This Week in WordPress #245

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 245 entitled AI is Not That Bad after all. It was recorded on March the 20th, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined by three guests today. Firstly, we have Michelle Frette joining us again as one of our regular co-hosts. We've also got Kristen Wright and Rob Howard.

It's a WordPress podcast. We talk a lot about WordPress specifically. We talk about. WP Campus and what it's doing with their new board of directors. We talk about the 6.2 release of WordPress, which is coming down the pike very soon. What's in there? You can find out in a couple of field guides. I did a demo with Mark West Guard from WS form, and please go and win one of the two licenses.

You can find that on the WP Builds.com homepage. Equalized Digital has received money from Marika and Yost and it hopes to be able to make their plugin more fully featured and available in your WordPress admin. Very soon at a Rim have got their web agency Summit around the corner, and so we talk about that full site editing.

Who's using it? If you're a theme developer, it looks like increasingly you. What is certified WP and how can it help us certify ourselves as WordPress experts? We also talk about the fact that Automatic has acquired Activity Pub making WordPress a first class citizen over on the Master on Social Network.

And then we get into ai. How good is this new chat, G P T four or G P T four or whatever it's called? What can it do? Will it make coding a breeze in the future? And then to finish off, we talk about day one from Automat again, and the fact that it's called a web version available and a plug-in which has come out from Rob and his team called Every Alt. 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? Hello. Howdy. Hello. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Whatever other salutation there might be for a different time of the day. , it's this week in WordPress, episode number 245. Thank you for joining us before we. I think it's important to say, go and share.

Go and share this thing. It is probably the best way to do that is to go to WP Builds.com/live. Then do the old command, CTRL c paste it into your Twitter feed or Facebook feed, or whatever it is that you might like to do. Get your mates, your colleagues, your parents, your cats will talk about cats later.

Drag them in and, swell the congregation. And hopefully we'll have a nice episode today. It's really nice to have three guests with us today. Welcome, first of all, to our regular co-host, Michelle Frache. How you doing, Michelle? I am good. Thank you. You. I'm very good. It's just occurred to me that all of our little captions have gone.

I'm gonna quickly fix that. I'm gonna go like that and hopefully there we're all of our little captions up here. Rob, if you wanna change your caption, you can do that by go. Oh, and also Kristen, if you wanna add a little bit of where you're from and what have you, if you go to your picture on the left, you can click the three little dots and update it if you wish to do that.

How are you, sorry, Michelle. Say that again? I think you said you were good. I am

[00:04:04] Michelle Frechette: good, and I asked

[00:04:04] Nathan Wrigley: how you are. Oh, thank you. Yeah I'm doing well. Michelle Frache, here we go. We have a slightly updated bio. Michelle is the director of Community Engagement for Stellar WP at Liquid Web, and she has been called the Busiest Woman in WordPress by Matt Mullenger Word Camp US 2022.

I can vouch for it. I was there. It was true. In addition to her work at Stellar, WP Michelle does a whole bunch of stuff and you can see all of [email protected]. You've cut that, you've cut that bio right down, haven't you?

[00:04:36] Michelle Frechette: I really did. Yes. Yeah, . And actually, we're gonna be talking about something in a few minutes that I didn't know you were involved in, which is yet another thing which we could have added to the bow.

[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, thank you. , thank you so much for joining. Oh yeah. And also we're joined by Kristen Wright. How are you doing, Kristen? Hey, I'm doing well. Thank you. Yeah, great to have you with us. Kristen has been working in the word press industry for over 12 years now. She gets to share her passion for journaling by doing marketing for the Day One Journal app, which actually is owned by automatic, if you didn't know.

She's the author of three books on journaling, including her most recent, the Transformation year, a Year of Daily Day Daily Journaling Prompts, and sh which is now out in paperback and hard cover. I've always wanted to write a book, . I really do wanna write a book one day, but I got about three pages in and think nobody's gonna read this, but

[00:05:28] Michelle Frechette: yeah, maybe you, I have that book, actually the most recent one.

Very nice. It's set my up. It's in my other office though. Otherwise I would hold it up and show you

[00:05:36] Nathan Wrigley: the, yeah, maybe Kristen some point gonna run off and find a copy and hold it up and yeah, that'd be good. and finally joined by Rob Howard. How you doing, Rob? I'm very good,

[00:05:45] Rob Howard: how about you?

Thanks for

[00:05:45] Nathan Wrigley: having me. Yeah, really good. You're very welcome. Rob, if you don't know Rob, Rob is the publisher at Master wp, which is a leading Word press and tech magazine. Honestly, go check it out. There's a lot of content there every single week. He's also the C E O of H D C, the digital agency that's leading the industry to a better future.

His team also just launched every alt We'll get to that. You can see what that is. An AI powered tool that instantly generates accurate alternative text for images on your WordPress wait site. Yeah, we'll have a bit of a dive into how that works and how all of that works, but it's an absolute pleasure to have all of you with us.

We're gonna be here for about 90 minutes. If you wanna drop a comment in, please feel free to do that. If you go to WP Builds.com/live, you need to be logged into a Google account cuz we've pasted in the face the YouTube comments there. That's all well and good. On the other hand. If you go to our Facebook group, then you'll need to go through one additional step, which is to go to chat.restream.io.

Slash FB chat. Restream do io slash fb. It just enables you to not be anonymous. You may want to be anonymous maybe not. So let's say hello to a few people who've joined us. Happy Monday says, Rob. Kens. Good morning. Hi there, Rob. How are you doing? We've got a nice wave from Courtney Robertson.

Thank you. We've got the kitchen sink word press. I can never remember who this is. Who is this?

[00:07:11] Michelle Frechette: Adam Summer.

[00:07:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you Adam. I can always forget it says Happy Monday from nc. It's, oh, it says Alex. Ah, yeah, very good. Last week, I was it the week before? I got his wrong name wrong a hundred percent of the time, so I'm gonna call him Ryan today, I think, or something like that.

And here we go. Every week Peter Ingersol drops in a weather report. And today, greetings from Connecticut. It's two degrees centigrade, 36 degrees Fahrenheit and rising. I like rising in weather. Temperatures are warming this week, so spring is in the eight. Yeah, we've got about 14 degrees centigrade here, which for this time of year where I live Peter is pretty darn good.

And look, we've got Ryan. Coming back with it's 34 degrees here was morning one. If it's 34 degrees, if you can use proper degrees, you're all basically dead.

I don't understand. Fahrenheit nomad skateboarding says day one, an awful lot. That's good to hear. We'll find out more about it later. And and then we've got Ryan, who's claiming to be Adam. I dunno what that's all about, . But let's get on with the word pressy stuff, Charlie. That's what we're here for about 80 minutes of WordPress stuff.

So here we go. Firstly, couple of bits of promotion. This is our WordPress website, WP Builds.com. If you fancy, go in there and subscribing to our list. You can just fill out this little form here and we'll keep you up to date when we produce new bits of content. Typically twice a week. You'll notice on the top here, we had a little plugin demo with my good friend Mark Westco.

He's the developer behind WS form. Honestly, like. Honestly, if you've got a WordPress form plugin and you've been using it for years, please go and have a look. I'm not saying you're gonna change, but it is genuinely worth a look. And if you're fancy winning it, we've got this page here. You can link to that from the thing here.

Just click on that image there. And you can win it. He's given away two licenses and you just have to tell us why you want to win it. We've already had some fairly funny ones because I've said you can be, you can say whatever you like in less than 200 words, tell us why you want to win this license.

This is the only criteria that will allow you to win. It could be funny, profound philanthropic, whatever you like. And we've had some funny ones already and Yeah. So go to that page and you can win it. Why not give it a go? Word. Pressy stuff. WP Campus have got a blog post out this week.

