This Week in WordPress #227

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 227 entitled he didn't have his jacket on. It was recorded on Monday the 24th of October, 2022. I am joined this week by a couple of WordPress guests. Sadly, we were unable to connect with Bob Donn as he had a electricity outage, but nevertheless, we were able to join with Rem Reese and Maek Palm Maki.

We're here as always to talk about the WordPress news, and there was various bits and pieces. WordPress has a security update. Go and make sure that you get updated to 6.0 0.3. We also talk about the silly awards that we are running. It's over at WP Builds.com/awards, and it's all about raising money for big Orange Chart, you can nominate yourself, you can nominate a friend, and you are guaranteed to win that category, and all you have to do is donate a small amount of money to Big Orange Chart.

We also get into how WordPress handles your images. It was a podcast episode that I did over at the Tavern with Adam Silverstein, and then we get into the WP Drama of the Week. It was all about the removal of the data from wordpress.org about plugging growth, and there's a couple of articles from Get Ellipsis, Alex Denning, and A Rebuttal by Matt Cromwell.

What do we think is the wordpress.org repository still fit for purpose? Should you be launching a plugin over there? We also talk about Jet Pack and the fact that it has changed the way that you have to now pay for social sharing. There's some plug-in update news as well, and also we talk about a silly, very silly article on Wikipedia. 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 manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, ssl, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by Goad 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. Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, whatever, wherever you may be, in which part of the world. It's very nice to have you with us. It's this week in WordPress. We're on episode number. Wow. 277. And we're joined by two fine gentlemen today. It should have been three, but I'll tell you more about that in a moment.

First stop on my well over there. I dunno if it's on my left or right. I can't quite work that out. It's Remkus du Reese. How are you doing? Remkus?

[00:02:56] Remkus de Vries: Good. Very good. Nathan,

[00:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: how are you? Yeah, good. Remkus has got a fabulous new camera. Look at the quality of Remkus picture. If you're, Listen the audio, it's really good.

[00:03:09] Remkus de Vries: It scares even. Yeah,

[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: you get to see the full

[00:03:13] Remkus de Vries: detail. Don't go over there.

[00:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: Remkus rem joins us. He's quite often on the show and it's very nice to have him back. Remkus is a WordPress veteran and a performance specialist at truer than North. That's all I've got on you. Is there anything else you wanna add or is that it?

[00:03:29] Remkus de Vries: No, not for the day. That'll

[00:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: do next week.

[00:03:32] Remkus de Vries: If you wanna know more, just Google

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: me. Just Google me, ok. Yeah. Yeah. You have one of those Googleable names, don't you? I'm quite lucky in that I have the same, Basically if you video, if you Google me, you get this model, which isn't me by the way. And then me, just cuz Nathan Wrigley's pretty unusual.

Remkus probably the.

[00:03:52] Remkus de Vries: No, there's only one. There's literally only one in the world.

[00:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: That's so good. That's great for domain names and everything. I know. , you've read not John Smith. And we're also joined by Match Check. How are you match Check.

[00:04:08] Remkus de Vries: I'm

[00:04:08] Maciek Palmowski: great. I'm really great.

[00:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: It's very nice to have you match X's been on many times as well and it's lovely to have familiar faces.

I really like that. We're gonna talk a bit later, but before then. Mache is a WordPress developer working as a product develop, sorry, as a development advocate analyst at Kinta after hours that he spends most of the time trying to find interesting news for Wpls, the Wpls newsletter. Oreos goes cycling.

You gotta tell us about the new job at Kinta Match Check. I think last time you were on, you weren't at Kinta, although it felt like you were about to be at Kinta. You like just a couple weeks later new. I

[00:04:45] Maciek Palmowski: was almost at Kinta and Right now I just finished the onboarding. It was amazing. And I think that yeah, it will be my dream job.

[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. That's great. The onboarding was that good. That's absolutely lovely. Well done. And I'm really pleased that it's working out for you. If you're joining us in the chat, I appreciate that. Please feel free to drop in any comments that you like. We try to get as many of them on the screen as we can if they're on message.

But in order to do that, you need to be in probably one of two locations. This one is the easiest one. If you go to WP Builds.com/live, then you can comment there. But you need to be logged into a Google account cuz it's YouTube WP Builds.com/live. On the other hand, you might be looking at this.

Facebook. And if that's the case, you've got one additional step to do because Facebook don't allow us to see your your avatar and your name. So you've gotta go to chat.restream.io/fb and authorize Facebook. But yeah, go and share it. Maybe step away from the this screen, go and share it with your friends and drag some people in.

That would be really nice. And I've got a few comments as we always do. Alex, thank you for joining us. Alex McNeil. I'm not sure that I've come across Alex before he's got a picture of what looks like Stonehenge on there. Hello Alex. Nice to have you. And we've also got Rob Kens hello WordPress peeps.

He joins us every single week. He's one of our absolute regulars. And he's saying that Remkus is looking amazing movies. No. He's not lying. No, that wasn't the point I was making. I was saying that Remkus had a nice. Camera. Not that Remkus, but he picked on

[00:06:36] Remkus de Vries: what you really wanted to say. Oh, .

[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: I was trying to get in there.

Thanks Rob. Appreciate it. Yeah, Rob. Good. Cudos to rob. Another greeting from I think Remkus, you're gonna have to say that word. So that's

[00:06:50] Remkus de Vries: the Dutch name of the city I live in. That is Leo.

[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is that you?

[00:06:54] Remkus de Vries: It's not me, but it's, this is where I am. Yes.

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: That's weird. Somebody's else's also coming in from Leard in the Netherlands.

Very nice to have you. Marcus Barnett joining us from GoDaddy. Good morning. Happy Monday in the WordPress world. Yeah, I guess in North America, we are basically the beginning of the WordPress week, aren't we? Which is strange to think about. Hello? Everyone says Maya, Paul Lacey. Oh, I don't even know who, I don't even know if I can tolerate putting that

Everybody knows you should. You

[00:07:24] Remkus de Vries: should definitely say Rob's. Last

[00:07:28] Nathan Wrigley: comment. Oh, okay. Anyway, thank you Paul. Of course. I'd love, I love you being here. And Rob is saying, Hey, Mark Paul . Yay, Paul, the traitor, forever to be known as the traitor. If you don't know, Paul used to do the show, probably did 150 episodes with me.

And we we parted on very good terms, but it just became a joke that I called him a traitor every time. So that's what we do and he's giggling about it just there. And we've got mar health boats and joining us as well. Maybe Marcel's the person with the Dutch name, I don't know, the Dutch town.

And we've got Max. Also thank you Christ. These comments just keep coming. Keep it going. Rob says Paul over one year and the trader joke's still going. I know it's never gonna end. Paul and Ben all the way from the Philippines. Ben Intel, we're gonna be talking about stackable a bit later.

Albeit briefly, Ben putting the kids to sleep. 9:00 PM over here. Okay. Thank you everybody that's joined us. What a nice collection of individuals we've. Feel free to share it, I'm gonna stick the screen on. I've got a few promotional bits. I do apologize you're gonna have to bear with me for about the next minute, cuz I'm gonna mention WP Builds a few times.

First thing to say, there's our website we're sponsored by GoDaddy Pro and we thank them very much for their support of the WP Builds podcast. Really appreciate it. They've been supporting us for months and months now, and I'm very happy that they are. No. I don't wanna go there just yet.

Here's the next thing. The WP Awards, which we'll mention later. Came out a few weeks ago and last year as a bit of a joke, I set up a rival awards system called the WP Builds WordPress Awards 2022. Now, it's not really an award cause you don't get anything. But the thing is, if you spend 20 hard earned dollars and donate those dollars to Big Orange Heart who are behind Word Fest, which will come up against later and then send that to me, I will stick you in a category of your own, which you will win.

So if you send me the receipt for your $20 donation to Big Orange Heart, I will put you on this and you are guaranteed to win. So far, four entries. Me. The WP Builds podcast is under the category of best podcasts called WP Builds. We're gonna totally win that. The best podcaster who talk. S star T and owns a shed.

That's Arthur crap. That's a bit of a nod to a podcast that I do with Bob Don. Best pod, best WordPress conform, beginning with Ws. That's probably gonna be won by WS form. And we've got best WordPress CRM named after Groundhog Day. Guess what? That's gonna be Groundhog crm. The point here is, it's just a bit of a laugh.

Last year we did this, and according to Michelle Frache, we raised over a thousand dollars for big orange chart by doing this silliness. So go on get $20, stick it on the counter, give it to big orange chart, put yourself on this form and enter the silliness. You are guaranteed to win and you've got 37 more days in which to do it, you two find folk. What would you nominate and what would it be yourself or would you be nominating somebody else? Cuz you're allowed to do that. Firstly, Remkus, what you, what would you go for?

Can I suggest best new camera owner, ? Yeah. May

[00:11:02] Maciek Palmowski: still go about the best new jacket. Sorry. Yeah. Oh, the jacket? Yes.

