This Week in WordPress #223

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode number 220. Entitled Ron Howard. It was recorded on Monday the 26th of September, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley. And as always, I'm joined by some WordPress guests. We have this week, Jess Frick, Michele Butcher-Jones and Maciek Palmowski. We're here obviously to talk about WordPress.

We talk about version 6.1 of WordPress, which is in beta and also Gutenberg 14.1. What are the changes that have happened there? We talk about Rob Howard's article, which is all about whether or not plugin and theme authors are creating a false sense of the prices. Are they offering fake discounts?

Published press has acquired the meta slider plug. Site ground has decided they're going to launch a E D specific type of WordPress hosting. I've gotta show tomorrow, depending on when you're listening to this with peach and Mary, and we're looking for some sites to be submitted, AI images, what are they about?

How do we get them in our WordPress website? As a new block, which can do all of the heavy lifting for you, ACF has got an update. And finally, we talk about the brokenness of passwords. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free 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 WP Builds.

Hello? Hello. Hello. Once more. It's a Monday. Which means it's Monday.

And we do the show on a Monday. It's 2:00 PM UK time. I dunno what time it is, where our guests are, but we have joined. Look, we've got a screen full of lovely people. I am so white today. Look at it. It's like more white than normal who have we got today? We have Jess Fricks, one of our regular cohosts.

How are you doing?

[00:02:30] Jess Frick: I am good, Nathan. It is feeling like a Monday, but it's so much better cuz I'm with y'all.

[00:02:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yay. Thank you very much. Jess has been on the show many times, but she is the director of operations for pressable. She is an iced tea Conor, and also she is a proud member of the post status community.

Thank you very much for joining us today. And we're also joined by Michelle butcher Jones. She's a first timer. This is the first time that we've had her on the show. So very nice to meet you, Michelle. How are you? I

[00:03:01] Michele Butcher-Jones: am great. And thank you for having me on the show this Monday morning,

[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: you are very welcome.

Where are you? And what time is it? If you're in north America, it's bound to be silly early. Sorry. I

[00:03:13] Michele Butcher-Jones: am in Carbondale, Illinois, which is almost in the Southern most area of Illinois where Chicago's on the north end. It is a frightened early 8 0 7 in the morning.

[00:03:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Sorry. Sorry about that.

Let me give you your proper introduction. So Michelle butcher Jones is the lead support specialist at thrive agency. You can see the logo in her screen. She's the founder of can't speak geek. She's also a jewelry collector and a book nerd. When you say jewelry collect like any jewelry or particular like rings or I don't know which I kind of

thing.

[00:03:52] Michele Butcher-Jones: The whole law necklaces bracelets we've started something we're working on the 50 states by my age 50. And when we go to a new state, I try to find a locally made jeweler to get a small piece from I've got a leather belt from. And leather slit from Cheyenne, Wyoming. I got a really pretty turquoise ring from New Mexico when we moved our daughter down there for college just little fun things, and that can also, help the local artistry in that area.

[00:04:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's really nice. I really a pleasure having you on thank you very much. And hopefully by the end of it, you won't be running away with your your arms in the air screaming. Hopefully you'll wanna come back on at some point last, but by no means least we've got match. Check Paul Maki.

How you doing match? Check. I'm

[00:04:46] Maciek Palmowski: great. It's Monday, but I have a day out. So yeah. It's like a long weekend for me.

[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Match, check match. Check's joining us. I reckon you must be. I don't know, five or six times now, something like that. It feels but it's third. I think it's a first time. Oh, okay.

It feels like more, I don't want you to take that the wrong way. My check is a WordPress. I'll be back. I'll be okay. Thank you. He's a WordPress developer at body as a WordPress ambassador, working at body as a WordPress ambassador, I should say after hours he spends most of his time trying to find interesting news for WP hours, which is a newsletter.

Or cycling. Yes. I should say if you are, if you're keen on WordPress news and that's what this show is about. So you probably are just go and Google WP owls, and you will find that they've got a fabulous newsletter, which they curate and they have guest editors and things like that. And go and check it out and get it in your inbox.

So thank you for joining. All three of you. Thank you for any comments that are coming in. One quick thing, we say this every week, but I'll go through it. Anyway. If you are joining us on Facebook, then there is a slight hoop that you've got to jump through. If you don't want to be anonymous, if you do wanna be anonymous, that's fine.

But if you want to de anonymize yourself so we can see your avatar and get your name, you have to go to chat.restream.io/fb. One more chat.restream.io/fb, and authorize us to see you. And that would be lovely if you are also feeling like, you'd like some other people, friends, colleagues, relations, enemies, even you'd like them to join the show.

Please send them a link. Probably the easiest thing to do is to send them to WP Builds.com/live WP Builds.com/liven. Get 'em in and you can start chatting with us over there. And we've got a few people who have done that. I'll do a few introductions quickly if that's all right with you guys, before we get started Maya.

Hello, everyone from rainy Belgrade. Yep. Maya, I got the same. I got the rain coming down all day long, but we'll be bright and cheerful anyway. Also Rob cans. Hello. Good morning, WordPress peeps. He says Rob's in Canada also as always. Cameron Jones joins us pretty much each and every single week.

And he's saying hello? It's bedtime though for Cameron, but I always appreciate him coming on. We're getting Nathan, your room reminds me of the only falls and horses episode where Dell steals the reflective wall paint and paints. if you're not British, it's highly unlikely that you've heard of only falls and horse, but it was a fabulous comedy show back in the

[00:07:30] Jess Frick: day.

I've American. I know

[00:07:31] Michele Butcher-Jones: that one. Okay. Okay.

[00:07:32] Nathan Wrigley: It's actually, it was a really good boat. But it probably didn't travel so well. And we've also got who we got as well. Paul Bedford, who's saying good afternoon from a hot 32 degree Stu road. South Africa. Yeah. There's no jealousy here, Paul. I'm not feeling like 32 is something I desire.

I'd rather have the 12 that I've got with the rain. it's for 14.

[00:07:56] Michele Butcher-Jones: It's

[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: 14 here I met. Okay. Is that center grade? Oh, okay. Oh, at last somebody, not America who speaks my language about about the temperature. When I was there at world camp us, I would constantly talk about the temperature, cuz it was always really hot.

And I only had cent grade to deal with and it very few Americans talking cent grade. So there we go. Good day. Folks says Courtney as well. Thank you for joining us Courtney. Enough of that, let's get on with the show. First things first. This is our website. WP Builds.com.

If you like what we do, go here and click onto this thing and submit your email address and we'll send you emails. Every time we produce a piece of content two a week, that's really all there is to it, but there's all our archives and live shows and stuff like that. WP Builds.com. Let's get stuck into it.

Couple of very brief bits. I don't know if anybody's gonna have a great deal to say about this you three, but if you do just interrupt me when I've handing it over, but it's just to say that WordPress it's inexorable March into the future. We're at WordPress 6.1 BTA one it's released and it is ready for testing.

It features version 13.1 to 14.1, all of those different bits of the Gutenberg pluggin, which we'll talk about in a moment have been rolled into 6.1. And the highlight features are improved block P placeholders, more design tools for blocks, fluid typography improvements to the editor preference and a new model interface.

The use of block based template parts and classic themes, locking settings for inner blocks and more. I'm cribbing this, as you can see from the WP Tavern website, Sarah Gooding links to leader article, but there's quite a few nice bits and. Pieces in there, but if you're into testing things and you wanna help the word press project now may be a good time to do it.

It's slated for release in about what have been now five and a half weeks, something like that 1st of November. And there's always things that need fixing add into that. We just mentioned Gutenberg 14.1. We've got some new things which Sarah highlights once again on WP Tavan. The major thing is the menu selector has been removed from the sort of the heading area.

So this area at the top of the page, and it's now been added into the sidebar, which makes it easier to use. There's a few other bits and pieces as well. Which I probably won't go into. You can read the article yourself, but I'll link to those in the show notes. But if any of you two, three, sorry, want to mention anything that caught your eye there?