It's called Introducing WP Campus inaugural Board of Directors. Now, correct me because I don't really know a great deal about WP Campus, but w p campus's board of Directors consisted of one person, Rachel Cherry until now, and now they've got this great big great and the good list of people who are on the board of directors.

, w P Campus, I think is a WordPress institution, let's just call it that, which is trying to figure out how WordPress can be used in the education space. And supporting. Yeah. Thank you. , and up until recently Rachel was the singular director and she decided to step down. And so the news here is basically a load of people have decided this project is worth pursuing.

So we've got David Dashen, we've got Reid Pier, knock, Kira, how Rachel Cherry is staying on for now. My understanding is that's not gonna be a long-term relationship. L Danielle Baldwin, ed Beck, Phil Crum. Eric Scott Embr, PhD. And if you wanna be involved in this project, your voice counts, you can attend the board meetings and those lists on there.

Honestly this is a really strong board. I dunno what your relationship, Michelle, it sounds like you know a bit more than I do. You got any thoughts on this?

[00:11:04] Michelle Frechette: I'm excited for it because when you have an organization with a director and not a board, you end up with burnout very quickly for your director.

And should anything happen to that person, it's very likely that the entire organization will fall apart. They were very thoughtful in how they did a call for nominees. This has been something that wasn't done overnight. They've spent plenty of time really developing their bylaws and how this is all going to work.

And so I'm just real excited for them. But they've put something together that's gonna be able to be sustained in a long-term way. Rachel's done an amazing job and I think she's will still continue to be involved at some, in some way, shape or form, even when she's not part of the board of directors. But she's done an amazing job getting it to this point, and I think this is a next natural step in order for it to be sustainable over time.

I know they took a hit a little bit. They, one of the things they do is they have a big event every year, WP Campus event. And of course nothing's happened over the last few years because of COVID, but this year they're actually coming back. They're having their event, I think it's in July, in new Orleans.

in Louisiana.

[00:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. , what about Rob or Kristen got anything on

[00:12:23] Rob Howard: this? I always love to see honest and transparent and straightforward governance in any organization. I think that they're doing a really nice job leading by example with this. In the WordPress space there is often a weird and sometimes opaque mix of for-profit and nonprofit of organizations that actually have public decision making and organizations that don't.

So it seems like they really went outta their way to create a sustainable, public transparent system. The things that this organization does can actually change and be decided by a majority of these new directors on the board. And I think that is really a great model especially for the non-profit and open source space.

Really taking the time to establish the rules and then following them and also, the initial creator giving up some of that power to the group is really cool a step in the right direction. I think

[00:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: I should, I didn't really dwell on the actual bios, I just mentioned the names, but honestly, I would encourage you to go and look and read the bios of each of the different people, cuz it is a, he is a, it's a pretty cool team.

They've got together. We've got a developer who works at Georgetown University. We've got a few front end developers several of whom have got, multiple decades of experience. Somebody that's been working in development and design for 20 years. Somebody who's been working in the educational technology field for just about a decade.

We've got the marketing and growth president from 10 op somebody that works for the College of Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. It just, it's just round, isn't it? There's just so much. interest there. It's not just gonna be one voice. So yeah go and have a look at the page. You may

[00:14:15] Rob Howard: re

[00:14:16] Michelle Frechette: you may recall also that WP Campus was a huge impetus a few years back around accessibility for the dashboard side of things, the backend of WordPress raising over $20,000 to do a proper evaluation.

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: That was them, wasn't it? I remember that was them. Yes. Yeah. . Yeah. Very good. Yeah, so

[00:14:36] Michelle Frechette: They've done a lot of good and WordPress, not just for higher education, but for WordPress at large.

[00:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: Kristen, anything on this before we move on? Yeah. I'll

[00:14:46] Michelle Frechette: admit

[00:14:47] Kristen Wrigley: this was an organization I hadn't actually heard of until this news item came up.

And so it was really cool to see this organization, organization exist in some of my past WordPress experience. It was always really interesting to see, colleges well known colleges using WordPress and some of the email addresses that would come through for premium purchases.

So just really cool that they're being supported with this organization. .

[00:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there's some piece whereby colleges and institutions like that I don't really know how the financing works over your side of the pond, but I think that universities and places like that in the UK are much more strapped for cash, shall we say.

, and they might be over your side because we have real strict limits on the amount of fees that they can charge. And whilst the. They're not nothing. They probably don't add up to a great deal of profit for the university. And so having somewhere to turn somewhere where you can deploy somebody on your staff and that person might not have a great deal of experience with WordPress, but they can go and look at all of the different bits and pieces, go and get support from that community.

Yeah. It seems like a really amazing endeavor. I shall move on if that's if that's what everybody has to say about that and say, crikey. This has been a long time coming. WordPress 6.2 is very close to being released. Like a matter of days. And the final release candidate one would imagine release candidate two is out.

If you've never tested a release candidate version of WordPress, it's really easy to do. You can be more complicated, but honestly, if you just go and if you just go to download, download something like local and. Get it running and on your Mac or your PC or whatever it may be, and then go and install the WordPress beta tester plugin.

That's all you need. And then you click a couple of block boxes, bleeding edge, and b CRC only. It'll get you there within about 10 seconds, and then you can go and check it all out. And there's a whole load of different bits and pieces. In fact, here we go. Milan Cap has a field guide. I'm just gonna scroll it reasonably quickly, right?

This is the WordPress 6.2 field Guide from Milan, right? I'm not gonna get into it, but there's, there is actually a ton. Each of these little boxes is a link where you can go onto a make. Dot WordPress article and read about it, but there is so much amazing stuff happening in 6.2. I dunno if you three, I'm imagining Rob being the in charge of a team might be following this more closely than any of the rest of us.

But Rob, I'm just gonna pass it over to you. Is there anything in 6.2 from your team's point of view, which you are keen to have in core, get, make use of, get using?

[00:17:31] Rob Howard: Yes, it's a big release. Yeah, we've done like articles pod, we have a podcast coming out in a week or two talking about it. There's actually a lot to dig into.

My understanding is, maybe I'm wrong about the exact moment that this is happening, but basically, we're at a place now where site. Phase two of the Gutenberg project is going out into the wild. We're not calling it beta anymore, it's becoming like its own real live thing, even more so than it was in the past.

So we're excited about that. Our team has been getting more into the block editor and site editing. We are using it for some of our smaller sites, some of our like personal sites specifically around like a complete block theme as opposed to Oh, nice. A classic or hybrid theme. Seeing that progress is really cool.

As an old fashioned coder, I also like that I'm gonna be able to customize with c s a little bit more on the fly. We were talking about how we love all the build tools and all the like really intense stuff, but I also like being able to hot fix things in 30 seconds. As much as it's unfashionable to use customizer for that it went away for a little bit and now it's coming back in a slightly like more integrated way with all the other like block editor and site editing stuff.

That's my 2000, the thing that I like that I that harkens back to 2010 as opposed to 2023, but always a good thing. And I think yeah, there's a ton going on. It's gonna be a big release. It doesn't seem like one of those releases that's going to be really like shocking or break a lot of stuff for existing clients, which I really like, but it's bringing in a lot of new improvements and really just like taking the next big step forward on the roadmap.

[00:19:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we had a comment just drop in from Max. Thank you for joining us, max. He says, hasn't the navigation been removed again? So the block is still there. Oh, in fact, nomad Skateboarding's taking it on. It has been removed from the site editor side panel. So there was this side panel which had templates and template parts and navigation in it, and it's been removed from there, which is I don't quite know what the story was.

