This Week in WordPress #222

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 222 entitled the busiest woman in WordPress. This episode was recorded on Monday, the 19th of September, 2020. My name's Nathan Wrigley. I will be joined by three fabulous guests. We have Michelle Frechette. We also have Amber Hinds and we have Marcus Burnette as well.

We're here as always to talk about the WordPress news. And what are we talking about this week? First of all, we talk about a video, which just in Tadlock, made all about what's coming in WordPress 6.1, which is now just around the corner. We also get into whether or not WebP should be part of WordPress core or whether it should be something called a canonical plugin.

What even is that we then get into a long discussion about Michelle's experience at word camp us over the last week or so, and how there were some problems for her from an accessibility point of view, GoDaddy have also launched in beta their new managed WordPress stores. We talk extensively about what's in it and what you can expect from it, and how if you're in the us, you can get involved, testing it out.

We then get into a bit of word camp news, the new word camp us states have been announced. And also they're looking for speakers for word camp Asia. We then get into a few little bits rounding off. We talk about beaver builders, new update. We talk about some nice new. And right at the end, a very brief conversation about why people don't talk about their salaries. 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. 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 forward slash WPBuilds.

Hello? Hello. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you may be. Very nice to have you with us, joining us. If you fancy making this far more interesting experience, then go out and tweet it or something like that, go to go to whatever social platform it is that you love.

And here's the URL for that? It's WP Builds.com/live. And you never know. We may get some of your comments on the screen. Later. I am joined as always. This is episode number 222, by the way and joined as always by one of my co-hosts the ever present Michelle frat Matt moue said that basically she's the hardest working.

Person, I'm gonna say in WordPress what was his exact words?

[00:03:07] Michelle Frechette: he called me the busiest woman in WordPress. Oh, he's

[00:03:10] Marcus Burnette: busiest.

[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. I've slightly butchered that, but yeah, we're joined as, as so often is the case by Michelle Frette and I'll go through her full biography. She's the director of community engagement for stellar WP at liquid web.

Oh, you've written it in there. The busiest woman in WordPress, a called in the Matt Mullen way. It has

[00:03:28] Michelle Frechette: to be in my bio

[00:03:29] Marcus Burnette: now. That's

[00:03:30] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. That's exactly. I think it should be a t-shirt. In addition to her work at stellar WP, Michelle is the podcast [email protected]. She's the co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com creator of WP career page.

Dot com lots of dot coms. The president for the board of big orange chart.org, director of community relations and [email protected], author business coach, and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an avid nature photographer. And if you wanna find out more about her on a personal level, that you can go to meet michelle.online.

Thank you for joining us as a cohost. Again, really appreciate it. Michel. Always good to be here. Thank you. We're also joined. Let's just go round the screen in the sort of order it's presented. Next up we got Marcus, how are you doing Marcus Burnett. Great. How are you? Yeah. Yeah. Good Marcus. In fact, actually there is some commonality here.

Isn't there this time, last week we were more or less all of us hanging out in exactly the same place. I hadn't really thought about that, but look, yeah, we all went to word camp us, which was really nice. I met Marcus there as well, and Marcus is a part of the Godad pro events and community team.

He's one of the co-hosts of the do the woo podcast and a team rep for the WordPress photo directory. How did your contribute day thing for the photo? Directory go was that. Yeah, it

[00:04:54] Marcus Burnette: was great. We had a little bit of internet stability issues, reliability issues in the building. So we decided to go for a photo walk.

And so we grabbed our gear, walked around the town and country and snapped away, had some good conversations along the way about how we can push some of the things forward. So I think it was great. Oh, highly

[00:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: productive. Yeah. That's really, yeah. You could totally pivot. You didn't need online, which is nice.

Yeah, that's great. Anyway, so there we are Marcus Burnett and finally joining us, join I a sort of late edition. I don't mean it to sound the way that came out, but we did have somebody, Sean Hesketh was gonna join us, but he's unfortunately unwell and I would really to thank am HEZ for step stepping in at the last minute.

How are you doing.

[00:05:38] Amber Hinds: I'm doing great. You noticed my little, like I'm gonna change my comment to a dash cause everyone else had a dash there just a second ago. oh, no. It's been a while since I've been on and I gotta,

[00:05:48] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, no, you gotta do it right. You gotta do it right.

[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: How do I fit in ? Yeah. Thank you.

Amber is suffering from slight technical problems and so the camera is not the usual one, but to me it still looks fine, Amber, to be honest, it looks really good. So Amber is the CEO of equalized digital, Inc. A certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility maker of the accessibility checkup login in and lead organizer of the WordPress accessibility meetup and WP accessibility day conference.

You are gonna have to school me, Amber, because I honestly don't know what a certified B. Is what's a B Corp.

[00:06:26] Amber Hinds: So a B Corp is a for-profit company that is organized for the benefit of more than just the shareholders. Oh, so it has a triple bottom line. So it benefits to shareholders, benefits the employees and benefits the broader community.

And there is a seek nonprofit organization that you can go through a whole process in order to become certified. So they do a ton of reviewing of everything from your employee handbook, to your financials, to just a whole bunch of different practices that you have out in the world and within your organization.

And then if you get a certain point, you are able to be certifi.

[00:07:07] Nathan Wrigley: So it's a full on, like it, it's not just a thing which you stick on it. It really is a proper endeavor to get that certification. That's nice. Yeah.

[00:07:14] Michelle Frechette: I think it this

[00:07:15] Amber Hinds: about six months to get

[00:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: the certification. Yeah. Bravo. I'm not gonna say Amber and I only will know about this, but I'm not gonna say awesome.

Amber. I'm just gonna try. And we had, we

[00:07:27] Marcus Burnette: had a long discussion I've

[00:07:29] Michelle Frechette: been trying not to say honestly, I just watching our conversation late at night at

[00:07:35] Nathan Wrigley: that's we had a fun conversation in a bar. Let's just leave it that way, extra ordinary,

[00:07:40] Marcus Burnette: but it is

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: not awesome. It does. We'll settle for that. Cameron Jones says, who are these people?

Hello Cameron's joining us as he always does from Australia. What is this channel? That's been so long. I don't recognize it. Yeah. Three weeks. Cameron we've had that is to say there have been three weeks gap just because of travel and things. I went on holiday with my family and then was word camp us, which just about.

Crossed out two of the weeks, but we're back. So that's great. And I don't know who this Facebook user is, which will lead me to a comment in a moment. But sorry, missed the beginning. Are the comments banned today because of the funeral, I am not going there. And but they say only half ingest the way you are going to identify yourself.

If you wanna drop into Facebook, that's fine. But the Facebook platform does one thing, right? And it does the anonymization of things. Unless you specify, you want to tell us who you are. I say one thing, right? That's highly inflammatory, isn't it. But you need to carry out one additional step. If you want us to know what your face looks like or your avatar and your name.

And that is to go to chat.restream.io/fb. It'll be in the post right at the top of where you are viewing this. And if you do that, then we can see who you are. So whoever that person was, didn't but we also have Peter inusal joining us from Connecticut. Hello, Peter. We've also got Courtney. Hey, Cameron.

Hey Peter. Courtney, we're gonna, we're gonna mention the bit that you pushed in my direction the other week, so hopefully hopefully that'll help out a little bit. Oh, it's peacha oh, peacha you're on as well. God, this is weird. Yeah, that's really unusual. And Peter says, Hey Courtney very nice.

Nice to have you all with us. Let's get stuck into the main event. What we're supposed to be here talking about first off we're WP Builds. Dunno if you know this by the way. But WP Builds. We are actually sponsored by Marcus's company, GoDaddy pro. You can see it there on the main website about. Oh, I would say about five months ago they decided to take out a full year's sponsorship of WP Builds and fully keep the lights on for a full year.

And I'm just incredibly delighted. So the logo's there and all of those kind of things, but it's not often that we have somebody from GoDaddy pro on, but Marcus Bravo and thank you very much for helping us out really appreciate it. Very happy to do it. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, so that's us now. Few bits and pieces.

I'm just gonna breeze through this one because it's not really something that we need to discuss. I don't think unless somebody's got something to mention, this kind of just happens toward the tail end of when I was deciding to take a bit of time off. And it was released on the 24, sorry, 14th of September.

And it was a video of. The great, just in Tadlock, who, as far as I knew, didn't actually have a body. He was everywhere, but very rarely was his face to be seen. I don't know if he deliberately didn't want to go on videos and things like that but he didn't. And he's got a new role, automatic he's one of the developer advocate.

I, I'm not sure what the exact title is, but he works between the developers and the community. And one of the things that he's trying to do is to get people aware of what's coming in version 6.1 of WordPress. And so to that end there. Now long recording with all of the great and the good bits that are going to be recorded.

So it featured the likes of I think rich table was on there. You also had Jonathan DROS, I think, and Marcus Ventura and various other people were on the screen, just showing really. And so there's a lot coming down the pipe in 6.1, you can see things here. It says things like a new default theme, which is gonna be interesting, refined template, experience, fluid, typography, improve consistency and loads of things around block blocking and all of that kind of stuff.

