This Week in WordPress #244

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 244 entitled, change the names Dennis. It was recorded on Monday the 13th of April. 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by three fabulous guests. I'm joined by Kathy Zant, by Maestro Stevens, and also by Mike Demo. We have a really interesting conversation, which goes off in a lot of different tangents today, but it's WordPress mainly.

We talk about the WordPress roadmap, which is coming up during the course of 2023. We talk about whether or not it's okay for plug-in developers to change their pricing, and also we talk about the plug-in review team and if it's overworked and whether it should be a paid for position. We also talk about the WP Community Collective.

I've got some events coming up this week, WS Forms Demo, and the UI UX chat that I have with peach and E. Each week we get into how you should price your plugins, and if $20 is a little bit too much to ask for an unlimited license. Per year, plug-in news in other directions. Main WP have partnered with Jet Pack.

Jet Pack has also added in some mastered on sharing buttons, and we go into the whole Twitter versus mastered on debate. And then we also talk about a whole bunch of WordPress events, which are coming up. There is cloudfest. There's Word Camp Phoenix, and there's also Cadence Amplify. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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

Hello there. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. Very nice to have you with us. We are WP Builds and we are on the, this week in WordPress, episode number 244. Crikey. Joined as always by some fabulous guests. We're gonna have a chat about the word pressy stuff and a few other bits and pieces as well, including the the British government deciding that internet security is.

It's not worth having . But we'll get onto all of that a little bit later. Let's go round the panel and introduce the guests. First off, let's say hi to Kathy. How you doing, Kathy?

[00:02:52] Kathy Zant: I'm doing very well. So good to be

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: back. You have a lot going on in the next few days by, by the looks of the things that you've posted in the show notes.

Yeah. Busy. Kathy is I, , I love your your little bio that you've put in here. Kathy is the Director of Marketing for Cadence. You'll find out more about that in a minute, but she's also very much into security and hacker culture, which we'll find out more about in a minute. She's speaking at Word Camp Phoenix, which we'll find out more about in a minute.

On March the 24th, and she's running a single day event called Cadence Academy, which yeah, you get the idea. It's later this week, March the 16th, Myro. Talk about him in a minute. We'll be speaking there. And what a segue that is, Kathy, that's just full of good stuff. Thanks for doing that, . Yeah,

[00:03:40] Kathy Zant: got a front, director of marketing.

I got a front load with everything I'm

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: doing right. Yeah, that was a great bio. That's great. And thanks for joining us once again. I really appreciate it. First timer Maestro, how are you doing? Nice to meet. I'm feeling

[00:03:54] Maestro Stevens: great. Excited. Thank you for having me,

[00:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: Nathan. I appreciate it. You are so very welcome.

Maestro is Maestro Stevens is a highly skilled marketer, webmaster and founder of the Iconic Expressions Creative Agency. He's got eight years of experience in areas such as marketing strategy, brand strategy, web development, and project management. He's also the proud f a proud father and enjoys using technology and strategies to simplify life and cooking, reading and traveling.

In 2022, Maestro developed a template platform under his agency called Iconic Templates, which focuses on creating free and premium templates for WordPress users. What Your busy as well. . Yeah. We should really get you on the podcast at some point to talk about all those templates. That would be really great.

I appreciate having you with us. That's fabulous. Thanks for joining us and Mike, how you doing? Mike Demo. Good. Thanks. You're very welcome. Mike has gone for the totally the antithesis of the long run complex. Bio. Mike's gone dead short, which is fun. He is the head of partners at Codeable.

Thanks for joining us. Really appreciate it. And I've gotta say, I'm loving the glasses. I don't know if it's intentional or not, but the way that the the mi the glasses are mirroring what's on the screen. It just makes you, I don't know, there's just something a bit cool about it, , that's.

[00:05:21] MikeDemo: Yeah, they're my new gunner, blue black blocking glasses. So they do reflect quite a bit, but they really look

[00:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: for in this scenario, I think it's perfect. Yeah. Thank you. So three great guests. Thanks for joining us. And just a few bits and pieces, if you're joining us live anywhere, the best place to do that is WP Builds.com/live.

In fact, stop what you're. Put your banana down and go and tweet that to somebody or go onto Facebook and say, come and join us. WP Builds.com for, I forgot my banana.

[00:05:56] Kathy Zant: I, no, I didn't know about

[00:05:58] Nathan Wrigley: the banana. I actually got a really rumbly stomach about two minutes before we kicked off. So I ran and got a banana.

I should be eating it during the show. But if you want to go and share that, I'd really appreciate it. It's always nice when people come in, drop comments and all of that kind of stuff. That's really nice. So WP Builds.com/live. If for some reason you are on Facebook and you're joining us, there's a little hoop you gotta go through.

If you don't want to be anonymous, you gotta go to chat.restream.io/fb. It's on the screen chat.restream.io/fb and give Restream permission to. Just tell us who you are. But yeah, go share that. That'd be really nice. Appreciate that. Okie dokey, right? We got some chat. It always kicks off the chat, doesn't it?

At the beginning. So Rob Cairns joining us. Might as well do these at the beginning. Good morning, happy Monday. The best way to start the week off is this weekend word pre . It's not starting the week though, is it? Rob? Some of us have been up for several hours now. Only just saying Michelle Frache says Good morning from, oh, she's getting into the weather forecast.

Look at this. The overcast Rochester, New York where the temperature is 35 degrees, one degree Centigrade. I can win. I can win the temperature award today in the uk. Where I am. It's minus six. Oh, wow. There you go. But yes, lovely to have you, Michelle. You'll be talking about you, you're on an event that we're gonna mention a bit later.

We've also, oh, Michelle are you coming with Peter? I'll leave them to have their private chat check. Good evening from the Philippines. Very cool. Thanks O'Neil. . Look at everybody. Does the weather now? What? Peter started something off 25 degrees. Yeah, that's cool. This is the guy that started it all off.

Peter Ingersol drops in every single week and he just drops the weather robot. Now everybody's doing it. Hello from Connecticut. 39 degrees Fahrenheit, four degrees centigrade. We're expecting rain, snow, and heavy winds. nor Easter is heading our way. Power outages are expected. Courtney is joining us. We're gonna talk about you, Courtney, a bit later.

Yay. Monday North America changes class. Oh. Really?

[00:08:04] MikeDemo: Yeah. You

[00:08:05] Nathan Wrigley: did that

[00:08:05] MikeDemo: already? Yeah, it messed up. It messed up my calendar invite for today. That's right. Calculated it last week and then I was like, these don't match anymore, which is why I sent you the DM .

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: That's total chaos though, because we do the same thing, right?

We do this daylight saving thing, but ours is in, I think it's in four weeks or something. So we'll have this four week period where everything's totally either truncated or compressed. That's we could, I think it's a bit of a bizarre idea, but we could at least knock our heads together and do it at the same time.

It was started in the uk. I don't mean it was started in the uk. I dunno where it began, but in the UK it was done so that farmers could go to church on Sunday in daylight. There you go. There's your fact for the week, right? Enough nonsense. Let's get on with the word pressy stuff. Just gonna share my screen.

Excuse the self-promotion, but you know why not? WP Builds.com. This is our website. It looks slightly different this week. You probably can't even spot it, but I spent about two days last week trying to get the whole website over to blocks. Prior to that, it was on a page builder and I decided it's time, so I converted the whole site more or less, page by page, over to blocks, and so I have a request.

If you stumble across a page, which is clearly decimated, then please let me, Go to the contact form and just tell me which pages decimate, cuz there will be pages, there's too many for me to keep up with and I'd appreciate that. So this is us. If you wanna subscribe, hit this form at the front and subscribe and we'll send you two emails each week about the content that we produce.

This is one of them, by the way, and a couple of events which are coming up this week. I've got a chat with Mark, mark, west Guard, who is the founder and developer of WS Forum. We're gonna be chatting on Wednesday at 4:00 PM UK time, 12:00 PM Eastern, 9:00 AM Pacific. He's just gonna demo the product and show people what it can do.

He's got some prizes lined up, so if for no other reason you wanna have a go at winning some WS form licenses, which I presume is what he's bringing. I don't know. Someone else who knows, but I'm guessing that's what it is. Join us for that. It'll be on the same URL as this WP Builds.com/live, and yet another one this week, but this is tomorrow.

This is me and Peach, peach and e doing our r ux show. We do it each month and the date for the next one is tomorrow. It's at 3:00 PM UK time, same url, always the same. WP Builds.com/live, and if you're fancy submitting your site, you can do it on this form. So yeah, there we go. All right, self promotion over.

Okay. Let's kick off WP Roadmap. This is a really good article. It's over on wp.org/about/roadmap and it is essentially trying to sum up what's gonna be happening within the next eight or nine months, encapsulating 2023. It talks about the fact that we've moved over from stage two, which was Gutenberg and full site editing into stage three, which is collaboration, think Google Docs and how that's gonna be taken over the reigns of all of the efforts really.

