host, right?

If there's something there that says your host says this, in addition to. That would be probably the best of both

[00:51:09] Nathan Wrigley: worlds. Yeah. So this idea that your hosting company could hook in and add extra information about their platform. I read that and instantly thought that's cool. That's exactly what we want because then your hosting company can tell you, look, it's not just some sort of generic thing, go to this page on this dashboard and click this button.

And if that doesn't work, then we need to get on a chat and, you need to call up support. And I just thought that was really cool. And then the first comment says hosting companies should not have the ability to fill with site health checks. And then I started to think, oh, I wonder if it's can you imagine hosting companies like dropping advertising in there or just something really nefarious like that?

And then I was thinking, okay, maybe that's where they're coming from. They just don't want hosting companies to be able to inject something into your dashboard in what looks like an authoritative WordPress place, because it could vary, you've got the upgraded cashing option where you can click this button and pay us another $10 a month, this particular suite of products and so on.

And so I got that. So I'm wondering maybe that's what the, maybe that's what the concern was about. Host getting in there and putting messaging that really doesn't do the user too many favors, but does them some favors for their bottom line?

[00:52:29] Zach Stepek: I think that's part of it.

[00:52:30] Cristian Raiber: Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but couldn't host just hook to those filters and J just change the output message making it look like.

Yeah. Where we've got we are, we're doing all these things here. Everything's fine. Don't bug us about it. Don't worry about it. Your site is running. Absolutely perfect.

[00:52:49] Nathan Wrigley: So I'll give it some context. This is from Sarah Gooding's piece on WP Taven where she's quoting Manuel, or Manuel Rodriguez who is from the performance team who said, and I presume she's quoting host may sorry.

A few details about the. Filters might be used. Hosts may want to replace the notes to recommend their preferred op Ugh. See, I can't even say it. Object cashing solution hosts may want to replace the original link to WordPress documentation with their own guide link. In that way, they are completely open to advertising.

If it's just a link, it might not be in the site, but they could easily create a beautiful landing page host or site owners may want to bypass thresholds and force suggestions or filter them to determine whether to suggest use of a persistent object cash. Developers can filter the threshold below with a which a response time is considered good.

Most of those seem like sensible options to me, I guess my concern is that somebody just decides to abuse it. But yeah, that all just seemed on the face of it. It's like all these things. It's a sensible idea, but you've gotta think about the abuse bit, cuz if it is abused, it's suddenly turns out to be not a good idea.

Yeah. Okay. Anything on that, Zach, any more to add, or have you had your bit, so

[00:54:06] Zach Stepek: The one thing I will say is that it does look like the notes are actually just a variable being filtered. So it looks like you can just add text possibly a link. So it, it doesn't look like it would be very easy to abuse, but it could be abused.

Yeah. The nice thing is that would only show up in environments where a plugin has overridden those by. Adding filters to those.

[00:54:38] Nathan Wrigley: I can totally see the piece though, where, so you take square space and as an example, they just don't need to worry about this because all of their customers are just using their solution.

They're just gonna deal with the performance and the user never needs to know, but depending on which configuration of plugins you've got and therefore which, and which hosting platform you're on and what tier you're paying for and how much Ram you've got, all of the bits and pieces which go to make up hosting, WordPress does need something like this, because if they are gonna be performing and they're gonna keep up with the likes of square space, then we need regular users to have some sort of insight into hang on a minute, your site's not performing very well because you haven't done this thing.

And this does seem to me to be a sensible way forward.

Yeah and

[00:55:28] Zach Stepek: that kind of leads into our next piece, which was the yeah the podcast with Felix on the Tavern and how important thinking about performance is from the beginning? Felix is involved in the new WordPress performance team where core is actually trying to focus in on performance as a key thing.

Whereas it's just been a given that we should be doing it, but it's never been checked that we are. So that's a big change and how important it is for us to think about performance as we're building, because now search engines are really looking at how fast pages are more than ever before.

And that future rankings might be affected by this. And given that, Felix is working at Google as a developer relations engineer and has been the lead engineer on the site kit plugin, which Google uses as a way to get your data into Google.

[00:56:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thought you were gonna say something else then no into Google.

Yeah.

[00:56:48] Zach Stepek: Yep. Yep. I was trying to think of the best way to say it without trying to be accusatory.