In other words, it's a fairly significant change. There's a lot of things coming down the pipe and this video of all the things that I've seen, touches on all of the bits and pieces. So if you are curious about six point. Go and check this post out. I will link to it in the show notes, but it's a piece by Chloe Bringman entitled 6.1 product walkthrough recap.

And she was just resurfacing that video. So Marcus Amber, or indeed Michelle, if you've got anything to say about that, interrupt me now. If not, I'll go onto the next bit. Okay. That's fine. I

[00:11:55] Amber Hinds: have not watched this

[00:11:56] Nathan Wrigley: video. Oh, it's actually. So

[00:11:59] Amber Hinds: I guess I have something on my to-do list for this

[00:12:01] Nathan Wrigley: week.

Yeah, it's an it's the weird thing is it's exactly an hour long. How good is Justin? He's like really good at everything. He was given an hour and the video is literally an hour long. It's not one second too long, not one second too short. It's just perfect. As with all things that he touches.

Okay. Enough slapping of Justin tad. Lock's back. Let's go for this one. This is Matt Mullenweg, who last week sounds like hot off the back of San Diego. Word camp us. He he got into the discussion all about whether web. Should be part of core now, for those of you that don't follow images or that closely I confess I don't really, I know there's JPEGs and I know there's PNGs, and I know that there's now web P as well.

There was some discussion as to whether or not web P should be like the core image file type in WordPress, such that whenever you uploaded something, for example, like a JPEG, it would get converted to WebP it on the face of it. It's a really good idea, cuz typically I think they're about 20% smaller.

Equivalent, JPEGs and so on and so forth, but it got kiboshed. It seems that's no longer coming. And Matt has said basically, and I quote, I've been reading through the conversation and issues here. I'm interested in supporting new formats and improving performance, but I think this change being pushed to default users when they upgrade to 6.1 is a lot for right now.

I'm happy for support, for working for WebP. And H E I C, which I believe is like what your iPhone takes. It's another image format to stay in core as we should be liberal with what we accept, but not change to convert everything to WebP when JPEGs are uploaded. And I just dunno what you thought about this.

I thought it was actually a really good idea on the face of it. I can't see any reason not to do this, but yeah, discuss. .

[00:13:54] Amber Hinds: Yeah. I'm in the same boat, just from a, I work with clients to optimize their websites. yep. And it's if you wanna feed the Google monster, you sometimes have like this is a low hanging fruit.

So I was a little bit surprised that it got held back, but you. If it's not ready, it's not ready. I guess maybe he's decided that it's not the most important thing from a performance standpoint and there's other things to do, or maybe there's problems that I'm not aware of since I don't really follow the performance

team, but yeah it's interesting.

[00:14:32] Nathan Wrigley: And it'll lead us on, in a moment to a sub talking about something called canonical plugins, which I confessed was quite a new idea to me when I first read about it the other day. But I think 98% I was by pure coincidence. I was interviewing Adam Silverstein from Google the other day. And he works on the team that, that handle, I think it's on the performance team along with so Felix, aunts and so on.

And he told me that 98% of browsers now support. P out of the box. So it's, it is pretty edged. There's a couple of, I think email clients that still don't support it, but 98% do. And it's basically older versions of safari, which are the hold ups. So from a technical point of view, it doesn't seem like there's a, an impediment to doing this.

Maybe it simply is, like you said, Amber a question of resources and the fact that I don't know, maybe there just isn't enough time to get this one through in a way that it's gonna be perfectly usable. But I do think that if you are gonna upload something, which is up to 20% bigger, let's say a JPEG. I feel that we should have this at some point.

So anyway, if Marcus and Michelle have anything to offer, let's go for that. Otherwise I'll move on to the economical bit.

[00:15:44] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. I think the one hangup that I've seen is like when social networks pull an image from a site that they struggle with WebP files currently. And so that would break all of that, but I think.

Having WebP built in as being allowed would be great. Let people go ahead and start uploading WebP images without necessarily converting all JPEGs to WebP right off

[00:16:13] Nathan Wrigley: the bat. So do you mean that? Say, for example, if I create a blog post and I upload a WebP and it's the featured image, are you saying that's well, let's use Facebook as the example.

There's a potential conflict there and you would just get a non image that just wouldn't be something that came across with your post. Yeah.

[00:16:32] Marcus Burnette: Last I saw it was the social network, struggled to pull WebP featured images in and display them properly. So that maybe one thing that's still lagging as far as as compatibility, not just the browsers themselves being able to show.

[00:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: Courtney Robertson just made a comment. She said she thinks the social network previews were resolved, still display original format. Oh, I see. So there's some sort of fallback, is that okay? So if not a JPEG so that sorry if not a PNG, they serve up a JPEG. That was my understanding, at least anyway, sorry, Amber.

No,

[00:17:06] Amber Hinds: that, that's just what I was gonna say. Cuz I think SVGs are the same way, like Facebook and other. They have a really hard time if the website only has SVGs on it. And but my thought is why don't you just make the open graph image? That's not actually visible to anyone, but is linked in the head.

A JPEG and then that might solve

[00:17:25] Nathan Wrigley: that problem. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like whatever the, sorry, Michelle. I dunno if you've had anything to say. No, I didn't have anything to add. No, that's okay. So what, whatever the thing is, Matt has decided that okay. Time to time to stall on that one. So that's what happening.

I'll just quickly add Courtney's other comment in Courtney again also a default to display, whatever image format shows the smallest data. Ooh, that's interesting. Okay. All the. The fact though, is that Matts decided to pull it and it raises the question here. Just pop it back up on the screen, cuz a little bit further that he wrote, this is an excellent territory for canonical plugins, a concept.

I think every make team should be exploring a lot more as a place to experiment and push functionality much like we have had with MP six and Gutenberg in the past. And that whole idea was then picked up by Sarah Gooding in the WP Tavern. On the 12th of September, her article was penned with the title, Matt Mullenweg renews push for canonical plugins.

And I confess, I really didn't know too much about canonical plugins, but it would appear that at some point in the fairly distant past 2009. This idea of a canonical plugin came about. And essentially I'm gonna quote because the description here by Jen Milo is significantly better than I could come up with on the fly.

So here we go. It's fairly lengthy bear with me. Canonical plugins would be plugins that are community developed. So multiple developers, not just one person. So that's one important point. It's gotta be more than an individual and address the most common functionality requests with superlative ex execution.

I'm glad they didn't use the word. Awesome. These plugins would be GPL and live in the WordPress. Do org repo and would be developed in CLO close connection. With WordPress core, there would be a very strong relationship between core and these plugins that ensure that a, the plugin code would be secure and the best possible example of coding standards and B the new versions of WordPress would be tested against these plugins prior to release, to ensure compatibility.

Forgive me, I've only got a sentence or two more to go. There would be a screen within, so this is a big change to the UI. There would be a screen within the plugin section of the WordPress admin to feature these economical plugins as a kind of editor's choice or verified guarantee. And these plugins would be a true extension of WordPress core in terms of compat compatibility, security, and support.

So in other words, stuff, which let's say. 30% of us really think would be in core. The barrier to entry now in my understanding is broadly speaking. If something is needed by 80% of the people, then it's ripe for going into core. But something, for example, like the WebP that we've just been talking about, maybe that's not for everybody, maybe 20 or 30 or 50%.

So the idea would be to have this canonical set of plugins developed with tight integration, into core, checked for security, managed by a team, updated all the time. It just seems like a really curious, interesting, dare I say it like essential idea and the fact that they're presumably there's no kind of like upsell going on.

It's not like you're gonna introduce a ton of adverts or whatever may come along for the ride with that. And the fact that it's not just one person should somebody get disinterested in that project? Hopefully there's somebody that can step in. So I just. I'm struggling to come up with good examples.

The WebP is the only one that's popping into my head, but I do think this is quite a good idea. So I'm gonna shut up and throw that one out at you. Three

[00:21:16] Amber Hinds: So I have some thoughts about this. I just posted a link to Matt's article on the make blog for core, where he talked about this. And I had some follow up conversations for some people from the accessibility team, because on that post, if you scroll down, there's some ideas that he threw out and for the accessibility team, he suggested an alternative.

Admin that is better for accessibility. And the whole conversation here is that this is a little bit like the whole separate but equal , which is really separate, is not equal. And and so we had some conversations and I know there were a few people with disabilities. Oh, I'm sorry. A few don't worry disabilities who were quite upset about this suggestion that they should have to have a separate admin experience and that the core admin cannot be made better for them.

So I don't know. It's side, I don't know that he meant it that way, but

[00:22:19] Nathan Wrigley: But, I'm just curious I'm us like not

[00:22:23] Amber Hinds: super great.

[00:22:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm gonna be very mindful of the fact that he wrote this word didn't he wrote an alternative API. Which could I suppose be interpreted in all sorts of different ways.