Do any of you three maybe

[00:19:52] Rob Howard: know? Yeah, there is a video on, oh, is that wordpress.org about it? We can try to dig it up, but I think what this speaks to is that there's this goal of completing site editing and that is probably a little bit overly ambitious in some ways. Like I appreciate that we're shipping it and putting it out to the world.

But particularly around some of the navigation components, there is just a lot of messiness over the last six to 12 months and I think. What I read in the in the notes was basically like, we know we've gone back and forth in this a couple times, like we may go back and forth again, but we think that we're in the right place right now based on user feedback.

It's that, constant evolution of the software. And in theory that's a good thing, but in practice it can be a little bit confusing for people who are getting used to one way, in 6.0 or 6.1 and then it changes back and forth a couple times. But there was a lot of confusion around some of those navigation blocks and components over the last six to 12 months.

So I think they're doing their best to clear that up and just, make some decisions around what it really should be because in some ways they're inventing a new interface or series of interfaces and there's no real right answer to some of these questions. Yeah. I think the team's doing their best to get it working and also put, put somewhat of a punctuation mark on it and say this is what, this is the thing we built. We're now shipping it, we're gonna move some of our priorities over to collaborative editing and these other big ideas. And then the future for the site editing tool is gonna be more slow iterative improvements as opposed to like lots of big releases.

At least that's

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: of the plan especially feels to me like the navigation piece is still not quite as well. Put it this way, a whole bunch of commercially available themes delivered a lot of more interesting stuff. Should we say in terms of navigation, what shipping with WordPress 6.2 works. But you are fairly limited, but the bolts, the architecture underlying that is now available.

For everybody to build their cool plugin on top of, to make that whole navigation piece a little bit more interesting and easy to use. So the piece that we had on the screen is like I said, MI Milan caps piece, and it is very technical and it, Michelle kindly has dropped in a link from from Rob's site Master wp.

It's Naasha Green who's written like a, you've described it as a field guide to the field guide, didn't you, Michelle? I did, yes. . So if you can't get your, if you can't wage your way through this, which is, it's, I guess there's a lot of technicalities there and, you've got functions being described and all that kind of stuff.

You've got a, what I'm guessing, I haven't read this one, but I'm guessing is a fairly more, a fairly simplified version of that in easy to use language. That's

[00:22:57] Rob Howard: great. . Yeah. One other thing I'll add is that we run an agency, so we are building a lot of WordPress sites. We have a framework that we own that's bootstrapped and underscores based, but we're really just psychologically starting to switch over to embracing more of the block mentality and the Gutenberg mentality.

It's been several years. We've been very cautious about it. But we are essentially taking the team's word for okay, this is the real release. We're going forward with this. It's not gonna, change or shift gears dramatically for the next few years.

We're now starting to incorporate that more and more on the client side, whereas if you had asked me a year or two ago, I would've been like, I'm not touching that, for a while because it's so volatile. So from an agency standpoint, I think we're at a place now where. . Not to say that there won't be changes, but I think the extreme volatility in the software is a thing in the past and it makes sense for a WordPress developer to start to embrace some of the new theme Jason and block features that have been floating around for a couple years.

But at least I personally have been quite cautious about going too far in on something that wasn't like fully baked. Yeah. Especially because we had, reasonable alternatives. It's gotten a lot better in the last year. Not to say it won't improve or need improvements in the future but we're, we're at a place now where we're comfortable like starting to train our staff on this as opposed to some of the like other methods that are

out there.

[00:24:43] Nathan Wrigley: Gotta say Rob, I do love these graphics, these little Oh, thanks. Yeah. They're just, they always look like those. You've had somebody sit down with an easel and some watercolors. They're just really nice. I'm just gonna quickly go to the homepage cuz look, there's just one after another.

[00:25:00] Rob Howard: Look at 'em.

The aesthetic was one of our favorite things about the brand. . So we actually bought the brand from the two founders about a year ago, a little over a year ago. And one of our favorite things was like, it just doesn't look like every other newsletter. It doesn't look like every other, theme or sub or whatever.

So we've really tried to. , carry that photo. Yeah,

[00:25:22] Nathan Wrigley: they're nice. If you go to any archive, you'll see there's just like dozens and dozens of them. Do you have these commissioned on a blog, on a per post basis or?

[00:25:31] Rob Howard: We used to use a service and the previous owners use like a design service.

At this point we've got it streamlined enough that like it's basically a background plus a watercolor. Yeah. Yeah. So we're just doing them, on a case by case basis. These are the writers or the editors. But yeah, there was a time when they were using. Like one of those design everything for me for an unlimited price services.

And they were saying, okay, we need a watercolor of the WordPress logo with clouds. We need a watercolor of a chart going up. Stuff like that. Yeah. But I will share another secret is that we also reuse them because a lot of articles can have the same WordPress and cloud logo. So it looks beautiful as long as you don't reuse the same one on every Yeah.

[00:26:17] Nathan Wrigley: Six Leave. Iton. .

[00:26:19] Rob Howard: Exactly. So a lot of them are generic enough that we don't have to design a new thing. Yeah.

[00:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: They look really nice though. They look really nice. Anyway, so on this piece, just quickly you can go to Milan's WordPress 6.2 field guide. That seems to be the more technical write up.

And if you want the much. Straightforward, easy to read version. Go to the master. Wp Michelle and Kristen, I realized we didn't give you a chance to comment on that. I dunno if you've got anything about 6.2 that you want to speak to, particularly, if not, we'll move on. Yeah. One thing I think

[00:26:53] Kristen Wrigley: is really cool is the style

[00:26:54] Michelle Frechette: book Ooh, know of this.

[00:26:56] Kristen Wrigley: And it's really cool, especially, if you're trying to develop a style guide or something like that for clients. Really excited to dig into this a little bit more, but I saw a demo of it and thought wow, that is really cool. And there's some global styles and copying and pasting of styles I thought, is really useful and helpful.

But Style book, just being able to see like how all blocks output across the theme. And then also being able to make global St style change. I think it's gonna be really useful. Maybe, I don't know as much for end users, but probably people who are building sites and managing things. So

[00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I'm trying to find a, I'm trying to find a decent image of this style book, but I can't find one.

I've stopped using Google and I've used this rival search engine, and this is a moment where you think, oh, Google or find that straight away. But I can't manage to find it, but it is really cool. , it's this completely different interface where it just lays out components from your website and as you fiddle with the styles, it just updates them all.

And it's a really nice way of seeing all of, so H one, H two, H three, what images will look like and so on, and you just click a button and the whole site, it just demonstrates what all of those components would look like, and it's a really neat idea. And the implementation of it is really good. If any of you three can find an image of it, I'll I'll shove it up there.

But my, my, my new search engine has come up blank. Michelle, anything to throw in? Nope, I think you've covered it. Yeah. Okay. So yep, go to either of those two articles. This is nice. This is a lovely piece and I feel that this is, ugh, this is the kind of stuff that warms the cockles of your heart. Equalized Digital raises, Pree funding for expanding Accessibility checker plugin development.

So Equalized Digital is run by Ambe. Hez, and I want to say her husband. Is that right? I, yeah. Thank Chris, you, Chris. Thank you. Yeah, and so they're all about accessibility and they have an accessibility checker plugin, and over the last period of time they've been trying to develop it. And from this piece that I'm showing on the screen on the WP Tavern website, it sounds like that's been a, an interesting journey, but it's meant that they've been able to do a little bit of work on that and then get on with their, Profitable stuff, which allows them to pay for it and then go back and then, yeah, there's a sort of flip flopping between them.

