This Week in WordPress #230

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 230 entitled Shorter this week. It was recorded on Monday the 13th of November, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined by my co-hosts. I've got Kathy Zant and I've got Nev Harris and also Zach Tirrell we're gonna be talking about WordPress, but what are we going to be talking about specifically?

I hear you ask. First stop. WordPress 6.1 has a new theme, It's called 2023, and one of the nice new innovations is the variations which you can use. So we talk about those and how you can implement those. Are they the full moni? Perhaps not just yet, but there's certainly a nice addition. WordPress's full site editing is getting a bit of a rebrand, perhaps less confusingly from now on, it's gonna be called site.

WooCommerce store owners have got lots of problems at the moment with fake fraudulent stripe charges. Why is this happening and why is it costing people money? There's a couple of Meetup courses on this week. They're both about blocks. One is using the navigation block and the other is bar about using development tools without react to create blocks of your.

Sabrina Zeidan is trying to get to Word Camp Europe and we are trying to help her achieve that goal. There is also some tools on the market this week. There's a whole suite of tools by affinity for all different platforms, and they're on really affordable pricing and pro writing aid. Has also got a tool. It's a bit like Gramly, but it's a full on lifetime deal. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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

Hello. This week in WordPress. We're on episode number. I don't know a lot. And this week we are joined by three lovely guests. First of all, we've got back for, probably, I'm gonna guess Kathy, maybe like the 10th or 12th or 15th times. Feels like that's something like that.

Always a pleasure to have you back. How are you doing, Kathy?

[00:02:46] Kathy Zant: I'm doing very well. Good to see

[00:02:48] Nathan Wrigley: you again. Yeah. Thank you. Kathy is a podcast, sorry, a product manager, product marketing manager for Cadence. At Ithe at Stellar wp, she helps organize both Word Camp Phoenix and Word Camp us. Did you do you have plans for Word Camp Phoenix for the forthcoming year, or has that all been put on ice?

[00:03:09] Kathy Zant: It. I'm no longer in Phoenix, so I don't get the joy of organizing, but I'm wearing my word Camp Phoenix shirts. Oh,

[00:03:19] Nathan Wrigley: nice.

[00:03:20] Kathy Zant: the last one. So I'm like, I'm already, I'm send now in

[00:03:25] Zach Tirrell: this people.

[00:03:26] Nathan Wrigley: I appreciate you joining us once more. Really appreciate it. We're also joined, as you can see. I don't know.

Nev Nev. Is this the first time you've been on this particular show? I've forgotten. I can't remember. I'm sorry. It. Oh, okay. That's good. . In that case, I don't feel quite so bad. How are you doing Nev? I'm doing f Fabulous. good. Nev is nev well, Nev helps digital business owners find the profit hidden in their businesses.

He is also one of sorry. He also is the one on the media call when they talk to, when they want to talk about finance without putting their audience to sleep. Is finance and bi nev your thing then? It's not really my thing. Never has been. But that's your bag, is it? Yes. Yes. Yes.

[00:04:12] Nev Harris: I've, I owned an agency for eight years, but then I just transitioned to this a couple years back.

[00:04:18] Nathan Wrigley: So you you look like you might be in a northern part of the United States because of what's behind you. I can see it's like an atomal scene. The have fallen off. Where exactly are you?

[00:04:31] Nev Harris: I'm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, freezing my butt off right now. . Oh,

[00:04:36] Nathan Wrigley: For one of the, one of the, I dunno if there are any upsides to global warming, but at least at the minute in the uk typically by now it would be ridiculously cold.

But I've, I went out yesterday for a walk with my son and I was in a t-shirt and thinking this is not, Anyway, it's not a podcast about the environment. So we'll quickly press on and last, but by no means least definitely for the first time joined by Zach Terell. How you doing, Zach?

I'm good. Yeah, Zach, I dunno if it's just me, but your audio is very choppy there. Did Kathy and Nev have the same experience? Yeah. So Zach, I'll just do an introduction for you and let's see if we can figure that out as the show progresses. Yeah, a bit of a head scratch. Anyway, Zach Terell is the general manager at Learn Dash the events calendar and Restrict Content Pro, which are all stellar WP at Liquid Web Brands.

Let's have a, let's have another go. How are you doing, Zach? See if you've managed to fix you stuff. No, now it's totally silent. Just apologies for those people watching. But just for Zach, if you go to beneath the picture, the larger picture with all four of us in, there's a little cogwheel and if you click on the Cogwheel have a little find the audio sections and see if there's anything in there, which is a surprise.

Switch it on or off. And then we've got the private chat, Zach as well, which we can use during the show. If you want to update us on anything, feel free to do that as well. Couple of couple of people joining us already. It's very nice to have you with us. We've always got Rob Cairn. Thank you, Rob, for joining us.

And he says, Hi Kathy. Know Zach and yeah. And Nathan too. Thank you. Very morning. Thank you. Very morning. Thank you very much. And we're also joined by Peter from Connecticut, Chile. He says that's what it's like over there. And Michelle, four of my favorite, oh, four of my favorite people. She said, Yeah, thank you.

And just down the road. We've got Elliot Salby as well. Courtney Robertson's popped in to say hi and so's my long car as well. This is very nice. How's it going there, Zach? Any joy with fiddling with your audio? Still crack? No fully. Yeah it's very it's basically non-existent. There was a moment there where we, I think you said the word crackly, but aside from, I don't wanna hear anything what we'll do We can't, regrettably, I can't probably spend too much time troubleshooting it cuz we're gonna crack on, but We'll, I'll come to you and if you at some point feel that the endeavor is not worth your time anymore, feel free to if you is just, face basic not working.

