The WordPress news from the last week, which began Monday 16th January 2023
Another week, and we’re bringing you the latest WordPress news from the last seven days, including…
- WordPress is thinking about starting phase 3 of Gutenberg, and there’s a lot planned.
- What might a new design for the WordPress themes repo look like? There’s an idea for you.
- WordCamp EU tickets are now on sale. Get them while you can!
- Collaborating this week, Kadence Cloud + SureCart & LifterLMS + Paid Memberships Pro.
- Do you feel like you might be good at creating intentionally bad plugins? There’s a use for that.
- Lots of news about WooCommerce Block this week.
- And, the UK’s ugliest dog?
There’s a whole lot more than this, as there is each and every week, and you can find all that by scrolling down and clicking on the links!
This Week in WordPress #238 – “What happens when my camera goes down?”

With Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Katie Keith and Rob Cairns.
Recorded on Monday 23rd January 2023.
If you ever want to join us live you can do that every Monday at 2pm UK time on the WP Builds LIVE page.
WordPress Core
wptavern.com WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy published a summary of the project’s “big picture” goals for 2023. The goals fall into three major categories: CMS, Community, and Ecosystem… |
Community
tommcfarlin.com I’m trying to branch out a bit with the stuff about which I write this year. And given the the rise in discussions on WordPress Certifications, I see an opportunity to do just that… |
wordpress.org Last month at State of the Word, I shared some opening thoughts about “Why WordPress.” For me, this is an easy question, and the hardest part is knowing which lens to answer through… |
wptavern.com On the podcast today we have Corey Maass.Corey is a full-stack web developer who works with agencies and businesses, large and small. He specialises in advanced WordPress functionality and building products for, and using, WordPress… |
europe.wordcamp.org We’ve just released the first batch of tickets for the 11th Annual WordCamp Europe event to be held in Athens, Greece at Megaron the Athens Music Hall on 8-10 June… |
lifterlms.com LifterLMS gains new investors in Jason and Kim Coleman, co-founders of Paid Memberships Pro, to further success… |
wordpress.tv All about images on the web: current formats, how browsers load images, and upcoming formats – when and how to use them… |
Plugins / Themes / Blocks
wpastra.com We are proud to announce the latest release of our WordPress theme Astra 4.0.0… |
make.wordpress.org Do you have demo plugins that are dangerous on purpose? We want to see them…! |
wptavern.com WooCommerce 7.3 was released this week with the new Products block now in beta. In December 2022, the Products block went into testing in WooCommerce Blocks version 9.1.0. It’s based on the Query Loop block and is intended to replace all of WooCommerce’s current product-displaying blocks… |
wptavern.com When Automattic launched a mobile app for Jetpack in June 2021, it was targeted mainly at users who were on a paid Jetpack plan, as it enables access to features like backups, restores, and security scanning… |
wptavern.com WooCommerce Blocks version 9.4.0 was released with support for a new block-powered Local Pickup option under shipping settings. The feature plugin offers users early access to new blocks and improvements to existing blocks before they become available in WooCommerce core… |
wptavern.com WooCommerce Blocks maintainers are asking the developer community to share feedback on any performance issues they are experiencing with the Cart and Checkout blocks… |
make.wordpress.org As part of a broader project to reimagine the visual appearance, functionality, and other elements of the WordPress.org website, one of the next focus areas is the WordPress Theme Directory… |
advancedcustomfields.com Looking back on the past year, there’s no question 2022 was eventful for Advanced Custom Fields… |
kadencewp.com Designers and developers selling libraries using Kadence Cloud now have a new way to sell access license keys using a new shopping cart application, SureCart… |
kadencewp.com We’ve added support for Cloudflare Turnstile to the Kadence CAPTCHA plugin. Turnstile is an invisible CAPTCHA alternative. You can still use Google’s reCAPTCHA versions 3 and 4… |
Deals
Find a deal in our searchable / filterable list. It’s like Black Friday, but every day of the year! |
Security
ithemes.com This guide to clickjacking, or user interface redressing attacks, will show you how clickjacking works so you can ensure your WordPress website’s content can’t be used by attackers… |
givewp.com Version 2.24.0 patches a vulnerability. Here are the details and how to update so your website is secure immediately… |
ithemes.com Each week, we report the latest vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes. Vulnerable WordPress plugins and themes are the #1 reason WordPress sites get hacked… |
WP Builds
In this episode, co-hosts Paul Halfpenny (CTO & Founder of Filter) and Nathan Wrigley (of WP Tavern) are joined by Lucy Collins (Director of Web Usability) to discuss the important topic of web accessibility… |
Welcome to the last episode (sigh) in our Business Bootcamp series. Over the last year, we have been attempting to question everything we know about building WordPress sites… |
Jobs
Post a Job If you know of a job in the WordPress community, please feel free to post it here… |
Not WordPress, but useful anyway…
techdirt.com For years now we’ve written about the problems of the UK’s latest (in a long line) of attempts to “Disneyfy” the internet with its Online Safety Bill… |
wikimediafoundation.org The interface update, built in collaboration with Wikipedia volunteers worldwide, will make the site more welcoming, easier to use for everyone… |
bbc.co.uk The unusual-looking dog, from East Yorkshire, is one of several in line for winning the title… |
austingil.com This article covers HTML form design patterns, common gotchas, and CSS tips. You should be able to walk away with some new knowledge and helpful code snippets… |
editorx.com Designers across the country share their big bets, areas of focus, and ways to move the industry forward this year… |
The WP Builds podcast is brought to you this week by…
Omnisend
Omnisend is the top-rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. More than a hundred thousand merchants use Omnisend every day to grow their audience and sales. Ready to start building campaigns that really sell? Find out more at www.omnisend.com
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% off new purchases! Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.
The WP Builds Deals Page
It’s like Black Friday, but everyday of the year! Search and Filter WordPress Deals! Check out the deals now…
Transcript (if available)
These transcripts are created using software, so apologies if there are errors in them.
[00:00:04.650] - Nathan Wrigley
It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 238 entitled what Happens When My Camera Goes Down? It was recorded on Monday, the 23 January 2023. My name is Nathan Wrigley and today I'm joined by three lovely guests. Joined by Michelle Frachette, by Katie Keith and Rob Cairns. It's a WordPress. Podcast. So we talk about WordPress. We kick things off with some news about some changes that are going to be happening with WordPress over the coming period. We've moved from Phase Two and we're about to enter Phase Three, which is all about collaborating in documents. What does that all mean and what else is coming along? For the ride? We look at a new design for the WordPress Themes Directory. It's just a template at the moment, but it may be an exciting new way that you can discover themes on the repo. Shore Cart and Cadence Cloud have collaborated to enable you to sell your templates from those platforms. WordCamp Europe tickets are now available. Lifter LMS and Paid memberships Pro have started a new collaboration. Update your give WP plugin. If you have an old version, there's a security patch there. Then we talk about WooCommerce and some new blocks which have come around.
[00:01:22.800] - Nathan Wrigley
There's quite a lot to talk about. And then we go on to the non WordPress stuff. Wikipedia having a new update how to build HTML forms so that they look nice. And then the UK's ugliest dock. It's all coming up next on this Week in WordPress.
[00:01:42.370] - Nathan Wrigley
This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL and 24/7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by 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.
[00:02:13.690] - Nathan Wrigley
Hello. Hello. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. Very nice to have you with us. Episode number 238 of this Week in WordPress. You can see on the screen that I'm joined by three fabulous individuals from actually, yeah, pretty much all over the world today. It's quite nice. First of all, Michelle, how are you doing? Michelle?
[00:02:33.530] - Michelle Frechette
I'm good, how are you?
[00:02:34.990] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, very well. Michelle freshette. You've probably seen on this podcast as well as really all over the internet, because as you're about to hear, Michelle is well, let's just say she's relatively busy. She is, first off, the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web. She's also been recently called I was there, I was in the room. She was called the busiest woman in WordPress by Mollenberg at WordCamp US 2022. In addition to her work at Stellar WP, michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk. She's the co founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Career Pages, president and of the Board for Big Orange Arts, director of Community Relations and [email protected], co host of the WP Motivate podcast, author, business coach and frequent organiser and speaker of WordPress events. She lives outside of Rochester, New York. She's an avid nature photographer and if you want to learn more about her, you can go to meetmichelle online. I got to ask Michelle. When you work in an office, you have this intra and out tray sort of thing, and hopefully they kind of balance out the entry and the outrage kind of have this sort of seesaw effect and one never gets yours seems to just get fuller on one side here.
[00:03:55.930] - Nathan Wrigley
Do you ever sort of drop projects or do you just sort of keep them all? Do you just add them in and keep adding them in?
[00:04:02.430] - Michelle Frechette
I deprecate things just like other people do. Right. There are things that no longer serve or there are things that it's time to sunset and so, yes, of course, I do that as well.
[00:04:12.560] - Nathan Wrigley
Well, thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. Also, we're joined, so I'm in the UK, michelle is in the US. We've got Katie. Keith. Hi, Katie.
[00:04:22.120] - Katie Keith
Hi.
[00:04:23.030] - Nathan Wrigley
Katie is in Majorca now. You got to forgive me, Katie, I'm going to say it's part of Spain.
[00:04:28.410] - Katie Keith
Yeah.
[00:04:30.870] - Nathan Wrigley
Okay. She's there at the moment. She's the co founder and CEO of Barn Two Plugins. She loves finding ideas for new and unique plugins that help people achieve new things in WordPress and WooCommerce. Originally from the UK, she now lives in sunny Majorca oh, it says Spain. Sorry. And can be found puddle boarding in the sea or hiking in the mountains. Was that kind of part of the reason of going there? Just to adopt more of that lifestyle? Because with the best will in the world, you are hard pushed to do paddle boarding and mountaineering in the UK.
[00:05:04.130] - Katie Keith
Yeah, I did manage that in the UK, but would often be rained off. And it's more seasonal, of course. Yeah, definitely.
[00:05:11.800] - Nathan Wrigley
But you're enjoying living there.
[00:05:13.170] - Katie Keith
I guess it's good. People don't realise how beautiful a mountainous it is. They just think of the kind of Magaliff style tourist resorts and it's a lot more than that.
