This Week in WordPress #224

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 224 entitled if you don't shout, you can't claim you've been ignored. It was recorded on Monday the 3rd of October. 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'm joined as always by some lovely WordPress guests. Three of them this week. We have got Birgit Pauli-Haack.

We have got Bob Dunn, and we've also got our regular co-host Kathy Zant. What are we talking about this week? While we're talking about the WordPress core editor and all of the lovely new things which are coming in WordPress 6.1, about to drop in November. We also talk about the full site editing program test call.

This is number 17, organized by Anne McCarthy. What's in there? Woo Sesh is coming very soon. It's an online free woo commerce platform where you can go. I think it's three days and watch expert speakers talk all about WooCommerce. I did a podcast episode about accessibility with Joe Dawson over at WP Tavern, and it got me into an interesting conversation about accessibility and some of the things that I needed to be improved.

We also talk about the CMS market share of WordPress. We also talk about the California age appropriate design code and how maybe that's a good idea, maybe not. Who knows? And we also share a few non-word pressy things at the end as well. It's all coming up next. On this week in WordPress.

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

Hello? Hello. One small. It is Monday the 3rd of October, but you'll probably be listening to this on Tuesday, the 4th of October. This is this week in WordPress, Episode number, Good grief. 224. The numbers only go up. They never go down . Yeah, it is good. Unless it's your age, of course, and then it's slightly pressing when the numbers get to the quantity that I now have. I am joined, We're gonna talk about WordPress, but I'm joined by three fabulous guests.

We've always got some lovely guests on this time. They're all from North America. And let's just go around clockwise. So if I'm here, the first one on my right as I'm looking at it, but I think on the left row over that way is is Beit Power hack from Gutenberg Times. How are you doing?

Big it?

[00:03:00] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. So good to be here. Thanks for having me again.

[00:03:05] Nathan Wrigley: You are so welcome. I'd mentioned that Bega is the publisher of the Gutenberg Times. She is also the co-host of the Gutenberg Change Log podcast and a WordPress developer advocate at Automatic and Living in, if I'm not mistaken, are you Florida?

Have I got

that

[00:03:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: right? Yes. Since a result of Florida.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: And how was it over the last week? What would that

[00:03:27] Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was a little disruptive yeah, two days gone because of hurricane, actually three and a half days because we had to put the shutters up on our house. So we stay safe in our house and we ride it out.

But there we were lucky. We didn't, not a whole lot of people were in further south. Hurricane Ian made landfall and the search really devastated some of the coastal coastal lines and coastal towns. And that's really heartbreaking to see what damage had been

[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: done. Yeah. I'm very glad that you and you and your household are very safe and thanks for joining us.

Appreciate it. We're also joined by Kathy's aunt. Hello.

[00:04:13] Kathy Zant: Hello. Good to see you

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: again. Yeah, very nice. Thanks for having you with us. Ca Kathy's one of our regular, super regular cohost, so thank you for all of your commitment to the show. I really appreciate it. She is the director of marketing for Cadence and I themes at Stellar WP and stay with us because she's got a bit of training coming up, which we'll be telling you about a little bit later on, right towards the end.

But yeah, thanks for joining us. You're not in Florida, right?

[00:04:40] Kathy Zant: Not in Florida, in Texas. And, Oh, okay. The weather here is finally beautiful. So

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: blessed. I have no words. We don't do beautiful weather in the uk. We do muggy and depressing most of the time. And finally down there, down, there's Bob, Don, Bob, Wp.

I don't know which one to say. How are you? Hey, I'm doing

[00:05:05] Bob Dunn: good. Nathan

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: Bob is currently living in America, but , who knows how long that's gonna last. Bob's got this online saga, which you're gonna find out a bit later cuz he's decided to move completely to the, it is more or less the other side of the planet, right?

It's 10 hours time zones away or something. Yeah. It

[00:05:26] Bob Dunn: seems like that it's about, yeah, it's about eight hour difference in many miles.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay we'll find out a little bit more about that later. Anyway, it's absolutely bombers a clock for Bob, so apologies for dragging him out of his bed. Bob, if you didn't know is a podcaster.

He's a publisher and [email protected]. Go and Google do the woo. If you're into WooCommerce and WordPress, then Bob is your authority, audio and otherwise fabulous show. We're gonna talk about WordPress news. Just a couple of quick things. Thank you for anybody who's decided to join us in the comment, so really appreciate it.

We have a few little caveats to about that. And the first one is if you join us on Facebook, you can't you can't automatically display your name and avatar. You have to go through this little step and you should find it at the top of the post. But you've got to click on the link chat.restream.io/fb.

That's chat.restream.io/fb. And if you do that, it will give you the option to. Confirm that you allow Facebook to share your stuff with us during the course of this week. The platform that was in Restream had multiple problems connecting to all of the different sources. So that might have been YouTube, it might have been Facebook, or it all seemed to go a bit chaotic this week.

So if you are making comments and it's pretty clear that nobody's replying to them or giving you any giving you any pats on the back or whatever it might be, I do apologize. It may be that they're not coming through to the platform. And for that, I'm sorry. If you fancy sharing this, feel free to do that.

Stop it right now. But make sure to come back. We're at WP build.com/live, and if you've got a YouTube. You can make comments over there. So we've got a few people saying something. This person who is a Facebook user, so it seems to be working over there, but your results may vary. Good morning from Chicago.

Now, who would that be? I don't know, but thank you for making the effort. Thanks very much indeed. Hiya says Rob Kes and also, hey, Rob from Connecticut. Hi Peter. Hey Peter, Very much, and I did, I'm pretty much saw that I saw Mayor. Cars comment, pop in over on Facebook. That doesn't appear to have come through, nor indeed does Courtney Robertson.

So you guys appear to be on face sorry, on YouTube. So maybe the YouTube comments are not coming through to us, and if that's the case, or some of them are coming through and some of them are not. I do apologize. It's it's, I dunno. I have no idea why that might be. Oh, and then as soon as I say that may have pops in and says, Yeah, I'm here.

Okay. So ignore everything I just said. You can more or less say, For the whole of my life. That's what my mother always tells me. Anyway, , let's get on and talk about word pressy stuff. This is our website, WP Builds.com. There it is. You can see that this we are sponsored by the Mighty Goda. We'll be talking about an event that they've got later with Courtney Robertson.

Thank you for goda for supporting us. I really appreciate it. If you wanna subscribe to our stuff, click on the link here and then fill out forms and click enter and things like. You can work it all out for yourself. Okay, here we go. Anne McCarthy has got a couple of pieces featured at the top of our show today.

The first one was published middle of last week, I believe, 26th of September. It's called Core Editor Improvement Catalyst for Creativity and Control. And in it, if you are watching this, you'll get an impression for how much there is to say it. We are gonna keep it to the nearest bullet points, but it is to say that a lot is coming down the pipeline very soon.

And you can see the changes that you're gonna be able to make, not only by the screenshots, but in most cases there's a tiny little sort of 10 or 15 second video which demonstrates what the changes will be. But there's gonna be an awful lot of changes coming for typography. Block support. I'm having to scroll between all of these.

Dimension and spacing block support. You can see there's a lot of. Here, Colors keep going. Then layout, block support, border block support, They all seem to end in support and a whole bunch of other things. Basically, I'm just letting you know that this page exists if you're interested in all this kind of stuff, and I know that big, It definitely is.

It's worth checking it out. The post, as I said, was called Core Editor improvements, catalyst for creativity and control, and you can see what's going on. But I'm gonna hand over to the expert bi. Tell us what's coming up Big. It,

[00:10:01] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it's a part of the WebPress 6.1 release that's coming to WebPress in November 1st.

And it's now in beta two. Tomorrow is the release of beta three. And these are the so the design tools with the block editor that users can use have been tested on the plugin and also it's 6.0 and before and now that those design tools are finalized. They're coming now to every block.

I don't know if you remember after 6.0 there was this idea or the complaint that you can change funds on paragraphs, but not on heading. And that was part through all the blocks that they're. Some blocks had dimension controls, some didn't. So for spacing and padding. And now the team went through all the blocks, all the, I don't know, 40, 50, 80 blocks and made sure that the blocks that needed have all the design tools that they need.

So you said it, it's the typography you support with font, family changes, line, hide line li letter spacing yeah, drop caps and all that. And then there is the the dimensions for padding and margins where you can then check you wanna have left and right margins or just the margins or padding for the whole block.

Then there are the border controls. Not everybody gets, not every block gets a border control, but the container blocks definitely, which are the. The group block and the columns blog and all those. Then also, yeah, color support that has been probably ex added to all blocks a while ago.