[00:56:54] Nathan Wrigley: You could have said dashboard, but then I

[00:56:56] Zach Stepek: thought that yeah, I think it goes a little, both ways, get your data from Google, into your dashboard and get data from your site to Google. But yeah.

Given that he's there I would imagine he has some insight into how search engines, like Google are looking at our page performance

[00:57:17] Nathan Wrigley: and speed. It's fascinating as well that Google are now seemingly all over WordPress, go back several years. And I several means quite a lot, a decade or more.

I don't remember Google having the sort of dominance taking the big booth at the word camps. Now they're all over the place. They're always like the gold tier sponsor. They've got the giant booth. They're really interested. They've got this site kit plug in. They're paying people like Felix, not just to be part of the community, but to build and develop plugins because they know WordPress 43, whatever percent will come to that later.

They know that this stuff matters. And on these proprietary platforms, you'd have to think about it on WordPress. You really do. Yeah. There's quite a lot of wisdom from Felix in that episode. I really I struggled my way through it, but I managed to get through it with the modicum of knowledge.

There was quite a lot that ended up on the editing floor. Let's just say that, or I said, can you explain that to me? And I'll ask the question again thing. but it came out good in the end. So go and check that out on the Tavern. And can I say, I've gotta say Zach, nice segue. Brilliant York. That was pretty darn good.

Okay. Very quickly. Word cam. Asia is open. Call for speakers is now open. Do I need to say anything else? Looks like the event obviously got canceled because of COVID. Oh, in the most horrific way, they were like a week away from it all happening and then it all got pulled. It is going to be hosted according to the site here on the 17th to the 19th of February.

In Bangkok, Thailand one and a half thousand people expected, and they obviously want people to speak, cuz that's the point. So if you're into that, if you fancy jet over to Thailand and you wanna speak now is the moment the article on WP Tavan will help you locate all of that. And if

[00:59:10] Michelle Frechette: you can't travel, we just announce the call for speakers for November 18th for word

[00:59:16] Nathan Wrigley: Fest.

Nice. I missed that piece done. I'll mention that next week. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Oh, okay. I'll put that on. Where's it going? Was it going, was it, I can't see it in the chat, but maybe that's in the private chat. Private chat. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It somehow just popped up in my thing there. So let's just add that in quickly, cuz that's worth mentioning.

I will probably do a better job of mentioning that in the near future as well.

[00:59:40] Michelle Frechette: I appreciate. I think I'm on next week with you so I can talk about

[00:59:42] Nathan Wrigley: it. Yeah, that's great. Okay. There it is. Anyway, word, first.live/ 2022 November slash November. So yeah, if you don't want to attend and get on a plane word, Fest has got your back.

Alrighty. I'm gonna leave that one cuz there isn't enough time. Oh no. I don't wanna leave that one because Christian wanted to talk about this one. Is that right? Christian? Have I remembered correctly?

[01:00:03] Cristian Raiber: Yeah, but if we don't have enough time, we can just keep over cuz because it's gonna be a long conversation around this one.

[01:00:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. See I think I'm gonna drop this one if that's all right, because sure, absolutely. Just don't think we got the time, just a quick couple of shout outs. If you're into using blocks, you've probably heard of stackable premium suite of blocks that you can add into your WordPress website.

They come up with quite a nice new one, which I don't know I've seen before I could be wrong. It's called the map block and it does exactly what you'd imagine. You click the map block and it enables you to locate it, drop unique pins in it, color it in certain ways, all of the stuff that you've seen elsewhere that you've probably had to wr.

Within with the code over on the Google website, you can now just do that and maps, like basically all, almost every site seems to have a Google map on it these days on the contact us page. So this seems like a pretty cool idea. You can check it out on stackable.com on their blog. It came out last week.

So you can check that out in your time if you like, nothing to do with WordPress, but I just wanted to plug this tool. I've got this, it's called horrify. It's a Chrome extension who knows? Maybe it's Firefox. As well, I don't really know, but it's a wicked cool little extension, which allows you to inspect your site.

It doesn't try to do an awful lot of stuff, but it enables you to, for example, download all the assets from a particular webpage. So obviously if it's your own website and you just need to get a particular image, it can just chalk 'em all down, get, you can get videos and stuff. I'm not saying anything.