Couldn't it, here's something extra, but yeah. I can understand where you're coming from Amber, but that does make sense. Yeah. Yeah. But okay.

[00:22:42] Amber Hinds: I think the major concept of having more of those kind of major feature plugins, I think is interesting. There is, a thought too on who's gonna develop and manage them and how many people are on some of these various teams that are already volunteering a lot to core.

And do they even have time for that?

[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, so right on cue. Megan, I'm gonna say it's Megan. I don't believe we've met Megan. Megan Haynes has written this comment in our she's on YouTube canonical plugin development for multilingual, which is a possible recommendation that Matt has given us would prove two complex and laborious for free contributors.

Sponsored could do it though, and really it should be done. Okay. That's interesting. Thank you. Megan and Courtney Robertson is saying it might be a really steep ask for the various teams to maintain their own plugins, especially teams that aren't as dev centric, which I guess is part of the thy problem.

Isn't it? It's all very well to say this. And from my perspective, looking from the outside, looking in. If all of that could be achieved, it seems like a no brainer. But now, you've got you guys starting to comment from the inside, looking out, and you are raising all sorts of possible, things that might make this really difficult to do and maintain going forwards.

Okay. Michelle or Marcus, anything there?

[00:24:07] Michelle Frechette: My only thoughts are whenever we start talking about taking things that are plugins and putting them into core is we have an ecosystem that's built up almost 20 years around WordPress. And when we start to implement things that other companies are actually employing people and making money off of that, we run the risk of.

Putting people out of business and taking income away from not only, we can look at it as business. It's just a business, but those business that every business represents people. And every one of those people represents a home. And whether it's a family of one person like me, or a family of 15 people, we're, the ecosystem is now supporting families and supporting individuals.

And when we talk about putting things in core, we talk about potentially disrupting that whole system.

[00:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting point, Michelle, thank you. Anything to throw in the, in, in here Marcus,

[00:25:01] Marcus Burnette: I, wasn't a word presser in 2009 when the original call was thrown out there. So I'm not exactly sure what what all that entails.

I guess my question is. What makes something about 30% good for about 30%? That's not good for 80% when we're talking about like the accessibility admin, why wouldn't we want an accessibility admin that's accessible for everyone and not just like 30%. So I don't, that's the question for me is what would fall into this category of Canan canonical plugins.

That's good for a small subset that wouldn't ultimately benefit everyone.

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I just thinking my first initial reaction to that, Marcus, and again, this is not words inside of my head. I'm just trying to put this sort of devil's advocate position is people I guess would say every time we include a 30.

Type of thing. Then we make WordPress core a little bit bigger and there's more to patch. Whereas if we've got it as little individual compartmentalized plugins, but I totally get your point. That makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, if I need

[00:26:10] Marcus Burnette: to install 10 more plugins though, then I have 10 more plugins I need to

[00:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: manage.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting though. Isn't it really interesting the idea of keeping WordPress core completely lean, but then I do feel the idea of a subset of plugins called canonical plugins gives them a certain. Certain kudos. And Michelle says, I wonder if, especially if they started to cross pollinate with things that are already commercial plugins it does feel that yeah.

Especially if the UI in WordPress had a separate featured section you'd struggle to compete with that. I feel if you were, I don't know, multilingual or something like that, which is obviously coming at some point fairly soon. So Cameron, hello, Cameron. Again, he says, I like the idea of economical plugins, but I feel they'll need their own UI to be really discoverable, like the importer plugins rather than the traditional plugin install path.

Yeah. And just a couple of good mornings. One from Cammy. Hello, Cammy. Nice to see you last week for the first time. It was really nice. And hello Adam, who turns out is a fabulous singer. So moving on from canonical plugins, right? This one I think is gonna. Possibly dominate the conversation today a little bit.

It's it's written by a, ah, somebody called Michelle frak, which, I don't know, dunno who she is, but she sounds lovely. She's written a piece called five days without a shower. And I was being a bit sarcastic there, Michelle, it's an unusual piece for our WordPress post five days without a shower, but it struck home.

It sounds like you've you've had a lot of interaction on social since you posted this piece, but given its curious title just explain what this piece was all about and what drove you to write.

[00:27:57] Michelle Frechette: I think Amber especially would appreciate the fact that if I wrote something with a blog, post title called accessibility at word camp, nobody would read it.

It had to be something, a little sensational but actually honest. I arrived at word camp us on Wednesday and I wasn't able to shower until I got home because the hotel that was supposedly an accessible room. Was retrofitted to meet the bare minimum, which is that it had grab bars by both the toilet and the shot and the bathtub, but being somebody who can't step into a bathtub who can't stand in a bathtub and who can't sit on the floor of a bathtub, that was like it looks pretty, but it's not usable.

And so it's it was like the wax fruit on your grandmother's coffee table. It looks good. But if you eat it, you are going to be in trouble. Had I gotten into the bathtub, we would've needed people to get me out of it. And that would've been an embarrassing situation. It just, it was not accessible it even after they brought a shower chair, it still wasn't, it still wasn't accessible.

I would've, it would've been like sitting in the rain. So there's no way to actually move the shower. When you stand in a shower, you move your body to the water. When you're just sitting, you can't do that. So it's, it was a rather unpleasant experience. Which is why I started though.

It's like that smell at word camp us. Yeah, that was me. Cause not only that, but like the deodorant I brought didn't work. So I had to actually borrow from my roommate. Otherwise it would've been a really bad situation but it, and it wasn't just that right there, the only. the only doors in the entire word camp experience that actually opened with a push button so that I could actually access them by myself was the external doors to the event.

Not the doors to the hotel lobby, not the doors in any of the bathrooms, not the doors within the venue itself. Any time I need needed to go through a door, I had to ask somebody to help me or struggle to do it myself. And if you read the article, that I actually got stuck in the lobby bathroom for a few minutes because to be able to hold a door, move your mobility device backwards, move the door behind you and then move forward without injuring yourself.

It's not easy to do . And yeah, so I struggled quite a bit and I know I wasn't the only one I did talk to some of the other people. With mobility issues who, chose not to be named at that. And I, a hundred percent appreciate that. But who also were struggling with doors and showers and things like that.

And I just think it's something that we, as a community need to keep in mind and retrofitting things like, if you go to a restaurant and the only way to access it, because there's stairs in the front is to go to the back and come in through the kitchen. That is not the experience that everybody else has.

And so just like Amber says, we don't want supper but equal. When we're looking at our dashboards or using our dashboards, I don't want to have to come in through the kitchen to experience the same things that other people experience. I don't wanna get stuck in the bathroom. I don't wanna have to take a front.

Yes. I know women go to the bathroom in packs. That's not actually true. We're absolutely able to go to the restrooms by ourselves as long as you can get out of the restroom. And those were some of the experiences that I had, and I thought it was important to write about them, but then also I don't complain about things without also trying to at least bring some ideas forward for moving forward.

And so the end of that article also talks about ways that we, as a community can look at word camps and make sure that they are accessible for all.

[00:31:46] Nathan Wrigley: Couple of things, firstly, from my point of view, you're, you are very economists normally aren't you don't seem to stray into fits of anger online or anything like that.

And I notice straight up that you've written this and there's a heavy amount of humor in it to keep it light. Because if

[00:32:05] Michelle Frechette: I don't, I didn't wanna cry through word camp. So I had to be, I had to employ humor

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: for my thoughts. But I want to know if you are willing to talk about this, so you've used a bit of humor to make it palatable.

I guess to get to draw people toward it. Is that the actual feeling or is, do you feel a certain, okay. Anger is not the word I want, but that's a word which is gonna come outta my mouth. So do you feel cross about this? Does it, does it, are you irritated? I would say.

[00:32:35] Michelle Frechette: More frustrated. So you can be frustrated with something once, but then when it happens for three, four or five days in a row, that frustration starts to grow into something. I don't know what the right word for it is, but indignation maybe, or just, if there were people who were trying to help it would've turned into anger quite easily.

But every step of the way, there were people who reached out who tried to help, who did what they could to make it a better and a more pleasant experience. I am surrounded by people at, in, in the WordPress community who know me, who love me. Some of you might not love me. That's okay. But the people at word camp I have a lot of friends.

I, I do have a face and a voice that are known in WordPress and I feel. For me, I don't put this burden on anybody else, but for me I've built a platform in WordPress that I need to use to advocate for others as well. And so I feel like I have a voice in WordPress and if I can't affect a change for people like me, who struggle with doors and who have those issues, when they are at an event like that then how could somebody who doesn't have a voice AB advocate as strongly.

And so I want to use that voice to make sure that other people are not having the same experiences that I have, and to make sure that camps that come beyond this one are better experiences, not just for me, but for.

[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: A lot of the commentary in the article, although certainly not limited to, but a lot of the things that you wrote were constrained to the hotel, they were about the actual venue.