Talk about Nice. An investment has been secured by them of an undisclosed amount, but it's from Yost DeVol of Yost fame and Marika Vander Act of Yost fame. They have decided to invest in this to accelerate the production of it. It sounds like they're gonna bring on some I dunno if it's full-time staff, but it certainly sounds like they're just going to concentrate on features to make everybodies accessibility experience a little bit easier.

Some of the things they're hoping to drop in the near future. is a visual UI where you can click on elements on your website. So it'll be a plugin, you'll install it, get it going, look at the website, and then click on components of the website and then get useful information as to where your accessibility standards are not being met or presumably patted on the back if you do well.

And I just think this is really lovely. What a really nice story to report. Accessibility seems to be a hot button topic in the last couple of years, but I imagine funding for this kind of stuff is pretty hard to find. So in, in steps, some very nice philanthropic individuals, Yost and Marika.

So Bravo. I'm gonna hand this one over to you three.

[00:30:46] Michelle Frechette: And what Equalize has also been hi hiring lately too. So they've hired at least one position and I think they have another one open right now. So this is probably helping to , get this off, up and running and keep working on it.

And I'm pretty excited about it. So many things that are labeled accessibility are things that are truly not accessible, like accessibility overlays and things like that. And so Amber is definitely a huge proponent of true accessibility and runs a meetup about accessibility, all those kinds of things, and does a lot of really good work.

So this is really exciting to see that the things that she's working on and that they're working on as a company are able to move forward for the

[00:31:27] Nathan Wrigley: community. Yeah, obviously if accessibility's your real given thing and you've poured a whole boatload of time into it, then you'll understand it inside out and.

Perhaps won't need something like this, but WordPress powering 43% of the web. You've gotta imagine quite a lot of those 43% of websites are built by people who, they don't really do this for a living. There's quite a lot of just blogs, people getting their brochure website up, and having a little bit of a helping hand, especially in, in, in terms of compliance and legal responsibilities, which are getting more and more talked about.

This kind of stuff is amazing. They mentioned that they want to, at some point make this their full-time. And in order for that to happen, they need the feature set to be good so that it can be self-sustainable. And then presumably there'll be some revenue model for them on the other side. So anyway Kristen or Rob, if you've got anything, go for it.

[00:32:19] Rob Howard: Yeah, we use this plugin. Sorry Kristen, go ahead. No, that's fine. That's

[00:32:22] Kristen Wrigley: fine. I was just gonna point out, there's a line from the article that I really appreciated just talking about making accessibility just as important as seo. And I think a lot of people would not put them on the same level as far as like importance when it comes to building or maintaining a website.

So

[00:32:36] Nathan Wrigley: I thought that was really neat. Yeah, thank you.

[00:32:39] Rob Howard: Yeah, that's a great point. And I think the difference is that people see SEO as, income generator, and they see accessibility as an expense, right? . So switching gears in a way that I think makes web accessibility equivalent to physical accessibility at like stores and stuff like that, I think is really where, I would like to see the psychology and the thinking of business owners go in the future in the same sense that you're like okay, I, if I'm gonna have a store, that store needs to be wheelchair accessible, maybe I need to put in a ramp or an elevator.

These things are like no-brainers to us. But if you look back at like the seventies and eighties when those first Americans with Disabilities Act laws were coming into effect in the United States, like that was not a given at that time. And there was that kind of like cranky complaining of oh, now I have to pay for this new thing that I have to add to my building.

So I think we're. A similar thing happening with the web and hopefully in, five or 10 years, it'll just be a no-brainer that like somebody who's visually impaired or can't use a mouse needs to be able to interact with my online store or needs to make a reservation in my restaurant, stuff like that.

Right now, I don't think that the median business owner is thinking about that. We do have a lot of people among our client base who are getting more aware of it and willing to invest in it. And, frankly, I'm telling them like, listen, like we have clients coming to us with lawsuits in hand because they're not doing this in time, so you guys should really get ahead of this.

It's not. like a joke or an option anymore, like the Department of Justice really is enforcing it. I think there were like 4,000 a d a related website lawsuits in 2022. And typically what's happening is people are settling them out of court and they are paying a settlement of five or $10,000 sort of as a penalty to the plaintiff who's a disabled person who tried to access their website but couldn't in some way.

But then they're also in those settlements committing to fix the problem anyway. So if you're gonna go. Pay the settlement and then pay the developers anyway. You might as well get out ahead of it. . Yeah. Not pay your lawyers extra, not pay the settlement, and also serve your customers better.

There, the, it's definitely been a little bit of a v volatile like process in the last few years, but in 2022, the Department of Justice actually came out and said yeah, this is a thing that we're gonna enforce. We know the law was written in the eighties, but we believe that it applies to websites if you're a public business.

So if you're just like, an off, if you just have an office and you don't have a store at someone of the public, you're not quite as subject to the law. But if you have a physical space or you sell some sort of physical product, like you, 100% are. We've used accessibility Checker plugin on our own sites.

We have it on Master wp. It's great. It really Compliments a lot of the other tools that are out there, but it's also in your dashboard, which is unique, like a lot of the other tools. Yeah. Are like chrome extensions or like external checkers. So I would definitely recommend that people pop that free version on there.

I think there's already a premium version. So I think that's one of the like revenue goals for the future. And honestly there's a very passionate community around accessibility right now, but the challenge is getting that mainstreamed right. And I think that is a tricky process cuz you don't wanna mainstream it by just telling everybody they're gonna get sued.

That's a very Yeah. Uncomfortable way to do it for a lot of people. I'm a little bit more aggressive with that with my clients cuz I'm like, listen, I know this sounds like I'm telling you have to build more stuff, but I'm actually advocating for you guys to not get in trouble in the next five years because otherwise it's gonna happen.

The challenge is really like mainstream acceptance, but also just the fact that you do have to make trade offs. Like one of the things that we see is that sites that were built 15 years ago are more accessible than sites that were built four years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And the reason for that is that, the basics are pretty accessible.

But any sort of like what I would describe as like new fancy design, like you start to lose some of that ability to use a screen reader pretty quickly. So we actually are redoing one of our restaurant clients, and I built their site for. In 2010 or something like that. And we went back and looked at it and we're like, you know what, like actually you guys are not really having you don't have huge ADA issues on this site because it's basically like tables, and basic fonts and stuff like that.

So that was cool. But we're still rebuilding it for them to modernize it, but as we modernize it, we have to really be careful that we're also remaining a D eight compliant. And there's several other like acronyms and like sets of guidelines that you have to follow to get to that point.

But especially with restaurants, with hotels, anybody with a storefront. . Like it's past the point where you can write it off or run this round

[00:37:58] Nathan Wrigley: at this point. Yeah. It's interesting because we, there was a comparison there between SEO as a thing. Everybody sees the benefit to that because it directly materially affects your bottom line.

But the thing about the SEO is you are basically optimizing for Google. I know you could optimize for the other ones as well, but not really. You're gonna go at Google, so there's one point of truth. There's one source. You figure it for Google. It's curious cuz you kept mentioning the ada a of course.

the ADA means nothing to me. Yeah. Because the jurisdictions throughout the world are gonna be different. So this is gonna be a real issue, isn't it? Is that, which set of standards are the standards? Do people who adopt certain standards in let's say, I don't know France or Australia, what do they have to prioritize first?

Where are the ambulance chasing lawyers going over there as opposed to in the US what's the low hanging fruit that they can fix, which satisfies a bunch of requirements? And whilst there's guidance, and I imagine the ADA by default, just being the ADA will probably end up being the default. It is a curious thing that, in the uk the law is definitely gonna be different.

So there

[00:39:09] Rob Howard: is there is one, they're not really an official authority, but everybody has adopted their guidelines and that's called W C A G, which is web Content accessibility guidelines. So that's actually what is included by reference in Americans of dis. Billy's act. And we also have something called Section 5 0 8, which applies to the federal government here in the States.