[00:05:23.190] - Nathan Wrigley
Well, thank you for joining us. And anybody that is curious to know what Katie's plugins do, go and cheque them out. Barn Two. Google that Barn Two plugins and you'll see a suite of things all for WooCommerce, which is handy because there's tonnes of WooCommerce stuff in the news this week, by coincidence. So that's kind of nice. And finally, we're joined by Rob KENS. Hello, Rob. How are you doing? And he third of our co host today. I guess he's from Toronto in Canada, so everybody's in a different spot on the world. How are you doing, Rob? You're all right?
[00:05:52.220] - Rob Cairns
Doing well. And, Nathan, thanks for having me.
[00:05:54.560] - Nathan Wrigley
You're so welcome. Rob is the co founder, CEO. Chief creator of amazing ideas at Stunning Digital Marketing. He's the creator of the SDM Podcast Show and co moderator of the WordPress Global Product group on LinkedIn. When he's not playing with WordPress, he can be found enjoying sports in Niagara Falls and reading. It actually says in Niagara Falls. I wonder, do you literally go in Niagara Falls?
[00:06:22.730] - Rob Cairns
No, I go visit those who don't know. Niagara Falls region is about 90 minutes from Toronto, and we were just there at the Ice Wine Festival.
[00:06:31.830] - Nathan Wrigley
So is Niagara Falls not only a waterfall? It's the name of a town, right?
[00:06:35.970] - Rob Cairns
Yes, it is.
[00:06:36.800] - Nathan Wrigley
Okay.
[00:06:37.390] - Michelle Frechette
Two towns.
[00:06:40.670] - Nathan Wrigley
Oh, yeah, that's right. It's right on the border, isn't it? And if you're on the American side and want to look at the waterfall, you have to go to that sort of half bridge, which sort of jots out and never has a destination. It just comes out of it.
[00:06:52.310] - Michelle Frechette
It is the bridge to nowhere on the Canadian side.
[00:06:56.220] - Nathan Wrigley
You can see the full beauty of it. Yeah, okay. I get it now. In Niagara Falls. Actually, Rob, whilst we're at it, you had something that you wanted to mention concerning your podcast. We've just mentioned the SDM show podcast. Why not do it now? Tell us about your little epoch coming up.
[00:07:14.750] - Rob Cairns
Sure. We just published episode 297 this morning, a week Tuesday, I will be hitting the magic episode 300. So that puts me in a little bit of I think, Nathan, you're already there, and our dear friend Bob Dunn is already there, so I'm not far behind.
[00:07:34.560] - Nathan Wrigley
So please. I remember when I got to 100, I made a real fuss of it, and I made, like, this massive competition, and we gave away something like $16,000 worth of plugins and themes and all that. And honestly, it took me a week to clear up who want what I said, I'm not doing that again. And then 200 came around, not even mentioned, and then 300 more recently. No, just move on. Well, anyway, congratulations. That is a big mark. Thank you. Right, a couple of bits of advertising from me. I hope you don't mind, everybody, but the first thing is just to say, here's our website, wpbuilds.com. If you fancy subscribing to the bits and the pieces that we do and you enjoy the show, the best way to do that is either to go to your podcast player of choice and search for WP builds. These days, podcast players are clever enough to pick up on just searches. You don't usually need an RSS feed, but try that and if failing that, if that doesn't work, you can go to our subscribe page, which is in this link here. Or if you just want to keep updated with the content as we push it out.
[00:08:42.710] - Nathan Wrigley
Typically two episodes a week. This thing on a Monday, which actually comes out on a Tuesday, because as soon as it's finished, I edit it and what have you, and then we have the podcast on a Thursday. But if you're clicking here. We'll send you an email just saying that that has happened. So that's the first bit of advertising. The second bit. Forgive me. Is Page Builder summit. Page Builder Summit is coming back round again. It's the 20th to the 24 February this year. So, yeah, a little over about a month away. Just slightly under a month. We've got loads of speakers lined up. All the speaker roster has basically been settled, but we're still interested in having a few sponsors, if you fancy doing that. This is the page to go to. You can find [email protected]. Sponsors. I'll say that again, pagebuildersomic. Comsponsors with an S on the end. So plural. And yeah, go and have a look around. I'm happy to say that Cadence has actually sponsored us, which is really nice. You can sort of see a little bit further down, just there. Look, there's one of our sponsors thus far. We've got the ones that you can see, 20 Eye, Cadence and various other ones as well.
[00:09:50.410] - Nathan Wrigley
So very appreciative to those. But if you fancy joining us for the ride, it's happening in a few weeks time. We'll be opening the waitlist page for those people that want to actually attend the event in a few days time. Okay, there we go. Right, let's get on with the WordPress news for this week, shall we? It's quite a lot, actually. We've got lots of news items. It depends how deep we go into them. We might get to them or we might not. But let's start here. This is a piece on the WP Tavern. It's by Sarah Gooding. It's called WordPress Project aims to complete customization phase and Begin exploring collaboration in 2023. This teeny, tiny little article, well, I say that she writes really long pieces, but this one is one of the shorter ones. It actually contained awful lot of information about the upcoming year in broad brushstrokes. Joseph Hayden Chomposi, who is the executive director of the WordPress Project, has said that phase two is sort of drawing to a close and phase two is all about fullsight editing. Those kind of things block patterns, the way that it's presented on the page.
[00:10:57.540] - Nathan Wrigley
And now we're going to be moving on to phase three at some point. I'm not entirely sure from this article when that transition is likely to happen, but maybe it's after 6.2 is released. And phase three is a really exciting one because it involves collaboration, aka Google Docs. So the idea being that you would open up a document and be able to concurrently edit it along with various other people. There's more to it than that. There's all sorts of rules around who can edit what and what state they're in, whether it's in a draught and whether you're an editor. And so it gets kind of complex, but they're trying to figure out what that will be. Also, the hope is that in three, these are some cool items. Open verse search in Core. So open versus freely available images and the idea you'd be able to search from within your WordPress install and get some free images of which Michelle has contributed a lot improvements to the navigation block, which I'm pretty sure everybody could agree if you've used it, could still do with a little bit of work. Media management. There's going to be quite a lot of updates to the media library.
[00:12:00.880] - Nathan Wrigley
And so in two minutes, I've basically outlined a dramatic amount that's going to change in WordPress. Hopefully in the next phase, I've said enough. If anybody wants to comment, one of you three, jump in.
[00:12:15.050] - Rob Cairns
I love to. Nathan? One of the things for me is the Media Management library. I think the media library has been neglected for a long time because it's kind of not a sexy WordPress project and it needs an overhaul. So for me that's a big deal. I'm glad we're finally getting to it. So that's a piece of good news.
[00:12:35.350] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. When I came to WordPress, I came from Drupal, and basically, I think I'm pretty sure in saying that in the time that I've been in WordPress, the media library, in the way it looks, hasn't really changed. At the time I moved over, it was a revelation. It was so much better than what we had in Drupal, but it hasn't changed a lot. So much so that I install a plug in to make it a little bit easier to manage. It's called Happy Files. It's by the guy who creates the Bricks page builder, and it allows things like, you can just put folders and things like that. And so you can store your images in places where you can remember where you put them. Because once you've got like, I don't know, for WP builds, I think we've got about 1600 images, something like that. It's pretty hard to keep a track on what went where and all of that kind of stuff. So it really does help. But yeah, that's a really Core piece, right? Katie or Michelle?
[00:13:25.350] - Michelle Frechette
I love the idea of adding the open verse into Core because so often I'm like going back and forth between places to find images, free images, and being able to do that, I think is really going to be good. I was just looking at the photo directory. We have over 5600 published photos in the photo directory, and we cleared the queue on Friday. I'm one of the photo moderators and we have 45 new photos to review and either deny or approve. We do get some bad apples who are submitting stock imagery and things like that. So only submit your own photos people.
[00:14:05.150] - Nathan Wrigley
Do you have to do a manual cheque of each one then, to determine if it's basically taken from, I don't know, getty Images or somewhere else?
[00:14:12.980] - Michelle Frechette
We don't cheque everyone. We go with our gut. And if it looks like it's to stock image, we will cheque them. And I've discovered probably a dozen or more just in the last few months of people trying to submit stock imagery.
[00:14:29.680] - Nathan Wrigley
Okay.
[00:14:30.650] - Michelle Frechette
Or Linked advertising.
[00:14:32.720] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. But also, Michelle, I noticed that your contribution to the photo library is not in your introduction to this podcast.
[00:14:42.090] - Michelle Frechette
I've got to get out of that.
[00:14:43.610] - Nathan Wrigley
Come on. There's not enough in there. Okay. Katie, anything there which piques your interest?
[00:14:50.430] - Katie Keith
Yeah, I'm excited about the collaboration side of things, particularly on posts. I don't know exactly what the detail of what's coming, but that does need improving, like people submitting work and feeding back. What I'd love to see would be when you edit an existing post, you might want to save a copy of it as a draught for people to cheque and then use that to override the live post. And currently the only way I know to do that is I think it's the Duplicator plug in. You can do that. And I feel that that's quite a common thing. That should be part of Core.
[00:15:28.330] - Nathan Wrigley
This is sort of self promotion, but it isn't intended to be self promotion. I did a podcast episode with Steve Burge. This is going back before Christmas, December the 7th, it looks like, and he goes into real detail about where he thinks we're at at the moment, because this is with the collaborative editing and he thinks it's going to be a really difficult task to pull off, largely because of the different infrastructure that all of us have. If you're on a very modest, tiny little hosting company and you're paying them a very small amount of money, you can imagine the complexity of things syncing here, there and everywhere. And I don't know, imagine sort of seven people trying to edit things at the same time. It could be a difficult proposition. We're so used to things like Google Docs, who obviously have the most gigantic infrastructure imaginable, and the same would be true of Microsoft and whatever platform typically can do this. So he's convinced it's technically possible, but it's going to be a really difficult piece to play. One of the things that he thought may happen, and I think this is quite curious, is that you would concurrently edit just a single block at a time.
[00:16:36.770] - Nathan Wrigley
So you imagine that you've got a body of text and it's made up of 50 paragraphs. It might be that they're going to explore the idea of just if you concurrently edit one paragraph at a time and then you sort of move on to the next paragraph in the next paragraph, so it's not trying to pull the whole document all at the same time. But it's pretty transformational, isn't it? If you think about it, there's a lot going on. There the idea of collaborative editing, a complete overhaul of the media library, the navigation block getting improvement and the open verse, that's a tonne to do. I got to ask, though, if any of you have been playing with what we've done in phase two, which is all of the stuff surrounding full site editing and so on, do you feel that's finished? Because I kind of feel we're sort of halfway there with that, but maybe the community feel that actually enough has been done already. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that, whether phase two really should be coming to a close.