I'm not saying you would want to use that. But if you did taking videos off the internet, this apparently will allow you to do it. It's just really cool. It's constantly under development. They send an email at every two or three weeks where they've overhauled something or done something new, just highly recommended, basically hover if I it's on app Sumo.

So go to the app Sumo and, type in hover if. and you'll be able to get it for $49. It looks like which honestly, I think is a great deal. Okay. this, I don't even know what to say about this. OneLA MES Smitka has produced a blog post this week, which I read and I really was like, oh, really?

That's a thing. Oh Lord. So the five minute install of WordPress, Chuck the files over, link it up, then go and create a database and then write down those credentials somewhere. Then within a few minutes, you're gonna go into WordPress, launch the site type in the database name, user, and password and all that sort of stuff.

And yay. WordPress website, dead simple. Ha no, because it turns out that there's nefarious people out there who are scraping the registration of new domain names. And then with some sort of clever Jery pokery, which is explained in this website in the time it takes you. To go and write down your database credentials and all of that.

They've just gone and done it for you. They've just got into your site, set up the account, put in a load of back to whatever they like. And I just thought, oh Lord. So now it needs to be the famous two minute install or the famous 12 second install, or we need a different install process altogether.

Or I guess you could just use your hosting company, which might just do all this in a few milliseconds. But yeah, I just thought this was absolutely fascinating. I'm not really explaining it very well. It's worth a read, but I suspect that Zach has something to say about this. I could be wrong.

[01:03:35] Zach Stepek: Yeah. So this is why I don't make sites live until I'm. With making sure that things are secure and taken care of like that. A lot of hosts when create a new application or a new site they take care of these steps for you. So that's a helpful thing. If you're doing it on your own yeah.

Just make sure that you don't have the installer open to the world. Until you've gone through the process. That's the easiest way to avoid this,

[01:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the problem here is that like for the nerds listening to this podcast episode, they're gonna be able to go. Yep. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

We won't do it that way in the future or we'll mitigate it somehow. We'll read around the problem and figure it out. But this is like the official way of doing it. And if the hackers are figuring out ways to just circumvent it in the teeny tiny amount of. That it takes to do that process, literally minutes, they figured out what your IP address is.

And I've gotta say, it's just fascinating, the way that they cover their tracks, they're using all these VPNs to discover things and then entering the credentials and then setting things up in your website and then backing away so that it looks like everything's completely normal, essentially, probably to send email from your website, which nobody wants, but this is the official way of doing it.

And if there's a back door into this, which is being exploited by robots, then do we need a change? Do we need this to like, not be an official way because that's a real problem waiting to happen. We get millions of these all over the internet. Ooh.

[01:05:24] Zach Stepek: Yeah, I think that, it is troublesome that it's so easy to take advantage of an open board press install like this four minutes from the certificate issue to abuse the installer.

But in some cases, the attacker managed to do it in under one minute. So even the one minute install wouldn't be enough. Yeah,

[01:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. That's right. I, from a technical perspective, I don't really know of the way that you would circumvent that, if you are literally downloading WordPress and you are uploading it, FTPs FTP, whatever it may be, you are doing it in that manner.

That presumably there's gotta be some point at which you are given a form to fill up the config file with the information that is required. I don't know, in the current way of doing things, if there is a way around that, Obviously, like you said, your host can take care of this and probably it'll all happen.

Booming. Just all more or less immediately obviating that problem, but oh yeah. Christian or Michelle, anything on that before we press on?

[01:06:31] Cristian Raiber: No,

[01:06:32] Nathan Wrigley: not really. Okay. Nope. All right. Anyway, just be careful out there. You've got a new WordPress website, just be careful. That's all we're saying. That's all we're saying.

Okay. Jobs. We sometimes mentioned that there's jobs around and this week I came across the fact that lifter LMS, they have a web developer job. If you like writing code, they're hiring a web developer to write new code evolve, existing code bases and accelerate the lifter LMS engineering function. You can go and find out about it.

Lifter lms.com/web developer dot lifter. I think you're wearing their shirt today. I yeah, I am. I am. Can I just say, during the course of this episode, I have discovered I've made a really fascinating breakthrough about how to cool down and it is this, you put your legs out under the desk and you just gently rotate like that.