But stick with us for a bit and we'll see if we can see if we can get you on. Thank you very much. Okay, so let's just do a few little bits of self-promotion first, if that's all right. This is WP Builds. You can see at the bottom there. This year around, we're sponsored by GoDaddy Pro. Thanks to them for keeping us, keeping the lights on over at WP Builds.

Very much appreciated. We also you can see at the top here, we have a Black Friday deals page, which you can find here if you go to WP Builds.com. Slash Black, you're gonna be able to find this particular page. And at the moment, I think we've got about 130 deals on there, something like this. We've been kindly sponsored by GoDaddy, WS Forms Stellar WP, as well as Gravity Forms.

They also keeping the lights on at this page, but it's searchable, filterable. Like I said, there's about 130 deals on there at the moment, and if you just click this button and you can drill down into how. They're saved and if you know the name of something, you can type it in there and so on and so forth.

So maybe go and check that out. Book and market for your Black Friday deals. The other thing to mention is we're doing a silly award. We do this. This is the second year we've won it, and last year I think we raised a little bit of money. Maybe Michelle Frache, I think you said it was about a thousand bucks for big orange chart.

The whole point of this deals page, it's at, Sorry, this awards page, It's at WP Builds.com/awards. It's just ridiculous. You give $20 to Big Orange Heart, send me a screenshot of the receipt and then I'll stick you on here and you can. Whatever category it is. So wp build.com/awards. And I'm just gonna put this across your bows as well, if you are interested in stepping away.

Now, that's the wrong word. If you're interested in trying out masteron you've probably heard a lot about Masteron in the last, I don't know. Couple of weeks. Lots of people seem to be experimenting with it as an alternative to Twitter. We've had an instance going for nearly two years now, I think, and you feel free to join us over there.

It's at WP Builds.social. So the URL is on the screen. It's at WP Builds.social, and the idea really is that it's a federated network. Loads of different instances of batoon and spreads the load. So rather than one giant service like Twitter, which needs to make tons of money to keep going, this is a federated thing.

Lots and lots of little instances build up to the whole network and yeah, it's totally free to use WP Build Stop Social. Give it a go. And here's Zach again. I've noticed you've just dropped out the call and come back in again. So let's, should we give that a try, Zach? See if we can get your mic going.

He's on a different computer, I think now. Hey, Zach, can you hear us? Any luck at this point? Yeah, that seems to be crystal clear this time. I dunno what the gremlin was there, but we seem to have fixed it, so that's great. And sorry about that. No, I, we all work in tech. We know how this goes.

, unexpected things happen, especially with audio. It seems, it feels like audio is the thing which always goes wrong. Video always seems to be much more reliable. It seems to be everybody's audio anyway. We haven't actually got. Nots in the bolts of the WordPress news yet. So let's start that now. Last week, WordPress 6.1 dropped.

We had Jonathan Devros on talking all about it, which was really nice given that he was the lead. This week we're gonna be talking about the theme which shipped with it cuz we didn't really have time for it last week. It's called 2023, even though we're not quite there yet. And it's a real departure from previous WordPress themes because this one, rather than basically being.

Here's the theme, one size fits all. They've taken a really different approach this year, and I'm just gonna quickly scoot to a different article, which is this one. This is over on the wordpress.org article. It's all about this and you can see all of the different bits and pieces, but this is the bit that kind of is of interest to me.

All of these different style variations that you can use. So it's basically 10. Themes within one. That's really a bit of an exaggeration. It's not like each of these is tremendously different from all the other ones. But if we have a look over on this site, you can see. This is an article by Channing Riter.

It shows how you might have your WordPress website, and simply all that you do is you go down the menu on the left and you just try out these 10 different variations. I think they had multiple, more than 10 submitted, and they finally coalesced on 10. Not say these are the best or the worst or whatever, but these are the ones that just broadly demonstrated the capabilities.

And you can see what they look like. So here's the first one. That's what you would. With that one. And then let's have a look at some of the others. Look how different that is. That's so remarkably different. There's a whole load of other stuff, but let's just dwell on this. What do you make of this attitude towards theming from now on?

[00:12:37] Kathy Zant: I love it. It reminds me a lot of the. Starter template plugin that Cadence has where you can pick a starter template and then you can choose your colors and fonts. So this, built right into a core theme is really cool to see. Being able to really take a theme and start customizing it just as you're getting started, I think it's really cool.

[00:13:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really interesting. Also the the sort of, the way that you do it, as we just described, I think the friction to it is pretty low. You've just got these style icons at the right. They don't really give much away, and so each time you click on one there is a bit of a visual shock. It's Oh, okay.

It's not just about the colors, but CSS around borders and paddings of images and fonts and so on as well. So there's a little bit more behind the scenes, but I just think this is a. Yeah, interesting way. So I'll let Nev and Zach have their take on it if they want. I think you

[00:13:34] Nev Harris: hit the no on the head where it's about reducing friction, so it'll make it easier for somebody just, that's maybe newer to WordPress or checking out WordPress to jump right in and be able to with the menus there.

Not having to re-install exchange on the ground. Just be able to click and see how things change. I think it's brilliant.

[00:13:56] Zach Tirrell: That to me it feels like a good first step in moving in this direction. But it feels like somewhere that's the beginning of a journey and not the end. It's still a lot of colors are make a huge difference.

Typeface makes a huge difference. But I think until themes also are giving us options for different layouts and those kinds of things, we won't really see the power. Cause as an end customer, I'd be, I obviously react to the text and some of those things, but it's still fundamentally the same layout, right?

And so I think that I think it's great. I really like it, but I think 2024 will hopefully go one step further, with things like block patterns and the power we get from the full site editor at this feels like the beginning of a.