[00:11:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Rakus is sporting a very fine new jacket, which we're all jealous of. Yeah. Okay. Best new jacket. Okay. Best new

[00:11:14] Maciek Palmowski: jacket. Yeah I'll take it. I'll take that.

[00:11:16] Remkus de Vries: Just let's not add to it.

[00:11:17] Nathan Wrigley: This is good.

Yeah. What about you Match? What would you best New Kinter employee possibly.

[00:11:25] Maciek Palmowski: I was more thinking about the best newsletter with a bird in its name or something like this.

[00:11:32] Nathan Wrigley: I like it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:34] Maciek Palmowski: Okay. Yeah. But I can spend $40 and go for, You can win twice.

[00:11:39] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. I love it.

[00:11:41] Remkus de Vries: Does yo Dafo have a newsletter then?

[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley:

What? Hang on. What? Oh. Does V mean like eagle or something like that? Falcon. Falcon. Oh, ah, get it. So

[00:11:57] Maciek Palmowski: a night birth with a night birth in its name A night we will matter. We'll make it better.

[00:12:04] Remkus de Vries: So I'm just gonna say specificity matters, man. Just does yo,

[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: does yo's name literally translate? I dunno what yos means, but let's just say yos name translates to Yost the Falcon.

[00:12:16] Remkus de Vries: That is most certainly a translation. I don't know if it's if the origin is of a different kind, but it's most certainly literal translation is the Falcon. Yes, That's as my, as mine is the Friesian. His is the falcon.

[00:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: So yours is like to do with cows and his. I am, I Hold

[00:12:40] Remkus de Vries: on, hold on.

Legion the color. I

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: think it's . Yes. The that just sounds like a superstar name though, doesn't it? Yoast. The fcon. It sounds like something out of Iron Man or something. Yeah.

[00:12:53] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. So Marshall just commented and saying could be a boat too, but the boat is referenced to the falcon itself. The, Oh, the birds.

[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. Look. You see what happens when you get derailed by a silly survey like we're carrying out here. Anyway, the point is we're trying to raise money for a good cause. Big orange heart 20 $20 a shot. It's just a bit of fun. And we'll be announcing the winners when it's all over in 37 odd days.

I think I've coincided it to time with the beginning of December. So something like that, you can find it by going to WP Builds.com/awards, and it's raising money for big chart. Okay, last plug for me. And apologies, this will end that bit. I'm doing a show tomorrow, a live show about this time is gonna be 3:00 PM UK time.

It's with Peach and Mary. And we do the ui ux show. Try to do it each month and this month we're on schedule. It should be happening. And we're gonna take some users submitted sites. If you fancy submitting a site, which you three quarters of the way through or nearly finished and you just want her eyeballs all over it, then go to WP Builds.com/ui, fill out the form.

And also we're interested in deceptive designs as well. If you got any of those, which is

[00:14:06] Remkus de Vries: ironic you saying if you want her eyeballs over it because if you scroll up you don't actually see her eyes.

[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: Hang on. Wait. No, I don't wanna resize the browser screen cuz if I do that, all of the tabs go crazy.

But if I'm saying resize, Yeah, I . That was good. That was good. Also, next to her it says, geeks in great big letters. Look at that. But that's good. That's good. Yeah. Okay. So that's the. Promotional bit for WP Builds. Forgive me for that. Let's get into some WordPress proper stuff. WordPress 6.0 0.3 a security release was released over the last few days.

There's a whole load of information on this page. You can Google it, but I'll put the link in the show notes. There's a whole bunch. You can see there's one after another. There's probably 15 or 20 different things that have been patched or fixed alongside the names of the people who spotted them.

The, sometimes the advice is, wait a day or two for an update with WordPress core, especially when it rolls over a major version. At least that's my advice just to see what happens. But in this case, I think just click the bottom, update them because, security patches are there for a good reason.

Either you two got anything to say about this, or should we just crack on?

[00:15:13] Maciek Palmowski: I'm still just fascinated by the, this sentence, all versions since workers.

[00:15:20] Nathan Wrigley: 3.7,

[00:15:21] Maciek Palmowski: wasn't it?

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's pretty incredible.

[00:15:27] Remkus de Vries: And given that the security issues that were patched were, none of them were severe it's at least a testament WordPress wanting to provide an as safe as WordPress can be version for all the way back to three seven.

[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Which is crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. Why was three seven released? I think like 1492 when the Americas were discovered, Something like that.

14,

[00:15:59] Nathan Wrigley: 15. Yeah. A long time ago. Like a long time ago. Yeah. So we gain towards a decade. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:09] Maciek Palmowski: So this is really backwards compatibility to the max

That's

[00:16:14] Remkus de Vries: exactly what this is. Yeah. I

[00:16:15] Nathan Wrigley: wonder what, I wonder what prevents 14 sorry, 3.6. From being update, What is it that happened between six and seven? That means that, No so it's been three

[00:16:23] Remkus de Vries: seven since forever. I think they've made a conscious decision that there's probably something in there that is a

[00:16:30] Nathan Wrigley: natural divider.

Just a line in the sand where can't cross the Rubicon. Yeah. But it's been

[00:16:36] Remkus de Vries: backport to three seven for for, let's

[00:16:40] Nathan Wrigley: call it the decade now. Yeah. In almost, Yeah. So anyway, if you are, if you're running multiple WordPress installs just go and get it updated because my, my experience of multi updating my sites, there was no problems whatsoever.

So yeah, go and get that done. Okay. I just wanna mention a little podcast episode I did. It was really interesting. This was on the WP Taven website. It's with a guy called Adam Silverstein, who is a Google employee. He works with the performance team, I believe it is. And he's a developer relations engineer.

In the content ecosystem team at Google, but he spoke to me all about images and I just think images on the web are just a bit magic. You shove in, you drag an image off your desktop and shove it in the media library and boom, there it is on the screen. But of course there's a whole load of stuff going on in the background, What is that image made up of?

Basically it's just a bunch of random text. If you actually see the stuff that an image is made up of, it's just whoa, how can that be an image? But the browser interprets it and he talks about like the history of how images came to be on the web, what images were best then and what images are best now.

The long and the short is start using WebP. That was his advice. You've got really no excuses. Couple of variations of safari, I think going back a long way into the past that don't support it. Oddly, this week I've found a reason that I can't use WebP, cuz one of the SAS services that I use doesn't interpret WebP.

It's one of the things that pushes my my posts over to things like YouTube. It just can't cope with WebP. So I'm gonna have to withdraw that. But hopefully I'll get a support ticket raised with them. But yeah, it was an interesting episode and there's a couple of formats that are coming down the wire, which are gonna supersede WebP I'd never heard of JPEG xl, which yep.

Yeah, never heard of that one before. He explained why that's good. But yet at the minute is unusable not unusable, it's just don't bother cuz it's, browsers don't support it. And another one called AVI as well, which there's benefits in terms of file size. So anything you two gents wanna comment on there.

[00:18:50] Remkus de Vries: Adam's on the money there's l. Close to no reason why you wouldn't be switching to WebP.

[00:19:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:19:01] Remkus de Vries: Which is why it's been slated to be incorporated in the next WordPress version. The implementation, however, is the bottleneck of why we're still not seeing it. But it's a no brainer.

[00:19:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. He his takeaway was basically WebP typically over jpeg is about a 20% reduction. Obviously, your usage may vary. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower, But and oh, sorry. And it's now supported by 98% of all all devices and different browsers. So you really, unless you're

[00:19:42] Remkus de Vries: me, yeah, I think that's a slightly skewed percentage.

Mostly because you have unoptimized jpeg and from which you will create web, which is by default optimized and compressed and, all of those things. So there's a little bit more happening than just switching. But if you have I don't know 10, 15 years of a blog and lots of images and you switch to WebP and you delete your jpx, I will guarantee you have , a lot of more storage available to you?

[00:20:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. That's,

[00:20:19] Maciek Palmowski: Sadly, not those, not all social networks can use WebP as a, for example, as an image in open graphs source or something like this. Yeah,

[00:20:33] Remkus de Vries: you have to keep your social images is probably the only reason. You may want to keep a JPAC version on server, which is which is just still the issue why we don't have WebP by defaulting ris.

I, the implementation itself is just.

[00:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's essentially the problem that I've run into. I have a service, it's called repurpose.io. It's really good, actually. I know, and it consumes an RSS feed it can consume all sorts, but I just, it consumes the RSS feed for this, and then it strips the audio, and then it puts the featured image on as the image on YouTube adds a little sort of wavy line because apparently YouTube like images to be moving on YouTube, especially if it's like an hour long and then it pushes it to YouTube so that I don't have to do all of that stuff.

But they're refusing YouTube just decline the whole thing because it's got a WebP image and they can't apparently cope with it over there. There you go. Anyway, good little podcast episode. Really enjoyed chatting to Adam, and obviously, there's definite consequences. You'll have a smaller server bill and hopefully things will be a little bit quicker.