But there's quite a lot of other stuff in terms of the C M S. There's gonna be a lot of work done on the APIs. Open verse search in core, the navigation block's gonna get some more work. Media management who doesn't want the media library to look slightly different. I think we can all agree on that.

Simplify the release process, PHP 8.2. And one more thing in terms of the community China reinvigorate events after the pandemic. Honestly, I feel that they're like back to where they always were, in all honesty. But yep, that's the idea. Holistic com contributor, onboarding, refinement of polyglots tools.

I'm guessing this is in preparation for phase four of Gutenberg, which is all gonna be to do with multilingual sites. And a few other things, including more learned materials and so on and so forth. Development of canonical plugins, which is really interesting. And then in terms of the ecosystem, WordPress playground, this is the notion that you can run WordPress, I believe, in a browser without any need for a server, which is fun.

Simplify the release cycle. I dunno what this means. I don't even know what this sentence means. Create a WordPress brand discipline. What does that mean? But that's gonna happen as well and various other things. But you can see the release cycle dates here. A 6.2 is. Just literally 15 days away.

It's gonna be heading to you on the 28th of March, August 6.3 mooted and 6.4 in November. So it was an awful lot on there. I've really paraphrased it terribly. But Maestro, Mike and Kathy, the drill here is when I finish talking, you will just interrupt each other and crosstalk and all of that. So anybody who wants to go first, you go for it.

What do you think of this?

[00:13:14] Kathy Zant: I think there's a lot of great things coming down the pike, and I'm most excited

[00:13:20] Nathan Wrigley: about being able to collaborate right within

[00:13:23] Kathy Zant: WordPress. That's been the one thing that's kept me developing content in Google Docs is because I am working with so many other team members

[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: here at Stellar, and I want

[00:13:36] Kathy Zant: feedback.

I need to give feedback, and there's so much collaboration that has to happen. So all of that's happening in Google Docs and then we poured it over to WordPress. It would be really great to have that right within the dashboard. and then to be able to do design with blocks doing that too, just I feel like it's really gonna change how it's gonna change how I work with WordPress, so I'm very excited

[00:13:59] Nathan Wrigley: about it.

Do you collaborate in a sort of team or do you tend to make content all by yourself and just get it pu published by somebody else,

[00:14:08] Kathy Zant: yeah. What typically happens is we'll have content, assign out somebody's writing something, and then I'll jump in, give feedback add some things. And sometimes, there've been instances where something noteworthy or newsworthy is happening and all right, we gotta put something out about this.

Everybody jump in the doc. And so there'd be like three people. Like you write the intro, you write the conclusion, and everybody's, it's really fun to see because you have all these colors going and people are commenting right in the doc. It's almost like everybody's maybe even whiteboarding together in, in a doc, right?

So if you have to get something out really fast, we divvy up the responsibilities and create the content that way. But I could see, a lot of times it's , like with the Cadence Amplify page you were looking at. We had a number of people working on that, but we had to wait till, some per somebody's working on it and we're all locked out.

We can't be in there together working on it. So those types of things preclude really fast development or fast content generation within WordPress. And so we've been leveraging Google Docs in order to do that kind of stuff.

[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: It's curious that until now Google Docs for collaboration. Actually it still now Google Docs for collaboration is like miles ahead of WordPress.

It just absolutely Miles. Just that ability to watch somebody else typing and, you can even have almost like a conversation with them. But if WordPress pull this off, I f maybe this is overdoing it, but I feel that the block editor will become superior. to Google Docs. If you can have that collaborative editing, commenting, plus all the blocks and the ability, I don't know, take a paragraph and shove it up to the top or suddenly, without having to highlight all of it, turn that paragraph into an H two or make that into a list, or whatever it might be.

I feel that it's gonna be pretty cool. Yeah, Kathy, that's great point. Maestro or Mike, anything on that?

[00:16:07] MikeDemo: I, as far as talking to collaboration, it's something that will be used by, I think minority users. , the pub, the true publishers on WordPress. That's the thing is, I think it's gonna be a very useful tool.

I don't think it's gonna be used by the vast majority of WordPress sites. That doesn't mean I don't think it's worth doing, and I don't think that we can make it better. It's the content publishers I think will get a lot of use out of it. , but SMBs and things I don't think will, we'll mess with it.

a lot. But that being said, it's good to see, any of the publishing writing go in a good direction. I'm more excited about the PHP 8.2 support. Okay. Because right now the most common PHP version is 7.4, and 7.4 is currently on security fix only. Yeah. And and that's set to end at the end of this year.

And so being able for WordPress to support 8.2 and more importantly, I think WordPress can take the lead. Cuz historically, WordPress has not taken the lead to forcing P H P support versus some of the other open source CMSs. I think that's gonna pull the Hosts along because I think a lot of hosts will really drag their feet on the 7.4 to eight jump as long as the humanly can.

But if WordPress doesn't allow the seven PHP seven series anymore and forces you to be on PHP eight, I think that's gonna make sure a lot of hosts come along with it. It's very similar to, what Jummah did back in, I think it was PHP six back in the day as the first host that mandated PHP six before WordPress did.

I think the 8.2 support's gonna be pretty good cuz it's scary when the most common version of pH p is technically an end of life

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: right now. Yeah. Thank you. That's a really interesting interesting contribution. Yeah. So 8.2 for you. Google Doc style editing for Kathy Maestro.

Which of those pieces do you like the best? I would say

[00:18:17] Maestro Stevens: Mike has a point when it comes to the users adopting the collaboration, functionality. But I would double down with Kathy and say it's something that I've been waiting for, I'm excited for when it comes to collaborating. Or when it comes to updating a page, I think it could get really annoying when you do have to figure out, so imagine, you ever been in that situation where you're getting ready to walk through a door and somebody else is with you, and you're like, oh no, you go no, you go wait, no, you go no.

You go, oh no, you go. And then you both go and you both feed it to the door. That's how it's been for me and my team when it comes, who's gonna go at what time, and then when is that person done? And then, yeah. So I just feel like it's just one of those situations where, yeah, it's gonna be a small group of people, as Mike said, but as Kathy mentioned, it's something I've been anticipating for.

A very long time. Yeah, it's

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: hysterical. I hadn't really given that a lot of thought, but the just, it's the idea that you have to go to a third party platform, like a messaging app if somebody, or email if somebody's editing a post to say, are you finished? And usually they finished and just left the tab open.

It's oh yeah, I'll come out. And then, oh, and you go, yeah that's really interesting. Oh, you can obviously kick them out. But yeah. Okay. So the collaborative editing really gets the. Gets the bit I, for me, I, my, the site that I just put over to blocks, I used a classic theme. So I've still got a theme with using the customizer because of the sort of navigation stuff.

I just feel that the navigation block in WordPress core doesn't quite live up to what themes can, on old classic theme could do and all the options that might live in there. And so I'm curious to see how the navigation block turns out and whether I can make a header which does all of the things that I want it to do.

So all of that kind of stuff is interesting. But yeah, rebooting community events. That all sounds good. And thank you to Neil. Hello Neil. I don't, have we met before? I'm not sure. You might be new to the show. Wasn't the brand discipline something to do with standardizing the dashboard? Oh, okay. Yeah, that rings a bell.

So having notifications that look the same as all the other notifications and having guidelines, I think on the whole, most people adhere to that, but there's definitely some modeling up there, isn't there? And Peter says I'm always interested in the numbers and how it may set priorities. To Mike's point, I'm curious how many will benefit from collaboration.

I'll tell you what, if Mike's right, it'll be a lot of work. And let's hope that people start using it cuz I do feel that the technical barriers to that are really challenging. Especially if you're on like a super-duper affordable hosting, shall we say, which probably hasn't got a lot of grunt.

Yeah, we'll see. And Nomad skateboarding, hello. I see the collaboration between y be, sorry, I see the collaboration being used by a large number of users. So interesting disagreement there for myself. I'll be using it to show others how to do it, working in real time to create instead of Zoom support info.

Okay. Interesting. Okay, you've got a fair little bit of time. We've got until the end of the year for all that to roll out, but some of it. Come in sooner than others. That was at wordpress.org/about/roadmap, right time for a bit of WP drama. It's important to throw that in each week. This was a, I don't know where this came from.

It probably came from Twitter. Don't shoot the messenger. This was an article from Theme Craft Spell with a k, so t h e m e k R a F T. And they had an article this week called Open Letter to the WordPress Community concerning the plugin review team and review process. And I'll just quote the first line, which gives you a tenor of how it all goes.

We feel it's time to write about our experiences with the repository of wordpress.org. Also to get feedback and share experiences from others in the overall community. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We believe something is deeply wrong inside the WordPress plugin review process and the team. And then they go on in quite a lot of detail.

I might add. They really try to make the case that that essentially the WordPress plugin. The plugin review team can pull plugins a moment's notice. They don't give you any warning necessarily. You have to fix the plugin for the reasons that they've highlighted. And then you've gotta begin the whole review process again.

So if it took you three weeks previously, it might take you another month to get your plugin back in the wordpress.org repo. And they make the point that, this really upsets all of our business model. Our team are sitting around, they can't, they can no longer necessarily work on things.