[00:17:35.650] - Rob Cairns
I don't think it's done yet, Nathan. I do a mastermind group on Fridays where we talk about full site editing, that slide by Brian Gardner over at WP Engine. And that group tends to concede that we're not quite there either when we talk about FSE and blocks and all that stuff. I think there's a lot of work to do and I think, honestly, they're jumping ahead of themselves at this point. So I think we would be better delaying phase three for some time, too. Pretty well locked down, in my opinion.
[00:18:09.190] - Nathan Wrigley
But, yeah, I do a bit of echo there. I don't know where that came from, but hopefully that wasn't too loud for everybody else. I do think maybe they just have to draw a line under the sand and say, okay, we've done enough, we can carry on doing that. But equally, at the same time, we've got to move on and do the other promise things. Phase four, of course, that'll be several years off by now. That's going to be multilingual bits and pieces. Okay, there we go. Thank you. A couple of comments coming in. I did forget, I forgot Peter Ingasol was going to deliver his weekly weather report, so we might as well get that out the way. Forgive my camera. It seems to be going berserkers. I don't know if that's just me, but that's kind of weird. I'll deal with that in a minute. He says Monday, it's one degree centigrade, 34 here in Connecticut. We are under winter weather advisory. That doesn't sound good. So our current cold rain could turn into snow some parts of the state. Yeah, it's cold and cloudy here, but then that's six months of the UK.
[00:19:07.540] - Nathan Wrigley
Not much more to add, but I appreciate you coming each week and telling us all about it. Thank you very much. Also, we got Lana. Hi, Lana. She says good evening. Oh, I wonder where you are. If it's the evening that's interesting. And we've got Daesha saying, Hi, Rob and Hi, Diesel. Yay. Do you know? Diesha, rob. That's good.
[00:19:25.990] - Rob Cairns
I do very much, though.
[00:19:27.700] - Nathan Wrigley
Oh, great. Okay, we'll move on to the next piece. I'll try and fix my camera while we're doing things. I haven't the faintest idea what could possibly be wrong. It's never gone wrong before. But my unplug and plug it back in. Michelle, look what happened to you spoke and it fixed itself. I swear, my hands. That is kind of eerie. But my Mac my Mac never crashes and it went full green screen today and I haven't seen that before, so well, not for a very, very long time. So maybe there is something stranger for Lana. Says she's in the Ukraine. He she apologies, I don't know. But hello, Larna. Very nice to have you with us. Right, let's move on to the next story. Here we go. We now moving on to this one. This is just a cosmetic thing, but I think it's quite a nice thing to mention. If you go to the Themes page very often, it's quite likely that you're really familiar with the interface. You've probably seen it a gazillion times before and that's the way it's always been. Right? Well, hopefully not for much longer because it says here we got an article called a Refresh of the Wordpress.org Themes page as part of a broader project to reimagine the visual appearance, functionality and other elements of Wordpress.org, the website.
[00:20:46.930] - Nathan Wrigley
One of the next focus areas is the WordPress themes directory. My camera is now Glitching and Michelle, you must begin talking again. Talk. And this is the intended now, when I say intended, I really don't know how much weight that carries. I don't know if this is just a kind of proposal or somebody saying wouldn't it be nice if it looked like this? But I'm showing it on the screen now. For those of you that are listening to this on the audio, essentially it's all black with the new WordPress blue that we're all familiar with. Giant kind of italicised Serif font saying themes. It's pretty full on, you can't miss it. It's pretty much punching you in the face. And then a very minimal layout with a couple of icons of different images to left and to write some iconography underneath giving you ideas about different ways that you can use tones on them and things like that. And then there's a great big philtre option where you can sort of philtre down, as you might imagine. Really. I was just showing it because I thought it was quite nice. I don't know if any of you got any opinions.
[00:21:47.990] - Nathan Wrigley
If you do, yell them now and I will try and fix my camera.
[00:21:52.120] - Michelle Frechette
I think it looks great. I think it's funny. I was running our local meet up a couple of weeks ago and was reminded what it's like to be new to WordPress when somebody who was new to WordPress said, I don't understand. I keep trying these themes and none of them look like they do in the directory. And I said, oh, welcome to WordPress.
[00:22:15.450] - Rob Cairns
I agree with you. You got to play I agree with you. Michelle looks really great. And by the way, just while we're talking to Take a Poke at Nathan, I think the episode title needs to be what Happens When My Camera Goes Bad?
[00:22:28.590] - Nathan Wrigley
But that's oh, nice. Well, there we go. There we go. It's back. Whether or not it'll stay back, I don't know. Sorry. Right, I'm going to write that one down. What happens when my camera goes bad, Katie? Every episode I try to come up with the most unusual or interesting line that said in the episode. So at the minute, I think that's leading the way. I write that one down. Katie, what do you think about this new design?
[00:22:55.320] - Katie Keith
I love the font because it says designed. The concept of themes is supposed to be visual. I know themes have moved on way beyond the visual, but in theory it's a skin, isn't it? And so I really like the way they've used such an artistic font. The lack of space around the edge upsets me a bit, though, I must admit. It's actually touching the edge of the page just here. Sure, that's intentional.
[00:23:19.090] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, I do know what you mean. It is definitely putting the images sort of front and centre, isn't it? It's making those the big thing. But then again, I guess if they were making those front and centre, they probably just have one at a time. I have to say, in the past I found it a little bit tricky, too. I don't know what the navigation will be like or what the defaults will be like, but I've never really kind of understood how what is on the home page, the first page, if you like, never kind of really understood what I was being shown, whether it was download counts or whatever the criteria may be. So having all these different philtre options, especially if you could somehow save them, so that when you came back, the same philtres always applied set as a cookie or something, that might be quite interesting. Sorry, Katie, I feel I might have interrupted you.
[00:24:02.670] - Katie Keith
I think the grid works really well and I love the philtres because it is hard to narrow them down sometimes.
[00:24:08.430] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. So, for example, some of them are quite helpful. So we've got things like accessibility ready block editor patterns, available, block editor styles, whether it's suitable for body press and so on and so forth. The usual things that you might see, I guess, but I like it looks really nice. So hopefully coming to a website near you at some point in the near future. We'll have a newly designed WordPress themes area. Of course, you'll have seen this similar design. There's a couple of sections where a couple of areas of the WordPress site where this has happened before. It mentions it in the article here. The showcase area, or the news area as well, has got something quite similar. So following on from a similar pattern okay, right, bit of stellar news for you. I think Michelle is probably going to be the best person to take this on, but I'd also be curious to know what Katie thinks, given that she's very much in the sort of ecommerce WooCommerce space. So this came out of the blue to me, at least this week. Cadence have joined forces with Shorecart. And I don't really know a lot about Shorecart except that when I look at their logo, I immediately think Spotify.
[00:25:20.310] - Nathan Wrigley
Do you know what I mean? Is it me or is it just that? Why is Cadence doing things with Spotify? So the article is entitled Sell Your Design Library using Cadence Cloud and Shortcart. A feature of Cadence Cloud is the ability to create templates, if you like libraries using the cloud. And now you'll be able to sell them with this new shortcut platform. It integrates the two so that you can easily essentially put your assets together and then flog it from the cloud. But do you know a great deal more about this? I've just broadly said, what's going on?
[00:25:55.970] - Michelle Frechette
You pretty much took the words out of my mouth with that. But what I think is really cool about it is and with the Page Builder Summit coming up, you can certainly attest to this that good page builders have economies growing up around them and ecosystems growing up around them. I created Meet Michelle Online because I wanted to have my own Link tree, but I didn't want to rely on linktree. And so somebody else took that idea and created templates around that idea. And now as part of the ecosystem, designing these templates and things like that. And so when you have that kind of thing happening where you could actually create it within your own website and then sell it through an add on surecard. I think it's pretty awesome that you can make it that seamless.
[00:26:42.770] - Nathan Wrigley
It says that it came out as a result of user request. So I'm guessing there's a bunch of your users who not only are using the cloud for creating these templates, but obviously feel there's a need to sell them. And presumably our Shorecart users as well. I don't know that Shorecart has been around for the longest of times. Anybody that can help me out on this, but I think it was an initiative. Was it Adam prizer and brainstorm force? That's what's in my head for no reason at all. I don't know if that's true or not, but I don't know if they're still custodians of it.
[00:27:19.050] - Michelle Frechette
I'm not certain.
[00:27:20.430] - Katie Keith
It must be new. You're right. It's Adam. I remembered now. I was talking to him about it at Wordcampus in September and it wasn't launched at that point. So yeah, it's pretty new. So it's interesting. It's got over 3000 installations already and it's growing quickly.
[00:27:39.250] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. So that's the shorecart plugin. So this is obviously some kind of alternative to WooCommerce or what have you. So if anybody's in the comments wants to tell us about it, that'd be great. But it looks like if you are a Cadence Full Bundle subscriber, if you've got the full suite of their products, you can get this Shorecar add on as a version. One for free. Says there's no additional charge for using this add. On plugin. It's just another benefit of the full bundle. I don't know if it's a paid add on if you're not part of the full bundle or not, but just an interesting idea. I know there's a whole bunch of people out there. In fact, in the comments, there's one happy customer, Michael, who says he's happy because it's now everything he needs to put together his website. So, at least for my great test of audio, that's perfect. So there you go. If you're a Cadence customer and you want to sell stuff online, templates and so on, you've now got a Shorecard integration. Maybe we should cover Shortcut at some point and see what that's all about. Rob anything or should I move on?
[00:28:45.750] - Rob Cairns
The only thing I would add is I think we're going to see more of this kind of partnership, because the only way for some of these plugins to grow, like, surecard, is either partner with an existing builder or something or to be bought. So I think this is going to be one of many we're going to see this year, personally.