Alrighty. That's good. All right, let's move on to the next piece, which is this one. All right. This is gonna be the big one for the day. I think we could all go down all sorts of rabbit holes here. This is gonna span three different news stories. The first one is WP Tavern. It was a couple of days ago October.

The. The piece is called discussion on replacing Pluggin, Active in-Store Growth Data Continues Behind Closed Doors. We've alluded to this drama a little bit. Then we're gonna follow it up with two other pieces, One from Alex Denning on Get Ellipses, and then another one by Matt Cromwell. We had a tiny little chat before we pressed record over here, and we've got some opinions, I think, to share.

The first one is that a few weeks ago, I'm gonna say three weeks, it might have been a little bit more. Suddenly some data disappeared from the wordpress.org repository. It was data which was available to plugin developers who had their plugins on the repo, and it gave them some indication as to whether or not their plugin was gaining in popularity or declining in popularity.

I have never seen that data, so I dunno how useful it was, but the mere fact that it went. Instantaneously without any consultation. Got a lot of people up in arms. The immediate conspiracy theories started to swirl saying that, there's definitely malicious intent here. It, then the story then morphed over a few days and people were saying, Actually, it's probably done for security reasons, which now appears not to be the case.

It was just Dom, essentially Sarah Goodings basically writing, No, they just pulled it because they believed that the statistics were not meaningful. They couldn't be used in a way that was meaningful because they were inherently. Inaccurate given that fact I guess you've gotta ask yourself, if you've been using that data over the last 3, 4, 5 years and it's been important to you, where does that leave you?

If you suddenly find out that everything that you thought was true in that data is possibly not quite as true, this may be a bit of a cause for concern. And I'm gonna hand it over at that point. What's your thoughts on this?

[00:23:56] Remkus de Vries: I think the so the something being pulled because data is not what it's supposed to.

The data's not reflecting what it's supposed to reflect. I think that makes all the sense in the world. I think the whole, I think the actual issue that we're looking at here is that this is not being communicated. This is all done internally. Lots of it has happened in closed dms. And I'm sure there's reasons for that.

But if we're open source, then we are proponent of transparency as one of the key things, then this is a bad move. And not from a technical perspective, because I fully agree with if data is producing crap statistics, then your data needs to be produced in a different and better way.

If you need a lot of time to figure that out, then by all means just get rid of it, start anew and figure it out proper, but not communicating about this, and then acting as if your nose bleeds and there's okay, whatever. I need to maybe just fix this. And we'll just see how it goes.

That's really not good politics, not good ethics, and not good working manners. If we have to guess in three different direction of where the problem was originating from, why this was happening, that's just for lack of a better word,

[00:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: horse. Yeah. So the issue that you are highlighting is just, Yeah, communication really was a bit there wasn't any communication.

There was none.

[00:25:37] Remkus de Vries: There was none. No. And even upon assisting, different things were suggested, hinted left between the lines, whatever. We just didn't know. I that,

[00:25:51] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, go on prem. Just carry on. No, I was

[00:25:53] Remkus de Vries: gonna say that, that is, for me, the issue. I fully agree that if it's if it's crap that you're having presented and people are basing business takeovers and all that based on that data I can see how that becomes from feeling guilty about it to wanting to fix it.

Moving and to the point where you go, Okay, I need to get rid of it. I fully understand that. But the whole thing is we're not a small economy anymore.

[00:26:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, good point. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Match check. Anything to throw in the hat there? In the range?

[00:26:31] Maciek Palmowski: Yeah. First of all, I fully agree with Rehs about the communication.

It was disastrous. It was just disastrous. Living it for three weeks until the moment when we learned that the data was wrong. It's horrible. On the other hand, we already had hints before the data from the sorts isn't reliable. I remember reading some time ago about two months on post that is, there was a history of one developer who saw how at some point all his data from the repository change because they were trying to fix it at some point.

I also don't understand why it wasn't communicated for a longer amount of time about how this data is Yeah. Is just bad. Just like this. So the problem that I also have with this is why if we already knew that this data was bad, why we didn't hide it like months or even years ago because we can find that people had some doubts about this.

[00:27:54] Remkus de Vries: So I think that part is explanatory because if data is there, it's being used. And it was at the time as accurate as they could make it. And I can see how that grows over years of usage. You find it hard to just yank it. I get that part, but you have to. You have to interject yourself there.

If you want to go from fully available to yanking it, you have to interject yourself there into, Okay, hold on. There's people actually, depending on this being there, I need to do my due diligence. I need to start telling people, Look, it is inaccurate. This is why we're le getting rid of it. Here's the three month period.

We're going to start preparing, removing it while in the background working on whatever you just tell them what you're going to do. It's not rocket science. It's not hard. Just bloody

[00:28:51] Nathan Wrigley: do it. The, so one notable voice in the piece that Sarah mentions is Anne h who's been on the the podcast, this show before.

Oh, and the podcast as well, actually. And she is trying to grow plugin at the moment. And so obviously this data was probably a bit of a linchpin as to what she was doing. And she said to quote, I cannot emphasize enough that conversations about what was to replace the active growth tar sh charts should be happening in a public slack channel or a track ticket.

This data should belong to the community, and the community should be able to participate in deciding how or not to display it. So this, the story is now moved on and we're talking a little bit about maybe a silver lining to this cloud. That is to say if it's gone what is a replacement going to look like?

And so now we have a new drama, which feels like. Please tell us what's going to be in this. Don't just invent it in closed slack channels. Let us know, let us have our thoughts about it. And she goes into great detail about the different things that she would like to see in this in a replacement set of metrics.

And then veto, pag offers some other alternatives as well. And they're very much in line with what you would expect, I dunno, maybe a third party proprietary marketplace to have available as data. Yep.

[00:30:11] Remkus de Vries: So I think the problem here is that you I think the perspective is here we can't disclose this because if people know the actual internal workings, they could probably gamify whatever they were doing already in a much better fashion.

I think that's the fear behind it. But that's not to say that you can't be open about the process. That it doesn't have to be all cloak and dagger, because that's what it looks like now.

[00:30:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it does a little bit, doesn't it? It does take on that sort of specter of things are just being done in the dark and nobody had the expectation three weeks ago, or four weeks ago, whatever it was, that any of this was going on in the dark.

We'll have to see how this story develops over the days, weeks, and Monster come, but the hope is towards the end of the article. The hope is that we'll get much more fine grained data off the back of this. At the moment or rather, previously, the data was the stretch between one.

How many installs you had and where you were trying to get to. When you get up to the size of something like Yost really the sky was the limit. You can't really go anywhere else. You've got more than 500,000 or a million or whatever it might be. That's the end of where the statistics allowed you to see.

But in the future, maybe we'll have more granular the idea. You can probably see it on the screen here. Maybe we'll get as many as increments of 10 installs or 50 or whatever it might be. Maybe that's gonna be a little bit more useful to people. I'll. Yeah. Yeah. So let's be sanguine about it.

Let's hope so. But as, as Amber says, it would be nice to see out in the open for more information and some commentary on it. There were three interesting comments. Go to WP Tavern and search for the type, the post, which like I said, was entitled Discussion or replacing plugin. Active Install Growth Data Continues behind closed doors.

But leading on from that, let's let the drama continue over on Get Elli. We have so we've got two pieces. One, one is contradictory of the other, but this first piece is Alex Denning from Get Lysis. It's called WordPress do org, is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2020. And he sites at the beginning the, this data that we've just been talking about.

Then he goes on to develop why he thinks that in the future, if you are beginning your journey in WordPress plugging development, he thinks that really, there is no place for your product to have a free version on wordpress.org. I hope I'm not overstating it, but I think that's essentially his argument.

Don't. Just have a paid version. If it was always gonna be free, then of course that's fine. But if you intend to have a paid tier and a free tier, his contention is don't bother having the free tier on.org because it's a waste of your time. He makes the, Sorry, you, can I finish that? And clearly you wanna get in?

Yeah, I can see there's the sweat building up on your forehead. Yeah, that's right. And now with your beautiful new camera, we can see Oh, I know . Yeah. So he's essentially saying that, not only do you not really have this data anymore, but also the ability, and he says very clearly, it's quite common to only convert one to 2% of.

wordpress.org repository users. And if that's the case, maybe you'd be better off spending the time that you are, I don't know, supporting that version and replying to support tickets and so on. Maybe you'd be better off spending that money on things like Facebook or Google Ads or what have you. He's also saying that in the recent par since 2016 in particular it looks like the big word press plugins are continuing to dominate.

So your voice is likely to be drowned out by the incumbents already, although there's obviously some notable exceptions to that. And that's it really he's saying Stay away and at this point I'm gonna light the blue touch paper and walk away and give it to Remkus .

[00:34:32] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. So I think like all information you need to be curious where it comes from.