Feel free. Otherwise I'll just move on.

[00:10:33] Maciek Palmowski: And if I remember, oh yeah, you first. No, you.

[00:10:38] Nathan Wrigley: And this is the problem with these live things. Isn't, it's there's always, especially when everybody's trying to be lovely and polite, which I really appreciate it. So I'll decide Jess, you go fast.

[00:10:49] Jess Frick: I was just gonna say one of the cool things that happens where I work at pressable we always have the beta version available.

I will say one interesting thing though. And this is unique to this year 6.1 drops on November 1st and PHP 7.4 is end of life at the end of the month. Oh, okay. And so there's a very interesting window where you really need to get up to date on both things at the same time, which is great if you only have one or two sites, but if you have a thousand.

You probably should be working on that right now.

[00:11:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In your platform, Jess impressible, do you manage expectations there? Do you put up notifications saying that? Oh, yes. Yeah. Okay.

[00:11:41] Jess Frick: Oh yes. Historically we don't let you use outdated versions of WordPress which is also, a conversation topic where it regards PHP.

Because you certainly don't wanna be on an end of life version. But at the same time, you don't really have a lot of time to test unless you use that beta version now. To make sure everything's beautiful. Yeah.

[00:12:10] Michele Butcher-Jones: And now last week, or two weeks ago, we got an email from both flywheel and WP engine, which are of course owned by WP engine saying that you usually, they will not support any end of life unsupported items, but with the mix.

Mix up, mash up with 8.1 right now for PHP. They're like, we're not gonna require you yet at the end of the month, but getting in gear.

[00:12:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. As well. I think

[00:12:43] Jess Frick: others are talking about

[00:12:44] Nathan Wrigley: it too. Yeah. Okay. Thank

[00:12:47] Maciek Palmowski: you. Yes, especially that the next PHP version may be a bit breaking, especially for the older WordPress version.

So yeah,

[00:12:57] Jess Frick: eight zero to eight one. Isn't that bad.

[00:13:01] Maciek Palmowski: Exactly. Exactly what we, the older version, especially that I remember that Juliet and Tony were, they are repeating this over and over and over that we should connect the supported versions of WordPress. PHP versions with WordPress rather than keeping the support for the old PHP versions, which.

[00:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: There's an interesting conversation to be had there, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:30] Maciek Palmowski: And this would be, it'll be, bring, it'll bring benefits for all of us. Only not for the companies that decided to make an application that works only on PHP five, six, but, sorry.

this was,

[00:13:50] Michele Butcher-Jones: oh, sorry. Mall go ahead.

No. From what I've seen too, it's more themes that are having issues with pH B eight instead of plugins.

[00:14:01] Maciek Palmowski: I agree. I agree. Also many agencies will have problems especially when they build all those themes that are doing everything. Some custom work that doesn't follow standards.

And we know how it sometimes is during all the agency work when you don't have time for everything. So we sometimes add this small, little quick fix another quick fix and when the version changes all those quick fix fixes, just

[00:14:36] Nathan Wrigley: collapse one. And Rob in the comments is saying, I presume this number 325 refers to the number of sites you've got there.

Rob. So 325. Yeah. That's a lot of expectations to manage over the next five weeks or so. Yeah, let us know if you've done any you. Preamble work with your clients to, to make sure that they know what's going on. But yeah. Thank you, Jess. That was a well, remembered piece. Courtney's put on here that she would like me to invite Juliet and Tanya, to be on the show, Courtney, when this is finished, can we connect on slack or something?

And maybe you could give me an introduction because I don't have the addresses. I don't think of either of those two people. And that would be fabulous. Yes. Says Rob, it is, and he's already started I hope so. You've only got to do about 10 a day from now on Rob, something like that, nothing to, oh, Rob, that's such a big, that's such a big load of work, right?

Sorry, match, check. We had that moment where you and Jess were talking over each other.

[00:15:45] Maciek Palmowski: and also with the new WordPress version, the WebP support as default is pulled out gum. Yes. Which kind of makes me sad cause I am a huge, I'm a huge WebP fan, really. I'm using web piece sense this few years already.

[00:16:06] Nathan Wrigley: Using, did you just take the, hit back in the day a couple of years ago? Did you just think tough if you are in the, whatever it was at the time percentage of people browsers don't support it.

[00:16:20] Maciek Palmowski: It wasn't a problem because using the picture tag, I was able to make it available for everyone.

So it wasn't a problem. It was always backward compatible. Yeah. And I was using web P since many years already. Yeah. I would say since even when safari didn't support it and it really was a great decision and lately I just decided that I'm just using web PS default I'm I stopped Kirk, especially for those smaller sites that I do for myself or something.

So web P is the default format. And now I'm looking at what futures, the future format like. AV right. Or something like this. Yep.

I recorded

in episode on, I see WebP. I see a WebP right now as a, as this default one for the web. I know that it's not for everything. It's the format for the web.

And soon some will. Take over web place. And I already can see that in five years we will be having the discussion should AV be a default format in WordPress AV book out from

[00:17:40] Nathan Wrigley: version. Should we discontinue support for JPEG and things like that? Yeah. Yeah. Cetera,

[00:17:46] Maciek Palmowski: cetera. Yeah. The cycle will be the same.

Just the formats will

[00:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: change. I was talking to a Google chap called Adam Silverstein at word camp us about this actually just images. And he was saying that from, okay, so he was talking, I don't know if this is coming out of Google or if it was just Adam saying this, he said that 98% of browsers now support WebP and the other 2% are really edge.

It's things like really old versions of outlook and things like that. Yeah. So I think match it. You're right. Curiously though, whenever I export an image and I create dozens of images each week, I always export them still as JPEGs. I have no idea. I've just got that muscle memory. I just click that little icon and click export and out it comes as a JPEG.

But my understanding is that typically 20% is the saving in terms of data consumed, hard disused op. So it, across those dozens of images it is gonna be megabytes and megabytes of needless storage that I'm currently using. Jess you did a little cheer when you said when match check said that WebP had been pulled out.

Do you not? No

[00:19:04] Jess Frick: I am a fan of WebP, but we're not ready. That's the problem. Okay. We're not ready. Unfortunately. I think there's a big education need here. And I think, principals written about it. I've seen it written about extensively everywhere, but if you're not on the. And by the way, our esteemed host who's wonderful and brilliant is still exporting into J or I know it wasn't JPEG, but you know what I'm saying?

It's just, there's not been that change. Yeah. And having WordPress change it as default is fantastic, but I think we just need a little more time to talk through it. I know even from a hosting perspective, there's been a lot of questions about what that means for us and our storage. And so I think just a little bit more time and maybe work on it for the next major version.

[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's curious, like devices I no longer I have a phone. My, this is the only thing I use to take photographs. Now. I, it was a long time ago that I had a separate camera, but the phone and the cameras that I always had, the digital cameras, they always produced JPEGs. And it was like ground into me from an early age that images they're JPEGs.

That's what an image is. And so I kind of default to this position. I'm not wedded to it. And because match, check has said that next time I do export an image, I'm gonna do it in WebP and I'm gonna see just how beneficial it is as you say it is the future.

[00:20:37] Maciek Palmowski: It is. Yeah, it is. I remember that one project, when we had this discussion about adding WebP support I remember that the company no, we don't need it, but they were using amazing.

Everything. All the transfer is paid by a megabyte. So when I mentioned how much transfer they will save and they counted it with how much traffic they have it was a very quick decision that yes, let's go where a great format future for us will save load of money.

[00:21:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So thank you. That was two bits that I'd missed out there.

I don't think they were mentioned in these articles, but yeah, so Gutenberg 14.1, all of the changes that have come up until that point from whenever it was 13.1, they're gonna be rolled into this beater. And you can find out on the article, which are linked to in the show notes, how you can go and be to test it and make sure that WordPress is as good as can be.