[00:29:03.390] - Nathan Wrigley
Do you remember, like, I'm going to say, like, two years ago, everybody was talking about acquisitions because it was happening all the time. It really did feel like every week there was three or four more of them. Well, I think that Word now needs to be hijacked, and it now needs to be partnerships, because I see these partnerships every single week now. There really are loads of them, and obviously people have, rather than sell what they've got and then go and try and find something new to do. They're just finding people who've got a real nice fit. So in this case, cadence and shortcut. But I was talking to Main WP Dennis Thornton the other week, and he was talking about all these different partnerships, SEO Press, for example, and Atarim just like, perfect little symbiotic relationships where they both promote each other's stuff, and it works out really well. Hi, Courtney. Sorry.
[00:29:55.650] - Michelle Frechette
What a great sign of a healthy ecosystem around WordPress, though, right?
[00:30:00.820] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, it was quite interesting. In fact, I'm going to plug my Tavern podcast again. The episode with Dennis Dawn and was exactly about that. It was about why it's a good idea to create partnerships. And in some scenarios, it just doesn't make sense. You not partnering because there's absolutely no conflict in the user base. It's not like if we talk about this other WordPress plug in, they're going to cannibalise our sales. The only thing that can happen is we're going to introduce you to new customers, because in this case, Shorecart Cadence, there's no overlap in that sense, but it just makes perfect sense to match things up. SEO press and aterim and main WP just makes really perfect sense. So the next question for Katie is, do you collaborate with people in this way? Have you got partnerships that you're either working on or have worked on in the past.
[00:30:56.310] - Katie Keith
Yeah, all the time, more and more. So at the lowest level, it might just be a guest post swap or something like that. But I try to do it in a more involved way, where we really think about how to appeal to each other's customers through talking about how our products work well together, to add functionality, and even people that could be viewed as competitors, like Iconic, for example. We work very closely together. We try not to overlap, but there is overlap, but where there isn't overlap, we try to promote each other's products and hopefully grow together. And then it's always good when, as you say, with Cadence and Shorecart, where there isn't any overlap. So you can just go all in and work together to, as I said, grow together.
[00:31:46.530] - Nathan Wrigley
I think the integration piece for me is the Holy grail of it because if the relationship is guest posting, well, that's brilliant because we all get to know what you're doing. But for me, as a purchaser of Plugins, I'm always really chuffed when I just get a free new integration with a service that I've never heard of. And without a shadow of a doubt, it's going to get me investigating what that other thing is. Because I've already invested in this one thing over here, I'm at least going to explore it. So in this case, if I was a Cadence user and I suddenly hear about shortcut and there's this new free thing that I can do that's going to pique my interest. Dennis. Hi, Dennis. So there's Dennis from Main WP, and he's saying thank you for the mention. You're very welcome. Joining us also is Courtney from Daddy. Very nice to have you, Courtney. It says on here and I don't really understand, I've never seen this on the UI. For the restream thing that we're doing, it's got you marked down as paired, and you're the only one in the comments that I've ever seen with the word paired next to it, and I have no idea what that means.
[00:32:59.180] - Nathan Wrigley
So I'm sorry if I've done something wrong or I don't know what's gone on there, but paired, we are paired. We're having a collaboration. And also Happy Monday from Maya. Hi there, Maya. How are you doing? From as well. Okay, let's move on. This is something which I'm going to be I really would like to make sure I'm going to get to this. This is WordCamp Europe. Last time in Porto, Portugal. This time coming up, it's going to be in Athens. I've never been to Athens. I've always wanted to go to Athens. There's something very appealing about going to Athens, but I bought a ticket even though I haven't got accommodation or anything like that. So this is just it really just to say that the tickets are now available. I think I paid 49 euro. Was it 49, something like that, or 50? Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah. There you go, look. €50 for a ticket. And I think more or less at the minute, the euro and the dollar are fairly on par, so broadly speaking, it's $50. It's the normal thing. It gets you entry to the event. You can also agree to attend the contributor day, although I've forgotten whether that's in front of or behind the main event.
[00:34:16.260] - Nathan Wrigley
They also asked for the usual things like do you want your avatar going on the page? And what's your dietary requirements and things like that.
[00:34:24.290] - Michelle Frechette
T shirt size?
[00:34:25.320] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. T shirt size, yeah, that's right. Well, there was a lot of T shirt sizes. It's like a full page of that's. Good.
[00:34:32.470] - Michelle Frechette
Inclusive.
[00:34:33.250] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. Really cool. So that's it.
[00:34:36.420] - Michelle Frechette
Speakers is still open, though, right now?
[00:34:38.180] - Nathan Wrigley
Yes, that's a good point.
[00:34:40.230] - Michelle Frechette
Only for like another week or two, I think. So if you're interested in speaking to get it in there.
[00:34:44.540] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, the page that I'm looking at is purely about buying the tickets, but, yes, I think you're right. Michelle, if you look over here, get involved, call for speakers, call for sponsors and obviously the call for volunteers. It is what it is. If you want to go to WordCamp Europe, you're going to have to go here. My understanding is it always seems I don't know if it's like fake scarcity a little bit, but it often seems like they run out very quickly. But I think it's they run out of tranches. They have, like, I don't know what it is, 500 and they run out and then a few days later they put a few more on. But honestly, I think if you are even thinking of going, get in early, because it typically does sell out. So I guess the next question to you is who's going? Who wants to go?
[00:35:28.390] - Michelle Frechette
I both applied to Speak and bought a ticket, so I've got my basis covered.
[00:35:33.450] - Nathan Wrigley
Yes, of course. If you get a speaker slot, you get a ticket. Right. You'll be able to do something with that ticket, but you don't know if you're going yet. You're going to wait on the speaker slot thing.
[00:35:43.070] - Michelle Frechette
Oh, no, I bought a ticket, too, just in case. I will plan to be there.
[00:35:46.530] - Nathan Wrigley
Have you done all the air travel bit and everything yet?
[00:35:49.180] - Michelle Frechette
Not yet. That's coming. I actually am waiting for my passport and once I get my passport, I can secure travel.
[00:35:55.410] - Nathan Wrigley
Okay. Yeah. Katie?
[00:35:57.490] - Katie Keith
Yeah. We're going to sponsor we've never sponsored before. The small business one, the smallest one that gets a table, basically. So currently learning about swag and trying to decide what to do and all of that, I got a bit excited and bought more tickets than I have team members because of scarcity. Well, after work camp, US sold out in an hour and five minutes last time, and Asia, I was going to go with six team members and none of us got tickets. So I think the other Word camps have created that impression of scarcity for Europe, which obviously has a much greater capacity. So maybe Europe's okay because tickets have been on sale for like four days now and they haven't sold out. Yes, and it's only the first batch as well. But, yeah, I still think get in there, because people have missed out on work camps in the last year. So, yeah, I think I'll probably bring at least there'll be at least six of us.
[00:36:57.290] - Nathan Wrigley
Nice. And you're going to have one of the booze at WordCamp Europe, the ones that you're talking about, they're like, I don't know, they're like a metre and a half, two metres wide or something like that. You get your logo in a big banner above your head and the logo draping off the table. And honestly, it was really busy. I don't know what it'll be like in Athens, but the location of the sponsor booths in WordCamp Europe, they surrounded the main speaking auditorium, so you really couldn't get access to the main area without bypassing at some point, the sponsors, and I think it worked really well. There was a lot of engagement, there were people stood by almost every booth at one point. So I feel it's a really good investment for somebody like you to go and put your face out there and all of that kind of stuff. That's great.
[00:37:48.490] - Katie Keith
I was talking to Mark from WS Form, who did the sport performance sponsor last year, and he said he said he directly measured a good ROI from it, which I wouldn't expect, because I would see the main benefits as the indirect benefits, like becoming better known as a brand, the relationships you build, the partnerships. But he said he actually did a sale and generated lots of sales, which really surprised me.
[00:38:13.390] - Nathan Wrigley
He had a really nice his product is really easy to figure out by looking at it, isn't it? You can see the form builder and get a real impression of, oh, okay, that's how WS Form work. And he had a video and I actually asked him, I said, did you get that professionally done? He said, no, I did it myself, like all things Mark does. But it really showed everything how complex the plugin could be. So that was another thing. There was a great big telly behind his head as well. So sorry, Katie, I'm probably going to now force you to go and make some kind of promotional no, we do that.
[00:38:45.740] - Katie Keith
I do have a full time video person now who's new, so we're okay there?
[00:38:50.410] - Nathan Wrigley
Well, yeah, I think definitely worth it. So this piece was all about getting a ticket. They're on sale at the moment. The URL is European.org 2023 and from there you can go and find out about tickets. Rob, you going, I have a ticket.
[00:39:07.300] - Rob Cairns
At this point, but it might be my vacation week, so if the lady in my life rules the iron hand. I'm not going. I might be having a giveaway for one word, your picket.
[00:39:25.910] - Nathan Wrigley
Well, fingers crossed. Let's hope you go. And I shall be endeavouring to go. But again, I haven't put it against the calendar of what the rest of the members of the family are doing yet. So we'll see how that goes. Okay, so some news about collaboration. Again, we were just talking about it a minute ago. This seems to be, like I said, an interesting and growing trend. So this isn't an acquisition. This is more of a kind of I don't really know what the term is for this, but here we go. Lifter elements. Strengthens leadership with investment from paid memberships. Pro So Paid Memberships Pro is a very long standing membership solution. You can see on the screen the founders. You've got Jason and Kim Coleman. You've got Kim on this podcast, actually, in the past, doing this show, and they've decided to invest in Lifter LMS. The article is on the Lifter LMS blog. You can go and find it there. And as you might imagine, because it's not an acquisition, it's not a takeover, it's really an exchange of finances, but also experience. I'm pretty sure that Kim and Jason I don't know if they get a seat on the board or something like that.
[00:40:33.950] - Nathan Wrigley
For some reason, my memory is blanking. I read this entire article and now I can't really remember.
[00:40:38.670] - Michelle Frechette
It's right there above their pictures.
[00:40:40.560] - Nathan Wrigley
What does it say? What does it say?
[00:40:42.420] - Michelle Frechette
They'll be taking active roles in the company to apply their engineering, design and business skills to Lifter.
[00:40:47.320] - Nathan Wrigley
Thank you very much. Their expertise and experience will be invaluable as we work towards our mission to democratise learning in the digital classroom. Okay, so for their investment, they do sort of seem to have a bit of skin in the game now as well. I mean, there's such a big overlap there, isn't there an LMS platform and a membership platform there? I would imagine in many ways, they kind of overlap. So, yeah. Again, another example of WordPress businesses working together. Good luck. Hope it works out. Jason and Kim. And also Chris Badgett, who I know from Lifter LMS. I'm sure there's some other people behind Lifter LMS as well, but I only really know Chris Badgett, so yeah. Any comments on that?