The plugin itself is not getting updated across websites. So if it's a security problem while everybody's stock on the old insecure version until it's released, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then they have a go at the theme review team, not individually, not like naming names, but they post screenshots, which kind of name names.

And I've read through some of this and I, I'm not sure that I get their point about how. Impolite the team were the bits that I read. It really did feel like the theme review team were trying extremely hard to explain themselves and be as polite as possible. Anyway, I thought this was an interesting article to mention.

Maybe there is something broken there. If the theme review team can literally pull the rug out from under you and all of the SEO and everything is important to your business, that's gotta be of concern. And if it takes weeks and weeks to get back up and running, then that could, undermine your business.

I dunno if any of you three had a chance to read this, but yeah. W p drama, Woohoo. .

[00:23:56] MikeDemo: Yeah

I

[00:23:58] Maestro Stevens: read it pretty much in depth myself. And I would say I have a different take maybe when it comes to what I got from it as far as the dynamic between the conversation. I feel like it started off really.

Really warm and then it got a little colder as the conversation progressed. Yeah. I can definitely understand something that wasn't mentioned when you were given the description of the reasons why it was just a financial standpoint, if they're looking to monetize their plugin or looking to, feed their families, feed themselves and this is the way that they need to do it, that process of having to go back and forth for like minor things is really huge.

And I think that based on them wanting to bring it up, but the same time the WordPress review team giving them some feedback on this is how our process is, but giving them more explanation on, hey, we're a team of two. And matter of fact, not just we're a team of two, Hey, we're volunteers and we're not just volunteers.

This is a rigorous hard situ like process. So that's why people are coming on and dropping off and coming on and dropping off because it's not easy to handle all of this. As I was reading, I'm getting more context. behind the conversation of why maybe they're just backed up and they need more help.

So I think it creates a bigger problem than just this scenario that we're talking about here that I've heard in many other conversations, especially at work camps, and they of the word but I really hope that they, figure something out. They weren't trying to be as polite as possible. But at the same time, there were a little bit, the situation where you can get a little bit snappy while you're trying to be nice.

And yeah, I started to see that, like they were getting annoyed and I can feel that pressure.

[00:25:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean. I'm desperately trying to find this bit now where I thought it sounded Yeah, really bend over backwards, polite. I'm really, I can't find it now, so I'm just gonna give up Kathy, Mike anything on this.

[00:25:58] Kathy Zant: I have a few friends who have volunteered to be like, let me be a part of the team. Let me take some of that workload off of you. And they have not. Been invited to do that being said, I have a lot of compassion for the plugins team. 60,000 plugins is a almost insurmountable amount Yeah. For two people to manage.

And I think the team needs to expand. A lot of what makes WordPress successful is that extensibility, it is the plug-ins. The plug-ins make WordPress. If I didn't want to put a learn in management system or e-commerce or control things and extend WordPress in the way that I wanted, and I just wanted to.

A plain old website and I didn't care about SEO and all the other stuff. Wicks, Squarespace, there's lots of people who go that route because they don't want the extensibility, but our audience wants it. And to have a plugin that you are relying on for let's say e-commerce or something that's so fundamental to what you're doing with your website, be up in the air cuz it's closed by the plug-ins team and you have no idea what's going on.

It just adds this insecurity and this unsettlement in so many people and it's not about the plug-in author, it's about the people who are using that plugin. I, if your plug-ins closed, you know there's a lot of security firms and secur. Security experts will tell you, you need to uninstall that until you know what's going on, just for security's sake.

If you really wanna keep your site secure, and yeah, think about it, your whole site is dependent upon this one plugin that's now closed by this team. You don't know why, and your business is shut down. You can't take e-commerce in. It's, it puts people in a very precarious situation. So I'm hoping that the.org team take a look at the plugin, how those things are managed.

This is not a criticism of anybody on that team. This is just. . You guys need some help. It shouldn't be, it shouldn't fall all on you. And there needs to, I think there needs to be a change to help the plugins team do a better job so that it is good for everybody who uses

[00:28:11] Nathan Wrigley: WordPress. Yeah, I missed that piece right at the beginning.

But they do mention in the article that they believe, and I'm not sure if that's, if it's truly the case, that there are only two people who are essentially given the responsibility of the keys to the kingdom on the review team. I don't know the truth of that. But if, like you say, Kathy, people who are capable of carrying out those reviews have offered to help and that's fallen on Duffy as maybe that's something.

Maybe that's something to look at in the future. I'd like to, I'd like to mention Adam, thank you for your preciseness, shall we say WP, the kitchen sink , 60,687 plugins to be exact. That is rather a lot to manage. And thank you for this bit of context as well. Now I'm going to skateboard and the main person is retiring in a couple of weeks.

Okay. So that'll be interesting. I wonder if that shakes things off a bit as well. Mike, anything to add to this? Or shall we move?

[00:29:11] MikeDemo: Yeah, a lot to add to it. First off, as far as people volunteering for different teams, it's not just a plug-in team issue. It's hard and open source to volunteer.

I don't care what CMS you're talking about, juila, quadruple WordPress. It's hard to break in, especially if you don't know people. We have a whole onboarding issue for new people and it's gotten better over the last couple years, but it's still pretty daunting for someone to, volunteer on a team.

Secondly this article talks about that being on the plug-in re repository is a requirement, just like the Google App store or the iOS, store, Google Play Store or the iOS app store. It's not the same. You can easily self-install by default without having to do anything different on your WordPress site to install a non-listed plugin.

Unlike Android, where you have to like, , change a setting or jail break, an iPhone. So it's not the same. You don't need to be listed on the plugin repo. I understand it's a cr, it's, there's a lot of value to it, but the sandbox, we're, you're playing in there. If you're a plugin dev, you're playing in their sandbox.

You're playing it, and it's volunteers right now. And you have to respect that. And yeah, it might suck. It might be stressful, but there's, there's not a lot that, it is what it is. And, you should try to work on ways to communicate with your customers outside of the repo and do things like that.

I understand it's not easy, but. , it's not a requirement. You can sell your plugin just fine without being on the repo if you choose to. And the situation is, or the situation is, I firmly believe, and I've thought this, I've been saying this ever since, I first volunteered for the AL project.

I think there should be, the extension directory on Jummah or the plug, the plugin reap on WordPress. I firmly believe those positions should be paid because the only way. to require people to hit service level agreements or SLAs is to pay them. But you can't force a volunteer to do 20 plug-in reviews a week, or, I'm just making up numbers.

I'm not 16. Yeah. Unless you pay them. And then on the flip side of that, I think there should be a listing model where plug-in devs need to pay a small fee to list their plug-in, and you can maybe pay more if you want that review to be expedited. And, it could be as low as $5 goes to the WordPress Foundation or something to get listed.

And that could help offset the cost of the people doing the reviews. I understand that's probably an unpopular opinion, but the best way to have the s l a be something that's, you can count on is to put money behind it. Quite frankly, it's the only way that you can make sure that those standards get hit, because it's really hard to force a volunteer to hit certain SLAs when they're a volunteer, because they're a volunteer and they're doing the best they can.

[00:32:27] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, that's kinda nice. That's, that, that's really interesting. And I swear I've never even had that thought before, but ca I can see Kathy's head nodding up and down. Yeah I agree that it would be a hard selling to the community, wouldn't it, with some kind of fee model. But if you pegged that number really low 60,000, lots of $5 is still not a lot of money, but it starts to hit, it starts to hit the kind of amount of money that would pay some something towards the salaries.

And I, that is the piece that I really like. My, I do like the idea of having those people paid. There's obviously some kind of agreement, how many they've gotta get through, what hours they're working and all of that kind of stuff. 40 hours a week, whatever it may be. Yeah, that could really, that's really good food for thought.

Kathy, you are nodding, right? , you are in

[00:33:19] Kathy Zant: agreement. Yeah. Oh, I think it's great. Yeah. I think a change needs to happen. I the current model isn't working right, and so I, Mike's got some really great ideas to make it work for everyone. Look at gravity forms. They're not on the repo at all.

Extremely powerful plugin, extremely powerful form. Like you could do so much with gravity forms and there, it's a successful business model, not on the repo, but the repo. Is it's so valuable for someone who's just coming into WordPress and isn't quite, because you, because when you choose a plugin, you're like, choosing, this is where I'm gonna lock my business in a lot of ways, right?

If you're doing WooCommerce and then all of a sudden you wanna switch to another commerce plugin or something, you're locked. It's hard to do that. So you're making some very important decisions and there's so many resources on the repo that helps you understand, how, what other experiences are people having with this?

How well is it rated reviews? The support that happens, the free support that happens there? There's, so going back in time and seeing like w what functionality changed like three versions ago, and being able to like, go into advanced and pull that kind of information, all of that stuff is really helpful for a new user to WordPress to understand what they're getting themselves into when they choose a plugin.

So I, I think it's worth. Investing in and it's worth expanding our management of as a community.

