This Week in WordPress #218

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 218 recorded on Monday the 25th of July, 2022. This episode is entitled 300 plugins.fish. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'm joined today by Michelle Frette, as well as Nick Adams and Kirsten Wright. We're here to talk all about WordPress and there's lots of news.

The first couple of things are about images will soon hopefully be able to upload SVG and have WebP images created for us. We also talk about a new default theme for WordPress, which would heavily feature block patterns. It sounds exciting to me. wordpress.com have decided to backtrack on a change that they made to their pricing and.

We have a new project by Mike Oliver called the website builders collective. We get into that. And what it's all about, there is a proposal to have a plugin checker for WordPress, a bit like we do on the theme side at the moment, it should automate many of the things that plugin developers have to at current have manually approved.

We also get into the fact that I had a podcast episode with am hens, all about accessibility and tons of offers. Stellar WP are giving 40% off their entire suite of products. And surprisingly, during the show, We managed to get everybody 25% off WP buffs as well. 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. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you are in the world this week in WordPress. Can you believe at episode 218? Ridiculous. I hear you scream, but we've managed to get there and we are joined this week by three lovely guests. We got the often here, Michelle frat. How are you doing Michelle? Good.

[00:02:31] Michelle Frechette: I actually don't think of myself as a guest.

I think of myself as a rotational. Co-host

[00:02:35] Nathan Wrigley: that's it? You are a rotational co-host I like it. I like the rotational bit. You are one of our six rotational co-hosts but our pleasure to have you back again, if you Don's know Michelle it's. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate the time that you put into it.

Michelle, if you don't know, is the director of community engagement for stellar WP at liquid web. In addition to her work at stellar WP, Michelle is the podcast barista at w. Coffee talk.com sorry. WP coffee, talk.com. I think I butchered that. And she's the co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com, creator of WP career pages, the president of the board for big orange heart.org, director of community relations and [email protected].

She's an author, a business coach and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. And as we'll find out in a moment, she's just added something else to that biography, which , which will no doubt say in weeks to come, but you can find out more about [email protected] pleasure to have you thank you for joining us.

Yeah. And we've got two people that we've never had on the show before. So that's always a pleasure for me. It's lovely to have some new guests and thank you for joining us. First of all, let's go to Kristen Wright. How are you? Hey, I'm doing well. Where are you based Kristen? I'm in

[00:03:56] Kristen Wright: the very hot Oklahoma city at the moment,

[00:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

Okay. So does that mean it's ridiculously early where you are? Oh, I'm sorry. No, not too early. Not too early. Okay. Okay. Thank you for joining us. I'll do your biography as well, Kristen is the marketing director. I themes founded in 2008. Ithe was one of the very first premium WordPress companies and is best known for their WordPress security plugin ithe security, which we will be talking about very shortly towards the end, cuz they've got some nice new features coming out.

There's also backup Betty body, which was the original WordPress backup plugin. And since 2011, Kristin has led content, email and product marketing at ithe working behind the scenes to build one of the most trusted brands in WordPress and on the side, she's the creator of the transformation year, a year long email series with daily journaling prompts.

She's the author of two books on journaling. Tell the trial and a tiny existence right before we go and introduce Nick, I don't even know what journaling is. So tell me very briefly. What is journaling? I'm guessing it's like just a daily. What I might call keeping a diary. It

[00:05:03] Kristen Wright: is a lot like keeping a diary, in fact.

So it's just like a daily record of your day and, insights, introspection, all that good stuff. So has a lot of mental health benefits.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Is I was gonna say, is the purpose of it to go back and examine what you did from a sort of mental health point of view and take note of where you were and how your journey was on that day and what, which things worked for you and which things didn't.

Yeah. It's

[00:05:27] Michelle Frechette: just a,

[00:05:27] Kristen Wright: It's a conversation with yourself, oh, okay. A lot of people you need that outlet to be able to reflect on your day and your life. Oh,

[00:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: That's amazing. That's really cool. There you go. There's a new guest, Kristen. So thank you for joining us today and last, but by no means lease, we joined by Nick Adams.

How are you doing Nick and where are.

Doing great. I'm in Boston, Massachusetts, where it is also equally ridiculously hot right now.

[00:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Do you know what I live in the UK, which basically 363 and a half days of the year. You can never say that, but today is one of those times when it is, they've got the sun streaming and you can see I'm basically in heaven, everything's this pearly white and and it's lovely and hot here, but yeah.

Thank you for joining us, Nick. I'll just do your bio as well. Nick Adams, as you can see, he is the CEO of WP buffs. Since 2016, WP B has been providing 24 7 WordPress support and maintenance. The global team of experts take care of your entire website so that you have time and freedom to focus on what you really want to do.

How's it all going over there at WP buff? So you still continuing on your growth path?

Absolutely. Yeah, the team is continuing to grow and And just being all over the place we've got, our team is on every continent except for an. So if anybody's got any leads on any scientists or penguins looking for a job , we can get on that last continent.

[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: That's so good. Imagine that having a maintenance plan for a website in Antarctica, that be so cool. Just to tick all the boxes, get all the, I, what do it, let's see if we can find somebody in Antarctica. Thank you for joining us all three of you. I really appreciate it. And thank you for anybody.

Who's coming into the comments. Feel free to drop in any comments. If you wish to remain anonymous on Facebook, that's fine. But if you don't wish to remain anonymous and you would like us to know what you look like with your avatar and so on, then you've gotta go through this little step. You've got to go to chat.restream.io/.

More chat.restream.io/fb. And that will de anonymize you or get to see who you are like, for example. Actually Kathy is coming to us via Google comments cuz she's over on the WP Builds page I think. And she says, hi Carmen, that's very nice. And this person has not de anonymize themselves. I dunno.

They are. Michelle is I'm gonna guess. Can I guess yeah go.

[00:08:01] Michelle Frechette: I think it's pizza, but

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not sure. Okay. All right. Let's find out Michelle is 1% winning the vibrancy contest this week. Ah, you're talking about ah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I never win that contest. There's no chance that I will end

[00:08:16] Michelle Frechette: that I can send you some purple dye if you'd no,

[00:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: don't send me the purple die.

Oh dear. Maybe for charity one time. No offense to everyone else says Pete, a non taken and as always you get an award or something camera and he's always staying up late on a Monday night. He's in Australia. Can you send some heat wave my way bloody freezing here says just wait a few weeks, Cameron.

I'm sure that things will turn around. If you do wanna join us in the comments, I'd really appreciate. And maybe stop for a moment and go and share this it's WP Builds.com slash live. There you go. WP Builds.com/live and see if we can get some more people in having a chat with us. There's quite a few already, but let's get on with it. Shall we? Share the screen and start naing and droning on about WordPress. As we always do. First off, this is our website. WP Builds.com. If you fancy subscribing, click that link and we'll keep you up to date, we don't need to say much more than that. If it was feature on the comments, just then I'm doing a thing with feature tomorrow.

We typically try to do it each month, but COVID and word camp Europe got in the way a little bit. So we had a month or maybe two months off this time around, but we're doing one again tomorrow. We're doing one of our live UI UX appraisals. And it's happening at 3:00 PM UK times. So it's basically more or less this sort of time-ish and we're gonna do live.

And she dissects a couple of websites. If you would like some professional tips and tricks from feature, go to WP Builds.com/ui, and you can fill out that form and we will hopefully therefore feature your show for free. You get some expert. Tips about some UI UX aspects for free. Yeah. Was it feature, do we know anybody know?

Was it peach? No, it was apparently me. No, it wasn't peacha no, it wasn't. It was Matt. It wasn't you Matt, consider me the budget or the 0.01 alpha. Oh, I bet. Nice to have you, Matt. Oh, that's great. Thank you. I made me chuckle that comment. Thanks a lot. Okay. Let's get stuck into the news properly.

So we're gonna be talking about images a lot, plugins, a lot themes a lot this week. It's really. Ground into WordPress this week. Sometimes we go off piece a bit, but not so much this week, because there is a plan for adding web P native support in WordPress. I dunno if but web P's like all the rage if you go into any image editing program these days, that's one of the, one of the options along with JPEG and Jeff and all of those things.

And, but it hasn't been included in WordPress core, but the performance team is looking for serious. About whether this should be added to WordPress core. That seems to me like a bit of a no-brainer, but there you go. They found during some research that that really there's a lot of support for it.

