This Week in WordPress #221

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 221 entitled. It doesn't make sense that it doesn't make sense. It was recorded on Monday the 22nd of August, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined by three WordPress guests this week. We have Kathy Zant. We also have Nick Diego and Maciek Palmowski.

There's a lot of WordPress news to talk about as there always is. First off, we kick off talking about the WordPress plugin ecosystem and the fact that newsletter glue as decided to drop their support for their repo plugging and also WP optimize has decided to start a new and curious pricing structure based upon point releases, not annual subscriptions.

We talk about the WooCommerce marketplace and the opportunities that may be there. Gutenberg is going to have a new model potentially, which will onboard you into setting up the editor. Just how you like it. Word camp us is just around the corner and contribute. Today is something that you might like to be involved with.

We also talk about the wizard, which visual composer has got in a recent update. And then we talk about two of Stella's products, flux checkout, as well as cadence WP. They've got a option to update the way that woo commerce works in every single way possible. And we also get into the security of ring doorbells and how your voice box, your larynx is less developed than that. Of other primates. I'm gonna have a couple of weeks off. In fact, I think three weeks off for my summer holidays. So thank you for your ongoing support. And I hope that you enjoy this episode.

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

Hello? Hello. Hello. Good morning. Good evening. Wherever you may be. I am the Lord of the dancer. no, I'm not going there.

Very nice to have you with us today. We are joined as always on our, this weekend. WordPress show. You typically got three guests and we've got three fabulous guests today. We've got our very regular cohost, Kathy Zant. How are you doing Kathy? Doing very

[00:02:45] Kathy Zant: well here in rainy taxes. Oh, excited about rain. We haven't have rain in months, so it's

[00:02:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

Okay. Actually peculiarly in the UK, I think probably across Europe in general, much that you can tell us in a minute. There's basically, no rain has just decided it's not a thing anymore. And in the UK, it not raining is like there's no tea around. Yeah. So yeah, drought conditions here, people are now being told not to use water in certain situations and so on, but anyway, Kathy is the product manager for cadence at stellar WP more on that later.

She also dabbles in security and hacker culture. She's helped organize both word camp, Phoenix and word camp us more on that later. And she's also contributed to WordPress, sorry, word Fest live in a minor role as well. So welcome. Welcome back to Kathy. Appreciate having you here. We're also John by Nick Diego.

How are you doing Nick?

[00:03:43] Nick Diego: Doing great. Thanks

[00:03:44] Nathan Wrigley: for having. Is it raining? it is not. Nope,

[00:03:48] Nick Diego: it is. It is a nice sunny day here in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

[00:03:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thanks for joining us. Nick Diego is a developer advocate at WP engine. He can be found creating educational content, building plugins and themes and contributing to WordPress core.

What have you been building plugins and theme wise lately?

[00:04:07] Nick Diego: Admittedly, I've been so tied up in my developed advocacy role. I haven't been building many plugins and themes, but doing a lot of contributing to WordPress, getting excited about 6.1, which will come out.

[00:04:18] Nathan Wrigley: Later this year, so yeah. Yep. Yep.

I'm looking forward to that and anyway, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Lovely to have you on again. And right here we go. Here we go. Just, get the lungs ready. I'm gonna try match. Check surname. Match. Check is joining us. Maciek Palmowski. That's not right.

Is it us feel? You'll

[00:04:39] Maciek Palmowski: know. It's really good enough. And also you get bonus points for magic. It's. It's really great. It's really

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: great. That I've remembered. I don't know. I think when I first met you, I wrote down the word magic or something like that, and it's got into my head. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Mad check is a WordPress developer works at body more on that later as a WordPress ambassador after hours he spends most of his time trying to find interesting news for WP for the WP hours, newsletter, orgo cycling, Ugh, cycling. That's cool as is the WPLS newsletter.

Is that going strong? Still? The WPLS.

[00:05:19] Maciek Palmowski: Of course it is. Of course it is. And I can even say that Nick will be a guest editor soon, so really?

[00:05:26] Nick Diego: Oh, new news. This why not on the bio. Oh, that's lovely. That's really nice loving the WordPress community. If you fancy share in this, probably the best way to do that is to go to, I don't know, Twitter or whatever.

[00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: Do WP Builds.com/live. Once more, WP Builds.com/live. If you go there, you've gotta be logged into Google. If you want to comment, cuz it's YouTube comments. The other option is if you are in our Facebook group, you can go to WP Builds.com/facebook, but they anonymize you. It's about the only thing that they appear to do from a security and privacy standpoint, where they anonymous your avatar and name, you have to click on a link chat.restream.io/fb.

And then you can comment if you don't want to do it anonymously. That's what you'll need to do already as a few nice people hopping into the comments. It's a pleasure to have you here. It might as well just go through a few of those nice way to begin things. Isn't it Rob Kens saying good morning.

Happy Monday word, press speech. Indeed. Thank you for joining us. Rob and he's named you all one at a time. And me as well. Thank you. Rainy Torontos says, Rob her dear peach. Andary hi, peach picture Peacher. I know that you wrote me a message just before this, we show went live and I confess, I read it with seconds to go and I'll have to decline if that's alright, because I just didn't get a chance.

I'm really sorry. She knows what that means, but nobody else does. So there you go. But B, B, what else? We got cloudy. Cloudy Connecticut cooler this morning says Peter Ingersol. It's nice to have you with us. And also Cameron, who was on the show last week. It's bedtime. Cameron go on off to bed.

It's 11 at night or something. And when the time zones changing a couple of, the what's it called daylight saving when that changes, that'll be Cameron out of the show for six months or so he says, cuz it'll be like one in the morning before we start lovely to have you all with us. I really appreciate it.

Very nice. Feel free to drop any comments in if you like keep 'em polite, you always do, but nice to have you with us. Okay. Let's get started. This is our website. WP Builds.com. You've seen it before. I'm not gonna waste any time on it. Let's get stuck into this right. Post status had an article this week from Dan canals.

I dunno if I've pronounced that correctly called winning together in a D decentralized plugin E. Now it references two plugins in the article one, which we'll mention in a moment called newsletter glue, but also another one called organized WP. And I confess I haven't played with the organized WP plugin in any way, shape or form, cuz that wasn't the intent of this piece.

The intent of the piece was what about a new pricing model for WordPress plugins? Cuz at the moment you've got free. That seems to be the way of doing it. There's also lifetime and there's also annual. So you subscribe to something and typically that's for support and updates. Although I've seen this model elsewhere before, it doesn't seem to be common in the WordPress ecosystem, organized WP have taken the T that they're going to charge every time there's a major release of their plugin.

So you buy it once and then let's say you have to wait. I dunno, 12, 15, 18, 24 months until version 2.0, runs out sorry, comes along and then you pay again. And although it's a little minor tweak, I think there's some hidden benefits here. From my point, if the plugin development is slow and deliberately slow, let's say it's a plugin which kind of reaches your doorstep and does everything it needs to do already.

And it doesn't really need features and updates. In that sense, I probably do feel like this is quite a nice model for pricing. I just think it's a bit curious, a bit different. So I thought I'd mention it. So as always match check Nick and Kathy, feel free to just interrupt each other cross talk in some way will figure it out, but somebody's always gotta go first.

So over to you. Yeah.

[00:09:22] Maciek Palmowski: It's a very good idea to start using this model because as we talked a bit before the show the Sunday uses it right.

[00:09:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Cindy is a is a PHP application. You send out email with it basically through Amazon and places.

[00:09:41] Maciek Palmowski: Yeah. And really sometimes when we just need few features and we really don't care about updates for us as users, such mobile can be really great.

We don't have to worry about subscription. Also in my case I really don't remember when I used any support that is included in most subscriptions because I always try to solve something myself. I can even correct the code, whatever. I just do it one day. Yes.

[00:10:16] Nathan Wrigley: Very different position to the typical user.

Yeah.

[00:10:18] Maciek Palmowski: But still I have to pay for the support and I don't need it. And in such case, I just could have the plugin pay for it once on the other hand for the developer It may be problematic. It may be prob problematic because such a developer may end up in a situation that I think advanced custom fields had at some point when they had all of those lifetime users like me and no one wanted to to buy a new license.

And the moment when delicious brains announced or even asked, Hey, if you are using our plugin maybe change your lifetime license into this new subscription line. And there, there was a huge outrage. So this pricing model can be troubled some for the creator, but on the other hand, it's it doesn't close the doors.

As the lifetime model can do. So I think, yeah, I will. I will really watch carefully how it'll work and maybe some other plugin creators will try to use this pricing model.

[00:11:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. That's really interesting. The whole thing about you not needing support or maybe so I'm thinking in my head is a plugin.