[00:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you remember when Log four J this was going back probably about a, I don't know, a year ago or something. There's this little bit of code which was basically holding the whole internet together and there was a vulnerability discovered and there's just this one guy who manages it and he is just doing it on a voluntary basis.

And the whole internet was in turmoil because this guy had the keys to. that code, and it, I think at that point people started to question is the whole voluntary basis thing always the best solution? And in some cases, I think maybe it's not. Yeah. Kathy, good point about the, you don't have to be on the repo.

The point in the article was that's their way in, isn't it? They, s e o themselves, through the wordpress.org repo then get people to upgrade, visit their website and so on. So for them it's causing a real problem. But yeah. Mike, get it? I get it. Good idea. Kathy, go. Sorry. Yeah.

[00:35:36] Kathy Zant: That model's worked really well for a lot of people.

But if you're starting a plugin right now, and let's say, gosh, pick a niche that of WordPress, let's pick on forms. There's so many forms plugins, right? And there's a way in, you can do a free version that's freemium and there's upgrades or whatever. But that's not the only way. And there's so many different types of ways to build forms with WordPress.

Now, how do you're not going to be able to rely on the repo itself. So to the person who wrote this article saying this is the only way we'll ever be successful. Yeah, maybe 10 years ago, but I don't think anymore. I think there's so many other ways to market your

[00:36:18] Nathan Wrigley: software. This image sums up what I was talking about.

It's just the perfect image. So this is the entire internet. Everything. And this little piece of Lego down here is log four J. So you know, and it goes wrong and yeah, you can imagine what happens to everything above it. It's a bit like that with this review team, isn't it? If the review team's not working, all of this other stuff stacked on top of it, all the other bits and pieces that come along for the ride don't really work as well as.

Couple of comments on this. Thank you to Courtney. She says GoDaddy has allocated hours from a staff member to on to onboard to plugin review beginning a month ago. Okay, so that's new is it? That's that You've GoDaddy have allocated a member of staff in the last month, so that's a new thing.

Okay, thank you for that. Thanks Courtney. And Peter OLS says, for me, this is a great example of where priorities should be considered millions of users. Don't forget DIYs. rely on things that a few volunteers shoulder. Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting. Do you know I'd fascinated that with that thought, Mike, and genuinely, that's never occurred to me before.

I'm wanna scratch my head some more about that when we finish this, when, so carrying this on a little bit, this is a GitHub repo that came in. I, again, I've no idea how this came across my radar this week. This is, I feel, I don't really know where to go with this. So there's a guy who's had a plugin which has been freely available on GitHub, a k a, you can side load it, you don't need the repository, but he's had it there for absolutely ages.

And it was a GitHub, a p I plug-in. So it enabled you. To refresh your GitHub repo, the plugin could refresh and I guess suck, consume stuff out of it. I'm not really sure. But this, over the last week or so, since January, he's decided that some of those features he needs to make a bit of money from it.

He is got this plugin, it's been used loads and loads of times. And so the faux pa that he's made in the eyes of his users is that he's stripped out a feature, which has been free forever in this plugin, and he's charged $20 a year for unlimited sites. Right? And you can imagine the way the conversation goes, blah, this is outrageous.

You can't possibly do this if something was free, it should be free forever, kind of thing. It was a bit more nuanced than that, but I had a little bit of a pang of sympathy for the developer in the sense that it was a bit like that log four J image that we just saw. If he can't afford to carry on developing it, then the whole thing will just collapse anyway.

He's gonna step away, get disinterested, stop doing it. If he gets his $20 a year from each of you, maybe he'll be able to carry on and perhaps even increase it. I don't know this is such a dilemma. Do you pay for things, do you not? Is it allowed to take out features from people who are using things already?

The GitHub repo is under the name of where you can see it, there, it's Afra Gen, and his plugin is called Git Op Data. And you can see the thread, but yeah, I was really torn. I thought to myself, okay, if he was charging a thousand dollars, then all my sympathies starts to evaporate. But it feels that at $20 for unlimited types a year that really puts me on the side of Yeah, I got your back.

I have a lot of for you. Yeah.

[00:39:42] MikeDemo: So thi this is Andy. So Andy's a good friend. Yeah. So click his name and click sponsor for me. Yeah, the sponsor, the, yeah. No, yeah. There you go. You okay? He only has seven current sponsors, and he is only had six current sponsors in the past. This is your issue. We in open source.

Keep thinking it's free as in beer. I am so sick of open source people thinking that open source means free isn't monetary. That's not a requirement to be open source. It's just an option that a lot of people take. Plus, because it's open source, if you really cared that much, you could pay the 20 bucks and, get the full code base and fork it.

You're just not allowed to use any thing that's not covered under the license, such as, CSS or brand name trademarks. , but yeah I get so sick of open source people thinking everything should be free.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Wait, hang on. I've just read his bio. It says, hi, I'm Andy Frain. I think that's how you pronounce it.

I'm a trauma acute care surgeon. What? Yeah. He's surgeon in Southern California. No. That's so great. He just does this in his spare time. And he said, look, he's a surgeon. . That's brilliant. I'm so pleased I read that. That's so good. And you guys know him. Do. Yeah. .

[00:41:09] Kathy Zant: Yeah. Ah, that's even, he's very active in the Southern California slash Arizona community over there.

So he'll probably be at eight at Word Camp Phoenix. So I

[00:41:19] Nathan Wrigley: didn't realize he's an amazing person. Yeah, I'm okay. This is wonderful cuz I didn't realize a so ha. Complete. What's it, full disclosure? I didn't know that you knew him at all, but it makes me feel good because I was going a bit liberal on this, sitting on the fence, understanding it from one side, understanding it from the other.

Now that now that you've given me some context, I see that he's just, he's like this surgeon, he's given his life over to help trauma patients. It does feel like, he's going, he's spending over backwards $20 a year and as Mike says, okay, if you pay the $20 fork it's yours.

You can do what you like with it as long as you give, the proper accreditation. Oh, this, there's such an interesting debate. And then you can make, and then you can make a free. Yeah. . Yeah, that's a good point. But the bit that people were trying to say, and they were getting a bit antsy about it, was, you're taking away something that we've used forever, and all of that.

And I, eh, it's his product. I guess he can do what he likes with it, but it's a thorny debate. Sorry, Myro, I feel like we've just hijacked the whole conversation then. You've not had a chance to speak. If you've got anything on this, please button in now.

[00:42:28] Maestro Stevens: No. I agree with everything Mike was saying.

I, unlike Kathy and Mike, I don't really know him at all. But to the sentiments of your point, yeah, definitely think that after, you put a lot of time and effort into this 20 bucks, in my opinion. I know it's controversial. I know it is. Yeah, I know it is $2 is controversial these days for when you're checking free.

It's just weird. But that whole notion, I think it goes back to just being able to like, It's like you have to work. Like you can't be a volunteer. If you don't already have, unless you're retired and you have some income coming in, it's it's very hard to either be a volunteer or to do something for free when you don't have income coming in.

Fortunately, yeah, he's a certain, that's a beautiful thing, right? He's making a little bit of money. I'm assuming he's making a decent amount of some cash here in order to be able to do what he's doing. However, I think it could go two, two sides because now that it's been exposed of, I'm not sure people are actually going to his page like what Mike did, right?

But I can see some people using that against him too. Oh you're well off making all this money. Why do you have to? Yeah. That's how we work sometimes in the world, right? Oh, you're already good. Why do you need to, why you need more money for this? So I can see that being used against him in some ways.

But at the same time, I completely agree with the fact that one 20 bucks is not a lot. He's been doing this for free for a long time. I get how people feel when it comes to having a gated. Access when it's time to pay. And they've been getting it for free for a long time because it's once you've been used to what you've been using you don't want to, you don't wanna have to adopt the changes.

But Kathy and Mike made both great points. I feel bad for the dude now, that I see more information about it. People are complaining, but

[00:44:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's, yeah to be fair, the complaints never got into like personal abuse or anything. There was no, there was none of that. But it did stray into the, it did.

There was some language used in there, which was maybe stepping over some lines. But honestly I have so much respect for somebody who, a, is a surgeon in b find's time in the evening, presumably to just throw a plug in together and, have a completely different career.

Bravo, Andy Frain. That's just amazing. And yeah, but it,

[00:44:48] MikeDemo: but if he had a hundred sponsors. He probably wouldn't have started charging for this. Yeah. You know what I mean? Interesting. It goes back to give back to the code you're using. I've always recommended for years for agencies add an optional 10% line on all your invoices for open source contributions.

Oh, I love it. I've never, anyone, I've recommend, anyone I've recommended this to. And I've I've known dozens if not hundreds of people that have done this. I've never had anyone that's had a client, Bach told me that a client's asked them to take that off. And then you can use that to contribute to WordPress to contribute to the plugins, to the developers.

Also, . We also need to look password press. There's the rest of the lamp stack. Lennox, Apache, MySQL, php. Yeah. Donate to those. Everyone loves the classic editor, but how many people have, do, have gotten a subscription to TinyMCE e, which is what the classic editor is built on. Yeah. So put your money where your mouth is.