Now there's almost nothing that doesn't support it. So for example, only a few versions of safari on Mac OS don't support it. And that only represents less than 3% of people browsing the internet. 97% of email clients support WebP RSS readers, basically all of the top ones that they don't say, which ones they are, but the top RSS readers don't support it.

And also they went out and reached out to web hosts and said, look, would this be a problem if we create WebP images as well. In other words, if you upload an image and they create a WebP image, you are of course using up some more storage and the web, no sweat, it not, don't worry, looks like on most hosts storage.

Isn't a concern. Most people are not using anywhere near the allocation that they're paying for. Now. It may be that if you're on a super cheap host that this won't be possible anyway, they haven't built in the support for WebP, but it would appear that really there's a bit of, it's a bit of a no brainer.

The proposal is to have a 355 bite, not killer bite on compressed piece of JavaScript, which would detect. Whether there was WebP support and they would only create the WebP images for use user facing content. So for example, they would still put JPEGs and so on into RSS feeds and things like that.

It would only be on the front end of your site. Anyway, there you go. That's the long and the short of it, WebP, I say, let's have it. It's over to you three.

I'm all for it personally. WebP has been around and really just like a solid format for over a decade at this point. And and so to finally see it getting core support and and the ability to, auto generate WebP images, I think is gonna be great.

They work great in their very nice file.

[00:13:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's the piece, isn't it. It's about the file size. And obviously this has been suggested by the performance team because smaller payloads coming across the wire is better for the environment is better for your speed. It's better for your search engine ranking.

There's no downside. It's just that we don't have it. So yeah. Good point. It's all about the file size coming out, the other end and it, I forget what it is, but I believe off the top of my head, it's like a 40% reduction on a typical JPEG, something like that. It's a lot. And if you've got an image heavy site it's this is gonna matter.

Sorry. Carry on Kristin or Michelle.

[00:13:53] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. To be important. Go ahead. Yeah. Just as far

[00:13:58] Kristen Wright: as image size, output too, that's something we see a lot with backup buddy customers. It does affect even things like your backups, right? Like you end up having enormous backups. Yep. Because you know your images.

So a lot of average users don't really realize the impact of image size on their overall size. So

Michelle.

[00:14:17] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. So I had when I was freelancing, I had a cus even a customer, a local WordPress meetup attendee said, I don't understand why my site isn't working so well. Can I come over where you take a look with me?

And the hero image was 40,000 pixels wide and I'm not sun exaggeration. Like it was . Oh dear. I tried to load the site and it like after 45 seconds, there was still nothing coming up. I said let's take a look at this. Let's replace this image first. And then of course it was much faster, but I can see that people who don't know, people who do know what they're doing would love this people who don't know what they're doing.

This would. Truly beneficial for . That's

[00:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: a, that's the piece. I think in the, if you are doing this professionally you just know this, you've been told this countless times is optimize your images, make the images, the size that they need to be and nothing greater. But if you're a, just a casual user of WordPress, which is probably the vast majority of installs of WordPress, then an image is and images and image and who cares.

It's a photograph that I took and it's 14 megapixels doesn't matter. It'll be fine. And of course it won't the. The a lot of the image, squishing services like S smush and short pixel and jet pack, I believe has got it. They've been doing this for a long time, but the idea of putting it into core, I think is really clever.

There's a bit that I missed off the bottom of the article, where it said that they would own, so this is hopefully coming in WordPress 6.1, and it would only create WebP versions of the core image sizes. So if you've registered quirky, 16 different types of images that all get created, that it won't be dealing with that at the beginning, it will only do the, the large, medium and thumbnail to begin with.

And it will only create WebP images if they are going to I dunno how it works it out, but it's gonna work out. Whether it'll save you save you space. If it's smaller, it'll make it. If it's not, then it won't, and they'll only be making. And again, I dunno quite how they're gonna work this out.

It will only create WebP images for things which are intended for use on the front. And which for me is pretty much everything I upload. So I can't really think what the other scenarios are. But anyway, there you go. If you're interested the piece is over at make dot WordPress co dot org. And it's a piece that was written on the 30th of June by Adam Silverstein or silver steam.

So you can follow it up if you're interested about that. Okay. Oh, there's picture. Hello. Peacha did you miss the bit, I mentioned the fact that we're doing a show tomorrow and yeah, so that bit's already come and da, if it is what's this Nick, I don't get this. Do you know a guy called Jeff Betton court?

If it is Nick approved, then it's the way of the.

Oh, yes. Yeah. Jeff is one of the smartest people in WordPress and I a hundred percent agree with

[00:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: his statement. Whatever Jeff says goes, and he approves Jeff approves this message. I'm pretty sure he

has knee right now.

[00:17:26] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. That's his knee right there behind me.

[00:17:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's really meta that the thumb goes up for a brief moment. I think that's hysterical. There's somebody watching right over the other side of the room. Oh, that's lovely. And hello? Hello there. VKA from Bangalore in India. Very nice to have you with us. I don't think we've met before, but lovely to have you.

Okay. Let's move on. We've talked about WebP. Let's move on and talk about this one. You can, by the way, right? Just a complete aside. Does anybody ever read this bit in the gray box at the top? When you go to make.wordpress.org, do you ever read that bit or is it just this bit here? or is it just annoying that it has to be there all the time.

Wouldn't this be better in a sidebar or something? There you go. Ran over WP drama coming at you. This I think is super cool. I am really bullish about this. I hope this happens. I'm already gonna say it. So this is Channing Riter on make dot WordPress do org. She's got a proposal for a new kind of default theme.

So obviously every year, more or less, we get a new default theme and it looks like this and it looks like that. And you may like it, or you may hate it. You may use it, but typically I don't think many people do use it. She's got this idea, but wouldn't it be nice if instead of creating a theme, which is specific to a particular use case, what about if the theme was just to really drill down on style variations and style variations came in word press six.

And it's the ability. If you're looking at the script. Screen, you can see there's an image of what we're talking about. It's the ability to change out things like typography by clicking parts of the new editor UI. So you could change all of the fonts the colors, and basically just completely modify how the site looks and feels by setting up some style variations.

And so is, and the proposal is let's do that. To make a new default theme, which is pretty bland out of the box, but that you can click and change the style variations to radically alter it and make it like basically really use this feature. And she says, what if instead emphasizing the theme itself, we highlighted an opinionated set of style variations designed by members of the community.

It would be interesting to experiment how opinionated we could make each of the variations. Maybe one variation makes all typography on the site, user single type in monospace font while another ISS, many different fonts paired together. I think that pushing the boundaries of what can be done with style variation format should be the goal.

If we can have fun seeing what kind of things can come up with the process. And so that's, it's a pretty short piece, but it got a lot of comments. Loads and loads of comments, which is not normal. Lots and lots of comments, mostly favorable. I haven't written a comment, but if I did write a comment, it would be highly favorable.

I think this is a really cool idea. And I've said enough. So it's up to you three now.

I think it's great. It's it's something that a lot of third party premium themes outside of the outside of the WordPress repository they've had that option for a while. I think it makes a lot of sense. Rather than having to either customize the theme every time you want to check out a different style.

or worse having to constantly change themes just to, to get the style that you want. It's great. If you find a good theme where you mostly, you like the overall layout and it's got good code and I think good code this is coming from a, developer. So of course that's my big thing.

If themes got good code it's great to be able to stick with it. Nice clean code. And these style variations really allow you to to change up quite a bit without having to switch themes or even having to customize it yourself.

[00:21:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. That's really interesting.

So Michelle or. Kristen anything. Yeah.

[00:21:35] Michelle Frechette: So I really hate when people make things easier, said nobody ever. So

[00:21:41] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Good point. Yeah. I'm just gonna leave it there. Yeah. That's all you needed to say. Yeah, that's right. Kristen, anything on

[00:21:49] Kristen Wright: this? I love it. I think one of the things about default themes is that they show us how all these things should work together.

I think that it's always the best example because the core team is working on it. So to see how it's implemented and to see okay, this is what's possible with, full side editing style variations, it would be really awesome to see. How for it. Yeah. Cuz

[00:22:09] Nathan Wrigley: we've always had an opinionated theme haven't we, 20, 22, I could actually use 20, 22, but a lot of the other ones I haven't really been able to use.