But now all if you needed, you can also have a link color, which was the one that was missing. Border support. We talked about it. And one is also I think a layout control where you can say, Okay let the, I don't know if it's in the post. Yeah, there it is. Yeah. Yeah. Where you can Have for buttons and columns and galleries and so on.

The layout support in terms of, is it stacking, is it in a row or is it in a column displayed and does it inherit design from the theme and these kind of things? So it's quite a few. That has been a lot of work. And I think from the, I don't know a thousand or so prs that come from the plugin into WordPress now, I think 400 a part of that consistency updates I call them that bring all the design tools to all the blocks.

[00:13:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's, there's an absolute boatload big, it's just scratched the surface. But if you're watching this, each of these images that you can see so for example, I'm currently looking at the color support blocks with color support. There's just a laundry list of more or less all the core blocks and then asterisks if you like caveats where it won't be supported in 6.1, but in most cases, everything is supported everywhere from now on.

And essentially the takeaway from is when WordPress 6.1 comes along, you'll be able to make your text and blocks and background colors and borders and border radius and all of that kind of padding margin, All of that. It will offer the kind of things that you've been maybe used to with your page builders and things, all of those settings that you've become used to.

So yeah, really exciting tons of stuff coming down the pipeline. So go and check that out. I'll hand it over to Kathy and Bob in to say about this. And if not, we'll crack on with the next bit. I just, I

[00:13:56] Bob Dunn: tried to memorize all these last night and after two, I was done. I was a complete failure, but I wanna be prepared.

This is amazing.

[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's a lot. There really is a lot there. There's far too much. I mean it, in most cases, they're a part of the way through it. And I don Dunno if you can see, but on the image here, it's got this like little marks out of 10, how far through so in this case, the current status is 54.76, which is a very precise measurement, I might say of the things that need to be done are in fact done.

So no doubt this image will change over time in future releases. Sorry Kathy.

[00:14:34] Kathy Zant: Yeah, no, I just think it's incredible. That's one of the things that WordPress is doing is giving so much more control to users to be able to do so much more with WordPress. And this is just extending upon it and we're really seeing what the promise of what Gutenberg.

Wanted to give to WordPress users coming to the floor. And I, yeah, I'm here for it. I think it's

[00:14:56] Nathan Wrigley: great. Can I ask you a question because I don't mean to put you in an awkward position, but the, obviously you are your talk and speak publicly about cadence a lot that you work with them for them and how does it so things like cadence and commercial rivals, they've been taking a lot of this and implementing a lot of this for quite a long time, but obviously in some cases that is free and in other cases you have to pay for the upgrades to that.

How does it feel from like the cadence angle when the features are starting to come into course? So it, it makes, Yeah, how to describe it, it makes it so that the commercial offering that you've got is becoming more and more into line with what the free versions.

[00:15:40] Kathy Zant: Yeah, there's so much more that Cadence does that.

It I just that some of the stuff even in the provost and like a shop kit that extends, basically allows people to use blocks to build out w commerce product pages template and all of the stuff with cadence elements that allows people to do stuff with. Custom post types and being able to template things or to create a block and then say, Okay, I'd like this particular block to be added to the end of every blog post that's written by this author, and just all of the granular types of controls.

I don't think it's competitive. I think anything that goes into Core is going to just elevate WordPress and Cadence is here for that because there's so much more, even in cadence free and the upcoming addition of cadence blocks that's coming out, that is going to take things even to the next level, being able to move.

Blocks within row layouts and things like, we just got a preview of it last week and so I don't wanna be like spoilers or anything, but it is, it's really exciting. So I don't feel like this is, I feel like this is just lifting all boats. It's it nice everything that like Generate Blocks is doing, and all of the other block providers are doing are lifting all of WordPress and some blocks are.

The cool thing about it is you can use WordPress Core and get all of these cool features. You can use Cadence and get all of these features and use like a couple of blocks from Cadence. You can install, generate blocks and use a few of their things. And it's not like you're having to commit to page Builder on this page.

You can take a little bit from everything, obviously you don't wanna use every single block plugin decide on where you wanna be. But yeah it block world is so much more open and we're really I think in at a new age of creating with WordPress and it's super exciting.

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That was a fine answer and sorry for That's what I'm here for. Fine answer. You putting, Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Kathy, Fine answer Z That's it. Is what she's gonna be known as from now on. No, that was great. Thank you so much. A rising tide raises all boats or something to that effect is the Yeah.

The takeaway. Yeah. Okay, great. And Who got Rob is in agreement. He says, I agree. Cadence Pro is well worth the money. Thank you, Rob. Okay, let's move on. We're gonna stay with Anne and McCarthy, but this time we're gonna be talking about something that she's doing in the near future. She has. I think she's, I think she's orchestrated them all.

I could be wrong about that, but we're on the call for testing number 17. So she's been behind a program of encouraging people to get out there and test the latest and greatest, the new features and so on. And the way that she's been doing that is been, she's been creating like a. A a fake website if you like, a themed website.

And then from there she wants people to go in and have a play and have an explore and give her feedback about what went wrong, what went well, what was easy. And as always, she's post, it's on make.wordpress.org. It's entail FSE program, call for testing number 17 or hash 17 guiding the Gutenberg Gallery.

And I'm just letting you know that this exists because if you're into testing WordPress and you want to help her out and give some more feedback, it's a very user friendly way of doing it. You just follow the instructions basically, which she's got here we are on the screen. You just follow on directly as you are instructed and.

Everything will work as planned, be not, and if not, then you know, give some feedback. They're using Ister, wp, which is a brilliant service. I dunno if you've come across this before, but you basically click a button and it spins up a website and it sounds like they've been gifted instead WP, by the team over there.

So that's quite a nice way of doing it. You won't even need to install anything. You just click a button and your site is ready in literally five seconds. That was my experience anyway. Anything to add to that or shall I just move on you guys?

[00:19:47] Birgit Pauli-Haack: If you wanna know what's coming to work for 6.1 and wanna get a a handle on it dive into call for testing because it goes through most of the new features because that's part of the testing part.

That's one thing. And if you wanna contribute to WordPress that's Instant gratification kind of thing because your feedback is really helping making everything better and also get the last bugs out of web 6.1 just before a week before the release candidate comes. So it's, we, yeah I'm calling your listeners to dive in and even if you don't go through all the instructions, you only half of it or something like that it's still a great contribution to, a high impact contribution to WordPress.

Yeah.

[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, that's great.

[00:20:45] Kathy Zant: Especially with the full site editing being just such a game changer. I think at the more testing and the more eyes we can get on it, it's gonna be.

[00:20:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I feel that as well because it's one of the things which is difficult to get right and, it's made it's way along that trajectory, isn't it?

And is it perfect? No. Hopefully it will get considerably better. Yes. But we need feedback for all these different use cases and yeah. Anne's been making it as easy as possible to follow along with literally foolproof instructions. Yeah, go and give her a hand, Bob, anything or should we move on?

, go ahead and move on.

[00:21:21] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Okay. I think they said it all.

[00:21:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, one little quick comment from Michelle, who's already intuitive. Something that we're gonna talk about later. We mentioned it last week. We'll mention it later, Michelle, but she says we built the WP Motivate with Cadence.

Of course, I w WP motivates site. We'll show that in about an hour's time. Alrighty, next thing is an event. This is wanted to give a shout out to Courtney, who is usually in the comment. She was earlier. She may be struggling to make a comment. I don't know. But she's got an event, which is coming up this Wednesday.

It's at it's at 8:00 PM bst. I always think that sounds rude. Bst. It just sounds like a like a rubbish time, let's put it that way. I guess in North America it's two o'clock or three o'clock in the afternoon or something like that. But it's called call for Word press testing. Hello. A little bit like what we just spoken, spoke about, and it says, as part of a series of test sessions during our makers of the web meet tops we are once again going to contribute to the WordPress project by reviewing the current progress and providing feedback.

And it's all to do with 17 what you've just seen. So if you want a bit more hand holding, you don't wanna do it all by yourself. Here you are. This is the perfect scenario to do it in the friendly hands of the Gow team, Courtney in particular, but you can see she's joined by Gina Marie, Innocent George Maor Dash, Billy and Evan Herman.

I guess most of them are on the Go Daddy team, but. Yeah. Okay. So that's that. I don't, yeah,

[00:22:56] Birgit Pauli-Haack: anybody? Yeah. I just wanna give her a shout out to coordinate Robinson who not only is on the goad team, but she's also part of, and if not a team rep on the training team. And she has been instrumental to make those testing calls a little bit further spread out and teach people how to be part of it.