And my lower half has just dropped by about 10 degrees, cent grade. It's absolutely lovely. My top half is still like I'm in a Coldron but the half is it's really FID. Good. So there you go. Hot tip.

[01:07:42] Zach Stepek: quite literally hot tip. Oh,

[01:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: tip . Yeah, very good. Yeah, it comes, you can find this hot tip over at WP chill.

it's

so happening this week. Oh my goodness. Oh no, we're plumbing. You that's we're plumbing. You that's okay. It may, you may or may not know, but. Automatic. I'm gonna say automatic. I think it's automatic. Anyway the Matt Mullenweg in some way is the custodian of Tumblr. And there was a, an interesting podcast, which I listened to this week over at tech crotch.

This has got nothing to do with WordPress, but I just thought would be quite an interesting debate. We have Matt Mullenweg making the claim that he thinks that Tumblr can be better than Twitter. And I just think, okay, if you'd said that to me six months ago, I would've said no, not so much.

Nobody's interested in Tumblr, but I wonder what were the Elon sort of poking around and now backing away. And everybody seemed to be questioning whether Twitter's gonna be around in the same form that it will. Anybody. Is there anything in this story, does anybody use Tumblr for anything at all ever anymore?

Or is this just him trying to, trying to make something out of nothing? I don't know. I don't

[01:09:01] Zach Stepek: the younger generation spent a lot of time there and then the not safer work stuff went away. Yes. Yep. That's what I'll say.

[01:09:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Made a lot of feel sad. Yeah. Yeah. I just can't see it.

It just doesn't feel to me like a place which is getting any traction at all. I've used it, but I, it feels to me like it's a, like a bit of a MySpace. It got to the point where if it's not the thing that everybody's using it quick very quickly at, it just stagnates and nobody's gonna be hanging around in there.

I can't see myself installing Tumblr for love nor money, to be honest. I think the point

[01:09:39] Cristian Raiber: he's trying to make is that with Twitter moving into the long form content game. Yeah. Yeah. And Tomberg getting Gutenberg and all the goodies that have made workers, such a great publishing platform, they're essentially billing out a better publishing tool yeah.

Than Twitter is or ever will be. That's the difference. I think he's making here otherwise, just making it as popular as with given where it is right now. I think it's gonna be a

[01:10:09] Nathan Wrigley: really

[01:10:10] Cristian Raiber: horrible, uphill

[01:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: struggle. Yeah. Cuz it feels to me as if the only interface that J just to get this outta the way I am the most lousy Twitter user, I really am.

I'm unable to understand it in most ways, but all I, the only interface I want is a text box and a keyboard. I don't need the, I don't need the flashy, the grids and I don't need the containers and the groups and all of that. I just. A the ability to type some text and maybe throw, an I Sendry gift in because that's what Twitter is.

It's like this very quick in and out. Don't think about it too much as Michelle can attest to the lack of thought platform. And it's not really about long form publishing. I dunno. I just wonder if we're eating the word press.

[01:11:04] Cristian Raiber: They think so Twitter think it is because they've got a lot of creators in as an audience, right?

Building up huge following numbers, follower numbers, sorry, on, on Twitter. And then they're linking to their blog post they're like, and if you wanna read more, just go to my website here and re read this blog post where. Wrote a 5,000 word piece on it. Now Twitter is just trying to take people away from going out of their platform and keeping them there.

Yeah. It's it's it makes sense in a way especially with the acquisition of revenue. They're trying to go after sub stack now. So basically just create a long form content, lock it

[01:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: behind a pay wall,

[01:11:48] Cristian Raiber: all on Twitter. So you don't have, you don't need a website now you don't pay for hosting.

You don't have to fill with AEO settings. You don't have to install anything. You don't have to worry about security. You don't have to worry about anything. It just works out of the box that, it's just one platform, right? It's just one place to have it all for you. Easy to get money from other people they've introduced monetization.

It's easy to connect with your audience. Everything lives very, you've got built in analytics right now. It makes a lot

[01:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: of sense. History shows that he's pretty good at, turning platforms into giant successes. So yeah. What do I know? But yeah. Yeah. Oh, anyway, there we go. Tumblr, let's see if any let's come back to this story in literally six months time and see if there's any change.