I'm not gonna tell you what it is, cuz that wouldn't be a good plan, but I've got in my head a plugin, which I recently renewed. I'm pretty sure that there were very few updates during the course of the year. Cuz I watched that stuff quite carefully just because of this show, and also I didn't reach out to support.

So there's a part of me at the minute going. I'm not sure about the value of that, but equally here's an interesting point to raiser. I hope I got your name right there. I've clicked on the wrong one. Sorry. She says that's horrible for those of us, that charge clients. So that's a really interesting point.

If you are a, if you're building websites for clients and you are offsetting the cost and you want that to be predictable. Yeah. That's a, that's an interesting point. Okay. Over to Nick or Kathy, if I've got anything to add. Yeah. I think

[00:12:35] Nick Diego: that. That model works really? Oh I'm not gonna pass judgment on their pricing model, but from my perspective, as I've built and sold a few plugins is that I think that pricing model works really great if you're in like a closed ecosystem.

So I think like screen flow, which is another app has a similar pricing model. Like they give you updates for a version. And then if you wanna get the version 10, you have to pay that upgrade fee or whatever. That's like standalone ecosystem and their own thing. , but in word pressure, you're like plugin conflicts and, changes to WordPress core.

You need to do updates for, and there's so many things that you may need to change and update the plugin that you might be doing a lot of work and then having to maintain like different versions. If you someone's on version one and they're on version, someone else is on version two and you gotta do, fixing bugs in both of them.

I just think that it might be a little bit challenging for the creator. But. Yeah, that's the road they've

[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: chosen. So I'm sure they have a plan for, yeah. That's a really interesting point though. What do you, have you got any thoughts on this, Kathy?

[00:13:38] Kathy Zant: Yeah. This isn't new. This is the way software used to be sold.

I was on Adobe Photoshop, like six forever and a day. Yeah. Oh

[00:13:47] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. That's right. Everybody stayed on that one. Yeah.

[00:13:50] Kathy Zant: I just, that's all I needed or that's all I thought I needed. I didn't, everything was fine. I was, compressing my images and cropping things and using Photoshop the way I needed to use it.

The it's, this is gonna put the pressure on the developer. If, if you want to compete and and get out there and say, okay this is gonna save you money. I don't necessarily think that this is good for the developer because every time you make a release, it's gonna have to make a huge splash in order to garner some income, right?

Whereas a steady stream of income means that you can invest back in the product. You can invest in bug, fix fixes, security, fixes taking care of your customers. So for a longer term software production and Nick was saying with all the complexities, with, different versions of PHP, different versions of WordPress, different versions, there's so many different types of things that you have to account for when you're doing QA on any kind of software for WordPress, because it's being plugged into.

people are running WordPress on windows, you've gotta account for that. Are you gonna support that? yeah. There's so many different things, so it kudos to them for doing this experiment. It'll be interesting to watch, but the onus is really going to be on them to create software that makes a big splash.

That's going to attract enough users to get off of Photoshop six,

[00:15:23] Nathan Wrigley: so to speak. Yes. Yes. That's right. Interesting. I, okay. Like I say, I know nothing about this plugin, but haven't, they done a great job in with the tiniest little pricing variation. They've managed to get loads of people talking about their product, who perhaps otherwise wouldn't have mentioned it.

I don't know. I don't know if we would've mentioned it because of the, what, whatever it does, but we're talking about it. And we probably said it's name a hundred times already. So they've done a good job from a PR perspective. Yeah, the, I think it's curious the sendee model so that this is the PHP image, emailing script.

It got nothing to do with WordPress. I have real confidence in the developer there, and I have confidence that if something is truly broken, he will patch it going backwards. But also I think it's like a total side gig for him. I'm sure he is got other things going on and. Because of that, it doesn't get updated.

You get these tiny little increments during the course of the cycle, and then you do get this big update, like you mentioned Kathy, and it does feel worth it. Every time a point release has come on, I've dipped into my wallet almost immediately. The moment is dropped, cuz I think actually that's really cool.

So yeah. Let's see how this goes. It's quite a few comments around this Andrew Palmer who was on the other week he says that he started, okay, so Andrew has beha.ai, which is an AI generation plugin for WordPress. He says we started doing a pay as you go model on beha. AI. People seem to like that.

Oh, that's interesting. I love the go pay as you go update. So in your model because people are consuming tiny little bits frequently, and often you can do that. Because if they write a long form piece with Bertha, you can charge them a little bit more, cuz it's longer. Yeah. That's interesting. To makes the point.

That it's not predictable. We had that one earlier. And Cameron who has managed to stay up. Thank you, Cameron. He says it's certainly interesting, but I think that underestimates how unsavvy, some of the people are trying to use these plugins. Yeah. Good point would be great for me as a dev, but I don't think it's sustainable.

What birther AI are doing since Cameron still with the pay as you go is a better approach. But I think being assessed that's a lot easier to do. And there's crikey, there's quite a few comments here today. Isn't there. Has anybody picked up a comment? Which I need to say? Oh yeah. Screen flow was mentioned feature.

Do you know I've got the screen flow rival called Camtasia. I dunno if anybody's used Camtasia, they do this really wicked little dark pattern where, when it rolls onto the point update, they the UI the model that pops up is exactly the same as all the other one. So you click update and then you realize you've been rolled onto the next model and you've got to pay for it.

It's really annoying. It's really annoying. Cause you got all story. It's go back. Yes. It's just not so sure about that. Anyway, there we go. That was that was post status.com. And the. Was called winning together in a decentralized plugin ecosystem. Now you may have Eagle eyes here and notice that that mentioned at the top of that article is another plugin called newsletter glue.

I am a big fan. Of newsletter glue and newsletter glue, have another sort of curious story around pricing and things like that. They've decided they want to remove themselves from the wordpress.org repo. The reasons are slightly technical, more than anything else in that when they started, they're very, I do love Leslie, by the way, Leslie's very honest and honorable and if something's how to describe it, you could easily have concealed a lot of the detail within this post, because it was, maybe you mistepped a few times, but she didn't, which she basically says we made a bunch of new mistakes, which I think is lovely and honest in the way that we set up free versus paid basically.

If you wanted to get the paid version of the plugin, which is fabulous, highly recommended, you had to uninstall the free version and then go and install the PA the full version. Whereas I think in many cases, the opposite is true. You keep the free version and then you add the features in with the sort of like pro plugin.

The, so what basically happened is all of the features that are worth having, I think are largely tied up in the paid version. So the free version wasn't doing anything after several years, they'd only got a hundred people using it, cuz essentially they were all on installing it and going over to the paid version.

So they've decided to remove themselves and just put themselves out there and say, we made some silly mistakes. And I just thought this was a nice piece worth mentioning because of that and nothing more, just how honest and decent they are. Anybody wanna chip in, go for it.

[00:20:23] Nick Diego: I think Les highlights some interesting comments about new plug-in developers and navigating.

The repo. I built, I started on the plugin repo and building plugins and stuff, and it's the wild west in many ways. Cuz you, you have to figure it out for yourself. And I don't necessarily think that's a downside or there needs to be some sort of guide on wordpress.org to teach you how to build a for, for profit plugin.

But like the thing that she has, she had to navigate with how do you structure free versus pro takes a lot to figure out. And I think that's why we're seeing things like freeness pop up and other, third parties that try to help people with that. But it's a challenging one. I think if you get it wrong, you run into the problem with Leslie.

But the also the repo is such a powerful tool for visibility. If you can create that funnel from the repo to paid it's. Pretty powerful. It's incredibly powerful. But structuring that's a bit challenging

[00:21:32] Nathan Wrigley: for sure. Yeah. I'll just quote the bit where she lays it all out.

She said, as I said, a moment ago, we made a bunch of new mistakes in the way that we settle free versus paid, which made the customer upgrade workflow weird. I think it could have worked. We just didn't set it upright and it just doesn't make sense to fix it. I wonder if given her time again, she would still be on the repo as you sell bunch of benefits to that.

But in this case it just doesn't make sense to disassemble the plugin, rebuild it and really try and start all over. They're just gonna concentrate their efforts on their paying customers, which makes sense.

[00:22:10] Nick Diego: And I also think on the hand oh,

[00:22:11] Maciek Palmowski: sorry. Go. I just wanted to say that they are very small because newsletter glue is created by only two people.

Yeah. And the biggest problem that, about which we can hear when it comes to the official plugin repository is the support, which is let's say problematic. It can by not responding to those free support, you can only generate, let's call it a bad name for yourself, because you are not responding. And on the other hand, if you are spending too much time on a free plugin, you are just losing money. So especially when you are such a small team I really think that is likely that Did a good thing, especially for them, because like I said they are small.

