This Week in WordPress #220

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 220 entitled. Do you have a chicken baster? It was recorded on Monday the 15th of August, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'm joined by several lovely guests three this week. I'm joined by Jess Frick and Cameron Jones, as well as Christian reer.

It's a WordPress show. So what are we gonna talk about? WordPress and as always, there's quite a lot of news. There's a WP drama this week. It all started when Matt Mullenweg left a comment about some new design for the wordpress.org homepage. We talk about that extensively. And then we talk about the new 20, 23 default theme and how it differs dramatically from anything that you've seen before fluid typography is coming to Gutenberg 13.8 and we see how that might be implemented.

Word camp us is around the corner and the speaker list has been announced. We also get into the subject of the new integration between main WP and Atarim if you own, either of those, that could be quite interesting for you. There's a very short little bit about north commerce and also about the fact that we did a podcast episode number 290 this week with writers shes over at visual compos. 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. Hello. Good afternoon. Welcome. Good morning. If you are in the United States. Good afternoon. If you're in Europe and good evening, if you are Cameron in Australia, I just tried to do an Australia accent. it was really bad. I'm gonna leave you myself. Oh dear.

Which this week in WordPress pleasure to have you back. We've we've been having a week off. I went on holiday. I went to Wales and it was really hot and swam in the sea and it was really hot and it was all lovely. And now I'm back and I'm ready to talk about WordPress again, and I'm joined by three fabulous guests.

First of all down there, we've got Jess Frick from principle. How are you doing Jess? I'm great.

[00:02:54] Jess Frick: Nathan. I'm so

[00:02:55] Nathan Wrigley: glad you're back. Oh, thank you. I'm well, dunno. What's the correct

[00:03:01] Jess Frick: way to go. I was gonna say like, when you go on vacation, I'm glad I'm back, but not really.

[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: When you go on vacation, do you, does your mind just flood with interesting things to do?

Cuz mine really does. I guess I just put the breaks on to the normal thought processes and I just fill up with ideas and then I come back home and they immediately get drained away and come to not, I think

[00:03:23] Jess Frick: it comes down to the, is it a trip or is it a vacation?

[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[00:03:28] Jess Frick: Trips, not so much vacations, absolutely

[00:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: vacation.

It was. And all the good ideas have gone. Anyway, this is Jess Jessica Frick. She's the director of operations for pressable. We'll be talking more about them. Later she's an nice tea Conor and a proud member of the post status community. So welcome back. One of our cohos she's here all the time.

Cameron Jones is making another return. He's been on here several times. One of one of which was slightly less successful than the others, cuz all the equipment broke down, but he's here today. He's actually gonna be featuring on the show later, cuz he's written a really thought Provo provoking article.

How are you doing Cameron?

[00:04:07] Cameron Jones: Oh, a little sleepy can saying it's late in the

[00:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: evening. Yes. how late in the evening. It's

[00:04:14] Cameron Jones: 10 30. Oh

[00:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: yes. Late, not too bad. I'm not able to talk at 10 30 in the evening. I'm be tucked away in bed at that time. So thank you for joining us. Cameron Jones is a professional word for us developer from the little beach town of Victor Harbor, which is in Australia, as we've just said, he's the founder of the premium plugin store Mongo's marketplace best known for Mongo's page plugin, which is used by more than 30,000 worst press web WordPress websites.

He's also the maintainer. Of the official WordPress plugin for the free donation platform. Kofi Cameron also has contributed patches to several popular plugins, such as ACF and jet pack, as well as having spent nearly a decade building sites with and products for WordPress. He's also spent time as a word as a meet top and word cam organizer, and also contributed to core.

But when he is away from the laptop, you can find Cameron on the sports field at a dance class or in the mosh pit at a heavy metal concert. I gotta ask cuz some of those seem like interesting combinations. Tell me first about the sport. What's the sport or sports?

[00:05:22] Cameron Jones: Usually it's cricket during the summer and Aussie rolls football during the winter.

And I've also been playing baseball this winter. So that's been fun. Yeah. And the dumb scene was coming up in two weeks.

[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh good luck. Good luck. And what about the dancing? What kind of moves are you into?

[00:05:43] Cameron Jones: I do line dancing, country boots, goon.

[00:05:47] Nathan Wrigley: that's such an interesting combination. Yeah. Jess and Christian, have you ever seen Aussie rules football?

No. The UK world. No. No. In the UK we call it Aussie, no rules, football. Cause it's the most mental sport you've ever seen. It's honestly like as soon as you, if you watch it for the first time, I guarantee what's, why did he, how can they do they can kick it, they could throw it, they could Chuck it.

It's just such the most amazing sport. And it's on a pitch, the size of a cricket field. So it's massive. And the judges. So

hold on.

[00:06:25] Raiber Cristian: Just wanna make sure I get this right. So this is soccer, right? This you call soccer. You're okay. So it's something like rugby. Yes. A bit

[00:06:35] Nathan Wrigley: on a cricket pitch.

it's brilliant. It's really brilliant. It's well worth watching, but it's line dancing. It's probably closest

[00:06:44] Cameron Jones: to Gaelic football is probably the closest sport to it. Yeah. That's you know, not it, but yeah you mash a bunch of sports together and you get Aussie

[00:06:53] Raiber Cristian: roll.

[00:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The only thing it doesn't have, I think is like darts.

If it had darts in it, it'd be truly interesting. I think I do,

[00:07:01] Cameron Jones: cuz if you get it through the different goal posts, you get different scores,

[00:07:05] Nathan Wrigley: but that's anyway, worth watching Aussie rules, football, sorry. I'm not mocking. I genuinely remember the first time I saw it thinking what is what?

And then getting really into it. It was on the BB, no channel four, our channel four for years when I was a kid then had a real cult follower. And it really

[00:07:25] Raiber Cristian: has a reach responsibility role, honestly. Like we've got soccer, we've got a B, which is. Really violent, especially back in Romania, it's really violent, extremely violent.

I'd say but otherwise, I think we watch a lot of international sports. Like maybe these seems like a very localized type sport. It's very popular maybe in Australia, right? Yeah. I guess we just UN watched

[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: those know you're hearing the voice of Christian Raber who who is joining us this week.

He's been on before, but Christian is the owner at WP chill, which you can see next to his name. He's a blogger [email protected]. And he's been working with WordPress for over 10 years and has built or acquired a collection of plugins that are being used on over half a million active websites.

All may all managed by a remote team. He loves talking about anything, business, WordPress investments and product management, any time of the day Christians' best known plugins are modular image gallery, strong testimonials. And lastly, download, monitor, how are you doing Christian? You.

[00:08:33] Raiber Cristian: Yeah, absolutely.

I just can't wait to get this part where we have to wave our hands. That's

[00:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: my, oh, this is the best fit

[00:08:39] Raiber Cristian: we can. Yeah, this is like the only reason why's. Yeah, no, we have to keep doing it. Could you imagine a show where, you have something that shows up like a red light and everyone has to go crazy like this, what you are talking, and you have focus on doing this with your

[00:08:53] Nathan Wrigley: hands, but also talking, I don't even know how that whole thing started. I think we accidentally did it one time and then it just became like the thing. And it's now the thing that we do was as an accident, I thought, yes, more or less as most good things are.

We're gonna talk about WordPress at some point, but just before we do a few things to say, first of all, if you are joining us firstly, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. If you'd like to share this stream I'd really appreciate that. It's nice to have an audience, especially if they come into the comments and give some comments.

WP Builds.com/live is the best place to do that. That is a YouTube embed. And because of that, you need to be logged into YouTube. If you wanna make comments. The other option is to go to our Facebook group or Facebook page. And if you want to be de anonymized, Facebook require you to go to the following URL, chat.restream.io/fb.

And then you can click a button, which then allows us to see your avatar and name. Otherwise you just come through as an anonymous user, which is fine. If you wanna do it that way, just like Jess just did. Was that on purpose or was that an. You just avatar yourself at the exact moment. I was avatar it was so perfect.

Wasn't it? Yeah, that was good. That was like, almost like we planned it. Oh goodness. There's quite a few comments. Let's get through a few of these, cuz it's nice to say hello to people. Isn't it. Hello, Rob cans, joining us once more. Thank you. Rob. Really appreciate it. Medium WordPress mafia.

