This Week in WordPress #235

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 235 entitled Nathan Butcher's Names. It was recorded on December the 19th, which is a Monday 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined this week by three very special guests. It's our last episode before Christmas, so it's a bit special. We have Michelle Frache, we have rem, and we also have Tao Ver Shot.

What are we here for? It's called this Weekend WordPress, so we talk. About WordPress rather a lot. First up, the state of the word address was delivered by Matt Mullenweg. Michelle was there in New York this week. So we talk about all of the different bits and pieces that he mentioned, including the new WP Sandbox Project, which enables you to launch WordPress literally.

Inside your browser. It's pretty extraordinary. Tao tells us all about the fact that Yost SEO Free now has the included inclusive language analysis. That's a really nice adventure that they've taken us on. Gutenberg 14.7 has got some nice new features, which we talk about. 1.6 million euros is the price if you want to take over the Mail Chimp for WordPress plugin.

It's interesting having those numbers out in the open, so we talk about that. WP Gives A Hand is a project, which during the course of the next week, will hope to get companies donating some of their profits to worthy causes. We also talk about the fact that Cadence is on a clip. 200,000 installs for the theme and word fence has decided to free up their vulnerability database for commercial and personal use as well.

It's all coming up next on this week. In WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by 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. Invoice clients and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/WP Builds,

Ah, comfortable pair of old shoes in it. Christmas comes around we're on this weekend. WordPress two kind of feels like I'm on this. We've had two weeks off actually because I've been a poorly little chap and so I'm really glad I'm back in the way of things.

Somebody's got a lot of noise going on in the background now. I dunno who that is. It's fixed. Oh, is it? Okay, good. Thank you. Yeah, so here we are the week before Christmas. I appreciate anybody who sent me some gut messages. That's really you. Michelle today is in need of those vibes as well cause she's not feeling particularly well this morning.

But let's just go round the panel and introduce everybody first of all. Hi there, Michelle. How are you doing? Honestly, you are right.

[00:03:16] Michelle Frechette: I've been better, but I am I'm a trooper. I'm gonna power through .

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate you joining us today. Michelle, Chet, if you don't know her then where frankly have you been living?

She is the community, sorry. She's the director of community engagement for Stellar WP at LiquidWeb. In addition to her work there, Michelle is the podcast barista at w. Coffee talk.com. Co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Career Pages. She's also the president of the board of Big Orange chart.org, director of Community Relations and contributor at Post Status.

I'm gonna take a breath author, business coach, and frequent organizer and speaker at Word Camp Events. Michelle lives outside Rochester, New York, which was handy for the state of the word this week, where she's an avid nature photographer and you can find out more about [email protected].

You went there this week, right? You actually attended Invite? I did, yeah. Was it an invite thing or did you just, could you invite yourself if you like? I

[00:04:15] Michelle Frechette: got invited. . I was one of the people that was invited. And I always, and of course that's a huge honor to be able to say this was an invitation I didn't have to ask to be invited.

Nice. It was very cool. Yeah. Very nice. One of the little perks of doing all the stuff I did. Yeah.

[00:04:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you do a lot. As we just heard. And he hadn't been with us for a while. We got taco back. We managed to drag him back in. What? Yes, taco was a regular for absolute ages and then he had to step away cuz like your calendars got all muddled up, didn't they?

Your Monday, which was free, became a Monday, which was busy or something. Was that right?

[00:04:53] Taco Verdonschot: Yep. Yeah. There was a management team meeting that. Deemed more important than this week in WordPress. I'm not sure why.

[00:05:01] Nathan Wrigley: I am not. How dare they about that? Yeah, exactly. Tot. Anyway, very nice to have you back on this final show just before the, the holiday season starts.

Tao is the head of relation. This is great. This bio, by the way. Tao is the head of relations at Yost and the irregular contributor to WordPress as GTE for Dottin. Deputy. Deputy on the WP community team. He lives in, I'm not even gonna try, I'm gonna say witch and win close. Yeah. How weaken? Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.

He lives in weaken in the Netherlands, which is very close to yo stage clue. Tao is still pretty active on Twitter and he's only just started tooting a bit. Yeah. Good for you. I've seen you lurking. And this mo this is the bit, this morning Tao learned that there's a save button of bot at the bottom of the show notes page, which is required if you want to store your input.

[00:05:54] Taco Verdonschot: I did my input twice, so that's not too bad.

[00:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: Dedicated. That's not too bad. And you know what? Remmers I, for some reason I have got my, I've got my section for you. Blank. I'm so refresh. Sorry I don't refresh cancer. Oh, there you go. You've done it properly. There we go. Perfect. Let's read out. Recu is excellent.

I know Recu has got a lot in the pipeline at the moment. Reus. DRIs, how are you doing mate?

[00:06:22] Remkus de Vries: It's alright.

[00:06:24] Nathan Wrigley: . Let's finish this year. And we had a chat, we had a chat before, so I know what you're going through. Yeah. WordPress veteran and WordPress sorry. WordPress veteran and WordPress and Woo.

Commerce performance specialist at Truer. The North REMCOs is also contributor to the WordPress project, predominantly by organizing word camps such as Word Camp Europe and Word Camp Netherlands, which he co-founded both of. He's based in the Netherlands, and Remco publishes a WordPress related newsletter each week, which you should totally check out.

And you've got the coolest r url rem.us. So basically it's his name. But instead of the I us. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Not many people can get their actual,

[00:07:11] Remkus de Vries: so I tried to get rem.com, but they want 10,000

[00:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: k for it, so I'm like, oh. . No, this is better. I like this more. Yes. Tell us Reuss, before we start, cuz I know that you've been jiggling your endeavors around a little bit recently.

What's the thing which is happening to you at the minute? What are you in putting your energies into?

[00:07:33] Remkus de Vries: I think two things primarily. There, there's a, there's this this geezer from the United Kingdom who has recommended I start doing a podcast as well. Oh, full. I know. But I have recorded the first two and I have a couple follow up already in in the calendar.

And secondly, I am working on my courses, which are, which is a totally new thing for me not necessarily doing courses, but The way I'll do this course is new for me in terms of everything I'll do from scratch. So that's mostly where my attention goes if I'm not doing my regular work.

[00:08:25] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. J During the course of this week, I've been I've been editing a podcast episode I did with a chap called Chris Budget. I dunno if Chris. Chris is behind Lifter lms, but man alive, there's in the making of a course. I've never done any of that. I've never endeavored to do any of that.

I've only participated in, going through other people's courses and he just started listening out all the things like, yep, okay. Yep. There's that. Then there's that. Then there's that .

[00:08:54] Remkus de Vries: If you look at it from a simple perspective, it's just a bunch of lessons, which is about the information you're learning, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And, but you'd be wrong because the, I've had conversations with various people who've helped me out tremendously, who are doing nothing other than these types of things. And every single conversation I go oh, okay. Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. Need to do that too. And I need to remember that.

And I had. Yeah, just every single conversation has been an eye-opening in terms of the little things that go along with it.

[00:09:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There is a lot more to it than meets the artist. There is. That was what I discovered. Anyway, the best of luck with those new endeavors. I hope it. Yeah, of course.

We got a few comments coming in. By the way, if you do wish to make a comment, I'd love that. That's really nice. But there are a few little caveats, especially if you are on Facebook, and this is basically the caveat. If you want us to see your name and your avatar, you have to go to chat.restream.io/fb.

It should have been in the comment, sorry the thread right at the top. If you're over there, that will allow us to see who you are and so on. If you wanna remain anonymous, that's fine. Some people just get over that by writing their first name as the first word of their comment. So entirely up to you.

And if you're fancy sharing it, just pop your keyboard down for a moment and Go to whatever social platform you like and mainly we're over on WP Builds.com/live and it would be nice if anybody wants to join us for that'll be lovely. And there's a few comments here, firstly from Divida. Hello Divida.

Thank you for running your your awards Divida. That was great. There was a whole bunch of people won gold, silver, and bronze this year in all sorts of different WordPress categories, the last bit of WordPress goodness in 2022. Oh, thank you, Denda. That's really nice. And hello, Amy. Hope you're feeling better now.

Nathan and Michelle, take it easy. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I had a brush with, I had a brush with a surgeon and then a brush with Covid and let's just say it was curious. I have missed, says Divida, the save button of your . Yeah. You defender

[00:11:12] Remkus de Vries: closure

[00:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: we're, I've missed it. Yeah. Yeah. . Here we are with the regular forecast, the weather forecast, which we get each week from Peter Ingers.