And they, you just fear that they're a bit too generic, but with this one, if it's fairly plain and the focus is really on the the typography and just messing around, just to show off what can be done with the technology. You probably won't end up using whatever font combination they've gone or got, or color combination, but the fact that you can actually do it and it's highlighting it.

I think that's really cool. And we had a suggestion last week. I can't remember what the piece was and it might have been on the Tavern about using block patterns in the new default theme as well. So having a ton of different block patterns that you can actually download on the wordpress.org side as well is quite interesting.

And I've learned something today because Courtney. Has schooled me. And how did I not know? So apparently Courtney tells me that there's a little box. Look at that. It says hide, welcome box. And if you click it, look what it does. It hides the welcome box. Courtney, do you know if this I'm gonna refresh this page and let's see if it's sticky.

Ah, look, it stays in, right? That's it from now on. I'm never seeing that little gray box ever again. Thank you, Courtney. I've learned something new. That's brilliant. Yeah,

[00:23:27] Michelle Frechette: but after you hide things like that, then you go, why do nobody's ever told me that before? And then you're like it's in the gray box

[00:23:34] Nathan Wrigley: that you hid

Yeah. And then I'm in like a month from now. I'm gonna be saying, why is there this little thin gray band at the bottom of every, oh, sorry. At the top of every single it's point, let's get rid of it. Cameron says, I think it's a good idea, but I can't help but laugh at it because Matt recently said he wanted thousands of full sight editing themes, mixed messages are Phil.

Yeah. I get your point about that camera. It does feel to me as if we might be heading for a point where we just don't need that many themes. We just need. A handful of well built themes that we just drop patterns into. I don't know if that's the direction that's desirable or not, but it does feel like that's where it's going.

For me. Team reps says Courtney might want the gray box. If you want to find meetings. Okay, I'm gonna enable it again. Cuz now I feel bad for the team reps. So the box is back and it's gonna stay there. I should never have mentioned it. Okay. Moving on. We're on the Tavern, Sarah Gooding, who, by the way.

I think is doing a pretty terrific job. Given the given the fact that Justin Tadlock left probably, or I don't know, maybe six weeks ago, or she's had to step into the breach. I think she's doing an amazing job so well done. Sarah okay. WordPress design contribute. Oh, this is the sorry. I do apologize.

I'm repeating myself. I was supposed to miss that tab out. I was supposed to come to this one, so we did WebP images. Now we're talking about SVG images. So today it's all about the images. WordPress performance team is working on a module for SVG uploads. I use SVGs for just every logo I have done for years now.

And you have to, because it's not an image it's not allowed in the media library by default. It's weird, isn't it? I think if you're a non-experienced WordPress user and your graphic designer gave you an SVG image and said, just upload that to your website, you'd be a bit perplexed. Why it didn't work because you would probably assume it's an image.

What, but it isn't, it's a file format. And because it's a file format, it brings a load of XML, text nonsense with it, which is potentially I say, potentially a security problem. Now there's a few plugins like SVG support or safe SVG, which have got staggering install bases, by the way. SVG support has got nearly a million and safe SVG has got over 600,000.

So we know that this stuff is desirable, but the intention here is the performance team. Wanna see if we can have this built into core and not a lot more to say, really. I just think, why not, let's have some kind of sanitizing process built into WordPress core and and let's have SVGs all over the internets.

[00:26:17] Kristen Wright: I actually though I PED Timothy Jacobs lead developer, and security to just unpack what are the security concerns with SVG files? Because it's hard, it's just hard to unpack, like what's really going on here with SVG files. And he gave me a very lengthy explanation and I thought it was really interesting cause it's stuff I didn't really realize before.

And so there's two parts to this, right? That like on the one hand, if you create your own SVG files out of illustrator and export those and upload, you don't have anything to worry about. Safest houses. Yeah. Yes, exactly. But the fundamental issue is that because they're interactive.

They can include things like JavaScript. Yep. So the part on the WordPress side that I think is really interesting, I didn't realize is that, there's these protections in place to not allow like less privileged users to up upload, executable code. And so that's what we would be unpacking, right.

Is like that authors could then be able to upload code that then could turn themselves into administrator users. If they've got JavaScript in there that would be, make them into a user with higher permissions. Super interesting. I learned about w Kess I guess is the strip's evil scripts.

That's, what's built into WordPress to help protect that. To, so I dunno. I thought it was really interesting cause I never really understood the specifics of the security

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: risks of SVD file. Yeah. So the plugins that we've got at the moment, the safe SVG and what have you they do double duty.

They allow SVGs to be uploaded, but then they also strip out what they think is the harmful. Bit, and that's basically what they're proposing that the team, the performance team is proposing by the way, Bravo performance team. There's a lot going on in the performance team at the moment.

And it's see, there really are churning out an awful lot of stuff. And they've only been going for what feels like eight minutes and we've got lot of these great things coming along. So I'm gonna quote it. It says B contributors propose the idea of working on a new SVG uploads module. They are first aiming to allow users to upload SVG files without scripts.

So it doesn't say that they're gonna sanitize them. They're just gonna make it by the sounds of it. So that if you have, as you described the one that you created, that, doesn't have scripts in it, you can upload those ones. And I don't know if in the future they're gonna work on some kind of PAing of the SVG to figure out what they need to strip away, but you're right.

They do present a security threat. And with that, I'll hand it over to Michelle or Nick.

Oh, Yeah. Oh yeah. I can say that I I have actually seen SVG being used for malicious things out in the wild. So it's definitely, it's a real threat. It's not a big one, mostly because SVG isn't used by most people.

Obviously graphic designers are all very familiar with SVGs cuz most graphic designers prefer vector formats for good reason. But a lot of website owners don't really even know what they are. But it is, you can end up with SVG files, just looking for an image for your site, Googling, looking for something.

And if you download it from the wrong place I have absolutely seen where it wasn't a WordPress site, but it was a different, it was like a custom built site and they ended up using some SVG files that they found online and One of them had some malicious code in it and it had to be taken out.

It mostly was just injecting. It was like the, the search engine injection type yeah. Stuff. So nothing overly malicious taking over a server or anything, but that's still, it's a real threat, so I'm glad to see that they're taking it seriously and not just saying, okay, you can upload SVG now.

Best of luck.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'd be curious to see where they go with this, whether or not it's gonna strip things out or it's just gonna enable things that already are pre-stripped out. But again, they are have great, they're tiny, they're teeny tiny little files and they, if you expand your SVG, it just looks just as good in the 40 megapixel image version that you were describing earlier Michelle, as it does in teeny tiny, it's just the perfect way of doing things, but we don't have that support at the moment.

Michelle, what were you gonna add?

[00:30:45] Michelle Frechette: No. I said, I don't think to add I'm it's been said.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alrighty. In which case we've got the thumbs up for WebP and we've got the thumbs up for SVG that's it. And. Let's go to this one. Okay. Okay. This is, this was the WP drama from several weeks ago.

wordpress.com decided that without seemingly asking what they're already paying customers wanted, they decided to change the pricing structure. Now it needs to be added that it wordpress.com. They didn't change the pricing structure for people already on, they were gonna grandfather those pricing deals, but they decided that they would get rid of their different pricing tiers.

So you, if you're looking at the image here, you can see we've got four tiers. We got personal premium business and eCommerce. What they did was they basically killed all of those and just went into two plans. I believe it was the free and the $15 a month pro plan. The community seems to have spoken.

There was a lot of negative pushback at the time. I remember there was quite a few articles all over the interweb saying what. This just seems madness. Why didn't anybody talk to us about this before you did it? And a few months have gone by and automatic have backtracked. It would seem so automatic VP of con of content.

Michael pick said in a new pricing announcement. What we heard is that some of you missed the more granular flexibility of our previous plans. Additionally, the features you needed and pricing of the new plans, didn't always align for you. So they've rolled it back basically. And now you can only have you can not only have the two plans.

You can go for the personal, the premium, the business and the eCommerce, and be more complicated for, wordpress.com, administrative staff and so on. It seems that's seems that's what the community needed. If you're at wp.com. , if your grandfathered in and apparently you can keep your free and pro account, if that was something that you bought into over the last few weeks.