I don't know what you mean. But thank you for joining us, Madeline. That's really nice. We got a Facebook user here. This is what it looks like. If you don't click the link you just go, come through as Facebook user, but whoever you are we're glad to have you Peter Ingersoll joining us once again.

Good morning from Connecticut. He says and peach. Hi everyone. I am Billy. Billy, no mates working on the 15th of August when nobody works in Europe. What why does nobody work in Europe on that day? Peach? I genuinely don't know. That's not me being ignorant. I have no idea. Is it like that's actually

[00:10:55] Raiber Cristian: a huge holiday right now, which is St Mary and it's both for Orthodox and Catholics

[00:11:04] Nathan Wrigley: is right.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I guess Henry VIII got rid of all that back in the middle ages for us. And now we're we don't have a clue about that particular holiday, but da. Okay. This person's gonna go on YouTube. And then it's just a bunch of people saying hello to each other. There you go. You right Christian, because it's a Virgin Mary related Saint thing.

beautifully described. We'll go with that. We're gonna talk about WordPress, but before we do just share my screen. This is us WP build website. If you haven't see subscribing to the stuff that we do, there's a button here it's labeled subscribe rather critically. And if you click on that, you'll get to a page with all sorts of options to fill out forms and get on our mailing list and so on.

So feel free to do that. We'd really appreciate it. That'd be nice, but let's start do you know what we need? What we need apart from the hand waving, we need, I need a little jingle that I can play when there's a WP drama piece, right? When it's the weekly WP drama, I need some sort of or a cow bell or something like that.

Just something that I can strike. I

[00:12:11] Raiber Cristian: know what you need, actually. It's the, but. Sound a what? You dunno that sound it's pretty popular. It was turning. Yeah, it was meme at some point. Oh, to do. Yeah. Okay. It's like the sound it makes when you hit the drums, right? It's

Yeah.

[00:12:28] Nathan Wrigley: Unfortunately this platform doesn't have that capability, but I feel next time.

I don't know, or I. Viking hat or something like that during the no way Jess has just disappeared.

[00:12:44] Raiber Cristian: As if that

[00:12:45] Nathan Wrigley: happens, Jess has got a VI. Okay. So the theme of today's show is to try and find things that Jess has got in her room. part, she whipped out a Ciara okay. Okay. Okay. So let's get to this story.

So this is a piece, and honestly, we're not even gonna really dwell on the piece itself, which is a shame in a way. We're gonna talk about the WP drama side of things. This was a piece by tele worth on WordPress make dot WordPress do org. And it was called it is called developing the, and the redesigned home and download pages.

And in this piece, tell you with paints, a picture of what's been going on over the last few days. Or month, I should say more like 33 days in terms of getting this website designed and scoped out and getting people to cast their eyes over it and see what they think and really doing the typical job that you might do on make.wordpress.org to flesh out exactly what's been happening and who's involved and so on.

And then, so as is so often the case, it's the comments that caused the fuss. You can see that the first comment was from Matt Mullenweg, who on August the ninth through, this is not a good use of time, nor does it further the actual goals of a new homepage or download page. And we have better places to spend our development time.

Now, as

[00:14:03] Raiber Cristian: you

may, that's exact same phrase that, and one of us working with whir should. We have better places to spend our times

[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: The, you can imagine the comments. There were basically some people that came back and how to describe it. They thought that this was a little bit Inc Sendry and a little bit ill judge tele worth came back in and spelled out exactly.

And actually a really great length. Why they thought that this was not a particular waste of time and so on and so forth. And then Matt came back in and said, yes, it doesn't feel. 33 days is particularly quick for me and have implied that maybe it would be better to use some different tooling.

If things needed to move more quickly. Now, this obviously went off in Twitter and there was an awful lot of people saying things like it. Look, hang on a minute. Is Matt saying that we would be better to use alternative tools than the block editor, if it's going to be quicker and so forth. So I don't know if you guys have had a chance to Coate on this, to dwell on it or what your thoughts are, and we'll get onto Cameron's thoughts with his article, but maybe I'll start with you.

Cameron. What's been your takeaway from this?

[00:15:20] Cameron Jones: Firstly, I've wrote my article before I saw these comments, so they're not exactly. Directly related. I know tele worth personally not particularly well, but he has been the official photographer at most, if not all word camps in Australia, which, you know make it that what you will.

And perhaps I'm, have some bias from knowing them personally, but yeah, it was probably not the wisest comment to make. And some of the points that Matt raises in his longer follow up comments saying have we, considered, the comparing, the casing avenues and that sort of thing.

It's like people were asking these sorts of questions five years ago and were practically ignored when it came to like how. Gutenberg was being developed in the first place. But now they only matter now that it's being put on their own site. And if for whatever reason, Gutenberg isn't good enough for, being used on wordpress.org itself, what does that say about this whole project?

[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And that feels to me like the bit, which people got it. I think you encapsulated it really there. If it's not, if it's not fit for being used in a swift way on the.org website, then what is the use case for it? If not there maybe for a bit of context, I'll just read Matts reply.

If that's okay with everybody it's fairly lengthy, but it might give more context of the conversation. It says 30 days, sorry. 33 days since project kickoff doesn't feel quick to me, but I think it's worth diving deeper into trying to figure, trying to turn fig trying, sorry into not trying to turn Figma designs into themes quickly.

But we are solving, but are we solving the right problem in the first place? What would you say are the actual goals of a new homepage or a download page? And how could you have developed? How could you have all that development time going forward? I would guess we want. More people converting to the key actions on the.org website.

And then he talks about AB testing and things like Optimizly and so on and so forth and using PHP and include files. Then he goes on, say, and I'm following the second paragraph here. You could imagine a world where instead of taking more than a month to launch a single design, which implies a maximum rate of under 12 of these could be done in a year.

So we make 20 to 30 designs up from ideally with a different approach and copy and focus our development time on measuring the success, blah, blah, blah. So I won't carry on reading. I'll just pause there. I think I've got the tenor of it there. So Jess what's what have been the bits and pieces that you've kept picked up on Twitter or elsewhere about this?

Have you had any thoughts on this person or seen the Twitter storm that develop.

[00:18:26] Jess Frick: I just would like to say it does seem that whenever something like this happens, I end up co-hosting that week

[00:18:35] Nathan Wrigley: it's Hyster signed. Just it's very much bland .

[00:18:40] Jess Frick: So pressable being owned by automatic. I think I do have a little bit of a different perspective here.

And at risk of sounding like an apologist, I read the comments differently than other people. It looks to me like honest feedback, and sometimes we don't like feedback. I think had I written this in response to it, people would be responding differently, but because it's Matt, they're, understandably responding in a different way.

People were pushing back later in the thread and they're going to. A later comment was made that the time for questions and feedback had already passed this kicked off some time ago. The question, the probing question too, is this really going to accomplish our goals?

Are we answering the right question? I will say that, those are questions that are hard to hear in a positive way in the moment sometimes because you don't know for sure if you are answering that question. And then I think there's like an instinct insight of us and we're like, yes, of course we're doing it.

I think that part of what I've learned, over years has been that it's best for me to stop in that moment and ask, what are they seeing that I'm not seeing. Now I obviously have not taken the time to read what the goals of the homepage and the download page redesign were.

So I can't speak as to whether it actually does match that, but I do think that we get kind of Pearl clutchy whenever Matt says something that makes us uncomfortable.

[00:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: You're gonna have to explain that. Explain that phrase to me. What does Pearl clutchy mean? Clutching our

[00:20:31] Jess Frick: pearls. He said something and it sounded

[00:20:35] Nathan Wrigley: rude.

Oh so basically you are saying there's an element of, so as an example, if I had written that exact comment nobody would've possibly even replied because it's me and not Matt. Whereas the fact that Matt had said it, there's an element of posturing. And as you described it, Pearl clutching, that goes on because we don't like to hear anything from that source that's controversial or opinionated.

[00:21:05] Jess Frick: And admittedly, I think there have been some things that have happened in recent months that have people knee jerky whenever he says something. And so I think there's some element of that, but at the same time, he is the head of, this project. And so rightly so his words are given a little more weight.