[00:14:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess you you hit the null on the head.

Kathy Cadence and other tools have had the ability to stare at a whole variety of different templates, but they're not bound by the same layout, which obviously this is constrained by you. You picked it up perfectly. Didn't use that. Every single layout that I'm clicking on and enlarging is.

Identical. You've got a lovely big ma head image followed by what is presumably the H one here. And then you've got three blog posts with the associate typography underneath. And, we go onto the next page and it's the same. And what we are basically doing is changing bar margins, padding, text, background color, and so on and so forth.

But it does feel like you said, like the beginning of a journey and if this could be. A bit more like the offerings of cadence. Wait, I dunno. You might have a real estate version of it, or you might have a, I don't know, a WooCommerce version of it or a blog version of it then yeah, that would be nice to see in the future.

I like it. Okay, Let's go to the, let's go have a quick look at some of the other bits and pieces. Sorry, I'm flitting around these articles. So in the nice new theme, we obviously had the bits that we've just mentioned. We got those. We've got the different style variations, so we've also got a whole variety of new block patterns as well.

And there's some various other bits and pieces that you can fiddle with in terms of editing. And I won't go into it, but if you've got a new version of WordPress 6.1. Gonna have to play with 2023. It's just fun to get waste 20 minutes clicking on all the buttons and see what you get. It's really nice.

Okie dokey. Let's move over to. I don't know if this is even a news story, but it's interesting, in the same way that whenever you hear about a rebrand of something, it can be quite interesting. We've had full sight editing now for. Ooh, I dunno, 18 months or something along those lines.

I can't exactly remember. And everybody who's been calling FS e and a little while ago, Joe Ser Hayden Choi, who is the executive director of the WordPress project, she raised the subject that she thought the name was a little bit confusing. And so she proposed that we ought to change it to.

Different. So she put out her tendrils and got some information back from the community. And in the future it's now just gonna be called site editor or site editing, couple of reasons for that. The first one is it was the most popular choice. That's one thing. Good to have a democratic decision of those people who contribute an answer, but also apparently in terms of internationalization.

That term is e really easy to hook into with a whole variety of different languages. And I'll quote there was broad support for site editor, particularly from the polyglot community as the term translates most effect as this term translates most effectively into hundreds of different languages. So I guess site editor, you can just use a.

Two words string in almost any language and it gives you the same feeling of what's going on. So I dunno if that's of importance to you. I'll probably be saying full sight editing by default for the next year or so and tripping myself up. But there we go. Hey, I'll hand it over if you've got anything to add, confusing or otherwise.

[00:18:12] Zach Tirrell: I love seeing, that consideration of the multilingual international sort of angle to the whole thing. I really appreciate. Keeping that in mind?

[00:18:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think it just makes more sense because full site editing. How to describe it? Firstly, you've always been able to do full site editing.

It wasn't really like a new feature. If you had the, if you had the technical skills to edit anything, you, you could have done that for the longest period of time. So I guess site editor gives a bit more of an impression of actually what's going on, because the UI for that certainly doesn't do the full Monte just yet.

[00:18:54] Kathy Zant: I like that it's simple. It's, it'll be important as I've been teaching my daughter how to use the WordPress, like the customizer has really thrown her. She's like in the customizer, and so she sees the sidebar and then she sees the site, and so she's trying to click on the site and she's I'm trying to customize it.

That's what it means in her mind, right? So I, as long as we're using site editor within the WP admin that we're actually like if you're in the site editor that you're editing the site, that as long as it like intuitively makes sense. So I don't have to explain another thing to my 14 year old. I'm all

[00:19:31] Zach Tirrell: for it.

Can

[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: I ask you, Let ask you about that because during the pandemic, right at the beginning of lockdown, I decided to teach my three children all at the same time. Cause they were all off school. And and the schools hadn't figured. Homeschooling or anything. So a lot of it in the first weeks was left up to us.

So I thought I would boldly teach them all how to use WordPress. And they found things like the customizer fairly straightforward. And then more recently I went and tried to, I tried to show them full sight editing. There was just general pandemonium. They. Didn't get it and they couldn't understand, okay, if I click on this now, where's the thing?

They got used to the customizer. So it was the one source of truth for all the thingy things. And although it was a bit of a faf remembering where to go back to and then which sub menu and parent menu to go back to for all of the different things. In the end, they got it and they've now their brain has atrophied onto, that's how it is.

So now the move to full sight editing is now an impossible for them and they don't want anything to do with it. So I'm curious, your 14 year old daughter, has she only been shown. Was she primarily shown the full site editing Capabil?

[00:20:47] Kathy Zant: Oh, no, I didn't go there, . Oh,

[00:20:49] Nev Harris: okay. I didn't make it

[00:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: that far. You wait until you do that In that ,

[00:20:54] Kathy Zant: I basically just gave her a site and said, Okay, get started.

Here's the customizer. Start getting started setting it up. And then she, I didn't give her much direct I wanted her to figure it out and then I'd help her along the way. So I didn't give her any instruction, but it was an interesting process to watch her intuitively pick up things in certain.

That I would've never, I'm, I grew up with WordPress, just know how things work. But I wanted to see how someone who is just completely fresh, thrown into the deep end, how it, she immediately installs a Cadence starter template and Oh, this is Wicks for WordPress . Which is hilarious to me too, because she's on, Instagram and whatever, and so she's seeing all the ads, and so she's got this mindset.

So it was really interesting to me to just throw her in and see how it worked. But yeah, the customizer, she saw the site in. Panel in one frame and then the customizer in the other, and then wanted to get in there and start customizing it and editing it like, with a stack.