Here's a curious article. It's kind of WordPress related, but equally it's not, I dunno of the three of you who had a chance to read it, but I'll paraphrase it. This is master WP. It's Ron Howard. Talking about about, sorry, I apologize. What did I just say? Did I just. Yeah. You said Ron,

[00:22:01] Jess Frick: but that's oh, I'm sorry.

That's a different guy

[00:22:03] Nathan Wrigley: entirely. Yeah. Wasn't he in like happy days or something happy days. yeah. Okay. Yeah. It definitely isn't him unless he's had a real change of career. Robert Howard wrote a piece called when is a discount, really not really a discount. And it caught my attention because in the UK, we had a, there was a little bit of a debate a couple of years ago where some of the supermarkets the likes of Tesco, the equivalent love Walmart and things like that.

They were caught faking discount prices. And so for example, they would say that a bottle of wine, let's say it was down from 15 pounds and you could get it for, I don't know, for a limited time for 7 99. It turns out that the supermarkets work within their rights to put the price of that bottle of wine up for a day.

And then for the whole of the rest of the year, they could claim that the reduced rate was a reduction. Whereas in fact, any sort of sensible narrative would say it was the other way around, it artificially went up for a day and Roberts discovered that this behavior is happening in the word press plugin space is totally legit.

There's nothing to stop you doing it, but I'm just curious, and I know for. Fact, because I look at this stuff pretty closely. This is pretty rife in the WordPress space. You'll go to a plugin page, you'll see 3 99 crossed out and it'll say 2 99 or something like that. But there's no there's no way that we can enforce this or really ever discover.

Rob goes to the way back machine. And, he looks at various different points in the parts of these websites and discovers that, yeah, they've been this price forever and they're artificially creating this and whilst it's good, it may be good if you're a, if you're a, I dunno, you feel like you've got a good deal or certainly if you're a vendor of one of these things, it feels like a good way to market it.

Rob's point is, I'm not sure this is a good idea. It's damaging the ecosystem and we'll get onto a bit in a minute. Probably one of match check's articles from Jonathan world about whether this is a healthy thing to see, I dunno, what are your thoughts?

[00:24:18] Michele Butcher-Jones: I think for me, it starts at those back in the eighties where there was those time CDs that they would do at like midnight on TV.

And you can get all these for not 1299, not 9 99, but by them all for $139. And it's all that whole perceived value that really started too back in the like early two thousands early to mid two thousands with the internet marketing like NAMS and places like that, where we pushed a perceived value, not the actual price of it.

It just kinda trickled down into now plugins and places like that. We'll see what the perceived value price is. Not what the actual is since the marketing.

[00:25:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it is. It's a bit of marketing lingo. My, I think the main point that he's trying to make is that really things like woo commerce, it's trivially easy for any of us to create a store.

And then depending on how we are, I don't know. Let's use the word morals depending on what our morals are. We might adopt this, or we may not now does that cause. Does that, cause let's say that you are in competition with a plugin. You're both doing exactly the same thing, your reforms plugin, their reforms plugin.

They're doing this where they fake the sort of reduction, but you are not, you've got the moral high ground, but you may be losing out to people who are like that FOMO thing or it's a good deal. And then you get things like you see, banners at the top of websites where they put a countdown timer on, and then you go back long after the countdown timer ran out and the countdown timers just started again.

and you just think, I'm not so sure about this and because it's really easy to do. We may get L into thinking this is clever marketing. This is what we must do. I'm not sure then. What, if we, what if we're breaking laws, he mentions the Kinetica law, which says that essentially, if your product hasn't been at that price for 28 of the previous 90 days, you are breaking the law.

And so it raises problems as to whether or not you selling, I don't know, t-shirts or whatever it might be to the United States. If you are breaking their laws, they might not view that very favorably. Anyway, I've talked enough.

[00:26:50] Jess Frick: I personally think people are exhausted. I think we're exhausted.

You remember when popups worked? Yeah. Everybody had popups on their site. And then everybody just got tired of 'em and now everybody hates popups, but I think popups are making a comeback like cassette tapes. I think with these sales and the countdown timers, I think we've just it's lost the mystique in that drive, the, this whole concept that they're gonna sell out their plugins

Yeah,

[00:27:23] Jess Frick: no, I it's. If there's a limited quantity

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: available. Yes, that's right. I've got a PDF to download, but there's only 20 remaining. Exactly.

[00:27:33] Jess Frick: Yeah, exactly. Scarcity marketing is it's. It's great when done well, but I think, you, you see it a lot in the WordPress space and not just with plugins, but there's this race to the bottom with discounts and part of the problem is you've got these people that are newer to WordPress and they'll come in thinking that they're, let's say hosting is $3 a month.

and let's say it goes, a year in and all of a sudden, now they're paying 30 a month and they're like you bait and switched me. No, that was your coupon length. Yeah. And so there's some of that too. I think discounting is just, it gets real sketchy real quick, but just as a consumer, I think people are just tired of it.

Like just tell me what the price is like. Yeah.

[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: Cuz also Rob makes the point that you have no real conception that the price that you are seeing is what everybody else is seeing because in a store. Selling, I don't know, let's say shirts and what have you. The price is just written on the label and it's a big job to go around, changing all the labels and and what have you, but who's to say that if you're in Canada, you might be getting a different price to somebody in the us.

You might have put a I don't know, some sort of Lincoln so that, oh, you've come from this website. You are gonna get 10% off or, yeah. It's between these two days. In other words, we can play with. Really granularly and we don't really know what we're getting and there's there's a WordPress company.

I won't mention any names, but they it would appear that they're constantly on sale and it just makes me think when it, when is it not a sale, then, do you ever advertise the fact that it's now not on sale for a little while? And

[00:29:20] Jess Frick: should I buy now? Or is your discount gonna be better next week?

That's

[00:29:23] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. And that's a curious one, isn't it? Because if a company that's always got a product on sale, then offers it for I don't know. Instead of it being 10% off, it suddenly goes to 20% off. Do you feel a bit short change by that? I don't know. It's a yeah. Match check. It sounded like you had something to say.

Yeah,

[00:29:40] Maciek Palmowski: I wanted to say because in PO always try to save money. We have many sides that compare prices on different stores. For some reason there are not such a, there is such for virtual products yet. The thing that all of those price compares have is the price history. So it's busy to see if someone is cheating because let's be honest, very often practice like this, especially when we try just to use the formal effect and things like this, it's just final cheating because it's doing a sale.

It's trying, this is a way of trying to use some of our, me against us. And and especially every year when I, because yes, of course we have to adopt black Friday because it's such a long Polish tradition. All those. Sales are so easy to check and compare when you look at the history at the price history and you see that.

Yeah. Why is this product much more expensive than it usually is? yeah, so yeah so yeah, adding those those price histories were one of the best things and let's be honest doing something like this for WordPress plugins would be also doable.

[00:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really, that would be a, that would make a fabulous project for somebody.

I right at the outside, I'm gonna say, it's not gonna be me. But some kind of yeah, price tracker over time where you could see that X plugging has been at this price and then it went up and it went down and mapping, that would be really curious. And it would give you a genuine idea as to whether things had been artificial inflated.

Of course we are. We are around the corner from black Friday and I am pretty convinced my check that you're right. That it is, let's say. Abused. Sometimes you definitely get the impression that the majority of WordPress vendors don't abuse it and you get a genuine discount, but I think there are one or two who who yeah.

Push, push it a little bit. Shall we say? Okay. That was an interesting one. That was Rob, not to Ron Howard over at master WP. Go and check that out. I just wanted to give a quick shout out this one. I don't know if there's much, anybody wants to contribute to this, but I was lucky enough to meet Steve Steve Burge from publish press the other day at word camp, us really thoroughly nice chap.

And we both have a shared interest in history. So there you go. And it came to light this week that his company published press had acquired another. Plugin company called meta. They've applied, acquired a plugin called meta slider. They don't really go into what it is that was exchanged in terms of finance.