It's

[00:45:48] Nathan Wrigley: Just run that by me one more time. So you are saying that if you've, if you'd like, got a bunch of clients when you bill them, add a line item at the bottom, A 10% line item. Yeah.

[00:46:00] MikeDemo: Okay. Open, open source fee. Because you can say you're saving all this money by not doing a proprietary or doing this from scratch.

We can take it off if you want. Blah, blah, blah. I know dozens and dozens of people who do this, that they've never had a client block at it, ever.

[00:46:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's fascinating. I love it. We're gonna talk about the WP Community Collective a little bit later, and they've got this financial mod. Yeah.

I guess at some point we've gotta figure out where that money goes and who looks after it and all of that kind of stuff. But I guess if you're a freelancer, an agency or something, you can make that decision for yourself. Pick the word press projects. Pick Andy, do Andy, give Andy loads of cash.

So let's give him another shout out. So he is at github.com/a frain, A f r a g E n. You can see it on the screen, but for those that are listening he's act out

[00:46:52] Kathy Zant: that he's active on post status too, so you

[00:46:55] Nathan Wrigley: can find him there. Okay. Oh, this is I'm so pleased that story came out.

That's really interesting. I thought he handled it really well. And yeah, $20. Throw the bone, I guess is what I'm trying to say. There's a few comments surrounding that. I don't want to miss anything.

[00:47:13] Kathy Zant: Courtney's comments really good about how Andy helped her.

[00:47:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, great. Lovely.

Thanks, Courtney. Andy sat with me at W C U S and helped me put Core Trunk on my laptop. I've struggled with that for a decade to contribute to the core team. Oh, I'm liking Andy more and more. . You get Andy on the show. A Andy, the other Andy from WP Kitchen saying, he says, Andy is amazing.

I presume you talking about the Andy that we're talking about, not yourself. Working with open source software. This comes from Eat Paint studio. Excellent name. Working with open source software to earn a living. It's our social responsibility to enable the developers we rely on to support themselves.

Oh, it's Emily. Thank you, Emily from Chicago. Mike, you've hit a vein here. Everybody's in agreement. It's definitely nobody's arguing Nathan, and yet it's a subject that's taboo. This one's really taboo. Yeah.

[00:48:07] MikeDemo: Yeah. Na Nathan, if you do get Andy on the show, I've been trying to get him to do a live stream of VR surgeon simulator for a fundraiser.

So maybe you can, he's got, I think he's got a piece

[00:48:21] Nathan Wrigley: software called VR Surgeon. No,

[00:48:23] MikeDemo: it's a game. It's a game. Can get called Surgeon Simulator. And I want him to play it on a livestream for Big Orange Heart or something. Cuz I think that would be funny. Oh, nice. I haven't got an name to agree to it though, but maybe you can push him over here.

[00:48:35] Nathan Wrigley: We'll see. Yeah, we'll see if we can dial down that one in. That'd be great. It's hard foundation or something. Wp, I'll just say Andy. The other Andy. The Andy in the chat. It's the tragedy of the commons. Yeah. The tragedy of the commons refers to the situation in which individuals with access to a public resource, also a common act in their own interest.

And in doing so, ultimately delete this dis deplete the resource. This economic theory was first conceptualize in 1833. This is great. We're getting a history lesson by British writer William Foster. Lloyd, that was such an interesting chat. Thank you. Thanks for all of that. I would, I didn't know where that was gonna go, but it went in the right direction.

I'm pleased by that. Okay, so we all know the state of tech at the minute, if you are working in, oh my goodness. The news about Silicon Valley and the banking system this week seems to have hit even this side of the pond. Layoffs have happened. I don't know if people are becoming more and more confident, but certainly layoffs have happened in the WordPress space as well as elsewhere.

Michelle Frache, who's in the chat, or at least she was. Has put together an article on post status where she outlines some WordPress layoff resources. So she's linked to a variety. Seven different job boards and job links. Help with creating a resumee, some areas where you can go and find help to search out jobs networking opportunities articles on how to make use of LinkedIn.

If you like me, LinkedIn is just a, I don't even begin to understand how that works. And also things like your mental health and Mike just mentioned top of the list there, big orange chart amongst some others. And yeah, hopefully all of you guys have got secure jobs. But Michelle, thank you for putting this resource out there.

Mike's obviously from Codeable. Mike, I'm just wondering if there's been a bit of an uptick in people coming your way looking to have a different alternative, new revenue stream.

[00:50:41] MikeDemo: Yeah codeable, we've actually shut off applications two months ago. Huh. So because we we accept about 2.8% of everyone that applies to us there's a waiting list, so you can go to codeable.io/apply and put your name on the waiting list, and then you'll be first when it reopens.

But we accept about 2.9% of everyone that goes to our vetting. But we also, our goal is to make sure that we only onboard enough people that can work as much as they want to work. . So we don't want to have not enough devs turn on enough. So we're still growing, we're good, we're still getting lots of new clients, but at a different pace than we were.

Over the last few years. We are just making sure that we have enough work for our current batch of experts before we open it up. But we do have a waiting list. We have a lot of people who are very interested. In addition to those job boards, I would recommend the niche boards.

Product Hunt is a great board to apply on. Hardly anyone applies off a product hunt, so it's a great way to get your resume seen. Same with WeWork remotely is also a board, smashing Magazine power to fly hacker X Woman hack. So niche down as much as you can on boards and if you're looking to hire, I can't say enough good things about hiring on product Hunt.

Product Hunt only has a couple dozen job posts at any one time, so you get so much attention versus some of the other big boards out there. , that's what I always recommend. General Assembly, we posted in the post status newsletter on Friday. Just posted a state of hiring, recruiting report last week.

And there's a lot of interesting insights in there. One of which is that diversity is not getting much better over these last few years because policies, are wiping away any diversity sourcing that people are attempting to do. So I recommend checking out the general assembly recruiting report that came out last week.

[00:52:49] Nathan Wrigley: Mike, if you've got the time, would you mind dropping if you can find them, dropping the links to both of those in our little private chat thing? And I'll be sure to put 'em into the matching show notes, but general assembly and what yeah, what was the other one? Yeah, is the, is it just product on.com and then Yeah.

Is there like a forward slash job board or something like that? Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Okay. That'd be great. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. I don't think there's probably not a lot of commentary around that one, but thank you Michelle. That's much appreciated. You can find that on post status.com. The piece is called, if you're looking at the screen, you can see it.

WordPress layoffs some resources. So yeah. Thank you for doing that. Okay. I did a podcast episode on the WP Tavern this week with say, Reed and Courtney Robertson, who is in the comments. It was all about the WP Community Collective. We were talking about getting contributors paid. This is a really interesting in initiative, it's like a double fronted marketplace in a sense.

WP Community connective are hoping to stand in between people who've got money to sponsor but don't know where to sponsor, and people who want to sponsor but don't have the capacity to sponsor. So the money flows through the WP Community Collective and they have these I want to say fellowships, I'm not sure if I've used the right word there.

We talked about this last week, but the idea is they're gonna create fellowships for a particular thing. So the accessibility fellowship is the first one up. It's not fully funded yet, or at least it wasn't last week. But the idea being that somebody will fulfill that role. And then any company that have got a little bit of money that they want to contribute into the project can do that.

And you send it straight to the WP Community Collective and then they forward it onto that project. And in, in that way, hopefully there'll be this constant flow of, money going in one direction and making its way out to the people who need it because there's a lot of people out there who would love to contribute, have the skills to contribute, but as we said, they don't have the finance to contribute.

Interesting initiative. I dunno if anybody wants to comment on that. We did mention it a bit last week, but the podcast aired this week, so I thought I'd mention it. Feel free to jump in now, Maestro or anybody, any of you.

[00:55:03] Maestro Stevens: Yeah, I think it's so I'm noticing a pattern in trend during this conversation.

Everything we've been talking about has been associated with some type of money or the need of funding, right? Something we've talked about. So I think, I didn't want to go to head of ourselves, but I wanted to in the, on our first conversation to say, Hey, we're gonna get into a potential way that, would help resolve some of those issues within this particular topic right here.

It's something else. I've noticed a pattern when I watched the state of the Words or Word Camp when they're asking Matt, at the end ask Matt. I always watch those cause I wanna see how he's going to respond to certain questions. And every year I see people asking about how they can get more help financially with contr contributing.

And especially with this last one work camp Asia. I saw a lot of information on that as well. And the asking the questions. So it's interesting. That it's, and again, I don't know, what we aren't allowed to say or the situations, but I just see that there is some kind of disconnect between, the direction of the, as Mike already alluded to, open source versus, people contributing and wanting to volunteer or wanting to give help or wanting to do things, but they just don't have that incentive financially, especially, with all the layoffs.

So I just think it's something that's very important. But I love what they're doing. I read the article. I didn't listen to the entire podcast, but I did check out some of the examples that they said that they were. Attributing these funds to, and things that they were not attributing the funds to.