And as much as I appreciate Alex I really do. I'm calling Humbug because consider Alex is a bread and butter is working in marketing, helping WordPress related and possibly outside companies in better copy and better conversion on on their product pages and stuff. It makes a lot of sense to have this standpoint from Alex's perspective because I think, and I think it's also one of the other articles you have highlighted for us to discuss is the article Matt Cromwell wrote, which very eloquently without saying that was bullshit is saying that is bullshit because Matt gives a very fine case of.

Essentially anything Alex claims as to be, this is why, and this is what Matt announces it and says no. Hold on. I love Alex Denning, but he's very wrong. Is pretty much my my take on this as well. That is not to say that a lot of stuff has changed over the years.

Does it mean it's possibly harder for certain things? Yes, but it's, we must not forget that the maturity of the market and the saturation combined also means we have very different very different WordPress ecosphere than we did 10 years ago, five years ago, 15 years ago. . So the re I think the relation between this and that is a, as we are where Alex tries to make it a logical one.

It's a causation. I think it's correlation. Because for whatever example Alex comes up with, there's plenty examples where it still does work. I've seen people share examples of plugins in the very recently, only a thousand, couple of thousand, and still are making very good conversions in much higher percentages than than what he's claiming.

Yeah, I guess that was my hot and bothered take on it, but yeah,

[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: that's okay. So just before I drop match it into the conversation, I'll just mention that this piece which is a complete rebuttal. It isn't a piece which you can have as a standalone.

He is essentially pointing to Alex's article and saying, Look, I don't agree with it. So this is Matt Cromwell who wrote this a few days after the get lysis piece by Alex, and his post is entitle the case for a premium sorry, the case for WordPress plugin premium model. So they stand on opposite sides of the bridge.

He's saying, Yeah, totally, it's still worth it. It really is worth it. And he takes Alex's article piece by piece and tries to display why in his case it, that has not been the case. It's still worth doing. Let me just boil it down a couple of things. Firstly the optimization in terms of seo, if you can use that word, because the WordPress repository really isn't a search engine in the way that Google is.

Google can pretty much figure out what you're intending to say, even if you don't specifically type in the correct words, it can get a feel for it and serve you with that op, not the case for the repo. In fact, Max says he's looked at the code for the search function on the repo, and it's very deterministic.

For example, things like the name of your plugin is important. The things that you add as the description text is important. And so it is possible to to have the long tail. And he makes the point that his plugin give WP still is outcompeted by some of his rivals that are significantly.

Given a different set of keywords. Now Google probably wouldn't make that mistake. It's more sophisticated. It knows what's going on. So there's that. But he also makes the point, and I suppose this is the critical piece, is he thinks that one to 2% conversion from free on the repo over to paid, he says essentially that's grossly misunder, mis, that's not the right word, underestimating, let's go for that.

And he points to figures more like 10 to 17% I think was the sort of boundaries that he put on there. And if that's the case, then if you can convert 10% of a growing and swelling free user base, That's probably worth doing. The article goes into all sorts of other claims and counterclaims and so on.

But it's just interesting. Two complete different interpretations of whether the repos fit for purpose or not. And I would just, before I hand it to Matt, check, I'm gonna raise this po, this piece, this comment by Max, which kind of, I think sums it up quite nicely, Getting a product in front of the right audience within Word, the WordPress repo is quite a challenge.

Fair enough. It is. It's not sales orientated for obvious reasons. And here's the phrase, it's truly just a repository. It's not a store. And I think that kind of feels about the right tenor for me. So it's a place where you just put things, marketing probably wasn't thought of when the store was invented.

Maybe we now would like it to be more like a marketplace. At the minute it's not no proper listings. He says no categorization. And compare it to Shopify, for example. So Match, Sorry. I can't, You can't, Yeah. Our frozen match outta this conversation so far. I'm sorry for that match check. I'm giving you the floor.

You go for it.

[00:40:25] Maciek Palmowski: No problem. Especially that the comments you just pointed out are really interesting, especially the second one. Let's be honest, the repository is a bit behind. It's a bit behind when it comes to Yeah. It became just a repository and it looks like everything Everything else is on the developers and the creators.

And so it makes a bit harder to use it for for any marketing reasons at all. On the other hand I think that the truth be between those two articles is a bit, we a bit some, somewhere in between. For example, we had cases from one of the for example, Leslie's Newsletter Glue. They removed the plugin from the repository because in, in their case, it was more of a problem rather than than the way to have new client.

Because from what I remember their number of conversions was a bit closer to what Alex was saying. So again, I think that the repository is huge. It's huge. And without the proper data, which we don't have about like from everyone, how many people convert it's really hard to tell.

I, I think that both of them, so Alex and Math are guessing on some subset. Which they know already. For example, I know that Matt is for sure guessing mostly for give WP and everything related to it. Of course. I'm not sure what was the subset that Alex was was using. But in general, and here we should go a bit to the article before about the repository data.

Of course, it doesn't have a possibility to update plugins to a paid model right now. Yeah. But maybe. But maybe it's time to do something with the repository. So it's,

[00:42:52] Remkus de Vries: I think as long as math is in power, that's not happening.

[00:42:55] Maciek Palmowski: I know, but the interesting part is that it's all possible on, i dunno, wordpress.com,

[00:43:04] Remkus de Vries: on WordPress, but those are all commercial entities.

So the comparison with Shopify that yes, was made earlier is the same thing. Shopify is entirely fully commercial. There's no open source component as such. In fact, I think if we're, if you're being honest, there is really nothing we can compare WordPress to in terms of size, in terms of what's going on in, in inside an open source community where there is from the start, never has been an incentive.

Commercialize, its extendability the plugins. Themes, same thing. I think the only muddied water here is its recommendation of hosting, but yeah. But other than that, there has never been any commercial incentive to have a marketplace because for those who didn't want to trust on.org they jumped onto whatever Envato was doing.

So com and

yeah, no, but still if you want to have your stuff promoted by Jet Back, Automatic Auto, or whoever the com, whatever you wanna call that entity, you can, But that doesn't mean that we should have a commercial entity. Integrated into what is essentially, exactly what it said, a repository.

That's it. We just happen to have the ability to add text to it, which allows us to write copy that can convert.

[00:44:51] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that this is a problem which I imagine won't be solved possibly even in our lifetime. And I don't just mean WordPress, this whole marketplace thing, because you really are conflict, you are putting two opposing forces against each other, and neither of them want to give any ground.

So the closest example I can come up with, which is not open source, truly in the sense of the word is Android. On my phone where Google have the marketplace it really is a for profit enterprise. Yeah, it does give me the results that I want. There's a bunch of free stuff in there and I know that every time I'm gonna install something for free, I am going to be inundated with ads.

Despise. Yep. And so there is the option to typically upgrade or buy a paid version of the same thing and it lists those things side by side. But there's a bit of me, which I would really dislike that model because I do love the fact that if I dip into the repository, I know that everything that I see there is free.

Sure enough, there might be things that I'm gonna be upsold on, but at least I know that this portion is for free. But equally, talking about Alex's piece let's assume for a minute that he's got some accurate data based upon the research that he's done, that there are companies that are really struggling wasting their energy and their time in there.

Yeah. I can see it from both sides. I think it's

[00:46:22] Remkus de Vries: a can of worms. Yeah. That it's probably not a can of worms, but A drum of worms.

[00:46:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. . Let's have a look. There's a couple of comments coming. I do apologize, whoever you are, Facebook user, we can't see your name. If you want to scroll up in Facebook to the post at the top, there's a link that you can click and it will de-anonymize you if you wish to do that.

But you say whoever you are, unlike WP Shopify is not hobbled by a lack of cohesive, top down, commercialized organization. I'm gonna have to think about what this comment means. Unlike WP Shopify is not hobbled by a lack of cohesive, top down, commercialized organization. In fact, WP has a liberal conflict between automatic and the software authors and vendors.

This makes things even more difficult to compare with Shopify. Okay. Yes, I think I understand that and I think I agree with it. Like Reka said, Shopify is a business. Pure and simple as there started as a business, right? It's there to serve its customers so long as they pay. Simple as that. It was Spencer Forman.

Thank you Spencer. And from just down the road from me living in. Sonny Briton we've got Elliot Salby. Having a free version of one of my plug-ins on the repo has been amazing for me. Oh, that's interesting. A huge amount of ProCon conversions I get come from that. Elliot, if you are feeling fruity and you want to give us some statistics on that, just give us a ballpark figure.

Are we in the 5%, 10%, 30%? How has that worked for you? But that's interesting because that you are more on the macro side than you are on the Alex Dening side. You think there's a completely worthwhile trajectory in sticking your product on the word press repo. That's amazing. Okay, great.

I don't think we're gonna solve this, but I do hope that it's we most certainly aren't, but no, not you and I or match check today, but it's an interesting story. Two completely conflicting opinions. They're both being quite polite about each other, so Yeah, it's,

It's too entangled. Yeah,

[00:48:25] Nathan Wrigley: What do you think about the idea of a takeover marketplace?