I think though he does ask some important questions and the answer is, I don't know the answer. I just, I see it a little differently this

[00:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: time. That's interesting as well, because let's say that the WordPress project was a for profit corporation with shareholders and all of that, I guess Matt would be just doing this in a boardroom and, telling people often saying, look, we're not doing it that way.

We're gonna do it this way, cuz this is the way I want it done. And in this scenario that's not the way it's done. So it's all done out in the open and and I guess to expect anybody to tread on eggshells all the time, permanently 365 days of the year and not give an opinion would be a little bit unreasonable.

So that's an interesting angle on it, Jess, an important one. So he's raising questions that needed to be asked and yeah, asking, but also interesting that you said that he. Shut down in a sense as well, because the process had been gone through the time, had elapsed for him to make comments that were gonna, incisively change the way it was gonna be done.

So it led its course and probably its WP drama of this week. And not next week

[00:22:36] Jess Frick: I saw Daniel just popped in and I was actually thinking about his tweets on the matter.

[00:22:41] Nathan Wrigley: Daniel. I do want your opinion on this, actually. So this is Dan Daniel. Schult Smith. Who's just come into the comments cuz he, I think Daniel's got a very different opinion to you, Jess, in that I think he thinks that that this kind of thing is not the way that you're gonna EUR, let me try and capture it.

Stan's thoughts. Sorry, Dan, to put words into your mouth, I think your tweet implied, if you want new, fresh blood into WordPress, the a sure fire way to stifle that from happening would be for the team at the top, if you like for one of a better word to be having a go at the people who are volunteering their time and that's where this gets really tricky as well, isn't it's the whole volunteer bit.

And as soon as the volunteer bit comes in, everybody starts to say we're largely just volunteers, Christian. I know that we've locked you out of this conversation thus far and I don't want to, so can we hand it over to you?

[00:23:36] Raiber Cristian: Yeah, sure. I forgot that Jessica works for pressable, which is, an automatic owned company.

So now I have to rethink my sentences around this. Oh no. Don't get me wrong. So the way I've seen it from the outside and the way I've I've looked at, it was like, this has happened to me as well. Whenever I've handed down ownership of a project or leadership without being very specific and strict about the guidelines, rules, timelines, and everything like that.

And then I came back, let's say 33 days and took a look at where the project currently is. I was unhappy, like in my mind it has very different expectations of that project. So what I think we're seeing right now is Matt imagined something. Then he came in and looked at what's happening, which was like, are the hecks going on?

Like you're taking way too much to do this. One of the other issue. I think that's coming up from this from those phrases and sentences is he realizes that it's far easier to iterate over a design in pure HTML and PHP, test it and be tested, figured out which version is the best one. And then move on to implementing that one into Burg and people just, flock to this and they were like, holy shit, you finally understand our issues with Gutenberg and how difficult it is to iterate.

And everyone jumped at that and was like, yeah, you finally get it. You finally took a look at it. You finally realized how long it takes to put something out their life. And you're finally understanding our pains. Probably he hasn't, put himself into issues of a day to day developer that has to do this for clients day in and day out with all the good work changes out there.

And I'm not blaming him for that. Cuz he has so many things to manage. This is like it's impossible to ask him to do everything. But just people show an opportunity and ticket, right? I think it's classic example of how loosely managed automatic is and that's part, by design, by choice.

It also encourages a lot of creative work, but it also can stammer you progress really fast progress. it'll take your time without any strict deadlines. And so I agree with Jessica's point, like I see it differently than other people, but I do see the pain points as well, that he's now experiencing himself without probably ever thinking about him and was probably caught of guard.

Like when he thought about that sentences and typed it up, I don't think he realized the impact it's gonna have and how well that will resonate with the audience and how they'll, they're gonna pick at it and tear it apart, like sentence by sentence and go yeah, this is our problems. We've been crying about this for five

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: years, plus.

Yeah. That's an interesting point in that his words. Really do get dissected. Don't like really dissected for the tiniest nuance or, but

[00:26:45] Raiber Cristian: they had a lot of nuance, right? That all the, that entire phrase, like it was long phrase had a lot of, meaning to like it, it painted the bigger picture.

Like you could see the entire workflow, do this in HTML, use optimizing AB test, which we all know takes a few months and do all of these one after the other. And in the end, you'll have your winning version and then you can move into Berg, like anyone who has ever done this process know how painful it can be.

Especially with Gutenberg making, breaking changes almost every three to six months. And everyone saw that process and then started picking at all those small problems along that process. And, finally they could resonate with what Matt said and that pent up, frustration that's been accumulated all these years.

No, one's hearing our voices now. Finally, Matt's hearing it. Let's let's hit. Let's hit him. Let's

[00:27:41] Nathan Wrigley: let him have it. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Let's get the barrels out. Okay. Let's Daniel, thank you for posting some longer comments that we can read out and give your opinion. So Daniel says, and by the way, this is in one of his tweets, one of Daniel's tweets was mentioned in the article, which we may or may not.

I can't remember if it comes up later, but it was mentioned in an article as a, as an important talking point around this story Daniel says an issue to me was that the critical feedback in public from a leader has a critical bias that is not there as a peer. My suggestion was that Matt should lead with empathy and emotional intelligence rather than popping in every now and again, and then dropping bombs.

Okay. And he carries on Christian mentions a great point. It finally showed Matt how difficult the Gutenberg. Gutenberg actually is for some designs and I'm just gonna miss out Peter's comment and go to Daniel's final one. That's word carry the most weight of anyone in WordPress. And he needs to be aware of how he talks to people or it's going to discourage people from even joining.

Yeah. That was the bit of your comment that I remembered the way that if you alienate, then that's gonna discourage people in the future. And then Peter's saying great points about the hit and run type messaging, making himself a lightning rod is at the very least a distraction. It doesn't help.

Yeah. It's curious as well, isn't it? Because it's not like a tweet.

[00:29:11] Raiber Cristian: I wanna make a point here. So if you can just circle back for two minutes, sorry, 30 seconds. The Hiton type of messaging is something that I personally understand because when you're extremely busy and you try to make time in your schedule for every single thing, like everything is important.

Everyone wants your opinion and values your opinion and puts a lot of weight on your words. There's no way you can be everywhere, right? But you do realize that your input is important. So you try to give it and be as constructive and as succinct as possible with the allocated time you have just imagine this for a second.

You've been, I don't know, working nonstop for eight hours and you've got five minutes to read this piece, see exactly where it's going, what the project is. And you've got five minutes to express your thoughts as clearly and concisely as possible and leave the people to digest all the information you've just expressed as well as let them act on it.

It takes time. It's not necessarily hit and run. It's like I did the best I could with the time I had. Don't be so judge about it, cuz I, I can't spend time here. But it's easy. If he steps in right now, if he stop steps in into this life cold we're having right now delegating proper.

Yeah, sure. That makes sense. But at the same time, you're not gonna weigh other people's words as heavy as you weigh math. He's still trying to get involved in the community and make sure he's part of the community. Don't get me wrong. I don't think it's the best approach, but I think it's better than seeing nothing and never being, at least trying to show people he's reading the same sources as us and seeing the same information as us.

That's a really point. Yeah. Because I think that's extremely important for the community to realize he's actually trying, he's putting in a lot of.

I don't disagree with that. Don't get me wrong. And I think sometimes employees should be rattled. Probably if Nathan could put up this comment on a screen right now. Yeah. Sometimes I think they need rattling, heavily opinionated here. But when you take 33 days to push out a design, that's just a design without any, clear objectives, you should really think why do that?

If it's just graphical, maybe it makes no sense. Just sorry for de long rant

[00:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: about it. No, it's okay. No, it's okay. It's an interesting point. A couple of things come outta that for me, the first thing is yes the fact that this is an official WordPress channel, as opposed to a tweet or something, where you just drop some kind of Inc bomb and wander off it, it is indicative, it is in the right place and it is opinionated, which is, what comments ought to be.

It, there was no hint in that for me of, of of being inflammatory or abusive. But I think some people took it as more kind of unhelpful. And what have you and I've gotta have a little bit of empathy for anybody I suppose. And it wouldn't just be Matt Mullenweg. It would be kind of anybody who, whose words are under the microscope in that way.