[00:41:27.450] - Katie Keith
Yeah, so it also mentioned in the article that Thomas, who was the CTO, I think, before Lifter, has moved on. So my understanding is they're basically taking over his role, particularly with the technical side. And I believe Jason is doing something like a day, a week at Lifter, so he is actively contributing and they're looking for ways they can get closer and closer over time.
[00:41:54.450] - Nathan Wrigley
That's a big deal, though, isn't it? If you go to doing 150 of your working week on something which a little while ago you didn't really have any relationship with, that's quite a big change. They really are deadly serious about that. Interesting. Michelle, Rob, should we move on?
[00:42:12.810] - Michelle Frechette
I'm excited for all of them. I can't wait to see what happens.
[00:42:16.970] - Nathan Wrigley
In other news, paired, we still have no idea what paired means. Courtney says I have no idea. Perhaps she's logged into YouTube and other platforms of Restream Audio. I don't know. But she just say Loads loves the small business represented at Wordcam EU. Yeah, just going back to that story, actually, katie, did you go to Wordcam EU? Were you there at that one?
[00:42:40.840] - Michelle Frechette
Yeah.
[00:42:41.730] - Nathan Wrigley
So you'll know what I meant about that arrangement of booth?
[00:42:44.830] - Katie Keith
Yeah, because it was like a circle around and you had to go through it to get to the main sponsor hall or where the talks were.
[00:42:51.610] - Nathan Wrigley
But I do think Courtney makes a really good point. It's just nice to be in an environment where you are with so many other people who are going through the same sort of struggles and things that you're going through, all in the one space. Yeah, it's really nice and entice the folks to hang out with your booth. She says interactive games to win prizes is usually a hit. Yeah, that's true. Elementor, last time they had this great big I don't know how good it is for the environment, but they had this great big VAT full of little squishy balls and you had to dip your hand in. And if you bought a ball out with nothing written on it apart from the Elementor logo, you got a squishy ball. But if you had something else, then you won whatever it said and I put my hand in and I won a squishy ball. And then the next person just behind me, she pulled out and got an iPad pro. No, it's like being at Las Vegas where you vacate the chair and then somebody comes along and pulls the one arm bandit and wins the million dollars.
[00:44:01.550] - Nathan Wrigley
It was a very valuable squishy ball. Okay, so, yes, good luck. Good luck to both companies and all involved. I hope that works out. Seems like a real nice bit of synergy. Okay. Mika Epstein is after what can only be described as a very unusual request this week. She wants intentionally wrong plugins. She's on the lookout for people who've got plugins which basically break well, all sorts of things. She wants things that are broken, but intentionally broken. So she really is after developers to go out there and build something which does something it shouldn't do. And this, I think, is more to do about onboarding in the future. I think there's a concern that when you put your plug in into the repo and want to get it evaluated for whether or not it's suitable and fit for purpose, there's not much guidance in the way of, well, what means it's not fit for purpose? So they're going to look at a whole load of deliberately broken ones and identify what they look like. So she wants these. By wrong she means plugins that don't sanitise or escape. So that's code short code is not checking for validity security.
[00:45:19.750] - Nathan Wrigley
Again, that's a bit of code SQL prepare so the function SQL prepare issues using scripts instead of WP underscore in Q using Curl gets a bit technical here, so I won't read that one out, but the final one has got nothing to do with code trademarks infringement. So for example, starting off your plug in with, in this case, she's mentioned the name Microsoft, you've got something which collaborates in some way with a Microsoft thing, microsoft teams or something, those kind of things. She said the list is incomplete, but what she wants is just a tonne of things which are deliberately broken and I've never seen that before. So I thought that was just quite.
[00:45:57.890] - Michelle Frechette
It'S like you have a secret shop, your people, right? Like, let's see if they find mistake here.
[00:46:04.370] - Nathan Wrigley
It almost sounds like you've got to go out and deliberately write this as well, or at least get your plug in and then deliberately do something wrong. So I don't know if it's a process of whether or not you will tell them what you think is wrong with it or whether it's for the team to figure out, like, okay, we're going to sleuth out and figure out what it's wrong so that our process for detecting wrongness can become better. Anyway, there you go, it's on Make Wordpress.org. It's called looking for your intentionally wrong plugins.
[00:46:36.590] - Michelle Frechette
It does kind of remind me of when the police say they offer you a free television if you come to the station and then the person that they offered it to actually has a warrant out for their arrest.
[00:46:51.810] - Nathan Wrigley
I was once right, total aside, and I don't know if this is legit, but it's a story which is still in my head. I was once in Washington State, right, driving a car which I bought, and I got pulled over by a policeman who said, you have to pay me $50 in cash, otherwise I'm going to take you to the station. And I was like, that was a bit suspicious, thinking, hang on, why is it going to be cash? Okay? So he ended up paying him $50 in cash, thinking, you know what, if I don't pay, I'm just going to and then drove away. And I just thought, this is a racket. He just made it up. That was my experience with the Washington.
[00:47:36.920] - Rob Cairns
You know what that reminds me of? His and Michelle will equate to this. Being in North America's. Boss Hog on the duke's a hazard.
[00:47:47.030] - Nathan Wrigley
That show was huge in the UK as well. That was the two guys whose door didn't work right, and they had to throw themselves in through the window. Yeah, very cool. Yeah. I just remember sitting there thinking, I have no power here. Even if I'm right, I'm wrong. There's nothing that I can do anyway, sorry, this is supposed to be about WordPress. They are droning on about the police. Okay, very important bit of security news coming your way on the Givewp plugin side of things. Got an email this week from the Give WP team. The long and the short of it is you got to update your plug in because there is what they've termed critical vulnerability. Michelle being very connected to this, do you know more?
[00:48:27.810] - Michelle Frechette
I have not heard that anybody actually experienced any issues with something that was discovered and patched before. I have not heard of any actual attacks through that vulnerability, which is always a good thing. So it's good to find those and squash those bugs before anything malicious does happen. But go ahead and make sure that you've updated your givewp so that you aren't vulnerable any longer.
[00:48:52.800] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, so Give WP 2.23.2 contained an unauthorised SQL injection which was considered critical. We obviously know what critical means, but in this case, I presume it means it could be exploited right away. There's probably not a great deal of complexity there, but it was an immediate thing, so it was patched immediately and now we're onto 2.24.0. Perhaps we've bypassed that already by now, I don't know, but please make sure you've moved away from the 2.23.2 version. These kind of things happen all the time, but it's very nice when you see a plug in manufacturer actually email out into their list and say, get on with it, rather than hiding behind it and just using the regular update cycle, unlike LastPass Cost, who seemed to have just ignored the whole problem anyway.
[00:49:51.390] - Rob Cairns
Nathan you mean LastPass PayPal and T Mobile right behind it?
[00:49:57.700] - Nathan Wrigley
I don't know about the PayPal and T Mobile things. Is that bad as well?
[00:50:01.140] - Rob Cairns
Oh, no, yeah, they're bad as well. So what I'll tell you is I give WP a lot of credit for being transparent and taking care of the users, being in the security space a little bit. And I think I've kind of dubbed this year the year the Vulnerability. I hate to say that I think we're in for a rough year because the disclosure laws have all changed in the UK, changed in Europe, changed in Canada, changed in the US. So companies are coming forward more and more. So I think we just got to get used to it. And I think the key companies we want to work with are the ones that say, hey, we've got a problem, we fixed it and let's move on. I think that's the important thing.
[00:50:39.630] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, I really don't think anybody who's got any technology in their lives has any misunderstanding that technology is perfect. The only imperfect bit, I think really is when the company just sit under, pretend like it never happened. And so it's quite nice to see when somebody deals with it responsibly and produces a piece straight away, informing all their users. Yeah, let's hope as Michelle said, nothing actually onto what happened. Items and word fence and patch stack. Every week, at least every couple of weeks, different for each of those publications, they create a laundry list of plug in vulnerabilities that have been discovered. So it is quite a good idea. I subscribe to all of them and they're usually in like a bullet pointed list with icons of what the plug in is. And you're probably familiar with the icons, so I just tend to sort of scroll through them each week and typically it doesn't affect me, but it's quite nice to subscribe to this. So that's item Security, that's Word Fence and Patched out, they're the ones that I know of that produce that, but then I think there's some other databases out there as well.
[00:51:50.370] - Nathan Wrigley
Okay. Right, next one. Right, katie, you're up. This is all about WooCommerce for the next level. You probably know more about WooCommerce than any of us. So three news pieces, all on the tavern, but coincidentally all about WooCommerce all happening in this week. So first one is WooCommerce 7.3. I think this is the most interesting one, for me at least. Anyway, WooCommerce 7.3 introduces a new block. It's a beta block and it's the new product block. Essentially, you get the option to drop in the product block and do all sorts of configurations as you're now familiar in the right hand side editor, you can change the way it looks and you can change the different queries and so on. No, I'm confusing two of the story, so this is kind of nice. There's also some patterns which they've thrown in, but I couldn't quite understand what the purpose of that was. But Katie, I have to ask, do things like this coming into WooCommerce, do they compete with you or do they complement what you do at barn two.
[00:52:57.930] - Katie Keith
I'll go with option three, which is they give us opportunities to integrate with it. So, for example, our WooCommerce Quick View plugin doesn't compete particularly, I say it complements, but it would add a Quick View button next to the Add to Cart button within the block. So we would then need to test with that and integrate it and make sure it works. We have a product Philtre plugging which would add philtres either above the new block or to the side, and that will probably require some custom integration as well to make it work. So I'm hoping that the new block will have the required philtres for us to do that because the current ones didn't. And it always feels really sad for the customers and unprofessional to have to document. This doesn't work fully because the philtre doesn't exist in the current WooCommerce blocks, which is literally what we've had to do so far. So I'm hoping that the new one will move it on a step and allow us to get in there and make the philtres work properly with it.