And I thought that was pretty interesting.

[00:56:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the idea was, is to create these fellowships for something so it's not just random. There are things which, and they are, they're bound to wordpress.org initiatives. So it's not just anything. So anyway, if you go to the WP Community Collective, I believe That's right.

Or you can go to the Open Collective. I'll put the links in the show notes. You can see the current state of funding and it's. Got there yet. Apropo, of everything we've been talking about today, this is, I think this is a good way to put your money into an open source. If you don't know where you wish it to go.

I've gotta say sorry to Adam who's in fact not called Andy. Sorry about that, but . Yeah, but somehow my name's got messed up as well. Look, it says on the screen now, I'm called Natalie, so I dunno what's, don't really know what's going on today, . So anyway, sorry Adam. I've met Adam as well and I've got no excuse.

Courtney says, let's fund contributors too, right? That's been the strain of what we've been talking about today. Cultivating where, oh, . Does that say cumulatively, do you think? Like cumulatively we're half, oh yeah. Cumulatively, we're halfway to the goal of funding Alex Stein for six months work at five hours a week.

Okay. So they need, I can't forget what the goal was, but it was several thousand dollars. It wasn't a gigantic amount of money. Automatic, just provided two K. Hey, nice. Thank you. Most of the income was from individual contributors. The general fund can be reallocated to access to the accessibility fund as well.

Oh, okay. So if you put it into, if you go to WP Community collective you allocate it to a part, it can be siphoned off elsewhere if you wish. Okay. Thanks. Thanks Audrey. For saying it's all good. I'm just gonna use any name beginning with a now, just cuz it's funny. So Audrey, it is cumulatively, yes.

Thank you. All right, let's go on to the next piece, unless either of you two have anything you want to say about that. Apologies. Kathy, I think it's awesome. That's it? Yeah. Yep. Go and listen to the podcast episode, Courtney ans say, explain it really well. Although we had lots of hiccups with the audio and it was a mighty editing task.

Just put it that way. If you are a main WP user and you are a jet pack user, this might be of interest to you. So it's plugin sort of stuff. This piece, main WP have integrated jet pack security, so jet pack protect and jet pack scan inside their interface. I've actually found the jet pack article.

Usually I'm, when main WP update things, I'm showing the main WP article, but this is on the jet pack website. And now you can do that, you can do all that scanning goodness inside your wp, sorry, your main WP interface. There's not really a lot to say about that, so I'll just drop that in and quickly move.

Alright, so this is interesting as well, talking about plugins. Let's move on to themes. When WordPress six came out, it came out with the 2023 theme, and it had this really interesting innovation in it where instead of it being almost like one theme, you had a whole load of different variations. And if I memory serves, they were called style variations.

Yes. There it is on the screen. It came with 19. No, it came with 10 style variations and no, it didn't, I can't remember. It came with several, right? A handful of style variations. They excluded some, they just cherry picked the best ones. But there's been a suggestion mooted recently that why don't we carry this idea on?

And so Sarah Gooding writes a piece called WordPress Themes. Team proposes community. Themes initiative, and I'll just quote it cuz it's the easiest way. Representatives of the WordPress themes team are looking to carry forward the momentum contributions found in creating the 2020, the theme style variations.

Automatic sponsored core contributor, Maggie Cabret Cabrera published a proposal that seeks to extend this new era of increased design contributions through a community themes project. The goal is to bring theme bring together a squad of people to build block themes all year round with the same default in the same way that default themes are built.

So rather than just having this one big release, 20 23, 20 24, whatever it may be, just this ongoing sort of cycle I think it's largely born out of the. It's turned into a little bit of a damp squib. We were hoping to have 500 block based themes in the repository. By now, you haven't quite hit half that number at the time.

This article went out 247, so maybe it's a way of drumming up support for that. I said when I was talking about redesigning the WP Builds website, I'd stayed away from a block based theme just cuz of the limited things that I could do with headers and so on and so forth. So I can see why this initiative might be needed.

So there, that's what that is. Anybody interested in this? I guess if you're running an agency, this might be of interest to you.

Nope. Nice. Stro .

[01:02:08] Maestro Stevens: I'm with Nathan and I almost Nathan. The almost got me the Natalie almost got . Oh,

no

[01:02:18] Nathan Wrigley: don't do it. I'm gonna change that any moment now to something else.

[01:02:22] Maestro Stevens: Yeah. To your, I don't really use block-based themes, but I do think that it's something that, it's a good idea.

It's gonna be interesting, as you mentioned, it being done year round. It's all, it's, I don't know. It's hard to explain cause I'm a little biased. Kathy Bonne I use the cadence theme, so I'm a little biased. Okay. But I do think that it's something. because Gutenberg and the editor is extending so much and full site editing.

It's here, it's expanding and people want to, I think people are more curious more than anything. Cause it's just okay, we add another 250, like we're at two 50, man, we didn't make that 500. Okay. How people are using 200? He's who are, who's actually using? And then how much more do they want out of new types of themes?

Or is it just one of those things where you just want quantity? , are we going after quantity? We going after quality? Are we going after just options? Is that what we just want more?

[01:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. For me it's totally options. It was the lack of options, right? It was just the fact that in a theme that I'm quite familiar with and comfortable with I've just got this muscle memory.

I know where all the options are and I know that it can do this by clicking a button. Whereas in the block editor, less options. agreed. Yeah. So anyway, there we go. That was WP Tavern. WordPress theme team proposes community themes initiative. In the spirit of changing names, I think all of us should change our name.

I am now officially called Dennis Wonky. And anybody wants, wants to join me on this adventure. Feel free. There's always something stupid in this show. I don't know quite how it always creeps in, but it always creeps in and I blame. Alexander, you know the guy that started all this a minute ago?

Jet pack. Okay. This is my weekly master on tirade. There's quite a few bits and pieces in here. Gotta love the master on. We're now nearly 10 million users. I've got a feeling, Mike. It's not gonna be enjoying this next section. You just shaking your head with the word bastard on there, Mike.

[01:04:38] MikeDemo: Yeah. I'm so upset. Yeah. Of and the billion new social networks. Talk to me in two years. Yeah, two

[01:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: year. Okay. Yeah. When it's actually got some impact

[01:04:49] MikeDemo: When this all shakes out. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. I actually was, I was talking to an influencer marketing company and Twitter. It's on sale right now for ads, cuz it's such a weird marketplace.

There's definitely opportunities to be had in , everything. Master Don's fine. I have a master on account, but I don't think it's gonna be anywhere close to where Twitter was. But yeah. Yeah. Ha

[01:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: en enjoy it. Have fun. Yeah I'm really enjoying it actually. It's quite interesting. Good.

So I'll just quickly go through these things. If you have made that leap and you are putting some time into there, it may be of interest for you to know that jet pack. If you've got that installed and they're running out on your website, jet Pack 11.9 adds a social sharing button for Master on.

You've got the bottom of the post, you've got all the Twitter, Facebook, blah, blah, blah, and curiously pockets and Skype. Skype is still in there. Anybody raise your hand if you're using Skype, Bueller. Yeah. It's still there, but they've added Masteron. So you just click a button and now when you click on that, you're told, you're asked to fill in the details of what Masteron server you're using, and you can share that.

Also if you another master on tool, if you're interested in turning on into. A source where you can auto automatically post things. This is quite nice. You can point your RSS feed from your WordPress website at this tool. It's called masto feed.org. I'm not suggesting that you pollute Masteron, if you're producing a piece of content and you're having to manually go over there, cuz a lot of these automatically publishing tools haven't caught up yet.

Jet Pack apparently is thinking about doing this. Go to Masto feed, put in your RSS feed and it should cross post, presumably it's taken the featured image title excerpt, I don't really know, but maow feed.org. And also friend of mine, Daniel, he did two of the word survey. Two is the word which can be substituted for tweet, where he, so Mike, this will be of interest to you actually, because he wanted to know actually what a WordPress is doing.

on Masteron, and he had some good results. The survey was reasonably small. It was only 200 plus, I think it was a 203 or 204 people tooted in, oh, sorry. mentioned it, but essentially they're thinking that the WordPress community on Masteron is becoming a bit more stable. I've definitely discovered that the WordPress hashtag on.

On Master On for me now, generates really great results. , I've added it in as a search, like on tweet deck where you can have one column, which is just a hashtag. I've got that with WordPress and it just constantly delivers me what I need to know. A lot of the stuff from today. Will have come through there.

The majority of the participants find that WordPress is an important part, sorry, that Masteron is increasingly becoming an important part of their social activity. Nearly all the participants suggest that it will become more so in the future. And also, quite interestingly, a lot of the people seem to be picking out WordPress specific instances.

So unlike Twitter, where you go to twitter.com and that's it with Master On, you have to pick an instance to set your account up with. I've actually got one. It's here. It's at WP Builds.social. Feel free, it's open and you can come and join. But a lot of people seem to like the idea of that because you can search, you can set it up.