Sure. My guess. I think we know what my guess is from everything I've just said okay, Michelle, you're up? We've got the LearnDash piece learn. I've got the LearnDash website up here. The LearnDash cloud website. Yeah. Tell me about this. So

[01:12:56] Michelle Frechette: learn dash cloud is a way for content creators course creators to launch their.

Content in their courses without having to already have a WordPress website, learn dash cloud is better than SAS because it actually continues to use WordPress, but for anybody it comes with you get your site, a WordPress site with learn dash pre-installed and you just start creating your content right from there.

So it's a brand new, we just launched it last week. We're still working out, those just launched. Issues and questions and answering questions people have. And it's but it's brand new. It's fresh off the presses and we already have people creating courses with it. So it's very exciting.

So

[01:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: is it a rock up, pay your money and clicks, and buttons. And you've got yourself an LMS everything's taken care of ally, wordpress.com kind of thing. You just you've gotta bring the material, but all the other bits of books are

[01:13:58] Michelle Frechette: done. We don't create your curriculum for you. no, that would

[01:14:01] Zach Stepek: be

[01:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: really good.

[01:14:04] Michelle Frechette: just click here to spit up a photography class though. That's

[01:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: maybe someday, but not yet. It's coming. It's coming. So it's a basically done for you solution you, but it still leverage with WordPress so you can throw right. Your third party plugins and whatever else it is that you've been. So

[01:14:21] Michelle Frechette: let's say that you've built your website in, an alternative Content management system, you can still have learn dash by linking through to your coursework on your learn dash cloud website.

[01:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: This is cool. So when did this actually launch then last Tuesday. Nice. So it really is new. Let's have a quick check on the pricing. Shall we? Yeah. Okay. So one 90. Per year per site. You can see on the screen, all the bits and pieces that go in. Oh yeah. Okay. So if you double that to 3 99, you're gonna get 10 sites per year.

And if you are some kind of like Uber school, like a university or something, you can go unlimited. Oh, you double it again.

[01:15:08] Michelle Frechette: Okay. And that's not one course, that's a site with as many courses as you'd like to create.

[01:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: This pricing model it just always fascinates me the idea that you go from one, double it to 10 double it to unlimited.

I just find it so interesting. Cuz a lot of companies seem to be doing this exact model. Now that exact number one 10 unlimited. And there must be wisdom in that. But there you go. One side there aren't

[01:15:33] Michelle Frechette: a lot of people that need unlimited. So yeah.

[01:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean it never is.

I mean it, if it was unlimited, we'd literally be consuming the Earth's resources, but one 10 or unlimited there you go learn.

[01:15:48] Michelle Frechette: That includes you're hosting. We're hosting it too it's

[01:15:52] Zach Stepek: everything. That doesn't it's if you flip the switch on the pricing page to full site, then you'll see

[01:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: the cloud.

Got it. Got it. There we go. Thank you so much. I'm sorry.

[01:16:01] Michelle Frechette: Sorry. I apologize. You were looking at the plug. Oh,

[01:16:04] Nathan Wrigley: full so am right. Okay. Here we go. 29 per month for the cloud hosting. So new, in fact, is it that both me and Michelle didn't spot that there's a toggle at the top. luckily we've got Zach along for the ride and yeah, for,

[01:16:19] Michelle Frechette: for launch, it's a a monthly, we're gonna be moving that to annual fees very shortly.

So this is your opportunity to get in at that

[01:16:27] Cristian Raiber: price.

[01:16:27] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you for hair. It's very nice, indeed. Yeah. Cool, cool. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on. This one is gonna be coming back to Christian, because he's thrown this one in, this is from a website called get ellipses. They're a website specific WordPress marketing agency.

And they've got this thing this week called the launching the weather report. WordPress is down 10.4%. I gotta say Christian, I read this and then I read it again and I still didn't get it. So explain.

[01:16:59] Cristian Raiber: So I read it three times before I could make sense of it.

[01:17:03] Nathan Wrigley: done

[01:17:04] Cristian Raiber: one more. You're not the only one.

And I intuitively knew what they were trying to say, or at least assumed what they were trying to say. And yet I couldn't figure that out just by reading their piece. So it looks to me like they're trying to build a tool and they're building the bits and pieces right now.