Okay. Yeah.

[00:22:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because I've been using it for long, a long period of time. I've made the mental break that Okay. I can't actually edit the text over on the right. I'm just here to edit the way things look, but yeah. Okay. That's an interesting point. We have a comment from Kay. Hello. Kay. I don't think we've had you on the show before, so very.

Always nice to have somebody for the first time. She says, I like site editor. It's very clear. Full site editing sometimes confuses, and that raised in my head. If I go to see a client and I say we're about to enter the full site editing interface, that's what nowhere near as clear as this is the site editor.

Click that button and we'll be going into the site editor mode, which I guess is a lot clearer. So thank you. And Peter says, The editor, the block editor is still called Gutenberg by many, even by top WP folks. I prefer site editor. But FSC will be around for a while. Yeah. . So anybody new to WordPress?

What we're gonna have is the customizer, Gutenberg full site editing and site editor, all overlapping for the next 18 months until finally we can we can expunge all the terms, which we don't need anymore. And that was part of this as well, that the article that Sarah Gooding wrote on the WP Tavern, part of that was to give Ja, a chance to say, Look, if you are, if you're in the business of working with WordPress and your clients need to know about this start changing your documentation over, make the change now.

Get rid of all instances where it says full site editing, and let's take this on as a whole community. Nev, anything to add before we move on? I

[00:23:34] Nev Harris: think it's a great step in the right direction with WordPress clearing up their terminology and around. Everything like that, making it simpler for the average person that's not in it every day to understand what's going on, even in terms like security vulnerabilities.

True that's an industry term, I think that's scary to some people that aren't involved in WordPress all the time. Yeah. So I think WordPress

[00:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: could do that. It's funny, isn't it? Cuz we, we live in, all four of us basically probably live in this total echo chamber where realistically it doesn't really matter if we change it from full site editing to site editor.

You, you know what that means. But if you are, if you're brand new to WordPress, the nomenclature of site editor does seem a little bit easier. And I know it's a trifling thing and it's a bit of a triviality, but may, maybe it'll just add tol. So anyway, if you've got a product or service or whatever clients that are using anything to do with full site editing, start swapping over that documentation over to site editor from now on.

Now I confess I don't really understand this article a bug. Imma raise it anyway because I don't really have a WooCommerce store or anything like that. I use Stripe from time to time, but usually it's to get a direct payment from somebody. Into my bank account, and so I'm expecting it to come in.

But this article that I read this week, again on the Tavern by Sarah Gooding this, it's one of those moments where you really feel the pain of store owners will come as store owners. And I'll try to paraphrase it. If anybody sees me slip up or hears me say the wrong thing, please just jump in and correct me.

It's called WooCommerce Store Owners Combat Fraudulent Stripe Charges. Okay? And it seems that over the past few weeks, Advanced. This has been raised in the advanced WordPress Facebook group. They've been discussing the fact that there is a method out there where you can fraudulently put through stripe payments.

So imagine like Woo commerce and so on. And you typically, it would appear that these are very small charges, so something along the lines of $2 99 and one of the contributors to the conversation whose name is John Brown, said that he's got five websites and he's tried all sorts of ways to combat this problem.

He's put up capture and they've got. Cloud flare on there and it's in the under attack mode. But one of the clients has had, I dunno if it's one client or a combination of all five clients. 1,200. Say that again. 1,200 transactions going through at $2 99. 100,000. Similar transactions have been blocked.

Nevertheless, it's still quite a lot going through. And the dispute costs and the refund costs is gonna be somewhere in the region of basically, let's call it $2,000. 1,940, I think he said, which has got to be dealt with either by the store owner, or maybe it's John himself. I'm not really sure. But the point being, that's an insane amount of money.

For something that is just allegedly fraud. And it does make me wonder how is this even possible? I thought the promise of signing up to something like Stripe was that you would be protected by them, but apparently not. If this, if the charge goes through successfully and they say, Yeah, this is legit, our systems.

Indicate that this is legit. You are then eligible for, Sorry. You are then on the hook for a small proportion of the refund cost, I believe. Is it 40 US cents per refund or dispute? Whatever it might be. Anyway, the point is, this is happening. It's in the wild. There are a whole load of suggestions for different ways that you might tackle it, but many of them seem like fairly blunt instruments.

You are hitting a knot with a hammer and it's things like, throttling the amount of transactions that can go through your WooCommerce store per hour, blocking whole countries blocking IP ranges, all of this kind of thing. None of it's ideal. Any of you, Woo commerce people, any of you three understand this a little bit more or even just have some sort of commentary on how shocking this must be?

[00:27:56] Zach Tirrell: I don't know, as I understand it more, but we've we've had a similar thing happening since we launched Learn Dash Cloud Edition, which comes in at a lower price point, right? Comes in at 29 instead of these a hundred dollars kind of products. And so we've had pretty continual fraud attempts against that ever since it went live.

Maybe 15, 20 a week of those coming through. So it's been a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole. And like you said, we block IP ranges and we have turned up our, fraud indicate, I don't know exactly what it's called, but there's like a threshold that says, this is when it indicates as fraud up.

So we've been playing with it. We've gotten, it's gotten a little bit better, but it's definitely been something we've been.

[00:28:43] Nathan Wrigley: So in that intervening period, so you say it was 15. So that still to me is a galling amount of just. Utterly wasted money. Whether it's a hundred dollars or $200, it's, it's not gonna break the bank, but it in, in a sense, it's money that is just totally going down the sewer.

There's no point in spending that. And Zach, is this basically the stolen credit card numbers or just attempts at random strings of credit card numbers or something like that have been put through? I Strike doesn't.