So big shout to coordinate for taking that on and leading people through a testing session there as well.

[00:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, of course. So there we go. That is Wednesday, but the link will be in the show notes and the link is quite long, but if you just Google call for WordPress testing goad, you'll probably get there and it's number sorry, 5th of October.

So in a couple of days time. Speaking of events, Oh, Bob, anything or Kathy, anything. I just think it's great.

[00:23:56] Bob Dunn: I'm drinking. I think it's obvious that from all this testing, if anybody's saying that WordPress isn't interested in feedback, I'm seeing this testing all the time, so it, there's no reason not to help if you're saying they're not reaching out to you.

So there's a lot of options.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: That's a curious point, isn't it? Because Bob, I suspect you are in all these kind of communities that call is made quite a lot, isn't it? It is the call that people are not listening or are tone deaf or whatever it may be. And that's a difficult one to, that's a difficult bridge to cross because if all of this stuff is there but you don't find it, or don't choose to look for it, then it's difficult for the team to say okay, what we'll do is we'll get a tin opener and we'll open your brain.

And figure out what you are thinking and then we'll put that into work. Sorry, that sounded really Yeah. Ridiculous. But Like we're gonna into a crystal ball and figure it all out. So these things are here. , but it takes time and it takes effort and you have to go and do it if you want to.

If you want to be able to claim that you were ignored, you have to go and shout first. I was

[00:25:09] Bob Dunn: told by Anne once, she said, we talked a couple years ago, or a year ago, and she said, Oh man, McCarthy. She said, If anybody has any doubts that there's not much happening in WordPress, just you know, go into some.

Going to WordPress, make WordPress Slack channel and just sign into some of the core. And I've done it, and I absolutely know, don't know what they're talking about most of the time, but it also amazes me the constant activity. It's Whoa, if you don't think anything's going on, just sit there and zone out on that for a few minutes and you'll see it all.

[00:25:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, the A, I've just coined a phrase. If you don't shout, you can't claim to have been ignored. I quite like that. Yeah, write that down in my Zen book of poetry, which I put next to me . Okay. Anyway, Courtney, thank you. She says the time pops up in local time. Yes. And in my case, bst, I'm gonna guess that's like 2:00 PM Eastern or something like that, roughly there.

Anyway, Wednesday, roughly, something like that. So shout out to the GoDaddy team. Next one is another WordPress event, and it is firstly WP Tavern. I've got an article about it, but I think I'll just move on to the real page itself. This is woo sesh.com. I love this. It's a free event, but I love of the fact that they've crossed out that it would cost you $800.

But no. We're gonna do it. We're gonna do it for free. This thing's been. Forever as far as I can tell. It is brought to you at the top at least. Anyway, it says, Go Daddy and WP Sessions present. I don't know who's responsible for what, but it's a virtual conference. It's on the 11th to the 13th of October.

It's completely free. You've just got a surrender your email address if you wish to be informed and what have you. And it says, if you regularly work with World Woo Commerce in your business, there are several presentations that will set for you. We have created a speaker and session lineup that is designed to help your business in the head.

There's a whole bunch of speakers here that you can see on the screen. I'm not gonna read out all the names, but you can. There if you're watching I'm guessing Bob being the w almost guy, this is something you are really into, right?

[00:27:24] Bob Dunn: Yeah. This year actually we're partnering up and if you ski, Yeah, I think you should see Cathy's faith in there somewhere on this.

This is Yay. Look there. Yeah.

[00:27:34] Kathy Zant: I just saw myself and I'm like, oh my God. Did I pitch a talk there? That remember, But then I remembered Bob signed me up. Yeah. .

[00:27:41] Bob Dunn: Yeah. What's cool is this year they're bringing in do the Woo is gonna have at the end of each day, a wrap up. Just conversations. Nice.

So I've plugged in two of our hosts for every day. I'm avoiding it, but I'm letting all my cohosts go in there. So at the end of each day, they'll be talking with probably a speaker and maybe a sponsor and just, yeah, just having a nice little party. And yeah, Kathy is one, I'm not sure which day she's on, but she will be there one of those days.

She's graciously offered to do it. And yeah it's always good. It's aimed at agencies and developers, so it's really the people that are running their businesses and building with commerce. And it's been around for a while. Brian Risen, who behind WP Sessions, has been doing this for quite a few years actually.

Yeah I definitely, if you have any touchpoints with WooCommerce in your business I definitely tune into some of

[00:28:44] Nathan Wrigley: this. Yeah, there you are at the end of each day. Bob, Don, do the Woo Day Little Round up with Kathy on the 13th with Zach and Robbie on the 12th, and with Brad and Jonathan Wal on the 11th.

So just for our audiences sake, you mentioned cohost, your on your part. Just tell us about how your podcast runs. Yeah. So we know it's called Doo. We know that you started it, but it's been going for years and years, and it's developed and morphed and changed. How does it work now? How does it run?

Yeah

[00:29:17] Bob Dunn: it's it's the site itself is turning more into the pod, just the podcast as far as community support and a lot of things going behind the scene. But the podcast itself, I, I've been podcasting like you, Nathan for way too many years, and there, there was a point where with do the woo, I thought, do people really wanna listen to me?

Day in and day out. As I added more shows, especially a couple week. So I, so the whole impetus of do the Woo is to elevate voices, not elevate my voice. So I thought this would be cool, because I'd started with Brad Williams when we first started. He was a cohost, and I started thinking why don't I just, step behind the scenes and find some more co-host.

So I, it's not the easiest thing in the world. I have, I don't know how many of 'em I have now, 9, 10, 11 co-hosts. I'm gonna be adding some more, but it's it brings in a lot more, and I wanna say diversity in the sense of, how we think diversity, but a lot of different, Opinions and insights.

Everybody has a different personality. So I can sometimes match my co-host. My guess with certain co-hosts that I think are just gonna resonate and they all bring something different and they, I pair them up with each other. Sometimes they're with the same person. Sometimes they fill 'em for somebody else and it's pretty amazing for the number that I have that I can just seamlessly not worry about it.

I can plug anybody into any show and I know it's gonna be great. So it's turned into a, I love it. I love seeing every week, what comes out of their mouth and, but direction, they take it and they have no direction. For me, I basically say, Here's a guest, here's what they do.

You take and run with it because it's your show now. So it's a different perspective on podcasting. It's a different way of doing it, but, I, now that I've done, I don't think I'd wanna do it any other way.

[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's amazing. It's obviously, it's been going for years and years and, you are definitely the voice of Woo Commerce without a doubt.

And and I know that you've I don't know what the big plans are, but I know that you've got some interesting plans for the near future. We'll maybe get onto that towards the end when we talk about the other geographical big plan. But yeah, thank you. Can I just say that

[00:31:44] Kathy Zant: Bob pulls in the best guests too and like these conversations that as a host, like I get to ask.

We just had a conversation with John Maa and it was an amazing conversation on move visions. And so Bob makes this he has this ability of pulling in all of these people together. And just watches the magic happen. I don't even know if he knows exactly that he's doing it, but the, but his power of bringing people together has made some really fascinating conversations.

So it, I'm just like really happy and excited and blessed to be a part of it because I get to have these fun conversations with people I would've never talked to otherwise. Oh, it's really fun.

[00:32:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's really nice. I've detect Bob's got a tiny bit, Crims and .

[00:32:32] Bob Dunn: It's the light change. No, I'm just,

[00:32:34] Nathan Wrigley: I've got the Photoshop filter here.

Oh no. But that's nice though. It's nice to nice to have been doing what you've been doing for such a long time to, to get nice feedback from people.

[00:32:44] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I must say give some. Yeah, as a guest, it was a really, a very comfortable way to do, I think we did it about a month ago. Yeah, I have a few Gooden book talks there yeah, discussions there.

So it was, it's a great show answer for a guest, so I would come on anytime, but of course, , there are hundreds of others, good, brilliant people out there. Not that I'm brilliant, I'm just a cheerleader of all those that build Gutenberg. But it's a great show. And any of that be it more technical, be it the more visionary.

Yeah, it's so different levels of looking at things and I, it's really a great way to let the community talk about things and come together.

[00:33:31] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Bob. So indeed. Thank you, Bob. So if you're if you're curious, you could obviously Google do the woo, otherwise you could go to do the Woo, which is d o t h e w o.io.