I I personally. I would really find that aspect of life really difficult if I knew that every single thing that I said was gonna be dissected from every angle by can you still kept

[00:32:46] Raiber Cristian: millions of people, you kept at it. And you still kept doing it even though the entire community. If time judges you and

[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

Let's just put up the let's just put, sorry, Jess, you carry on and I'll put up the comments as,

[00:32:59] Jess Frick: yeah. Just one quick thing to Daniel's point, and he's right. We all want him in the project to be successful for years. It's the delivery that needs tweaking. I just wanna point out, nobody talks about the times that Matt comments and it's not WP drama.

I think most of the time when he is working, it's not newsworthy because it's. As I said earlier, pro clutchy

[00:33:25] Nathan Wrigley: at that point, that would be quite, that would be interesting. Actually it would be quite an interest. Nobody's gonna do this work, but it would be quite interesting to see if you took photo mats, Twitter stream and all of the comments that he's made, let's say WordPress, make wordpress.org.

It would be interesting to see how many of them were a cause of drama. I suppose the counter argument to that is if you are in that position, you've gotta be very mindful that it could, anything could be read in any witch word. Of course.

[00:33:54] Jess Frick: Of course, and Lord knows, I have tasted at least seven or eight pairs of my shoes in the last two years, like who among us, hasn't said something truly regrettable in a public forum.

[00:34:07] Raiber Cristian: It's easy to do that, actually. Yeah. So if you don't hide behind a communications team, like a PR team that. Thinks about these kinds of things and tries to and you've seen how several, those types of messages are like their sentences that barely say anything. Yeah. And most CEOs of huge companies hide between the behind those companies and just stick to a script, you rarely see those unscripted chats or that's stepping out and going unscripted here and saying his thoughts and people are like, no, we hate your ideas. We want you more involved. That's still right. So feedback not necessarily valuable or actionable. And I get wider frustration, but we have to realize he's just one guy.

He's never gonna be able to put himself across so many different aspects of the business. There's a lot to do with the business, that size insane amount.

[00:35:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's just

[00:35:07] Jess Frick: the, that's the front side. The not profit side. Remember he's got the whole profit side too.

[00:35:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh yeah. Daniel

[00:35:17] Raiber Cristian: saying all I was thinking about the future and being challenged, by huge competition.

[00:35:21] Nathan Wrigley: It's time it took, Daniel's saying he's questioning the time it took. Do you mean the time it took for the 33 days? Or do you mean the 33 days? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Time. Okay, here we go. Is follow up time. It takes for developing or designing a subjective based on other commitment, skill level, et cetera. Yeah.

And also the nature of the way that things are done in the WordPress community. Aren't they, it's not okay, here's six people deployed in a company who are on fulltime payroll and we can tell 'em exactly what to do and deploy them. However, we we expect everything to be done in, eight and a half hours or whatever it may be.

It's a very different thing and I. Jess I'd missed the bit at the end where they said that the conversation was locked out anyway, because the time was up and all of the usual processes had been gone through. So that is the WP drama for this week. Because we got Cameron here and Cameron's cam, Cameron's getting us back into a subject, which we covered a few weeks ago and I think it's an important subject to carry on if that's right.

I'm not entirely sure that we dealt with it in the perfect way. Okay. Hang on. Let me get ready for Cameron's. Okay, there we go. We go, there we go. I think what you need. No, I'm not sure. It's ready. I don't think we need the full blown. Viking hat this time. I think the Tiara would be satisfaction.

Tiara. Yeah. Go for the Tiara. It's not quite the drama. look at the size of the head object. It's directly proportional to the nature of the drama. So I wanna introduce you to Cameron's blog it's Cameron Jones, web.com.au, Cameron Jones, web.com.au. I will try to put the link on the screen in just a minute.

I failed to make a little piece of text for that. And and Cameron's taken his pen to paper this week with a post entitled, why I'm not sold on five for the future. Normally it's me explaining these articles. That would be ridiculous in this particular case. So Cameron. All I'll say is five for the future is the idea that companies, individuals give 5% of their, I'm gonna use the word resources, cuz I don't know how that word, be time.

It could be. It, yeah, it could be all sorts of things, but that's what it is and you've, you're not sold on it. Tell us why.

[00:37:41] Cameron Jones: Funnily enough, I wrote a 2000 word blog piece. why, sorry, go read that. Yeah there's a variety of different reasons. The influence that automatic has on the project and the whole murky waters between who is really running the show Just how 5% is actually quantified.

And Rob Howard from master WP had a really good analysis on, the toxic score, keeping elements of, keeping track of hours and comparing them, like we saw it was weaponized in, the whole GoDaddy tweet storm. Yeah. There's yeah, several reasons, unfortunately.

Yeah. Read the book post.

[00:38:39] Nathan Wrigley: Do you think though, that, essentially you, you are having read it. There's quite a lot in there, but first of all, let's tackle the thing about what this bit here, what is a contribution at the moment? So for example, does this count does this no, sh okay, let me reword that.

Should this count? No, let me reword that again. Let me go back to the beginning. Let's go through all the things which do count. So at the minute we've got basically putting in time to developing into core, is that where it ends? Is that where your 5% can go? It's

[00:39:21] Cameron Jones: a bit more than that.

It's to my knowledge, the best of my knowledge, it's contributing to a make team. That does. Usually tends to involve writing code for WordPress core. It can involve other things like like wordpress.org is running things like diverse speaker training and that sort of thing. And that's coming under one of the make teams and that sort of thing.

So that's obviously not writing code for core at all. And, that's would count towards it. And marketing like the new homepage and download page and whatever, whoever's designing that, if they're being sponsored that would come under that cuz it's contributing to a make team.

But then yeah, there's obviously a lot of things that don't count that, Aren. Make team contributions.

[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: And it feels to me from the article, we've got it on the screen at the moment, but we'll read out some other things. Are you, do you think it would be a good idea to broaden the scope of that so that the net is cast wider?

So basically if it's anything to do with WordPress, the promotion of WordPress, the creation of new things in WordPress, anything that promotes WordPress that ought to come under the umbrella and therefore a new definition of what that 5% is

[00:40:47] Raiber Cristian: not

[00:40:47] Cameron Jones: necessarily I think it can be broadened but little bit, but I do think that more or less it is, the right things are being counted and the wrong ones.

Aren't, like this podcast doesn't count. I'm gonna leave that. It probably

[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: shouldn't, I'm going

[00:41:07] Cameron Jones: go off to the where my main grief comes with it in terms of what counts, especially is there is this attitude that if you are not contributing. Two five for the future. Two, the things that count you are not doing real contributions, right?

Whereas, I think this podcast is a very valuable contribution to the community. I don't necessarily think it should count towards five for the future, but it shouldn't be disrespected and disregarded in the way that I feel the current rhetoric around fight for the future is doing so, calling people free riders because they're not participating in the fight for the future program and calling them a parasitic existential threat to the project.

Because they're not contributing enough hours, according to your opinion, it's, GoDaddy sponsors this podcast, they sponsor other podcasts, they sponsor events and stuff, it was only, oh, there's 9,000 employees and they're only doing 200 hours or whatever it was, not that it should count towards it.

It's but it should be at least acknowledged,

[00:42:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. On a five star rating system. If five star was the top and five for the future, I think WP Builds, sits firmly in the one for the future. The ones it's quite generous. Yeah. I think, alright. Half, can we go with half Cameron, half for the future, the nor 0.5 for the future.

If you manage to post this on Twitter. Okay. That's fine. Yeah. You can go for a full start that's but it's, it is really interesting because there are an awful lot of people doing an awful lot of things and much of it thankless, much of it, obviously coming under the umbrella that Cameron's just described, it, it goes channels indirectly to a make team.

Therefore it counts, but a lot of people doing a lot of other things. So you've just mentioned sponsorship things like the sponsorship of this podcast itself, the fact that you three are on it, giving up your time in order to, help spread the word and in some way help the word press ecosystem.

None of that counts. And as you say, Cameron, perhaps rightly but maybe the net does need to be cast a little bit wider. Let's throw it open to Jess and Christian. See what they. Oh, my God oh, that's all.