[00:29:17] Zach Tirrell: I assume it's stolen because they have addresses, right? Yeah. They have information to fill out on the credit card form, so it's gotta be stolen.

And one of the things we were able to do is instead of having to incur the, $40 dispute charge for everyone, we were able to identify a pattern and say, Okay, we already know. These 20 are fraudulent. We'll, we maybe have gotten a dispute on one, but we'll just be proactive on the other 19 and cancel all those orders.

Refund all those orders, and now we're paying the. 40 cents instead of the $15 dispute fee. So yes, we're able to get it in front of them. If we had 1200 of them, I don't know , how proactive we might have been able to be, but we also probably would've noticed really quickly cuz the volume's

[00:30:03] Nathan Wrigley: not that high, but yeah.

Yeah. Yes, and I guess that would speak, you know that the volume is really important, isn't it? If you've got a shop where there are several thousand transactions going through per day, it's gonna be very difficult to spot. Okay? So we've. 10,000 orders today instead of 9,000. It's the run up to Christmas, that could be legit going through them all one by one, you're wasting money on staffing, all of that kind of thing.

And you're right. Sorry, I failed to point out that the dispute charge, so once the transaction has been authorized the dispute charge is 15 bucks, which is just, on a thousand of them, it's a lot of money. Whereas if you can turn it simply into a refund, you're. 40 cents, which, is still something.

But yeah

[00:30:51] Zach Tirrell: and just in general running a store, it's so frustrating when we have, and I think probably most WordPress businesses have a really flexible refund policy. We're happy when refund someone's order. Yeah. Never happy to pay the $15 dispute charge when I'd much rather pay 40 cents for the transaction.

[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the other thing is because it's digital goods you. Lost a thing. You haven't, there's no physical commodity which needs to be brought back to you. Whereas if it was, I don't know, slippers or sandals or all the things for Christmas that comes in boxes, this is a really different story.

You've gotta somehow get, wrestle those things back out of the the clutches of whoever's got them. Presuming that the addresses have been flad to something that you can actually take delivery of it. I don't really. The thing that I find quirky is what? Why is this even happening?

What do the, Is it that they're just trying to amass a whole load of free digital goods? Is that the point? Or is it just, let's do it just because we can cause chaos. I.

[00:32:01] Kathy Zant: They're testing cards, so they'll get a database of stolen credit cards, from some hack site or wherever they bought it on the dark web, whatever.

They're testing to see which card numbers are valid on a smaller purchase.

[00:32:16] Nathan Wrigley: So 2 99, does that sort of fit in some sort of area of, It's something, but it's not nothing. It looks like it could be.

[00:32:25] Kathy Zant: Yeah. So if it works on 2 99, is it gonna work on 2,999 on a really expensive camera that they can then buy and then sell?

So it's just, they're testing the card to see if it's valid because they want to be able to buy goods that they can then resell. And that's how these criminals make money. There's a new service from CloudFlare called Turn Style, and I don't know if Elliot's still in the chat, but he's got a plugin that brings turns style into Word Pro.

And I haven't tested it or anything, but I'm really, it's a, it's an alternative to recapture and I'm really interested to see if turns style is more effective at. Snapping, these types of things. I'm very, I don't know. I'm throwing it out there. Somebody test it.

[00:33:13] Nathan Wrigley: Let me know how it works. Elliot.

Elliot was mention, we mentioned it on the show a couple of weeks ago, and he was in the comments, He's yeah, it's a free plugin. He says it'll always be, Oh yeah. He says yes. He's here. He says it'll always be free and it works with a whole slew of things already. I dunno if Elliot's got a pat on or anything like that where he wants to, take donations to, to have it do more in the future.

Obviously the time and investment, but it works with all sorts of plugin solutions for forms and WooCommerce and all those kind of things. Elliot, have you got any thoughts on whether or not it is actually more successful in blocking this stuff? Cloud, not CloudFlare. Stripe themselves have a technology, which I believe is called radar.

Which is like their advanced fraud spotting technology. And the article makes the point that up until last year that technology was free. You could just deploy it anywhere for nothing. Whereas now there's a cost associated with it. But yeah, so I dunno if your banks in the US work like this, but about a year and a half ago now pretty much every transaction that I do online, , they it.

So you put the transaction through and then a message comes up on the screen and it says where you've got to click something on your banking app to make the transaction actually take place. So you know a bit like when you log into Google or something, if you've logged in, if you're in a new browser, you've never logged into Google, it says go to your mobile phone and click yes, and then we're gonna show you three numbers.

Pick one of those, number that matches the one that we are showing you on the screen that's now. Banks here do for more or less every transaction because they realize the friction to that is so low.

[00:35:00] Zach Tirrell: Yeah. That's called 3D secure too. Yeah. And yeah, it's become required in a bunch of countries.

[00:35:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Yep. I would imagine it's required here because even the most trivial of things I have to do it for in, in physical locations, obviously, for obvious reasons, they must have been through that and they can decline to, to put that on because there you are, they've probably got you on CCTV and all that kind of thing, but anything which is done over the internet, even if it's a teeny tiny amount of money, You have to go and click that button and say, on my bank I use a bank called Staling op.

It pops, it completely takes over the phone. So it doesn't matter what you're doing, if you're reading your email, it just takes over the phone cuz it knows this is the most important thing that's about to happen. And you either click yes or you click no. And in that way you can make things come or go. It feels like that's the perfect solution to this.

Maybe I don.

[00:35:57] Nev Harris: The one thing about something like Zach said there, the, if before you can dispute something, this is how it's supposed to work. With Visa, Mascar, America's arrest, before you dispute something, you have to have made an attempt to reach out to the vendor and get a refund. And then if you're unhappy with the vendors, Solution to that problem, then you have the dispute as an option.