So it was a great big conference center com hotel. There was many rooms and layers and doors and avenues and bars and all of that kind of stuff. Are there any industries that have now just got this, so for example, I'm imagining that, you had to go through airports and on airplanes and all of that kind of thing.

I just wondered if this has been sewn up by an industry, to the point where you can happily breeze through that scenario. And it's always gonna be fine. I

[00:34:43] Michelle Frechette: always. Have the best experiences at airports, huh? I have, I do not struggle at airports at all. I can't speak for people who have other disabilities than mine.

Mine is a mobility disability. But I had the most ex I'll tell you what, I almost cried from happiness at my TSA experience in San Diego coming home. And I've never, almost cried for joy at TSA, but I actually tweeted about it and they followed up with me because I was treated with such dignity. I was taken through a process that.

Where I was assisted the whole way. I have a mobility scooter that I use. I take it right down to the door of the plane, and then I use my cane to get on the plane. They take my scooter, every air airline I've used. They take the scooter, they put it down underneath. When I get off the plane, it's there waiting for me.

So I have the ability to navigate through an airport on my own. I used to use wheelchair service and then you're at the, you're beholden to somebody else pushing you through an airport. You feel bad if you say, Hey, I'd like to stop at Starbucks or I need to use the restroom when you're on your own.

I have the ability to do that. I actually had in one airport, I think this was out. Gosh. I don't remember now where I flew, I flown a lot this year. But I was at a stopover in, I think it was Philadelphia and I got off, I got up off the jet bridge and I'm in my own mobility scooter. And there's somebody like within, with my name, knowing that I'm somebody who's got a disability and they're going to take me through the airport. And I said, I can travel faster. You beside me not to be rude, but I have my it's like my legs don't work well, but I'm perfectly capable of finding the next place to go. So I didn't need assistance that way.

So in, in that was the one time that I thought do they think that people in wheelchairs or people in mobility issues also have the inability to navigate at the airport? Because my brain works perfectly fine. It's just that my legs don't work as quickly. So I declined then. I do have a friend who is deaf, who was offered who was almost made to take a wheelchair to get to her next destination.

And she's I can't hear the announcement, but I can see, and I can walk just fine. So leave me alone. I don't need your wheelchair. So sometimes they don't get it right, but by and large airports do a very good job and airlines do a very good job accommodating in my experience, I know others have not had the same experience.

I can only speak for my personal experience.

[00:37:18] Nathan Wrigley: So I've ran, I've asked a couple of rounds of questions. So I'm just gonna hand it over to number and Marcus.

[00:37:23] Amber Hinds: I was just gonna say I, I think it highlighted for me how important it is to bring people with disabilities into the process early, because accessibility means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Like I wasn't aware, I never noticed you smelling. And I wasn't aware of any of the issues, until I saw the article, which made me really appreciate that went out there and wrote it. I saw what went through my co presenter and friend Alex Stein through his experiences. And he, for anyone who's not familiar with him is blind.

And he was like, the building is huge. The accessibility on his end was fine. And, but it's also interesting because he was telling me he might write a post on his LinkedIn about his experiences in airports and how bad it is. Exactly. And because for him, he relies on a guide to help him find places and frequently they'll take him and sit him next to the place.

And then they leave and he said, they're not supposed to leave for more than 30 minutes, but they do. And if he has to go to the bathroom, he can't find the bathroom. And he, so he like tries to avoid getting there early. And I was afraid he was gonna miss his flight. And he's Nope, I can't get there any or earlier.

But I do think it is a conversation that needs to be had, which is how can we make it easier for event organizers who I think have good thoughts in their heart, but aren't aware of these things. And maybe we need to look at the documentation on. On the, four word camp organizers or four meetup organizers.

And we're put together something which we've started a conversation about that on Twitter. Maybe it's a separate site, but I still feel like some of it should be in the actual documentation about what are the questions you should ask? Cuz clearly it's not enough to just ask a hotel.

Are you accessible? Cause I think their answer is yes, but in reality, right? It wasn't right. Yeah. No. And this came up a bunch with the meetup that I run. We do live captions for a time. We had ASL interpreters, but we haven't been able to find the sponsors and it's accessibility. And I is we have to have these things if we can.

But the foundation is unfortunately we can't pay for that. So now we have to go find sponsors to help cover the cost, but it would be great if every virtual event had live captions. And if everyone knew how important that was,

[00:39:59] Michelle Frechette: And I've had so many people reach out to me privately.

You, if you just look at my Twitter, you'll see lots of people come with it publicly as well, but I had people reach out to me, privately, Alex actually reached out to me and said, here's my phone number, Michelle, if you ever run into problem, I know how to advocate, call me. He's so sweet. I appreciate that.

You're awesome. I love him. He is awesome. And then the CTO of my own company at liquid web Joe, Osterling reached out to me and said, that I he. He cried reading it because he had no idea what I was going through there. And that if I, in the future to contact him, he would move mountains to, to get me what I needed.

And I appreciate that. I appreciate that. There's so many people who are willing to help in this, when those situations are happening because we absolutely need advocates when we can't advocate for ourselves. I think I'm pretty good at advocating for myself, but there are times that your frustration level just renders you almost incapable of just dealing anymore but to get in front of these things and not have to have people intercede in the heat of the moment is what we want.

We want an experience that as soon as you approach the front door, you have a button you can open, you have, or a doorman that's there, whatever the experience is so that there are people, there are things in place where we don't have to look for assistance and find ways to circum navigate the.

What exists to be able to accommodate everybody who is there and has the right to be there. And so I like, like I said, I can only write from my own perspective. I can't write from the perspective of somebody who's blind or deaf. I don't have those perspectives. I can only imagine what those kinds of things.

I'm glad that we had captioning there. I don't know what other issues somebody deaf might have needed. Even if just an interpreter to be able to have lunch at a group of people, at a table where you don't know anybody. So there's lots of opportunities for us to learn and grow. And I don't know that any one person is going to have the ability to know how to navigate all of that, but at least we have to have start the conversation and start to put into place opportunities and whatever, I can't think of guidelines heading into events so that we can make sure that everybody has a similar experience and the best possible experience that they can.

[00:42:22] Nathan Wrigley: Mark has anything to add.

[00:42:23] Marcus Burnette: I don't have a ton to add to that. I just wanted to say that I appreciated Michelle's honesty in writing that piece. It's hard to put yourself out there sometimes. And so I appreciated the honesty there and then as easy as it is to slam people, I also appreciated, and this is just who Michelle is adding people's names that were particularly helpful in that piece.

Let's do it. Let's and giving them the due credit for being upstanding citizens and very helpful, friendly people. Because it's so easy to slam companies and people that are doing it wrong, especially when you're frustrated and writing a post that I'm sure just boils the frustration again, even though you're back home and away from all of that, you get to relive the entire thing again.

So taking the time to really call out the people that were helpful, I think was fantastic too. It made me rethink, go back in my head and rethink the room that I was in. I was in a different hotel, but, try to think about what things would've been difficult for, mobility or people that, don't have eyesight or hearing or whatever else.

And just think through how they would've navigated the room that I was in. And it wasn't, necessarily specified as an accessible room, but nevertheless, there should be some level of accessibility in any room. So I got a chance to sit back and think about how that would've what that experience would've been like.

And I did see some of the conversation on Twitter and I think getting some of that down from everyone in the community, get getting those things in a list where we can tackle those things as the events are being organized is. Just hugely critical.

[00:44:16] Nathan Wrigley: So the one person name them, the one per the one person I forgot.

Can I just name the names on your list quickly? Just cause I

[00:44:23] Michelle Frechette: think, but lemme tell you who I forgot to add was you Nathan cause you, cuz you moving my scooter for me was the funniest thing that happened in all of

[00:44:31] Nathan Wrigley: word camp list. Can I tell you the story? Can I tell people the story? It was absolutely.

I hear the story. We went to a restaurant and and the scooter was Michelle arrived on the scooter. I don't believe he had any problem getting in to the restaurant at the beginning. No. So we arrived. And then Michelle needed to discard the scooter at the table and it was in the aisle, so it needed to be moved.

And so I decided I would move it and the quickest way to move it is to ride it. But I didn't realize there was a speed option. didn't realize there was a way of making it go quickly. So I pressed the button, which makes it move and it. Went about a centimeter a second. And so I I

[00:45:13] Michelle Frechette: had, I had turned it to turtle mode because usually people get on it.

Don't realize how fast it can go. So they don't know how to control that love. And they L forward and hit people and hit things. So I turned it all. That's why I thought story was going. Nathan knocked over an entire

[00:45:27] Nathan Wrigley: table of food. Yeah. It was just me just moving a centimeter in it, like just the slowest most with an

[00:45:35] Marcus Burnette: awkward stare, I assume.

Yeah. Yeah. I was

[00:45:38] Nathan Wrigley: just waving. Boy. But yeah, that was a very pleasurable moment. I must admit that was a lovely evening. Now. I really enjoyed that. Okay. Let's name the names because I think that's important. So I know some of these people, and I dunno some of the other songs, I'm sorry if I butcher your those but Michelle had fantastic experiences with Michelle butcher Jones, Mark West guard, who was actually with us on that evening.