And if you've, dabbling any dalliances with WooCommerce or just freelancing, developing whatever, as it says on the screen, connecting WooCommerce products and site builders, developers, freelancers, and agencies, go and check it out. Listen to the podcast. And yeah, obviously this was all prompted by the whole woo sesh thing, so maybe get off signed off for that.

That [email protected] online event. 100% free. Although it, feel free to give me seven $99. I'll happily take it. Okay. Okay. This is a, this is an interesting one, and forgive me. This one is a little bit about me and I don't wish it to be about me, but it was a curious journey that I went under this week.

I did a podcast episode at Word Camp US I recorded a chap called Joe Dolson. And Joe, if you don't know Joe, Joe is an accessibility, I'm going to use the word expert. I dunno if he would apply that to himself, but I'm going to say he is an expert with accessibility. And we did the podcast episode and in my normal way, edited it down and put it live and everything.

And below me, as soon as I'd published the episode, there was a few people on Twitter sort of saying, Look, Nathan, it's lovely that you've done a podcast episode about accessibility, but that transcript that you've got there, people with accessibility needs, can't really can't really find it as easily as you would like them to.

And so what happened after that? I just want to very quickly run this story by basically what happened is a ton of people emerged and helped me, shepherded me through what I was doing wrong and helped me, enabled me in the space of less than an hour to fix it. To the point where it's good enough.

It's definitely not perfect. And if anybody is got developer chops and they want to, for some reason develop a transcript button for a website with all of the area labels, feel free to reach out to me cuz I can put you in touch with all the people who can help you with that. But it was just the fact that from this episode, a load of people.

Told me that I'd done something wrong and then helped me to fix it in a really encouraging, nice way. There was none of this sort of shouting at me or, getting on their high horse. It was just, Look, Nathan, you know what? You've got a podcast about accessibility. How about you try this?

Because it would be really helpful. I won't tell you all of the people in the background that gave me some tips and tricks, but yeah, I was able to fix something very quickly. So the point of that is for me to just say once again, as I often. Fabulous community we are in, we're very lucky If you if you curate it and and you are hanging out with the people that are nice towards you, fabulous.

Because that's the experience I'm having. I hope it's the same for everybody else. So I suspect nobody's got anything to say about that. But episode 44 of the WP Tavan podcast is all about Joe Dolson telling me how to fix most of the common the six most common Wang errors on your website. And turns out that I was able to fix one of them with a wonky implementation of the transcript that I've got, which can see is right at the top here.

It used to look right down at the bottom with a tiny font, size 14. And what I learned was that basically for somebody with a, for example, a with assistive technology, This podcast player. If you're trying to read this needs to have equal weight as this, and I didn't really know that. I thought that it being at the bottom of the text would be good.

So essentially putting it at the top, this is the transcript you can see there. Putting it at the top enables people to find it immediately rather than have to search and search and search and search and then write at the bottom. Oh, finally the thing that I was looking for, the transcript.

This is what's, this is a block and it's called, oh, what is it called? It's not a core one. It is called, I've Forgotten. Custom details block or something like that. So it's not perfect. It basically drops in an accordion. So if anybody has any helpful advice about how we could get a button.

Accessibly to display a transcript, that would be very helpful. Sorry, rant over to you. I dunno if anybody wants to say anything, Nathan.

[00:38:09] Bob Dunn: I just like to point out that's a perfect example. What you did is when people came to you instead of going getting on the defensive, you accepted it.

And that's what, I think a lot of people can learn from is that there's a lot of people willing to help You don't just go, Hey, back off. And I'd never see Nathan say back off, but, Hey Bob, back off to me all the time. But with the compliment, but you did it the right way, and it, and I think a lot of people get, Oh yeah, yeah. Why did you have to tell me that? They get very defensive and they'll right away things go south and you took it as. Constructive criticism and said, Let's deal with this. And people said, Yeah, we'll help you.

[00:38:57] Nathan Wrigley: So that's cool.

I I feel now that you've said that, I feel I framed what I was trying to say in the wrong way, cuz I wasn't trying to this is gonna sound awful. I wasn't trying to make it about me. I genuinely was trying to say that I did something wrong and then people helped me and I was really grateful for the help.

But that was very kind of you. Thank you. Okay. Should we move on? Okay. From one accessibility thing to another is the where has it gone? Where's the bottom? There we go. 2022, which is the latest default WordPress theme. It is a block based theme, so you know, you have to go and explore all the goodness in there.

It is the first default WordPress theme, and I say default WordPress theme. It's not the first WordPress theme. So it's the first one that comes packaged with WordPress, which has reached a certain standard. And the standard that it's met is the Wang Double A Level Accessibility Requirements Standards.

And so it has been tagged accessibility ready. I don't think anybody's trying to say, Here, the job is done. This theme does all the things and all the things are done perfectly. I think what they've, what they're trying to say is, Okay, there's a barrier to double A and we've got over that barrier.

And for now that's where we've got to. But an important milestone, having a default theme, which everybody can use achieve that is really By pure ants. Joe is mentioned Joe, obviously Sarah Gooding in this article. She went out and spoke to Joe as there was a bit of a one two punch there on the tavern this week and I just thought that was really nice.

There's obviously, like I said, quite a bit to do and there's some bits and pieces which Joe outlines, which still need to be done, but very nice to have this in the arsenal of WordPress defaults.

[00:40:47] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Definitely, yeah, definitely. Yeah, there's there, that's also the one of the three block themes that actually have that label.

There are two more. One is from Carolina Neer and the other one I forgot. And yeah, big shout to Joe Dawson. He is from, for quite a few time. Years, been the team rep of the WordPress accessibility team and has done some great work there. Especially also with testing Berg and the block editor over and over again.

And they the team is now working on a testing, automatic testing for block changes, because that's always the hurdle. Yeah, Gutenberg the plugin releases every two weeks and yeah, it's really hard to keep up for anybody, especially when blocks change their markup and all that. Is it still accessible or has some regression taken place and it's a completely team effort.

And Joe was on that team. I think he still is, but then there's also Joe Simpson. And Alex Stein did some great work. He also had an accessibility workshop on Word camp us. So there is in the background, as you say, there's quite a few things going on to make WordPress more accessible and better

accessible.

[00:42:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The one that you mentioned is, it's on the screen, Jace theme Jace, by team, by Caroline, by team, Yeah, by Carolina. And I might it just say the theme teams. I dunno if there were other people involved or if it was just Carolina, but there's that. But it would appear that in the repository now, there are 94 themes, which are tagged as accessibility ready.

And obviously, your success may vary. It may be that one has more features than others, but anyway, there we go. Bob or Kathy, anything to add?

[00:42:58] Kathy Zant: I don't have anything. I just think it's so important for things to be ac accessibly ready. A lot of the enterprise customers that I talk to want, they have to, the legal ramifications of not having an accessible site, they have to put attention on that. So with WordPress putting a high premium on accessibility, it, we have to, everybody has to start thinking about this.

There's just too many risks if we don't.

[00:43:27] Nathan Wrigley: That's great for doing it. One of the things that I got into with the podcast that I did with Joe where he tackles the six things that you can fix quickly was we got into the whole idea of ambulance chases. We, that's the term we have in the uk.

And it basically means people who hire lawyers and go looking for an accident that they can then, sue people for. And Joe was pretty clear on this. He said, whilst it's maybe not such a thing at the moment the laws are coming in, the accessibility guidelines are becoming more solid, and the trip wires are there and you can automate to spot the trip wires.

And so in the same way that Getty images have been able to come after you with literally no work, they just send the bot out onto the internet, It finds your website, it knows that you've not paid for that image, and it automatically sends you a, some sort of lawyer problem in the mail. I think Joe is convinced that is going to start beginning.

And if you can prove that you've begun this work. The six things which you can fix that he highlights in the podcast are actually fairly straightforward. Then you maybe have legs to stand on, but yeah,

[00:44:40] Birgit Pauli-Haack: The theme is only the first step. The biggest turtles are coming from the content creators that need to be a little bit more trained in terms of how is a link to be read.

Yeah, it was quite hilarious if it wasn't so sad. When Alex Stein and the workshop and the work. Had the screen reader going over the microphone and just reading out the links. It's click here. . Yeah. The reader or yeah, the listener who listens to the screen reader has no clue where to go if it doesn't have the labeling.

So it, it's the, it's, it sounds little, but it's something really very important. And content creators are really the bridge to that. Yeah. And there is actually, because day in and day out, they putting their information out. And the same with all texts on pictures or when to put an all text and when not that's content creators.