I love this. Good morning from connected us where it's currently zero degrees, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, under mostly cloudy skies. Okay. Here's a weather update for you. Yesterday, about eight hours ago, if you looked out my window, there was about six inches of snow. There was snow everywhere. The temperature was fluctuated by 15 degrees, so it went from minus five, actually 17 degrees.

It went from minus five last night in centigrade to plus 12 in centigrade. Wow. And I woke up this morning, I was out at about 11 last night, trudging through the snow, woke up this morning. Every particle of it is gone. It is the weirdest thing to see snow disappear in the same way that it appears. You wake up and it's like it's gone from green to white.

I've never in my life gone from white to green in the space of six hours and there's not any, I have snow, huh?

[00:12:15] Michelle Frechette: Happens all the time in New York. Really?

[00:12:17] Nathan Wrigley: I've never, because it's always like this slow sloshy transformation where, you go through three or four days of this horrible, I wasn't referencing the.

Oh, . What were you referencing? I didn't ask.

[00:12:32] Taco Verdonschot: I'm not sure. You should ask Nathan.

[00:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not sure. The mind boggles. And we're being joined by somebody all the way. James jk. All the way from Mexico. Nice to see everybody. Thank you. And it's 25. Just stop James. Yes, .

[00:12:49] Michelle Frechette: It's minus two here, 28 degrees Fahrenheit.

[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, we had minus, minus five last night, but yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it's very nice to have you all with us. We're gonna talk about the WordPress news for this week, and let's kick it off with probably one of the biggest stories I guess, that we get each and every year is the state of the word.

State of the word used to be done by Matt Mullenweg inside of Word Camp US, is my understanding. I was never in attendance for that. More recently pr presumably with Covid and all, it's gone to its sort of own little independent event. I know Michelle went last year, and as she said, she actually went this year.

Was it a pretty small affair, Michelle? How many people were in the room and all of that?

[00:13:31] Michelle Frechette: About f about 50 people. Okay. I they live with it to 50. .

[00:13:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it looked like a really like convivial little atmosphere, it wasn't like a hotel foyer or conference room. It looked more like a, I don't know, somebody's sitting room or something.

It's

[00:13:45] Michelle Frechette: the Tumblr offices. Oh, a few years back when automatic acquired Tumblr, they also acquired the lease for the Tumblr offices in New York City. So that's where they do the state of the

[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: word. Yeah. Okay. All right. And let's just go through a couple of the top level items. Obviously Matt takes the stage and he tries to sum up what's been going on in WordPress during the course of the year from his perspective.

And then given all of that, there's a bit of crystal ball gazing where we're trying to figure out what things are gonna be happening in the future. As always, WP Tavern and Sarah Gooding are on top of the story. And really the highlights, were the event itself, which was quite nice.

Community members, Michelle included. Got to ask some questions again, Michelle got the first question in, which was quite nice. But Guttenberg adoption was one of the main themes talking about how Guttenberg has improved over the course of the year and the fact that it's now starting to appear in all sorts of different places.

There's an app, which I confess I've never heard of before, called Engine Awesome. Which Matt pointed out has now using a sort of stripped down version. And also there was reference, I dunno how o bleak it was, but there seemed to be reference that it was either in Tumblr already or it was gonna be put into Tumblr anyway, so there was that all the stuff about Gutenberg and then moved onto the community side of things.

And if you stare back over the last three or four, four years, the community really tanked in some ways. The events and the meet ups. Got stifled. Nobody really was able to do any of those, but it looks like there's been a real bounce back. So just in terms of the contributing to the project itself, 1,399, which is gallingly close to 1400 contributed of which 652 were contributing for the first time.

There was also much, much more in, in terms of events. I can't remember the numbers now, but we went from London Word Camp last year to, I think it was 21 or something in the course of last year. So that's all bounced back. And we got onto, if

[00:15:48] Taco Verdonschot: you look at those numbers for contributors in the graphic, what stands out is that we had almost half of the contributors last year was new.

Yeah. And only a few contributed to more than. one release or to all releases, so , aren't we doing something wrong? If that percentage new time contributors is so high compared to the overall number of contributors,

[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: you're gonna have to run that by me again, cuz I think I missed the thrust of what you were saying.

You were saying that although it's an encouraging figure, because it's nice to have new blood, are you saying it's Yes. Discouraging because it's really very large proportion and new, in other words, aware of the other people. The old people gone if you like it. Yes. Yes. And we're seeing,

[00:16:36] Taco Verdonschot: if I remember correctly, every single time.

[00:16:39] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, I was gonna say, if I remember correctly, it's roughly the same thing every single time. .

[00:16:44] Nathan Wrigley: So where do the, where do all these people disappear off to then, I guess is the answer? You want the answer to that question? Trying to figure out, yeah. Why

[00:16:51] Taco Verdonschot: aren't we able to keep these people in our community and why aren't we able to keep them contributing to WordPress?

What's scaring them away? Yeah.

[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: And it's interesting that, that's never mentioned in that way is it? There's always this great big focus on look how many new people in other words that is a nice metric to have, but really what you wanna see is this number, this 1300 sort of being 1700 this year, 2,100 the following year.

And basically it just keeps growing as a Yeah, okay. I get it. Yes. Yeah. That's

[00:17:22] Remkus de Vries: interesting. Ideally, but if we're being honest, it's still a weird metric to track anyway because what is a contribution that can be. It's just somebody popping in the comments saying, Hey, how about we fix it this way?

Or How about we do that? And it can be someone who actually wrote a piece of code, tested it refactored it tested it again, there's, this can either be a 10 minute input or a couple hours of input. There's no way of measuring that.

[00:17:55] Michelle Frechette: But also, go on, Amy. Amy brings up a really good point that it doesn't indicate sponsored versus unsponsored.

And unsponsored people have a more of a burden on their time, right? Because they're usually working full-time. And then also it doesn't talk about the fact that we do have, just you could only be a organizer, a lead organizer. A word camp twice. There's a reason for that. It's because you burn out after a while, so maybe after one or two times people take a break and come back in later.

So we don't know what that ti what that time series data looks like. Yeah. So I think that it's not necessarily that the, that those people drop off and never come back. It's more likely that they take a break and come back again later.

[00:18:37] Taco Verdonschot: Possibly.

[00:18:38] Remkus de Vries: And the only thing that still irks me every single time we talk about contributions is we don't include translations.

, which as Tao and I know can eat up a huge chunk

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: of your time. Interesting. Yeah, that is a good point. Spotted there Tao, I confess I hadn't really seen it that way. I was swept along by the, isn't it good that there's loads of new people? I hadn't really thought about it from that point of view.

If you've got an answer to that question answers on a postcard to Tao at yo hq, where he'll he'll gladly sift through, I'm surely absolutely don't do that by, don't actually anybody. Please don't do that. He's got enough work on his hands. Let me put this back on the screen. So we've got some other things that were mentioned, which are new tools coming to the community.

We're gonna have, okay, I think this is quite an interesting one and certainly from Tao's point of view, I'll be interested to know what he thinks about this. We're gonna have new taxonomies inside the plugin and theme directories, which are gonna be able to indicate a little bit more. So for example, we're gonna have a tag marked community.

And to quote Matt Mullenweg, it says in the article here, this is for software that belongs to us all with the lead developers stewarding. It's stewarding it for the next generation. It feels a little bit, almost like a half canonical plugin, which have been mentioned recently. And the canonical plugins are gonna be ones which are Essent.

They're basically part of core but not needed in core. So that's another one there. And then also this one, which I think is quite interesting, a tag designated Inc. Designating if a commercial if a, if an aspect of the product is commercial. So I'll quote another tag would be designated for commercial plug-ins that have some sort of upsell and often include commercial support.

Anything with a pro version will fall within this category. Mullenweg said he wants wordpress.org to create an environment where commercial and non-commercial plugins can exist together harmoniously. So do you wanna speak to us a little bit about that? Presumably Taka you've had thoughts and conversations around this cuz this could either work really well for you or, maybe change nothing.

I don't know.

[00:20:51] Taco Verdonschot: So it has already changed on wordpress.org. Yeah, so if you go to, for example Yotta, you'll see that it's now tagged as commercial. Which is fair because there is a paid upsell to Yotta Zero. But it also is interesting because the free version of YOTTA Zero is just like a community plugin, is very open to getting input from the community.

It's developed in the open. Are not really mutually exclusive, but they are now on wordpress.org. So that's interesting. At the same time, I'm super happy because the commercial tag comes with a link that can send people to the premium support Oh, spot. So that is really helpful. That is a huge win. Yes. Except for the ui, but that's something that we can prove on later.