[00:54:00.410] - Nathan Wrigley
Always nice though, to get options like this for complete novices. If I'm coming to WooCommerce, I think it's fair to say that in the past it was a real jigsaw puzzle of trying to hook things together and make your store, unless you wanted something like truly out of the box. Basic the basic cart with the basic layout and all of the stuff that you get, all of this stuff that's now coming into blocks is really interesting. What's showing on the screen is a three column grid. You've got some criteria in the right, so, for example, you can add in different philtres, like whether it's only show things which are in stock, you can also show things which are out of stock, and so on and so forth. Various different options, like the number of columns that you can use and so on. So it's really great. It allows completely inexperienced users. And I got to say, for WooCommerce, I'm not experienced at all. Something like this would really allow me to get into the weeds and start mocking about oh, no, I am right. It is based upon the query loop block, which, if you've ever used it before, really does allow you to sort of drill deep into the WordPress database and sock stuff out to show on the screen.
[00:55:06.340] - Nathan Wrigley
So, yeah, very cool. I'll move on to the next one, if that's all right. And this one is dead simple. Again. It's on the WP Tavern. It does one thing. It does one thing, it's WooCommerce. Blocks 9.4 adds support for local pickup. Exactly as you might expect in this day and age. Seems like everybody's getting everything lived to home, but maybe a bit like me, you quite like the option to be able to go and pick it up from a local depot. In my case, there's a little drop off box, it's about 300 metres from my home. And because the weather is so rubbish here in the UK, and I'm often not in the house for hours at a time, you know, Amazon parcel arrives, I get home, it's soaking wet, it was a book, it's completely ruined. I'm now more and more choosing these local pick up options and it's great. Walk there, punch in a code, out it comes, it's really, really great. And now you can do this with that block again. Katie, anything to throw in there.
[00:56:08.710] - Katie Keith
WooCommerce has always had a local pickup payment gateway in the settings, but I suppose what this is doing is making it easier with regards to blocks and things like that. And I don't think you could enter in the front end and address. I think local pickup until now meant that you had to collect it from the location of the vendor. So it's moving it on a bit.
[00:56:31.200] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, because there's an option, you can see it in the UI pick up options. You got the option of wait, I don't know if you can add in various. Different options. I'm not quite sure how this UI works, but what is showing us in the screenshot is an option for New York as well as an option for Los Angeles. Yeah, I may have been misunderstanding the nature of that, but perhaps it's not the ability to send it to sort of local drop off areas. I'm not entirely sure.
[00:56:54.050] - Katie Keith
I think you're right. And that's a really good use case for it because that's such a need now, and the fact that you can enter a dress suggests that is what it is. Unlike the local pickup in traditional WooCommerce.
[00:57:05.390] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of lucky in that I've got a front door, which is on my own land, if you like. So my front door is my front door and really, you have to be breaking the law to take that parcel. But if I was to live in, I don't know, a flat or something where you've just got a collection of letter boxes in the foyer or something, having the option to drop it off somewhere else is really nice. The typical thing that happens in the UK is if you're not in, they write you a little tiny postcard note in illegible handwriting that you haven't a clue what it says, and it usually says, come to the depot in the next two or three days and pick it up.
[00:57:41.490] - Katie Keith
And that's such a nightmare for people who work in an office away from their home. And US WordPress types have that luxury of actually being at home a lot during the day, but people with nine to five jobs away from home, this is a real issue.
[00:57:56.140] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so that's another new block. And then the final WooCommerce story directly is all about performance on the WooCommerce side. So the new WooCommerce cart and checkout blocks. It's all the blocks today, isn't it? It seems to be lacking in performance and there is a growing desire for it to be more performant. I guess this article is really raising that as an issue and hoping that people will rally round and test. There's a little table here which kind of spells it out really nicely. If you use short codes in the past for WooCommerce, you can see that the total payload was under a megabyte was 935 KB, whereas the new block option adds an extra two megabytes. It's 2.9 megabytes. And you can see the statistics on there. The number of requests made on the page load has more or less doubled. It's gone from 77 to 144. A few people quoted in the article saying, yeah, the payload, the JavaScript that's brought along is all bigger. So at the moment, probably, I would imagine people into SEO want their site to be quick, will steer away from that. But, yeah, go and read the article and get that checked out again.
[00:59:09.060] - Nathan Wrigley
I'm throwing it at you, Katie. Being the WooCommerce expert, I wasn't aware.
[00:59:12.950] - Katie Keith
Of this issue, and it's good that that's been raised. But my main comment is in that table you just showed. I love the way they've added Shopify to benchmark it. Yeah, sure, the blocks are slower, but just look at Shopify.
[00:59:26.550] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, it was interesting because I wasn't sure what that meant, actually, because it says here it's showing the legacy code checkout with blocks, checkout and Shopify. So I was wondering if it was a combination of this short code as well as Shopify, or if it was just sort of standalone shopify.
[00:59:43.860] - Katie Keith
It must be standalone because Shopify is a separate host.
[00:59:46.960] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, of course. Whatever it is, it's not that bad. Okay.
[00:59:55.310] - Katie Keith
Shopify being the second biggest ecommerce platform, I believe, after WooCommerce.
[01:00:01.310] - Nathan Wrigley
At the bottom of this is an article which you can click on, which is a discussion of how these kind of things might be improved. Okay. Right, let's move on. Unless I apologise, I didn't bring either Rob or Michelle into either of any of those three. Did you want to comment? I apologise for not asking.
[01:00:23.350] - Michelle Frechette
I'm good.
[01:00:24.710] - Rob Cairns
I'm good, too. I just think it's all good for the Wu ecosystem. That's all I am.
[01:00:31.290] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, very nice. Okay. Right, so I'm going to move away from WordPress for now, for a bit. It may be that we drop back into WordPress, depending on the other stuff that's coming up. I think we do. But just to say, one of the websites which I use probably as much as almost anything else, if I type in a fact, for example, to Google more or less every time, it's the Wikipedia article which rises to the top. But whenever I go to Wikipedia, I've always got that feeling of like, wow, we're still in 2007, or something like that. Haven't changed their design for ages. They're about to do it. So one of the biggest properties on the Internet, making a big well, not really a big change. It looks pretty minor, to be honest. But then again, with a heavy text based institution like this, I guess you can't really do much else. But it says the first major desktop update in over ten years. It's 22 years. 22 years old. That's cool. You know, Michelle, earlier you were talking about how the open verse, the image openverse, is like a great example of how the Internet can be cool.
[01:01:38.560] - Nathan Wrigley
I think Wikipedia is almost the best example online of how humanity can do things right. Just the idea that almost everybody can go in and edit and it's just miraculous. It's not full of junk.
[01:01:56.630] - Michelle Frechette
I've been talking about crowdsourcing at its finest, right? I mean, we crowdsourced so many things. Crowdsourcing really became like a term around things like fundraising. But this is absolutely crowd sourced information. I've created pages on here I'm sure others have, and tweak them and update them. And I don't spend a tonne of time in there, but I use it for all kinds of information.
[01:02:22.990] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, I'm the same. I'm a consumer, so really I'm kind of stealing everybody's goodwill. But I use it quite a lot just to research things. And I've got kids, and they're often trying to do homework. And like I say, Google will typically throw one of these articles back at you. But I'm always amazed by how incredibly well, what's it called? Citation, how the citations are there. It's obviously thoughtful people writing thoughtful articles and, yeah, pretty amazing, but the ability to change it. I once went in and changed something because I found an error. And it was quite interesting coming in and seeing how that little process worked. There's like a pyramid of people above you who get to cheque, all of that. But I remember when I was a kid, there was always this like once a year we'd get this knock on the door and it'd be a guy coming around trying to sell encyclopaedias. Back in the day, if you wanted to find something out, that was the way to do it. Right. You either went to your local library, which took ages, and looked at their row of encyclopaedias, or you had your own set of encyclopaedias.
[01:03:31.900] - Nathan Wrigley
It was like the mark of being. It was almost like the I don't know, the status symbol. I've got the encyclopaedia britannica. Then it was always followed. Which letters have you got? Well, I've got P and D at the minute. I'm still trying WP builds it up.
[01:03:46.970] - Michelle Frechette
My father bought an entire encyclopaedia set when I was born, as though 1968 was the year that time stopped.
[01:03:56.450] - Nathan Wrigley
That's right.
[01:03:58.250] - Michelle Frechette
Nothing would ever be added to history.
[01:04:01.360] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. And here we are with Wikipedia, 22 years old. An amazing thing. Every year, just before Christmas, they offer the ability for you to donate money to help.
[01:04:12.610] - Rob Cairns
Please do. Please take some time if you use it and donate some money to offer him a valuable service. Michelle, just add to your father's. Same time stopped in 1968. I remember my dad buying encyclopaedias, and there was that they had the reoccurring revenue model. They put an annual every year, just updated. So there you go. We're all dating ourselves on this.
[01:04:38.500] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, well, Katie is the youngest of us all. Anyway. A big thing like that, you can't really go changing it all that dramatically. So the change isn't that dramatic, but it somehow just looks a little bit cleaner, a little bit nicer, so hopefully that will roll out. I confess I haven't checked, but I just thought that was a nice story.
[01:04:59.710] - Rob Cairns
Cool.
[01:05:01.090] - Nathan Wrigley
This is one just very much worth mentioning. If you use forms a lot and you have the ability to style them so that they look in line with everything, this is just a great little article that I found this week. It's on the Austin Gill.com website and it's called how to Style HTML Forms. Right. Or sorry. How? WP builds HTML forms. Right. Styling. It's a five part series where it's cool. Just a total forms nerd, it would seem, who's decided to devote masses of his life to helping everybody make nice forms. The first section is all about semantics, then accessibility. Very important. This is the third in. This is all about styling. It then user experience, security of the other parts, and then it just goes into so much depth about how you can make your form look great. And I just wanted to drop this into the show notes. This was constantly one of my bug bears when I was building websites. More than I do now. Was trying to make them look nice. And here you go. This article will tell you how to do all that. Very nice. Thank you. Awesome.
[01:06:06.950] - Rob Cairns
That's awesome.
[01:06:07.800] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, isn't it? Thanks.
[01:06:09.400] - Michelle Frechette
For sure.
[01:06:10.230] - Nathan Wrigley
Nice people out there on the Internet. I think I'll miss that one for the moment. Shall I?
[01:06:16.580] - Katie Keith
No?