They have to pick their battles and they just decided they will just go 100% premium. And as Nick mentioned yeah, the official repository is a wild west. It really needs a lot of love. And because it's really chaotic. It's enormous, it's big, but it's so hard to navigate. It's really hard to quite quickly discover which buttons are are free, which are just partly free and are just promoting their paid versions.

So in, in general the plugin repository really should need, it need a lot of changes. It should be rebelled.

[00:23:58] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask both Nick and Kathy, can you hear match, check echoing? Yes, match check just underneath the screen is a little cogwheel and one of the options under the audio setting is echo cancellation and noise suppression, because I can hear what I'm saying a second time, and I think it's coming through your connection.

I'm not a hundred percent sure. That's

[00:24:23] Maciek Palmowski: true. I have. Let me mute.

[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Hello? Hello. Hello? Oh, no, I can still hear myself. And is he muted? No, he's not muted. So I think it is you.

[00:24:36] Maciek Palmowski: No, it's not mute. I was muted for a moment. So it

[00:24:38] Nathan Wrigley: wasn't. Ah, okay. I don't know. Okay. We'll carry on. Apologies for the COE audio basically is the message there.

Okay, so Kathy, anything.

[00:24:49] Kathy Zant: Obviously the repo is a huge opportunity. You end up in searchable in so many people's dashboards. It's a great opportunity to get in front of customers that you would never get in front of otherwise. The amount of effort it takes, like Matty said about just managing support in the repo.

If you're not answering support questions, you don't even show up. So it's not just getting on the repo. You do, you have to work the repo and you have to work with all of the customers there. I know a specific plugin that I've consulted with where they weren't answering. And even though they had tons of installs, they just kept going down further and further in the search.

And they weren't even getting in front of customers cuz they weren't supporting. They were just, leaving it up to the community to support each other in the repo and it just was not working for them. It's a huge effort. And if you're a small team, you have to prepare for that to be if you're going to use that as a way to get leads, so to speak into your flow from free to a premium model it can be very effective.

It just takes a ton of investment. And I don't think a lot of people realize that when they get into it, they think everything's just gonna be sunshine and roses. I'm in the, when I'm in all of these dashboards and it's work, you have to work it and you have to support it. And it's not really fun support because there's a lot of people.

You gave me the software, so therefore you must want to do all of these features that, that I need for my vision of how your plugin should work. And so it's not fun support either. The paid customers are much more fun to support. But getting that perfect flow from free into a premium model can be very challenging.

There, there's tons of, in the security space, we're always looking at these N plugins where people take the premium plugin, change some things in it and then offer it on these N sites with a free dash of malware. So it's a very challenging business model that takes some experience and some knowledge in order to get that flow really working.

[00:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's. I totally take that on board. That makes it is just such a big opportunity. Andrew's making some points in the comments. He's he's saying that when someone upgrades any of the plug-ins that he's involved with from free to pro the license, recognizing this, so there's no extra install, it's basically a an ed D hook, which then releases the tiger releases all of the the fun stuff that the pro brings along for the ride.

And then in, and then he thinks that if that's the result, then Leslie might be missing out on an opportunity. Yeah. Maybe match X point about the fact that there's two of them, they've gotta pick their battles and even okay, we'll come back to this in a year's time kind of thing. And we'll see where we're at.

[00:27:50] Kathy Zant: The manage really is. I just have one point. The magic really is if you can put in the premium an API access, rather than just that's where the magic really is. If there's some kind of service that you can provide that requires some kind of API access, then you have much more control over that relationship.

And that's, that seems to work best.

[00:28:14] Nick Diego: Yeah. And I just wanna mention about the repo is that it is truly a marketing thing. It's a marketing opportunity. And to Cathy's point about answering those support questions, doing releases frequently, all that plays into how you rank. So it's not just like you put your plug-in out there and you just, everything's gonna be fine.

You really gotta work for it. But if you can, it's survival of the fittest. Like you can get really high ranks. You can keyword optimize your listing. You can put in, FAQs, you can pretty much really optimize your listing and really get high up on the list. Above other maybe plugins that have more installs that, aren't doing that.

So it's, it is an opportunity, but it takes a lot of work,

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: Somewhat out of the scope of WordPress, but always love a bit of Droople. Let's throw this one in this is lax. Who's making the comment that he loves, how Druple the Droople module repository. So plugin replace word with module has filters.

So this is the piece about making it easier to discover things in the WordPress repo. WordPress could introduce some filtering and sorting options and making the discovery a little bit easier. And then Cameron makes the point that gravity forms, I did not know that gravity forms used to be in the repository.

They aren't now. And they're still doing pretty good. I'll say they're doing pretty good. Yeah. It's like a, an out and out success. I didn't know that. So they had a free version at one time and just decided to concentrate their efforts. We'll come back and see how this all shakes out. WP. What was it?

WP optimize. If I remember that correctly and newsletter glue, lots of, interesting pricing discussions being had this. Okay, let's move on. we're talking about marketplaces. This is the next thing. This is about the woo commerce marketplace. There are some kind of eye watering numbers here and match check, I think was quite curious about the percentages that were being charged here.

This is Alex Denning writing on the 17th of August on the get sis.com website. The piece is called who's winning on the WooCommerce marketplace. It's a long article. Alex really likes to get the graphs out and push the data in our direction. But the curious thing for me was essentially WooCommerce is winning on the WooCommerce marketplace.

And what I mean by that is that. The official woo commerce things, the ones that are sponsored by automatic seem to be an incredibly well. And I didn't know this I've been in WordPress for a fairly lengthy period of time. I did not realize that until recently there was a sort of lock in mechanism, which meant that if you wanted to list your woo product plugin, let's say on the WooCommerce marketplace, and you also wish to list it on your own website.

In other words, give yourself a fighting chance of, taking all of the com the money for the plugin sale. Then WooCommerce, we're gonna charge you a fairly eye watering, 70% in commission. If on the other hand, you decided to. Just go all in on the WooCommerce marketplace and say, look, it's just over there.

Then it was gonna be a more typical 30%, which I believe I could be wrong. I believe it's kinda like what apple do and Google do with their app stores and so on. I think it's 30, 70 could be wrong, but that appears to have changed. They've now decided that they're gonna just go with this one pricing model.

The 70% has gone and the 30% is what's remaining. But look at that. 85 and a half million dollars in estimated woo commerce marketplace sales. But the vast majority of them the top five are listed here. I won't bore you by reading all of the names out, but the four out of the top five are owned or are created by WooCommerce directly.

So the marketplace does very well for those plugins created by that team. And I just wonder how competitive it is for anybody else. If you look over at this chart, I'm showing you a pie chart here. WooCommerce, as in the developers of WooCommerce w make up 44.1% of things that are sold by vendor share sky verge, which I believe who owns sky?

Is it GoDaddy God, I think, yeah, go Godad. Sky verges at 17.2, then there's another one called prose, press P R O S press confess. Not heard of that is a pretty gigantic 16.3 and then everybody else make up the rest and they're all tiny slices of the pie. You'd be gutted if you got a bit of pizza of their magnitude, put it that way, but the w bit you'd be nice and full up.

So interesting statistics coming out of coming out of get lysis. I dunno if any of you wanted to comment on that, but the takeaway that I got was that I think it'd be jolly hard to compete against the w commerce. Behemoth in the woo commerce marketplace. And I do wonder 30%, although it's less than 70 still seems like quite a lot.

[00:33:27] Maciek Palmowski: On the other hand, there is still a lot of market for for let's call it local product. For example, in Poland, we have this company called WP dust because in Poland we have our own delivery services our own payment gate, because for example, PayPal isn't popular in Poland, most popular is for example, pay you or so so there, there are really regional only PO so this company, WP desk photo of a model.

Okay. So let's create everything that a Polish company would require. And I think that there are many companies in many countries. Where there is a great place. They won't ever reach this 1% of this whole commerce.com pie, but it's not their goal. It's not their goal. It's just trying to, it turns out that picking all those small crumbs that fall off the table, you can really create quite a big.

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting. I'll just raise the next graph, which I confess I forgot was available. This graph apologies if you're listening to the audio but there's another graph on the screen now, which shows that really the vast majority of people in the WooCommerce marketplace they're working in the 10,000 to $50,000 area.

So you can see the line is just significantly bigger. The ones that we talked about a minute ago, the big five ones they're in the sort of half a million to it, sorry. $900,000 to a million dollars. They're really at the end of the spectrum and E everything really skews towards the cheaper end.

So I don't know. Alex makes the point that they're really unable to tell you how long this period lasted for. In other words, we don't know if this was over a period of six months or a year, but you can get the impression from this that really the bottom end of the money is where the vast majority of the marketplace sales are taking place.