But at least there is a link now that where our premium users who still end up on the WordPress org page can click and say, okay, I want support for this and I want to pay. I'm ready to pay. So that is definitely a good step forward for.

[00:22:17] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask, did you get to choose that link, or is it just going to the base URL of yos?

[00:22:23] Taco Verdonschot: I think that if you are listed as the owner or developer of the plugin, that you have the options to set it, which I'm not for Yost I'm not sure. But I also know that I think auto set the settings for the first, like the top 10 or top 20 plugins. So Frio was already done. We didn't do it ourselves.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: You can imagine that if there was a UI where you could specify what that was, you can imagine it being. Quite an interesting marketing tool if you could choose Yes. Like a Black Friday equivalent of that link around Black Friday, or I don't know, some sort of promotion that you were running at the time.

That's interesting. Okay, so mixed. It sounds like you've got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it's great, you've finally got a link off, just a really important property Yes. In the word press space, linking directly to a page, maybe of your choosing, maybe not, but it sounded like you were dancing around the word commercial a bit because certainly from my point of view, the word commercial kind of feels like it's got negative connotations.

I could be wrong about that, but when I hear about commercials on tele I'm just trying to figure out ways to skip through them, frankly. But also it just, it feels like an interesting word to choose, put it that way, as opposed to, I don't know, upgrade or something like that. It's not always that you can upgrade. It's what this basically says, and what I like about it is that what it's saying is there's a company backing this product, and that may mean something in terms of reliability. Is this plugin going to be around in 10 years? And that is very different from a community plugin that is intended to be around.

[00:24:29] Taco Verdonschot: But yeah, I'm not sure if that's, if it's, if it falls on one person, I think contact form seven is the ultimate opposite example. But if it falls on one person to build a product, at some point they might. Be done with it. They might burn out, they might stop. If there's a whole company behind it, it might be more reliable.

So if you're picking your products that you want to use in your project, it might also be a positive thing that there's a company behind it.

[00:25:03] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, I think the com, the word commercial is weird. Just consider the option of somebody builds a plugin and it's free. Support is free. Everything's free, normal.

What if that person says if people really need support that is beyond free, I'm happy for them to contact me and will set up whatever we need to set up. Does it then become commercial? I don't think so. The plug-in stays the same. There's no upsell. There's no upgrade. Oh, yeah.

[00:25:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's a good, it's a good point.

I guess on balance, Yost is happy with this. You've got a nice link out to your commercial. Product. Yost is a different one, isn't it? Cuz everybody knows, everybody's heard of Yost. Everybody knows that you've got a commercial side maybe for some of the, I wish.

Oh, okay. . I wish. Okay. Yeah. No, everybody here knows . Yeah, no, that's definitely

[00:26:02] Taco Verdonschot: a problem. The discoverability of having a premium ups upside. And then in that regard, this is really.

[00:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. There's quite a few comments that have come in about this and maybe some of them have now lost the focus cuz we've moved on a little bit.

But James saying this is in response to Michelle, that's what I was thinking, Michelle. People might be contributing to release and then make a break before coming back or getting involved in another aspect of the project. Thank you for that, James. Amy says, the related text on the Yost plugin page, commercial plugin.

This plugin is free, but offers additional paid commercial upgrades or support. Okay. And again, I'm wondering who got to write that text, whether it was you or.

[00:26:42] Taco Verdonschot: I think this is default for all the commercial

[00:26:45] Nathan Wrigley: plugins. Okay. It does sound like boiler plate, doesn't it? Yeah. Okay. The related text on the yo plugin part.

Oh, we've just read that. Have we? Yes. Thank you. Commercial says Bridget Willard definitely has a negative connotation. Yeah, that's in my head a little bit. Bridget. I don't know if that's just me, but I do feel that a little bit. And we see, according to Amy, Commercial, the word commercial heading before we see the details. Okay. One quick last thing about state of the word. Actually there's a few things. Firstly, did anybody notice Martin Mullenweg's lapel badge? Oh, yes. That was , that's

[00:27:29] Michelle Frechette: the first thing I tweeted from the event was his double check marks.

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: There was a subtle dig I guess at Mr.

Mosque and what's going on over there on Twitter. He's obviously double certified , which I think was quite interesting. And also, I dunno if you saw the news today, Elon has put out a tweet saying you can vote him out as c e o. Basically, he's gonna step down. If no, he re is no, he's not.

[00:28:00] Remkus de Vries: That's a ploy. Come on. He said half in November, he said what was it? I will do this temporary. I will be looking for c e o to replace me as soon as possible. So that's already in the works. He's already talking to somebody and he's just giving the crowd the idea that they have

[00:28:16] Nathan Wrigley: influence.

He's too good at this marketing stuff, isn't, he's got me shut the front door. That's right. He's got me something that's or

[00:28:24] Taco Verdonschot: he's banning everyone who voted him out. Yeah. , I know,

[00:28:29] Michelle Frechette: I wondered about that myself, but I al it's not that he's too good at marketing. It's like you are too much of a sucker to believe what he has to say.

Nathan . Yeah,

[00:28:37] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. That is right. Yeah. Actually, do you know what it was? Because it was carried on the bbc. The BBC put that story out. Yeah. They're 24 hours late anyway, with everything they report on.

[00:28:47] Remkus de Vries: Anyway and Twitter's happening so fast.

[00:28:49] Nathan Wrigley: So you didn't on in other news, let's get back to the state of the word quickly.

There's one final thing at the bottom. A truly remarkable thing was, unveiled is the wrong word, but brought to people's attention and it's this WP WordPress Sandbox project, which is really remarkable and I genuinely don't know how this technology is even achieved. It just. Literally seems like magic.

So Matt demoed it. I, thinking back, I can't remember how the demo went, but essentially if you go to. developer.wordpress.org/playground. And that's what's showing on the screen right now. And I'll just click refresh. It throws up a, an install of WordPress and it you feel to yourself I've seen this before.

This is the sort of thing thatta WP does and taste WP and all of that. No, that's not the case because this is all running inside your browser and I genuinely haven't a clue what the text stack is that's going on in there. But there's a database, there's php and it's all happened in the blink of an eye.

And this is a fully functional WordPress website, which only exists inside of my browser.

[00:30:06] Remkus de Vries: It's not fully functional because it doesn't use my sql, it uses interesting sql. Okay, thanks. SQL Light has quite a few limitations, so Okay. If a, if you wanna run a plugin that has his own my SQL implementation or custom database tables, whatever, it won't work here.

At least not in its current form.

[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: REM cuz obviously you've looked at this a little bit, certainly, I think probably more than I have. Can you see what the purpose of this is? In the documentation for the the, for Match Matt's talk, it was all about developers and people being able to try plugins out and I was thinking, yeah, that seems interesting, but I also, yeah

[00:30:47] Remkus de Vries: know I think the, I've skimmed mostly, so I haven't fully read everything here, but what I've seen is that it's suppo is, it's supposed to become a playground in the literal sense where you can just activate all these different things even from, you see the edit site there, so you can go to the site editor.

You can play with all these things that are part of WebPress now without actually having to install it, so you get a better feel for those who'd like to see how things work first. I would imagine plugins and all the things will become an option as well at some point to fully, properly test.

But there's a, see yeah, this is

[00:31:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, we've just on the screen, I just went to the, I tried to go to the repository to put a, plug it in and you can't, you have to upload yourself.

[00:31:38] Remkus de Vries: It's all local storage, so whatever your browser is capable of doing, this is what it'll allow us to do. Okay.

[00:31:44] Nathan Wrigley: It just, it seems to me like a very clever technological implementation, but I can't quite see, I don't know the

[00:31:53] Remkus de Vries: technology behind it either but oh, there I can see tons of things like, oh, good.

So from what does this plugin do just turn it on and see what it does. Yeah. To what if I can change to this theme and then start playing around in my site editor to and this is I don't know if this is part of the roadmap yet, but I can very well see this being used as let me see how this theme actually works.

So in the theme store itself, so you actually go to, oh, okay, great. So this is what it looks like. Instead of that incredibly bad screenshot we currently have to our availability.

[00:32:39] Nathan Wrigley: There is never a fitting. Yeah. Okay. I'm now starting to see more of a purpose to it. So you are in your imaginings.

You might off the WordPress repo just stumble across a plugin. You just wanna quickly see what it looks like, what its capabilities are. You click a button, it launches in a new tab in playground. With that plugin, I

[00:33:02] Remkus de Vries: would imagine we're working towards being in that situation where we can do

[00:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: that.