[01:06:16.870] - Nathan Wrigley
Okay. It's a good one. Right? This is an article, I don't know who it's by, but the website is called Editor X, I think. Is Editor X like a page builder? Is it like a squarespace type of thing? I don't know. I'm not sure if it's like a publication that just publishes ideas, like a blog. Don't know. Anyway, they've got an article entitled how many of these do you get every year? But this one I quite liked. It's called The Big Ideas That Will Change Web Design in 2023. And obviously they're crystal ball gazing, but I like it. There's a few things in here which I thought was nice. First one, what do we reckon about this? Right. Do you think that in 2023 it's going to be okay to use unconventional navigation? Will you be doing any of that? I'll show you a couple of examples that they quote as being nice. And I've got to say, I kind of like them. So imagine this on, like, an iPad or something. So there you are. You got the page. Unfortunately, my little logo. My name is in the way, so you can't quite see it.
[01:07:22.610] - Nathan Wrigley
But right at the bottom, right in the middle is like a little brown dot. And if you hover over it, the word menu just kind of gently appears. It's beautifully done. And if you click on that how about that? I think that's really great. If I was using my finger on this, this, to me, seems like a far superior UI for doing menus than anything I've used before. So you swipe left, you swipe right, you've got a little thumbnail of what the page is like, and then you tap the finger again, whole website goes away. What do you make of that? Is that cool?
[01:08:02.570] - Katie Keith
I love it when it's open. I love the visual side of it that you can see the pages that entices you to click on them. I hate that it's at the bottom for two reasons. One, because it's not convention. How would anybody know to find it there? Maybe somebody massive like Apple could get away with that. But I think small websites can't be reinventing the wheel because it's not what their users expect and they'll just be frustrated. But if you put something like that in the middle at the top, or maybe on the left at the top, then people would find it. And then I like how it is when it's open.
[01:08:39.190] - Nathan Wrigley
I'm just going to see what it looks like when we're on a mobile interface. So when you're on the mobile interface, you can see it on the screen. Now you've got the little brown dot at the bottom, but it only says menu, seemingly, when you interact with it. So, yeah, that's a bit of a no no, isn't it?
[01:08:58.000] - Katie Keith
How would anybody know to interact with it?
[01:09:00.170] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, I would think.
[01:09:01.070] - Katie Keith
I'm hiring for a designer role, and I rejected a few people because they had websites with really innovative navigation that I felt was completely inaccessible because of the learning curve related to working out how the hell to navigate it. And I don't want someone like that in my company because I want my users to instinctively know where to go. So even if they're a good designer, I actually rejected those applications.
[01:09:26.080] - Nathan Wrigley
That's really interesting.
[01:09:27.270] - Michelle Frechette
What does a screen reader do with that, too? I mean, talk about accessibility, Katie. It seems inaccessible and we can see it. Can you imagine what a screen reader would try to do with us?
[01:09:37.480] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, good point. Actually, do you know what? I think I'm going to bookmark this one to use the pizza next time we do our little UI show because she always brings out the UI tools, things like wave, but that's usually for contrast. But we could look into that. Yeah, I think what they were trying to say was not that this is going to become the normal, but this is a bit like your trendy magazine. There's going to be a few people pushing the boundaries, but I think their stipulation is there's going to be a few more people pushing the boundaries. Interestingly. If that had an icon in it, so I'm looking at the little blue dot at the bottom. If that had an icon in it, which was your little three hamburgers, you know, the one that's typically now associated with mobile menus. I actually prefer it at the bottom because okay, caveat on a phone because my thumb is at the bottom and I get really infuriated that essentially my phone ought to be largely a one handed device, but it's not. It's always a two handed device and one hand is just consumed by holding the thing so that the other thing is free to interact.
[01:10:44.180] - Nathan Wrigley
And if the navigation dwelled at the bottom and I could, with my thumb, sort of go left and right there, I'm feeling there is a bit of a place for that. And I notice if you have an Android phone, I don't know if any of you do, but if you have an Android phone, more or less everything now has got a little dot menu at the bottom and usually it's like an ad, a contact start, an email or something like that. But increasingly the little menu at the bottom, when you click on it more menus sort of collapse upwards out of it and it's just become the normal way that I interact. So now I'm kind of hankering for navigation at the bottom of the page so that I can use my phone one handed whilst driving. Not whilst driving.
[01:11:31.690] - Michelle Frechette
Definitely not doing scrolling on the couch.
[01:11:36.590] - Nathan Wrigley
Do you know what I mean? I've got other things to do with the other hand. I need the other phone in the other hand, trying to do how we've all become so lazy. But that's the thing, I really like the anyway, I thought that was really nice. Let me show you another one, which I thought was nice. This one is an example of how it's very similar. Right? I've decided to show it on a mobile because it just works better. So the menu is contained in the more or less normal menu item at the top. So you got menu, logo, what have you, if you click on the menu, what do you reckon? To me, that feels like native iOS. That feels like I'm actually on an iPhone and they're kind of trying to mimic what the iPhone would do to me. You can then sort of scroll with it and you get these other bits and pieces at the bottom. And if you click on those and click the menu again, there's options at the bottom and I can't find a particular example of it. But again, it scrolls up from the bottom a bit like you would have with your notification pane on the iPhone, you know, when you scroll it up and you can do the volume and the brightness of the screen and all that kind of stuff.
[01:12:40.050] - Nathan Wrigley
It does the same kind of thing. So anyway, I just thought they were kind of nice little examples. What do you reckon? Funky menus on the way out? It's not the kind of thing I'd be getting involved with. I think I'm a bit more like Katie. I just want something solid and reliable. But it does kind of feel that that hamburger menu top, right? I don't know, maybe we just need to move on. Just because we need to move on for no reason other than that.
[01:13:06.140] - Katie Keith
Well, that's an excellent analogy that you mentioned, the hamburger menu, because for years loads of people didn't know what that was. Particularly people that maybe aren't so computer savvy and they were like, where's the menu? Where's the menu? And often the younger generation would find, there it is, it's those lines. And that's a really good example of intuitively bad usability, actually. Whereas the example that you just showed nathan showed the Word menu. Well, unless you're a restaurant, which is another issue that is clear, but people have come to accept the hamburger. But actually, intrinsically, I think it's a bad usability element.
[01:13:48.710] - Nathan Wrigley
Well, the website goes on to talk about a lot more. It talks about the fact that they think that and we won't get into the thick of it all, but it's a nice article. I'll drop the link in the show notes. They think there'll be a rise in unconventional navigation menus and I would welcome that, actually, to be honest. And we'll go on to this one, which is AI becomes another tool in the toolbox. Okay, we have this conversation fairly frequently, but I know Katie's got some opinions on this one because Katie dropped another link in the show notes, which you can find on the Smart Company website. Really, I don't use this phrase very much, but I have to use it now. Unless you have been living under an actual rock, you will know that people have started to use AI in all sorts of fun ways, creating images and creating text. This article, I had to read it really very quickly because Katie sent it through and I didn't see it until the last moment, basically. Katie, it felt to me like the thrust of this article was, if everybody uses AI and we're all using the same AI, everything's just going to sound the same.
[01:14:57.340] - Nathan Wrigley
And so your business isn't really going to sound different or authentic, it's just going to sound like, well, they used AI. That's really lazy. Is that really what it was saying?
[01:15:07.970] - Katie Keith
Essentially, yeah. And it uses the example of WordPress themes that have created quite a standardised look across many of the world's websites. Now, you can do anything in WordPress, obviously, and yet there are many websites, you know at a glance that's a WordPress theme, don't you? So they're using that as an analogy for the impact of AI on the copy side of things. So the two together, they're saying, going to make the Internet a really boring place.
[01:15:36.170] - Rob Cairns
I would agree, katie, one of the biggest things in businesses, to differentiate your business from your competitors. And if we all keep using AI, it will be the same. There's a really good book out there called The Inside Advantage. It was written in 29 and it talks about why business owners have to make their business different than their competitors succeed. And I so strongly agree with that, because then we're all fighting everything on price and then we know where that goes, right? So we don't want to do that. So well said.
[01:16:10.710] - Nathan Wrigley
I have this feeling that we're in this kind of incubation period with it where we all think it's just dead cool because it's dead cool because at no point have you been able to go to a website and say, I don't know, write me a piece about Justin bieber. I mean, for God's sake, why would I want to do that anyway? But you get the point. And it would just splurge out an article about Justin Bieber. I actually put it to the test this week. I got Chat GPT and I asked it to I posed it a question, but the intention of the question was basically, give me a blog post of about 700 words, something like that. And was it great? Yes, there was. It managed to make all sorts of interesting conclusions that I definitely would not have made. So it was a really good kickstarter. But did it sound like an eight year old? Yes, it did. It sounded like somebody that was just given the task to write something really boring, but incredibly accurate. Now, I know everybody's going to say it's going to change, it's going to change, it'll get good at style and you'll be able to do it in the style of Justin Bieber, for example.
[01:17:22.110] - Nathan Wrigley
But I don't know, I'm just not convinced that the world needs this deluge of AI. I'm just becoming a bit of a luddite, I think, in my old age, I'm going to get Michelle's opinion on this.
[01:17:31.810] - Michelle Frechette
At this point, I think it's a great tool, but I wouldn't rely on it. Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean that everything is a nail kind of thing. And if you are using it for research and for idea generation, I think that's great. Right. So I can't always think of ten reasons why I should X-Y-Z. But if I ask AI to tell me ten reasons, it'll give me ten reasons and then I've got something to start from. I think it's great I wrote about this at Post Status, but it's a great way to get past a writer's block. If you have been assigned a topic that you need to write about, would I post an entire article that was generated by AI? Absolutely not. It doesn't sound like me, it doesn't have my voice. It doesn't have the voice of Post Status or of Learn or whoever else I'm writing for at the time. But is it a good way for me to kind of jump start and get into things? Absolutely. So I can see the benefits of it. I spent an hour with Andrew Palmer last Friday looking at Bertha AI, and you can even generate images in there right now.
[01:18:39.580] - Michelle Frechette
And he kept showing me with the idea of rock climbing, should have used Justin Bieber. That would have been more interesting, but one of the images, like the guy's knee was bent the wrong direction, like his leg bent the wrong direction at the knee. And I thought, well, he's been in a rock climbing accident, apparently, but it shows that it's a great tool, but you shouldn't use it as the end all. Don't fire your content staff at this point, because you think you can get everything through AI I think at the.
[01:19:08.460] - Nathan Wrigley
Bottom of it, that is my concern, is that it's going to be so compelling for higher level employees who are making the decisions about payroll. I think it's going to be such a compelling decision to lay off people.