So there you go. It's probably not a lot to say about that. Is this, shall I just move on? Yeah. Okay. I will. And we'll go to this. Oh, how I want this to be successful. This is w. W B collective I double took then thinking I should be saying WP. This is WB collective.dev because it stands for website builders collective.

And this is a project by Mike lover. I dunno if you've come across Mike Oliver before, but he was on the page board of summit a couple of times back and he's decided he wants to put a collective together a community where he is gonna provide learning materials and courses and community essentially.

But it's very specific, which I like as well. So this is for people who are using either. Generate press and or generate blocks. So if you are building your websites or thinking of building your websites would generate press and generate blocks, then Michael is beginning a community. You can get it for looks like it's gonna be $20 a month and you get $2, two, two months for free.

If you go for the annual and it's gonna include generate press and generate block tutorial, videos, landing page, and content templates, WordPress tips, design, and performance updates on the new features that are coming out. And I gotta say, if you've ever watched any of Mike's content before, it is super easy to follow is an excellent exampler of building websites with these tools.

I know it stands in contrast to what you're doing over at stellar. Doesn't it Michelle with cadence, but still nice to have a community for those people. Who've gone a different route. Sure.

[00:34:47] Kristen Wright: I love this. I think though I was surprised to see that there's a membership attached to it, obviously glad, to see it supported financially and by the way of, paying for it. But it's, it was interesting to me to see that it was, there's a price on it to join. So yeah.

[00:35:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really I don't really have any experience of building a paid community.

But my understanding is that is an extremely difficult thing to, obviously if you've got some like red hot topic, and you are Elon Musk, you could probably put a community out there for any amount of money and people will just buy into it almost immediately. But if somebody like Mike starting this out, it's not an incon inconsequential amount of money.

Is it either $20 a month? 240 or a year, or I think he said that you get a couple free, so it's probably 200 a year. I think that's probably gonna be the hardest way. I have no doubt that the content on the inside will be worth every penny because he is so excellent. But I do hope that, that heve managed just to find enough people to make it worthwhile for him.

Yeah, that was interesting. Anything on this? No, it's D

[00:35:55] Michelle Frechette: it's different than like when we talk about a growing, Being a community it's different than just starting a Facebook group. , he's actually providing content that is consumable that you might want to pay for. So it's different than just Hey, I wanna throw a bunch of people in a room and see what happens.

This is, yeah. This is more like he's built, he's building courses and he's building a community based on that. I'm just curious which LMS he's using, but that's a

[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: story for another day. I can tell you actually, because he does. No, he does mention it and he's not using the WordPress one. Yeah. He's well, I say it's not WordPress.

Hold on. The word is Podio. Is that a thing? P O D I O have you heard of that word before? Let me do fine pod. There you go. The course platform is podio.com, which sounds like a SAS solution. I've no experience. I've never even heard of it before, but, or PODER. Sorry, not Padio Pader. And yeah, but look so here's Matt Davis.

I in saying Mike will definitely be successful. He's a smart dude, great designer. And the offering looks ideal for people wanting to get into generate press blocks. Ecosystem offer looks good for the audience and the price is definitely in the affordable. And then what does it say category? It got cut off on the screen, but I'm gonna continue reading it.

The affordable category. He should be charging more in Matt's opinion. I imagine he will in the future. Yeah. And thank you. He's confirming that it's a SAS LMS and he's using Padia. Thank you for that. Yeah. So what I find really interesting about this one though, is that he's not trying to hit everybody.

He's not trying to do the WordPress. He's going only for that, what must be a fairly small market, people using generate press and or generate blocks. Or immediately you've got the WordPress community, which is huge down to a tiny little sliver. And I dunno what his expectations are, but I do like the idea that he can concentrate on being hyper laser focused on that exact thing.

You have to keep your eye ears peeled on this one, Michelle, and see if there's a, see if there's a Cajun variant to be done at some point.

Yeah. I will say I've been a member of the generator press community on Facebook for many years now. And it really is a great team behind ed press, mostly Tom, but he's, there is a team there that's helping out and and the community is great.

There's a lot of good interaction there. And I guess if I can offer any unsolicited advice, not actually to To Mike, but rather anyone who joins this community is is get involved and start conversations. I've seen a lot of communities start up and users and members who join the community and they come in and they say, oh this community is boring.

There's no conversation I'm done with it. Someone needs to start the conversations. Mike can only start so many conversations and post so many things. So if it's gonna be a community, everyone's gotta get involved. So hopefully people will do that and start more conversation and get things going, cuz that's how you get a nice, strong community that, lasts as long as the Facebook

[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: one they've.

As, yeah, I guess he's been making free content for the longest time around this, I dunno what the cadence is. Sorry. I meant literally with a C how often he's putting that content out, but it feels like he's done loads and loads of videos over a long period of time. And I suppose the moment does arrive where you think to yourself, actually, I really enjoy doing this.

I appear to be quite good at it because people are telling me I'm quite good at it. And every time I put out a video, people tell me how fabulously instructive it was. And I guess at some moment, a little light bulb goes on. You say, do you know what I could do this? I could do the exact same thing and possibly make a little bit of revenue for it.

And also just do a boatload more of it. And I don't know what the user base that he's looking for is, but basically he does say he wants to move away from client work and he wants to move into content creation. And this is a way of doing it. And if he can get 50 a, I dunno what the number is, then he can start to do that.

And. And swell the offering that he's got. Yeah. Thank you, Kathy. I I genuinely didn't mean to make that slip up, but yeah. Cadence is an actual word as well. It turns , but it S smelled differently. Okay. So best a lot, Mike. I hope that goes well. Maybe we'll get you on the show at some point and you can show us what you've got in there.

That'd be nice. Okey dokey. Let's move on. Oh, by the way, I should share the URL. I dunno if I did, I probably did. K B double the elective. It will be in the show notes, which come out tomorrow. Okay. Look, there's that annoying gray box again, look at that. I'm gonna hide it. I'm so hiding that. Look you remember, I was talking about the performance team and the fact that they're just on fire, more proof.

If it were needed. This is Felix answer from the performance team. Bravo talking about the fact that they want to streamline the process of getting plugins included in the WordPress repository. So at the moment, and I didn't really don't really have much insight into how all this works, but at the moment, there is a theme check plugin, which is at all.

And I'm just gonna read off the screen. It says at all, which statistically analyzes, sorry, statically analyzes a given WordPress theme to determine if it follows certain and seem developments, requirements, and best practices. In other words, they've automated the process of turning people down to some extent.

In other words, if you fall foul of major clangers, they can, the software can spot it. There's nothing on the plugin side. And obviously there's absolutely boatloads of plugins. The reason I suspect is because it's diffi more difficult to do themes, very constrained in what they can do.

It's about the way that the website looks largely and plugins can do well. Anything, literally anything. So there's been that. And so the primary goal of this is to provide a plugin provide plugin developers with feedback on requirements and best practices during development provide the wordpress.org plugin review team with an additional automated tool to identify certain problems and weaknesses in before manual review happens.

So it's not when the intention here isn't to cut out the manual review. I think it's just to, to put a hurdle in the way so that there's at least the stuff that can be automatically identified is automatically identified and provide technical site owners with the tool to assess plugins based on those requirements.

It's gonna be a plugin itself allowing it to be used in our environments to to the theme checker. However, the scope of the plugin checker should preferably be slightly expanded so that it can better adapt to different environments. I'm getting all of this from make.wordpress.org. It was published on the fifth of.

So it's not exactly brand new, but it's called proposal for WordPress plugin checkout. I think this kind of stuff presumably is being done to save hours and hours of manual checking, which I guess in this day and age doesn't really need to happen, David, to you.

Yeah. I think this is a long time coming.

I think anyone who knows anyone on the plugins team knows how hard they work and just how nonstop it is. Just like what was going on with the themes team and having to try and review just, sometimes thousands of submissions all at once. And and I think really this addresses probably one of the biggest misconceptions in the WordPress space and is gonna help with it.

Which is something that my company deals with a lot, because all the time we see people who think. That the more plugins you have, the worse your site is gonna be. And that can be the case, but the thing is one bad plugin can be way worse than 10 good plugins, your site. Yeah. And so I think having something that's gonna be checking performance of plugins is really gonna help hopefully dispel that myth of more plugins equals bad.