Kimberly Ry, I'm going to Sayari Ryan Marks, tofa DRO the entire stellar WP and nexus team the post status team and also Pagely where they had a great big party on. Really very big boat. And and it looks like you had a great experience there. You, as you said, you mentioned some of the things that you feel the event did also here's the list on the screen.

You can read the article yourself by the way, it's on post status.com and the articles called five days without a shower. So you mentioned aisles and rows were wide. The microphones are accessible for the Q and a sessions. The live transcriptions were really good. And something about the box lunches being available for you and easy to hand and people people were there checking you in and out, however, You've obviously got some things which you think can be dealt with.

And so I think this number, the first point that you make is really interesting to me because it's genuinely the only way I would know how to deal with this. And that would be in much the same way that I may go to Amber. He equalized digital and say, I have a website. I would like it to be more accessible than it is.

Now. You are the expert, please. Will you take that on your first suggestion is to employ an accessibility expert who obviously knows the ins and outs, and presumably doesn't just combat it from your perspective mobility, but would also combat it from the perspective of all the perspectives.

I, I don't know, Amber, maybe you've got more right. More insight into that such people exist. There is an industry of people who put events on and get accessibility, as part of their.

[00:47:37] Amber Hinds: So the international association of accessibility professionals, they have certifications that focus on accessibility in the built environment, not just in the virtual environment or the web.

And so I am, as a member, I'm like aware of some of the stuff they talk about and they have training sessions, all that stuff. I don't focus too much on that, but that would be my guess as the first place to go to try and find somebody who's certified in that maybe, one would hope that event organizers would have contacts on this, but my guess is probably they don't, unfortunately it, it might be like the reality of many web developers or web agencies don't think about accessibility.

So it might be the same thing for event organizers, but I would think that'd be a good place to.

[00:48:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. And then another suggestion would be to add an accommodations role to all the word camps. So somebody whose job is to just deal with the accommodation side of things. That's a curious one, Michelle, you develop this a lot more.

But number three is checking each person. Oh no, that's that's something. Okay. But yeah, so the idea of employing some accessibility expert, but also having somebody on the word camp team, whose job it is entire, just to deal with the accommodation side,

[00:48:52] Michelle Frechette: some of the accommodations that were not met well for others was the food situation.

As far as like halal food, kosher food soy free, dairy free, those kinds of things I was hearing from people that they couldn't eat, what was provided because they couldn't be certain that their allergen was not part of the meal. And so I think that we really need to be cautious about that too.

It's just as important as me being able to enter a door, somebody who's at an event being able to eat at that event is just as important. So I think that somebody on the team and it can be part of the the attendee experience team, but it should be their only role. That person should be dedicated to making sure that anything that comes in through those registrations as a special accommodation need, whether it's accessibility or food allergies, food needs, those should all be dealt with very kindly and very intentionally.

[00:49:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I think universally a fabulous piece. Michelle, thank you. Not only because it was probably a, difficult one to write, but also highlighting for folk like me who basically need it highlighting. So appreciate it. Thank you very much. A couple of comments around there. The first one I had a little while ago was Michelle, again, saying that she was really happy that you wrote this, but disappointed that you had to write it.

Courtney who I guess is hosting WordPress events. She's love. She said she would love a checklist for those hosting parties. Yeah. That's an interesting idea. Isn't it? Yeah. And then Jess, FRA. Hello, Jess. I love the idea of paying and accessibility expert. So what we just talked about to help with these large events.

Yeah. You feel like, especially the large events, there's there's no wiggle room. There is the, yeah. It's an added cost. But I chose, I choose that over a word camp Frisbee or something like that. Interesting. I know that for my school, my children who just go to a regular school in the UK when they do just any kind of outing, I know that the school staff have to go very often on their own dime.

I, I don't mean literally that, they have to go in their own time and they have to go and check this stuff out to make sure for certain, for 100% certain, so I guess it can be done, but hiring an expert don't think they would be asking too much says Patricia Shetler hello, Patricia, another new face.

This is nice. Wouldn't be asking too much what could be 1%. And she also says any event could use that person taking care of special requests. It's just. Lazy. She says, okay, thank you for all the commentary on that really good piece. So let's move on. B BU, we're gonna go here, gonna go here. This is firmly in Marcus's domain here because as we said, right at the top, Marcus is working for GoDaddy and GoDaddy Marcus.

First of all, forgive me if this news isn't exactly brand new. How long ago was it that word camp? Sorry that managed WooCommerce stores came on the horizon for GoDaddy. I know it's a sort of preview at the moment, but has this been in the making for a long time and then we can get into what it actually means?

[00:52:12] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. I don't know if it'll come as much surprised that I think we've been working on this since the Pagely acquisition. I think it was even in the press release for the Pagely acquisition, that there was some kind of. WooCommerce SAS products coming. We didn't do a great job of keeping that a secret.

It's been coming word camp us. We officially put the name out there and it's in preview currently. We're looking for people to give it a test, run, give us some feedback so we can make it everything that it needs to be before we make it generally available to everyone. But yeah, word camp us is when we decided to.

Sort of officially announce it.

[00:53:04] Nathan Wrigley: So it's called managed WooCommerce stall stores. It's a GoDaddy product. It would appear at the moment, at least. Anyway, I tried to click on the link and I was met with a page saying quite rightly that I'm not entitled to make use of it yet because I I'm not based in the us because clearly on the page, they're in bold, it says it's available to us based customers only.

And the text that I'm reading on the page here to quote, manage WooCommerce stores is for established businesses. So there's something that seek to rapidly grow by selling in multiple channels. It eliminates the need to maintain a variety of complex e-commerce applications or cycle through add-on features for dive functionality.

I'm gonna keep quoting if you don't mind it's powered by e-commerce software that combines woo WordPress flexibility with an intuitive user experience on a highly performed, fully managed platform, which I believe is that. Pagely architecture. And it is a new eCommerce platform that combines today's best performance functionality and scalability.

Oh yeah, there we go. Using the raw power of page Lee's enterprise managed WordPress platform, high performance on AWS backed infrastructure with looks like a 99.9, 5% up time guarantee. So what are we actually getting here? Is it so obviously we've got the hosting side that we've just read about Pagely what's the rest of it.

Is it like a unique dashboard? Does it look like WordPress? Is it a collection of plugins? Are some of them custom? Just Marcus, just tell us quick what it's, what it is. Really? Yeah. oh, okay, great.

[00:54:41] Marcus Burnette: yeah. Yeah, that was a lot of big, fancy words in the blog article, but so manage managed WooCommerce stores is WordPress and w commerce.

Fully managed for you, right? So you don't have to worry about updating those or issues with any of those that includes, all the wonderful backups and all of that the reliability. So it's a culmination of course the recent acquisitions for GoDaddy. Point I believe was the first one acquired.

And so that now powers GoDaddy payments, which I can talk about a little bit too. And then sky ver, which of course was the the one that I was a part of as well, and came to GoDaddy and that's going to be really more the software side. And then of course, Pagely with the cloud infrastructure of the hosting itself.

So managed WooCommerce stores is a culmination of all of those things together, right? We have Pagely powering everything. Sky verge has beefed up the default w commerce. It still looks like WordPress and WooCommerce. But some of the things that we think should be built in are now built in like sequential order numbers and costs of goods, there's gift certificates, and that's all built in and not extra plugins that you need to purchase or manage.

For that fact. There's some cost savings there and also some maintenance savings there. And then the sky ver plugins that haven't been built in are still available as part of the package as well. So you can download any of those and use them. That's like w commerce memberships and local pickup.

Plus this, the social login stuff, and skyr had 60, 65 plugins extensions to commerce, something like that. Like I said, a couple of, a few of them have been built in along with a couple of other just features like shipment tracking that we thought every WooCommerce owner is going to need. And then GoDaddy payments is gonna be critical for this one, as well as you alluded to earlier, this is.

$1 a month hosting. This is for established businesses that are selling already. We can call them the power sellers, folks that are somewhere in the a hundred thousand to million GMV a year. And so it's gonna be larger. Larger businesses probably that are selling on WooCommerce. And GoDaddy payments is going to have lower fees than just about any of the other payment gateways.

And when you're doing a hundred thousand to a million dollars in sales, that the percentages, even the smaller percentages make a difference. And it's been a long time coming with the acquisitions and SkyBridge folks, building things, and Pagely getting the architecture ready to put this all together.

And then I didn't even mention the biggest piece really is the omnichannel sales and being able to connect your WooCommerce store to things like Amazon Etsy, Walmart, Facebook, Instagram, and have your WooCommerce store be the source of truth for. The price, the description, the inventory, and all of that.

So you're not having to manage six, seven different platforms. When you're selling things that can all be managed right through your managed commerce stores dashboard.