So basically, if you look at W C A G 2.1 a, that's the thing that people are using. Yeah. So I think that actually does apply. Yeah. Yeah. Internationally. However the other thing that remains to be seen is like exactly how a judge would interpret some of these guidelines. So they're not always like exactly cut and dried in the sense that oh like some things are clearly wrong, right?

And some sites are clearly unusable. But. . It'll be interesting to see if we ever get to a point where gray area is addressed in an actual court, because that could then move the needle a little bit or tweak move the goalposts, tweak the guidelines, whatever metaphor you want to use. Right now most of these are settling because basically people are saying like, yeah, like we know this.

This is new like this. Our site's not up to date. We acknowledge that and we're gonna fix it and move on without, taking it to court. But I think there is a potential for kinda what happened with GDPR and Google fonts like, a judge basically made up a new rule, right?

In saying that you can't use Google fonts, and I've lampooned that a little bit in our articles because I think it's a little bit over the top. But at the same time there is that possibility that you might say, okay I thought this type of menu structure was okay, but now there was a ruling about it and I have to go back and change that.

Just being on top of it is a a thing that I think all web developers and designers are gonna have to make part of their job, at least for the next few years, as it gets more. As they nail down the

[00:41:15] Nathan Wrigley: details a little bit more the bundle theme in WordPress 6.2, Google Font.

Google Fonts included in the bundle theme. So they, because

[00:41:22] Rob Howard: it's illegal to reference other websites on your website now, I'm just like, this is just . I've written a couple articles about this, but GDPR certainly, I feel like certainly is the whole. Point, like no CD CDNs are illegal. Yeah. Let, oh boy. Oh

[00:41:36] Nathan Wrigley: boy.

We'll see. Yeah. So we'll see how that up. Bit of context. Justin. Justin Tadlock, my life is complete. He's made a comment on this show. For extra info, the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990. Thank you, Justin. That's great. If you are, ah, yeah. Okay, great point. Nomad Skateboarding.

If you are, if you use most of the popular themes and builders, the default bells and whistles are almost you universally not compliant. Having proper and carries on having proper text contrast fixes many of the issues. Looking at the white text overlay on photos. Yeah. . Okay. And, okay, so let's hope that Amber's plugin with the kind sponsorship from Yost and Marika Amelia Capital, I believe it's called.

. Let's hope that brings this to fruition more quickly. Michelle, anything you wanted to add in there? I've already said,

[00:42:33] Michelle Frechette: all said,

[00:42:33] Nathan Wrigley: all I can, in which case, yeah, but isn't that a nice topic? That's such a nice story to, to be featuring. That's really cool. Here's another nice thing. This is an event.

This is the Web Agency Summit. It's happening next month. So really, we're just telling you get your calendars out. Put this in the diary. It's a big WordPress event, 40 plus speakers. They say Speaker WordPress experts, disruptors, and thought leaders. It's all happening live between April the 25th and the 28th.

The. The URL is atri.io/summit once small atri io slash summit. And yeah, go and check this out. Michelle, I know that you are getting involved from the actually, if I scroll to the very, very bottom, let me find it. There we go. Look, post status joins Ari's Web Agency Summit. This is a nice collision of two different things.

What's all this about?

[00:43:33] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, we're going to be staffing the networking lounge. So I've been reaching out to a lot of community people and getting them to sign up for an hour here or there to just keep the conversation flowing and having some, just some great conversations in the networking lounge throughout

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: the event.

What's the what's what are the conversations that went on, do you know, in terms of post status? Is it just, Mutual backpacking backpack. Did I say that right? Back patting, I think is what I meant to say. Are you just helping each other out? They'll help you, you'll help them kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Nice. .

Nice.

[00:44:08] Michelle Frechette: Exactly. I've been working with Deisha over there to To get those things moving forward. And yeah, it's pretty exciting. And I think you actually committed to an

[00:44:17] Rob Howard: hour,

[00:44:18] Nathan Wrigley: did you not? I did. Yeah. I I have and I said, veto owes me big time . I'm looking forward to it.

I can be very persuasive, can't I? You can be very persuasive. I think basically, Michelle, almost everybody in the WordPress communities is in some way, shape or form in your debt. And , I dunno about that. You know what I mean? You come along. I'm probably theirs by now asking this question. It'll be highly unreasonable for me to refuse, but yeah, I'll be there.

I'll be, I don't have any insight to what it is that I'll be doing just yet. But put it in your diary. 25th to the 28th online event. 40 speakers and yeah, atri.io/summit. And look, there's Rob. Kens chiming in the call for speakers is still

[00:45:00] Rob Howard: open

[00:45:00] Michelle Frechette: too, by the way. Say that. , the call for speakers is still open, so if you're interested in speaking, you can apply to speak at that event.

[00:45:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And Rob Keirn says, me too. Oh, did you get on? Did you get him as well? Excellent. . Oh, that's brilliant. Oh, key doke. Let's move along. Full site editing. There's no way I can unpack this in the time that we've got provided here. But this is an article on WP Marmite. We featured them a couple of weeks ago.

They had this interesting article about whether we should strip out the blog from a default word, press install, and have it as some kind of canonical plugin, which I thought was quite an interesting idea. This is a study that they've carried out and they went around asking a. Theme shops, cuz that's obviously their thing, what their position was vis-a-vis a whole bunch of different things in terms of full site editing.

I know it's called site editing, they know it's called site editing, but they said we're just gonna keep calling it full site editing cuz that's what everybody keeps calling it. And it's quite interesting. So they asked a bunch of questions, for example are you endeavoring to build block-based themes?

Have you got bespoke blocks going on and a whole bunch of other things. And then they compare that data with the previous year and the year before that and or at least did in some cases. And it seems that there's this slow but inexorable rise in the adoption of full site editing across these theme house companies.

And obviously, A lot of people go out there and they purchase commercial themes. I know that you can build them yourselves, but many people prefer to just, spend a few dollars and have something out of the box. And and it would seem that full site editing is becoming more and more a part of their theme offerings out there.

Definitely they're not throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I just thought this was an interesting survey. I don't know if the three of you had a chance to dig into the weeds a little bit, but in almost every single question that was asked there was this, a slow rise, a little bit of momentum towards full site editing, which I thought was curious because I don't really have any insight into the theming business.

And yeah, it definitely looks like people are moving in that direction. So I'll pass it over to you if you've got anything you want to.

[00:47:20] Rob Howard: Yeah, I'll say that first of all, I had to Google what Marmite was when you showed this. It's not good. And I realize it is it's not good, Rob. Oh, it's like Vegemite, right? It's it, because I've tried Vegemite in Australia. It's the work of the

[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: devil.

[00:47:34] Rob Howard: It's really, I'll leave that to you guys.

Yeah. . I feel like there's a funny trend of I feel like this is not the only website that's named after a in the world press industry. So there's something going on with that. But I think, so two things jumped out at me. Number one is what I touched on before, that Gutenberg has gotten better, right?

And I think that when you see. People adopting it. Like it's because it's not like a horrible experience anymore like it was a few years ago. And I think that is really good and just reflects the improvement of the software. And people are like, okay, like I I'm starting to see the vision for this.

I'm starting to see the benefits as opposed to just the the drawbacks of something being super new and a little bit less tested than maybe it could have been. The other thing that strikes me is that the question that actually I would like to ask the theme shop folks is site editing making.

Theme creation irrelevant or less relevant or different in some more holistic way, right? Because like site editing in some ways basically replaces a lot of these out of the box themes or at least a lot of the features, right? I think that's definitely true of the true full page builders like Dian Elementor.