And also it's curious because I can't initially see the overlap between metas slider, light box and published press. But yeah, hopefully Steve will make something good out of this. He talks about the fact that he is going to do a lot more work on it. There's a pro version that they'll continue to sell and the there'll be a standalone version focused on images.

But it won't be included in any sort of published press package that you may already have, looks like they're standalone. So just to say Steve, congratulations. Well done. Nice. That's that? Anybody you wanna contribute on that? Or shall I just move. There's another one making a comeback. Yeah.

Oh,

[00:33:32] Jess Frick: sliders are all the rage that nobody wants you to use sliders. And now I'm starting to see him pop up again. Yeah. So he says not pop up

[00:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: literally, but no. Yeah. A popup slider. Now there's a there's slider. Yes. Popup. All we need to do is make, and it'll pop up. Slider with the blink CSS applied. Steve says a traditional slider.

Isn't a good fit for a news website for a couple of reasons. We aim to tackle those, the variety of problems head on first to solve the issue. We plan to expand dynamic content features of meta slider so that you can easily pull in fresh content. And secondly, we'll focus on the speed of meta slider.

So you don't have to worry about sites being slow. And I think, apart from the UI UX of it, the idea that it would grind your site down in terms, cuz it would load like 20 images, which were just out of the view port. Let's see what Steve makes of it, but Bravo Steve well done. I hope it's a a marriage made in heaven.

That's great. Okay. Here's something new, a absolutely brand spanking you a caught site of. First thing this morning when Michelle frat, who of course is on this show very regularly sent me a message on slack saying that her, that is to say Michelle frat and Kathy Zant have started a new podcast it's called WP motivate.

And that is the url.com WP motivate.com. And the idea and I confess I haven't had time to listen to it today, but the idea is they're gonna serve you up on a Monday morning, a very short, so five to 20 minutes of content. That's what they're limiting themselves to. So a nice sort of motivational.

Word Pressy piece of content in at the beginning of the week, it says Kathy and Michelle aim to start each week with some joy, some silliness and some motivation and looks like it says here. There isn't, as far as I know there, isn't a way to sign up. I don't think to any list, but if you go to WP motivate.com you'll be able to join in their happiness and positivity.

So again, Bravo Michelle, , it's hysterical when Michelle comes on this show because her bio is crazy long. It's one thing after another. And now we've got .

[00:35:55] Jess Frick: I am fairly certain at least like 20% certain that she's a cyborg.

[00:36:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There's two of her. There is a, there is another one of her somewhere else.

Yes. That

[00:36:07] Michele Butcher-Jones: moment said she was a business woman in WordPress.

[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. She was very pleased with that. She was a tickled pink by that.

[00:36:16] Jess Frick: Nathan, I have an important question. Is she planning to release this, to compete with this show? Because we have your back. Oh, sweep the leg for you. We'll snap. And

[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: just be like, just Jess it's war it's full on war.

There's no at you. This is the last time this has ever mentioned on this show. No, it's great. Isn't it? It there's, obviously I don't, I dunno if there'll be any overlap, but it is on the same day she's I, she says in the morning, but the first episode is already out. So I don't know quite when the, if there'll be a collision in terms of time, but theirs is all pre-recorded and our recorded version of this goes out on a Tuesday.

Yeah. But thank you, Jess. I appreciate your support.

[00:36:56] Jess Frick: got you. I got you. I love Michelle,

[00:37:00] Nathan Wrigley: there's only so much love to spread around. Isn't it just, yeah. all right. That's great. Well done to WP motivate Michelle and Kathy, and look at the hosting that they've They've decided to go for that's a compressible.

[00:37:18] Maciek Palmowski: The small

logo.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's isn't it. Isn't it. Josh. They've done you round. Yes. Dream it's OK.

[00:37:27] Maciek Palmowski: The placement is great, but can you give me a bit bigger logo? Yeah.

[00:37:32] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. More cow. Give us small logo. Yeah.

[00:37:35] Jess Frick: I don't know. I was hoping it would be a popup, but

[00:37:38] Michele Butcher-Jones: what can

[00:37:38] Nathan Wrigley: you do? sliding popup one letter at a time.

P oh, E that'd be great. Anyway, well done. Well done to the pair review. I'll I will add it to my list of of podcasts, which I've got on my phone and hopefully have a listen in the next few days. Okay. From one new thing to another new thing, the genuinely I think this is a, I think this is really interesting.

So WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding once again writing an article called site ground launches managed E D hosting. And as soon as I saw this, I just thought, why has nobody else done this? This is absolutely fascinating. So how long has it been now? Have, so I thought this was new. Tell me Jess, where I'm wrong.

Learn dash

[00:38:27] Jess Frick: hosting over at nexus.

[00:38:29] Nathan Wrigley: So that's based around E D

[00:38:32] Jess Frick: no, it's a different. Plug in all together.

[00:38:36] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, okay. So that was the piece that I thought was quite interesting. Oh, you mean just the specificity of the fact that it's EDD digital download data. Yeah. So yes. Yes. So obviously, if you are into the, if you're into selling goods, we talked about t-shirts a minute ago, a real good thing to do for that would be to go to a managed WordPress company who have a woo commerce hosting option.

And they're absolutely loads of them. You can go click a button, you've got a store set up right away. But EDD is for digital products. It's for, selling plugins and whatever digital stuff that you happen to have. And it's big, the marketplace around EDD is pretty huge. I think it says something like, what is it?

I can't remember. There were some numbers here. 2 million domains. Yeah. Okay. I think's a domains on 2 million domains is the site of site ground, but I think it says. On of those 200, sorry, 2.8 million 50,000 are using ed D that's it. And yeah, so it's not huge at the minute, but I did think why is nobody else done this?

It just struck me as a really curious thing. It's a marketplace. If you can click a button and get an, a digital download store set up right away, site ground have collaborated here with the new owners of easy digital downloads. And they were bought a little while ago. I'm gonna say 18 months, something like that by awesome motive.

And you can see that automo. They're quite happy to upsell their other bits and pieces in there which they always are. Yeah. They're quite good at putting the other bits and pieces they've got there. So you'll have to contend a little bit with that. If you go for this, you're gonna be cross-sold all their other books opt in monster and WP forms and all of that kind of stuff.

But I just thought this was a really interesting idea. So it's 2 99 for one website. So that's $2 99 per month for one website, 7 99 for unlimited you, you know how this goes. But I just thought I was

[00:40:45] Jess Frick: curious, interested to see how much more awesome motive on their various content property starts promoting site ground.

Now that they've got this partnership.

[00:40:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder I do wonder it, but I just thought I, I would not be surprised if somebody else. Copies this idea and starts to sell E D based stores, because it's a marketplace you've got a direct access to customers. And, if you're building a piece of software or plugins or anything that you can digitally download, basically you can do through ed D.

So I just thought it was a good idea. I don't

know

[00:41:22] Jess Frick: that ed D will be able to make that partnership. They probably have something with site ground specifically for this.

See,

[00:41:30] Michele Butcher-Jones: I'm sure there's

[00:41:31] Jess Frick: I see there's something, some kind of exclusivity. So you could probably do it with a different plugin, but I'm sure.

Awesome. Motive worked something out with site ground specifically for this

[00:41:43] Nathan Wrigley: of course, cuz there's no free variant of ed D is there's just the paid there's nothing on the repo also. Yeah.

[00:41:50] Jess Frick: When you have that in there, everything else pops up too, so

[00:41:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. It's a very good deal

[00:41:58] Jess Frick: for awesome motive.

[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like sight ground. If we REW the clock about six or seven years, it feels like sight ground we're right in the mix. And we're being talked about all the time, but I really haven't heard anything much from them or of them in the last few years. And Michelle, you were saying that you'd try to, you had some sort of insight there.

[00:42:22] Michele Butcher-Jones: They about four ish years ago had changed their model for how they did support. And there was a big kind of uproar uprising over it. And I know with the support model changing and with everyone raising their prices a little bit, I know there was a decent size Exodus off of side ground.