[01:19:25.090] - Michelle Frechette
Say people should then ask AI to do specific tasks and see how it fails on so many levels if you're relying on it solely without any human element.
[01:19:37.040] - Nathan Wrigley
Well, a good example on Chat GPT-3 at least, anyway, is I think it stops scraping the internet in like 2020 or something, so it doesn't know anything about the last two and a bit years. So if you ask it, I don't know a question about what is Justin Bieber's latest song? If he's had any songs since 2020? It simply doesn't know about it. So there is that. But my understanding also is, factually, it can literally drop you in it because it just gives you the wrong fact. It tells you that something.
[01:20:05.300] - Michelle Frechette
It wouldn't know who the reigning sovereign of the UK is right now, then.
[01:20:08.520] - Nathan Wrigley
Yes, it's an important matter. It should know the reigning sovereign of the UK. Major historical yeah, that's right. Speaking of which, let me throw this in your path. This wasn't in the show notes, but I came across this week, I've actually started to pay for search. I've decided that I no longer wish to use Google and I'm going to try it out for a year and see what happens. It's called neva. Neeva. Neva.com. And guess where they all learnt their trade, though? Google. But they've decided to set up this. What they're claiming it's no tracking, no bias. They've been scraping the internet for five years, so it's not like they sort of launched the other week, which they did, but without any scraping of the internet. So really, the only difference I can see in terms of the quality of the links that come back is that it's a tiny teeny bit slower. So whereas Google, you hit return and it's boom, it's right there, right? And you forget how amazing that is with Neva. It's maybe like you click the button and I don't know, a quarter of a second goes by and boom, it goes onto the screen.
[01:21:20.400] - Nathan Wrigley
But it really, really works. It's really, really good. I like the way when you do a search, which, because I'm not logged in on them, incognito windows, I can't it presents it in a slightly different configuration. There's just images in slightly different places and the thumbnails for images are slightly different. But also so this is where the AI comes in. It will integrate with Chat GPT and give you a bespoke search back at the top of the search results if you enable it. So, for example, I don't know if I just say, who is Justin Bieber? It will throw the Chat GPT thing at me, which is kind of curious. And I do wonder if Google and this is nothing to do with Neva, just in general. I do wonder if Google are sort of a bit frightened of things like Chat GPT, because I see so many people now going there to get answers to things. Whereas before you always went to Google, right? If you wanted to know the answer to something, you went to Google. And I see people left, right and centre now, just asking Chat GPT, because it gives you this sort of narrative version back, as opposed to just a screen of links, which you've then got to go and look at.
[01:22:33.780] - Nathan Wrigley
So, anyway, Neva neeva.com worth checking out. $50 a year. I'm not convincing anybody, am I? You're all staying with the free. No tracking. Rob, you won't be tracked.
[01:22:50.870] - Rob Cairns
You know what, Nathan? We've had this discussion a million times on this show, my show, other shows, and I'm almost at the point of view where if you feel you don't want to be tracked, you should go live under a bubble on the moon and just cut yourself off from everybody.
[01:23:06.840] - Nathan Wrigley
And be done with it. Rob, you won't be tracked.
[01:23:09.630] - Rob Cairns
Yeah, thanks.
[01:23:12.570] - Nathan Wrigley
I don't know, I'm just a bit over all that kind of stuff and the results are broadly the same. So if you were hoping to go there and find a really big difference, now it is more or less the same. But, yeah, okay. There we go. That's that. Right. Last one is Michelle from the top of the show. We know that Michelle doesn't do much. Frankly, no twiddler thumbs, not doing very much. So it's good that you finally found something to do. Michelle new project, would you believe this is the WordPress historical timeline. Tell us about this. What's the intention? I should scroll it while she's talking.
[01:23:56.490] - Michelle Frechette
This year is 20 years of WordPress. So this is on May 27. It'll be 20 years since WordPress launched. And I thought, would it be fun? If you go to Wordpress.org, they have timelines or whatever that are official timelines, but that's not community driven. Right? So those aren't showing things like when the first Word came in, Rochester was, yes, I have absolutely loaded some of my own events in here. I had to prime the pump, Nathan. So you will see WP, Motivate and Give on there, those kind of things, but other people have started adding things to it. So winning WP, for example. First word camp Europe in Light and the Netherlands. Taco submitted that one. And those are all links that will open in a new tab to show you that event or a post about that event. And so there it is, the first one, back in 2013.
[01:24:53.620] - Nathan Wrigley
So the idea is you want people to use it's user submitted. If you scroll to the bottom of the timeline, you can see a form dead simple. First name, last name, email, the event you want to include, and then when it was. So what month, what. Year.
[01:25:10.210] - Michelle Frechette
Don't make me do the research, is all I'm asking.
[01:25:12.760] - Nathan Wrigley
Okay? And the idea is, just over time, you want to just grow this timeline and a little bit of community fun there.
[01:25:19.750] - Michelle Frechette
You can find it just for fun.
[01:25:22.390] - Nathan Wrigley
So it's on the post status website, right?
[01:25:25.110] - Michelle Frechette
This is part of my post status job.
[01:25:26.860] - Katie Keith
Yes.
[01:25:27.370] - Nathan Wrigley
So if you go to post Status, see how American I was when I said that. I said post status.
[01:25:34.570] - Michelle Frechette
I'm glad.
[01:25:35.410] - Nathan Wrigley
Instead of post status, status, status, post status wordpresshistoricaltimeline. And you can go and submit your own bits and pieces there. And Michelle will be given extra jobs to do this week.
[01:25:54.190] - Michelle Frechette
They don't show up immediately, folks. They do come to my email and I will get to them when I do, actually.
[01:25:59.200] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah. You're going to cheque them all out one at a time? Yeah. That's really nice. So one more time, postdatus comwordpressoricaltimeline. I saw an article with Emily. No, it was a shot of Emily Blunt this week, and she was I think she's got an American husband and she has a daughter who's American, and it was all about how her daughter says the word water. And she started off because she water. She hung around Emily a lot when she was really, really little, and she would say, May I have a glass of water? And and and then apparently, just the other week, she came over and said, Can I have a glass of water? Like Emily was flabbergasted.
[01:26:44.510] - Michelle Frechette
Where does your adorable accent go, Charles?
[01:26:46.840] - Nathan Wrigley
Yeah, exactly. Right, okay, that's it. That's all I've got. I've missed anything? Did I miss anything? No.
[01:26:52.690] - Katie Keith
Did any of your face get missed?
[01:26:54.230] - Nathan Wrigley
I'm sorry if I did. No, I think we got them on, didn't we? Oh, no. I got to end very quickly. I don't know, I feel a bit bad doing this. This is the BBC website showing what is possibly the UK's Ugliest dog. And, I mean, look at it.
[01:27:17.960] - Michelle Frechette
I don't think there's any possibly about it.
[01:27:20.890] - Rob Cairns
It's there.
[01:27:22.510] - Nathan Wrigley
Look at it. Right, so you think that picture is staged? They've obviously drawn its tongue out. They've, I don't know, shaved it a bit. Then just the cavalcade of photos.
[01:27:36.290] - Katie Keith
Just keep coming.
[01:27:37.780] - Nathan Wrigley
Look at it. It's like an ork or something like that, isn't it? Bless the little thing in the nightmares. There it is. Look at it.
[01:27:48.410] - Michelle Frechette
Are you sure there's been a supercabra?
[01:27:53.270] - Nathan Wrigley
I just think it's quite funny. Anyway, there you go. That's my bomb shell. Okay. And last, very, very last thing, I put a cupboard in this room this week, right?
[01:28:01.820] - Michelle Frechette
Yes.
[01:28:02.240] - Nathan Wrigley
And I had a spare shelf at the top there, that shelf there. And each week, depending on how if I can be bothered or not, I'm going to place a new object on that shelf. So I'm going to ask you, what is that object? And you've had the whole episode to try and figure it out. Any ideas what that object is, did you manage to figure out container?
[01:28:27.970] - Michelle Frechette
I'm going to go a ship in a bottle.
[01:28:29.740] - Nathan Wrigley
Ship in a bottle? No, sorry, not a ship in a bottle. Katie, what do you reckon?
[01:28:34.130] - Katie Keith
Yeah, it looks like a trophy, but you're on the bullet list icon that.
[01:28:39.500] - Nathan Wrigley
Says you're nearly there. You're almost there. Rob, any ideas?
[01:28:46.630] - Rob Cairns
I was thinking a junk container. I'm not even going to go get it.
[01:28:50.750] - Nathan Wrigley
Get it for you. You can see finally what it is after all this time.
[01:28:56.010] - Michelle Frechette
I think you're on the right track, Katie. I think it's an award.
[01:29:00.810] - Nathan Wrigley
It's an elementor.
[01:29:02.100] - Katie Keith
I call elementor, not a bullet list.
[01:29:04.400] - Nathan Wrigley
It had something to do with WordPress for the first time. So there you go. Now, maybe we'll carry that on, maybe we don't. Maybe a bit of a damp squid, but thank you.
[01:29:13.070] - Katie Keith
Forget that. You have to tell the story.
[01:29:15.030] - Nathan Wrigley
Well, I was thinking I could offer a prize if somebody oh, I got it. I just got it because I don't know, I got it through the post because I helped them right at the beginning when they needed help. I was one of the people that mentioned their plug in rather a lot. I think they were grateful. So I got a nice little award. So next week I'll put something different up there. Maybe I'll offer a prize, who knows?
[01:29:38.290] - Michelle Frechette
There you go.
[01:29:38.980] - Nathan Wrigley
And identify somebody on the show. But thank you, Michelle, for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, Rob, for joining us. This will come out tomorrow, 07:00 a.m. UK time. It will come out as a podcast episode. We'll be back next week with a bunch of different people. Don't forget. Go to the page builder summit. If you're a sponsor, we'd love to have you on. Otherwise, go to barn two. Go towards the links that Michelle mentioned at the beginning. Go to Rob's website, make them happy and we'll see you next week. We got a wave. Oh, look at that. It was like Pavlovian. Katie wasn't farther. Honey, I really appreciate it. Have a good day, everybody. Thanks for the comments.
Support WP Builds
We put out this content as often as we can, and we hope that you like! If you do and feel like keeping the WP Builds podcast going then...
Thank you!