So it only shows things from that particular instance. And we've got a few people over there posting and yeah, so more master on stuff. We so as a segue, , see how long Twitter goes. This week or last week, in fact apparently a Twitter engineer brought down Twitter last Monday.

He was playing with the API and he's now the only person who's in charge of, now, what is it? He's the only engineer who's essentially got oversight over whether things should be committed in his sphere of influence. He committed things, lots of things started to break. And Mike, this is the bit that's getting me worried, right?

I know that Twitter's better, bigger, more fully featured, but seriously, does this sort of stuff worry you where a single engineer can take down Twitter for a period of.

[01:09:23] MikeDemo: Twitter's a cluster right now. I'm not saying, yeah, I'm not saying Twitter is perfectly safe and the best thing of all time. It's not.

And, Musk's ownership hasn't helped things. Especially with, he just did another round of layoffs with a bunch of managers that he manager he sent an email and asked managers to nominate who their direct reports would be good for possible promotions in the future.

And almost everyone that was recommended got promoted to the manager's job and then the nominating manager got fired. So

[01:10:02] Nathan Wrigley: that oh, that's hideous.

[01:10:04] MikeDemo: So yeah, Twitter's not great right now, but that being said, it, I'm not gonna sit here and say, oh, mass John's going to be all, end all. There's a billion things going on, a billion social networks right now.

Things are gonna come, go get bought out. The Twitter in two years from now might be the same. It might be way worse. It might be dead. Mastermind might be the most popular. I don't think it will be because of the individual little small groups that it, that makes it good for some things, but not good for other things.

Yeah, I'm not I'm gonna hold on to Twitter as long as I can, just because I've created it for. , oh, over a decade. . Yeah. But I'm not saying that it's in a good spot. I don't think it's in a good spot. I think I'm guessing Elon Musk is trying to make it as cheap as possible, get cut the cost down as much as possible, potentially get the revenue up somehow, and then just sell it.

Or just take a big loss on it. Yeah for tax reasons. No, it's not in a good spot right now, but I also don't think I, I read every week Product Hunt has five to 10 new social networks every week. ? Yeah. Yeah. I've covered some of them on on post status and it, I'm just sick of the new Twitter killer coming out every couple of weeks.

But mash band's. Cool. So did

[01:11:29] Nathan Wrigley: you see oh, what's it called, right? Did you see this week the Activity Pub plugin? I didn't include this for some reason, cause a, I just thought there was like maximum amounts of Masteron already. But Activity Pub is the protocol which Masteron is built on top of.

So basically it's a skin for activity pub. So if you go to all of these other similar things like Pixel Fed, they're using the exact same underlying protocol. It's Activity Pub look who just started to look, who just started to commit to the activity Pub plugin on WordPress. Those people. So I think they're starting to take this a little bit more seriously.

This plugin's been around for a while. Essentially it turns your WordPress website into an instance of Activity Pub, a k a Masteron. And so automatic are now officially fronting up the not only but along with Mattias, I can't say that name. Fefa. Sorry, Mattia. They've decided to inject their efforts into that.

So that gives me some kind of, yeah, some kind of pause for thought. Look, there you go. Picture a word, press next to a picture of the See you. No. Tweet bird there. Is there on that picture. , okay. Anything to do with that, Kathy, or anything to do with that Myro? Anything or should we just quickly move on to more word pressy stuff?

Let's move on. A few events because this stuff matters. Phoenix Word Camp is happening. Good grief. In the next few days, really. March 24th to the 25th. Let's just scroll a little bit here. Ooh, look at that. Look. Was a name right at the top. Day one kicking it off, Kathy Zant. Passwords are broken.

Pass keys are coming to save us. How long has this one been in the making? Are you pleased to be Pres speaking here? It looks like a pretty full on event in all honesty.

[01:13:40] Kathy Zant: Yeah, there's people coming from all over the world and some of the topics. Most of the topics are pretty future focused.

There's a lot of interesting interesting stuff happening. Lots of great speakers. So I definitely wanted to highlight this and anybody who's gonna be there, I'm gonna be there, come find me. Cadence is sponsoring, so we'll have a little booth where you can come hang out with me and get some cadence.

Swag.

[01:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: Has it typically been quite a big event in terms of the, obviously the, there's a lot of people speaking. Yeah. But in terms of the people, the number of people showing up, it's a big thing, right?

[01:14:16] Kathy Zant: Yeah. In terms of all the word camps that I've been to, like Miami's massive. It's just people come from all over the place.

It's usually timed very well in the springtime when people are like, Hey, get me outta the snow. And then Phoenix as well. There's tons of people coming in. Cause they, they also have the cactus league f baseball happening in Phoenix at that time too. So a lot of people are like word camp and nice weather and baseball, and so it attracts a

[01:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: lot of people.

Yeah. You've totally you've got the formula just right there, haven't you? Good weather sport, WordPress. Nice. So here we are, we're looking at the Phoenix dot Word camp.org page slash 23 3 to forward slash schedule. I haven't looked into the state of tickets or anything like that, but yeah, Kathy's kicking it off and then there's a.

Laundry list. So it looks like there's about 10 people on each track each day, of which there is two tracks. One called full court, one called Fast Break, and yeah, loads and loads going on. So go check that out. Another event going on. Look at this one. Look, this is the Cadence. Amplifi is this new. I do apologize if you've running this for a second or third time, but this is, look, it's

[01:15:29] Kathy Zant: brand new.

Brand new and I used AI to come up with the title . It didn't come up with it, it took 30, 30 times. And then I was like, Ooh, amplified. That's interesting. And then I played with that for a while. So it's an AI chosen title. Yeah. Little trivia there for you. But yeah, we put it out just there's so many people in the cadence community who are really active.

Maestro being one of them, cuz he's helping us kick this off. It very exciting. Cool people coming to share their knowledge about everything from funnels to seo, to accessibility to c CRMs. We've got Michelle speaking about podcasting. So we've got tons of. Tons of cool people going to be at this event on Thursday, and it's gonna be on YouTube two tracks so you can bounce between the two different tracks and be a fun event.

I'm excited.

[01:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: Look at this. Peter OL's happening at the same time. I don't believe he's talking about building a slide presentation in Kate's. I think he's gonna be talking about the weather. We all know that's what he does. So yeah. Peter, like you're gonna be talking about Caden. Firstly, couple of things.

A congratulations. I know. Much work goes into these kind of events and it's not easy. There's a lot that goes on in the background. Secondly, cool website. I like the way you've laid it out. I'm not making a comparison, but I do think it's an interesting comparison. There's the Phoenix one, and I think yours is, I think there's just something about it.

It just stands out. It's really nice. So the obvious question, I know more or less everybody's gonna ask it, do I need to be into blocks and cadence to show up to this event? I know you've just highlighted that, but would it Yeah. Would it be a good idea if I was a Cadence subscriber already?

Would I get more out of it if I am?

[01:17:18] Kathy Zant: Not necessarily because we're gonna be talking about everything from, obviously I firmly believe that blocks and Gutenberg and building within native WordPress is better for the web and better for your site. But we'll be talking about all kinds of things from performance, s e o so you don't need to be.

In cadence we're gonna have a security talk. Robert Rowley from Pat Stack, who just came out with that really great

[01:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: State of WordPress security.

[01:17:49] Kathy Zant: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So he's gonna be talking about that and how, all of their findings and what that means. So this is really about WordPress, what's cadence like?

We're helping you get more outta WordPress, more out of the web. And so we just, I wanted to put this event on first of all, just because there's so many knowledgeable people within the Cadence community, and I wanted to highlight them, but also I want people to be more successful with the web.

And so I worked a lot of people pitch talks. There's a lot of pitch talks here, but there's a lot of people I'm like, this person, I know they know their stuff. They're really awesome. And I reached out and make basically curated a few of these talks. Yeah, I just want people to be successful.

It's all free. It's gonna be on YouTube. It'll be recorded, so you can just go find it if you can't make it on Thursday. Nice. Nice. It's so much fun to come to a live event. Look at everybody in your ch in your in the chat here. They just add so much color, so

[01:18:46] Nathan Wrigley: it's Oh, yes. Fun to come live. Yeah, indeed.

Yeah, it's great. And speaking of which, max Hi, max saying he is looking forward to it. Courtney is saying, look, there's Peter. Yes. There's Peter's an actor Maestro. Oh, that's a nice comment. Maestro, I'll make your day. Maestro is one of my favorite presenters on WordPress tv. That's cool. A nice thing to say.

And then Peter is, says he, I bow to the vow, to the maestro. Oh. Who speaking at the same time than I am. . He, there's a little bit of a rivalry going on there. Look at that. Peter and Maestro at the same time. Maestro, are you excited about this? You got you. Are you ready? Have we got everything prepped?

[01:19:29] Maestro Stevens: Absolutely. I've honestly, to me, this has been a long time coming and I think Kathy and Ben and Hannah have done a great job. I have some, I've been a guest on their podcast in the past, so I've gotten to know them a little bit more intimately, which is pretty really cool. Kathy has been somewhat of a, or Vicky has been somewhat of Oh, does she?