I manage I'm one of the admins for the WordPress hosting group in Facebook. And there was about six months after that happened. There was a lot of talk of people, not really recommending sight ground anymore, but it seems in the past, like three to six months, or really trying to remarket themselves back.

Okay. Kinda like how GoDaddy did about 2015.

[00:43:21] Nathan Wrigley: interesting. Okay. So yeah, maybe they've had a bit of a PR whoopsie and they're trying to reestablish themselves. Okay. So speaking of this, first of all, hello, mark. West guard. Nice to have you with us. Appreciate it. And then Cameron says he can't. So we're talking about awesome automotive EDD still.

I can't help thinking that this is purely a marketing strategy at this point. Not sure how much uniqueness you can have other than some pre-installed plug-ins and a few server resources. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Cameron. That's an interesting opinion. Yeah. And Andrew Palmer then follows that up with EDD has only 60,000 users.

Now automotive is involved. They can do these partnerships, it own it also only installs a very basic version. Didn't know that. Thank you. Ed D does have a free option, but it's worse than useless. Oh again, thank you, Andrew. For your wisdom. I didn't realize they had a free version. Okay. That's great to know.

Just looking down the comments. No, there's nothing more to add. There's just people saying good morning to each other, which is jolly nice. Isn't it? People using the comments to say hi to each other. Okay. There you go. I thought that was quite interesting, but yeah. Very quick plug. I hope you don't mind.

Oh, look at that

[00:44:35] Jess Frick: site. Ground is now their top managed WordPress hosting provider recommendation on WP beginner.

[00:44:40] Nathan Wrigley: You couldn't interesting. Make it up. Yeah. Yeah. You could not have made it up. Quick promo, if you don't mind, I'll do this as quickly as possible every month or thereabouts peach and Mary and I get on the screen a bit like we are now, and we go through a few websites and look at them.

There's user submitted and we look at them in terms of UI and UX. That's what Peacher does that day jobs is a UIUX specialist. And so people submit their sites and ask them to be looked at by her. We've got a few in the bag for this current episode, but if you want it to be featured on another episode, please go here.

It's the easiest URL to remember. It's WP Builds.com/ui. Just submit your name, the URL, and so on, but we're also after any deceptive designs, it used to be called dark patterns. Feature hates them and wants to highlight them wherever she finds them. So if you've got any dark patterns, please fill out that form and let us know.

And hopefully we'll get your website featured. On the show. Oh, this is the story of my 2022. I have no words to express how unbelievably amazed I am by what AI images have done over the last year. If you'd have asked me just a couple of years ago to demonstrate the difference between computers and humans, my, all the answer that I just brought out every time was humans can paint.

Computers can't and I haven't got that anymore because now they can do it all the time. You've got all of these things like D and mid journey, and now a free plugin has come around. It, and this is again on the WP tab and the article's called new block diffusion plugin creates AI, generated images from text prompts, just as with all the other bits of software.

You, you give it some text. So you might say, I dunno I'd like a picture of a dog sitting on a cushion next to a copy of, I don't know, war and peace or something like that. And you, the more text you give it, the more, the greater the chance it has of coming back with an image that you like, this is the plugin is free.

It connects with. Now, let me get this right with a service called replicate to use the replicate API. It's one us scent per image, and it takes six seconds to create the image allegedly. So basically by the time you've hit, enter and slurped your coffee and put the coffee back down, you've got an image.

And on the screen here, if you're watching this, you'll be able to see it. The phrase that was used to generate the image that you see was shift into a new era of human AI, art collaboration, and that's what it came up with. I don't quite understand the connection there, but the point is I'm loving all this stuff.

And the fact that there's now a block, which allows you to do it more or less for free. Dare I say that, I just think is super cool. What are your thoughts on this? Is it terrifying? Is it brilliant? Is it, what is it. Both. Yeah,

[00:48:04] Maciek Palmowski: no, really. I was surprised even before we get to the painting part, when I had done also as a guest editor w P LS and after sending Pete accountant and everything he asked about did I like everything?

And I said, yeah, of course. And he mentioned, yeah, because it was generated in the part by AI. So yeah, I have one guest editor that used AI to do most of his work. And to be honest, I didn't knew about. Yeah. So I also had the chance to talk with people from contento that are able to using AI to convert.

For example, the talk we are having here to to an article, not just the transcript and the dialogue article and create some bits for social media and everything. And I was like, yeah, amazing. So with paintings it's the same it's, but as you mentioned we saw the description and we saw the end result.

It was beautiful, but I also didn't see the connection. So those descriptions and end result are sometimes weird. Still the form of Of everything that we write and what we get back it's much better, but in a year in a two, it'll be much, much better at

[00:49:52] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. You can imagine on one hand, sorry,

[00:49:57] Maciek Palmowski: go on.

I can't imagine because this is also the thing that, that you mentioned few years ago. I wouldn't thought that AI will be capable of so many things. For me still one of the biggest things about AI is the Google, the whole engine be that based on which Google translate works, it's really amazing to see how we learned speaking Polish, because Polish is quite difficult.

It's very difficult and it has some small nuances that were always ver, always difficult to come from English. And right now it just works.

[00:50:52] Nathan Wrigley: Ha

[00:50:54] Maciek Palmowski: to understand this, the sentence without it, it would be just impossible and AI made it happen. Think so. Yeah. I just can't imagine what will happen in a year, but it'll probably be more amazing and more scary.

[00:51:10] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I think I've had to push my definition back of. Of what a computer can do more now. So before it was, it can't create art and I've had to abandon that because clearly it can. And so my definition has had to go a little bit further back to say it can't conceive of the art. It needs a prompt if you just went off and said, create me a piece of art.

I still think it would flounder. I don't know. Maybe there's a, maybe there's a default setting where it'll just come up with something completely random. Of course that's a possibility as well, but I just think this is so interesting. It terrifies me and makes me incredibly joyful at the same time match check, because I kind of worry on the back of all this, about the, like the jobs.

So I'm thinking in this case, people who, whose living has been to do this kind of thing, and I imagine being an artist is a. Is a difficult thing to, to manage anyway. And now where at the cost of a SC, you can create something which may take a, let's say a human artist, hours, weeks, maybe months, even to create the economics stack up very much in favor of the AI.

Don't they, if you're looking for, I don't know, thumbnail art or something like that to go with on your posts. I imagine the days of paying artists to do that are slightly numbered. We do have Andrew Palmer in the comments and he's got birther AI, which is doing the same thing for text. I've got a feeling maybe Andrew, you could speak to this.

Maybe you are adding some of these image capabilities in as well, but Michelle or Jess, any thoughts?

[00:52:53] Michele Butcher-Jones: I think there'll be a mix where it you'll possibly have like the word, like for websites, for your featured image and things like that of may being moved to, of using AI. But when it comes to the art of the actual physical prints painting, stuff like that, you're not just buying the item, but you're buying the story behind it as well.

[00:53:23] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting, Jess,

[00:53:27] Jess Frick: it just makes me think of the the meme where you see what a $10 tattoo looks like. Next to a thousand dollars tattoo.

[00:53:38] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing that the $10 tattoo is inferior. It's not

[00:53:42] Jess Frick: a tattoo that you want. Okay. Yeah. It's really not yeah. It's dirt lion versus like crazy line. Yeah. But I can tell you that, I am personally not an artist, but I know artists and to watch them work is nothing short of magical.

Yeah. And while AI is coming so far and it's so good for these sorts of situations, I think the people that it's going to bring are people that wouldn't have already like chosen artists. It's the same people looking for, cheap and free themes. They're looking for cheap and free

[00:54:18] Nathan Wrigley: art.

Interesting. I guess I. This probably has played out in the history of every form of technological innovation. When yeah, jet row toll invented his machine, which allowed farmers to plant seed on mass. Presumably a lot of people who were previously employed to literally go scatter seed they had to find other things to do.