So we have things like, oh, I dunno, free and various other companies like code, not code Canon. What is the Envato the umbrella thing that seems to be collapsing a little bit around? It doesn't seem to be as popular as it once was.

[00:48:43] Remkus de Vries: I think it's popular, but I think it's less visible. I don't actually know the data in terms of what are what their revenue is doing.

But I like, there's so I've onboarded quite a few sites in the last couple of months since being back on the market. Quite a few of those have Envato products. And the sad part is it that automatically means there's a lot of room for improvement because I think the quality of performance is crap.

But the, my conclusion at least, and this is a of course just my sample, but my conclusion is that it's. There's there's a very large contingence of WordPress, and I'll start very carefully saying, expressing how that group is called from starting from the configurator to the semi developers like that whole, and there's agencies with I, what I've learned in the 2025 people doing exactly that.

Turnaround websites are just relatively low cost default templates set that whole thing up, and that market is pretty much entirely what Envado is servicing. And I I think, I suspect a large portion has moved also to the site builders Beaver Builder Elementor. But I don't think that market is dying just yet.

I think it's.

[00:50:18] Nathan Wrigley: I would imagine that if you are okay let's take an example of if you want to come into the, and Matt makes this example. No, it might be Alex, I can't remember if it was, somebody makes the point that if you are bringing a forms plugin to the marketplace, then maybe that skews the whole conversation a little bit because you are gonna be up against Giant in competence.

You've got seo, sorry, Wwp form and Gravity Forms, although I don't believe they've got a free version in the repository about that. No. But you get the point, there's just, there's already a ton of plugins that consume that space. Same could be said of SEO and various other things, but maybe if you've got a little niche one, which I believe Elliot who made the comment earlier, I believe his is a little bit more niche.

I, I think it's an extension to Woo commerce to do with discount coupon codes and things like that. It's a little bit more niche. You can probably carve out the SEO on that a little bit. So

[00:51:10] Remkus de Vries: that's, I think, where the growth still is. So if we're winding the clock back to 10 years ago, right? And you have a plugin, the chances are that whatever you have as an idea doesn't actually exist as a plugin.

That's one. And the second is that it, it becomes a lot easier to use an existing platform to distribute, because a lot of the facilities of versioning and deploying is, it's already there to use repository. It works. And if you have that niche, which is your pro option as well you have a lot more possibility 10 years ago, five years ago.

But in the last five years ago, it's become, very saturated. I think we're up close to 60,000 plugins now. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that's not even counting all the things on Envato. on woocommerce.com and all the satellite companies surfacing there. I think it's, this is partly also an entrepreneurial thing because if you saw the chances, then you'll need you, you'll have to see different chances.

It's just not the same playing field anymore.

[00:52:25] Nathan Wrigley: I can't speak for the accuracy of this chart. I'm just going to assume that that Alex has got the accuracy right. But this is quite an interesting chart which reveals the number of plugins in the marketplace over time. So you go back to 2018, it really does look like there's, oh, I don't know, maybe three or 4,000 or something.

And obviously that it just builds more or less a straight line going up until we get to about, let's say about 55, 50 6,000, something like that. 2017, and then a real plateauing over, Yeah. That's literally five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Five years ago. It plateaued. It went ver went up very little between 2017 and 19, and then a little bit of a rise, more of the trajectory of the early days over the last couple of years, but then this year very much plateauing against rising.

Steadily nonetheless, but plateauing out. And so yeah, maybe this plays into it as well, but 60,000 plugins to compete against. It would be nice to have Max said in the comments, the ability to, I don't know, have greater search capabilities, searching, categorizing Sure.

Filtering, tagging, Absolutely. And so on and so forth. That would be quite nice. Okay, here we go. Look at this. Thank you. You're very kind, Elliot. 15 to 20%. Boy, that's great. 15 to 20% of websites actively using the free version upgrade on average, and over 75% of my total ProCon conversions come directly from the free version.

Okay. If it was Elliot versus Alex, then you know, you can't really argue with that. Elliot, can you?

[00:54:04] Remkus de Vries: That's great. So Elliot most likely has two things figured out very correctly. One is, What is the break between free and pro? Yeah. . So that has to be done. Absolutely correct.

And the second is he's getting 25% of conversion still happening, not through the free version. So his seo and most likely his his product landing page and funnel is.

[00:54:33] Nathan Wrigley: It's the one two punch. He's doing it from both sides and getting it right. Exactly. And doing it correctly. Yeah.

Okay. So that's interesting. So there is, okay, so there's a way out of this dilemma and that is do the repo and do the seo. Of course. But it should have always been that. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so let's see where this conversation goes over the next few weeks. It was certainly an interesting little chat.

Thank you guys. That was great. I enjoyed that. Let's move on a little bit. The next one is, it's a community piece and it is to say that an event is happening fairly soon. 18th of October, it's the return. I dunno how many times we've done this now. I think it might be the fourth or something.

Michelle Fette, who's in the comments, I'm sure she can steer us in the right direction. Word Fest live is coming back on the 18th of November. So what is that? A little over three weeks, something like that from now. This page that you're looking at, if you're watching it ignore the fact that it says register.

So speak, I believe that's finished long ago. This is just me essentially saying that it's. Stick it in the diary. It's a 24 hour event. It's pretty mind boggling. , the amount of wrangling that goes on in the background to make this event happen. I can tell you, having looked at it a little bit from the inside, they really do spend a great deal of time finessing this event.

It's one of the best. I'd stick it in your diary. November the 18th, word fest. Live match it. You said you'd, did you apply successfully

[00:56:01] Maciek Palmowski: or no? No. I've, I missed the date by a month.

Okay.

[00:56:05] Maciek Palmowski: For some reason I always had a, has a, have a problem with with translating August into Polish.

It's one of those things and

[00:56:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, really? ?

[00:56:16] Maciek Palmowski: Yeah. Yeah. It happens. And and this cause that I was sure that I have one month extra, and I even started, I started entering all the data and I was like, Oh,

[00:56:32] Remkus de Vries: is , is August in Polish not translated to the Augustus emperor? Is that what's happening?

[00:56:40] Maciek Palmowski: Or No?

August is in Polish. And here we go again. It's all because June and July for some reason I always felt that those are the vacation months and this causes the problem. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. In Polish, August, is she,

[00:57:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So Michelle Frache ever so helpfully dropped into the comments.

The schedule will be posted tonight, so all the speakers and everything that's all been wrangled. Later on today, you're gonna be able to get the schedule and you can stick it in your diary and attend completely free, totally live. Fab. What have we got? Another thing to mention, it's community piece.

There's probably not a lot to say about this. It's another event, if you like, WordPress documentation team to host. Its first online contributor day. If you've ever been to a word camp or a sizable word camp, they often bolt on the beginning or the end, a contributor day where people sit down and try to help promote the project as a whole.

And documentation is one of those things that I think probably if you've ever had a product or a service, it's . It's so easy not to do the documentation, focus on the product, and then forget all of the documentation seems. It's the way for WordPress as well. But there's gonna be a day, an online day, 25th of October.

So basically it's tomorrow. And if you're fancy getting involved, you can go to this article on WP Tavern and. Check it out. Hopefully you'll be able to attend. So there we go. Alrighty, next one. Jet pack. . Do we wanna talk about Jet Pack? Shall we talk about Jet Pack? Let's talk about Jet Pack ever so quickly.

Social plugin on Jet Pack. I, we use this on the tavern, although I don't know if it's the free version or the paid version. There's this social thing which you can remote, you can push to different different organizations, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on and so forth. And up until now, my understanding is if you had the paid version, you got an unlimited amount of that.

They've got on the free version now limit of only 30. I probably said that the wrong way around a moment ago. There's a limit on 30 shares. And so if you were using a free version previously, you probably were allowed to do this. You could publish dozens of articles a month and get them pushed to all the networks.

Now, let's say you're pushing to three organizations. Each one of those counts as one token, if you like. So you're only gonna be able to post 10 things for me. That would be fine. But if you're a larger organization and produce a lot of content, this could be a bit of a problem. It's gonna be $10 a month if you want to step up.

And for that yet, a thousand. So it's gone from unlimited to a thousand at $10 a month. And rem you were making the point before we started that there's a ton of services that do this kind of stuff anyway, right? There's plenty

[00:59:41] Remkus de Vries: of ways of around having Jet Peck take care of this for starters, but I think the more interesting story actually is a different one.

Why would Jet Pack pick this particular extension, which is on the decline and has been for years, social sharing. Why would they pick this one to monetize? Yeah. It's interesting, right? That makes zero sense from my perspective. And I'm sure they could, they, I'm sure they have their reasons for it, and I'm sure they have logic that that, that justifies their decision.

But I just monetization of Jet Pack has baffled me for how long has Jet Pack been there?

[01:00:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, lots and lots of years.

[01:00:34] Remkus de Vries: probably well over a decade. I've had discussions with. People part of the management of jet pack team leads decision makers and none of them could answer me in any straightforward way.