Okay. Alright. Okay. That actually what I do think is

[00:33:09] Taco Verdonschot: interesting and you can see that's on the screen now is the URL that's reported for this posterior editing on the now, on the side. And sidebar here.

[00:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: Berg sidebar. Ah, okay. Sorry. Yep. Okay. Yep. So it says wsm.wordpress.net/scope and then a load of P run numbers.

Numbers, yeah.

[00:33:32] Taco Verdonschot: That's but so it's Brett's proxy? Yeah. Yeah. It looks like it's running on wordpress.net in some way, shape, or form. Yeah. That's interesting.

[00:33:43] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. Yes. Okay. I wonder if any I won't endeavor to get people to use that url. My guess is that URL just won't work. Should we try it?

Are we able to get that and stick it in an incognito window? I'm thinking now

[00:33:57] Remkus de Vries: that there is a plugin called Frankenberg by Tom Noel. It might very well be an adaptation of that because that simply allows whatever's in Gutenberg to be on the front end of your site, which is essentially what we're

[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: looking at.

Yeah, look, there it is. It's definitely, so this is in a, mind you, it's in the same browser window. It's in an incognito window, but then so is everything else. So I don't know if cookies and what have you are stored or I genuinely dunno how all this works, but it certainly seems to work and, but I'm still, I dunno essentially, but yeah, wordpress.net is being used there.

Okay. So that's a really curious development. Maybe in the days, weeks monster come, people will start using it in new and innovative ways. Sorry, Michelle, it sounded like interrupted you.

[00:34:43] Michelle Frechette: No I just thought it was really interesting and like thinking I'm not a developer thinking of how I would use, this is exactly what Rek said.

I would absolutely test plugins this way and see what the settings look like and how it operates and whether or not I would want to, I'd be comfortable with using it. Yeah. I don't remember what plugin I was looking for recently, but I went through three before I found the one that I actually settled on.

This would be a better way

[00:35:07] Nathan Wrigley: to. . And it really did happen more or less instantaneously from the moment I clicked the button. I think two, maybe three seconds passed. And then that WordPress site was ready. So there's definitely some limitations on what it can do specifically around mys q a light and what have you.

But Sarah wrote a much more in-depth article over on Tavern on the 8th of December, new WordPress Sandbox Project, demos test drive themes and plugins in the browser. Where she talks about, who'd built it, it's a chap called Adam Zelensky. And yeah, I guess we'll be hearing more about this in the days and weeks to come.

So the next thing then to mention on our little laundry list is is coming from you. Tao, the Yos team. Yes. I've done something pretty cool this week. About six months, I'm gonna say six months ago. That's probably completely made. Roughly up, roughly, yeah. Is it? Oh, good. Yeah, roughly. That's about the first time I've been correct.

This week, Yost released a feature into their premium or commercial, I'm gonna have to use that word from now on into their commercial plugin. And it was all about inclusive language analysis. Now, first off, for those of us who haven't been paying attention to that particular story, can we talk about what this even is?

Tako? What is Yes. Inclusive language analysis.

[00:36:28] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. What has been doing for a very long time is help you write for SEO using a green traffic light and orange and red to see this is what I'm doing, this is what you can improve. A couple of years ago, we've added a readability check, a readability analysis.

So aren't you just doing the right things for seo, which is more the technical side of things, but are you also creating a text that is readable on the internet because people are using websites on their phones while on the bus, while walking. So that's when we added the readability analysis.

And now there's a third analysis, and as you said, it has been in premium for a while and it now came to free. And that is, are you we're hoping not on purpose, but are you offending people who are reading your content? are you using the language that is inclusive to as many people as possible?

And the example that you're showing on screen is for example, a warning when you're using men and women in a text, because are you sure that you are talking about a group that is exclusively men and women because there's more variations than just the binary men and women. The plugin recognizes that non-inclusive of potentially non-inclusive phrases and explains why it might be problematic and gives you alternatives so that you can write a more inclusive text and you don't accidentally alienate people who might otherwise buy your products, engage with your content.

Visit your website. .

[00:38:37] Nathan Wrigley: So this little the screenshot that we're showing at the moment is showing a, an orange dot, amber dot. Yes. Is that indicative? So is the same traffic light system green for go if you like and here's a potential problem.

[00:38:51] Taco Verdonschot: It's slightly different because green means we haven't found anything.

Okay. And it doesn't say you're all good because inclusive language is evolving really fast. So we're never going to promise you this is all perfect. The thing is green means we didn't see, we didn't flag anything that might potentially be problematic. Got it. The orange traffic light is showing in certain circumstances, this can be problematic.

So verify whether that's the case with this use of that specific phrase. Because if you are talking about a group of friends and you know that they're all men and women, then obviously this is not problematic because you know that you're correct. But if you are targeting a general audience, then it might be much broader and you're not entirely sure.

So this is where you really have to do the work yourself to see, hey, is this indeed problematic? And then there's the red traffic lights where you go okay, this is, we are 100% sure to know that this is absolutely not inclusive. That's the way it

[00:40:16] Nathan Wrigley: works. Okay. That's the way it works. And then, but then the story here this week is that you've decided to roll it into free, right?

Yeah. So this is now available to everybody. Why did you do that?

[00:40:29] Taco Verdonschot: Because it matters. We've always said that yo is for everyone. We do SEO for everyone and we basically had this in premium and people are asking us, but we're a charity. It's very important for us to use the right language, but we can't afford premium.

We really feel that we should be using this feature, but we don't have the funds for it. And this is something that is going to make the web a better place for everyone. And that is why we decided it should be in our free product because it is. Helping our goal of SEO for everyone and making the web better for everyone.

[00:41:18] Nathan Wrigley: Couple of nice comments in relation to that. Lana. Hello Lana. She says, amazing feature. I was struggling with guys in my emails and content and having Yost feature during article writing is awesome. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then that's so awesome to hear. Yeah. And then another one good citizen Move by Yost Bravo says Amy.

So that's nice. Can I ask a couple of quick follow up questions? Sure. Firstly this, some people are gonna say I don't wanna go near this. And my understanding is it is off by default, right? You have to go and enable it before any of this happens. Is that correct?

[00:41:58] Taco Verdonschot: That was indeed the case in premium and.

Still isn't free, but I can only hope that as many people as possible are going to activate it. Yeah.

[00:42:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Yeah. Yes. And the second one is I've got two, two further questions. First one is, does it take onboard well, obviously English, we've seen that. Yes. Does it go through the same heuristics and checks with a whole bunch of different languages as well?

Not

[00:42:29] Taco Verdonschot: yet. Okay. So it's English for now, but obviously like the readability analysis, which we've expanded to over 27 languages we really want to do the same, but Okay. You need native speakers and educated native speakers to get this right, because it's such a

[00:42:50] Nathan Wrigley: sensitive. . Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

And finally my understanding with Yos is that all of the analysis is happening in my own WordPress website. This isn't phoning home and doing some kind of AI check on a big, large computer in the cloud somewhere, right? Nope. This is all

[00:43:10] Taco Verdonschot: done in browser Yeah. On your own site.

Yeah, we, so we don't like having your data yeah. , because that means we're responsible nope. It's all on your own site happening in browser, Michelle.

[00:43:27] Michelle Frechette: So I had the, you weren't gonna ask. Yeah. I had the honor of previewing this before it went live and was just blown away by how amazing this plugin was.

My only criticism was that it was, Premium and not readily available to everybody. So like when I found this out, my heart saying, if you can believe, all the work I do on inclusion. So I thought this was absolutely brilliant and I did just wanna give a shout out to Hannah. Hannah's one of the developers on this project and we had her on the Underrepresented in Tech podcast.

She's brilliant. I know there's more people that were involved than just Hannah, but I can speak for that conversation and how much I appreciate all that has gone into this project.

[00:44:09] Taco Verdonschot: Very nice. That's a lot of work by the entire lingo team. Yeah, definitely.

[00:44:15] Nathan Wrigley: Roku, anything to add on this or shall we move on?

[00:44:18] Remkus de Vries: I would only be re echoing what has already been said

[00:44:22] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yep. Okay. We'll move on. Yeah. Nice. So you can check that out just in case you're interested. It's over on the yo website and the article. I should probably just pop it back on the screen. Makes it a lot easier to understand.

It's called New in Yos Free The Inclusive Language Analysis. Okay. So go and check that out. Right back over on the tavern. Just a couple of things that have come up in Gutenberg 14.7, which a couple of them I think is, are actually really nice. The first one is that you are going to get different colors in the Gutenberg, Etta, depending on.