And that forced migration of labor, if you like probably led to all sorts of people who would've been throwing seed for the rest of their lives, going off and finding something, something else to do. And you imagine that working in a bank 60 years ago, there would've been hundreds of people with great big ledgers toting up all the numbers and they've all gone because somebody invented the spreadsheet, but it didn't seem to put everybody out of work.

And there's a bit of me which thinks yeah, stop being so doom and gloom. Nathan, it's fine. And just enjoy it for what it is, but it does. I, yeah,

[00:55:14] Jess Frick: I think Nathan or excuse me Nathan, Andrew just came in with a great comment. That would be my follow up. I think that AI is absolutely fascinating in where it's going, like he says here,

[00:55:31] Nathan Wrigley: so Andrew says there will be AI experts who will create on your behalf.

Lot. Ices were concerned when automatic weaving machines were invented. Yeah. I think you just broadly made the same point as me. Didn't you Andrew, about, technological innovation frees up people to do other things and yeah, it, I guess whenever the bedrock of things, which you are, which you've grown up thinking about, that's the normal way of doing it.

Whenever those things get shattered, it makes you pause a little bit. And the assumption is always a bit of panic. Everything's gonna go wrong and horrible, and it on the whole, it doesn't seem to do that. So just as another thing, if you are a birther user, Andrews just said that this image generation will be in birther from next week, Andrew, I wonder if you could tell us how that works.

In other words, if you are a birther user on a subscription at the minute, cuz it's a, typically it's a, they have a free tier, they also have a paid offering. Do you have to buy image credits or can you use your text credits that you're currently using and swap them over? Let us know.

And he's added one more little comment. Art will still w X, I don't know what he meant there and be much more valuable to made by humans will have a bigger price tag. This is the time for me to become an artist. I can feel my calling now I'm gonna sell my artist

[00:56:57] Maciek Palmowski: orange AI

[00:56:58] Nathan Wrigley: artist. no real artist. I'm gonna look.

Andrew said, I'm gonna put a bigger price tag on it. I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be rich beyond my wildest dreams with Stickman drawings, right?

[00:57:12] Michele Butcher-Jones: also, it just that the big change in stores in the past 10 years, of where a lot of the more big box change stores now have where you have to check out yourself and they don't have any cashiers.

And then I was at a grocery store and they have a little robot now that will go in the lanes to scan the shells for inventory. Wow. If you don't know one's coming up behind you we'll startle the snot at it. You .

[00:57:45] Nathan Wrigley: I do wonder if if the Destin of humans is basically to be like those creatures in Wally, do you remember the film Wally where they fly up on the spaceship and they encounter this race of humans, 5,000, 10,000 years in the future.

And they've, they're basically capable of sitting in a sofa and consuming drinks, and that's their purpose in life. Maybe that's what we want. We want everything to be comfortable and easy and click of a button. Michelle, by the way, through this article at us, right at the end of last week, it might not have been Michelle.

I can't remember. But it came on last week's show and I just wanted to point it out one more time. It's a really interesting article. It's Adrian R Rosselli Adrian rose. Sorry. And it's fascinating because he takes alt images. Sorry. He takes alt text from images and then he puts them back into the art, the generators.

And he sees what comes out and you it's really fascinating. Oh my God, that's amazing. Oh, it's so clever. So he here's the first one, right? So he shows you this and the human written alt text is a cartoon Kauai slice of toast with happy eyes opens smiling mouth and reddish cheeks. There is a splatter of blood coming to the top of the toast, similar to the Watchman logo.

It's a pretty good description of what we're looking at. And then he feeds it into all these different AI creation tools. So that exact piece of T text, and he gets, just so different. So here's one, this is what crayon C I, Y O N gives you. And it's just, it's kinda hit the Nile on the head.

Then mid journey gives you. Which kind of look like little avatars for toast,

[00:59:37] Jess Frick: apples. That's escalated very quickly. Look at this

[00:59:40] Nathan Wrigley: one. It's just like the heck. It's so good. This is the apple alt text fed into crayon. So this is apple read the image and created its own alt text. And then finally Apple's text.

That's beautiful though. Whether or not you, whether or not you think that's hysterically wide from the market's absolutely beautiful. I suggest that you go and read this article. It's really interesting reading, but it, one of the things that it brings to bear is please make your alt text actually usable on your websites.

If you've got. For all the right reasons, accessibility and lots of other reasons, make the Tex actually say what's in the image and just connecting that a friend of mine. I say a friend of mine, somebody reached out to me, John Donner sent me an email this week.

But by pure coincidence, it overlaps with this article. He's got two new plugins and the first one is called fix alt text. You can find it on the repo. These plugins are both free. It's called fix alt text. And it gives you prompts where images throughout your website. If you've missed this, it will find images with no alt text on them so that you can go back and fit backfill, retrofit your website so that the alt text is there very important for accessibility purposes.

It doesn't just, oh, it does. Anyway, the point is good for SEO. Good for accessibility. And if you don't know which images haven't got alt text, this plugin will surface those for you. And the other one that he's got is called where used, and this will take more or less everything in your WordPress website.

So attachments, post links, blocks, and it images all sorts of different things. And it will tell you where in the website is actually used. So that little image in the media library, which is like four megabytes that's not used anywhere will where used will tell you that it's not being used. And so you can delete it.

So I think this is anyway Bravo to to John dormer. So quickly surface. This is one of my favorite plugins, ACF, advanced custom fields. I'm so happy that Elliot con all those years ago created this. I use it virtually everywhere. It's one of those things that gets thrown on the website more or less straight away for me, at least.

Anyway it recently got taken over. And I want to say it was delicious sprains that bought it. That's right. Isn't it. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure it was delicious sprains first delicious brains. And then w then yeah, of course then WP engine then acquired the majority of the delicious sprains plugins.

Thank you much check. That's great. And they've decided that it's time to give it a bit of an overhaul. The UI they felt was a little bit too well, not too busy, but just a bit too spacious. There was a lot of space given over to things that really didn't need that much space. I have to say. I love it. I really like it.

This is version six. And essentially what they've done is they've created this article where they show up before and after. And in every case that I've looked at on this page, I think, yeah, really nice job. So they've gotten rid of things that didn't really need to be there. They've added tabs and so on, but essentially they've just tried to minimize it.

So this UI, which you can see, that's the old way of doing things, lots of space, you stop lots of unnecessary things there that you didn't really need. It's now being compressed to something which looks a little bit like this with accordions that open and close. And just to say to the guys over at WP engine, delicious brains, ACF, whatever it is Bravo, I think you've done a really nice job.

You guys using stuff like ACF, do you ever stray into this? Yeah. Yeah. The ACF a lot at our agency. Is it like the default? Has it been the default forever and ever like it has for me, yes. Yeah, it's just one of those things that gets thrown in. You'll be delighted when you click update on your website.

Dunno. You've had a play with it yet, but certainly from the screenshots, I haven't updated and had a look at it on a live site yet, but it looks like they've done a really nice job. So thank you first to Elliot con and then for all the other people, who've had their hands on it. Okey doki, right?

Let's go to this one. I themes security. I don't really know much about this. Maybe you guys are more Technological in terms of security than I am, but this is Kathy Zant writing. Oh, we mentioned Kathy already. She's got a, she's getting in the show a lot today. This is all about web or now I dunno how even to pronounce this, it looks like you say web Orhan.

Web Orth N I don't really know, but I themes, they claim at the top of this article to be the, a groundbreaking release, the first of its kind in the WordPress space, they're enabling you to use a different way to log into your website, this web Orth N or web Orhan. And the idea is that instead of using usernames and passwords, which every website has done forever.

To log in. That's obviously vulnerable because it literally can be stolen. And if it's stored in an insecure way, or somebody manages to crack the cipher, which is which is holding your hashed version of the password, for example, you can be compromised. The idea here is that it defers that logging in capability to things like your browser or your fingerprint reader on your phone.