Like you either need to use one or the other, but there's also a whole large group of like in between themes where it's hey, like you have my theme. You need to also add these plugins, which add site building features to the theme. And, there's a lot of those companies out there that basically were really valuable to users in 20, 15 or 2018 or whatever.

But I'm not sure that those use cases even really still exist if site editing takes hold because you would want to build. I think you'd want to build in a way that is more compatible with core for the future. Yeah,

[00:49:42] Nathan Wrigley: I agree. When you were talking about WordPress 6.2 and the updates there, and especially around the navigation block, I feel that somebody could quite easily step in and make a.

Make some major changes that were not major, just fiddle with that to give it a different experience. So a different way of creating that, but still leveraging that navigation block to do all the bits and pieces. It's just a bit funky at the minute, isn't it? It's not what we're used to and so we're not quite there.

But yeah. Thank you for that, Rob. Michelle, anything from you or Kristen? No, you're good. You're all good? Yeah, go and check it out. It's WP Marmite and what you'll definitely notice is that in, in all the cases of all the shops and they went out to, they analyzed 123, so it's not a tiny survey.

I imagine 123 represents a fair amount of the WP theme shop space. Some of the bigger ones though. It's Code Canyon. Sorry. Yeah. What's it called? Theme forest I believe as well, and checked a few bits and pieces out there, but it seems there's a slow but inexorable rise. Okay, good. Good to know. You're getting

[00:50:45] Rob Howard: Some negative feedback, Nathan, about marm comment. Yeah.

[00:50:51] Nathan Wrigley: Ok. Ross . Ross. Ross is in the uk. Ross, by the way, has the coolest chrome extension ever called WP Turbo drop. What you're doing in. Go and Google it right away. It's really great. He says he can't believe there's no other comment on Nathan's Marma review, so here he goes.

You're wrong, Nathan. So wrong. Marma is the best. Mar's just not the best. No , it's, have you ever had it, has any of you ever had something akin to Barite? Okay. So it's a bit like putting imagine like you've drained your car of oil and then eat some of that . That's about, I'm so gonna get sued by the Barite

[00:51:37] Rob Howard: company.

It sounds like a word. Camp Europe. Marmite eating contest. Yeah, it's gonna be cards. Yeah. See how

[00:51:43] Nathan Wrigley: many sausages you go through. Yeah. Clearly Ross is really into it. Sorry for offending your sensibilities. It's one of those few foods. It's just, it's always a bit of a joke in the UK because it's one of those things that you either.

Love or you hate. There cannot be a middle ground. And for example, certain members of my family just crave it and love it. And just the

[00:52:05] Rob Howard: smell of it, it drives me from the kitchen.

[00:52:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm sorry, I got carried away there. . Let's talk about something WordPress again. This is a podcast episode I did on the Tavern recently with Tisha Lou Allen all about something called certified wp.

The, okay, this is a whole interesting debate. , and I'm really curious about Rob's take on this as well. Especially given that the master WP offer a whole bunch of courses. So Tisha is really trying to put together a I won't say canonical, like it's the end of the world, this is the only variant, but her argument goes like this with WordPress having 43% of the web.

But then, but there being no real way of certifying. Employees that I can do these things in WordPress categorically. Look, I've got the badge, I've got the certificate. I sat the exam, I did the course, and I passed the test. Wouldn't that be a good idea to have? There isn't at the minute, but certified WP is an initiative, which I think she began it, that's my memory at least.

Anyway, hoping to gather this community of people together, figure out what these certifications might look like. What levels would there be? How high up can it go? How developer or how just implementer e could we make those certifications? And she makes the case in this podcast, I thought really strongly.

She also has a thing called wp WP Connects, or Connects wp. I'm sorry, I can't remember which way around that goes. WP Connects, thank you so much Michelle in which she is this is the inspiration for it. Really. She's trying to educate people who come out of the services in the US who are looking for something to do with their lives after their service is over.

And by all accounts, that is a real moment in time where, you've been busy doing your service and suddenly there's this cliff edge and you really don't know what to do with yourself. And so WordPress could be a real decent a decent way of getting people into it. So she's been offering coaching and things like that.

So the debate here is should we have a certification thing? Should it be the certification thing or just one certification thing? And I know, Rob, you are interested in this. You've obviously got courses over on Master wp, but Michelle told me at the beginning, you're also this project specifically you're into this right?

[00:54:48] Rob Howard: Yes. Michelle and I are actually both directors of the nonprofit that Tisha created for this purpose. We just had a meeting I guess a few weeks or a month ago. And it touches again on that like governance of the nonprofit and stuff like that. So we did, all the elections and everything like that.

Yeah. We're both Michelle and I involved closely

[00:55:09] Nathan Wrigley: with this. So Michelle what's your position on it then? Do you want it to be just one of many different offerings or is the idea to make it almost, if you're like the offering,

[00:55:23] Michelle Frechette: I think there's no design to be like, have a quarter on the market or anything like that.

And certainly we're not trying to make sure that there's nobody else could ever do this again, but instead to create the best possible credentialing standards that we can . The WP Connects being, they use right now, they're using skill bridge, which is something that kind of a military thing that, you know, when you are separating from the military to try to get you back into civilian life and find a job outside of the military.

And for people who want to then continue to work for the military. But as civilians, they would need to have a credential to be able to work in WordPress. And there isn't one now. So the idea was first to create this credential specifically for people who want to go back to win the mili for the military as civilians.

But then if we're going to do that, why not create it for the entire industry and not make it niche? Because WordPress is WordPress. And so the

[00:56:23] Nathan Wrigley: idea, can I just , can I just ask you a quick question there? Is that, because Yeah, of course. From the military side of things, the money to pay for that education piece has to be bound to an accreditation process.

You, you can't just ask the military, give me X thousand dollars and I will go and spend it on. My furthering education, it needs to be no, tell us what the thing is and we'll pay for it and you can then consume it. So

[00:56:49] Michelle Frechette: that's part of it. But it's more like they could get that, that they could become accountants and go work at another company, right?

So they don't have to have the accreditation to go out and work in the industry, in the field. But if they want to go back to work for the military specifically, they have to ha show a credential in order to be able to be hired that way. And so this credential fills that purpose, but then also, as long as it's being created, why not make it available to the entire industry so that if companies are hiring.

Especially companies that aren't WordPress companies that don't have necessarily the ability to vet their their applicants the same way that those of us within WordPress can do. This would be something that says, I've passed an exam. I've hit a certain level of credentialing that shows you I understand how to use WordPress to this level, that level, whether it's a user developer, et cetera.

To be able to have that as a standard.

[00:57:51] Nathan Wrigley: Rob, being an employer you obviously, it's, it matters whether that credential actually is a reasonable document to hold. If you show up with, look, I've got this credential, and then it turns out that, you go through three people and none of them can do what they claim to have done.

It matters. So it, presumably, it's gotta be rigorous. The curriculum's gotta be well thought out. It's the teaching's gotta be well thought out, the examination. Whatever that may be needs to be proven. And then, yep. Given all of that, is this the kind of thing that you would take as an employer? You would look at that document and say, okay, you, you're in the, you're in the short list kind of thing.

[00:58:38] Rob Howard: Yeah. A couple big picture thoughts. The first is that I really like. Fact that this is pegged to something that the Department of Defense is gonna accept, right? So I think that it, it is an offshoot of Tisha's other projects that this happens to be the way that she's approaching the credentialing.

But that is a standard that is like clearly legit in my mind, right? If you're saying like, we have this cred. , the, US government is accepting it. It would be weird if then some random, WordPress agency was like that standard's not good enough for me, . So we really want to get it to a place where there is I think legitimacy to it, right?