Kind of template parts block that you are using, whether it's a reusable block and so on. If you're familiar with page builders, the one that I'm most familiar with is Beaver Builder. And in Beaver Builder, typically if you're interacting with something, everything's blue. It's this sort of pale blue.

But if you're interacting with a global row or a saved row or something like that, just to make it really obvious, it, everything goes an orange color. And the idea behind that is, okay, I know that this is not just being edited in this one part of the site, this is gonna have a wider impact. And there's a little video here showing that there's a kind of I don't know if these colors are gonna be configurable in any way, but you can see here that you've got blue normal blocks and then you can probably see on the video as well that we've got a different colors purple popping up.

The person is editing the headers and the footers, so that's nice. Just a nice little UI thing. And this one as well, the inserter, and I'll quote the inserter, is getting a major change in 14.7 with the addition of a media tab. So it's gonna be next to blocks, patterns. Now there's gonna be media making it faster to add images, video, and audio Users can select the new tab and select a media type.

And then you'll see the 10 most recent items, which in many cases I feel might be enough. It certainly would work in my workflow. Workflow pretty well, but then there's also gonna be a open media library button at the bottom, so you can just invoke the old media library. Actually, if memory serves, although I didn't mention it, I got a feeling that Matt in the state of the word said that there was gonna be some overhaul of the media library and the year to come.

So maybe this is part of that initiative.

[00:46:43] Remkus de Vries: I was thinking the same thing because this certainly looks like a first small, like really small step into how could we do media differently? Yeah. It's an editor fully now instead of invoking A whole bunch of modals doing weird and funky stuff.

[00:47:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You imagine that the UI that we can see on the screen here, mcu, where you've basically got one image stacked on top of another one. , if you are after one that's been uploaded very recently, in other words the first tent, this UI is gonna work. But in, in some cases it really does take me quite a long time with the existing structure to find the one, you go to the bottom load a hundred more and you just straight through and you'd imagine that there's gotta be some yeah, there's gotta be some I think for

[00:47:32] Remkus de Vries: larger sites.

Yeah. I think for larger sites, when multiple people are working on it and everybody uploads their images all at the same time, this doesn't make any sense. No. On the other hand, if the default filter is uploaded to this post, it could. .

[00:47:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anyway, so there's some nice, fairly straightforward but nice little changes.

Michelle do, was there, there was quite a lot of talk in state the word as well about open verse and whatnot as well. Wasn't there, have you got any numbers to share on that? Cuz I know that you are interested in that.

[00:48:02] Michelle Frechette: Not overall numbers. I had been, my question was about the photo directory project where we have almost 5,500 photos accumulated in just a year.

And, what that would look like going forward and made the suggestion that it would be really nice if I had an idea that my photos are being downloaded, being used so that I know if I should keep contributing to a project like that.

[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Yeah, I remember now. Yeah. So in other words, you get some kind of data back saying your image has been looked at, I don't know, 200 times.

If you've ever uploaded a, an image to Google Maps, then they're really good at getting back to you and telling you over and over again, in fact, to the point of stop it now Google, I realize that picture of that statue is really popular, but they do, and it is breathtaking the amount of times.

Yeah. If the data's correct, you take a picture of a statue in the middle of London or something and a couple of days later, a hundred thousand people have looked at it. It's just, it's amazing. It's, but it makes you feel good, right? And it makes you think, actually, yeah, for sure. You know what?

I'm gonna contribute more to that community. And what's

[00:49:09] Michelle Frechette: really nice is the photo directory project now does give you a badge on your wordpress.org. Not only that, but if you look further down where it'll, where you can see your favorite and plugins and your activities. Now you can see the link to your photos and the, your uploaded photos as well.

So they're doing a lot. A lot has been done to at least, it's only been a year, but So make it an Unsplash. Yeah. So yeah, I would love to see it actually able to be connected to the media library where you could connect automatically to the, that's bound to happen. That's bound to happen.

Exactly. Exactly.

[00:49:44] Nathan Wrigley: That will be a transformational change actually, if you think about that. If you can just chalk the, but also if you could tick a box when you upload an image to say, put it in open verse, I'm totally happy. Just and then that'll, oh, from your worker site to open. So yeah, I take a picture now.

I upload it to my website, tick a box to say, yeah. Give it to open verse. He did. He

[00:50:07] Michelle Frechette: did say that. That is coming. That's one of the nice things that's in the pipeline.

[00:50:11] Nathan Wrigley: As soon as that checkbox appears, you can imagine that it will go from 5,500 to, a bunch more. Yeah. It's like overnight.

The,

[00:50:20] Michelle Frechette: yeah. The difficulty is that there's only a handful of us that are on the photo team. And I know for me alone, I don't know how many of us there are, maybe 10 of us. I have discovered at least 15. PIL photos that have been uploaded. So things where I find them in iStock and stock images.

I'll swear and then I have to say sorry, but No, and at this point we're not banning people from uploading photos, but we're keeping,

[00:50:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, absolutely. How do you do that check, Michelle? Is it like that sounds like a fairly manual process. Are you literally looking at the picture?

It's entirely

[00:50:57] Michelle Frechette: manual. Yes. I have to, oh my Lord, I down download it to my computer and then upload it to tonight and see if there's a Oh,

so

[00:51:05] Michelle Frechette: yeah. And this is not to say that there aren't amazing photographers and WordPress because there are, but when I see one person submit five photos and one is an aerial view of another parachute, an aerial view of a cloverleaf, Highway a really nice flat light setup of a desk and then a pager's easel.

Like those didn't all go together. Yeah I started to check them, right? Yeah, these are all fake, or they're all somebody else's and you cannot

[00:51:35] Nathan Wrigley: ask them. Fight in, fight there. Michelle, I could imagine in the future there will be AI involved in those decision making processes. Let's hope.

Yeah. . You've gotta imagine that the likes of Getty Are not issuing all those well yeah. I've got, I've had friends who almost assume, as they accidentally put images on the internet, which they shouldn't have done, the law, the letter arrives via email almost immediately.

It's nah. Yeah. No human was involved in that decision. Exactly. Amy says, I think Matt said something about a future ability to upload or include people in the images. Yeah. And I'm wondering how that would work. Yeah, that's a good point cuz at the minute if there's any trace of a human f I think it's a face, maybe it's,

[00:52:17] Michelle Frechette: If it's a recognizable face, if you can, okay if I look at it and it's not so far distant where it's just like featureless, then we say no.

Okay. If there's a license plate, if there's an address, we take things like that off of, so that it's not personal personably identifiable

[00:52:34] Nathan Wrigley: information. Yeah, I can imagine that would be a whole viper nest to get into because obviously then you've got, that should be automated asap. Yeah, because presumably you could just upload pictures of people that are not you whom very well may want their photo never to appear on the internet.

So yeah,

[00:52:52] Michelle Frechette: As a photographer, I get, street street photography, you actually are allowed to take anybody's picture if they're out in public in the United States anyway. And you can use it any way you'd like. But if you're taking pictures in private, then you have to have a an artist re or a model release in order to use them

[00:53:14] Nathan Wrigley: publicly.

I don't know what the situation would be in Europe more broadly. I feel it would be different than that, but I could be completely wrong. But it feels like the Europeans and the North Americans tend to have different opinions about those. I

[00:53:27] Taco Verdonschot: think from the top of my head, and I'm not an expert on this because I'm not a photographer but it's very similar, whereas in public domain, As long as it's not a close up of someone you're pretty much good to go.

regardless. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Whether you shoot is a

[00:53:48] Nathan Wrigley: different story. Yeah. . Yeah, that's a, yeah, that's right. So anyway, that we got into all that because we were talking about the changes in Gutenberg 14.7. Of which the ability to add media is going to be directly in the ui, which is really nice.

. We just have to see how that implementation goes right from one story to another. Honestly, I don't know what to make of this story. I think it's interesting. Curious in equal measure. The founder of the Mail Chimp for WordPress plugin has announced, not in, I can't remember where. It was on some third party website, or it might have been in Instagram or what, where was it?

Sorry? Reddit. Reddit. Reddit or Hacker News or something like that. Hacker News. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. To the Teron. Yeah. Okay. The guy who has been making this plugin, who, it turns out I think maybe both Reka and Tao, no. He has decided it's Danny Van Cutin. And again, sorry, Danny. Oh, I knew other thought it.