And so it's tough. It's must be really difficult to make those, to scrape your way over to the top. Anything above this sort of $350,000 mark, there's probably only 20, 20, 30, plug-ins in total over there, whereas there's several hundred over on the other side. So anyway, there we go.

Nick or Kathy.

[00:36:06] Kathy Zant: Oh, Cameron just mentioned in a comment that ProsperUS is automatic too. Ah, there you go. Even more

pizza

[00:36:15] Nathan Wrigley: okay. So combined they, yeah, they've really got much more than half of the pizza than if we did that. Cameron, what do they do? They build, oh, okay. You put it on the screen.

Thank you. You are as always invaluable prosper press build extensions around memberships there and they're Aussie. Ah, there we go. They were actually bought out by automatic recently ish. So that slice belongs to WooCommerce too. Okay. So in a couple of years, the charter look even more skewed, a bit more than 50%.

Thank you, Cameron. And that's very invaluable. Nick, anything.

[00:36:45] Nick Diego: I just think that, we're seeing now with both like in the block editor and in w commerce where some of the low hanging fruit in terms of features, instead of being isolated in plugins are now being brought into w commerce itself or bringing brought into the block editor or WordPress itself.

So maybe five, 10 years ago, those were plugins. And now a lot of that stuff being pulled in or developed by eCommerce itself. So I think people are just gonna need to become more and more creative about the products that they're building to be, Successful in such a competitive

space,

[00:37:21] Kathy Zant: And be more creative about going after the market and going after the customers who are using w commerce.

The w commerce marketplace might not be the best place to go tap a funnel, finding new customers. You might wanna get more creative in getting people into your space and into conversations and into your purchase process in other ways,

[00:37:46] Nick Diego: and really focus on niches, like thing like you're talking about like specifically for Poland or, a specific industry.

I think there's a lot of exploration there that's possible.

[00:37:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think the Poland analogy was that excellent, wasn't it? They, I'm guessing those guys are really cleaned up in the Polish market, which is fabulous. That's true.

[00:38:06] Maciek Palmowski: And it's not so easy to do because you have to live in a country that is big enough, so you can do it.

And on the other hand, it wasn't took over by some global companies. For some reason, for so many years Poland is fighting of eBay. Currently. We just got amazing, but our local Allegro is still fighting hard. So for some reason we really prefer our local product. Even if those local products were bought up by someone else, it doesn't matter of course, but still they seem at least local.

But like I said the same model trying to be built in tech or in S Slovakia, it wouldn't be so easy cause they are much smaller than home. It's really difficult. It won't be possible everywhere. And understanding those niches is crucial because for some reason, people in this country prefer some solution over other, on the other hand, also something that for me was weird.

Why Germans love paper, money so much.

[00:39:32] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know that they did not know that they did.

[00:39:36] Maciek Palmowski: And it was it was weird for me. And this is again a thing, because you can think, okay, so let's do something like this German and big country, but then you can hit this point that, but okay. But people don't like to go digital.

Huh? So it might not work. Yeah. There are many things. In, in, in Germany, it's many cases it's related to privacy. Yes. So privacy really Germans are I would say a bit paranoid from looking how let's say this global market looks like, but, okay. It's great because this is getting the balance between what is happening in, for example, United States, where.

Let's be honest, the privacy is we will talk about this

[00:40:21] Nathan Wrigley: time, right? Come to that. We do the curious first of all, I'll do Andrew's comment. Cause it's been on the screen for an absolute age. He says, he's talking about woo commerce in particular. Woo. Commerce makes so much money because they're plugins in woo are very expensive.

Yes. That's a good point. High ticket prices obviously will skew that data a little bit and now I've completely forgotten what it was that I was going to say. We should probably just, we'll just suck that one up and move on if that's all right. Okie dokey. I very, I like this. I love the continual evolution of the block editor.

It, now it may be that you haven't seen the model or in Gutenberg for a little while, depending on how often you build new sites or whatever you manage them with, you might. Page builder or something like that. But when you first start to create pages and posts for the very first time in a WordPress install, or if you've cleared out your cookies, telling it not to come back, then you get this fairly brief little model that pops up and it's called the onboarding model.

I guess Sarah Gooding is writing a WP Tavern an article called Gutenberg designers, explore adding configuration options to the block editor onboarding model. So it, there was no interaction with that model. It literally just showed you what a couple of the features were that were already present on the screen.

Now, the idea is that perhaps it would be useful. I'll play this little video. Perhaps it would be useful in the future to have a more complicated, bigger, certainly model that pops up. But the intention is that it would allow you to customize the initial setup of your Gutenberg layout. So for example, it might be able to say, for example, do you want the toolbar at the bottom or do you want it floating around the block where you're currently interacting, select that now, before we go any further and it might, for example, say, okay, should we set up some basic, I don't know, accessibility settings or something like that, let's do that right at the beginning, nothing like this exists at the moment.

And this is the proposal. The idea is that this might be a useful thing. It's not a feature which has been built as far as I understand. This is just what looks like a kind of mock up, but I'm all for this, to be honest, I think this is gonna be a really useful way, especially. And experienced people who are perhaps coming to WordPress for the first time.

Gutenberg's how should we say it's hard, it's a little bit disjointed. There's things buried in all sorts of different places go left, go, toggle things, open toggle things shot it's who knows where everything is. If you are there for the first time and what they do. And so I think something like this could be a really useful endeavor.

So I think, yes, I get two thumbs up for this. What do you guys are? Oh, nice. Four. So far four out eight .

[00:43:18] Nick Diego: Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of cool features that are hidden, like in the little options menu that very few people ever click on or know that it's there. So surfacing that I think would be very helpful caveat as long as there's a way to turn it off for people that don't want it for their client sites.

[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: Let's go. So yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. You don't want it popping up all the time and you do wanna be able to turn it off on client websites if you're onboarding them yourself or doing something or right. Have a custom way of doing things. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Good point. Okay. Match, check, Kathy.

[00:43:54] Kathy Zant: I would really like to, I would love to see this and I would love to see some real, very basic wire frame. Possibilities that people could like here's here are three different possible layouts you could jump in with. Okay. Because I've watched people my 14 year old daughter is learning WordPress right now.

And she's but why can't I customize this? And the customizer, that's where the customizing should be happening. She's don't ask our questions. But getting her started just getting a new person started with WordPress. They've seen websites and we've all been on the web for what, 20 years.

They've seen what some possibilities of layouts can look like, choose something, choose a basic wire frame, give people maybe three or four options that they could just get started with. And I think the onboarding of new users will be a lot easier.

[00:44:48] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know Kathy? That's interesting because my memory at the minute.

Terrible. And I can't remember, but I have a feeling that just a matter of weeks ago, we talked about exactly this the idea that this would be happening in the block editor. And I can't remember, I can't remember if I got it off the Tavern or a make post, but that there will be something like this.

Okay. So now we've got a collision of two different things. Haven't we, if they're both happening, they've pretty much both gotta happen at the same time. I'm guessing that the settings you'd want to come first and then the layout second. Oh, Nick's definitely got, so say good.

[00:45:22] Nick Diego: So you can actually do that now with what are called page creation patterns.

So if you define pattern and then usually it's in themes, it's not in WordPress core, but it's in, it'll be in the 2022 theme or 2023 theme, hopefully is that like, when you go to create a new pager post, it gives you a model and you can pick from some preset design. That the theme author has provided.

You could do that for your client site or something like that. So that functionality is there. It's not very visible. Like for example, like the documentation on patterns doesn't include it yet. It's on my to-do list to fix, but like some of that stuff is there. And I think we'll see, start to see the, everything coming together in 6.1, where you have a new Mo you have a new onboarding model and you can do page creation patterns.

And

[00:46:07] Nathan Wrigley: so would you get onboard? That's exciting. Yeah. Would you like to see the onboarding model followed by the page? Templating experience all in one model, basically. So in other words, you could skip through this, the setting up the accessibility settings or whatever it may be if you're not bothered with that.

And then eventually you'll get to the final part, which may be here's some possible templates for your page. Would you like to see it all in one UI mode at the start?

[00:46:35] Kathy Zant: It might make sense to just. Blank page. Hey, what do you want this to look like? That's the place where maybe that happens, honestly.

[00:46:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a

[00:46:48] Kathy Zant: good point. So if somebody's like fresh installed, they go through that piece where they're setting up the basic settings. And then they're gonna build a page, right?

Is that the first thing they're going to do? And maybe that's the place where they get some kind of wire framing ability where they can, or patterning ability. Are you

[00:47:06] Nick Diego: building a home page? Are you building an about page? Are you building a contact page and they can just click.