In addition to the direct effect of helping veterans transition back into, day-to-day civilian work, right? It also says, hey, this is a, like a really high-end, legit thing. So there's that component of it. The other. That I really like about it before I actually answer your question about how I would handle it is that so we have this huge problem, which is, I guess twofold.

So first and foremost is that people who build software in other things that are not php and WordPress don't believe that WordPress developers are real developers. And we've done a lot of like articles and podcasting about this. So I think that this is something we see for almost everybody who's entry level is they actually get discouraged from working with WordPress because people are like, it's old, it's busted, like it's boring.

Like it's not real coding, like you should go do. React or whatever other, obviously React is coming into WordPress, but you should go do the cool JavaScript stuff instead. And we actually are losing a lot of younger people completely because of that. Because they're actually being discouraged from even touching PHP or learning WordPress in any way.

That is not a big deal right now. . As like our hair gets grayer in the current like agency owner industry, right? We are gonna have a problem, which is that we are significantly under-resourced in like that, 20 to 30 year old group and significantly over-resourced in that like 40 plus group or however you wanna let that have that shake out.

But there's a demographic issue in the sense that we want new, hungry, young developers and designers to be coming into this space. That's an issue right now. For a lot of reasons. One of which is that it's not viewed as legit or like interesting or innovative to work in the WordPress and PHP space.

I think this would be a small step in, in the right direction for that. And it's something that's very similar to what we see, for example with Amazon Web Services. Yeah. Like you can go to aws, you can get, one of several different certification levels. Microsoft has similar stuff for their hardware and software.

And basically, . People who are out there doing like server tech and systems administration are going out and getting these certifications because they exist and they provide legitimacy in the industry. They're almost like a prerequisite to work on AWS stuff in some ways. To bring that into the other point that I was gonna make is that right now we have this problem where people are getting turned off by WordPress because it's old-fashioned or however you want to, like phrase that.

I think of it as tried and true, but it's definitely not the trendiest and most exciting thing for a, developer who maybe just got out a like college or just got out of a bootcamp to go into the other thing. Is that we simultaneously gate keep people and we say, oh, you can't come be a senior developer because you don't have enough WordPress experience yet.

But we create this circular problem where you can't go get enough WordPress experience. So basically the way to get WordPress experience is to be a freelancer. But not everybody wants to do that. Not everybody has the ability or the desire to do that. So if you don't come into the like bigger company with the five years of freelancing experience, you look like a novice regardless of whether or not you are a novice.

So to me the certification would really help, especially with the entry level hiring, cuz it's okay, like here's a thing that you can go. To show that you are at least at like this, like acceptable level. Like you didn't just pick up your first WordPress site yesterday, like you have a real level of knowledge about it.

And that can be done completely without anyone gatekeeping you. So you don't have to go get that first internship from, the person who may want to give it to one of their buddies instead, right? You don't have to freelance for years. It basically makes the industry more approachable by someone saying, Hey, I just got outta bootcamp.

I'm gonna go get this WordPress certification that's then going to get my foot in the door for 10 jobs instead of maybe one job, right? That I might have been able to get without anything on my resume. I think it fills a gap, which is that it's really. For a younger developer to build their WordPress resume, unless they get lucky and become a successful freelancer or get that first job in a somewhat random way.

So I think it'll actually, in addition to helping on the military veterans side, like it'll also decrease in, increase diversity in a lot of other ways because it removes a gatekeeper, right? And it says okay, like you can't throw my resume away because I have the certification on here.

Actually address this job application. And as we've seen there's just a lot of very flippant stuff out there. If you don't capitalize the p I'm gonna throw away your job application and stuff like that. The more we can get away from that, the better. And I think this gives entry level developers a much more legitimate piece Yeah.

Or a much more legitimate thing on their resume. And it, and you learn stuff too. , right? . Yeah, obviously I'm a fan of the idea. I know other companies out there are working on other certifications for different pieces of the puzzle. I think that they all basically would solve the problems that I just described of the difficulty of getting in to the industry and even knowing what the path would be to get in.

If you went out and you asked a bunch of people who just graduated from a boot camp, what they should do next, they'd be like I don't know. I'm gonna apply for a job at seven Silicon Valley companies and just say, I know React, right? That's like the only, that's like the job path that's coming outta those boot camps right now.

I would like to see them also be able to say, or I could go get my WordPress certification or both. And now it opens up more opportunities for everybody. Yeah,

[01:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: it's really interesting because it it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy once it's launched. If people take it seriously, then people take it more seriously, then people take it more seriously.

The the piece the a w s piece, I don't know if the. I dunno if Amazon fund any of that. And I don't know, for example, if Cisco fund their networking requirements, but I do wonder if the argument could be made that let's say automatic may have some skin in the game here in terms of helping these, but I guess other people would say why would they favor one certification over another?

Another thing that occurs to me though, as well is that once you start on this, I'm gonna call it a treadmill, you've really gotta keep that treadmill going because I, if we look back to WordPress, I don't know, 5.6 and think, what would the certification for that have looked like? It's nothing like the certification for WordPress 6.2.

Literally there's so much that has changed. . So we'd have to have this continuous process of the certification itself is getting updated and the one from three years ago probably doesn't carry the same clout as the one from last week and so on. So it's a big undertaking. .

Yeah.

[01:06:42] Rob Howard: But if you think about like other professionals accountant for example, like accountants have to do x number of hours of continuing education to keep up with new rules every year. That's something that I think we are already de facto doing for agency employees. Like we're always training people, right?

. It would actually in some ways be easier for me as an agency owner if the training was guided more explicitly by a certification that I didn't have to personally do all the cause right now, yeah. We're literally like sitting around saying, how are we gonna train?

Yeah. Yeah. We had that conversation last week, nice. And that's now an internal cost to me to both develop the training as well as have the team do the training. We do offset some of that cost through the Master VP workshops because basically what we do is we train our staff and then we.

Sell other people to training that we did for our staff anyway. That's what a lot of our workshops are. But this would, I think, defray costs even further. And I think standardize things in a good way. So that you could say, okay, I know that now that I can jump between different jobs if I need to.

I know that I like different WordPress companies, for example. I know that there is a meaningful standard. I also would slightly push back on the idea that 5.6 is totally, oh yeah, no, 6.2. Yeah, maybe the CHP and Java still exist, you have to learn the new layers that are being layered on top.

Ultimately you could, if you had time warped to today from four years ago, like you could still coach. Yeah, I guess my argument was more, but there is a continuing

[01:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: people coming through the door at the beginning of that funnel. So if somebody came in and wanted to start their base layer certification today, it would look very different from somebody.

Their certification. Yeah. A little bit of time ago. It really interesting initiative. . I'll just point to the podcast again if you wanna hear Talisha talk about this. Yeah. It's on the WP Tavern website. It's episode number 67. Kristen, did you want to add anything into that?

[01:08:56] Kristen Wrigley: Not really.

It's a really interesting idea. I definitely, in past experiences, we offered a training arm. People were always asking for some type of certification. I think it's just first establishing those best practices of the curriculum in the first place. And then where do you go from there? So the maintenance of it, like you said.

[01:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Courtney, who is very much involved in WordPress training she says the training team also share these sentiments. It's great to see others filling needs, such as the military vets in the interfacing with the US government, that'll be out of scope for training that yeah, that she's involved in.

This would also lend credibility to the boot camps, like where I instructed on the appropriate curriculum needed during boot camp learning time. And then Nomad skateboarding. My formal life was in sports medicine certification and continuing education was done yearly. It didn't mean a person was competent, but it did mean they weren't ignorant of all the subjects.