Don't put 300 plugins on your website please. But like I'm hoping that this will help people understand that there, there are good plugins, there are bad plugins and I don't mean malicious necessarily. Sometimes it's just the developer either. Didn't know how to write better code or didn't know about about all sorts of things.

Like synchron. Loading and stuff like that. And so you can have somebody who made a great looking plugin that just absolutely bogs down a site. And you can have, like I said, 10 people who created very streamlined plugins that do all of those same features and those are actually those 10 will load faster than the one that's not as well done.

And so what they're putting here in this checker, hopefully what's in the proposal is gonna really help address that and deal with all those free plugins that maybe were not very well coded. And I think more than anything, it's gonna help developers as well. Because if you are new to it, you write some not so great code and you submit it and they say, okay it doesn't break the site and it doesn't have malicious code, therefore will allow it.

You as a developer, you don't necessarily learn at least not as fast as you would if your plug-in was being checked easily like that. You may not learn that. That there's a better way to do it. And so hopefully we're gonna see the overall WordPress plugin ecosystem improve because of this.

[00:45:59] Nathan Wrigley: The, yeah, I think it's important to reemphasize that this is being done by the performance team. So it, I guess there's a component of it, which is trying to release op. Hours of people's time in the theme review process, but it is also trying to provide technical site owners, as I said, with a tool to assess plugins based on those requirements and best practices.

So the intention here is also to give the rest of us. Presumably automated performance data, okay, this plugin is doing this, and this, have you thought about an alternative? Is there something else that you could do? And I'll just read at the bottom I'll quote. It says one of the main complexities around plugins compared to themes is that the plugins essentially have almost unlimited feature set.

They can do anything. This makes it impossible to predict their expected behavior. It also complicates defining a reliable set of rules and guidelines to check for. However, there are certain ways to at least detect what a plug plugin does. For example, using certain WordPress APIs, such as to register post types and blocks such detection mechanisms would benefit from runtime checks as well.

For example, a plugin may not affect the homepage of the website in any way, but it could cause several issues in posts on certain post types and so on and so forth. So yeah, the intention isn't just about freeing up. It is also about getting developers, some handy, automated information, presumably that could be run almost the moment you submit your plugin.

It might be able to give you data back within half an hour or something, which would be really useful for you to know, you know what, this plugin's got no chance of being accepted on the repository. Go back, have a little bit of think about this, and this saving a lot of people's time.

[00:47:42] Michelle Frechette: We also know that we also know that the plugin review team has now had to become anonymized because of threats and, lashback. And so if this was automated and you were getting an automated response, it takes a little bit of that. Like animosity away. It's not a person that said, your plugin is bad.

It's like it didn't meet the basic require.

[00:48:05] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah. You can rail you can rail against the software rage against the machine, I think is right. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:17] Michelle Frechette: But what I would love to see too, is like thinking back to I don't wanna say lowest, common denominator in like negativity but people who build their own websites and then try to maintain them and don't know the difference between 40,000 pixels and, whatever are the people who also go, oh, good.

There's no updates. I don't have any plugin updates that I have to do. Then there are those of us who go, wow, that plugin hasn't had an update in a really long time. That's a red flag. And so if you had, I would love to see show up on. Dashboard our plugin dashboard say this plugin has been sitting here for three years and have had an update.

You might wanna look at that you cause you, you go to the repo and it says, Hey, you might not wanna download this one. Cuz it hasn't had an update since it's not necessarily, hasn't been checked for compatibility with your, with the current, WordPress version. We don't see that in the dashboard though.

Nick,

[00:49:11] Nathan Wrigley: do you do that kind of stuff with your clients? Do you, for example, alert them to the fact that there's a, you've had a plugin that really hasn't been updated for let's say four years as a really catastrophically long time. Do you do that kind of thing? Do you get in touch with them and say, look, this is, this plugin really is not to be trusted anymore or you need to update it or indeed, can we swap this one out for this one?

Cuz we've got slightly better. We've got misgivings about things.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that does come up all the time. Someone will have a plugin and. And perhaps that plugin is known to have a security vulnerability, or it's just, it's been so long since it's been updated that you just don't know, is there a security vulnerability that's just not known?

And yeah, that, that is something that we all the time are having to contact people and say, Hey, you've got this plugin it's been abandoned. Or you've got this plugin and it's just causing issues. So we, we do handle that from both a security and a performance perspective because bad plugins really really are our threefold in that they can be bad for security.

They can be bad performance and they can be bad for user experience. And yeah. For all those reasons, it is nice to be able to use a tool like this. And I'm actually excited that, their proposal includes making this a plugin itself. So you can actually load this up on any site you want and run the plugin checker.

And so that's hopefully gonna be a new tool that, that can maybe work along that a lot of us use

[00:50:58] Nathan Wrigley: on the management side. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. I actually had a quirky situation the other day, whereas I was informed by the software that I used to update client websites and so on that a plugin had been abandoned.

And I can't remember what the threshold is. It's 24 months or 18 months or something like that since the last update. And when I looked into it further, it was quite curious because this plugin was the, it did the tiniest, most of unimportant of things. And I contacted the developer and said, are you intending to update?

And he said, We would, but there's nothing to update. Everything that we wrote back then is still totally valid. There's no security threat. We do one thing. And it's the whole plugin is about eight lines of code nothing's changed. And I said, oh, that's interesting. Cuz it's being flagged on my software as a potential problem.

And he said, yeah, that is curious. Maybe we should just go in and update it with literally a comment or something. I said, yeah, that might be a sensible idea. At least it would look like it was being updated. So there are situations where that may not matter. I do apologize for the the fact that I'm going further and further into the pearly gates of heaven, but the sun here is beating down and don't go into the light.

That's right

into the light.

[00:52:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. slowly going towards heaven. Okay. Fascinating. Kristen, I figure,

[00:52:21] Kristen Wright: yeah, I just wanted to say from the security side I think this, the plug in checker is really. Is really going to be a good thing, right? Because we do, we release a vulnerability report every single week at ithe.

And we're seeing anywhere from 20 to a hundred new vulnerabilities specifically in plugins, each week. And so the amount of plugins that are being closed or, shut down due to those issues, they're not being patched. I think, getting those vulnerabilities, as a proactive measure, spotted before plug-ins are even approved is gonna be a huge win for the community as a whole.

Cause plug-ins really are the biggest source of vulnerabilities at the moment using vulner, vulnerable plug-ins. So

[00:53:01] Nathan Wrigley: just so that, Kristen, we feature your plugin vulnerability pretty much every time it comes out, sometimes it's a toss up because there's a, I don't know the rival word fence or something like that produces something that more or less on the same day.

But yeah, it's going in this week. So there you go. It is definitely red by people like me, so that's nice. Okay. Moving on. let's have a look at this one. Oh, another nice thing. We've got loads of nice things going on in WordPress and they're all making it easier to use. This is fabulous.

Sarah Gooding WP tab, and the article's called WordPress themes. Directory launches, pattern previews in. Beta, sorry, I don't know. You say beta or something. Don't you beta you say media, sorry. Meta contributors have turned on a new feature in wordpress.org theme listings that allow visitors to preview themes, bundled patterns.

If you're looking at the screen, you can see what I'm talking about. It says a grid displaying the patterns is now shown underneath a themes description and tags. These are automatically fetched from any theme that registers patterns and works for both block and classic themes. And this kind of goes to the piece that we were talking about a minute ago, where it feels to me like the theme, the whole theme of the theme is slowly being used Zed by patents.

And I wanna know more about what the patterns will look like in a theme than ever before. I don't wanna see the portfolio layout. I don't wanna see, I don't know what the about us page looks like. I wanna see what patterns you've got that would help me. Build those kind of things. And so this is now possible.

We're looking at something from the Zeva themes Z E V E R. And you can see there's a grid of nine patterns. Presumably on the screen that would look significantly larger than they do on my screen. And it's showing like what the homepage might look like, what a pattern for a homepage might look like.

There's a 4 0 4 pattern. There's various other ones with rows and columns all laid out with iconography and so on. And this just seems like such a great idea. If you click on the pattern, it's gonna launch within the theme preview so that people can see what it looks like in the context of the theme, but you won't be able to manipulate it or customize it or anything like that.