Okay. D Danny Van and Reka. Say it again. Sorry. Colton

[00:54:51] Remkus de Vries: just Okay. Co in your head when we do the double ones, you just make that an H for the second one and you're almost

[00:54:57] Nathan Wrigley: there. Oh, okay. Okay. I shall never make mistakes again. . Anyway, I'm just gonna call him Danny. He began this plug-in journey a, a long time ago, I think as long as 10 years ago or something like that.

From a hospital bed. It sounds like he was drawn up with some illness and decided, oh, I've got a bit of time on my hands. I'm gonna create a MailChimp plugin. Fast forward 10 years, this plugin is active on 2 million plus websites. I dunno what the exact boundary there is with but beyond 2 million.

It has been downloaded 42 million times, which just in just such big numbers and he has decided. In such a really interestingly honest appraisal of his interaction with this plugin. He's decided basically he doesn't want to continue anymore and he's offering it up for sale for the princely sum of 1.6 million euros.

Now there's a whole bunch of, there's whole ecosystem over other sort of like bolt-on plugins, which means that as of this week at least, the plugin is making $36,000. Per month. You can subtract from that a couple of thousand dollars that the developers, he hires in some third party developers to help him with the project.

So it's clearing well over 30,000 a month. And he wants to get rid of it basically because he said, I'm not really interested in this project anymore. Somebody else can take it over. There was quite a few comments down at the bottom saying, why would anybody what, 30 grand a month and you've decided to get rid of it?

And then he the developer, Danny himself, pops in to the comments just to lay it all to bed and said, look, I am just not motivated. Basically to quote Thank you. I am mostly selling because of a lack of motivation. The time I currently spend on this is the bare minimum to keep it running. I did a quick back of the.

Calculation. And I figured that if you, if everything just carried on the way it was, I think you'd be turning a profit in under five years. Can't really remember, but there's probably a whole bunch of growth there. Just thought this was a really nice story and it peeled back the curtain of money, which never gets peeled back.

When some company A buys, company B is very rare that the figures are put out into the open. So anyway, I guess Tao, Danny yes. Anything that you wanna say about this?

[00:57:25] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so I know Danny very well because he was an intern at Jost in 2014. So when he already had this plugin which was then the reason that he didn't join Yost as a developer because he already had a good source of income.

So yeah, no he's an amazing guy. He's He's been very smart about this, what the plugin works really well and I hope that it will find a good new home.

[00:57:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Do you know him then, Reka? You obviously I do. I do. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. It was just, I think for me, this, the interesting thing here was that figure of 1.6 million,

[00:58:08] Remkus de Vries: it's really not that difficult.

So if you just look at 36 times, 12 times less than four,

[00:58:18] Nathan Wrigley: was it less than four? Yeah.

[00:58:19] Remkus de Vries: Thank you. Yeah. So you're at you if you do at time, you're at 1.7 and and some change. So 1.6 is not too bad in terms of the asking price versus what you're getting for it, especially considering that there's a lot of potential for for making it better and upgrading and even just a simple price hike would already be totally acceptable cuz he's not necessarily asking a lot.

And if you're from the Netherlands, you can get it cheaper.

[00:58:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. How come? Yeah, that's what he tweeted. I, listen, I guess it's

[00:58:59] Remkus de Vries: stay anything or something like that. I dunno. Oh, that's, but anyway it's really not bad numbers in terms of what you're getting and the potential.

[00:59:13] Nathan Wrigley: I think the reason the story popped out in my head at least anyway, was just because to 1.6 million, as you said, it obviously stacks up, right?

There's no weirdness there. But it was the fact that a plugin, which does one thing, which is connect a service, which a lot of people are obviously using, I dunno how popular MailChimp continues to be, but certainly it was They're still growing. Yeah. Oh, okay. It was the fact that it just did that sort of one thing and that one thing could be profitable to that level.

And he's very clear in the article. It us usually in a typical week, he's spending about four hours a week on this. You're looking at less than 20 hours a month in order to, and

[00:59:59] Remkus de Vries: 432 K per year

[01:00:02] Nathan Wrigley: in amazing. Just amazing. Yeah. What the size will do that to you can do. Yeah.

And but for somebody like me who's never really been involved in anything on that magnitude the, it always amazes me how big the WordPress ecosystem is. And I've just noticed that I've got antlers on my head and I've completely forgotten about that. And now I've just feel ridiculous. . Let's move on as you should.

Yeah. That's right. That's right. That's right. Okay, let's move on to this story. I don't know anything about this other than the fact that it exists, but I thought I'd mention it cuz I've seen it. When I say I dunno anything about it, I dunno who's particularly behind it or what have you, but there's an initiative, which I'm sure I heard about last year.

It's called WP Gives a Hand. The hashtag that they're using is, WP gives a Hand and it says, let's make a difference together. Will you? How great is the feeling when you not only get something, but. New, but also be part of those who give back. And really the idea is an exchange of essentially just donating from today.

It's a week long in its breadth and scope Starts today, December the 19th to December the 25th. And I'll just read here, every company that joins the movement donates a poten donates a percentage of every sale to charity. And that bit is in bold. The charity event takes place on the last full week of the year, but you can join in any time.

So it just seems to me like a just be nice for the sake of being nice kind of endeavor. There's a button on site saying that you can join, but obviously some of these companies have decided they're already going to donate a proportion of their. Revenue to a charity, which looks like you name in advance.

So for example, the guys over at Visual Composer for the next week will be donating to a charity called Voices of Children. Indie Stack is going to be donating to Ocean Blue, the Amelia plugin to a charity called Body Human. I could go on, but you get the point. I don't know if any of your companies are involved in this or not, or if it's new to you, but there it is.

It's WP gives a hand.com.

[01:02:19] Taco Verdonschot: I think I saw mention of it last year. So it's, yeah, it's not the first time that it, that's what I think organized. . But that's correct. Haven't seen anything. Not a lot from it.

[01:02:34] Nathan Wrigley: No. No. Maybe it's just in its infancy. ,

[01:02:38] Michelle Frechette: the press release that I got came from Irma at visual Composer, so I don't know if she's one of the people who's behind it or Visual Composer is.

Oh,

[01:02:48] Nathan Wrigley: it says, yeah, it says, in, says in the footer. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Spotted Recu. Yeah. That

[01:02:53] Taco Verdonschot: might also be just a website built with

[01:02:56] Nathan Wrigley: Visual composer. They, the guys at Visual Composer are also responsible for this new project called English Stack as well, which is mentioned down here we'll see.

Anyway. The point being if this is your bag and you want to get involved, there it is. We have mentioned it. You could go and donate to charity. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on. Just a quick shout out to Dennis Dawn. And Dennis is the founder, one of the founders I believe, of main wp, which is a product.

It's a plugin, which allows you to maintain and curate multiple WordPress websites all at once. And I did a podcast episode with him this week all about how he's partnered with companies in the recent past, particularly the likes of Ari and various others in order to help grow his business. So if you're interested in that side of things making your business grow, then go for that.

I'd also like to mention that cadence, the theme celebrated 200,000 active installs during the course of this week. There's a whole load more data in here about the different things that have happened during the course of the year, but that's pretty impressive, Michelle.

[01:04:04] Michelle Frechette: We're pretty excited about that over at Seller wp and I know that if Kathy's watching, she's excited that you've mentioned it.

So how

[01:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: how quick do you have any metrics in how quickly it's risen? Because it feels three years ago, I hadn't heard of it one year ago. I was hearing about it quite a lot and now I hear about it all the time. It seems like it's really on the rise. Just anecdotally

[01:04:23] Michelle Frechette: that this year has been amazing for cadence and we've had a lot of adoption.

Okay. And the community. We have a Facebook community. The community around cadence has really grown quite a bit. So we're Okay. Really Ja, really jazzed about it. Okay, Dennis is in the chat. He says, thank

[01:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: you. Oh, nice. Hi, Dennis. Yeah, there you go. Yeah go and have a listen to the podcast I did with Dennis.

Yeah, it was really nice. Nice chatting to you, Dennis. Thank you. Okay, let's move on. Now, this one is, I'm by the way guys, I'm, I might have to miss a few out cuz we're running a bit late, so I hope that's all right with you. I don't know, I dunno how. Past this next story. This is Wordfence who have launched a free vulnerability database for it would seem more or less any kind of use.

I read this, I read it again, and a lot of the devil might be in the detail, but essentially there let me just quote right off the top of the article. It says, today we're incredibly excited to announce that Wordfence is launching an entirely free vulnerability database, a p i and web interface available for commercial use by hosting companies, security organizations, threat analysis, security researchers, and the WordPress community.