[00:43:27] Raiber Cristian: It's the first time I'm meeting Cameron and I haven't read the post. I know what the five for the future program is.

I know as a plugin shop owner, what frustrates me about it? Cuz they, they said like the people who are contributing the most to the five for the future program are gonna get first access into wordpresses.com plugin store that's been announced for a year or so by now they're gonna get beta invites into that program.

And my office is not one of those people. But I think I think the sentence that if you're contributing to any other activity than the ones listed here, you're not making real contributions will spin up, spin, spun off into meaning I wouldn't attribute to. So personally I wouldn't say you're not contributing at all.

It's not. Reading that sentence. It's not what I understand. It's not, you're not helping the, the product move into the direction we want to move because we, so how I see it, we have a lot of challenges in our plate with, out of all the huge list of places where you could contribute it. We've already hired people and put people into places and frameworks and process and whatnot.

But these are the areas where we still need help. And we think that even people with no experience could get involved and actually make an impact and have their and see their work put live. So for example I think I've opened two tickets eight years ago on track. They're still there. No one

[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: worked, no one Cameron fails your pain, right?

Yeah, of course. So

[00:45:13] Raiber Cristian: don't get me wrong. If you were a developer today and you went into contributing to one

[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: of the,

[00:45:19] Raiber Cristian: Track tickets or hundreds of thousand track tickets, most likely you'll work within C day of the light of day. That's 99% of the track tickets. The way I see it is like, where could we, what areas of the WordPress project, community foundation, however you wanna call us, cuz there's many aspects to it, right?

Could we lower the bar so much that everyone can enter. Everyone can get a gratification feeling like it ends in a point and you've accomplished your task and maybe see your work live. And it's always easy to pick at these sentences, right? Again, put this hat on and think this is the time he had write that.

This is the best he could come up with. Was it perfect? Obviously not. Am I making up excuses for him? No, I'm trying to be as honest as possible fight for the future program frustrates me as hell, especially because it affects my business. Can I change it? No. Will I get involved in fact, for the future, just to get access to the WordPress plugin store, whatever it's gonna be called?

Probably not. It's easy. You don't like it. You don't contribute. It's easy. You wanna contribute. You contribute without second. Guessing his intentions about it. That's I see it. I'm sorry if this goes against Cameron's post. Not my intention. I haven't read his post. Not really.

[00:46:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Okay. Broadly I think talking along the same lines, Cameron, I dunno if he was in your post.

I can't remember now or in Rob Howard's post where he was talking about the expansion of things like badges whereby it would, there would be. So in much the same way, if you signed up to a, I don't know, an LMS based course, and you make your way through certain criteria, you get certain badges along the way.

I wonder if that is a useful thing to do in the future is to split the community at large, into various different sub categories. Many of which, when WordPress started. I irrelevant because they didn't exist. Like media people who contribute to documentation and so on, obviously that's under the umbrella of, but all sorts of different things and people who contribute in those ways and can proably say that they've done certain things should get that particular badge.

I myself, for example, would get the Viking helmet badge for having created multiple blog, podcast episodes, and that kind of thing. I feel for me that probably wouldn't make a difference. I'm not really doing it for the badges, but I could see that for some people who were starting out, those little things might make a nice and solid difference.

If you could display on your wordpress.org profile that you've got, I don't know, 12 advantages here as well. Yeah. But more and more different ones, diverse range of different activities that you could be involved with. Let's open it up to Jess and see if she's got any thoughts.

[00:48:27] Jess Frick: Case in point I was the co-host when this broke as well.

Yeah.

[00:48:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What's going on Jess.

[00:48:35] Jess Frick: I've already shared my thoughts as well.

[00:48:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm just gonna check in the diary when your next back on so that we can calculate. So the day when the next Scandal's gonna break,

[00:48:45] Jess Frick: oh, Lordy. I've already spoken extensively in my thoughts with this. But I just wanna say, I serve on the hosting team and that's because I'm interested in hosting.

Obviously it serves my purpose professionally. I really like the people on the team. I enjoy being a part of the conversation. I enjoy having a seat at the table. I enjoy, contributing to make things better. And by the way, our team works in coordination with a whole bunch of other teams.

And I think a lot of people have thoughts on five for the future, and they're all valid for them, of course. But I would encourage people to just check out the teams that are available. It's easy to say I just wanna write blog posts and make that count. Cool. Have you ever been to a marketing team meeting?

I think you might find you can contribute to that and also do what you love and

[00:49:40] Raiber Cristian: the one, if you take contribution.

[00:49:43] Jess Frick: Yeah, of course. Just simply putting it out there that when you take five for the future title and all that other stuff away, what's behind it is really beautiful and amazing.

And there's a lot of really good people that you can connect with and work together toward a greater good. And that's what I think matters more than labels, badges and whatever other mathematical equations you wanna put into the value of

[00:50:10] Nathan Wrigley: your time. Yeah. I want really hard maths to be applied to this.

Impenetrably difficult maths and Viking helmets. I see that as the solution understandable. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Honestly. Why don't they all just come for, to me for the answers, I'll give them. Grains of wisdom like that Viking helmets and bill needs a swag store on well, yeah. Viking. Yes. Yes. The Viking t-shirt oh my gosh.

Oh dear. Yeah, I know. I can see

[00:50:38] Raiber Cristian: it. The helmets, right word now got

[00:50:42] Nathan Wrigley: Tiara. Jess, we're going into business. We're gonna launch a clothing brand with Viking helmets and tiaras. We're gonna be millionaires and you can honestly

[00:50:51] Raiber Cristian: turn this into custom emojis and like anytime there's drama. Add the Viking helmet or the tight tr you

[00:51:01] Nathan Wrigley: can think of.

Yeah yeah I'm gonna link in the show notes, a whole bunch of other articles, which we probably don't have time to discuss here. Be Cameron wanted me to highlight, I'll just put them on the screen quickly because I want to give them, whoops, is that gonna come back? Yes. Because they encapsulate some of the things that Cameron wanted to talk about.

This one is the WP review article. This is Joe Casabona and it's entitled. If you really want to democratize publishing, you need free riders. So that's people who use. WordPress without ever thinking about five for the future. And then there's two articles by Rob Howard. One is a slightly older one.

This is back in July, entitled, toxic score, keeping the case against five for the future. And you can imagine from the title, what that goes into, and then a much more recent post that's was this just this week, saving the future and solving the free rider problem again, over on master WP. So that debate can be held, but I will make sure to put Cameron's post in the show notes as well.

But if you go to Cameron Jones, web.com.au and search for this, why I'm not sold on five for the future and leave a comment there and let Cameron know what. Okay. I like this. I'm just gonna say that right off the bat. I think this is very cool. This is Sarah Gooding writing on WP Tavan. It's called new 2023 default three theme now in development.

We're well, we're into the latter part of 2022. So it's time to dust off and get developing a new theme. Each year. We have a new one and it drops as regular as clockwork now. Gonna be very difficult for me to describe, but it's a very different approach. Imagine basically a wire frame in the past, we've had fairly opinionated, default themes.

So they've come with a set of styles and, they look the way they look and you can go in, in the customizer and play with it to your heart's content and modify it. But it's bound by the choices that the designers made to a great extent. This is a really different take and automatic director, cha Channing, sorry, design director, Channing, Riter published a piece of what the theme might look like.

And I, I just think this is such an interesting departure from what we've normally had. So essentially what you're presented with is a website, which you could never deploy as it is. It's got placeholders. For images and they're not placeholders in the sense of, it's in a Lauren ipsum type default theme of some flowers in a garden or something, it's literally a rectangle with a line drawn through it.

So you can't just be away with the, you can't just publish it right away. And a whole load of styling choices on the right hand side in the panel. And you can change the way all of the things like the spacing and the padding and all of that works. And it just presents to me just a really different opportunity rather than download theme, modify, click, publish, and year off with this one, a little bit more thought is required.

So I like it. I like the way this is heading, but I like to tinker and I do a blank canvas. So I don't know whether it's gonna Sue everybody, but it strikes me as a really interesting one. Let me just quickly. Play this video. If you're watching at the moment, be able to see what I'm talking about.