Allegedly there are some problems with it. For example, Think woo. If you're trying to do things with woo, it's not working there at the moment, but this is a beater, we're just trying this out to me. This is totally where I want to see WordPress going. If a theme comes with patterns, I wanna see what those patterns look like in a large, full size view.

And I just think this is dead cool and the future. So there you go.

[00:55:43] Michelle Frechette: You heard it here. The future is patterns by Nathan

[00:55:46] Nathan Wrigley: Wrigley. That's it? That's what I think anyway. Maybe it's not, but it feels it, it does really does feel like it to me. It does say here a at the moment is that the patterns designed to be full width or wide width may not display as intended.

The issue should be resolved soon themes without hit an important. If you're designing themes at the moment, and you're not using patterns at all, it says themes without patterns are not necessarily disadvantaged by this new preview section. As the pattern directory has grown considerably since it's launched to host more than 800 block patents.

Anyway, I think that's cool. If nobody's got anything, I'll go onto the next one, but if you do go for it now,

[00:56:27] Michelle Frechette: I'll just say that patterns and the use of them across your site can really lend to your branding. So it can really become a cohesive element throughout your website and match your branding for sure.

So I think it's really

quite cool. And I think this is something that, again is one of those its been a long time coming. I think we've all dealt with that situation when you're looking at the theme repository and you just get that one picture that it doesn't really tell you what the theme really looks like.

And these theme patterns also give you much more of a preview for actually like how things are gonna look in the theme, other than just that like real quick, like home, like blog roll page that the, that we've all had to look at now for whatever it's been 15 years or something,

[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: Kristin,

[00:57:23] Kristen Wright: anything to add to that.

I love it. I think it's gonna enhance the experience of picking a theme.

[00:57:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Pure and simple. It will. It totally will. I just love the fact that it's all like these little components, these little mod modular bits that it's like jigsaws or Legos. You're increasingly building up the website rather than just downloading the gigantic mega theme that attempts to do everything.

Just this bare bone theme, which has got a header and a footer and a few patterns, and you can go and get patterns from elsewhere and Chuck them in. It just seems like it. I don't know. It just seems like it's gonna bring a bit of fun back into it all. You can swap things, put things in immediately decide that's no good.

Delete them, Chuck it in again. And there's just almost a zero friction to doing it. Very cool. Okay.

Yeah.

Combine that with the variations that we were talking about before and boom, you've got a whole quick builder. You can get a website

[00:58:15] Nathan Wrigley: set up and, 10 minutes get your S SPGs in there.

Get your web PS in there, get your patterns thrown in. And before you know it you'll. You'll be having a party all by yourself. Building WordPress websites. it's a one website salad. That's right. Oh, go and register that domain straight away websites.

We have dot salad as a,

[00:58:36] Nathan Wrigley: We should. My favorite domain ending is.fish.

I can't believe you can buy a.fish demand. Is there any domain on earth with the.fish ending? I'd be surprised. By the way, it was you Nick earlier who said that you shouldn't go out and install 300 plugins. I am gonna write a plugin called 300 plugins, just so that you can say to people don't install 300 plugins.

you can

find it.

[00:59:04] Nathan Wrigley: Thoughts of me trust . Yeah. Okay. Let's get back. The stuff I'd just like to raise the fact that I created a podcast episode with the fabulous and behinds. It came out last week. So it's fresh off the presses. And behinds, if you don't know, she's from equalized digital, and she specializes in trying to get the rest of us who don't place the importance on accessibility, she's trying to really upscale us and teach us what we need to know.

And in the episode, I think it's, I think it's almost an hour long. We go right into it all. What you need to be worrying about at the moment, what you don't need to be worrying about whether or not something is better than nothing, or should it be all in a hundred percent or nothing at all.

And it was just really interesting. She highlights absolutely boatloads of, you can see at the bottom here, there's a whole load of tools and resources that she recommends. And if you're new to accessibility and you are gonna have. Be good at this in the very near future. I feel then this was a really good 1 0 1 introduction to the whole topic.

I don't suppose anybody's got anything to say about that maybe around accessibility in draw, but if not, I'll move on. Amber did

[01:00:18] Kristen Wright: just do a course with ithe training last month. Nice. And so if anybody wants to dive into this a little bit more, she had a really great two day course on accessibility. So over time training.

Yep.

[01:00:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And if you wanna,

[01:00:30] Michelle Frechette: I think I saw her go ahead. Oh, go. I think I saw her on the attendee list for word camp us and I haven't met her in person yet, so like she's one of those people that I really wanna seek out and say hello to.

[01:00:43] Nathan Wrigley: And Kristen, thank you. I will drop that link into the browser here quickly and we'll have a quick look.

What do we got I-Team so this is training.iams.com. WordPress accessibility bootcamp. Coming up or already happened coming up. June. Yeah.

[01:01:02] Kristen Wright: June 28th.

[01:01:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, June, I'm sorry. Yeah, I saw that. And for some reason I was looking at my clock and saw July okay. So it's happened already but she is brilliant.

Very good. And also just like grounds you in it, talking about the fact that this, whilst you need to worry about it, it's not worry with a capital w it's worry about as in start to get yourself up skilled, start to make your boss think about it a little bit more. We actually got into that whole thing about what if your boss doesn't, care at all about this?

And she talks about strategies and how it's a good idea from a search point of view and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. Thank you for that. All right. Now Michelle, just before. Yes. The show started Michelle told me about this one. This is you tell me what this is. This is an exciting moment in Michelle's life.

A certain great number is about to be reached. And what are you doing here, Michelle?

[01:01:58] Michelle Frechette: So I'm just excited. It's taken a little while. Of course, I'm almost at 10,000 followers on Twitter and I thought what would be more fun than like to do some fun giveaways? When you reach 10,000 followers?

I'm 18 followers away.

[01:02:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So there's more than 18 people watching this at the minute. So if you all just go and follow Michelle than you that's right, but what's the what are you, have you solidified what it is that you're gonna give away or what kind of quirk things you gonna do? It's right there.

OK. Okay. Here we go.

Ooh,

[01:02:32] Michelle Frechette: there you go. There's the prizes. So an autographed copy of my book. A good firm, handshake and other essential business tips an hour long pick my brain session. So if you've always wanted to just ask me questions, then I can give you help. I do coaching and I do mentoring and things like that.

This is an opportunity to do that. And then also I'm because I love coffee. I'll do a coffee gift box. So three prizes, three winners. There are some rules and if you scroll that on, you'll see my Ws form on there that is gives you all the information you need to be able to submit metrics.

[01:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: I've put Michelle's Twitter handle on the on the screen there it's at Michelle, a Ames, M I C H E L a a. E S and no doubt with that, you'll be at like 44,000 by tomorrow morning. that nice? that would be nice. What a milestone do you place? I know that you're treating this with a bit of fun and all that, but do you Michelle, do you place like importance on this kind of stuff?

Does that 10,000 actually mean something to you? It's a, it's a fun thing to do, but you

[01:03:39] Michelle Frechette: It's fun. Exciting. I. I just love sharing with people. I don't get really technical in what I tweet. It's mostly fun. It's mostly community kind of stuff. And I just love building community within WordPress and the other people that in my life that follow me over there and seeing people connect and learn and grow.

And if I can be part of that, then that just makes me happy.

[01:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask cuz we all know, cuz I talk about it all the time. I am so bad at Twitter. I really there's something about me in Twitter. We don't get along and I find that if I follow lots and lots of people, so many hundreds I just, I get confused about what's going on and also I don't really get to see the things that I want to see because it's diluted a lot.

So I don't know if that's a thing, but or, are you one of those people that follows 150 gazillion people and hopes for the best with their feed?

[01:04:34] Michelle Frechette: I will definitely unfollow people that are. Spamming Twitter. Yeah. And there are words and phrases that I have on a block list or if you want like a filter list.

So anything political doesn't usually show up in my feed anymore. I saw Chris Wegman yesterday was posted that he figured out how to filter out Wordle. So he doesn't wanna see people's Wordle scores anymore. So he found a way that, that won show up at his newsfeed. So it, basically Nathan, I think you and I, you need to sign up, you need to win that hour consultation and I will.