This is part of a larger project known as Wordfence Intelligence Community Edition whi, which we're launching today. Okay. You could read the article and it would tell you what was involved in all of this and know exactly what kind of data you're gonna be able to get your hands on. There's a fairly long video, which I watch quite a lot of with Mark Munda, the founder, but the bit that I don't.

Quite get is that it's totally free. And I'm just curious as to why they're giving away what feels like the crown jewels, their threat analysis vulnerability database and past, you'd imagine we'll give it away to like non-corporate entities. If you're a mom and pop store, sure you can have access to it, but then to give it away to people like hosting companies.

So I won. I don't get it. So

[01:06:25] Remkus de Vries: what does it say when you click view pricing?

[01:06:28] Nathan Wrigley: Because let's have a look that you mean this button here? Yeah. Cause let's have a look what is left for them. Yeah, that's, so this regular word fence, this is just the normal word fence point, isn't it? Which is for the likes of, I guess you and me.

Yep. So I'm imagining that this suite of products that we're looking at on the screen right now is sufficiently profitable to make the it's gotta be.

[01:06:54] Remkus de Vries: Cuz I I see no logic other than. , we're making good money somewhere else, and we see a benefit in helping the community

Yeah.

[01:07:04] Nathan Wrigley: And I, that, that's why I'm regarding this so interested with such interest is because you don't often see something which is in really genuinely entirely philanthropic. There's normally lurking somewhere. It, there, there's a, there's an up, there,

[01:07:21] Remkus de Vries: there is the upsell of the plugin, of course.

By, by getting your, the word out. We are talking about it obviously now, but it's yeah. More people discussing this, talking about it, of course. We'll we'll also see an uptick in their They're plug-in base, I'm sure.

[01:07:39] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. What caught my attention is that it's called the word fence Intelligence Community edition.

[01:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: There it is. Yeah.

[01:07:47] Taco Verdonschot: Which means that there must be a different edition that then probably paid or will be in the future.

[01:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So maybe, yeah, and that this is the bit that I couldn't drill down on I couldn't drill down to see if it was limited in some way, whether it was rate limited.

Polly. I don't know the API every half an hour or whatever it may be, but I couldn't really, I couldn't see any limitations in it. And it says, I'll quote because it gives some context. Wordfence Intelligence Community Edition is a set of data available free for the community to use, and it includes enterprise quality, vulnerability, database, and API that provides full up-to-date downloading Jason format completely free with no registration required.

We're investing heavily in this database by growing the team, maintaining and curating the existing data and adding new vulnerabilities as soon as they're discovered. What I always am amazed by and Google kind of represents this perfectly for me, is how just data about. Customers can often be enough to be very profitable.

I never, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of money Google can make just by having data about what people are doing. They're not selling a product itself, it's just that it, to some extent, I am the product and I just wonder if there's an element of this, they'll be able to see who's doing.

You kinda have to assume. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways,

[01:09:15] Remkus de Vries: I haven't looked into how do they do the things they do, but I have to assume that's some part of it somewhere. Yeah.

[01:09:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Anyway, there you go. Nice story. Anything to add to that? Anybody? Or shall I move on?

[01:09:31] Taco Verdonschot: Just reiterating that it's awesome that they're doing this.

[01:09:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Agree. Yeah. Okay. Let me see what we've got. Tao mentioned this one. I confessed, I've missed this one. Tao , do you know what it really feels like? Moments ago that we were in Portugal, or at least me, Reka Tako, and about three and a half other thousand people were it feels like just the other day.

And yet we're already talking about word cam eu. It's gonna be held in Athens. The dates here, ninth to the 10th of June. I dunno when contra day is gonna be. If it's gonna be at the beginning or at the end. Is it on the eighth? So it's on the day before. Thank you. Yeah. And it looks like it's been divided up into day one.

This is nice. I like this. Day one is gonna be WordPress. Now everything that can be currently achieved within WordPress, I'm presuming all of the talks and presentations will be falling under that umbrella, and day two will be tomorrow, WordPress tomorrow. All the exciting things that are just around the corner for WordPress.

And the reason I'm mentioning this is because this is call for speakers, isn't it, Tao? Yes.

[01:10:39] Taco Verdonschot: Yes. This is the call for speaker. As always, work Comp Europe is looking for new stories, new speakers to present the best on WordPress. And I think especially with WordPress tomorrow, there's a huge opportunity for people who want to help shape the future of WordPress, but also the future of the WordPress community.

To what it is because looking at the flagship work camps work in Europe is by far the biggest. So I'd love to have people on stage that are part of a typically underrepresented group talking about the future and how we can see the future. From here.

[01:11:30] Nathan Wrigley: So the topic areas that they're looking to get covered are under the umbrellas of development, and there's a whole list of things that they want to be covered, business, community and people design.

And then they're open to other suggestions as well. And looks like they're after talks of about 45 minutes in total they're after some hands-on workshops as well and so on. So yeah, essentially if you've got your head in the game of speaking things like this, then now is the time to apply.

You go to europe.wordcamp.org/ 2023 and follow the links from there to the call for speakers page. So yes, that's nice.

[01:12:16] Taco Verdonschot: I would like to do one, one more call because you know that Michelle has the underrepresented in tech database with a lot of amazing speakers, and I hope that, all of them are going to apply for Word py.

And at Yost we have this fund, it's called the Yos Diversity Fund where we take away financial hurdles for people from typically underrepresented groups in tech who are speaking at conferences, but might have trouble getting their travel or their stay financed. If you are from an upper underrepresented group in tech and that you might have a problem funding your trip to work in Europe, if you're selected as a speaker please do reach out to the diversity fund because we'd love to help you overcome that financial obstacle.

How,

[01:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: How often do you do that? So is that like a one time thing a year, or do you offer two or three of those each year?

[01:13:27] Taco Verdonschot: So we pledged 25 grand a year. Uhhuh, towards that fund, and obviously during the covid year. So what was a bit harder to spend it all. But the goal for next year is to spend every single dime of it.

[01:13:44] Nathan Wrigley: And you, do you need to be in possession of a receipt saying, I have been accepted as a speaker, or can you do the, can you apply for both things in tandem? .

[01:13:53] Taco Verdonschot: Before we will transfer funds, you have to be accepted as a speaker. Yeah. But if you are not sure whether you'll be accepted to the fund, please do reach out before because we're happy to have

[01:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: that conversation.

That's really interesting because in, in a way you think that quite a lot of people might just be put off. Even applying to be a speaker on the strength that they know that they won't be able to afford the transit and the hotels and what have you. So if there's something in the back of their mind thinking, okay, there's a chance that I could win the YO fund as well as win the opportunity to speak at Word Camp.

Yeah. If you can do both of those at the same time, that might Yeah. Track some people over the line.

[01:14:34] Taco Verdonschot: That's great. Yeah. And winning makes, it feels like it's a competition between people, but if there's six, seven people who need our support to be able to speak at work in Europe, not a problem.

[01:14:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's wonderful.

Yeah, it is. I love what you're doing. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. I've got one more piece here before we go onto the, not particularly word pressy stuff. And this is over on master wp. This is n is it Naasha? I don't know how to pronounce. Nasha. NA's Na nasia. Nasha. I'm sorry. Nasha. Kai is, it is a full on day of me butchering everybody's name, isn't it?

I think that's what this episode's gonna be called. Nathan. No. Different than usual . That's true. . Normally there's only one, an episode this week. I've done it about four times. It's the police is called, it's about downtime. What the WP Community Collective means for the WordPress community. Strapline is WordPress has a new nonprofit that aims to help community grow and communicate better.

The WP Community collective quote, W P CCC is a new nonprofit organization. It seeks to provide fellowships to WordPress community members. So it very much. Sounds similar to the fund that Yost have just been sorry. Tao has just been talking about from Yost. It seeks to provide fellowships to community members that financially support their contributions to the WordPress project and community and more The W P C lists its operating principles as clear and direct communication, transparency and goals and operations and positive and proactive action.

It's been founded by , oh, dare I even try this. , given that I'm butchering names, sea Reed, Katie Adams, Farrell, and I'm on safe ground here. Courtney Robertson. They have decided to do this and it seems like nay Sher seems that's a really good idea. I don't know in terms of what it is that they're going to, how they're going to be distributing the money, how it is that you're going to apply for the money.

But anyway, this is a new initiative and you can get involved if you like. This seems to be the initiative that you might have been involved in, but I don't think you are. Are you Michelle on this occasion?