So you can see on the right channeling is selecting different options, and you can see this, the padding changes the images, the spacing between things change around. And it's just really different for a default word, press theme. So over to you guys, what do you make of it?

[00:54:44] Raiber Cristian: I'd say that themes have been moving the way from being opinionated designs into just being like a collection of functions that are generally applied across the entire site.

Font choice color choice, that kind of stuff for many years now. That's what may generate press WP, Astra Neve, and whichever blocks you like the top firm of popular themes. That's what made them so popular. Cuz they. They start stopped. Sorry. They stopped delivering specific designs and they just started giving back the freedom to the user and allowing them to choose whichever page builder.

They wanted to complete their website design, but like they switched from being a design framework to an utility framework because that's basically what themes are nowadays. They bundle up a lot of utility that makes it easy to change core aspects, but not design related aspects, necessarily.

Those can be tweaked with skins. For example, in blocks, you have a lot of, which is our theme of choice right now across entire websites. We've built our websites on good Morgan Blay. I think that's currently the best theme ever built, sorry to everyone else as raised the bar. And yeah, I think it's the logical natural choice to go with this approach instead of a heavily opinionated design, which sometimes it, you know, people like it, sometimes they don't, but it's a very specific niche purpose, right?

[00:56:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I was just gonna say, I wonder what what inexperienced WordPress users, coming into WordPress for the first time, I wonder what they would make of something like this, cuz it's clearly template to use. How many but

[00:56:45] Raiber Cristian: experienced users do you think WordPress still

[00:56:47] Nathan Wrigley: has or gets?

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. It's a good question. I think a lot would be my free.

[00:56:52] Raiber Cristian: Yeah. The growth rate has plateaued and has been plateauing for two years now. There's not a lot of new users stepping into this space, like it's growing, but not at the rate. It used to be those new users who started two years ago are.

At least capable of changing plugins and playing around with settings and clicking stuff around to

[00:57:13] Nathan Wrigley: make changes. I just, I personally love stuff like this. It just seems I don't know. It's the kind of exact canvas that I would like to look at. Yep. Because I can do whatever I want with it, but I do wonder if it's maybe a little too bare bones for other people anyway, over to Cameron and Jess.

See what they think about this. They still have choices,

[00:57:35] Raiber Cristian: right? Yeah. You still have. Sorry. That was it. Everyone else, please.

[00:57:46] Nathan Wrigley: Cameron. Sure. If not, I'll move on.

[00:57:49] Cameron Jones: I don't have many thoughts. I don't particularly like the way force editing is being introduced. Unlikely to use this. But my only real thoughts are, it. It's clearly being named 20, 23. And I know there was some discussion recently about not doing, 20, 20 X themes.

Yeah. And just having the one, just one. So is this meant to be it? Or is there gonna be a 20, 24? Have we reached that point yet or not? Cuz obviously that is the point that full sight editing is trying to get us to is that themes are yeah, not opinionated, they're just basic framework and your blocks are everything.

Does calling it 2023 mean that we're not at that point yet. And that we're gonna get a 20, 24 that it'll come sometime in the future or is 20, 23 gonna be the WordPress theme. For eternity.

[00:58:55] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if there's anybody who is making WordPress themes, watching this at the moment or listening to it after the fact be curious to know what your thoughts are on that, because I do wonder from what Cameron just said.

Yeah. That message is ringing clear in my head. We just, some people saying we just need this basic, the theme, whatever that looks like, and everything will be blocks from there on, in, and you can use full site editing to, to modify it as you see fit. I just think the, I just think the canvas, I really like it.

I just like all of the icons on the right where you can fiddle and it's really visual, but it doesn't lock you in and you've gotta have a bit of imagination to make it start. I guess the only concern I would have is that I think for people who are not experienced with playing. Page design, not just website design, but page design.

It would be quite easy to come up with something extremely mediocre based upon what you're given. Because it's just this one solid color background. And I dunno someone who's built custom themes

[01:00:00] Raiber Cristian: in the past and sold them to clients. I can promise you, even if you give them a design, they can turn

So don't take that away from them. We built we tried extensively to build themes that were, we tested with 200 plugins to make sure that anytime they install one of those plugins, it's still gonna look great. And they still manage to find that one point thing. They couldn't install that would fuck up the entire website and make it look like crap.

They were super happy about it. If you wanted to designer

[01:00:32] Nathan Wrigley: just, they just don't know it yet. It's bound to happen. Yeah. It's an interesting future. If we do get to the point where you just drop in the theme and blocks, what makes everything up, hopefully there'll be less of what you've just described.

Christian. Any thoughts on this, Jess? Or should we move on?

[01:00:47] Jess Frick: I'm just thinking of a world where I have three independent sliders, each moving at different times at the top of my website. Yep. See how that works for my theme. Anyway I, some people just wanna watch the world burn.

[01:01:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yep. I have one slider when you can have three. Oh, you've gotta have three sliders, at least three, I think at least three with Viking helmets. Let's move on. Okay. So we've had we've had veto Pello on this podcast many times before you may have known about him. He's behind at rim, which is a sass product now, but it started out as a WordPress plugin called WP feedback, and it allows you to.

Essentially interact with your clients and the clients have an interface where they can comment on things that they would like you to amend or change or design iterations and things like that. And it's a great standalone tool, but WordPress also has a plugin called main WP. And if you haven't used main WP before, I really think it's a solid solution.

I've got it up and running and I'm really happy with it. It's been ticking over for about five years with not a single problem so far, it's a solution which allows you to you connect it to your WordPress sites. Let's typically say your client's websites and it allows you to log into one dashboard and update all the things.

There's many more bells and whistles, but that's basically what it's intended to do. The two companies have got together and formed an integration, which I think is really neat. In that if you have both AAM and main WP you'll be constantly logging into both of them to try and see whether there's been any activity.

Do plugins need updating that's main WP, has the client given us any commentary that we need to look at that's AAM and whilst that's fine. If you could remove one of those steps, that would be good. And that's what this does. The idea would be that you go to your main WP dashboard and there's now a, an extra bit added to the row associated with each website.

And if the clients have made some commentary, so you can see on a picture here, the clients have been going around the website and they've made 12 little comments and main WP just now alerts you to the fact that's happened. I'm guessing that you'll click on this icon, this button, and then you'll go to the website and you'll be logged in.

You'll be able to use all of the ATRI, goodness, but I just think tools like this getting together, it's not a takeover, it's just a collaboration and it seems like a really neat one. Your thoughts?

[01:03:27] Jess Frick: I just wanna say that I personally love main WP and I love the team over at a room. I'm very excited to see this work together and I know that some of our customers will absolutely be excited to use it. Yeah. Really good people all around.

[01:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And just like a really neat idea, it's it's not gonna save you hours in a week, but it might save you hours in a year.

Yeah. And it's just the sort of thing that you need. If you've got a piece of software which is taking care of commentary and it can bolt into the thing which you'll log into every day, basically I log into main WP every day. I don't really do the client website stuff so much anymore that if I did, and I could just see a big blue button.

And by the way, there's nothing really blue in the main w P UI. Unless you theme it that way, but it really would stand out and you'd be able to see it right away. Okay. Something needs taken care of. It's just a nice little feature. And I want to give 'em a shout out. Love that. Okay. Okay.

If neither of the others have got anything to say about that, shall we move on? Gutenberg 13.8. This is Sarah Gooding over on WP TA Gutenberg, 13.8, introduces fluid typography support and revamped quote to block. I'm probably not gonna touch on the quote bot, but let's just all watch this video.

The idea being that you'll be able to set without doing things like media queries and what have you. The article says theme, Jason already allows authors to insert their own fluid font style values. This won't change, but this PR offers it to folks who don't want to worry about it. Theme developers who want to opt into fluid typography only need to set typography dot fluid to be true in the theme dot Jason and add fluid to each of the well, blah, blah, blah settings.

And so on. I just think this is really nice. Looks like a really nice implementation. The idea that you'll be able to look at that just looks cool, right? Just really sure does to see

[01:05:26] Jess Frick: one, one important note though, is this is actually being built into the 2023 theme.