That's right. We'll teach

ill,

[01:05:10] Nathan Wrigley: teach you Twitter. it's a recurring theme. I gen I don't get it. I don't get how replies are populated and wear the thing that I've I just don't really get it and I've never spent the time getting it, but I also didn't know what you just said was true. I didn't realize that there was a way that I could insulate things.

In my Twitter feed. So for

[01:05:31] Michelle Frechette: example, I just remember it so you can mute words and you can mute phrases.

[01:05:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And you can do that all in the Twitter UI. Can you, yes. That's how good I am at Twitter. I didn't know that you could mute things. Okay. That's great. I've got a laundry list of words, but you see my strategy for avoiding that was just to not follow people or unfollow people.

When I realized that a proportion of their tweets were about things, which they're very keen on, but don't necessarily cross paths with what I'm keen on. And I felt that was a bit of a blunt instrument, because I wanna see. The majority of what you want to say, but maybe there's this odd bit.

And now that I know that you can mute things, I'm gonna go and write the word Wordle. Also, you guys big on Twitter Carmen and Nick you get into Twitter and use it a lot.

Yeah. I I'm terrible at Twitter, which Michelle knows very well and she tries so hard to get me to be better at it. And I'm just not, but she tells me when there's something I need to see.

So that's, what's important. Yeah, this is true.

[01:06:41] Michelle Frechette: I text him things to look at on Twitter, but

[01:06:44] Nathan Wrigley: That, that to me is about the most useful person on Twitter is the person that's keenly interested. So in my case, it's WordPress, right? That's basically what I wanna see on Twitter. My family and friends and all of that, nobody's really using it for that.

We're all doing it in other ways. And so I just wanna see the WordPress off. So when I see a link. From somebody who I know is into that. So like you, for example, Michelle, that's immediately got my attention because I know that it'll be useful and you all. Applied your own filter to that already. Which is great.

And that means you. That means

[01:07:21] Michelle Frechette: you didn't see my tweet yesterday, where I had the most epic bed, the most epic bedhead ever, and felt the need to share that photo on my Twitter.

Actually.

[01:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: I did see that one. I did see well, that was the close up of you in your face, right? Yeah, that was a good one.

Yeah. Yeah. I dunno if that would've made it Twitter in my film if I've been applying and yeah. Okay. Oh thank you. And Carmen, are you a Twitter user? I guest for ithe and I think you Christian. Sorry, what did I just say?

[01:07:50] Michelle Frechette: Car? Carmen's my friend though. Yeah.

[01:07:55] Nathan Wrigley: The reason I said Carmen was cuz Carmen's just written a comment down here.

Look. Yeah. And I've just sped it and said, yeah, sorry Kristen. No,

[01:08:02] Kristen Wright: it's fine. I'm probably a casual Twitter user. Michelle also knows that I'm not the best at Twitter. I can find it quite addicting if I'm not careful cuz you're just scrolling. Endlessly. But here in Oklahoma city, we have a pretty active weather Twitter because our weather is pretty wild here.

So I do follow a couple of hashtags related to our

weather.

[01:08:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah. So we don't wanna get into the whole Elon mosque thing do no, we do not. We're not, we're gonna stay on the work you mute,

[01:08:32] Michelle Frechette: you can mute the word Elon.

[01:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, do you know what? I don't really know anybody that's talking about that, but it just, it's actually got into the mainstream press over here, which is just Aho, who, anyway, let's not get into that.

Let's carry on. So from one Michelle thing, so go and find that out. That's that's, Michelle's mic, that's meet michelle.online and the latest post you can find out about that. But also you've got a sale on, over at stellar. This is a Whopper. We do. This is a big one.

This is black Friday in July for an entire week across all of our stellar

brands.

Can I just ask, has this begun or are we getting a sneak peek? It did. No, this

[01:09:17] Michelle Frechette: is started today. It started today. It runs through the end of the month, the 31st. And it's 40% off of all the stellar plugins. So if you were to scroll down, you'll see all the different plugins and the links through to those sites and

[01:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, its pretty, let me just get the URL on there.

So I dunno if it's applied across the website as regular website, but if you wanna see it all in one page, it's stellar wp.com/stellar-sale. Let's have a look ithe down from $80 to 48 restrict content pro from let's call it a hundred down to let's. Call it 60 learn dash monthly pricing.

[01:09:58] Michelle Frechette: That's the cloud learn. That's our brand new learn dash cloud instead of 29 a month. That's 14 a month to

[01:10:04] Nathan Wrigley: start. That's more than that's more than 40 though, right? That's more like 50 something. Oh yeah. It says there look 50% off for the first can I just, I'm gonna be annoying. Look. I see it.

I see. Fix it later. Don't yeah, for the first three months, which yeah, I like it sh shut up Wrigley. The events calendar. This is the one that interests me. I, I run the event and this is intriguing down from two 30. Let's call it to two eighty three sorry, 180 3. Yeah, it's gone down from two 30 to 2 83.

It's come down by a negative amount. Give WP three 50 to two 10 cadence WP two 20 to what is that? 1 31 31. Yeah, iconic 300 to 180. And orderable one 50 to 90, more or less I'm rounding, but valid this offer is gonna keep going until the 31st of July. So you've got another six odd date. Is that literally everything that you guys have?

There's all of it. Wow. That's neat. Yep. I'm gonna add that into the show notes as well. And let's see. Let's see if we can get you some sales of thank you. Stellar stuff. You're welcome. No, that's great.

[01:11:21] Michelle Frechette: I'm gonna be getting, I'm gonna get you a new t-shirt because you wear t-shirts on the show and I gotta be wrapped.

So you're getting some

[01:11:27] Nathan Wrigley: t-shirts coming your way. I do wear t-shirts on the show, but you probably noticed I, I have basically three t-shirts and it's one of those three. I'm the, okay, so complete aside, I'm the kind of person that the t-shirt that's on the top of the pile that's what's getting worn today.

And whatever's on the top. Tomorrow is gonna get one tomorrow. So some weeks it just goes 1, 2, 1, 2, as they, as I wash one and just put it straight on , I'm not, I'm a bit more of a Steve job. So if you send me one and it makes it to the top of the pile, it's gonna be on for weeks. That works they almost walk themselves.

Okay. So stellar WP, cell. Very cool. Also, we said at the beginning of the show that we were gonna add something to your biography here it is. Yes. So this isn't just hang on. Wait, is the coolest URL like this? I do not know how you got this WP events. Anything that begins with two letters I thought was like, basically not available.

How did you.

it was

[01:12:38] Michelle Frechette: available. I don't know how to say it. you just,

[01:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: that's just so good. If you can try to get, it was December two

[01:12:45] Michelle Frechette: letters of anything. It was in San Antonio and there we go. Wp.com of course not, but WP events was available. And with, one of our plugins is the calendar and there is no longer any we word there's no wor no longer a website that shows all of the different WordPress events.

So you have, word, camp.org, which shows all the word camps you have meetup, which shows the meetups. But you don't have anything that shows the summits and the webinars and all of the different events that we can all be part of. And so I wanted to create a website that would be a repository for all of those different things.

And so we're using the events calendar. Of course, if you scroll down, you'll see the events that I've already loaded into the site and at the top, and at the bottom, you have the opportunity to add your own event as well. So when the next page builder summit comes up, I expect you to put that in here.

Yeah. And we'll get that added as well. And we're, we've got a brand new logo for it, thank you to Alex Manne over at stellar liquid web at helping us out there at the seller level. And yes, we'd love to see your events in here. It's this is the softest launch ever, because I'm putting out a press release later this week.

And so those of you who are listening now are getting the scoop, but this. This is exciting. We actually started working on it two weeks ago and here it is ready to

[01:14:10] Nathan Wrigley: go already. So it's user submitted. So if you've got an event you have to reach out which you can simply do by clicking this button at the top, you click the ad event button, you'll be taken to a a fairly easy to fill out form with the, what you'd expect cost and website, URL, and category and so on.

And then you are manually creating those. Are you and just deciding which ones go on. And yep. So

[01:14:35] Michelle Frechette: it will go into a holding, into holding for moderation and I will go through and I'll get a notification. And when those come in, I will go through, create the graphic that goes with it, using your logo or whatever you've submitted, and then approve those in so that they will be part of the repository at

[01:14:50] Kristen Wright: WP

[01:14:51] Nathan Wrigley: 90 events.