Not that they didn't weren't willing to just, there was just no. Yeah. I'll see. And maybe, and we haven't decided, and this has been going on for years and now this, I go,

[01:01:07] Nathan Wrigley: you couldn't determine the direction of travel. It's you make an interesting point about social sharing.

I don't know the data on that. I haven't read any data which says definitively it's declined, but I have stopped doing it. Yeah. So

[01:01:22] Remkus de Vries: I I maintained a few sites that are high traffic and it's, I just have to turn on turn on, look into a specific Google Analytics filter and it's clear as day.

it's rarely being used. And if anything, it's mostly shared to WhatsApp. It's not even Twitter, it's not even Facebook anymore. Because if you share it on Facebook, nobody's gonna see it anyway, so why bother? Yeah. Yeah. Twi Twitter for certain communities has some sense. But no it's, there's ways around this.

There's I think, much better solutions. And it's just a weird one to pick, to monetize, just

[01:02:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's interesting. Match you're not, in a way. Yeah, I

[01:02:13] Maciek Palmowski: totally agree. And especially when we look at it, it's really so easy to find a free alternative that will just work

[01:02:25] Nathan Wrigley: They're trying to, they're trying to reel people in jet pack's offering this for a dollar for the first month.

And then thereafter it's gonna be $10 a month. It does feel like quite a bit of money in order to do something, which is, Yeah, like you said,

[01:02:42] Remkus de Vries: if it was free and they were sending me money after .

[01:02:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know what though? I'm, Yeah, you're right about the sort of social thing. In my sphere, I share things that are to do with this channel.

But that's it. I don't really typically share anything outside of that. Long gone are the days where I'm sharing, here's my plate of food that I'm going to consume this evening. I'm not really into that , but that, that felt like that was a thing for a while with social networks and I just think the, Twitter, which I've tried to use a little bit more recently, I saw I mean it's baffling to me because I go away for 40 seconds and I come back and all of a sudden everything, which I thought, Oh, that'll be interesting.

I'll follow up on that. That looks real. It's gone. It's just, it's down there somewhere. It happens. It all happens so fast. And my little tiny brain that's not interested in really clicking at that moment, I just let it scroll past it and then I can't be bothered to go back. So I think it's maybe a victim of its own success.

There's all of these things. There's too much noise essentially for me.

[01:03:45] Remkus de Vries: So I think with all social media, you have to configure it to your liking. Yeah. You have to use the tools to make it digestible. Yep. Twitter is a great example of it. Facebook is unusable, whichever way you use it. Instagram is be, is getting there as well unusable.

And the, if you understand the algorithm, you can have it work for you.

[01:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. The way that I like to use social media for me, that is, what I mean by that is that, so that it works for me, putting stuff out is to build a community so that, the hope would be that if you put something out on Twitter, you, because you haven't put out 15 pictures of what you had for your meal last night, that people.

Respond, or at least the algorithm will put what you are doing out there because you've reliable and you've been, a good custodian for a while. But I don't know if that's the case. I have no, Nope. Metrics on that. No. Nope. No. Okay. I'm gonna give up in that case. And there we go.

Don't. It's fun playing with you all. No, you're right. No, I'm not gonna give up. I love all this stuff that, whether or not it gets to a million people or 17, I don't really mind. Okay. All right, let's move on's. Share the screen again. Anyway, that was jet pack. You have to pay $10 a month to share things from now on.

Right three. This is just three very quick little things. I think I'm gonna do this a little bit more on this show. I haven't really done this in the past. It's just a quick with through of three plug-ins that I saw this week, either on email or Twitter or whatever it might be, who've got an update that I thought was nice to see Publish Press.

I met Steve Burge, who was the creator of Publish Press at Word Camp us the other day. And isn't it amazing how a little tiny personal interaction can make you very favorable towards a product? Cuz that's the case for published press. I really now want it to succeed incredibly well because I've met Steve and realized what a charming fellow he is.

They've got version three, which they've come out with recently. They've got a lovely new dashboard. They've got some more block permissions and they've got some new block styles as well. So if you are a publish press user, big update over there. See what I mean? It's gonna be brief. This fluent CRM has had a a version tick over to 2.6.

And honestly, this article so long, I can't really go into all the bits and pieces, but they've essentially, it can be boiled down to new automation and new filtering features. But if you use Influence crm, which was on a lifetime deal, oh, a couple of years back, I think a lot of people bought it.

They've got a new offer 2.6. And lastly, as I mentioned, Ben Intel from Stackable. He's in the Philippines putting his kids to bed. He said they've got a new block available for their stackable users. Two, In fact, they've got a I maybe it's one block. It's a progress circle. Progress bar blocks, that kind of thing.

You want somebody to get the idea that 75% of people have installed things or we've got 3000 users, whatever it may be. You've now got a block for that. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna dwell on that, but there we go. That's three little updates. Okay, Sorry, I've got some more self-promotion. I apologize.

This should have come at the beginning and some reason the tabs come in at the end. But there we go. If you're into Black Friday deals, we do our darnedest to get a lot of them onto one page. It's at the incredibly difficult to remember. URL, WP Builds.com/black. Let me say it again. WP Builds.com/black Go book Market.

Just to be honest, quite a few of the links in here will be affiliate links. If there isn't an affiliate link, we don't use it. If there is, we do. And there's some sponsored slots, WS form, Goad Pro and Gravity Forms. They've stuck their products at the top. If you wanna do that. Click this little find out more button.

There's four little slots available down here, but if you've got a product that you wanna shove on this page, click that button, add your deal, and we will stick it on there. You don't, it's free. You don't have to give us anything. Random. Can I say something random?

[01:07:47] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, please. I just absolutely love Gravity Forms.

[01:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh look, there they are. And they came right in as a big sponsor. Tell me why you love Gravity Forms. That's obviously triggered you, isn't it? ? Oh

[01:08:00] Remkus de Vries: so I've used Gravity Forms as one of the very first thousand users, right? Oh I'm grandfathered in. So I have that privilege, but it's a plugin that continues to amaze me and in how it grows, what you could do with it, and how many.

Satellite businesses. It has allowed to grow within its platform. I hats off to Carl and the team. I think that is absolutely wonderful example of how you can coexist with someone that is building something on top of your platform. , Gravity Wiz is a good example of which is not Gravity forms, but they have extensions to gravity forms.

Yeah. Which make the whole experience just so much more versatile. And there's more, but just shout out to Gravity forums. What else? What

[01:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: else is that this gravity. Perks. There's gravity view, there's gravity whiz, there's a whole ecosystem of things just built on top of that. Yeah that's a good point.

Just in fairness I do wanna just mention this as well, in, in the form space, just so that it's equin equanimity. We do also have as a sponsor WS form, which is a blooming cool version. Mark. Mark West Guard was on just last week, I think as well, so just even in the balance, but that's nice to hear.

It's always nice to hear when somebody loves your product. Anyway, there it is. If you fancy putting your product on there, go for it. A deal came across my horizon this week. I've no idea. I've never used this. I can't say whether it's good or bad, but it's an app Sumo thing, Lifetime deal on a product called WP Reset.

Know a couple of people who bought it and they seem to be fairly favorable. Anyway, it's back on, I think it's 50 bucks or something for a lifetime deal. And the intention is it resets your. Your WordPress installed back to a period in time. So it's, I guess it's a bit like time machine or something for your WordPress install.

Okay, Good Versioning? I don't know. Don't know.

[01:10:01] Remkus de Vries: It's more for,

[01:10:02] Maciek Palmowski: I played around it with it for some time, so you can it's really great for developers if you want to create a, you don't want to re, re reinstall your WordPress to, to the blank state. But for example, you want to automatically have clean WordPress with some things added and you want to reset it every time to the

[01:10:29] Nathan Wrigley: same stage.

Oh, I say, so like you've got a site, you've been playing with it, it's a playground, and you now realize you've gone down the wrong rabbit hole and you just wanna, you want all the plugins and all of that. Still give me back. Yeah. So take me back. Take me back to when I start. Yeah. Before I had the beer and carried on maintaining the website.

Yeah. Okay. Anyway, there it is. It's $50 or something. Thank you, Matt. Check, that's really helpful. We mentioned this last week, but I wanna keep mentioning this cuz this is a lovely little service. It's called WP Turbo. We haven't gone into detail about it, but it just looks like a really cool little project.

Totally free. I'm, My understanding is that they're gonna have a paid tier built on top of this, but it's in Beecher at the moment and it's got a ton of WordPress generators. So for example, if, so this is like the. I feel this is for people who've been using a page builder for ages and have no conception of how WordPress does things under the hood.

You've just clicked buttons forever and it just worked. And, but you're a bit curious. You wanna know how WordPress actually does these things and how you can do things in code and maybe make your website a little bit leaner and just have the fun of fiddling with things and learning things. So let's take the example here.

Post type generator. You click on the button and you've got a ton of options for how you might register That post type, you give it a name, you can design what kind of post type it's gonna be, give it labels, what thing, Look at all these labels that you can add what kind of things it supports. So does it support comments, featured image, author, and so on.