[00:47:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it's invoked either when you begin to typing in the title or possibly when you've done the title and then you go and put the first block in.

So a good example is in cadence, when you drop in the kind of container block, then it just chucks in this other UI underneath with all these different grid options. And it's not there until you've decided to put a container in and then it's there. Yeah. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, okay, I've got these pre-built 20 different options that I can go for.

I'm gonna go for that one. Okay. Interesting.

[00:47:43] Kathy Zant: Yeah. And the cadence also has a design library where you can. Actually get like fully templated pages as well as wire frames from

[00:47:51] Nathan Wrigley: what to build that, that lives in a button at the top right next to oh yeah. Okay. Top left.

[00:47:57] Kathy Zant: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think something like that would be really helpful just beyond, everybody should be using cadence.

But, just in core, it would, it makes sense to give that kind of guidance to a new user. Who's just looking at WordPress for the first time. And that blank page blank pages are hard for everyone. It's hard for writers. It's hard for designers. It for a WordPress user, who's just coming in for the first time that handholding really needs to happen.

[00:48:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The model's great because you can't avoid it. Like you can dismiss it, but it's there. You've got to make an active decision to shut it down. Whereas the template button. You can easily avoid it. Unless you do something nefarious, make it flash and blink, which nobody wants by the way.

But it's easy to miss that to even know that's there. And just to, you see the big blue published button and everything else is black and gets ignored, but I do the idea of it being invoked right at the beginning. And you just run through that the one time and maybe, learn about the, I don't know, forward slash keystroke so that you can see all the blocks and all the different things that might be quite a useful thing.

Peter Ingersol is he says he really wants more control over the right sidebar settings, meta Boxees in the editor with order cetera. What do you mean by that? Peter? Do you mean you wanna be able to set up a default right at the start where everything's locked down or do you just find it a mess and a clutter and you don't know where everything is?

Or do you just wanna be able to switch things off and turn things on and so on? And block locking, I guess we're talking about here, Pete. Robert, Peter, the one thing I want, I do want is the ability to lock out more. That's definitely being worked on. We've had, you can now lock at the parent level, can't you?

But I, I still think my understanding is that anybody can unlock anything. It's more of a, more of an anecdotal lock than a real lock. You can

[00:49:50] Nick Diego: configure it, but you have to do it in PHP. So you can lock it down by user role, but you have, it's not like in the UI, you have to

[00:49:56] Nathan Wrigley: do that. That will be truly a great moment when that arrives actually for people building cost websites for clients, the ability to lock on a per block basis, or however that's set up whatever crazy configuration you wanna do once that UI and that ability is built out the idea.

Okay. There's your site. You can't mess anything up.

[00:50:19] Nick Diego: that's so let me put the two together. So imagine you get your modal. Yeah. And you, they can select from a bunch of designs and they insert it, but some of those are locked, so they insert a design, but then some of them are locked, so they can't mess 'em up, but then they can edit certain pieces.

So it provides like a consistent experience. So you can mix and match locking and unlock.

[00:50:41] Nathan Wrigley: So you can, I don't know, edit the title. You can swap out this image, but you can't change the background color and all of it. Yeah. All of that stuff. It's like nerd ever, isn't it. It's doesn't get so thick in the weed.

What am I gonna lock? And then of course you realize 24 hours later, I've locked way too much. They've no idea what they're doing. Have a clue. Okay. So let's have a look. Okay. He's replied, Peter said mess and clutter, but both. And all your examples. For example, categories have been pushed too far down for users to easily see and use.

Okay. Sometimes boxes too thin. Won't boxes. Do you mean the actual. Meta boxes, the title that you have to open. I confess it, I'm kind. Happy with where I'm at, but I can imagine a client would just be like a so yes. Okay. And then Cameron's saying, I find, I'm always forgetting to add categories and featured images because they hidden.

No, yeah. They're all closed. Aren't that's a good point previously where they're right there in the side bar. You'd have to write tab and open to the next. Yes, you do. You have to go through I don't know how you guys do it. Let's do a bit of a segue. Do you have a do you have a process just before you click publish of going through every single meta box to make sure that it's all been filled out?

Cuz that's what I do. I basically work. I go through the right sidebar first check the PERMA links, right? Open the next one, check the category, open the next one, check the tabs, open the next one, fill out the excerpt. Don. Then I go through the post itself. Then I do the met Boxees underneath. And when I'm happy, I then walk away from the computer.

Completely forget what I've checked. Come back to any minutes later and do it all again. That's what I do.

[00:52:26] Nick Diego: efficient. I love it. That's basically what I do as well.

[00:52:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I have efficient. Hey, that's a good idea. Wouldn't it be good to be able to check those off as you go through them. Little tick box. Did the tags.

That sounds like the sphere published press

[00:52:40] Maciek Palmowski: in a way rich tab created this small plugin for a checklist you can you can use, and it's only visible in the admin panels.

[00:52:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, thank you. If you are able to done that, then I'll stick it in the stick it in the show notes. That'd be great if you want to go in quickly.

Yeah. Ill find that there. Thank you. Okay. Have we done that piece? I think we all like it. I'm giving it two thumbs up. Two from match check, Nick Nixon. Nick's like at one did two in the end. Oh, okay. There we go. We, I think we got eight. I think it was eight outta 10. No, eight out of eight. That's good.

All right. Let's move on. The lovely writers reached out to me this week. Speaking. Ha crikey, occasionally we segue into something perfectly, completely by accident and here we've done it. If you are a visual composer fan, if you've used visual composer before, and you've just listened to the last five minutes of what we've been talking about in Gutenberg, they have solved that problem for you.

There's now a blank page wizard and there it is. That's their implementation. That's what it looks like essentially at the very beginning. If you are on a blank page and you're looking for inspiration you're now gonna have the option to go through a bit of a wizard to fill things out, various different choices.

There's a theme, default layout, a blank page layout, and there's custom layouts. And if you're on the pro version, I think it's called premium as opposed to pro, then you get all of their custom layouts as well. I didn't know, to be honest that visual composer didn't have that. But now it does. Hopefully I have discharged my responsibility there.

Okay. Anybody wanna talk about that? Or shall we move on? I think we've,

[00:54:33] Nick Diego: I just think it's cool. How some of these third party, we're starting to see some more parody between the block editor and third party, there's people so people can choose if you want some functionality, like you have the page creation blocks in the block editor, but you also have this blank page wizard and visual composer.

It's. They're informing one another now, which I think is interesting.

[00:54:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I remember the first time I ever came across a wizard like that, and it wasn't really a wizard in that it didn't interrupt my flow. I had to go and find it, but it was in, I think it was beaver builder. I'm pretty sure it was beaver builder years and years ago.

And I remember just seeing this tiny little thumbnail. Thinking. Oh, that looks curious. What happened? I clicked it. Everything changed. How easy was that? That's ridiculous. And I love all that kind of stuff. And it obviously for users and Kathy, who was it? Who was it? It was training their kids. Was it you Kathy?

Yes. Yeah. Okay. My daughter, when lockdown happened, I try when lockdown happened, I tried to educate my 11 and 13 year old boys at the time. They're a bit older now in WordPress. And honestly, like I just took me three minutes to realize I was, there was just, no, there was no path to success in Koberg back in 2000.

And whenever it was 2020 when all that started, I feel if I dragged them back in now kicking and screaming, I think things would be an awful lot easier, but nah, it didn't, I didn't even get past breakfast I had given up just didn't. Okay. Next thing. Okay. This one is not from me. This one, I believe who gave us this one?

Was this Nick?

[00:56:12] Nick Diego: Oh, yes. Yes. . So one of the things that we see if you work exclusively in the block editor, one of the things that I've been frustrated about another builders have been frustrated about is just a lack of consistency. So you can edit margin on this block, but you can't do it on this block, or you can edit color on this one, but not on this one.

And so this is a oh boy. Yeah. This is an effort to standardize everything. And I could not be more excited, which was why I wanted to bring this up here. And the last few last week, or so we've been really kicking this off and there's been like tons of PRS being merged. So it's the massive consistency effort ahead of 6.1 that's been kicked off and I'm could not be more excited cuz for a user it's so frustrating, they learn how to.

Change typography and they're excited and they go to the next block and oh, some of the typography controls aren't there , and so making everything consistent will really help with new users will help people build. Themes and, push the whole thing forward. So very excited. I,

[00:57:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think by the way, you've come across what that, what this initiative should be called.

Actually you called it the massive consistently effort. and that's brilliant. You're completely right. This is the reason that my children didn't get past three minutes basically, because nothing made any sense. Yeah. And it makes no sense that it doesn't make sense. That's a bit matter, isn't it?