And the first piece they're built is this algorithm there's internal. And it measures the health of the entire WordPress space, but not as we've been used to measuring it in the past Yo's famous Uly reports with WordPresses, WordPress is going up, WordPress is going down.

WordPress is stagnating in terms of growth, which is another a story for. Long story anyway. Yeah. yeah. And the way to vendors, this it's so confusing. It confused so many people on a post slack channel. They're not open sourcing their data. They're not telling us where they're pulling in this data, how much data they're pulling in what exactly is being included in this algorithm.

When you're looking at an EO algorithm, Google gives you a list of 200 plus factors they look at and tell you here's a huge list of things we look at when we determine the quality of a website or a webpage. And in this specific case, nothing about it. You just know that something is down

[01:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: 10.4% yeah,

[01:18:42] Cristian Raiber: yeah.

From what I've gathered is they take all the data, all the keywords they monitor for the clients, even the keywords that they haven't used for their client. Imagine they, they do keyword research for your project, right? And they come they take this list of keywords they come up with and pass it through their AI and are left at the end with only a handful of keywords they deem are good to go after cuz you have the highest chances of ranking number one.

But they pluck the entire list into a database and then they monitor all of these keywords. That's how they ended with a hundred thousand active keywords. They monitor plus volumes from ad budgets that their clients spend. And they somehow aggregate all this data. And according to them, all of this aggregated data is down 10.4%.

That's the bottom line. How that's useful to you or applicable?

[01:19:46] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno. Yeah, cuz I was thinking to myself, last year I bought four cushions. This year I bought no cushions. So I cushions are kinda cushions. Cushions are down absolutely. Across the planet. They're all down. Yeah. And that's all the data.

And it said, yeah, I didn't really know what to make of this. I saw people linking to it all over the place and obviously, 10.4, 10.4% down. Good grief. We need to really reexamine our relationship with WordPress now I thought, but the what data, what on earth is this about?

So what did you glean that there was anything meaningful in here? Or was it just, okay. We've got some data. We're not gonna tell you what it is, but it's down. I think

[01:20:24] Cristian Raiber: I could summarized this as the idea is good. The execution is not

[01:20:31] Nathan Wrigley: got it.

[01:20:32] Cristian Raiber: The idea is good. They're trying to set themselves up some, set themselves up as an authority in this space where everyone just goes every quarter to check in on the WordPress health.

So just go to their. Webpage tool, whatever, where they can host this specific

report and

[01:20:51] Cristian Raiber: they can always help you get your numbers up, cuz they're marking agency did the authority in this space, but otherwise at the end, just reading this it's so confusing. It just feels rushed. Like they worked on this for so long that at the end of it just says, publish.

[01:21:08] Nathan Wrigley: And we'll see what, yeah. All works very hard on the data, but the last little mile communicating what that data actually means was yeah we'll see what they come back to. I will link to it in the show notes because we've been speaking about it. So it's over at get SIS stock. I don't think it's a bad

[01:21:26] Cristian Raiber: thing by the way.

Just think it's very confusing,

[01:21:28] Nathan Wrigley: that's it? Yeah. Yeah. We'll find out, if next year when WordPress is down exactly 10.4% on every metric, they predicted it we'll be like good law. They are good. Yeah. F and AI is the technology that they're working on and its consuming data from all over the place, but we don't know where let us know where the data's coming from and what you're doing with it.

And maybe we'll be able to make more sense of it. Very last piece, cuz the time is fast running out. We've got two minutes left, but Michelle right at the 11th hour wanted to throw, we don't do this very often. Michelle, an actual book, an actual. Physical thing with real ink bit suspicious about these things.

To be honest, I actually

[01:22:10] Michelle Frechette: pre-ordered it. So I'm looking forward to getting it very soon. But this is a book by Maddie Osman, who is, you may know who she is has done a lot within the WordPress community. And she's written a book called writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style.

And so this book, actually in 30 minutes, it's gonna hit all of the Twitters and Facebooks and everything else with a huge book launch. But congratulations to Maddie and very much looking forward to reading it. We're actually gonna have her on underrepresented in tech podcast this week, because she has a whole section on inclusive writing, which I don't think we've seen in very many books and things about content writing.