You can toggle them on and off. What taxonomies are you going to use, where it's gonna be visible, you get the idea, blah, blah, blah. And it's all done through a text based, form based approach. And at the end, you get the code at the bottom, you copy and paste it, and you're done. It's great. I really like it.

And that was just the post type generator. I think there's 40 more. Let's have a look. You can browse that here A

[01:12:27] Remkus de Vries: looks like a more elaborate version of generate wp.com, which I've been using for whatever since they started. Yeah.

[01:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: But it's just one of those things that you could commit all that stuff to memory.

And it, for me at least now that I'm the age who I am. Yeah. There's no way that's, there's no way. No.

[01:12:50] Remkus de Vries: I neither do i, I just know where to go to quickly

[01:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: generate that. But so you've got a whole bunch of stuff for WordPress generators. Then you've got a whole bunch of stuff for admin, a whole bunch of stuff for query generators.

That would be interesting. Creating a block is possible, I believe. Plug in header theme, header, widget, generator, sidebar, generator. The list just goes on and on. Woo. Commerce, Elementor, it's just a growing resource, like I said, free at the minute. So go and use it for all of its greatness.

[01:13:22] Remkus de Vries: Looks like they have a lot more options than generate w. .

[01:13:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And it's just in beta. I think they sent me an email. I'm pretty sure they sent me an email or somehow I've got the idea that they are gonna have a paid tier. So get in while you can and make use of it. It's a great idea.

Loving it. Anything on that match check? Or shall we move on? No, we can go further. Okay. Right then we're, we've approaching the end. We've got about 15 minutes left to go. This is just to say that a bit of a shakeup at eye themes, not a shakeup in the bad sense of the word, but a shake up in a good sense of the word.

They have decided to shuffle their staff around and as we have Kathy Zunon rather a lot, I'd like to just highlight this. She's had a, what I'm guessing is a promotion. She is now the director of product marketing for Ithe and Cadence wp. So Kathy, if you are watching, well done. Bravo. Congratulations.

There's a whole load of other stuff in this article, but really that's what I wanted to say. Also, if you are an ITHE user, they are going to, although they're not saying what the products are, they've got a slew of products and they are going to be sun setting. Some of them, this is I guess a nice term for saying they're going to stop supporting or developing.

I dunno if supporting covers that maybe they will continue to support them. But it looks like, Yeah, I was

[01:14:42] Remkus de Vries: gonna say, I like the paragraph right above that.

[01:14:45] Nathan Wrigley: Which is this

[01:14:46] Remkus de Vries: one. Yeah. They'll be kicking off a discovery journey with the Ithe and Stellar WP Leadership to revisit the brand identity since I, Themes really isn't about themes anymore.

Yeah, it's a good point. Which is, which has been I've wondered about this very well, like a decade ? No. Short, shorter. This was two years ago whenever whenever they were added to Stellar. Yeah. But the umbrella of that,

[01:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: I think Stellar is the umbrella of that hanging.

[01:15:23] Maciek Palmowski: Oh. The next, the hosting, Oh, is it Nexus?

[01:15:26] Remkus de Vries: Nexus Liquid Web. Yeah. I was like, Why are they still using the I theme's name? It just doesn't make sense. There's, Yeah it's been there for 14 years, but yeah.

[01:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Plugin. I plug it. If that's available, they should definitely bag it. Somebody listening to this will have already bought that just now if it's available.

It looks like they're says here the ongoing foundational products is where they're gonna put their energies in the future. So we're probably all familiar with these item security, backup body item sync and training are where they're gonna put their focus in the near future. Yeah.

It's interesting, isn't it? Not one of those is a theme related thing. So yeah. Maybe bit of a brand revisiting and, Oh, here we go. Michelle Liquid Web says Michelle. Yeah, so maybe we both, all of us got that wrong, So thank you, Michelle. She knows she's in the notes over there. Okey doki. That's that one right now.

If you thought that. Liked Gutenberg and you cover your ears. Remkus

[01:16:31] Remkus de Vries: No. I like Gutenberg. Okay, hold on. Yeah. You're trying to turn me into grumpy old . Yeah, that's right. You're skeptic, but I think that's projection, Nathan.

[01:16:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. I re I retracted everything I said in the last 20 seconds.

But if you like your WordPress install to have Gutenberg in it, and you think to yourself, Wouldn't it be nice if Gutenberg was everywhere? Turns out match, dug something up. It can be. Tell us about this match. We're looking at a GitHub page. It's called Gutenberg Everywhere, Chrome. What are we looking at?

Yeah,

[01:17:06] Maciek Palmowski: you can scroll down a bit. I think there, there should be something inh me. Yes. There is even a beautiful example of how stuck overflow can look like with Gutenberg in which you can write a comment. So do you think

[01:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: any stack over, I'm not trying to be in Century here and I'm really not. Do you think Stack Overflow users, do you think there's gonna be too many people taking this up?

Like they prefer the Gutenberg interface to the Stack overflow?

[01:17:31] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, there's going be some hardcore developers who just yeah.

[01:17:36] Maciek Palmowski: So yeah in short it can, this extension can change every text area into into Gutenberg. And as we can see, it will load and save content in markdown format. Oh, this kind of.

Interesting. Which is sad because I prefer writing in markdown rather than

[01:18:02] Remkus de Vries: not

[01:18:04] Maciek Palmowski: still. So the, if you are a true hardcore Gutenberg fan, it's for you.

[01:18:11] Remkus de Vries: What I like about this is that what it will allow us to do in WebPress as well. So at a certain point in time, we may have a Gutenberg powered comment, edit comment.

And that kind of makes sense if this is how

[01:18:30] Nathan Wrigley: it's done. It's interesting because I know that Matt's well I'm speaking for Matt, like I know what's going on in his head. But Matt Mullenweg my impression at least anyway, is that he would like Gutenberg to be like the editor for the web.

Yeah. I don't have any insight as to whether or not that is a realistic new ce. Basically. And and so I suppose projects like this will be quite interesting, if people start to fiddle with it and realize it's superior it's I'm guessing it's not very feature rich. You have to, you, did you say it was marked down?

So you've gotta bring all of that along for the ride. You've got to understand how that works and what you're doing now. No,

[01:19:11] Maciek Palmowski: no. You don't. Oh, don't. Okay. It will convert, it'll convert everything from Okay. From and to mark down, so you can write as usual.

[01:19:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the I'm using typically in a week, I would say I'm probably using five or six platforms, all that have their own completely unique interface.

And at the minute, that doesn't really bother me. I'm using like, for example, Google Docs, I use a bunch and that's got a, an interface, which I'm completely familiar with. I flip over, I use Evernote quite a lot. Matt, check, I might just mute you because there was some incredibly crazy sound there coming through.

So I'm gonna mute you. Oh no, it's stopped, whatever it was, so I'm not gonna mute you. So I'm using Google Docs. I'm fine with that. I'm using Gutenberg. I'm fine with that. I'm using Evernote. I'm fine with that. I'm using a whole bunch of different, like CRM platforms and things like that. I don't really s I don't really have that problem.

It doesn't really affect me. I'm quite happy to flip from one to the other. On the other hand, I guess it might be a nice aspiration to have just one editor, but I dunno, I think Google Docs for Google Docs is superior at the minute.

[01:20:18] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, but that's cause it's focused on text, yeah.

[01:20:23] Maciek Palmowski: The question is is the web want to have one editor?

Yeah.

[01:20:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And do you

[01:20:32] Maciek Palmowski: want it to be

[01:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: good? And Burke, I think where time will tell, but I've got a suspicion that it might not be, but let's wait and see. Anyway. Thank you. That's a cool little project. So I'll put the link in the show notes and you can go and install it. Guessing inside a Croy browser.

So this is gonna work on Brave and Edge and Yeah. Yeah. A variety of other things. So yeah, if you're a Firefox user, maybe not, but I am gonna this and just see what my experience is, whether or not it is a bit of a cognitive dissonance. Oh. Okay. Here we go. We've got our Facebook user who is anonymized.

We dunno who you are, but it says there's also this related use of Gutenberg outside. Okay. Something called WordPress. So it's, Have

[01:21:18] Maciek Palmowski: you seen this? This is something amazing. It's done by Adam Scheme and it's WordPress that doesn't need my sql. We can just put it everywhere as a JavaScript module.

[01:21:40] Nathan Wrigley: Just like this. Okay, so this is mania. I'm guessing mania. Kamal who really, let's be honest, knows what he's talking about when it comes to Guttenberg. We will defer mania. What I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna be able to show it on the screen now, just cause of the time that we've got left available considering we talked about this one this week I will put it into next week's show and mania.

What happens with the comments on this platform. As soon as the show ends, I'm completely unable to get to the comments. If I remember, I'll go over to the comments on YouTube and copy and paste it from over there. But man, I will send you David. Thank you. Thank you. I'll just forget, I know what I'm like.