That's not something a theme can do for you. Yeah. There's definitely a great educational gap there. Sometimes and I saw a statistic where yeah, and I'm. Probably get the numbers wrong, but it was something like two thirds of commercial websites are not accessible to the extent it should be.

And that is definitely a gap that even all the accessibility advocates and those on the edge of it really have more work to do to get it better

[00:46:24] Nathan Wrigley: when, Okay. Sorry, you carry on. Kathy,

[00:46:27] Kathy Zant: I just have one more comment. . My husband had a stroke last year and I started trying to set up all of the devices, the iPad, everything, so that he could use them with half of his body

And somebody said to me that everyone is one terrible event away from accessibility being the most important thing in their life. So I just wanted to add that for a little bit of context so that we as content creators and developers, Realize that, we're all just one horrible event away from accessibility being.

Maybe even life challenging,

[00:47:05] Nathan Wrigley: so I don't mean to pry, Kathy and I don't wanna go into the details, but was it revealing when you set these devices up, what, Oh, okay. It was frustrating and

[00:47:17] Kathy Zant: I may have given up a little bit because it was just so frustrating. And then also just some, cognitive issues that he was going through that are getting better now.

But at the time it was just like, oh my gosh. Accessibility just as a whole has a long way to go in order for it to be truly accessible for everyone. So

[00:47:38] Nathan Wrigley: one of the curious things is that I talked to Joe about as well was the whole idea of who's responsible. So as an example, if you are an agency owner and you are handing over sites because you build them for clients, but you don't really have this on your radar, there's this sort of gray area and we don't quite know yet, but Joe made the point that if you'd paid for a website and you hadn't really got in the contract, that you hadn't really got into the thick of the whole while, it needs to be access accessible to this point.

And links need to be displayed in this way and the font size needs to have this contrast and blah, blah, blah. He was saying as a client you would fully feel that you could go back to your developer and say it's on you. You built it, you are responsible. You are the website builder.

So that's just another piece to add into the puzzle. Even if it's not a property that you necessarily own and run like Bob would do the Woo and so on, it may very well be that your clients are gonna come to you and and say you built it. You are the person, they may counter sue or what have you.

Course the other flip side, and I don't mean this to come out the way it comes out cuz it's gonna sound like you're chasing money here, but I guess there is a flip side in that you can go to clients who've got websites that were built many years ago where accessibility was probably not on many people's radar.

And there might be some additional things that you can you can work with your clients. So that might be a mutual benefit. Okay. Ready here. All right, Next one. Yeah. Yeah. Maya says yes a step way indeed. Oh, and she's included a love heart. Oh, that's nice. Okay. The next piece is all about WordPress', continued dominance.

I've, I confess, I've never come across this before. It's the Web Almanac by the HTTP archive. And it's one of these studies which goes into, actually goes into a boatload of detail. And it look who it's written by. It's written by Bob's friend, Jonathan Wal reviewed by Alex Dening and Dan Krause, and along Koba, I dunno how to pronounce that.

Various other, I confessed I'd not across it before. And a great big detailed study about cms. The long and the short is this, the CMS discontinue to dominate and they continue to be the way that a growing prop of the internet choose to build their sites. Now, not any one CMS in particular we're talking about yet, just the idea that if you want a website built, you're probably more and more as the years go by, you're gonna have some kind of software behind it, some CMS software.

It doesn't really seem to matter if you're looking on the screen, it doesn't seem to matter more or less where you are. It's in, around the sort of high, 35% of websites are built with some kind of cms. It does vary by country, but the graph doesn't really get straight much about that. And the one the chart that of course we like to see is this one.

And on the screen at the minute we've seen charts like this before. We see the. The WordPress chart is extremely big in 2020. It was just a, just, I don't know, maybe 32%, 20, 21, maybe approaching 34% and now 35%. I don't know. I was more used to talking in terms of the 40%. This has a little caveat.

It says mobile on the top, so there might be a difference there. But also I know that Alexa, not the Amazon speaker thing, but the company that used to gather data, I know that's now been pulled out. They've they've stopped providing that kind of data. So maybe that does something WordPress dominates massively.

You can see Mula Dral, Wicks and Squarespace have tiny little length in comparison. So we get to be all smug and happy for a moment until we see this chart, which is slightly less. This is not quite so great. This is, I can't make it go smaller. There we go. Core web vitals, performance per cms. And it would appear that in this case rival CMSs, outdo WordPress.

Now, this could be for a whole bunch of reasons, couldn't it? Plugins themes, hosting, but still images. It is, it's a bit, What was that, sorry? Image. Images. Yeah. But it is still a little bit concerning to see that WordPress basically at the bottom of the pile on this chart rather than dominating WordPress seems to be struggling.

So there we go. We be happy. We get to be sad. It's the carousel of life. I dunno if anybody.

[00:52:23] Kathy Zant: I can't tell you how many people, like just in the last couple of weeks have come like gleaning at us in the Cadence Facebook group that they're getting like 100% scores on Nice. The measurement tests for Quora vitals and all of that using cadence.

So there's a lot. And you can make a site that's really super slow with cadence as well, that fails everything. It really, that comes down to how it's being implemented now. Are there things on some of these other CMSs that help people make better decisions with compressing images and page size types of decisions, design decisions, that types of things that we could brand a word process?

I don't know. I'd have to look at that further, but to me this is how just because you have a hammer doesn't mean you're going to nail properly or that you should be using a hammer with screws. The tool and how the tool is used plays into that. I think more.

[00:53:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you're right. I think I my, Okay, so I'm completely guessing here.

I think the fact that our typical WordPress website has many more plugins, let's say than it maybe needs to have. If you were if you were able to spend more time cultivating your knowledge about WordPress and plugins and so on, maybe that's got a part in it, I don't know. But 60,000 plus plugins in the Word Press repository, it's easy to get carried away.

[00:53:48] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There's also if you scroll up a little bit to the top page builders let me just put the,

[00:53:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah, I missed that out. Come back to that. Cause

[00:53:57] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that's quite interesting. Then you Yeah. Some of the performance issues come from the third party page builders especially. Yeah. Yeah. The sometimes the element, sometimes the WP Bakery and they have a very high percentage on on the sites as well.

Yeah. So 43% and 33% that are using. Those two page builders. So I think that's also where this performance, some of the performance issues come from.

[00:54:26] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno if Jonathan is watching this or if Bob can get Jonathan to to comment at some point. Not today. I'd be interested to hear his commentary.

I wonder about this chart because Elementor it, so in, in order it goes like this Elementor, so it's this top five page builders Elementor, WP Bakery, Dvy site, origin, page builder, an oxygen. That's curious to me that there's a few of the ones that I would've thought would've been on that list.

And not, the likes of Be a Builder and things like that. And I wonder if that's just, they've picked a random selection to, to demonstrate something on the chart there as it flows. But I'm quite interested. I I run a summit with ancient Laro called the Page Builder Summit, right?

So we concentrate quite a lot on page builders and we throw Gutenberg into that same umbrella. And a lot of the people that come and do presentations are talking about different ones than you see there. Yeah. Bob, anything on that?

[00:55:27] Bob Dunn: God, I'd love these and I'm being very sarcastic. It's what I find interesting is, as much as I'd like to know what's behind this, it seems these things, all we do is second guess why something is way.

And unless there's a really in depth, they go into. Maybe those or something like that. But yeah I absolutely, every time we some kind of graph with WordPress on it, like you said, I can chair a little bit, I can weep a little bit and then, it's over or whatever. But yeah it's it's a, it deep voids hard to wrap your brain around a lot of

[00:56:12] Nathan Wrigley: times.

Let's see what Ann's got to say. Hello Ann. It's probably also caused by everything that has page building capabilities, which become, which can be compared to Swiss Army knives. She also carries on you can cut a nice wooden statue with it, but you can also cut off your fingers. And people don't notice until it hurts

That's a great comment. I love that. And then Peter says, Thank you, Anne. Peter says keep in mind how many WordPress websites versus other CMSs are DIYs bloggers, et cetera. Who aren't applying or even aware of optimization vitals. Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm imagining a significant proportion of the WordPress user base is just doing ordinary blogging, logging in, writing some text, sharing their universe and clicking publish.

And they're not too bothered about all of these bits and pieces and they're quite happy to upload the gigantic 12 k image with Taron on it. I dunno why I said tartan. I was searching around for a word and tartan came out. It's very easy to oversimplify stats numbers. Yes, indeed. And I feel like I did an incredibly good job of oversimplifying things there.