[00:58:23] Nathan Wrigley: So it's like the central it's the objective truth. It's the hub for all of the, I don't know, you've said here, eBay, Google, Walmart, Etsy, Amazon, the whole bunch of marketplaces.

You can be on and it syncs all that data and you just log into one. Yeah. That's nice. That's really nice. You familiar your

[00:58:41] Marcus Burnette: fulfillment through uCommerce as well. Yep. So when something comes in from Facebook, it shows up in your uCommerce dashboard, you can fulfill it. Market is shipped and then it'll push that back out to Facebook and everything else.

[00:58:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Tell me about this piece, a Adam. Adam, just throwing numbers, colleague of yours. Yeah. So you you, this is GoDaddy payments, correct? 2.3% versus 2.9%. 2.9% is the sort of industry standard. Isn't it? If you go with space sorry, square little what is it even called Stripe? That's it Stripe or square and all of these kind of things.

There's typically 2.9 plus a, I don't know, a small

[00:59:21] Marcus Burnette: yes, 30 cent. You take your pick. They're all just about 2.9% plus 30 cents where goad payments comes in at 2.3% plus 30

[00:59:30] Nathan Wrigley: cents. So this is GoDaddy's tech. This is not, it's not like you've built on top of, or have you built on top of like Stripe, but negotiated a better deal in the background or something?

[00:59:41] Marcus Burnette: No, so this is directly the point acquisition, right point was the payment process is a payment processor that GoDaddy acquired before sky verge. And point is what power is GoDaddy payments. Actually, so it is not on not built on top of Stripe or anything else. Yeah, you're

[00:59:57] Nathan Wrigley: If you, wow. If you are in the plus million dollar range and you are not 0.6% cheaper on transac, that really starts makes a difference at that scale.

Yes. It's a nice holiday or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So where do we find it? And if we're a us customer, do you know what the process is for getting on board and you basically, you're looking for people to test it out, right? It's like a beater program that you want people with current successful for one of a better word stores to hop on.

Yeah.

[01:00:30] Marcus Burnette: Currently the best way is to just DM me and I'll get people to the right place either on Twitter which I'm sure I'll be in the show notes here, whatever, or on post outta slack, make slack, WooCommerce, community, slack, WooCommerce, community, Facebook group. I'm in all those places.

Find me and I'll get you set up if you're interested.

[01:00:52] Nathan Wrigley: You you also make quite a comment about the sort of performance of it. I confess, I don't know a lot about Pagely but I know they were like around at the beginning, I think of the whole managed WordPress, maybe even they were one of the first to claim that Monica and yeah, absolutely.

[01:01:11] Marcus Burnette: And yeah, and known for the, their infrastructure, their performance and all of that. And that was a huge part of the baseline that we wanted for managed commerce stores. So even though managed commerce stores was an idea before the page, the acquisition, we knew that having that infrastructure was gonna be a paramount to making this successful.

[01:01:33] Nathan Wrigley: Jess for says, she's gonna give it a try. Yeah. Which is quite nice. Sorry. I have Jess.

[01:01:38] Marcus Burnette: Thanks.

[01:01:39] Amber Hinds: I always wonder about this making even. Our clients. Sometimes I worry about this, like making grade, like this right here almost implies that if you host with us, you're gonna have an, a score. Which that's, there's so

[01:01:53] Marcus Burnette: much.

Yeah. So that's the

[01:01:54] Amber Hinds: baseline that control that, like how do you control for they uploaded. Pictures of their products that a photographer took it. They never right. And every page has, I don't know, 20 pictures that are all 5,000 pixels wide. That always makes me nervous. Is that doesn't make you guys nervous, like putting that

[01:02:14] Marcus Burnette: there.

so a couple of things say, and see your question one, that's a bit of a baseline, which most people can probably claim the second part to that, which I didn't really go into, but is super important is that all of these sites are also supported by the sky verge and Pagely support teams, which of course, I'm gonna be a little bit biased coming in the sky verge.

And I was on the support team there, but I know how good that team is because I was on it. And this is like I said, not dollar a month hosting. This is gonna be very closely monitored for things like that. The support team is going to be. Proactive in reaching out to sites that are struggling, helping with performance, helping with optimizations, helping with security and accessibility and all of those things.

And I know just how good the SkyBridge and Pagely teams are. And this gets you basically direct access to those teams as well. You're not, you're gonna bypass the first couple of tiers of WordPress support and go right to the WordPress and WooCommerce experts. And of course, we're growing those teams.

We want more of GoDaddy to be WordPress and WooCommerce experts, so that will get larger and larger as we go. But you're you're gonna have direct access to those teams and those teams are gonna be proactive and seeing, all right, this site looks like it's struggling, or, we're doing okay across the board, but these couple of sites are not hitting that reliability.

Something's happening with those let's reach out to those customers and see if there's anything we can do to help. That's really

[01:03:43] Amber Hinds: cool. That's a whole, that's what I think managed. Posting should be right. When in a lot of cases, it's like, they update your WordPress for you and there's some security, but they don't pay any attention to your site.

So I'm very impressed to hear that.

[01:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: That's neat. Yeah, that is neat. Can I ask about the onboarding process? So let's say I come to you with a site regardless of how big or successful it is, but here I am, I've got my site and I wanna give this a try. Do you manage the migration and all of that, or is there a process that I've gotta manually go through?

Nope,

[01:04:14] Marcus Burnette: we do handle the initial migration over from a site as well. So once you get signed up, we'll have the support team will reach out, ask you if you have a site to migrate over. If you do we'll handle the migration as well to get you started.

[01:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's that whole, there's that whole bit of the WordPress ecosystem isn't there, which is on WordPress.

And then inside of that, E sorry, which is on WooCommerce doing trade, got shops and stores. And what have you then inside of that, there's the whole we can manage it ourself. We've got our own team, we've got our own development team. We're really capable. We're, we're fine. And then there's the other which what I would firmly sit in, which would be the, I.

Just take my hand and just do it for me because I don't want the effort of having it go wrong and have to be awake at three in the morning, freaking out. So this feels like it's squarely in there and you really have touched so many bases with that. You've got your own payment solution. You've got the Pagely infrastructure behind it.

You've got all those connections and yeah, no doubt more to come. So yeah, I, I

[01:05:15] Marcus Burnette: I look at it the way that apple controls the hardware on the software so they can fine tune everything to work the best that it possibly can. Yep. And having all of those pieces allows us to be able to do that as well.

[01:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Jess Frick who works for pressable, which is another word press E eCommerce, sorry, not eCommerce, a hosting solution. She said never underestimate somebody's ability to do bad things with good hosting. And then Adam that's tweetable.

[01:05:44] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. That's

[01:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: Adam says a lot. This person just loaded a uploaded, a three gigabyte image.

[01:05:51] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. And that person

danger will that's

[01:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[01:05:54] Amber Hinds: Yeah. I was gonna say that sounds small. yeah, but I think I've been on sites where I've seen like 10 gigabyte

[01:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: aren't they? The kind of things that you would want in your as an alert in your dashboard. If you upload an image, which is clearly.

Just absurd. I know that WordPress can do a job of compressing it, but I do think things like that would be quite useful, really. Do you really wanna upload this image? Give you any idea what you've just done. Can we try making it a bit smaller first and here's some software which will help you with that anyway, blah, blah, blah.

Thank you. This looks really cool. And we will no doubt we're coming back to it in the near future. Michelle, have you got anything you wanna throw in there or shall I move on in,

[01:06:33] Michelle Frechette: In my days as a freelancer and turning sites over to customers, I would say 100% that eCommerce sites were the most difficult things to hand off to a customer and having a solution like this would've been amazing 10 years ago for me.

yeah. Kudos to you, hats off I'm happy to see more hosts doing things like this, to be able to truly enable people to run a site that works well for them and causes less frustration. So great job. Yeah, nice.

[01:07:06] Marcus Burnette: And to be clear, there's still some work to be done. That's why it's in preview. So to please do reach out.

If people are interested, we do want feedback so we can make it everything it needs to be.

[01:07:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that is managed WooCommerce stores. Which is in preview from GoDaddy pro the article that you can find is on the GoDaddy pro.com website. And if you just Google the what I've just said, you're probably gonna find it.

Okay. Let's change, track again, where we're running fairly short time, but I think we're managed to squeeze most of what I intended to get in this one's really quick. Really it's just to say that word camp us obviously took place. We've talked about it at great length already, but that there is a new as one passes another one, I nearly really put my foot.

I'll tell you after the show, what I nearly said, and , it wouldn't have gone down well on this day in particular there is going to be the next word camp us held in 2023, which is going to be on the east coast this time national Harbor Mary land, which apparently is a waterfront convention center 20 minutes from Washington DC.

And it's gonna be on August the 23rd to the 25th. And those of you. Love to get this stuff. Pre-planned well, there you go. You got the dates. You can now start planning on it all. I don't suppose anybody's got anything to add to that, but let's move on to this one, which is very similar piece. Actually.