A lot of people jump right to the disputes, and so that brings back a charge. And $15 is a good charge. I've seen up 30, $40. So with different processors, but before you're hit with that charge, you're supposed to be given you're required to be given the OP opportunity to Fix that on your own.

So you're get, if I was getting a thousand, some charges like that, a thousand some dispute charges. I'm having a serious problem with the with the with Visa, MasterCard slash American Express for putting them through and not requiring 'em reach out to me. If it's just one, I'm probably not gonna complain that much cuz it's probably not worth the hassle if it gets into thousands of dollars

[00:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: a month.

Yeah. A couple of comments of common Rob can says he, Oh, sorry Rob, I've clicked on the comment, the first one's wrong. So dealing with Elliot's form, he says Rob can, says that he's testing turns style with WS form. Yeah, we have Mark West out on the show quite a lot, and he's the creator of WS form he built in.

Compatibility with turns style weeks ago. In fact, that was the first time I'd ever heard of it. So you can use it on there for free. Although Elliot's plugin, I believe also covers WS form could be wrong. And the banking system in Canada, at least in Rob's experience, doesn't work that way yet. Yeah, I remember seeing it for the first time and actually being a bit bold over by it and thinking, is that.

Just thinking, why is my bank suddenly stick up on notification? That seems weird. And then, because it's now completely, it's the way you have to do absolutely everything, then now I'm completely used to it. Okay. And Elliot's back saying I'm using it on a bunch of sites and it seems to be working great so far.

Okay. Thank you for making the time to do it. Yeah. Okay, great. It brings I hope it's not. Go on ne I

[00:38:23] Nev Harris: was just, It brings up an interesting point, like like you put a step in the middle of the transaction and do people then back out of transactions. It's like everything is timed, everything has three seconds longer to site, you're sales, all these kind of things.

So is the cost of these fraudulent transactions worth, like the cost of the time's gonna take and the extra step's gonna take, making you verify that transaction at one? At what point do you have a swap off on.

[00:38:55] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it's interesting because my behavior has modified, so I very often have no idea where my phone is, that's just typical of me.

I'm fairly forgetful. I put the phone down and then I go and just do other stuff and then, you know that thing where you ask somebody else in the house, Can you just phone my phone? And then it's, where is it? Everybody go hunt the phone. Now if I'm doing any kind of e-commerce transaction, I've now become habituated to have the phone next to.

When I click by now, and it didn't happen by design. It's just become part of my, I just think there's no point in clicking by now because I know I'm just gonna have this mad hunt for my phone. So I hunt for the phone first, get the phone, and then click by now. Yes, but I get the point, any impediment to making a sale.

But it, Yeah, cuz I just see it as that's helpful. I see that as a really helpful technology. That's really helpful. Yeah.

[00:39:53] Nev Harris: It's I, yeah, I think it's really helpful. But some, it's like, why does the grocery store have the milk in the stuff in a cooler that doesn't have a door on it?

Because they'll sell, if they put a door on it, they're gonna sell less. So it's worth it for them to, Cool the whole store to sell more. .

[00:40:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah, that's that's interesting. Yeah. Just I don't know if the UK is a strange example, but yeah, those little sort of terminal type transactions, they're now.

Absolutely everywhere. A year ago, literally 12 months ago, it was fairly uncommon to be able to pay on the phone. You'd have to ask that question, Can I pay on the phone Now? I would say that 99.9% of bricks and mortar places have it. And I was walking in town not that long ago where I. The bosca, the guy playing the guitar had a terminal so that you could, You didn't even have to flick a coin at him.

It was like you could just, there was a sign that he'd got pointing to his terminal and you could go and choose it. Amount. Dude, with your, Just thought him a long way, haven't we? We've come a poor guy's gotta pay tax on it though. Suddenly , but there you go. Okie dope. Yeah. Yeah, let's have a look at Rob cans.

No, we'll leave that comment there. Okay, let's move on. Couple of events to mention. We love mentioning events. There's a couple going on this week. The first one, these are both meat top events. This one's hosted by Wes Theron. Let me see if I can make that message go away. There we go. This is the first one that we're mentioning.

It's called Using the Navigation Block. And this event, which is happening November the 14th, so it's later today, says 9:00 PM gmt. So you've got a few hours if you want to sign up for this. It's at meetup.com. Just go search for using the navigation block. And it says, Let's explore how the navigation, how to use the navigation block together.

The navigation block is a new advanced block that enables you to edit your site's menu, both in terms of structure and design. Gotta say it's a fairly confusing interface for complete novices to WordPress. So if that's you, go and check it out. It'll probably be available after the. And another one let me make that go away as well.

I confess I didn't see the first part of this, but this is Jonathan Boer. He's been on the show before. And it's his second part. If you are into blocks, but you don't want to learn, react then this might be of use WordPress development livestream, developing blocks without React part two. And I genuinely don't know how he's gonna do that without react.

So that could be. Really interesting one as well. Anything to say about that? If not, we'll move on. Okie doke. We will, in that case, move on. Okay. I, let's hope Sabrina takes this in the in the way in which it is meant. Sabrina Zan, I dunno if Sabrina. She's she's a WordPress developer.

She's been on this show. Quite a lot of times and we did a little series together and she is hoping to go to Word Camp Europe this year and she put out a tweet, which has been consumed by my Master Don Feed. And it says, last year I was leading Word Camp Europe content team, and I'm honored to do so again for Word Camp Europe 2023 and Athens.