And on that bombshell, we'll move on quickly. Let's talk about this. Lauren SL Donie reached out to me in an email this week or last week, and he wanted me to mention some, the. A project that he's working on. By the way, if anybody else wants to email me like Lauren did, cuz they've got a new project, that's great.

You can do that. And he wants me to mention his new WP Biz Dev website. You can see if you're looking at the screen, it says Marketing and sales jobs for WordPress businesses. So he's, it's basically a job sport. You've seen this kind of thing again before there's a little twist to, it says full and part-time roles, contracts, consultancies, and projects to help WordPress businesses grow.

But you can see right at the top, really, he's, this is not the typical I don't know, a React developer or somebody writing a plugin for somebody else. This is purely on the marketing. And sales side of the word press ecosystem. That's quite nice. And he says listings are gonna be always free for businesses up to three people.

So the sounds from that, I dunno if he's introduced a paid tier yet, but if you've got a business and there's less than less than four of you, up to three of you working in that business and you're looking for a sales rep or a marketing person, then maybe WP Biz Dev will be able to help you.

They've got a fair few already. He's obviously he's obviously managed to get his tendrils out there and get people recognizing it. So that's really. Okay. I think this is gonna be the big one for the rest of the day. We've got a few other bits to cover, but Okay. Came across this week and I read an email from, Oh, I've forgotten.

There's a, there's an organization it, I can't even remember what the organization's called now, but essentially there's a, an online organization which is trying to put morals if. Into the internet. And I, I don't mean a particular set of morals like, some sort of Anglo Catholic kind of moral or anything like that.

This is just trying to make it so that the world is equitable and fair. And they mentioned something this week, which I thought was really curious, and it's this, it's called the the California a d c. What does ADC stand for? It's gone out in my head the appropriate, sorry. It's the California age appropriate design code and being ignorant of how things get passed into law in America.

I dunno what stage of the journey this is on, whether it's on the books to be law, whether it will have no chance of becoming law. No idea. But I the idea. And the idea here is that we've got young people, many of them are using the internet, many of them are using the internet with, in an unsupervised way.

It might be that they are more technologically capable. For example, than their parents. And the parents buy them the technology, let's say as a Christmas gift or something like that. And there's no firewall set up. There's no age restrictions set up. And sure if you're in the sort of teenage years, maybe you are gonna be thinking, Get off my back dad.

Leave me alone. I'm, I can carry on with my life, but what about the little ones? And so it's really proposing a law where the tech companies bear responsibility for the content that is on their platforms. So that's enshrined in law. And I know that in the UK we've had a few cases recently where some tragic events have occurred by people viewing content online.

That really, honestly, I think even a super libertarian would struggle to see the benefit in the content that these people were looking at, given the consequences that happened. I won't go into that, but you can look it up for yourself if you want. And I just thought this was a curious thing. It sounds a bit like nanny state, but then on the other hand, it sounds like maybe we need a bit of this stuff.

Maybe we haven't got enough regulation on the internet. Oh, dear. Did I just say those words? What do you guys think?

And the answer is to not a lot,

[01:01:46] Birgit Pauli-Haack: pretty much like the, I think the internet is kinda lacking behind in some of the regulations while we started with movie regulations. PG 13 and, Yeah. Rated and all that. And I think the internet needs to have a similar way to do this. I don't know if California is going overboard with it or if Europe is going overboard with privacy.

Yeah. That's also part of it. But I think we, if we Think about that. We all need to live together on that and that yeah. What keeps us to going back to the caves and hit the, hit us over the head with a two by four, something like that. Yeah, all laws and all some kind of regulation that keep us a little bit in check when we have crazy ideas about how we treat other people.

So I'm good. I'm I like it. Yeah.

[01:02:51] Nathan Wrigley: Bob, Kathy,

[01:02:53] Kathy Zant: I like it too. I, There's a joke in Amer cuz California is that they can push the envelope, so to speak, with their laws. And so there's a lot of things in the United States that you'll see a tag on it that says, this contains substances that are known in the state of California to cause cancer.

And we joke it's a good thing we're not in California, otherwise this would cause cancer because Oh, I see. Yeah. It's, because California just pushes it, right? Like this has a carcinogen. It needs to be labeled as such. And so they put these tags on there because California is the only one that's really pushing for consumer protection in that case.

I think that there's issues. Algorithms. YouTube had an issue not too long ago where there were content creators that were making content aimed for children. That was, spurious at best. It was not good content for children, but it was aim, it was like the characters from Frozen doing things that, you know, you.

See with an r rating on it, types of things that, a grownups aren't gonna watch. And so YouTube took the bull by the horns and if every time you post a video to YouTube, you have to say, is this intended for children or not? And so they did that on their own because of the outcry. Do we need legislators to do this or can that come from parents?

I think, looking at this website, there's a lot of different organizations that are saying, Yeah, this is a good idea. There's some issues here. And I think, people's standards combined with algorithms can be a messy situation when it comes to our kids. And so being more conscious and intentional about what our children are watching makes a lot of sense.

[01:04:41] Bob Dunn: Bob. Bye. That's a, it's a rabbit hole. It's, I agree with Kathy. There's a lot of gray area and a lot of people that don't really care. But their kids, it's, who controls what, or, I think that's a great idea. I think there's a lot of contact and creators and businesses that would be totally screwed if this got into place, which is probably good.

Or at least they would, revisit what they're putting out. But yeah there's a, I think it's gotta go in some direction like this, what that is. I'd hate to be on that particular team or that decision making to really, where do we draw the line here? But it's going to be, Yeah, it's a, it's like Kathy said, it's a hot mess.

Yeah, exactly.

[01:05:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. , it, it says on the website, everyday children are using the, a digital world that is designed by and for adults. So far I agree with everything. It definitely isn't designed by children. And I would say that on the whole, most of the platforms are not designed to be consumed by children, but they are being used by children.

And this is the thing where they are, where they being children are nudged to give up their privacy, offered harmful material and exposed to risky contacts and behaviors. Now the sort of curious thing f from my perspective is that none of this stuff was. None of this stuff I needed to think about that is to say my parents didn't need to think about this for me because basically there was the television, there was the radio, and there was the telephone.

The television was, there was a selection of just a few channels and it was head heavily edit, edited, and it was bound in time when certain types of content could happen. We have this notion of the watershed, and I believe it was like 9:00 PM or 10:00 PM and you could be absolutely sure that a different type of content would hit the airwaves after that.

So basically you didn't want your kids to consume that, You'd. Send him to bed or turn the tele off before that time you could field who was coming through the telephone. The radio was the same as the tv. Basically, our front door was the barrier to everything. Nothing could enter my life.

Almost nothing could enter my life that didn't pass through the front door. Now everything can get past the front door directly into your sons and daughters and infants bedrooms and nobody saw this stuff coming. There was nobody sitting there thinking 20 years ago when Tim Burners Lee was sitting there thinking, Do you know what?

I reckon the internet's gonna be really harmful. I I'm not so sure about this idea, these hyperlinks, this has trouble a for here, but it's crept up on us, hasn't it? It's crept up and slowly but surely, we've let certain things happen and I don't know, I guess the people behind this website are thinking.

We've gone too far. We need to just reign it back in again. Like Bob, do I wanna be the person in charge of that debate? No. , there's way, Because it's gonna be so hard because if people are gonna come from all angles, aren't they? No. We need freedom for everything. And there's gonna be the other side. No, we need freedom for almost nothing.

Should we talk about it though? Please? Can we talk about it? I just don't think some of this stuff should be allowed. Or at least it's not sensible by default. There we go. I've had me rant. Had me weekly rant. Yeah. . Let's move on. Let's move on to something which Kathy can tell us all about because Kathy's been talking about cadence a little bit and she's gonna be training us a little bit in how to use cadence.

I confess, I don't know much about this, Kathy, she sent me the link a little while ago and just tell us what you're putting on here. Kathy, is it's you, right? It's you doing.

[01:08:46] Kathy Zant: No, it's not me. It's actually gonna be Ben Ridner, the founder and creator of Cadence. The guy who is smart enough to say, Hey, Gutenberg's gonna be huge, when it was still just a mere plugin and

[01:08:57] Nathan Wrigley: not even in core and started developing for it.

[01:09:01] Kathy Zant: Very visionary developer doing tons of great things. This course, it says developer course, but it's really po people see developer and they think you have to code.

[01:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: And this is really for just anybody who

[01:09:14] Kathy Zant: is getting into doing more advanced things, a power user with Cadence.