This is word camp Asia has yet to happen, supposed to happen in 2019. And then we all know what happened with the world that got in the way. But it's coming back 17 to the 19th, February 20, 23. Look at this. They are after some speakers. Now, I honestly don't know what the guidelines are around speaking at word camp Asia, because typically when I've gone to a word camp, everybody's speaking in English because I've generally been in a country where that just seemed to work, but anybody got any thoughts on that?

Is that,

[01:09:03] Michelle Frechette: what is it all in English? This is in English. Yes. Okay.

[01:09:07] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Did you see the follow up piece where they were asking for more. Submissions, they're having a hard time getting local speakers, I think. And also maybe females it's been a while since I looked at that diversity. Yeah.

But yeah, Rob Howard actually shared it on, I think I saw he shared it on Twitter and he was commenting cuz we were talking about some, he was, he has a good piece about some of the challenges with expecting speakers to go for free and speak and have to pay for their airfare and their hotel and all of that stuff.

And how that puts people who aren't sponsored by companies who don't work for big employers at a disadvantage, it can make it really hard, especially for freelancers. And then he was highlighting like that piece where they were saying they were having a hard time getting like they have a lot of people sponsored by companies that are outside of Asia applying to.

Because it's like a vacation right. That their employee pays for.

[01:10:09] Nathan Wrigley: But here's a couple of interesting thoughts. I dunno if you've ever been to Thailand or any of the countries surrounding Thailand, but if you listen to the language Thai in the particular case of Thailand, but all sorts of other ones, there is, there's no overlap.

Between it and English, it's completely impenetrable to somebody like me. And so what the reason I'm saying that is because the reverse must be true. If you are from Thailand, it must be extraordinarily difficult to be able to speak in English without enormous enterprise and endeavor, maybe you were taught it at school or something like that, but it does raise a question, doesn't it?

If word camp Asia is basically a bunch of people speaking in English. I get that because it seems to be the lingua franca, but nevertheless, it does seem, it seems a bit curious, doesn't it?

[01:10:59] Amber Hinds: Maybe that's an argument for not having a word camp Asia, because there's so much diverse languages and maybe it needs to be more.

Maybe it needs to be a word camp, China and a word camp, like in more country specific in that way. Yeah. Although I know there's been back and forth about whether country word camps are allowed, even though word camp us exists,

[01:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: debate just goes on and on. Doesn't it? The the other interesting point that you made there was about the flights and accommodation.

And it there's a piece of me, which kind of feels that if you've made the grade and your presentation was accepted, cuz that's, there's quite a barrier there. You've gotta put a lot of thought into what you're gonna say and present it and all of that, I do wonder if plane tickets and accommodation might be a nice trade off there anyway, they're looking for people in or the accommodation.

[01:11:51] Amber Hinds: Yeah. It would be great to do everything. But yeah. But even if it was like the accommodation and the food, while you're here would be covered, like that would certainly help a lot of people.

[01:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, here we go. There's another comment from Adam from GoDaddy we just submitted our interest in financially supporting under rep speakers to try and help with this as well as others, I assume.

Okay. That'd be interesting to flesh out what your thoughts are on there, Adam and whether it addresses some of the things that Amber was just talking about. That's curious. Thank you there. They're looking for people in the following areas, accessibility, business, community careers, design development, marketing, and writing.

The typical load, but if you go to Asia dot word, camp.org, you can you can hunt things out over there. And by the looks of it, you have got about 11 more days to submit your present. Or at least the outline of it. Okey dokey, right? Here's a, an interesting one again, apologies. It's probably the second bit of news, which is a little bit more stale than typical because I've been off for a bit, but I did wanna raise this one, especially as nice coincidence Amber was on today.

I'm sure she's got some things to say about this Yoast, the popular SEO plugin in their premium version, 19.2, they have a new inclusive language analysis tool. It's in beta. Apparently all of Yoast happens on your tructure infrastructure. So none of this is reversing back and forth over the wire, which may be of interest to you.

But the idea of this is that you. B inadvertently or otherwise you be putting people off your content or going down in search engine rankings because of the style of language you are using, it may not be as inclusive as it should be. And again, quick quote from yo team inclusive language, avoids expressions that are considered to express or imply an idea, ideas that are sexist, racist, otherwise biased, prejudice, or denigrating to any particular group of people.

And then there's some parenthesis there. What inclusive language actually looks like varies based on standards in education, reli religion, and publishing with the new inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO premium. We're enabling you to attract a wider audience and reduce the risk of alienating people from your content.

And so I just thought this was like a curious idea. You've seen Yost in the past with its little traffic light system. If it believes that a piece is, has achieved all of the metrics that you've enabled, you get the little green traffic light and you think, okay, I'm good to go broadly speaking.

Maybe there's some extra work to be done, but at least I've got something, passing by back and saying good job. So the idea here would be something similar, in that it will analyze your tool for particular phrases, particular words, choice of words, te and so on, and then give you some guidance on that.

And I just thought, I really thought this was really left field and interesting. So I'm raising it. I didn't see. I didn't see this one coming. So I dunno if any of you guys have got any thoughts on it, but I really like it, it seems like a cool

idea.

[01:14:55] Michelle Frechette: I, I tested it for them and had conversations with the developers about what they were doing and looking at it.

And I've reviewed the list of words and phrases too, and replacement words in English, of course for this product. And I think it's brilliant. I know that there are going, especially in the United States, there'll be right wing people who don't wanna be woke or whatever the terminologies are now.

And for those people, you can shut it off. You don't have to have it if you're on your dashboard. But for the rest of us who like to be inclusive and like to make sure. That our writing is non offensive to the greater majority of our readers. I think it's brilliant. And they have a, when I tested it, there was a sample article that I could paste in and you could see what, what those things are that, that, that were popping up such as a teacher talking to boys and girls, like my teacher used to say, boys and girls settle down.

, but in today's non-binary world where we don't, aren't just speaking to boys and girls it would suggest replacements like children and students. And so there's opportunities to make our language much more inclusive. Which, obviously it's great for SEO, but it's just more importantly, it's just better writing and it's more inclusive writing to make sure that you are.

Writing for everybody and not just a binary world or an enabled world or a whitewashed world. And so I thought it was brilliant and I was super excited to be asked to be part of the review of this before it went out to public.

[01:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The things that they're looking for the cues that they're looking for, and it may be broader than this, but it they're looking for cues against these categories age, gender, appearance, socioeconomic status.

That's quite an interesting one. Race, ethnicity. I can't speak today. Can I race, ethnicity and culture and disability and neurodiversity. And honestly, when I read that list, it all sounds great, but in my head, I'm thinking, okay. Think of an example, Nathan. Luckily they've given me some because I'm struggling here.

So for example avoid using mankind as it's exclusionary. So we can all, I think of other words to put in there, avoid using poverty stricken. As it's potentially harmful consider instead. What does it say low income was one of the alternatives suggested, avoid using retarded as its derogatory consider using an alternative, such as uninformed and yeah, they all make sense.

There's more, there's a whole bunch more here and they have that. Yo SEO, red, green and Amber , threshold there. So yeah. Really curious, I should say you might be thinking to yourself what's yo business here and it's not they farmed out the sort of the research into this to somebody called Maxwell hope who is from the university of Delaware.

So presumably has some chops in this area. So that's, that I take comfort from that, that they've got somebody who's an expert in this area to do it. Anyway, sorry again. I'm blabbering on. I suspect Amber has something to say specifically here.

[01:18:16] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I spent a fair bit of time talking to them about this at word camp us.

I think it's neat. I have not had the opportunity to try it yet. But there are a few kind of in the accessibility space, there's some checkers like site improve is a big one that people may have heard of, which also does this kind of language talk and it's interesting to think about what the progression could be on for this.

Like where could they take this beyond the ex the inclusive language, what they've set up? Because there could be which they said they don't have right now, but I easily see an adaption where people could add other phrases that they don't want that maybe, and then other suggestions for their company.

If there's certain tech jargon that they're like, we really don't wanna write this, and this is the way we say this in our company instead. And so I think that would be a neat way to add that on and expand it where companies could then start. Having even more sort of brand control over some of the language that people use when they're creating content.

So I especially see for like large organizations universities very large enterprise businesses. It could be very useful in helping to ensure that everything stays on brand. And of course I'm definitely in the land of. It's helpful to have prompts as you're writing, right? Whether it's an SEO prompt, an accessibility check, or an inclusive language, like it's one thing to have this checklist or this, brand guide that we've created that says, this is how we write content, or this is how we talk about people. And it's another thing to actually have it there, reminding you, as you're writing the content and not being some separate document, you have to go look at it makes it easier for content creators.

And so I think this is a great idea and I'm very excited about it and to see what the general feedback is from them as they move through their beta

[01:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: Marcus, anything.

[01:20:12] Marcus Burnette: Yeah. I haven't gotten a chance to test it out, but it sounds like it's just the right amount of integrated. I want to still have full control over my content if I wanna say something specifically for a reason, but also I.