[01:05:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, tell me more, what, so you'll be able to do this thing that we are watching on the screen right now where it's shrinking and growing locked

[01:05:41] Jess Frick: and loaded fluid

[01:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: typography.

Okay. Okay. So that's nice. Yeah. Again, it's a minor little thing, but I thought I'd mention it. Anything from anybody apart from Jess, cuz she's just something

[01:05:54] Raiber Cristian: I think nailing Floyd typography has insanely difficult. Yep. This has been, this has existed as a CSS solution for. Maybe 10 years, 12 years more maybe.

But even back then getting fonts, headings, and sizes to scale down with their parent elements is never easy. Like finding that perfect scale of balance across screen resolutions, what media queries did though, they locked, it locked you in into specific designs, right? Specific break points, sorry. And someone ensured that at those specific break points you'd have, not a perfect, but an ideal experience.

What fluid typography does it adapts the entire layout across all the possible break points. So you're never gonna get the same experience with this website. So interesting, but I can only see it working in very simple use cases, such as a very minimalistic. Typography based blog or publication, news websites, stuff like that.

It's extremely challenging to get fluid typography working on a real website. When I'm saying real website, I'm thinking about one with sliders with three sliders with, pages. Yeah, exactly. so if you can for a second, just imagine in eCommerce se with a lot of traffic that implements this, it's not gonna be

[01:07:35] Nathan Wrigley: not challenging.

I basically look at the web. I'm just trying to think to myself, how what are varieties of different screen sizes that I use? Basically I'm bound to two different things. I'm on this computer.

[01:07:46] Raiber Cristian: Oh no you are because you don't realize how many knockoff cheap devices there are on the. Yeah.

And coming from China mainly, and they have these weird ass resolutions because we've built an image gallery plugin. We get requests such as on our support channels. We get people saying I just put your gallery up on my whatever brand named TV they got there. And it has this 594 pixels by Adam 594.

So imagine it's a square,

[01:08:17] Nathan Wrigley: it's a square. Okay. It's a square, but

[01:08:21] Raiber Cristian: It's it varies so much. It's insane.

[01:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: And that is interesting.

[01:08:26] Raiber Cristian: It doesn't look perfect. And I'm like, here hold on. So what do we have to do now? Should I fly to China by one of these TVs? Buy a new apartment, furnish it just with TVs from fur, ceiling, because there's so many brands and so many different resolutions and it constantly being updated.

What do I do now? Yeah.

[01:08:47] Nathan Wrigley: That's a,

[01:08:47] Raiber Cristian: so many different browsers as well. Yeah, because

[01:08:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I'm either looking at it like that on my phone. Never like that. I've given up, hold in. Does anybody browse the web that way on their phone? When did that videos? Oh, video. Yeah. That's the only case, right?

You click the little enlarge button and it's a video sometimes text. Oh, really? Like that. Oh no, never. No,

[01:09:13] Jess Frick: just if they don't, if the page is not responsive or if the email is going over the margins.

[01:09:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Got it. Okay. So I'm basically two, two resolutions. That's all. I need to think about me, but it's just you this monitor.

Yeah, exactly. And this phone, that way round orientate for text, but you're right. I hadn't really given enough, remember that the multitude of different sizes.

[01:09:35] Raiber Cristian: Yeah. That's not browsers as well. So Instagram, Facebook, anytime you open a link, you're gonna default, especially on iPhones. This is different on Android, but on iPhone, it just has a built in browser, which is.

Way dumber than the one you have on your phone. So that's gonna be entire, it's gonna react entirely different, with fluid typography and fluid, everything. So it's gonna break stuff easily. Yeah. And you're gonna be left with, hold on. So how do I even test this out? How do I even reproduce this on my end to see how, why it's happening?

[01:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, okay. Alright. Thank you for that. That was very informed. Thank you, Christian. And took that debate on Cameron, anything say about that or shall we move on?

[01:10:21] Cameron Jones: Oh, not really. Okay. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard. Topography photography is hard.

[01:10:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Getting it

[01:10:30] Raiber Cristian: perfect for everything.

[01:10:31] Cameron Jones: It will be interesting to see how they've implemented this and see how

[01:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: it works.

Yeah. When you see that video and it's, there's a lot of thought being done into making that particular scenario work very well. It looks really nice. Doesn't it's ever so appealing as you shrink it. It just changes a lot of times and it looks perfect in all scenarios. But like you say, trying to accommodate the 4,000 different screen resolutions out there.

Yeah. A heck of a challenge, right? So a new beachhead for every, for, so this is where the new YouTube channel courses are gonna come out. Aren't they? The how to do fluid typography in three years, it makes sense. But

[01:11:08] Raiber Cristian: the use cases are pre pretty limited.

[01:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It is time to do some back PAing.

Jessica is going to not only wear her Viking helmet, she's gonna get a large paddle out and just pat herself on the back. Because this hang.

No, I got a flag

for this one. She got a flag now just the best. Can I just tell you a story? This has got nothing to do with WordPress. When I was 21 years old, I went to a party in London and this guy showed up that nobody knew, like nobody could figure out how he'd got there.

And he was wearing an enormous trench coat and it went from shoulder to the floor and it turned out like as the evening went on, turned out, this guy had everything inside his coat, literally everything he'd sewn custom pockets. Throughout the entire internals, including behind his back. And it got to the point where I said to him, because it was getting ridiculous, people were saying, if you got a sewing kit and he'd rummage around it.

Yeah. Got a sewing kit. I said to him, Have you got a chicken baster? He had a chicken baster. He had a thing to, to base oil, onto a chicken. He had a small chicken baster. And Jess, what I'm feeling is that you have fast become the, that guy on this podcast that you've got all the things look at you, your array of things in the background.

[01:12:44] Jess Frick: You know what though? I keep this here because we do a lot of zoom calls and some people are killing it and they need to know that okay.

[01:12:50] Nathan Wrigley: That's what it is killing. But look at Cameron, very minimal look at Christian, very minimal me. I've got a few bits of paper, but it's very minimal. You got all the stuff going on.

It's

[01:13:00] Jess Frick: great. I've got stuff all over the place, but you know what? That's just how my brain works. I know where it all

[01:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: is. Jess, do you have a chicken Baer? Not in this room. Oh, it's such a disappointment. But I have

[01:13:12] Jess Frick: two

[01:13:13] Nathan Wrigley: sizes in another room. I don't know if you can come back. Oh, wait. Okay. That's fine. You got 'em in another room.

that's anyway, there's the chicken based amendment that is the strong contender for the episode, title chicken stuff for parties with you, Nathan. Honestly it was so strange. It was literally, we were all wetting ourselves with laughter, as people said more and more curious and weird things and he had them it was very odd anyway.

So what are we looking at? What are we looking at, Jess?

[01:13:42] Jess Frick: We were gonna talk about this in the last episode we ran outta time. And obviously possible did well here, but the cool thing about review signal. This is something that is done every year by a guy named Kevin O Hashi. And he does this with zero influence.

You do have to pay to participate because those hosting companies will pay him for his time. There is no way to get an edge on this. Everyone runs through the same tests and basically this is an annual performance test to show you how each host that participates is performing that year. So for example, right now, you're looking at WordPress hosting companies, and these are people who submitted for the under $25 category.

Each of those dollar amounts are different amounts for each plan. Plans that are between 51 and a hundred dollars and so forth. Yep. And different hosts will participate in different levels depending on what plans they wanna put in. So obviously the sub 25, there's a bunch of them. Those that performed well have stars next to their name.

Those that perform do not . You'll see that there's obviously highlights in every single area. In this one, there were a lot of heavy hitters for the 25 sub $25. The higher you go, the less you're gonna see. Obviously pressable got stars in every category. But the real story here, and this is something that Kevin specifically spoke about.

If you look at our best performers from the test last year and not our, like our pressable, but our like the community. If you look at our top performers from last year, there would be on the lower level this year, because every host across the board is just killing it now. Huh? Hosts are becoming faster than they've ever been before.

And it's really quite amazing to look at year over year. So I don't know if you're the technical type, but if you are, you can look into each of these individual hosts, click any random one. It doesn't have to be

[01:15:48] Nathan Wrigley: mine. Why not? Let's do yours cuz you're here. Okay. So if we click into the personal one, here we go.