So it becomes the conduit and you're gonna trust your phone, right? Cuz it's yours. So I just think this is a really nice idea. I tried the implementation out on one of my websites and it lodged something into my browser. I'm using Chrome or brave. And from that moment on, I've been able to log in by clicking something in the browser that just says, is this really you or something like that?

And it just gets rid of that little bit of friction. I think this stuff's really cool, but I'm not really an expert on how it all works. So if any of you guys understand it better, please educate.

[01:05:49] Jess Frick: I can share at pressable one of the most common feature requests is a different way to handle two FA okay.

There are so many different options now, and everybody's got their favorite people are using different clients. Some people are saying you can't use this one, cuz it locks you into this and I need this instead. And I think it's really great that, the worldwide web consortium's finally coming out with some kind of guideline and this appears to be what they're going to be pushing everyone to.

I read about it. And one really cool thing that I saw that is neat is it's gonna help prevent fishing attacks. So it's gonna prevent you from being able to, have one of those fake login pages. It's gonna be really interesting to see if this is accepted as a universal standard because there's a whole lot of money in all these different solutions.

And I don't think they're gonna go down without a fight

[01:06:53] Maciek Palmowski: Yeah, that's true. Because there are so many ways to store our passwords in a secure way. And yeah as you mentioned, there's it's a business, it's a huge business. And it's not only about logging in, into our websites.

It's also about our bank accounts that also have some more complicated ways. It's also about using some other applications, sample our FTP client and how connected with our client with our password vault. And it's also about all the file configurations, for example, WP conf, everyone who has access to it can see our password.

So it would be great to start it in some way, so no one can see it because it's, so yeah it's a big business and it's also, it's, there is a lot to do about it. So I think that but yeah, it would be great to have some universal way to, and yeah. Have having cab browser taking it over or a system together with the browser because it'll be even better because we are not doing everything in the browser.

Yeah, it'll be great. But I also would have to. To read more about mentation of it, because the only thing that I saw it's that's compatible with w three specification, and that.

[01:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we should say that this isn't. So the protocol, which Jess just mentioned it's not. So the underlying technology, this is not ithe, they're just implementing something.

Yeah. Which has been created by some fairly big hitters. I can't actually find, oh, here we are. Some of these small companies, you may have heard of apple, Google, Microsoft Mozilla and a company, actually, you may not have heard of, Yubico, which creates these things. I dunno if you probably all got one of these, but it's like a.

Key it's called a UBI key and it offers it's like a keyboard on a USB drive. And it enables me to hide behind a very long password, certain things, but the point is all of it's inconvenient, user names and passwords are inconvenient. I've got a password manager I use last M sure.

You've all got different things so that I can try to be as secure as possible, but effectively what I'm doing is just creating a brand new password for every service that I log into. And that's what I've been doing for ye I don't know, 10 years or more brand new, super long, ridiculously difficult, actually impossible to remember password, but then

[01:09:57] Jess Frick: also I just need that one password and I've got all your passwords.

[01:10:01] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. So the giant problem there is that if you crack and on the other hand, what

[01:10:06] Maciek Palmowski: will happen. Or what will happen if at if some last bus will say, yeah, sorry. It was our last day. Bye.

[01:10:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's the scariest thought? Why would you honestly I'm doomed on, so I really not. The implementation last bus is, this is April.

Actually. You've got the data anyway, but because it sends you a little blob every time you do you every time you save something, it, it's held locally and it's a little blob of data and you can download that. And hopefully if last pass did go out of business and you needed to go for arrival, but it does feel to me like things like last pass, one password, they tackle the problem of user names and passwords impeccably.

It's brilliant, but I cannot see the, I cannot see user names and passwords being the. The fact that I've. Oh, alright. So let's imagine that I've got biometric data in this case. My thumbprint let's say that. That is the thing that I've decided I'm gonna be logging in with. Obviously, if somebody comes and forcibly applies my thumb to a device, then the whole thing's blown apart anyway.

But I, I feel I'm just not living in that universe. I am not James Bond. let me say that sentence again. I am not James Bond. Nobody's gonna be breaking my door down to get my thumbprint. I'm protecting myself just because I don't want. Hackers to accidentally access something. They're not coming after me, but they might scoop me up in the trove of data that they steal from elsewhere.

But I just think this is really interesting. It's really interesting. Cut your finger.

[01:11:45] Maciek Palmowski: You can cut your finger. You can still cut your finger and it may be a problem for some readers.

[01:11:52] Nathan Wrigley: I, yeah, I've noticed. Yeah. If I go play tennis and I come back with a sweaty finger that, or a sweaty thumb doesn't work, I have to dry it all off and yeah.

Yeah. That's interesting. so this is web.

[01:12:07] Michele Butcher-Jones: And what would you found out was security? When it comes to the facial recognition is go through a pandemic and try to hold up your phone. and

[01:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: so you're sitting there, you're like. Yeah to get it to work. I've never trusted a device with my face yet.

I've gone for the B. Do you know what to be F to be honest, it was only about two years ago that I gave a phone. My thumbprint, I was being much more of a Ludi. I was quite happy to type in a six digit code to unlock my phone. And then eventually I thought, I'll suck it. Let's just give it my thumb. And and then as soon as I did it, I was like, why haven't I been doing this?

But I can't quite bridge the gap to doing my face. I just think that's too easy for me. Once you, if

[01:12:54] Michele Butcher-Jones: you are an apple user, once you get up to what is it like the iPhone eight or nine Uhhuh. It has to do the facial recognition

[01:13:03] Nathan Wrigley: in what did the print anymore? Okay. Yeah, I'm on Android. And my understanding is the implementation of the facial recognition is not as robust as the The apple version.

So yeah, it just seems a bit too weird. I just don't like the idea of somebody coming over with my phone and just pushing it into my face and going, ah, I've got your phone. It's mine now. Anyway, curious, but thank you to, I nearly said iTunes. I themes for implementing this. The article is called passwords are broken web Orth.

N is the new standard for authentication. Go and see if you can make sense of it better than I at least. Anyway, so there we go. That's that piece, right? Let me just share me. Jeremy screen, where are we going next? Oh yeah, a couple of quick things to mention. First one is that the guys over at visual composer, we had write on not that long ago on the podcast and they're offering 25% off.

It's a, as, as far as I remember, it's like a back to school thing. The URL certainly seems to indicate that I'll leave the link in the show notes, but it's at visual composer.com/two-school. And yeah, 25% off don't know until when, but anyway, there you go. Bit of a deal. And for the first year, Oh, is it just for the thank you.

Good clarifier. Okay. I didn't see that anywhere, but okay. Oh yeah. It says for first year. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Alrighty, match. Check. You shoved a few articles into the show notes that you wanted us to highlight this week. We've got a little bit of time. We've got about 10 minutes, so we may cover off a couple of them if that's alright with you.

Firstly, the sir Jonathan Wal has written a piece called R WordPress product businesses undervalued. Why have you surfaced this one? You obviously enjoyed reading it this week.

[01:14:58] Maciek Palmowski: Yeah. It is true because especially when I think about those small businesses and for example, ACF, I think ACF was this example when it's a great product and for some reason, Elliott had to sell it because.

He was too small. He wasn't making enough money to start building a whole company around it. So I agree with this, that especially that many plug-ins are started by people who just want to solve their own problems. At some point, they realize that, oh, it's not only my problem. Let me try to monetize it.

And at some point a big company comes in and either bot you or creates a similar solution that you are out of the

[01:15:52] Nathan Wrigley: market. Jonathan is a key proponent. I think one of the things that he's been talking about for a fairly long time is the fact that he thinks that the market can bear higher prices for WordPress products.

Let's just put it that way. And the example of ACF is just, is perfect. Isn't it? Because Elliott was selling that for life. So lifetime. I know I have it. I have one. Yeah, like I think it was $50. Wasn't it? $49 or something. I even

[01:16:22] Maciek Palmowski: had it a bit cheaper because I bought just one problem for ACF at the point where there wasn't the whole ACF pro.

Bundle. Yeah. So I remember that I bought the gallery or flexible content for a few dollars and at some point he converted it to lifetime and I was like, okay.