It's gonna be only open to people who are a part of the I Themes training or people who are Cadence customers. You have to have at least one of the bundles or even an ala carte plugin to participate in it. But it's

[01:09:34] Nathan Wrigley: gonna be a great training

[01:09:35] Kathy Zant: ju basically if you get to spend two days listening to Ben tell you all the tips and tricks to get more outta cadence.

It's a gift. Yeah, so I think it's be pretty exciting end of the month, October 25th and 26th, just for a couple of hours each day. But if you're using Cadence, it's a great way to, to dive deeper and get more out of the tools you

[01:09:56] Nathan Wrigley: spent money on. Okay. You need to have a product of some kind in order to get in behind the training wall, if you like.

[01:10:06] Kathy Zant: Yeah. But it's definitely worth it. And there's so many more people. Cadence is just on fire right now. We're getting so many new people coming into the ecosystem. The more that we can do to help people be successful, hey, I'm here for that.

[01:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: Is Ithe training is it tightly bound to cadence, or does it, do you know, does it do their security stuff and their backup stuff as.

[01:10:30] Kathy Zant: Yeah, Ithe I think has been around forever, and a day. And so Ithe is part of Stellar and Cadence is part of Stellar and Cadence and I, themes have been, the teams are very, work together a lot. I'm director of marketing now for both Ithe and Cadence, so I get to do things like this with Nathan Ingram too, who's just an amazing human and cohost for all of this.

So yeah it's just part of, it's all stellar stuff. So you'll see there's a gift training that we're doing, but this one is really cool and I just wanted to highlight it because it's it's really gonna.

[01:11:11] Nathan Wrigley: Sure. Thank you. So I'll put the link in the show notes, but basically if you go and search for Cadence Developer course 2022, I'm guessing that you'll get that as the number one result is [email protected].

Kathy, you're on a roll. We we mentioned this last week, but we're gonna mention it again because there was nobody on the show who was directly involved. I just briefly said that it was a thing. But let's talk about it a little bit more in depth. You've got a couple of os out. So this is WP Motivate, it's your new podcast with Michelle Frache, who has everybody knows is on Fire, Matt Mullenweg say I've gotta get the wording right, say she's the, what is it, The busiest, most hardworking woman in WordPress or something like that.

[01:11:55] Kathy Zant: Yeah. The busiest

[01:11:56] Nathan Wrigley: woman in Word. We'll go with that. Yeah. You've started a new podcast and you're a couple of episodes in is my understanding. Yeah. You've got the first episode, 25th of September, second episode third. Oh, today, Check it out. The 3rd of October, Finding inspiration in the compost. So everybody's starting podcasts.

Everybody loves podcasts and all that kind of stuff. What's the difference? What's the UVP for WP Motivate? I think it's part of the. Timing, what day of the week it's on and things like that, isn't

[01:12:25] Kathy Zant: it? Yeah. It's your Monday motivation. It's basic. This was Michelle's Hey, do you wanna do a project?

I'm like, Yes. What? before , before I knew what she wanted to do, any opportunity to work with Michelle. You guys all know her. She's just an amazing human being who does great things for the community. And she's This is my idea. And I'm like, this is my alley. Because I'm all about empowering people and helping people do more with WordPress, do more in life, know that it, nothing is beyond your capability of doing something.

If you have a dream, go do it. And so this was right up my alley. This morning's episode was all about, last week was kinda hard. Last week was, a lot of people feeling a little bit of stress. And but it ended on a very good note. And so we felt that whenever there is.

Shit, there is camps and you can grow something out of that, which, there are some shit shows around that are growing, some of amazing things. ,

[01:13:29] Nathan Wrigley: There are on there, Bob. There really are , That's another thing altogether. Yeah. You had you had the hurricane of course, and we had the government.

Don't get into that, Nathan. There's a whole minefield there. So the idea, a little one that is to say it's a short podcast, right? Just doing like little 10, 15 minute episodes and you wake up and it's just gonna boost you and regenerate you. But the, it's called WP Motivate. Are you working on WordPress content or is it like a bigger canvas?

[01:14:03] Kathy Zant: We're just going to be talking what, whatever's inspiring us right at the time, we'll talk about that. But it's definitely things that are cropping up within the WordPress community and our hot takes on how to reframe things in a very positive way and have a good perspective about what we're all here to do.

And you'd get to see me and Michelle, so we're on YouTube, but we're also, we also have the audio . But it's just basically just something to help you keep a perspective so that when you're going into Monday and it's five days of what that you find some positivity and all of that because life's too short to not, right?

Yes. Even in the midst of some of the, It's been a hard year for me. It's been a hard year for Michelle. My husband had a stroke, her dad passed away, and we've both gone through a lot, but you know what? We're coming out of it. Like flowers growing in compost, if or doing okay.

[01:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: I like it. Yeah, I like it. Can I ask, do you, Cause I haven't seen one yet heard one, do you do it live and then put it out as an episode later? Or do you prerecord and

[01:15:08] Kathy Zant: then Yeah, we prerecord. Yeah, we pre on Friday when we're flying high.

[01:15:12] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And what time So that we're going into Monday.

[01:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: That's, Yeah, that's what time do you put it out?

Would it be like, when I wake up in the uk would it be available at that point or do I have to wait until the afternoon? That's what we're aiming

[01:15:24] Kathy Zant: for so that you get to wake up with it too in the uk that Europe gets to wake up with a little dose of Monday motivation from us. So we

[01:15:32] Nathan Wrigley: usually have Cameron in the comments and Camerons from Australia.

And so the morning for Cameron is certainly different from the morning for Bob. Yeah. As it is at the moment. Okay. I d if beer get, and Bob have got anything to us, this, but it's nice to have a new thing to listen to WP Motivate space. As you'd imagine, no spaces or ongo or anything like that.

Dot com.

[01:15:55] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I'll definitely check it out. Yeah, it comes from Michelle and from Kathy. Yeah, it's definitely worth listening to. And yeah, I

[01:16:03] Nathan Wrigley: love the fact that it's the least friction piece of media in the world in that you literally type into your podcast player on your phone, WP Motivate. Maybe it'll take a week or two for it to get found in search for that exact term, but once it's there, you click subscribe or follow or whatever your players.

And from that moment on you're in, it's just such a great medium. I absolutely love it. And you've got sponsorships options I can see on the website as well. So if you're interested in making sure the show can keep going, have a look on the menu at the top, there's a sponsor us section and you can explore that as well.

Anything to add, Barb, or shall I

[01:16:43] Bob Dunn: move on? No, that's great. love the two hosts. And what can I say? It's, if they can motivate me, I haven't listened to one yet, but if they can motivate me, I think they've hit a gold mine. That be a, so I'm gonna test the waters.

[01:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: Speaking of motivating Bob, I tell you what motivates Bob Portugal motivates Bob . Somewhat unexpectedly. Bob decided that Portugal was where he wanted to live. I say that facetious, I don't know, maybe you'd been dreaming this dream for ages. But this week everything got a little step closer.

First of all, Bob, tell us about your tell us about your life and why you decided to go live in Portugal.

[01:17:28] Bob Dunn: I think everybody knows this one, but Okay. But yeah, it basically just, I. I, I could keep it as simple as we went to Word Camp Europe. My wife and I, of course, she didn't go to the actual Word Camp, but we fell in love with Porto.

And it just seemed to be the time, there, there was a lot of decision making in the background, but I think we just felt that there, there was something about the whole experience there that said, Okay, it's time to make a switch. It's time to go to a different culture, assimilate ourselves in it, and yeah, learn new things.

And yeah, we just, we've been progressing towards that. I started a blog where I talk about it, I think I have maybe two readers, but, it's yeah, it's something that I can just. spiel out what our experiences are. It's actually a fun blog. It reminds me of the old days of journaling on a blog.

When we didn't really care about audience or anything, we just decided to write. So we went to San Francisco last week. This was our step to actually deliver our Visa application. You have to do this in person. It's not like you're getting it approved. They go through it, spend about an hour making sure you have everything, all your, eyes crossed and t dotted and all that stuff, and have the right paperwork.

But the whole trip was really, we, it was very a windfall type thing where we just, you know, left Monday morning, came back Tuesday evening. So we didn't really do touristy stuff while we were there, and it just, the, everything fell into place really nice those two days. So it's I felt okay, this must be a sign, because of course we have to wait for a decision to be made.

Over the next two to three months if we're lucky. We right away we started out with a flight that was overbooked. We got there early enough and they offered anybody that wanted to wait four more hours, $600 each, and it wasn't a voucher for flight, it was just. A Visa card or American Express or whatever by cash.