Something that tells me I wanna be able to learn. So if it's doing it for me and just swapping things out, I don't learn anything, but if it's making suggestions as I go along, then I get to learn as well. So I think it's, I think it's the right amount of there. Prompt me, let me know, help me learn from the process.

Help me correct that in the moment, but then also correct that long term mentally.

[01:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that's the curious bit for me as well, is the teaching bit, because it may be that by, just benignly you are writing and some of this stuff creeps in and you really didn't even notice what you were writing might have that flavor to it and just being alerted.

Oh, okay. That's curious. I hadn't really anticipated that. Just a quick one. It's off by default. So should you be wary of this and you don't wish to have it on, you actually have to go and find it. And it's in the settings, there's a diagram on the, in, in the post, which are linked to in the show notes.

It's in yo EO settings under the features tab and you have to toggle it on because it's off and think

[01:21:32] Michelle Frechette: it's only in the premium version.

[01:21:33] Nathan Wrigley: At least it was original. Yeah. It definitely says premium next to the little total. So I'm guessing that's how it's gonna be in the, so if you're

[01:21:39] Michelle Frechette: looking, if you're looking for it and you're using just free version, you may not have that ability.

Thank you. Yeah. Good. Don't upgrade. Yeah. Yeah. That's it's worth it. It's worth it.

[01:21:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Mentioned at the beginning, Courtney hopped into the comments right away. Courtney would like many people to go out and fill out a very short survey. It's called the individual learner survey.

I wish I could show you the questions, but in order to progress from the first page, I basically have to one screen put in my email address and all of that kind of stuff. But Courtney's described it. She says the make WordPress training team wants to know how you learn WordPress. What's your preferred learning style.

And where do you go for training and what you would like to see? She also says it takes about five to 10 minutes to complete the survey. And so if you have it as, if you would like to make use of learning WordPress information in the future, and you wanna help the team out the URL's pretty straightforward, it's learn.wordpress.org/, and then these three words are hyphenated, individual learner.

Survey, and you can probably Google that. Make dot, sorry, learn.wordpress.org, individual learner survey. And it's a pretty quick thing to go through. Courtney, I hope that satisfied that that request just want a quick shout out. I hung out with Robbie from beaver builder over the last couple of days at word camp us, and then no, no sooner had I got back to the UK than he filled my inbox with his lovely email about what's new in WordPress, 2.6 seems like a pretty big update.

They've got a whole ton of new things they've got integrating with blocks of all things. Reusable blocks, MicroAge templates, new break pointing, global settings, Google font, previews, and much more, cuz we're running short of time. I'm gonna have to just leave it as simple as that, but go over to WP beaver, builder.com.

Search on their log and you'll be able to find this latest update 2.6. Very let's not do that one just, yeah. Shall we do that one? Amber

[01:23:46] Amber Hinds: wants this no salary. I don't know. Salary might be more fun to talk about. I'll do the auto generated images is neat. I'll

[01:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: do the autogenerated images next time.

I'll save that away for the next show, but very cool. I'll just quickly say it very quickly. Stability. AI is a PC version of things like D and mid journey. It's in beta. You've gotta compile it yourself. I think haven't actually managed to get onto it, but basically all of that clever image, AI stuff that you've seen with third party services using infrastructure, somewhere in the cloud, it's now available on the Mac and the PC, and boy does it look good?

So it's free as 12, which we all love. So let's end on this one. Transparency salary transparency. Why not write Ary peach? Cary must have more or less eroded her keyboard during the course of this one, cuz she's written a gigantic piece. We're gonna scratch the surface of this. But basically she's saying why don't companies when they advertise jobs.

And obviously some PE some companies do some companies. Don't why don't they tell you what the salary range is. And so from a company point of view, I guess there's certain benefits. If you don't say what the salary range is, who knows what caliber of people you might attract, it might be that, you get some people with very little experience, but you might get people with really unexpectedly, massive experience and you think, okay. They're probably worth that double the salary. This other person over there, however, from the, for the person seeking the job, you just wanna know how much you're likely to get paid, because at the end of the day, why would you put all of the time into curating your CV and putting together all of the unique proposal that you would do all of the paperwork that you need to submit?

If you've got no idea, there's a lovely little thing in here. I think it was Mike Oliver said that he applied for a job. Went through the four re stage of the whole thing. I think he got the job and then realized it was $20,000, less than current job. It's oh, okay. It's a bit of a let down.

So I'm gonna launch that one in, you've got three minutes discuss .

[01:25:58] Amber Hinds: I just have to say not only is that a waste of his time, that's a huge waste of that. Company's time going through four rounds of interviews with a candidate that was in no way going to accept that job. Yeah. And that's for us, I think in the very beginning, we.

Years ago, because we were like, oh we don't want people to apply and say, they want more money than, they'll go. It's like that whole weird this is my budget. They're just gonna fill up my budget. Like that kind of thing that a client might think. And then we had a few instances where we interviewed people and then they told us their salary expectations, not four interviews in cuz we asked it like on the second one and we were just like, oh, we have to go back drawing board.

We can't pay these people. And then I was like, this is. We need to just post, this is a salary range for this position, and then people will apply for it. And if they don't want to, they won't, and it saves us so much time. And so I don't understand why other companies don't, I'm just like you, yeah.

Will get much better candidates if you're honest about it. And if somebody wasn't making that range and they were lower and they're aspiring to it, but they go through arid process and they're great. Who cares that you're suddenly giving them a 20 or $30,000 bump in their salary, right? Like it shouldn't matter.

and there are places where it is required by law in the United States. There are states. So we were based in Colorado. You are, it is required by law to post salary. When you post a job. So anyone in the United States, if you're hiring and you're accepting candidates from Colorado and you don't post that you are violating the law.

So

[01:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: if you are posting a distributed job and your company based in Colorado, you are breaking the law. No,

[01:27:43] Amber Hinds: not if you're it's not just, if your company's based in Colorado, if you are allowing applicants from the state from Colorado to apply to your job. Oh, I see. Yeah. Then. Okay. You are breaking the law.

Yeah. And you could get in trouble with the state of Colorado, if an applicant reports your job posting. So literally that effectively means any distributed job in the United States should have a salary posted on it. Unless you're explicitly saying Colorado applicants cannot

[01:28:07] Nathan Wrigley: apply. I feel I feel peaches stirred up a Horne it's necessary, but which we don't have time to back.

But we're also running out of time. So unless Michelle and Marcus have got something crucial to say, I know your time's precious and I don't wanna use more of it than you've allocated to me. So unless Marcus and Michelle have something to say, I'll knock it on the head.

[01:28:28] Michelle Frechette: I couldn't say it in two minutes, so we'll okay.

Have to circle back

[01:28:33] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Looks. Yeah. Okay. There's a couple for next time. We can definitely restore those. That's it. I believe, thank you very much. Just for breaking the law. Here's a weird thing just very quickly before we end. You guys in America are far happier talking about money than we are.

We are so incapable of talking about what we earn and things like that. It's you wouldn't even tell your mother what you earn. It's so weird. So anyway, do you post salaries

[01:29:02] Amber Hinds: in the UK? Yeah.

[01:29:03] Nathan Wrigley: On jobs. Like the only people who salaries, are people who work for the government teachers and what have you, because there's a statutory, there's a statutory amount.

And so you could, if you really wanted to go and look and see that, okay, you they've been working for 12 years as a teacher. That's the kind of classroom that they've got. I know what they earn, but nobody else will tell anybody else. It's like completely taboo. You never say what's your salary.

[01:29:28] Amber Hinds: So you think like buffer is weird. You can go on Buffer's website and see the salary, every single employee. I don't. And that terrifies you. Maybe

[01:29:35] Nathan Wrigley: I really know how it happened, but I remember being in the us and got into a conversation where a bunch of Americans were telling each other what they earn.

And I was like, this is voodoo. Stay away from the subject anyway. Sorry. I've digressed again. Thank you so much to Michelle frache for joining us for the I don't know, 400th time or something. It's been a pleasure having you back. Thank you, Marcus Barnett. Hope to see you back one day. Thanks for your contributions.

Very much. And I, behind it turns out Amber, you couldn't have been better placed to come on this show. It was like the perfect. I know the perfect one for you. I

[01:30:08] Michelle Frechette: out to it, 2:00 AM. We were having a conversation. Yeah.

Yeah.

[01:30:13] Nathan Wrigley: I appreciate that. And we were both awake. Yeah. And I, I hope that I hope that Sean's feeling better, but if you want, if you wanna listen to this, we'll have it posted out on the website tomorrow.

But for now, thanks for joining us. Oh, no, we've gotta do the wave. If everybody would raise their hands, I forgot about the word. I know. It's I know it's awful. I know it's ho I know. Amber's just yay. I gotta . Thank you very much. We'll see you next week. Thanks for all the comments guys. Take it easy.