Exactly. And it should make sense and it should be consistent, but I realize that's a boat load of work, but what a great project.

[00:57:54] Kathy Zant: Yeah. I just wanna say thank you. that's all I have to say is thank you.

[00:57:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So what are the what would be the constraints around this? Because, okay. So if we're gonna present things uniformly across different blocks and so on, is that gonna be.

How to describe it. Are we gonna ask other plug-in developers to abide by certain guidelines so that everything looks consistent, even if you've chucked in a third party equivalent, let's say cadence, and they've got their own way of having tabs and so on and so forth. Or is this just gonna be for the core blocks only,

[00:58:31] Nick Diego: this is for core blocks, but it establishes block support.

So for example take padding and margin. For example, their dimension supports. I could write my own plugin and my own block plugin and specify padding and margin support, and automatic fed have patenting and margin support. But the thing is that a lot of as that functionality was developed, some blocks that were developed beforehand, didn't get those supports.

So you could change PAing on something, one block, but not on another. So this really is let's make sure that every block has PAing and margin support now, but we also wanna make sure that using the theme dot J on file. Somebody who doesn't want that for their client can turn that off. So one, the supports are there.

And two, there's a way to turn it off for people that don't want it on their client site or even in their own site. So it was a two-handed approach, making sure that the supports are there, but plus there's a way to turn it off. And also that it works correctly, once you implement it.

So

[00:59:31] Nathan Wrigley: I genuinely, and I don't mean sound inflammatory about this and I hope it comes out in the right way. I wonder how many people just took one, look at the block editor and just got a massive sense of what you've just talked about. The inconsistency along was just like, no, this is just too weird for me.

It's the number one complaint. I see. Number one. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, equally the E even the people who want to keep trying it keep coming back and making the same claim. Oh, that would be great. Okay. We'll be back here in 2028 with the with the consistent UI. It'll be perfect. That's square.

[01:00:12] Kathy Zant: One thing I wanna mention is that, obviously cadence has a number of blocks that are very compatible with Gutenberg.

If you're using Gutenberg and you use cadence blocks, they're gonna work much in the same way we watch what you guys are doing with core. And we wanna make sure that all of our blocks have an intuitive feel so that when someone is using a cadence block, it has the same kind of consistency that the user might see that it's just a different color on the icon, but that, but it still has the same.

Same settings in the same place for that consistency, because we're all here for the same reason to make WordPress easier and better for everyone. I think it's great that the core team is jumping on this and I'm really excited.

[01:00:57] Nick Diego: Yeah, the cadence has done so done such a great job of providing that consistency that wasn't in core, right?

All your blocks have the same functionality that core did not have. So it's

[01:01:07] Kathy Zant: it's yeah, there, there's a couple where it's, where you're set, where a setting is in it. Just not entirely consistent, but Ben is reworking a lot of that now for I don't know if it's gonna be two, five, or if it's gonna go actually to three, because he's work re factoring a lot of that so that it is consistent.

We'll be watching what core is doing, just because we want it to be a seamless process. When somebody is working with a core block and they're working with a cadence block it still feels the same because it's such a rewarding experience for a user to work with an interface that feels consistent and feels, that they know where to find things and they get rewards in such small ways that end up making a big reward of working with WordPress.

[01:01:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there is nothing better than muscle memory. When you're putting a webpage together, you just know exactly where that setting is and the mouse just finds it. You don't even have to think. You just, okay, it's down there, there click clicked on. And the frustration of where is it? Where is it? Is it up, up a bit left a bit.

No I totally get it. This is such a great thing. Okay. So I will add this to the show notes, which will go out in the newsletter tomorrow, which coincidence uses newsletter glue, just so that you okay. Let's check out the next one. Unless my check's got anything about that. If not, we'll press on. No, no everything

[01:02:27] Maciek Palmowski: was covered.

Okay. It's great. It's pretty great then.

[01:02:32] Nathan Wrigley: Word camp us is just around the corner. If you were lucky enough to get a ticket, then you can attend the event. 650, I believe. If you were not fear, not let's go to the sessions page first the sessions, which had to be pointed out to me were in alphabetical order.

I just was frustrated that they were all in a completely random order. They're on listed now, by the way, if you go to U us, sorry, dot word, camp.org/ 2022 slash sessions, you're gonna find all of the sessions there because there's such a small amount of attendees. I think it's probably fair to say that it's a bit slim down from something perhaps word camp EU, but loads and loads to choose from.

So go and check those out. But also if you are the kind of person that likes to contribute, and let's be honest, I think a lot of us do then contribute. Is going to be on the 11th of September and it's gonna happen in the beautifully titled Pacific ballroom, which sounds wonderful. I hope we get a break halfway through to just get up and do some moves.

That'll be kind, bring in the orchestra. That's all due the Charleston. So there you go. If you're interested in finding out more about contributor today, I'll link to this in the show notes, but you can participate. They commonly ask question is, do I need to be a developer? And the answer is a big categorical, no there's opportunities for, oh, literally everybody, no matter what your skill is, there is a team that you can slot into.

And it's not honestly, the scope is massive. And if you've never done this before, and you're feeling a bit nervous, just rock up, give it half an hour, sit yourself somewhere suitable. And I'm sure that you'll have a nice time and very likely make some new friends at the same time. So I'll be there and I'll walk you through it.

There you go. Nick's gonna be there wearing his don't P engine t-shirt I'm guessing. And and you can show you the ropes, but yeah, happening soon which guard, which of you lot are going, should we do a quick show of hands? Obviously Nick's going Kathy, you are going.

[01:04:48] Kathy Zant: Potentially. Yes. Got some like challenges, but I'm gonna fly in and get all my stuff done and then probably fly out the same day is what?

So look for me. Oh,

[01:04:57] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Okay. Alright. Look me. I'll checking that for you. Yeah, my check. Are you gonna go?

[01:05:02] Maciek Palmowski: No, I'm staying. I'm staying here in Paul,

[01:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: Staying for this one. I'm going, I've decided to go. So I shall, yeah, I shall see you there. I'm yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited. I just can't wait.

I've got to, I'm having a family holiday, which bots right up against it. So I'm going to arrive in a slightly be dragged state but what's new. I hear them say okay, so we've been talking a little bit about cadence on and off. Obviously, Kathy Helping the efforts over at cadence and cadence. If you didn't know, I have this fabulous thing called shop kit.

So it enables you to really hijack woo commerce and the way it looks and fiddle around with it in ways that really you'd have had to have hired a developer or learned those things yourself shop kit 2.0 is out. I am not the person to talk about it. Kathy is. So I'm gonna hand it over to Kathy and tell us what shop Kitt 2.0 can do.

What's the headline items here, Kathy?

[01:06:00] Kathy Zant: The headline item, the biggest headline item is those WooCommerce product page layouts that you couldn't change unless you got into the code and were actually like manipulating PHP and all of that. Now you can do this with no code. You can do this using just the cadence blocks core blocks.

You can set up basic templates that will allow you to set up the product pages. However, It's right for your customers, for your business, showcasing showcasing your products the way it works for you. I'm really excited because I'm starting to see some of the cadence users blowing what w commerce looks like out of the water and doing some creative and innovative things.

And so I have my, I'm either gonna be made fun of, or I am going to be like the wisest Sage in the world, because I'm saying that this is gonna change through eCommerce. This is gonna change eCommerce because of the creativity that it's putting into designers' hands. You can also like use galleries and put videos in it now.

And there's so many different there. I think there's 15, 14, 15 different modules that unlock commerce so that people can work with it without touching a line of code. And it's on it's

[01:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: fire. You can move things that are, traditionally fixed. On the right. You can float them left instead, and you can change the position of the images.

And basically you can just adapt it inside the block editor. So you use the settings on the right fiddle, get a template that you're happy with. And from that moment on, do you, what you apply some conditionals to it. You might have a category or something like that, and it's gonna work on.

[01:07:39] Kathy Zant: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You can basically set it up so that you can say, all of my products are gonna look this way or just this category is gonna look this way or just this one product is gonna look this way. And so there's all these different, higher level types of things where you can apply templates to all of your products, some of your products, one of your products, it's it's really flexible and powerful, and it's done, using ING rather than just going into editing all of your product data.

We've really separated the design of the page from where the data is being stored, which is to me, the power of WordPress is the fact that design happens in one way. And data happens in another. Typical database design works. So this is, it's just really powerful. Our audience, the cadence audience is super excited about this.

I'm excited to see more and more people using this. Woo commerce is so powerful and whether you're a huge company starting to migrate over to it or somebody who's just getting started and you don't wanna pay a monthly fee for, that's basically gonna break your bank. Commerce gives you tons of different ways to get started.