[01:15:53] Jess Frick: you scroll down and you can see how he performed year over year. But if you go further, they'll see the load storm. And this is where Kevin does his real data analysis. And he's running load tests, he's using specific software to see how the host performs under a lot of traffic with a lot of people doing a lot of different processes.

And that's where he gives you back these scores. And it's really interesting from a hosting perspective to see where you have room to grow, not only just in comparison to others, but just against what you want to, what you think you should be doing. But it's also just a nice way to celebrate how far you've come.

I know there are some hosts that got stars this year that didn't get 'em last year. And I think that by and large, they'd probably say that they were influenced by the feedback that they got the year before. So when you're out shopping for a host and they tell you they're the fastest, I would encourage you to come to WP hosting benchmarks and look at Kevin's data.

And he'll tell you who really was now that said different hosts will have different speeds. Obviously, if you have a site with nothing on it, you could be a whole lot faster than a site. running three sliders. There's always nuance, but generally speaking, I think that Kevin's data is a really good rule of thumb.

You'll see, there are a lot of hosts that don't participate and that's a conversation for another day. I have my thoughts on why they probably don't, but I think there's a really good array of hosts here. And I think it actually helps further the entire WordPress community by participating because we can all see what's working best for everybody else.

[01:17:41] Nathan Wrigley: I really, I didn't know that the. First of all, there was a fee. And I can quite understand that there's a fee because he's basically putting probably an awful lot of time in, and the level of detail that would go into this would be simply unachievable by a voluntary thing. So did you say his name is Kevin?

It is so Kevin cool gig, what a nice thing to be to be doing, if you're really into the data and the nerdiness of inspecting what WordPress host are like, it's great that you've managed to forge a life for yourself where that's what you're doing. But also this is the perennial question, isn't it?

In Facebook groups. And so on, especially with people who are dissatisfied with their current host, they just want some, one place to give them some kind of an authority. And while you say not everybody's here, it's a good place to begin that journey. Isn't it? It gives you some key point right off the bat.

And I would imagine that most people are not really gonna delve into the statistics too deeply, but if you are that person and you're looking to make a change, this is a good place to start. So it's WP hosting, benchmarks.com. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. And you are happy with the way it turned out for pressable this year, right?

I

[01:18:57] Jess Frick: am, like you said, not everybody's gonna go here, but we are really doing our best to reach more developers and agencies. We think we are very well suited for that audience. And I think most agencies and developers do care about their performance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very happy to see us perform well in this specifically.

[01:19:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There must be a little bit of nail biting when Kevin comes back and drops that bomb drops the Kevin bomb. And you don't get the star this year. But

[01:19:27] Jess Frick: have we looked for a few hosts? Yeah it's a little nervewracking. You're refreshing until the

[01:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: results are posted Kevin. Nice.

I like I say nice gig. That's great. Cameron and Christian. I know that time is short. So if you've got nothing to say on that, we'll move on. If that's. Yeah. Yeah. Alrighty. Okay. Let me just quickly nip to this one. We had the guys on from north commerce. If you don't know about north commerce, they're in like beater, maybe still even Al from, I'm not sure.

It's a platform which they're hoping to rival woo commerce. It's called north commerce. And I just thought I'd introduce this video it's on YouTube. It's called NORTHCOM update plugin security. And if you're curious about changing away from commerce or trying a different eCommerce solution built inside a WordPress, you might be interested to know about some of the bits and pieces that they're doing to ensure that your transactions are not being inspected as it travels across the wire and secure boy, that was, that went right through me.

That bus you Cameron. Yeah. Cameron just. Did the big sneeze okay. Word camp us. They have their speaker lineup available. Now, if you were lucky enough to get a ticket, then this is an article on WP Tavern, but basically you can now go and see they released it over a number of rounds. They did like a blog post each and every day for a week or something.

And you can go and check it out now and see what the schedule is like. And obviously if you are going it's from the, I'm gonna get the dates wrong. I can't remember. I think it's the sixth to the ninth or maybe it's the ninth, 11th, the 11th. Yeah. Ninth to the 11th of September. And if you are going, I'll see you there cuz I'm going now which is kind be cool.

Yeah, I'll talk more about it later, but I'm delighted. I do some sort of incredible, oh my

[01:21:23] Raiber Cristian: gosh. I'm

[01:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: so happy right now. I'll tell you the story when we've finished and I'll tell everybody else the story at some point, but just the weirdest thing what I am gonna be there, which is really nice. So if you're into attending that word camp, the important thing is if you didn't make it, there will be a live stream available.

So you'll be able to see the whole. Entire thing. I wanted to mention that I did a podcast episode this week with writers, CHS from visual composer. And whilst he is a employee of visual composer, it's not particularly about that. It's all about selling to your WordPress clients. The fact that you are using a, be a page builder, not as something that you need to be ashamed of, but as something that, in his words you ought to be proud of because it's gonna save you a whole bunch of time.

And Cameron, was it this one that you wanted me to mention or was it the other one? Oh, perhaps was it this.

Yeah, you're nodding. I think so. Yeah. I confess, I read this a few days ago and Cameron, if you are prepared to wing it tell us what this one's about because I read it. And for some reason, anything that I read got pushed out of my brain during the weekend. And I can't remember what it's about.

It's called new proposal calls for contributors to stop merging experimental APIs from Gutenberg to WordPress core. What are the talking points in here?

[01:22:54] Cameron Jones: In WordPress core in 6.0 or whatever the current version is, I can't remember. There are about 300 APIs as part of Gutenberg that are marked as experimental and shouldn't be used.

Unfortunately when you put something into core. People are gonna use it because it's there . And especially when you have a beta testing plugin called Gutenberg, that you should be doing all the experimental API stuff in when you put those experimental APIs in core, when they're not stable by putting them in core, you're almost endorsing them as stable when they're not.

And so people use them things break and it's not a good time for anyone. So I think it is about time.

[01:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: This happened how I'm obviously not committing to core or anything like that. But what is, there's no way of expunging these or they haven't been expunged over time or they just slip through a net?

Or how does it, how does that even happen?

[01:24:06] Cameron Jones: They don't really slip through a net because they have to be explicitly copied over from the plugin into core. I don't know exactly how they get in there. Obviously these are all features that probably should be in core at some point, whether it's just implemented in the best way.

Whether it's because the people who are working on 2023 theme are like, hi, I need this feature. Can we make sure it's available so that when people install the theme. They don't need the plugin for it to work. Yeah. Maybe it's something like that. I'm not sure, for if it was a couple that had come in, we'd say, okay, sure.

But 300 APIs is just ridiculous.

[01:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It does seem like a lot. Doesn't it. And presumably. Then there's no sort of particular security threat here. It's just a quirky amount of things in there that probably ought to be just in, as you say, the beta testing plugin, where they belong. Until further notice, unfortunately, time is our enemy today.

I've got a hard stopping about. 90 seconds. So we are gonna have to wrap it up there. There's a couple of articles that we never got to. I'm afraid might just push those onto next week. But I think we're gonna go with the chicken baster title for this particular episode. Christian has joined us purely for this bit.

Christian's hands are so ready. He's been like he's, I've been weighing them up. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't seen his hands during this. He's been them. He's had them in like bowl of water to make them look perfect. He's been moisturizing during the week. absolutely because it's that humiliating, but at the end of the show where we all raise our hands and we wave simultaneously, and then we are gonna use this as the album look, look, Cameron's got a hand missing.

He's got micro. Where's it gonna, where's it gonna go? Okay. And that look at Christian's hands. The best hands. I think. Thank you. Thank you for noticing. You're welcome. we'll be back next year. I say, we'll be back next week. I should be back next week. If the stars align, it should be. I can't remember off the top of my head.

Who's on, but I would like to sincerely thank Cameron for joining us today and staying up by what is now probably close to midnight. I apologize, Cameron. It's at midnight. Oh, I dunno how you maintain coness at that time of day, I'd also like to thank Christian Reba for joining us from WP chill and also Jess Sprick for joining us from principle.

Thank you so much. Your participation makes it all worthwhile and thank you for the commentary that's coming this week. I really appreciate you guys as well. So without further ado, I'm gonna hit the end stream and I will see you next week.