[01:16:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting. Because when you go out into the SAS marketplace and you look at what SAS products are charging, it's very typical to see $99 a month for a service, which does one thing and does one thing.

But you really, in the WordPress plugin marketplace, that's the kind of figure that you are looking at paying annually for something which may deliver the exact same amount of value. And and so his is key. Indicators you the three key reasons. He feels that product businesses are being undervalued in the WordPress spaces.

I'll summarize them just by the titles. He says misaligned monetization limited distribution. And this third one, I think speaks to me the most. It says inexperienced leadership. What I mean by that, I think is what you just said about Elliot. He he was an extremely capable develop. Who obviously was able to create this fabulous product, but maybe he didn't have the, he didn't have the, how to describe it without offending Elliot.

He didn't have the desire to market it as a product. He was a coder and that's what he wanted to do. And turning that into a profitable company was difficult. So yeah I feel there's a lot of sense in this part of me thinks isn't it great. A lot of WordPress things are really cheap so I can get a lot of value out of them for relatively small amounts of money.

But on the flip side, if I was a developer, I think Jonathan's piece, which is, look guys, should we start charging a reasonable amount? The market can cope with it. I think there's a lot of sense in what he says. Anything else from Jess or Michelle on this.

That's okay. Should we move on? I

[01:18:39] Jess Frick: was gonna, I was gonna let Michelle talk. She did like a big sigh. Oh,

[01:18:43] Nathan Wrigley: I see. I kinda have you go first three

[01:18:47] Michele Butcher-Jones: things, go through my head at the same time. Can't say one of them with bundles are great in a way when it comes to getting everything you need. But a lot of times I've found on myself personally is I don't need all of that stuff.

Like I'm going to pick on one of the more famous infamous, however you wanna look at it. Themes that a lot of like businesses who don't wanna hire developers and just want all the bells and whistles, the Bodi theme. Where it comes with the number of plugins already built in and stuff like that.

Nine times outta 10, you don't need all of those items. And so they're just adding people onto your site or for forgive me for anyone who thinks I may have send of jet pack. A lot of newer users like to use that plugin, but only use like a quarter of the features on it. And I'm not saying that they're bad or good, but I'm more of, let me just get the features that I need and give went back and forth with this as well on, do we want to just buy the items per piece or bundle everything together and what commerce did as well?

I'm more of a component of, let me get the things I need instead of bundle all the things together.

[01:20:23] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Jess.

[01:20:27] Jess Frick: I think I'm gonna

[01:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: pass on this one. No, that's okay. That's fine. I, I think my gut feeling though, is that Jonathan has probably got the right idea here. I've got a feeling that in the future, it's quite likely that a lot of the price points that we see now, 49 99, those kind of things, I think they will start to creep up.

As people realize that there is actually money in the ecosystem, and maybe people are prepared to pay a decent amount of money for something which does one thing. And does it really well, as opposed to what you were just saying, Michelle, you get one thing which does a ton of things, but doesn't do potentially any of them really well.

Jonathan world can be found at Jonathan world. Do Tom. He is a big proponent of this kind of thing, but the article goes into not just what the problem is, but he also offers a few solutions. And he's not just coming at it from the buyer's point of view. He comes at it from the seller's point of view as well.

So he trying to, he's trying to create knowledge as to how, if you are a plug-in developer you can get, a higher valuation for your bits and pieces. And yeah, there we go. All right, we'll make this one, the last one. This is match check once more. You've given us this piece. I confessed match check.

I threw this in the show notes right at the last moment. So I don't even know anything about it. Other than SSTA have got a piece called a new era of developer-centric hosting is coming. What is this about

[01:22:03] Maciek Palmowski: in, in short SSTA at the moment is workers is a workers' hosting company. That's it? They are great at hosting purposes and that's it.

And they decided to do something more. So they are working on on a way to host other applications written not only in P and written, not only in PHP, they could be written in note Python, whatever. I already have that the guest ACC the better version access. So I had the chance to play around with it.

It's a bit, it's still a bit rough around the age the edges, but I think if Kenta will be able to have the same level of of user help of documentation and everything, because let's be honest at some point, all the managed house, things are similar. There are things there, there are those small things that set them apart.

And if SSTA will be able to do it, they, this can be something really enormous for them.

[01:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: I'm curious about this, actually. Okay. So first of all, thank you for explaining. I didn't realize that's what this was about, but I wonder, I, my guess is that they're successful, but they wish to be more successful.

And obviously, there's only so much of the WordPress market that you can Hoover up because of all the competition in there. But if you can position yourself to go outside of the WordPress market, Then obviously there's a greater pie to have a slice off, but it does make me wonder, I associate ster with WordPress and that's all, it's just, WordPress is a, sorry.

Ster is a WordPress thing in the same way that I do for pressable. And let's say WP engine and all of those different companies. I wonder if this will dilute the punch of the marketing, if in other words, no way, if no, tell me more, just no way

[01:24:24] Jess Frick: this is infrastructure as a service.

It's brilliant. It's basically the backwards way of going about it than liquid web nexus did. Because remember they offer way more than just WordPress, right? And so there were lots of other ways to do these sorts of things, whereas SSTA is using you. Google's platform to allow you to do a whole lot more.

And remember, they've got a lot of freedom cuz they don't actually own any servers. They don't have to deal with any of that. That they're just the middle man. So they can extend in all kinds of ways where the management is concerned. But what SSTA does very well as they're gorgeous and they're easy to use.

They're just so pretty. I swear to God, I wanna steal their whole design team but they do a really good job of taking something that would be pretty difficult if you were to just buy your own server and make your own weird mishmash, which by the way, is where a lot of these headless applications are going.

They're doing all kinds of complicated things. They're turning sites into six different sites and I think it's very smart.

[01:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: So you see this as like a bright horizon for them and it, you don't think there'll be a confusion like ster, isn't just WordPress. It's a bit of everything else.

No. You think they'll be able

[01:25:43] Jess Frick: to separate? No, I think this is for people who use WordPress that also need to do other things

[01:25:48] Nathan Wrigley: And match it. You thought it was good, but still beta.

[01:25:58] Maciek Palmowski: Yes. It's still beta, but ocean is very solid. So the tech part is great. It's really great. There are some things still missing. There is no CLI, which would be great to use together with some CICS and things like this. But still it's working. It's still, so the hardest part it's okay.

There, are you always curious small by things? Of course. It's a bit complicated to use than to use fault. It was for that. It was here. You have everything. Install because yeah.

[01:26:48] Nathan Wrigley: Match your, I guess it's fairly timely match your sort breaking up now. So is anybody else getting match, check, breaking up by he's breaking up on me too.

Yeah. Sorry, match, check. But it's perfect timing because we've basically come to the end. Anyway. The show is like we're outta time, essentially. So perfect time for you to break up. You've hung on in there. Just one quick thought. It's a good job that ster has that name because I guess if you are called WP or anything else, that's a big pivot, isn't it?

That changing for WP engine? This would have to be presumably some kind of rebranded thing. So anyway, good luck to them. And thank you. Match, check for surfacing that I do apologize. We've overrun a little bit. I hope I haven't kept any of that. Yes, quite right, Jess. She knows what's coming. Michelle has no idea what I'm about to do to her.

Michelle, at the end of every show, we just put both hands up and just wave them for a few seconds so that I can use it on the, oh look, she's totally into it. match. Check. Come on, match. Check. He's breaking up. Oh my God. Have Aless match check. No, that's the first time. Oh, Thank you. Thank you very much.

We have over on. I do apologize. Big. Thanks to Jess. Thanks for talking to us today. Once more match. Check's still going for it. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it and yeah, hopefully you'll be coming back on. I really did. Oh, thank you. And match, check. Thank you so much for joining us.

I hope you can hear me. Let's hope your connection hasn't completely died and we will be back this time next week with some other fabulous guests talking more about WordPress. Thanks guys. Take it easy. Have a good week.