[01:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Look a role model .

[01:19:57] Maestro Stevens: You think I was gonna see that? Kathy, huh? But yeah, she's definitely been somewhat of a mentor in some ways. And shout out humble shout outs to Michelle for she as well too. She's the reason why I'm here and she's actually put me on some opportunity. So I like to pay homage when homage is due, whenever I can have an opportunity.

But this event I've been waiting for and I didn't know it was gonna happen. So I've been waiting for this for a while. I think it's right on time, the fact that they've put it on so fast. I don't know how long it's been in the works for planning wise, but you all did a great job putting everything together making it look nice and professional.

And then going back to your point Nathan slash Dennis the menace. I had to go there. When it comes to the look and style, I've noticed that pattern on a lot of Word camp, or word even meetups. When it comes to their styling of their page, I've noticed that style is like the new standard.

So I'm not sure if they're doing that intentionally or not, but

[01:21:05] MikeDemo: all,

[01:21:05] Maestro Stevens: they're

[01:21:06] Kathy Zant: all. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's all locked in. You can't even install any plug-ins, so it's locked into this multi-site. So it's very formulaic in terms of all how that all works. But it's also very interesting to work with having and having to pull people out and, yeah.

Yeah.

[01:21:23] MikeDemo: I'm loving. So it's not really fair for Dennis to call out Phoenix because they're very

[01:21:29] Nathan Wrigley: limited in their house. I do apologize. Yes, you are. I, and I didn't know that. So yes, thank you. I I stand corrected and I humbly apologize, but yeah, there is no comparison. But I do like yours, Kathy, I think your one looks really good.

Can I just

[01:21:43] Kathy Zant: say, The way I, the way we like Workflowed, so marketing me , I put together this page and then I'm like, I just handed it over to the designer who was then just tweaked it and made it look so much better. So I basically put the content in and they knew what all that, there was no like Figma, it was like all done right within WordPress with Cadence, blacks, and it was a really nice workflow because they knew exactly what they were dealing with.

There was no like content coming in afterwards. They had the page all laid out there and they made it look the way they wanted it to look. So a huge shout out to. Sailor and the Cadence team who did this for us, she did a great job.

[01:22:22] Nathan Wrigley: Bravo. Bravo. I'm gonna have to move it on, but yeah, so please go check it out.

Cadence wp.com. I do, you know what, I'll post it in the show notes, but if you just Google Cadence Amplify, I'm sure that you will get where you need to go, starting on the Thursday, March the 16th, and there's two tracks going on all day long, finishing off with Ben Ritner, doing what I've now entitled the State of the Blocks.

And I'm gonna go and get the domain state of the blocks.com very quickly. Okay. From one event to the other, Phoenix, amplify now onto cloudfest. Mike, perhaps it's, would it be easier to just hand this one over to you? Tell us why we're talking about

[01:23:08] MikeDemo: if you wanna do the hackathon first, cuz that's before the main event,

20th.

[01:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: Is that here? It's the other tab. I thought you had two tabs open one. Oh, I do. I do. One second. That one. Thank you. Yeah. Cool.

[01:23:22] MikeDemo: Cloudfest is the second version of world hosting days. W h d, if you remember that. It's the world's largest , cloud infrastructure conference, although they're a lot more than infrastructures.

We're we'll have a big team there. Codeable we'll have about 20 of our devs there. So the Hackathon, which we're a sponsor of, if you wanna scroll down to the sponsors, lots of WordPress companies are sponsor for the Hackathon. Is this weekend, I think over 150. Developers are doing a bunch of different projects.

But like Automatics a sponsor, go Codeable is a sponsor. Google inside Post Status Web Pros, Yost X, wp. It's one of the. It's one of the, it's the largest unknown word Pressy conference out there. So this, the hackathon starts on Saturday, ends on Monday. We'll be there. We'll be launching two new products actually at from Koal at CLOUDFEST next week, which we're super excited about.

And then I feel B over to the main conference, which is the slide you were on. This goes from the 20th to the 23rd. So Monday the 20th is actually WordPress day, so it's all WordPress. WordPress talks by lots of people we know and love. And then later in the week, I think Thursday possibly Josepha is giving a keynote later in the week.

And there's hundreds of speakers. It's a great conference. They have over 10 thou, almost 10,000 registrations right now. It's in roost, Germany, which is one of the smallest villages you'll ever know. But it's actually at a theme park. And the rise are open during the conference just for the attendees.

The temptation. I did put a la I did share with you a free coupon code. There's lots of free coupon codes for cloudfest, but you can use this coupon code on your screen for a free ticket that's valued at 399 euros. Cool. I recommend going. It's a great event. I've gone for seven, eight years and it's gone through a lot of iterations, a lot of people GoDaddy, I think LA year doing 2020 sold it off back to the original founders of Cloud Fest cuz GoDaddy used to own it cuz he used to be owned by host of Europe and then GoDaddy bas host of Europe.

And then I think 2020 hit and then they sold it back to the original founders. So it's gone through a bunch of iterations, but it's a great event and Cloudfest USA is back actually. So if you go to cloudfest.com/usa at the end. April in Austin, Texas for the first time in five years. Cloud Fest is coming back to the USA as well.

If you can't make the Germany one definitely check out the one in Austin at the end of April to early June, right before Word Camp Europe. So it's a great event. I highly recommend people go and they also stream a lot of the talks on the YouTube station and Facebook Live and stuff like that too.

[01:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: Mike, first of all, thank you. I honestly, this one just totally gets under my radar ev every time, and so thanks for the explainer on. I didn't realize there was a European one and a and a USA one. I will put all the links to the show notes, including Mike's coupon code, which is gonna, did you say free, like from 3 99 or something?

[01:27:01] MikeDemo: Yeah. Yeah. So it'll save you 399 euros off your ticket, which makes your main ticket free or is almost half of a V a P

[01:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: ticket. So that is absolutely phenomenal. So I'll be sure to put that into the show notes that follow on from this, or you can just hit me up and I'll have written it down somewhere and made a note of it.

So that's, wow. So Cloudfest definitely happening March the 20th or. There's the hackathon. What was the date for that? Was the date? Was that the date before that? Was that the eight, 18th, 19th,

[01:27:32] MikeDemo: 18th through the 23rd is the whole event. If you can include the hackathon. So I'll be leaving on Thursday and coming back next Saturday.

nice and cause of that, I will not be going to Word Camp Phoenix. There are people who are doing both, but I couldn't leave a day early from Cod Fest cuz of the things we have to do business wise and I really didn't want to do a red eye on Friday night. and then going straight into Word Camp for your next question.

[01:28:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I get it. That makes sense. Yeah. Wow. Loads going on in the WordPress space this week. This is incredible. This is a super busy week, right? We're very much running out of time. Let me just quick, quickly flick through cuz I don't wanna to hold the guests. I know Mike's on a bit of a tight schedule.

We had, we were gonna talk about Signal. I apologize, Maestro. I don't know. Do you think we can do your YouTube video in under a minute or do we wait for that for another time? Maybe we can

[01:28:32] Maestro Stevens: wait. It wasn't the whole, it was just a little clip part that, that guest speaker was mentioning, but it was basically iterating, I think what Mike had already mentioned back in the chat when it came, not the chat, excuse me, but mentioned earlier about diversity.

and it was a question of WordPress having a marketing issue. I thought that was very interesting. It was back in, I think, word camp US 2022, and it was a question to ask about just WordPress having a marketing problem. And it was also attributed to the whole diversity, inclusion and accessibility aspect of things.

Just getting more people aware who are in disadvantaged scenarios. And me being a minority myself, I'm just striving to do as much representation as far as bring awareness to this topic. Because Mike already said it. It's still a huge issue. , it's still a really big issue for a lot of folks.

So I just thought it was an interesting point that it was mentioned at that particular

[01:29:39] Nathan Wrigley: work. I'm really sorry that the time got away with us. We obviously got tied up with all sorts of different topics. What I will say is that I will post the link that Maestro has posted to me. It's a YouTube link and it's from Word Camp US in conversation with Matt Mullenweg on stage.

And it's an interesting question. I will. Link to it in the show notes. And possibly if I can persuade you to come back on this show another time, we'll bump it up because it's not like that conversation appears to be going away anytime soon. So yes that's it. There were other things, including security and all sorts of other things, but we've run out of time.

It only remains from me to ask you to join me in the humiliation. That is the wave that we always do at the end of this show, what we always do is we put the hands up like this. Am I gonna get Maestro? And Mike Is Mike's can he, is he gonna do it or, nice cleared off. Look, . Oh, that'll do nicely.

That's perfect. Let's go with that. That's very cool indeed. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you to all the people who posted comments. Deep heartfelt thanks to Maestro to Vicky, a k a, Kathy to Dennis Dana, who he is, , and to just demo. I appreciate it so much. It's been a fabulous conversation, full of insight and yeah, really great.

Hopefully we'll get you back on the show at some other point. Take it easy guys. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.