And this is putting more and more control into the hands of the people who are closest to the customer. And that means that sites are gonna work better for the end users.

[01:09:05] Nathan Wrigley: Couple of headline items as well. First of all, first thing, I've gotta say, if you can get me that sofa for $499, I will have it immediately, cuz that's a bargain.

Secondly, there's a couple of other items isn't there. So you optimize your checkout work? Yes. Are you able to briefly we dealing

[01:09:25] Kathy Zant: with here? Yeah. Obviously if you are trying to You, you want people to put things into your cart and they want to, then when they get to that point, you wanna take away all of the difficult decisions and make it easy for them to hand over the money as fast as possible.

And it's different for each storefront. Some stores need to know about delivery and all of these things when they're checking out some, it's just, boom, it's an easy download type of situation. You don't need a lot of data from the end user who's buying. So you want to make sure that your checkout is customizable and shop kit does that.

So it really reduces the friction for getting that that sale.

[01:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Okay. So that's part of the cadence bundle, right? Or can you buy shop kit as a. Thing.

[01:10:14] Kathy Zant: Yep. You can buy it as a separate thing. And you don't even be, need to use cadence blocks if you're just gonna use the other modules, the product page layouts do use cadence blocks.

So you'll need to, I recommend that you just get the full bundle because there's so many other things in it. I'm not gonna give you a sales pitch. You can go look. But the full bundle gets you cadence blocks pro and gets you shop kit as well as, updates. It's a subscription model. So the full bundle is the way to go if you're gonna do shop kit, just because it gives you so much.

But you can't buy it a LA carte and you don't even need to use cadence blocks if you're not gonna do the product page layouts, if you just wanted to use something else within the plugin.

[01:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Very cool. Very cool. And yeah, I remember seeing the video that you did about, I don't know, a month ago or something, was it, you I'm sure it was you and you just did it in about 20 minutes.

You customized oh no, it was Ben. It was Ben.

[01:11:05] Kathy Zant: It was Ben and the I theme training. Yeah. He

did

[01:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: a great job there. That's right. I watched all of that and thought actually that is. Bloom in marvelous. Very cool. Indeed. So blocks we lost the blocks okay. Curiously, another St. So cadence is a company.

The parent of which is stellar WP. Iconic is also another brand under that umbrella. Iconic also do woo commerce. So this is like a curious, overlap, these competing things, or they hope not. What's flux checkout, flux. Checkout's new theme. First of all, what's flux checkout. And then what's flux checkout's new

[01:11:44] Kathy Zant: theme.

Yeah, flex checkout is basically a plugin that allows you to customize your checkout. And it's extremely fast. They have the, they have a previous classic design and this is their new modern design. And it really does similar types of things, but it just makes that checkout process friction free and painless allows your users to just get what they need and what they want and get out of there fast.

And there's some people who are like really into blocks and there's some people who maybe are not, and they wanna use something like flux. So it's really two different kinds of got, there's so many different ways that people can use w commerce and so many different ways that people can, Des customize their checkouts.

And these products serve different markets, really. So we have friendly conversations about what we see in the marketplace. But we don't really see these as competitive products because different audiences buy these.

[01:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. So this is I'll put all the links to these in the show notes.

It looks like from the big red banner at the top, which you can't ignore it's cheaper at the minute 30% off. So you got until the, what is that? 15th of September, if you like the look of a flux checkout. Okay. Let's do match check spit next. If that's alright with you, Matt check and voice you on that one without it was gonna possibly come toward the end.

But here we are you are running a fabulous event entitled. Oh I say you are. I dunno if it's you individually going headless with next JS and WP GraphQL, again, I'll link in the show notes and this is the registration page, but who might be interested in attending such a webinar? What is what it's all about?

[01:13:28] Maciek Palmowski: We all are hearing constantly the words about gem stack headless, and some people just would like to see what it is, how to start and learn something from. From front from WP engine, because he will be, he'll be helping me in building such a simple app using headless WordPress together with thanks, JS and WP GraphQL.

In general, we are doing those webinars not only about headless workers, but about different topics related to the web in general, every once every two weeks this time it's had less workers about last last two weeks. Two weeks ago we had a webinar about the bugging PHP and so on.

So in general, it's worth following those webinars. There are sometimes very interesting topics. For example, we also had Milan top and we discussed about work documentation and how it's made. It's really worth

[01:14:35] Nathan Wrigley: giant guess. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I get the regular email updates, actually. I dunno if it comes through email or if it comes through a LinkedIn connection we've got, but you, yeah.

These events come thick and fast don't they? And this time, if you're interested in headless, which really is, everybody's talking about it and I can, I am not that knowledgeable about it. So you're gonna be joined by Fran who is WP engine. There's another nice coincidence. Look at that. Yeah. Shout out to Fran.

Yeah. Yay. Okay. Yeah. Good. So that, okay. Importantly, when is it? 24th of August. So this week, exactly Wednesday 5:00 PM. UTC. If you go to the page, which I will link to in the show notes, but just go to body DotWorks and then special webinars

[01:15:23] Maciek Palmowski: to Cameron's comment. Is there going to be to be every play?

Yes, of course. It'll be on YouTube with

[01:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Great. Okay. The sign up form is there. You've got two days to sign up and I'm assuming that if you sign up for that one, you'll be you'll be getting updates about the future ones as well. Okay. That's great. Thank you very much, indeed. All right, let's go for this one next.

So we're gonna step away from WordPress for a minute, because I think we need to. I think we need to worry ourselves. It's not a good thing to get through a, this week in WordPress without a certain degree of worry. Today's worry is brought to you. Courtesy of ring doorbells. Oh boy. Ugh.

Okay. So if you buy a ring doorbell, it's got a camera. Of course it has. That's like the point and you can, record that data and see who's been looking, see what your cat spin up to and see if anybody's intruded in your house. Probably what you didn't anticipate. And I don't care what the small print says.

Nobody's expecting the Amazon people to be able to just give that data away. So it, this is the Bruce Schneider website, which is fabulous by the way, regular updates and gets really down in the weeds with security. It's entitled ring gives video to police without a warrant or user consent. Amazon has revealed that it gives police videos from its ring doorbells without a warrant and without consent.

I won't bore you with any of the details, but basically that's it. So if you've got a ring doorbell and you live in the us, what can I say? Have no expectation that anything you do is private. If you've got 'em spread throughout your house, dunno why you'd have a ring doorbell in your house, but presumably extends to the other ring products as well.

Now, is it just me or is this just weird that you get this stuff? It's probably in the small print somewhere that we will give this away without a warrant. When the police just say, can we have that deal or should the expectation not be exactly the opposite that if you have a product like this, it should never be given away at all ever.

Unless I dunno, there's a big fight in the courts to get it out of the ring people. I could be wrong over to you. It's

taken down now. I'm

[01:17:57] Maciek Palmowski: being surprised that I dunno, Google. Should some data that I just search or anything.

[01:18:05] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno. I think it goes a little bit further though, because I think like the Google, the data that Google's got on me. Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. It's location data, it's messages and so on and so forth, but it's not the video.

It's not the actual video, are you sure? And it's scoop. Yeah. oh my Lord. Get me the tinfoil hat quickly. This is presumably it's scooping up like what your kids are doing on your front lawn and what your neighbors are doing. And maybe that's what it is. Maybe it's, the house over the street got burgled or something like that, but surely they should come to you and say, look, this has happened.

We've taken your data just so that but I'm guessing, if you're up to no good. That's exactly what they wouldn't tell you. Oh, I dunno, Kathy. I want your opinion on this cuz you're into security.

[01:18:59] Kathy Zant: I'm willing to give up all of my video footage for everything. As long as I can have the footage of Jeff Bezos everybody at Google, some politicians, perhaps , if privacy goes away for me, privacy goes for away for them.

That's

[01:19:16] Nathan Wrigley: a great repost. I love it. So okay. That we've both been quite glib about it. And I suspect that given that actual scenario playing itself out, which is unlikely, essentially what you're saying is no, this should not happen. This should not be allow

[01:19:33] Kathy Zant: in theory. It should not happen. It is happening though.

But I think that what is happening is that there is this leveling of the playing fields where I've seen a lot of hacker culture and I've seen a lot of people going after a lot of things and it is a laying. There's been such, all of our history has been very top down managed where the advantages have all been to a privileged view.

And I believe that technology is leveling that playing field and is making it making it a lot harder for people to do things behind closed doors. I really do think that they don't get to have, they don't get to have the power over us as much anymore because so much more information is becoming more and more available.

They can censor as much as they want, but the, what they're doing to us in terms of violating our privacy is going to bite them. So to speak in the

[01:20:35] Nathan Wrigley: rear end, I think the E FF, the electronic frontier foundation summit up beautifully. If you just pause this sentence and actually dwell on it for a second, police are not the customers for ring.