I am looking for sponsorship or a grant, if you will. Do you happen to know a company that might want to support my work as an EU organizer? Tag them please. Let me show you what it looks like on Twitter. Sabrina's handle is at Sabrina. Underscore Zan, which is Z E I D A N, at Sabrina underscore Zan.

And if you work for a company that have these philanthropic arms and want to put some money in the pot to get Sabrina there, I'm sure she'd be. Enormously grateful. Yeah, I just thought we'd raise that. Have any of you guys going to Word Camp Europe this year, or is anybody going, I don't mean this year, next year or is, are any of you guys going to Word Camp Asia?

It's about the most exciting thing that's happened in the WordPress space in years. Word Company in Asia. Go on. Anybody going?

[00:44:28] Zach Tirrell: No, I am not going to Asia, although we have a few of our team members that are in Asia that'll be there. So that's

[00:44:35] Nathan Wrigley: exciting. Good. I have to ask, how does that selection process work, and is there fighting

[00:44:43] Zach Tirrell: in that particular instance?

They were already going, they're in the region and they were very excited to have a word camp. More of an

[00:44:51] Nathan Wrigley: individual. I'm really, I would love to go. I don't suppose for a moment that I will be going, but I would really love to go just to just to see what it's, what the word camp scene would be like in that part of the world.

I'm sure the makeup of the audience will be really interesting, different, a whole bunch of new people to meet and yeah, and just getting to see a bit of Thailand and Bangkok would be nice. You shook your head. Kathy, you are not going, What about you? Never you.

[00:45:21] Nev Harris: I'm not going, but I will make a comment on Sabrina, though.

I think she is an amazing person that really would deserve this. She's she lives in Ukraine and when all this started happening with Ukraine, she had to move away from the country while she was organizing more camp. And I don't know who that word can't be you, but that was a phenomenal event.

And it wasn't just her planning it, but, the, her ability to like execute at such a high level with her whole world falling apart. How am I gonna hang now? And I can't work that day, and she yeah. So I think she's well

[00:46:03] Nathan Wrigley: worth a sponsor. Yeah, that's so kind. So just contact Sabrina directly if you've got the capacity to do that.

I'm sure she'd be grateful of any bits and pieces. Yeah, I think a worthy person that would be really nice. I'm gonna mention this article, and unless one of you has. The technical expertise to explain it carefully and thoughtfully. I'm just literally gonna mention it and then move away from it.

It's it's by Justin Tablo and it's over on Gutenberg Times. It seems to be where he's comfortable writing nowadays. You'll probably remember he did years over at WP Tavern where he belted out content. Like a open force. It was absolutely absurd. And and now he's he's working with automatic and still wishing to write.

So I've seen a couple of pieces of his over on the Gutenberg Times. It's called a walkthrough of layout classes in WordPress 6.1. And if this subject interests you, you're keeping an eye on all of the different changes that WordPress 6.1 has brought to the table. I could get boring and a bit nerdy.

I won't bother, but I'm just giving him a hat tip to say, go and check out that article. I'll link to it in the show notes, right? Anybody wanna mention that or shall I move on? Okay. I've got a couple of deals that I want to mention this week. If you are a I'm guessing most of you have got squirreled away, an Adobe license of one type or another.

I stopped using Adobe's products, Oh, I don't know, maybe five years ago or something like that. I came across this suite called Affinity. You ever heard of Affinity? Any? You ever use their suite? Okay. No. Stop what you're doing. If you are working with a team, and everybody's on Adobe, don't bother.

But if you have if you are just doing things that you can manage in house or there's only a small team, there's three products. They're called Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher, and I dare say they do 99. Of everything that you would get from the equivalent tools on the creative, what's it called?

Creative Cloud or something? The Adobe Creative Cloud. Yeah. The nice thing here is they're fully mature, right? This is not fly by night software. They've been around for a long time. They do all the things, but the payment model is totally different. You basically pay one time and then you've got it until the next major upgrade.

Considering I've been using them for about five years we've been on V one, although it was never called V one. I didn't know there was a V two even in the offing. I paid, I don't know, $29 or something for each of those. And I can use them on Mac, I can use them on Windows and I can use them on iOS.

You get all the platforms. You don't pay for a iOS license separately. It's the whole thing. And at the minute it's 89 pounds. So let's say it's $89. It's probably very similar. If you wanna buy all of them because they're celebrating their rollout. I guess maybe it's a Black Friday type of thing.

I'm not really sure, but. Yeah. Totally worth checking out. And there you go. Rob Cairns is backing me up. It's an amazing deal. The, I, yeah, I don't have an iPad, so I'm not really sure how good that deal actually would be for the iPad, but for the other bits and pieces, it's really great. No, no takers on the show.

It doesn't look like nobody's using Affinity. Nobody's gonna try the changeover. . I might be

[00:49:55] Zach Tirrell: curious. I. I don't love paying the Adobe prices. I don't do a ton with photo, thankfully. I have a very talented design team , that works with us. That makes that a whole lot easier. But this looks like

[00:50:10] Nathan Wrigley: a great deal.

Oh, and the nice thing is I feel like at this pricing for a design team, it would be really fairly affordable to get the whole team on it. Banking on the fact that, you might get four or five years worth of of updates out of it and the, it looks like the V1 version is still getting updated anyway, so even though they've just launched v2, the V1 version got some updates just the other day.

I dunno if it was to, maybe the update was just to stick the ads in for the V2 version. I don't really know, but Yeah. Totally worth checking out. So Jeff. Hello Jeff. I'm not sure we've had Jeff before Jeff win one. I use Affinity myself. It's an outstanding deal. Some of the reviews I've read say it's better than Photoshop.