[01:16:50] Michelle Frechette: I am not, but I am 100% in support of it. Absolutely.

[01:16:53] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have any insight into what it is that they're going to be giving the money out for?

There's defined principles here. It says the WP Community Collective provides fellowships to financially support their contributions to the WordPress project and community. And then there's three others as well.

[01:17:10] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I don't have any insight into that, but I'm going to try to get one of those people on the podcast in the new year.

So hopefully we'll have somebody on here in sometime in January to talk about this further.

[01:17:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that would be nice. So w. Community Collective. Let me just open up the authentic url. It is at the url v wp community collective.com where you can find out a little bit more. I have one frivolous thing just before we get into what we're doing for Christmas.

That little chestnut and it is to say, not that one. Where's it gone? This is over on the Guardian website if you really like. If you're a bit of a nerd, right? And you've got children who you suspect also might be quite nerdy. This is a challenge that Gch h q put out every year, and essentially it's to try and spot spice of the future.

So they put out this little puzzle, which is children's level difficulty man alive, it's hard. I had a good code in and it's okay, I've definitely got a spy. , they, it's like a Christmas card challenge and you can see it, it's on the screen right now. But basically it's a bunch of logic problems.

There is a defined win. There's a defined outcome, but the principle is you get stuck in you and some of your friends try to crack all these problems. Some of them are about cybersecurity, some of them are about coding, they're at that kind of level where most people can participate and have ideas.

I tried it and just started throwing objects, , cause it was actually really the top one is like this cube and it's like the traveling salesman problem where you've got to figure out the quickest way from getting to point A to point B, given that some roads only go in certain directions and then those directions flip given certain criteria.

But it's really good fun. And and like I say, if you've got a child who whips through this in a matter of minutes they are gonna be the next James Bond basically. Yeah, downloaded, it's I'm showing you the Guardian article. And if you manage to finish the whole puzzle, I think it tends you to a, what three words, location, and that location will then give you more details about how you can take this a little bit further.

And it isn't, it's not just a bit of a game either. I think this is a serious. To actually find out amongst the population, certainly in the UK who can finish this stuff, because I think the bar to finishing it is pretty high. And if you do manage to finish it as an individual or as a little collection of people, I think you are basically showing some extraordinarily talented br, neurons firing over there.

So yeah. Anyway, that's it. It's the Gch H Q Christmas festive puzzle, guaranteed to be fun at the Christmas table. . All right, I'm done with the regular stuff. I know Reka has gotta be out of here in a few minutes, so I'm gonna start with him. Reka, have you got anything planned for your Christmas? Are you doing anything nice over the holidays?

Do you take time off? Is that even a thing? I do

[01:20:13] Remkus de Vries: take time off and I'm just gonna focus on stacking as much food in my plate as

[01:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: I can and finish . Yay. Just very simple.

[01:20:24] Remkus de Vries: I'm a simple guy. I don't

[01:20:25] Nathan Wrigley: need much more . Do you do the whole thing? I don't even see the Christmas tree. Do you do the Turkey?

Is that a thing where you are? No. Is that a, not a, is that like an a, a reka knot thing or is that just like a, not a Netherlands tradition? As

[01:20:37] Remkus de Vries: far as I know, it's

[01:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: not a Netherlands tradition. Ah, no. Look, tacos shaking is okay. So what do you do on Christmas? What's the meal look like? What do you typically do?

[01:20:46] Remkus de Vries: Just fancy food, good food lots of it. Yeah, just I don't think there's a theme other than food.

[01:20:57] Nathan Wrigley: Just lots. Just the more shaped your plate becomes the Yeah.

[01:21:02] Taco Verdonschot: For a lot of families it's crome. Croma.

[01:21:05] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Yeah. What's

Crome? Yeah. Nome

[01:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: butchered another one. . What's that?

[01:21:15] Remkus de Vries: Like fondu type, but then not with fondue.

Okay. But like you had your own little barbecue plate in front of you where you put your little slice of meat and your mini papaka and Yeah. Its sort

[01:21:26] Taco Verdonschot: of a mini grill on the table when you cook your own food. It's for lazy hosts. Ah, .

[01:21:33] Nathan Wrigley: But that's like a tip, Sophie, but good fun. But if you stepped into a typical house, there's a high probability that people will be, that meal.

Yes. Yes. Ah, that's interesting because in the UK it's like Turkey all the way down. So that tradition can't be really old cuz turkey's come from, I don't that much Turkey. Yeah, I

think

[01:21:53] Remkus de Vries: Turkey is the, I was gonna say the art dockland. But is, that's not accurate either.

[01:21:59] Michelle Frechette: It's just foul .

Yeah.

Oh.

Yes.

[01:22:04] Michelle Frechette: We don't do Turkey either, because we had our Turkey less than a month ago for our Thanksgiving. Yeah. So usually there, there's no leftovers. No, those are gone. We, us, we usually either do a ham, but in my family, we do lasagna. Oh. Which is also very common in, in this.

The United States, all those onion noodles are sold out the week before Christmas. So I am not the only family to

[01:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: do that. in the UK it's Turkey, basically everybody. Really every, there's obviously gonna be some exceptions, particularly people who I think outside

[01:22:39] Remkus de Vries: of the thing that we use, so the mini grill thing?

Yep, yep. Outside of that particular thing, there's no default in what goes on there because Oh, okay. Some will do little mini pancake stuff some will do mini sausages, and, it it's also the thing the kids allow, are allowed to do themselves as well. So they cooking their own food and stuff?

[01:22:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. In the uk. There's no standard information. There's no standard. Yeah. Here it's basically Turkey and there's all sorts of constraints. So this is really weird because we have a national television network, the b bbc and it's watched by a lot of people on Christmas Day.

The, they have to charge the national grid, which is the power company because a significant proportion of the people in the UK boil their kettle at exactly the same time as everybody else. And it's when the. Queen, now King, when the Queen's speech is finished. So the moment it finishes like, I don't know, 40 million people get up and click the button on the kettle and they have to figure, they have to figure out the demand and spread the demand for Oh, that is awesome.

Everybody's use of a kettle. Isn't that weird? ?

[01:23:59] Taco Verdonschot: That is awesome. Brilliant.

[01:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: That's funny. . But it takes months of planning, apparently, just for this one. Three minute little episode where everybody's kettle balled because if that demand was on the system on a regular date, the whole thing, they can't

[01:24:13] Remkus de Vries: like, like per county or whatever, delay the broadcast.

Like

[01:24:19] Nathan Wrigley: this is the king recu

[01:24:22] Taco Verdonschot: we have.

I, yeah. I have,

[01:24:27] Taco Verdonschot: I would love to talk extensively about kingdoms with Francis because I'm sure that being Frisian, he's very much in love of our. Kingdom.

[01:24:41] Nathan Wrigley: We're not getting into that. We're not getting into that. The other thing, we have

[01:24:46] Michelle Frechette: somethings, we have something similar in the us it's the, as soon as the Super Bowl hits halftime, the water level depletes everywhere because everybody runs to the restroom.

That's fascinating. It literally puts a tax on our water system. Wow.

[01:25:02] Nathan Wrigley: That's so cool. It's very interesting. In the UK here, typically also, you have the whole Santa thing and the gifts get given and children run down. And when I was a kid it was basically every, all the gifts would be in the front room and that was a really exciting moment.

, sadly my kids have grown up to the point where they, that ritual has, is a distant memory, shall we say. So we have to contrive a lot of that kind of stuff. But I'm really looking forward to it. I know that Reuss has gotta run, so we'll knock it on the head fairly quickly. I would just like to say thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you so much. Reuss, if you need to drop off that's fine. Feel free. We can we can close out without you. Oh, quick wave. Yeah, I was gonna say,

[01:25:39] Remkus de Vries: I was gonna,

[01:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: let's just the last one before that. Yay. Thank you very much Reka, have a lovely Christmas and New Year and we'll see you in the new year.

Thanks so much. And Michelle, thank you all of you as well. Yeah, thank you Byebye. Michelle, same to you. Have a lovely holiday and we'll see you in a new year. Thank you. And Tao, same to you. Hope you have a lovely Christmas and. New year, take it easy. Likewise. And I hope

[01:26:05] Taco Verdonschot: to see you more often again in the new year.

[01:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: Tell me more actually, should we end the call and then tell me more? . So let's do that. Sounds good. I'll I'll see you in a sec. See you soon guys. See you next. I'll have a good week, two weeks, and we'll be back at the beginning of January. Take it easy. Bye-Bye.