[01:22:22] Maciek Palmowski: This is something really amazing. It's really amazing. So it's, we're talking about and

[01:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, great. Okay. We'll do that next week. Okey dokey. We mentioned this last week, but Match, wanted to mention it again. So we're going to, This is, sorry, I'm on the right at the bottom of the page. WP Awards the awards.

This is not the silly version, this is the sensible version of awards. So I can't win this one, you mean? Yeah. You stand a chance for what would you, Yeah, are you on here? The nominations have been closed. I'm gonna do a quick find for Remkus. No, I'm not. Oh no, there's no none out of none. If you search for WP Builds.

Look. Oh, it's not even their, That's a load of rubbish. But if you go right, just like

[01:23:06] Maciek Palmowski: I can tell you that

[01:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: Tys here. Oh, okay. Look, there is a, look. There is, there's a word Pres. Look, there's a podcast. Oh, yes, you can, you could click that button or that one.

[01:23:16] Remkus de Vries: I'll have to add myself there, as well as the YouTube

[01:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: channel.

Yeah. Anyway, this is more about what you really think as opposed to the silliness that I've been running. If you fancy see voting, it's open for the next few weeks. You add your name, email address Davinder was on last week. He's the person that's running it all. And go and give your favored WordPress plugins, themes, communities, whatever it may be.

Bit of a thumbs up and at end. I'm a little

[01:23:42] Remkus de Vries: sad. S. Hasn't added my YouTube channel.

[01:23:45] Nathan Wrigley: I'm a little sad. Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, Why? Yeah. Why hasn't he done that? Yes that's right.

[01:23:54] Maciek Palmowski: Especially with you with, I know why, Because you didn't have your jacket on.

[01:23:59] Nathan Wrigley: You didn't. True. There was no jacket at that time.

It is jacket. I think you should try to

[01:24:03] Maciek Palmowski: him that you have a new jacket and you want YouTube channel.

[01:24:08] Remkus de Vries: in all eyes. See, there's not a lot of WordPress going on that channel

[01:24:12] Nathan Wrigley: yet. , every week I try to come up with a title for the podcast and it's the silliest sentence, oed during that, and this wins, this episode's gonna be called, He didn't have his jacket on because that's perfect.

Okay. Five more minutes left. One more article. Shame. Oh, look at this. Yeah, go on. Why not Ben? Do it. Ben's saying, Shameless blog. Vote for stackable. Where does that feature? As in, there's a block section. Why not? There are so sections. Gutenberg add-ons. Here go Section five. It's gotta be in here.

Surely. Section five. I can't see it. It's here. I would've thought it would've been there. Oh. Stackable. Yeah. Ben's come in and shamelessly plugged, stackable. He wants you to win that one. So yeah, you can vote for that. You like, I bet. In a minute we're gonna get some other people saying the load arrival.

So step away from the controversy. I forgot to say at the beginning of this episode that, or did I say it? Bob Don was supposed to join us, but unfortunately where he lives he's got a power outage and he said he could try it on his mobile phone, but it would be terrible reception. So I'm so sorry. Bob was supposed to join us and I do wanna mention this because this is great.

He threw in as his pick of the week. This Art , this is great. Oh, this is the stuff that makes life in interesting. He's found a Wikipedia article, which is called Unusual Articles. So it's literally a list of crazy articles on Wikipedia and they are absolutely. Brilliant mind, numbingly weird. So things like I don't know places where gravity appears to go backwards.

Houses, which appear to foot it's, I saw a pizza farm. A pizza farm, of course, on the top. Yeah, I don't even know what to make of it. Crazy places in the world, which just have incredibly weird, I like this. This is my world. Yeah, this one's kind of cool. It's a principality called Sea Lan. It's not actually a principality, but the guy, this is so good.

There's a guy he lives like in the Atlantic somewhere. There's this old platform and he's trying to make it into a country. It's called Sea Land. There's like a living room embedded in one of these little towers here. That's, I think he lives all by himself. He's printed his own money and also actual land there.

Yeah, there's no actual other. He probably why it's called Sea Land. Anyway, it is a massive list of extremely, truly massive. This is gonna keep you going until the end of your days. Just looking at weird stuff there. So hat tip to Bob Don for presenting us with this weirdness. I'll include it in the shoot.

Oh, there was one called the Paul Effect. The Paul Effect. I just, What's the, Paul, Hang on that.

[01:27:03] Remkus de Vries: It's a Paul

[01:27:04] Nathan Wrigley: effect. The Paul effect. Let's see. No, not that one. No. Paul effect something. Paul, something in the lab working. Technical difficulties. Blame this guy .

[01:27:16] Remkus de Vries: It's Paul. It's poly. I missed the eye,

[01:27:19] Nathan Wrigley: but close enough.

Yeah, it's close enough. There you go. Okay. Quantum suicide, immortality, schmoo. The list goes on and on. Oh, South op map orientation. Oh, look at that. That's brilliant. It's so weird. It's just a map turned upside down. And of course, why wouldn't it be that way around? There's nothing wrong with it. But doesn't it look weird?

[01:27:44] Maciek Palmowski: Nathan? To be honest, I think that the next episode should consist only about articles from .

[01:27:51] Remkus de Vries: Undo down the sundown.

[01:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: Undo down. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing to do with anything normal. That's it. We've done our episode. I do appreciate, But the cow on the

[01:28:00] Maciek Palmowski: top of the power

[01:28:01] Nathan Wrigley: of you. You, Oh yeah. Okay. Hold on. Let me just show that cuz that is pretty cool.

What on earth is this about? It's how. Is that? What is it? It's just like a cow on a power line somewhere. That's so weird. There's a guy in the UK who has put a shark in his roof. So imagine you got a huge great white shark and you were like in a plane and you threw it at a house and it got embedded in somebody's roof.

He's built that into his roof, and he's even built like the debris around it. So that it looks as if it's just been sh like moments ago, shattered into his room. There's this fin and the back end of a shark. All of his neighbors want him to get rid of it and have been protesting to the authorities that it must go.

And he, every year he wins the next round. He's saying, I can do what I like. It's my house. I wanna shark in the roof. Of course I do .

[01:28:51] Remkus de Vries: You have this is not the only weird guy you have in the uk, but this is definitely .

[01:28:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, Google it. Google it now. Shark in route. Oh I've gotta do it. I don't, I Hold on.

Shark sharp in roof, right? I could just so that you know it. I'm not making it up there. There it is. Look, that's a YouTube, the heading. Look, I. Let me share it on the screen quickly. And that is not a joke. Look at

[01:29:17] Remkus de Vries: that. No, it's a joke.

[01:29:19] Nathan Wrigley: It's a joke. You know what I mean? In terms of it's like hard to miss.

Right. ,

[01:29:24] Maciek Palmowski: and also I like the give as Of the shark and the yeah. On the top of the website. This

[01:29:31] Nathan Wrigley: website also gives this, Yeah. This website brought to you in 2001. Yeah, . Oh, I see.

[01:29:37] Maciek Palmowski: There are also Sharks, Birds party parties.

[01:29:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yep, Yep. He's got a whole thing going on. What it demonstrates is if you do something truly wacky, you can probably milk it for the rest of your life.

I call it art because it's a sculpture. That's right. Yeah. But it, look at it, it's like the size of the house itself. Anyway, what the heck are we talking about? Is this supposed to be about WordPress? Why

[01:29:58] Remkus de Vries: didn't we start there? There are sharks within WordPress. Oh.

[01:30:02] Nathan Wrigley: You see what you did there? We had a comment. Look at that. Marcel Boatman manages to find the single what are they called? Like emoji or something about sharks. Very good. You get the prize. Marcel, for best comment of the day, appreciate anybody who made a comment. I love it. I love it when you make the comments. It makes the show so much more interesting.

Thanks for showing up. Contributing. It's really great. Of course I have to say thank you to the man, the jacket rem of Reese. Look at him. He's so chuffed with it. It is beautiful. Yeah. And I dunno what to say, but you are not the man. Thenot jacket match check. Thank you. Both the time. Yeah.

[01:30:46] Maciek Palmowski: I only have a lot of cats on my

[01:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: t tshirt.

Yeah. This is an interesting, that's not, this is an interesting, Ben says maybe he has trouble finding his house. Yeah. Maybe that sounds okay. Problem. Fixed a beacon on a drunken night home. I just, I live in the shark house. I hope

[01:31:02] Remkus de Vries: he

[01:31:03] Nathan Wrigley: lighting on it. Yeah, let's try my house is the shark one.

Yeah. Okay. That's it. That's it. We're done. Thank you very much. We've overrun there, oh, we've got a wave. Look, we've got, Thanks. Silly. Thank you. And we've done it. We'll be back next week with another panel of guests, and hopefully it'll be just as ludicrous and fun. Thanks guys. Take it easy. Are we on again then?

Yeah, it'll, Yeah. It's us again every week from now on. Same guest. See you later. Cheers.