Yeah, I can't really speak to that cuz I had a Photoshop license. And do you know that feeling when you just, that it could do a billion things and you only need it for. That was kind of me. It was like, remove the background. Okay. And then remove the background and then remove the background.

And that was basically what I did. It does all of that good stuff. Yeah. Totally worth checking out. Hello Ben. Nice to have you with us. Ben's the Ben's the lead developer over it. Stackable. Hi Ben. How you doing? Okay, that's one deal. And then the final thing that I've got today, so we'll probably end up having a fairly short show this time around, is if you use, Do you like Grammarly?

Anybody use Grammarly then? Yeah. Love it. Can I? Yeah. Okay. So here's me trying to upset the apple cart again. First of all, I'm trying to get you away from Adobe's products. Now I'm trying to get you away from Grammarly. Let me just pop it on the screen. This one is called, Come on. This one's arrival called pro writing aid.

And as I've, I had Grammarly for ages, then I discovered pro writing aid. I found that I could pay a lifetime deal for it. So that's what I did. And they have brought back their lifetime deal. Again, just for now, I guess it's a black right Friday kind of thing. It appears that you pay a hun hundred 99 pounds 50, so let's call it $200.

It'll be something like that and you get the full tool. And as far as I can tell, it does absolutely everything that Gramly does equally well. It's, Everywhere in the browser it works particularly well with a Chrome extension or a whatever browser you're using, type of extension. They've got a beater version of the Mac Everywhere app.

They've got a Windows equivalent and it really doesn't just follows you around everywhere and helpfully suggest things. You can give it writing style I dunno, I wanna be salesy today and I wanna be a bit more professional this day. And it'll, tweak it all and figure out all the bits and pieces.

So yeah, 200 bucks. For pro writing aid. If you're fancy having a look at that, I wonder if I can get anybody to to move over to pro writing aid. Yeah. Dennis is saying he loves Grammarly .

[00:53:16] Nev Harris: I think you got me .

[00:53:18] Zach Tirrell: The price is real tempting. I love the idea of being able to get a lifetime payment deal is

[00:53:25] Nathan Wrigley: grammarly's not.

Yeah, so the, it really does work everywhere. Plus they've got something equivalent to Google Docs. If you wanna do your write, I dunno if Grammarly has this, they, they didn't when I was using it. If you wanna do your writing in their tool, you can have a Google Docs interface. It integrates perfectly with, Everything.

If there's a text area on your website, it steps in and interrupts you. You can obviously turn it off or turn it on, what have you, but it's, yeah, it's great. So this is pro writing aid. Let me just put it back on the screen. 50% off looks like you've got 14 days. So by my reckoning, I've probably saved everybody about $300 just now

So go and get affinity, whatever. All the design tools and

[00:54:10] Kathy Zant: cowriting, I actually really like that they have their own writing tool because, Just from privacy and I stopped using Grammarly because of privacy concerns. Like I don't want what I'm writing in Google Docs or in my email to go to some other place, so I like to have things segmented out.

So the fact that they have their own writing tool and that would help me support. What I'm saying in that tool that I could then copy paste into my other tools and keep, the salty food in one side and the sweet food on the other. I that idea. Yeah. Let me just

[00:54:44] Nathan Wrigley: see if I can get it.

Get it up on the screen. I'm having a real difficulty. I'm guessing it's at pro writing a.com. I'm trying to see if I can actually log in and show you what it looks like. Let's see if this will work. Da. It says my username is wrong. That's difficult. Sorry. You carry on talking ne it sounded like you.

[00:55:03] Nev Harris: No, I was just gonna say, I think you made a an excellent financial argument for listening to the show because in, if you,

[00:55:10] Nathan Wrigley: that's the first time ever.

[00:55:14] Nev Harris: What else you gonna do today to make an hour? This is the most profitable hour of your day.

[00:55:20] Nathan Wrigley: So let me see. Okay, so here you go. So I I'll just start an untitled report and I'll show you on the screen, give you an idea of how it works.

So bear in. This is not how you would typically interact with it. Typically it's working in WordPress on each of the paragraph blocks or whatever it is that you might be working in. And if I just, I'll just delete that text. It was about a podcast I was doing the other day. So this is the tool.

And you can see that you have the option to, you can change the different sort of style of your writing. You can have a, this so us embedded over the top. It will check for overused words if you're being lazy with different kind of words and all of that kind of stuff. You can alter the structure, the length, the transition, the readability.

I don't know what that means. The stickiness of it shows sentences in your writing, which is sticky or otherwise. If you've overused, cliche. If your diction isn't quite on, if you've got pronouns which you've, you've accidentally slipped up with alliteration and then a whole load of other things.

Homonyms, consistency, acronyms, dialogue, pacing, sensory house and plagiarism tools. They're all built in and this is just the tool that you use online. So there. Go get it. That's all I'm saying. I think that's all I've got to say this week, unless anybody else had something in the show notes that they wanted to add, we'll call it a day.

We're having an early finish. We normally finish about half an hour later than today, but anything that you put in the show notes that I missed, Cathy or Nev or Zach, We're all good. Okay. In which case it's time. The time has arrived for the humiliation, I'm afraid. . Each each week I do a little thing.

Where would you mind, Would everybody just give us a wave? We do this and we try to get everybody Yeah. Look at that. We do it all at the same time. Perfect. Thank you very much indeed. We'll be back next week. I've forgotten who's gonna be on the show, but for this week I'm gonna make a big thank you to Kathy.

Thank you very much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. This is fun. You're welcome. Yeah. And to Nev, thank you very much. Great to be here. Thank you. And to Zach also, thanks very much for joining us this week. We'll be back, like I said, next week. And you guys, hopefully you'll come on another time.

That will be really great. Have a good day. Bye.