And Judy said, let's do it. And I was like, Oh, I don't know if I wanna wait for me. I was being stupid basically. And it took me about 10 minutes and we decided to do it. So then they gave us a voucher for lunch. And yeah, just met some cool people in San Francisco, couple from uk, they didn't know Nathan, thank God and then

[01:20:01] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that's unbelievable.

[01:20:03] Bob Dunn: incredible. And our bartender was from Bulgaria. Had a fun conversation. He had very dry, sarcastic humor. He wanted us to take all our leftover food to Portugal and use it in a few months. It was just, everything was just very, like I said, it was synchronicity.

It was like, wow, if all this good stuff happened before and after our appointment, then it must be a sign. At least I'm trying to be optimistic. Yeah.

[01:20:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's very much self motivational again. It's such a nice story, I've gotta say, I met Bob in Porto, and to be honest, Bob, I actually think that's the reason that you are going to look, You wanna relive that moment where Yeah,

[01:20:49] Bob Dunn: I, it's just that much closer, shrink in the path.

That's right. Yeah. And I think it's also a part of it is, part of it is a business because now I'm gonna be over in a different, Piece of the world where I'll be able to, in real life, connect and meet with some of the people that I've known for years. And, I've, I've been here in the US doing the WordPress stuff for a long time, so it's gonna be nice to connect to those communities and be a little bit more accessible, as far as travel and stuff to some of the areas around there.

So I think that's a plus on the business side Yeah. Yeah. And the, and you're not that far away,

[01:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: which is a plus, yeah. I've just bought the domain name Nathan moves to Washington state.com. Oh God. Yeah. Which is, yeah, which is apropo of nothing. I'm just saying. Just saying that's next year's drama.

The day you land basically is no. Oh, that's such a nice story. Honestly. It's kept my what we say, warming the cockles in this company. And it basically means, it gives you that warm, glowing feeling. I it. How nice is it when you get the opportunity in life to throw all the cards in the air and just see where they land?

And sometimes that can be a very scary thing, can't it? But equally the liberation of not knowing what tomorrow may or may not bring Yeah. Brings back some of that excitement that you had when you were a kid, when you turned over a rock and there was just something really boring as an adult, but the kids go, Look, it's a bit, it's that juvenile fun that you get to do again, you get to start over, Bob.

[01:22:30] Bob Dunn: I'm not, We're ba Yeah we're basically doing that. We're selling everything. We're taking just a few suitcases and, we had to let go of a few things that were, sentimental. I was like ready to dump everything. Judy, had moments where she would have to talk to Inate objects around the house and say goodbye to them.

But, it wasn't, but it's very. Refreshing just to get rid of stuff and think of just starting over that way. And, we're fortunate. A lot of people have said they, Oh, I'm jealous. I wish I could do this. This is what I would love to do. But we're in a position where we can do this very easily, there's a lot of things that people can't just do that as quickly, or, and Judy and I have always been that way.

We've we don't plan years ahead. Oh, we, five years ago we were thinking, Oh, we should have moved to Europe. It's always been something we thought would be cool, but yeah. Hadn't really planned it. And we just, something sits in our brain and you, we just don't turn back and it's, however that ends in the.

The results of that, we'll see. But I'm looking forward to it.

[01:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. So Bob's new post. You can find it [email protected]. Portal bob wp.com. I'll put that in the show, like show notes as well. And you can find out about how Bob and his wife made $1,200 by standing for four hours, which is great.

I wish I could do that every time I go to the airport. . That'd be great. . Okay. Last couple of things just quickly before we end. There was a we do these little non-word pressy things at the end, and I've got a couple this week they may have in maybe of interest. They may not. First one is, this thing is called radio paper.com.

I, I don't really know how to describe this. It's a bit like long form Twitter, but with one other per imagine email. Imagine your email was publicly available, which sounds horrific. It's not that I'm never going there. But this is the point. You go deliberately to have a public conversation with other people.

So it's a two and throw back and forwards and it just gets published. So it's a bit like a blogging p platform, but where everything is live and you can see some of the conversations that have been taking place. Some of them are very short. Some of them go into the pages. Pages. You just see what people are talking about and I just thought this is a really curious idea.

So that's radio paper.com and the other thing I wanted to mention, Okay. Which is called pen pot.app, and I know. But the world, what is it? Chicken Look. Sky has been falling in because Adobe bought Figma and everybody's panicking about what Figma will become or whether it'll become a, I don't know, a very expensive Adobe property and all of that kind of stuff.

So this came across my radar. It's called pen pots. And it's basically, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's gonna do everything that Figma does. It's a design tool. It's completely open source. And therefore free, I dunno if they've got like a commercial installation, which you can use with additional benefits.

I'm not sure. But the key component is it does all of team collaboration stuff so you can look at things in real time and share things with your colleagues and stuff like that. So it's called pen pop and you can find it at pen pot app. I have the design chop of a potato, and so I've not used it.

If I did use it, I'd probably draw a potato and think I'd been very successful. But I know go and give it a test and see what you like. It looks like it's like for UI and UX kind of stuff. It seems to be That's where they've got their mix in the ground, but there we go. I'm done.

Anybody else got anything they wanna throw in just before we knock it on the head, as we say in the uk?

[01:26:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I'll I put something in the list.

[01:26:35] Nathan Wrigley: Did you, I missed it. I'm so sorry. Where were you're missed it. I know. I'm terrible. What kind of person am I? Sure Meha Me. Oh, I've just recycled the wrong, Oh, for goodness sake.

Now it's on the browser. Tablet. It's in duh. And it's on. Where is it? Oh no, that's Bob. Where's your one? It's

[01:26:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: on one building, a block based help head of template and classic teams.

[01:27:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, Let me see if I can find it. Sing amongst your, It's

in the episode notes.

Let me look. Let me do, Oh, I see it. Okay, hold on.

I will open it and this here tab and then I will open it. Yeah. Over here. Perfect. Tell me about this. I'll get it on the

[01:27:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: screen. It's so with the FSE and classic theme, so there's always some people add this this narrative that everything old becomes old and new is the new way to do, but it actually really planned to do an adoption from classic scene to more user centric kind of thing.

And this is the first Piece that lets you build a block based head or template part in a classic theme and how to do it. The feature comes with WordPress 6.1, but it's already available in Gutenberg plugin 14.1. And Justin Tadlock did a a really long tutorial in what is involved to actually make this work for classic theme.

But there's nothing that a classic theme wouldn't be able to do, but it would enable his the clients of that theme builder to modify it. A part of the template for the full site. Yeah. Like a header or a footer and not have to call a developer to just add a link or something like that into the footer.

It's a it's a way to use some of the features that are in the block theme, like the theme Jason, that is now also available for classic themes since 5.9. Now it's the next building block is using block based template parts in a classic theme. And he does it with the example of 2021, which was the last classic theme, that default theme.

And then also what quirks were there, like CSS quirks that he needed to update, and also how pattern could help. With that, which are also part of can be used by classic theme. So it's a very in depth way to Oh it is. Yeah. Grad graduate adoption of the new features that come to WordPress, but still do the classic theme approach that's also interesting for bespoke for agencies who do be big themes for their clients.

And so to take a little bit of the new paradigm shift a bit into the classic themes,

[01:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Firstly, I'm sorry for missing that. I didn't, I apologize. I should have looked more carefully. And secondly, I think it's fair to say that anything that Justin. Padlock puts his to is worth looking at.

And so as described by big it there, if you're interested in what feels like a bit of an overlap between the classic theme and the capabilities of a block based theme and how you can modify one with the other, then go and check it out. It's gutenberg times.com and the article is called Building a Block Based Header Template in a classic theme.

And yeah, go and search for that. But I will put that into the show notes for today's episode. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah, of course. And I'm sorry about that. So it's that time of the day, that humiliating time of the day where everybody's gotta raise their hands and.

Foolish. So we're going to all do this if that's okay. And we'll wave and we'll wait. Ah, look, that was really quick. Thank you. Everybody managed to get their hands up at the same time. Firstly, sincerely, thank you for joining me, You three today. That was a dead easy conversation, wasn't it? Some weeks are easier than others and that was a really pleasant mix and so I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. We'll be back next week. I'm not entirely sure who will be on I think it might be Mark West Guard, I'm not sure. But we'll have to cope with that. And we'll see you next week. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for anybody who wrote a comment. I appreciate it very much.

Thanks

[01:31:10] Birgit Pauli-Haack: so much, Nathan, for having you.