The people who buy the devices are customers. And I don't care what it says in those terms and conditions. There's no way that in the advertising material for ring doorbell, one of the key benefits is warrantless, aggressive data to police just anyway, there's

[01:21:12] Maciek Palmowski: ING some although this would be a very original and interesting market problem, no really class video sharing or something like this.

Really. I. No one did it, no one did it yet. Almost we know have

[01:21:31] Kathy Zant: this is the, this is why Bitcoin came about, right? It's happened after the 2008 situation where there was all kinds of nefarious, the war on wall street and all of this nefarious types of things were happening behind closed doors.

And Bitcoin kind of came about of everything. Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. So I think that if we are going to have our privacy, violet, if this is gonna happen, and it seems to keep happening over and over again, whether it be, your cookies and your browser, or if it's your ring doorbell, all of these other types of things.

Let's push it. Let's make everything open source. Let's make everything out in the open. Let's put sudden light on everything. Let's see what happens then I'm feeling very well today.

[01:22:21] Nathan Wrigley: You are. It's good.

[01:22:22] Maciek Palmowski: I love the situation that in such cases, most politicians will say that if you aren't doing anything bad, you shouldn't be worried about things like this.

Yeah, that

[01:22:35] Maciek Palmowski: I always love this because every time we have such a situation in Poland, we have those that are ruling this. Someone has to say this phrase. And from, at some point, one of our technological blogs started asking those people who said this sentence. Okay. So if you are saying things like this, could you give us your phone so we could, we can publish once an hour screen of your phone of your messages or everything.

Yeah. It

[01:23:10] Maciek Palmowski: never, they didn't. The fun fact is they didn't even respond, which is illegal because as public figures in and politicians, they should respond in the term of. Two two weeks or one month, something like this, but they should,

[01:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, I got myself all

[01:23:32] Maciek Palmowski: detail. That's the warrant warrantless video, Nathan, you really should go for the marketing problem

and no.

[01:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: Less than the Malaysian pilots association are telling me to preach. So there you go. Hello? Malaysia pilots association. I have no clue. What I have a clue. Oh, do you? OK, great. OK. That's good. If it's humorous. I'm all for, okay. So's humor. So from one ridiculous thing to another, and then we'll probably have to knock it on the head.

Okay. Sure. Lovely. Did you know, the guardian told us this week that the only reason you can talk is because evolution decided that our vocal apparatus was gonna be. Less sophisticated than primates. So I'm gonna link to this in the show notes. It turns out that things like gorillas have these what are they called?

There's these appendages to the larynx and they're like bags full of air. And they enable these lovely creatures to produce enormously loud sounds. But they also stifle the ability to manipulate that sound carefully. We stupid creatures that we are, we decided to get rid of these in an evolutionary masterpiece and developed the ability.

And so it is the more basic model of larynx, which allows us to speak, which I think says everything. love this story. I don't suppose anybody's got anything to say about that, but I had to share it.

[01:25:15] Kathy Zant: This is what we're doing on the internet typing to each other, rather than talking right.

Since we've evolved.

[01:25:23] Nathan Wrigley: I just thought that was absolutely fascinating. And should we do this one very quickly? Let's get back onto something a bit more, on message. Let me pick the right one. No, I'll leave the spectra one, if that's alright, cuz we're gonna run out time. X WP produced an article this week is called pizza.

Isn't a perk, a response to the anti remote argument match check. Was this from. Yes, it was I love working from home. I've been working from home for the longest period but in the X WP blog this week, an article crop top. And I think basically it came from the right honorable Malcolm Gladwell who, seems to produce an awful lot of incredibly cool material, but he's rejecting the idea that working at.

Home's a good thing. The fact that you can work in your pajamas is not a benefit. I'm here Malcolm to say you're wrong. The slippers and the pajamas. They're the whole point. That's what it's all about. What do you think thing the pandemic's been, it's gone, maybe you all work from home anyway.

Maybe there was no change for you, but you all look looking at your little icons there. You all look like you're working from home at the moment. Are you gonna take Malcolm's advice and go back to the office? Because that's where the real works done. Or did stay in your PJ's. I,

[01:26:45] Maciek Palmowski: I did it once. I, because most of my career I was working remotely.

So I can say that I worked remotely before it happened be before it started to be cool. And once I decided, okay, I will go to work at an office, I will see how is it this, all those coffee meetings, this whole office culture, this I dunno, 40 Friday or whatever, the worst year ever in short, it's horrible.

It's such a waste of time to. On the other hand there are, it's so easy. It's so easy to get distracted. I know it also depends on the role you are doing. Cause probably for project manager, it's much better to have everyone at one place, so they can go from desk to desk and ask, Hey, how is it going?

Hey, how is it going? Of course it could be sent through email or slack, but,

and on the other hand, for me as a developer, it was horrible because I couldn't focus. Why, because of this project manager,

[01:28:07] Nathan Wrigley: when that's genius, cyclical argument. Yeah. That's lovely. yeah.

[01:28:14] Maciek Palmowski: And it's really easy to get this, to get distracted in the office and. I always felt that we had this argument also with my wife and she, she shares the same opinion that the amount of work we did during eight hours at work, we would be able to do in about four or five working

[01:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: remote peach Ander is in the comment.

And she says that she's been working forever and really likes it. And she's she also, she, we're not condoning this. Everybody we're not condoning it. She says she's going to burn all of Malcolm Gladwell's books. From this point on. But she also makes the really good point. And obviously we're being flippant.

I more or less can guarantee that none of us are actually wearing pajamas right now. No, this is,

[01:29:10] Maciek Palmowski: the way to, I. It's difficult to learn how to work remotely. It's not like working in the pajamas. In most cases, the moment you start working in your pajamas, you're doing it wrong. I had a friend for her and for her, the moment when she started work, it was the moment when she put it, her bra on just like it.

You can't work remotely without the bra. That's it?

[01:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: I have got two possible titles for this week's episode. The first one is it doesn't make sense that it doesn't make sense. And then if you're wearing pajamas, you're doing it wrong. I don't know which one's gonna, which one's gonna win out, but they were that's it.

Unless Nick and Kathy have got something to say about that. I don't wanna hold you beyond the time that's allotted. And we have just eclipsed that time. So if you wanna say something, you are free, I'm fine. But if you need to get off the call,

[01:30:12] Nick Diego: I've been remote for about a decade now, even in my previous job.

And I do think that it takes a lot to get used to it. And not everybody is likes working from home and likes that camaraderie with, fellow employees and whatever. So I really, I like the approach of do it works best, and I know not every company can do that, but if there are companies that allow people to work from home or people that want to come into the office, I think that's a nice thing

[01:30:38] Nathan Wrigley: if it's possible.

Yeah. So yeah. Give it, give people a choice. Yeah, that's a good point. Kathy, anything to add just before we knock it on the head,

[01:30:46] Kathy Zant: I'm a remote worker and I feel like work needs to fit around our lives rather than our lives fitting around work. That's hard

[01:30:55] Nathan Wrigley: to leave it. We should all, but also the

[01:30:57] Maciek Palmowski: thing that, that theary just wrote working remotely is not the same as working from home.

And by the way, this is also an interesting thing because lately I see that the term working from home. It's getting much more attention rather than working remotely. I don't know why. Maybe it's easier to connect with

[01:31:16] Nathan Wrigley: those pajamas. Yeah, I think people are used to often before COVID they used to go to the Starbucks and hang out there.

Didn't they? Whereas now we're all Def during COVID. We were definitely at home. Okay. I'm conscious of the time. I don't wanna hold anybody beyond the 90 minutes that we agreed to. So firstly, thank you. So I enjoyed that as always lovely chat, nice chatting to Kathy and to Nick and to match, check. We'll be back.

Oh no, we won't. I've gotta look at the calendar quickly. We're having a bit of time off cuz I'm going on holiday. Let me just have a quick look. I think it might be as much as three weeks away. What's the date today? It is the somebody helped me out. It is the next week off. And the week after that. Yeah.

Literally having three weeks off. I've never done that before in my life. I'm gonna stay in this room and wear some pajamas and it's gonna be fabulous, but I won't be putting the computer on. So I'll see you in a month's time. This show will be postponed until then. I hope that you can all cope. We'll see you soon.

Thank you. Oh, no, we've got a wave. We've gotta do the wave. Sorry, Nick. I don't know if you've prepared. Yeah. Give us all a bit of a wave. We've got the wave. Got the wave done. Thank you very much. Indeed. We'll see you in a month's time or three weeks time. Take it easy. Bye.