And just the, like I said, the best URL I'm highly impressed that you managed to get anything with two letters. That's pretty cool. WP events give, say, com at the end of that, no, no WP and shout

[01:15:10] Michelle Frechette: out to cadence. We use to the cadence theme on this and to nexus for hosting the site.

[01:15:15] Nathan Wrigley: There you go.

It's all in house that cool as well. Isn't it? That's really nice. Absolutely. Okey dokey.

[01:15:21] Kristen Wright: Are there any plan for doing an email newsletter for this?

[01:15:24] Michelle Frechette: It be kind eventually. Cool. Yep. Eventually. Yeah. So we'll have a signup that people can, you cannot, you can automatically subscribe to the calendar. So you'll see that below the calendar.

There's a place, a way to subscribe to the calendar itself. And then eventually we're gonna be building into hear a way that we can share newsletter things with you as well.

[01:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: Show me the where's the is when you say the calendar, where do I see that?

Okay. Right

[01:15:45] Michelle Frechette: below the

last

[01:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: entry. Oh, got it.

Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. I'm gonna do that when we finish this. Cause cause I that's exactly the sort of thing that I wanna know. That's right up my street. Thank you very much for, yeah. You're welcome. Making the effort and I will put the page builder summit on whenever it manages to come around.

Since

stellar got me really excited about discounts. I actually, while we were talking, I just launched a 25% discount on all of our monthly plans for people watching this, which is actually the highest discount we've offered all year. If you use the code WP Builds.

[01:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: Just see what you guys have me excited about discount let's oh, that's Nick.

When this is finished, when we stop, when we. Stop. Can we talk about that? And I'll make sure that I get the right URL and mention it. And so on. That's incredibly kind. Okay. If I had a product, I would be discounting it right now, but I have no product, so I'm not going to, but anyway, there we go. I have my 300 plugins project, which will be coming to fruition very soon, but it's gonna be free anyway okay.

Rights that fish. Yeah, that's top fish. That's it. We're sticking with the I themes because this one came across my radar. And we just happen to have Kristen on the call today. This is cool new feature coming to ithe security. And it's biometric logins and pass keys for WordPress. So it sounds complicated.

You just wanna give us the high level the high level, low down of what all this means and how this might affect the login process.

[01:17:22] Kristen Wright: Yeah. We're really excited to talk about this publicly for the first time. So this is another scoop.

[01:17:28] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. So we

[01:17:30] Kristen Wright: are gonna be adding biometric logins and PA keys as a primary login method to WordPress.

So this is actually, we're really excited about it's been months in the work, but if anybody's familiar with the web often protocol, which is a fancy way of saying it's the future of logins, right? Like it's passwordless logins, but if your device or browser supports face ID, touch ID windows, hello, even YubiKey, you'll be able to log into WordPress directly with those methods.

So it's hands down the future of logins and it's innovative. In so many ways. And I think for people who build websites for clients, there's always this issue of getting clients to use two factor or strong passwords or password manager. This is gonna solve all those problems. So we're really excited about this.

It's coming in a few more weeks, but this is gonna be our preview where we get to show it off for

[01:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: the first time. Okay. So what we're showing here is not the technology itself. We're showing on the page here. The fact that they've got a an hour long presentation with Timothy Jacobs, which is on the 10th of August.

So not that far away, you can register for it now I'll put the link in the show notes, but I'm gonna, I wanna drill down on the technology now for a minute, if you don't mind. Yeah. So it's using this protocol web Orn protocol, which. I guess there's gonna be an implementation in ithe security, where you can just switch off the traditional pass username and password process.

So you'll go to your website, I don't know forward slash WP admin or something, and you may not want to give too much away. I don't really know, but if let's say for example, I'm on my iPhone, it, how does it work? Do, am I gonna be given the option to log in with face ID and I'll hold the phone up to my face and I'm in, that's all there is to it.

It's.

[01:19:21] Kristen Wright: Yeah, it'll give the options of registering different devices too. You're not gonna only be logging in from your phone. In fact, like we talked length about how many users actually log into their WordPress site from their mobile device. Yeah. Point. Yeah. But I think a lot of customers do, if you run a WooCommerce shop where you like an events, calendar site where you're selling tickets, like you probably do have a lot of customers that log in from their phone.

It's something that I it's gonna change things every time we've seen a demo where our minds are just blown . And I think one of the best examples right now, though, is apple. If you log into your apple, account, I apple ID from safari, you'll see how that flow works will it'll look like that for WordPress.

So it's.

[01:20:03] Nathan Wrigley: That's cool. That's really cool. Now, before the show started, you mentioned that you wanted to talk about this. I told you that I had, I have one of these things, this little YubiKey device. Yeah. Which is a USB. It's basically a keyboard on a tiny little USB stick. And I use this to secure as much as I possibly can this too.

I could log in with this. Yep.

[01:20:26] Kristen Wright: Web often supports UBI key, so you'll be able to do it as well. So it's just, it's incredible. It's, we're super excited to be bringing this. Login secure logins is still besides vulnerable plugins. Secure logins are like the two big things about securing WordPress.

So this is gonna be awesome.

[01:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: This is gonna be awesome. I love all this kind of stuff. I don't understand the implementations and how the actual tech works, but I

do. And

[01:20:49] Kristen Wright: often from using a UBI key, I actually don't know that many people that use UBI

keys. So

[01:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. I have a whole cupboard full of tin foil hats for when the aliens invade and, I just don't want any of that radiation.

it's all going on. And yeah, absolutely brilliant. And if you combine this with the stellar, w. Offer that we mentioned earlier where they're knocking 40% off then maybe this is a good time to jump in if that excites you. Yeah. That's brilliant. Yeah. Thank you for that. What are great?

I use ithe for two a already. And I like the implementation that you've got. I, I often end up with the SMS code and the and what's the other one that I use the email. Sometimes I use that option as well, but I do like the idea of being able to plug that you'll be key in yeah.

[01:21:43] Michelle Frechette: And I'll point out,

[01:21:43] Kristen Wright: a lot of other implementations of this so far for WordPress have been as a two factor alternative. And, but this is going to be an alternative. It's going to be the primary login method. So you won't have to still have that extra step in with two factor. Be able to log right in,

[01:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Wow. Okay. Brilliant. Thank you. Really cool. OK, dokey, so that I'll put the link in the show notes. That's gonna be a talk by Timothy Jacobs on the 10th of August showing off that nice, shiny new feature. And that's all I've got, I think, except unless Nick has got a URL for me with the coupon code, I could share that quickly if.

Yeah, so I right now just go to WP buff.com and use the coupon code WP Builds and get 25% off your first month of any of our

[01:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: plans. I'm gonna call this one, the coupon show, I think, cuz we're doing pretty good. This. Time every week, we need to come up with a name for the show and often it's a bit sarcastic and pithy, but I think we'll call this one coupon.

No, I might call it. I might call it Kristen. I might call it. Kristen is actually called calm and you never know. See how we go. I thought it was gonna be.fish. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's too many. There's too many. That's all I've got. I dunno if you guys have got anything you want to throw in, we're gonna finish prob possibly five minutes early, but that's okay with me.

Call it.fish says, Cameron. Perfect. Cameron

[01:23:06] Michelle Frechette: and I are often on the same wavelength. I'm just gonna say fun.

Fun, fun.

[01:23:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. But that's it, I'd like to say thank you to Michelle. Obviously one of our six rotating. I'm gonna go for rotating cohos. I like that. The next time I wanna see you actually spining that's not gonna happen.

And thank you also to comp Kristin. See what I did there and also to Nick really appreciate you having you on. I'd love to have you both of you back. We know Michelle will be coming back, but Kristen or Nick, if you wanna come back at any point, we'll talk about that after the show's ended. Now, unfortunately, both of you, you may not be aware of this.

I am now about to humiliate you horribly because you have to wait, raise your hands, cuz this is how the image goes. And we just do this for three or four seconds. It's terribly embarrassing and it's over and you can now lower your hands. And I'm good to say. Thank you very much. Thank you to all those people who wrote us a comment really appreciate your participation.

We'll be back next week. Next week's gonna be the last one because for a little bit, cuz I'm gonna have a week off to go on holiday, which will be quite nice. So I'll see you next week. Thank you very much.