Very excited to talk to her about that too. So congratulations to Maddie and it's not expensive. Go out and pick up her

[01:23:00] Nathan Wrigley: book. If you if you've got the Kindle unlimited, which apparently is on my screen it's completely free at the moment. Go and, oh, the paper back's gonna be $12 and 99 cents.

Thank you for raising that to for us, I did wanna write at the beginning of the podcast, I said that I would link to Zach's Instagram account, where he chose off all of his cool concert photography. There it is. Instagram.com/z S T E P E C. Zach, and let me see if I can put that actually into failing me, let me see if I can put that on the actual website. Let's have a quick look at some of your cool photography. Go Instagram. Will I be allowed to use Instagram if I don't have an account? Okay. Yes, I use essential cookies. Oh, look at this. Oh, you are good.

[01:23:57] Zach Stepek: Thank

[01:23:58] Cristian Raiber: you. And if anyone from our panel I'm talking to the two photographers we have here.

Need an image gallery solution. I can connect it to .

[01:24:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yay,

[01:24:09] Michelle Frechette: Christian. We were gonna talk about that. We haven't yet. So I'll I'll ping you over in slack after meeting

[01:24:17] Cristian Raiber: Zach as well. Invitations is always open. I've got free lifetime licenses for you folks. So

[01:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: just hit me up.

[01:24:24] Michelle Frechette: Definitely you

[01:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: taking advantage of that.

oh, look, this is what happens to me when I use Instagram. I get that.

[01:24:30] Michelle Frechette: I dunno why you can get, you can go a little bit and

[01:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: then you, can I get over it? Can I get over that? This is great. Do you actually get time to listen?

[01:24:38] Zach Stepek: Yeah. Yeah. So we're only allowed to take pictures in the first three songs of each set, right?

So we get the rest of the set to just enjoy and listen. And then No, I'm in front of the barricade,

[01:24:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you're in that little bit, that little gap where all the people who've got thrown out, the mosh pit end up. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. That's safe. Safe zone.

[01:25:02] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. A little known fact for you too.

Nathan is our eyes and our ears work at the same time oh,

[01:25:08] Nathan Wrigley: Don't confound me with that. That's not true. I've heard this rumor and it's definitely not true, but yeah, you could barely cope with standing up, let alone all that. What I really like about this is you've got a groove going on.

Haven't you there's obviously like a, there's obviously a way of. Handling this and there's like a certain art to it and the lighting seems to be a big part of it. Yeah. Oh

[01:25:36] Michelle Frechette: yeah. Zach is phenomenal with this camera.

[01:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Thank you. Nice job. I'll put that into my into the show notes for tomorrow and let's see.

Let's see what people wanna make of that. Yeah. So that's instagram.com/z, as we say, step X, so Z step X. And like I say, I'll link to it in the show notes tomorrow, who I am actually hot. I'm freezing. I know. It's not fair. My,

[01:26:04] Michelle Frechette: my AC is the AC is going crazy

[01:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: here oh, I see. Okay I'll trade your AC for my hot if possible, but thank you.

Thanks for joining us. Michelle for Shep. Thanks for joining us, Zach. Thanks for joining us Christian. Now, Zach and Christian. I'm sorry to do this to you, but it there's a humiliating portion of the podcast, which is about to happen. And yeah, it's this bit. We've just all put our hands up and we just wave for a few seconds and then I can use that as the album art and give it a bit of, yeah, sure.

Yay. That's it. The humiliating bit is over. We will be back next week. Actually.

[01:26:37] Cristian Raiber: It's not start with that honestly. Oh, okay. Yeah. He just

[01:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: sets to move for the entire show everybody up. Okay. I'll think

[01:26:45] Michelle Frechette: So Facebook user is reus and he says, trust me, Nathan, you're not that hot

[01:26:50] Cristian Raiber: oh,

[01:26:52] Nathan Wrigley: what? Yeah. Honestly, I'm not alright, I'll put that on this, but yeah, he did say earlier that's me REM because I didn't realize you you looked around in Facebook.

That's interesting. And I am not that hot. I honestly, objectively, I am. If we're talking about the mechanism of heat, I'm very hot in every other sense of the word ice cold. And on that bombshell, we'll be back next week. Take it easy. Have a lovely day.

[01:27:23] Cristian Raiber: Bye.