Thank you. That's really interesting. There's a whole load of other maite based comments, but it all boils down. Oh, yes. No, I should air this one because I misrepresented Ross's. Chrome extension. I actually got the name wrong, so apologies. Where's it gone? Where's it gone? Where's it gone?

Where's it gone? There we go.

[01:10:15] Rob Howard: I think a Marmite podcast. That could be, I think that's gonna be the

[01:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: biggest, it's controversial. We'd literally have to have the screen divided down the middle it's Turbo admin Go and Google Turbo Admin add WordPress into that query and you will find it and you will be delighted that you did.

It's truly great. Oh, okay. Quickly, another one by Rob. 2 cents. We have to have a practical component to certifications because we do not need people who have certs only on paper. Yeah. I guess it's, I guess on the entry level, it's about getting yourself through that door. Let's move. Oh, how I love Masteron.

Oh, I'm gonna write a poem about it. Hold to Masteron. I really like it. And automatic really like it. Or at least they like the underlying protocol which supports masteron. We've talked about this before. Masteron is really a skin sitting in top on top of activity, pub activity, pub powers, all sorts of different implementations.

There are sites which are a bit more rather than. Comments like tweets you post photos. That one's called Pixel Fed and the logos just there. But automatic, we very quickly touched on this. Last week, automatic acquired the Activity pub plugin. Now what that means is that they've taken on Matias Fery hope I haven't butchered your name, Mattias.

And he is now going to be able to dedicate all of his time to making Activity pub work with WordPress and making your WordPress website a first class citizen inside of Master Dawn. So imagine if people could somehow, Go to Twitter and without you having shared anything, your posts would be there.

And imagine if somebody wrote a reply and it came onto your website, and if you replied to that reply, it would go into Twitter. So this is starting to hot up for me. This is the promise of masteron, the fact that it's open and it's not gatekeeper by some billionaire, let's say that by some billionaire.

I just think this is really interesting. And the idea that automatic with their clout around WordPress and obviously developer chops. I think this is gonna be really interesting. I, for one I'm gonna definitely go and play with this. I do like the idea that my website could become like a full on account on master on.

I just find that really interesting. So it's just open to you. You know what I think, what do you think? Maybe I'm over egging it.

[01:13:06] Rob Howard: Nathan, you actually run a Macedon instance. I do.

[01:13:08] Nathan Wrigley: I do, yeah. And nice. And I did it. I , that time when every you were into Nirvana and then like suddenly everybody else found Nirvana like two years after you thought Nirvana was cool? It was a bit like that. I I just got the idea that this whole Masteron thing there was no hint.

You're headed, the game was gonna be popular, right? Yeah. I just did it. And honestly, all you could find on Masteron when I was using it back then was cat's pictures that I swear. That's what, that sounds great. Do you remember, were you using it as well? , but honestly, no. I was new to it, 80% Twitter, the feed was cat pictures and I have no idea, but it just seems to have been adopted by people who love sharing cat pictures.

And it was it got a bit like, what the heck? And then that's what my Instagram was like. Then it just exploded. That's what I subscribed. It just passed 10 million users. Yesterday. Yeah. The growth is steady away. The line goes like this, so it's not like a million a day, but it is on the order of I think a hundred thousand accounts a day.

It is growing nice and it's open and so clever. Little things like this can start to happen and then who knows what clever little things somebody else will do in the future. Throw in things like web mentions as well, and it all starts to get very interesting. Yeah. Sorry.

[01:14:26] Rob Howard: I and especially if you think about how the Twitter a p i, I think just went to a paid service only.

Like there Twitter is very much closing itself for. Financial purposes. Like basically they're treating it like it was a private equity acquisition, and they're gonna now squeeze as much revenue out of it as they can. Whether that's successful or not, we'll see. But to me, like the mission of Automatic and the mission of Masson seemed extremely well aligned and it would be interesting to see more collaboration there going forward.

[01:14:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What I think what I don't think it is yet, Masteron, I don't think is a particularly great tool for reach. So there are a few accounts that I've come across where, because they're, they've been famous elsewhere and and they've obviously announced on their Twitter account, I'm going over to Masteron, here it is.

They've managed to get this groundswell of support and, you get a few that are into the hundreds of thousands, but it's not, yeah. It isn't that, and you can't algorithmically hope that your content will go to the top. Just because your post is shared lots of times, it doesn't mean that the algorithm suddenly thinks actually.

Let's put more of that in, cuz that's obviously growing. It's viral. You won't get any of that. Yeah. And so it will never be good for that kind of thing. But what it is it's a little bit more straightforward. If you don't follow somebody, you're never gonna see what they put. If you want the algorithm to bend your preferences, it's not gonna do that cuz it's simply chronological.

And I think you're right. Rob, I think the juxtaposition here between automatics mission and activity pub, in this case Master's mission. Is really well aligned, but it, I don't think it'll become that broadcasting hub. I don't think it'll ever have that virality. Sorry, Michelle, I know I keep droning on about this, but ,

[01:16:12] Michelle Frechette: I just, for me I think Macon's great for conversation, et cetera.

I don't see it as, at least at this point yet as a huge marketing channel. So I don't think, I think you're right, any brands. Yeah. It's not going to replace Twitter as far as brand marketing and things like that goes. So

[01:16:32] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you'd have to do a tremendous body of work to get to the point where your account had that.

So my understanding of the Twitter algorithm is, like I just said, if something if you post something and then within seconds a hundred people have suddenly shared it, there, there's some bit of the algorithm there going, whoa, stop what you're. post that all over the place, you'll never get that and gets rewarded.

Yeah. You will never get that on the current implement because it's open source. Who knows what algorithms some, somebody will come up with to make it exactly like that. .

[01:17:05] Rob Howard: I think that the point of mastermind is actually to eliminate the algorithm for our right, so that in the sense that it's good for micro blogging masses on is just as good for me if I wanted to do very short like tweet, like blog posts, right?

. But from a company standpoint, what's the point of Twitter? Twitter is an advertising platform if you're a company, right? Like the goal of me putting a master AP post on Twitter is that it gets so much engagement that then it gets engagement from people who have never heard of me before and then now they've heard of me.

And it's a function, it's, it functions as advertising, right? I don't even think it's really that good at that in most cases. Like it's pretty rare that you get that kind of Win on Twitter. That being said, like that is explicitly not the point of MAs on, it's the opposite of the point of MAs on, I think.

Mass is supposed to be calmer. They're supposed to be less like advertising and virality involved in it. . So even though the interfaces are very similar the goal is not really the same at all. That's

[01:18:11] Nathan Wrigley: another nice thing about the fact that it's open source, is that the interface that they provide, It's just now one of many that you can use.

There's a whole bunch of services where you can really modify the way it looks. So you can go for that tweet deck approach where here's all the columns, or one that I prefer is called elk. It's called e l k.zone. And it's under constant development. It's browser-based, so you don't install it anywhere, but you can have it as an app.

You can click the thing in Chrome and make it into an app. And it's really nice and it really does look a lot like Twitter, but yeah it's nice. Kristen, you are new to this whole master on thing that we're talking about. Do you use this? Is this even a thing? No, not

[01:18:53] Kristen Wrigley: yet. I'll echo Michelle's point about it, not really, not sure yet, like what the marketing applications are yet.

And I know like some things just aren't supposed to be that, right? Yeah. But I think the news of this is very interesting and definitely gonna be following along.

[01:19:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it just, it's such an obvious thing, right? Make your website. a first citizen of the social side of things. So you can reply and follow my website.

Just don't get me started. Courtney makes the point that Masteron is where she goes to chat with devs and open source aficionados. Yeah, that's a really good point. There is a very strong WordPress community and what you can do on Macedon is, I guess you can do it Twitter, you just follow the hashtag WordPress and lots of nice things coming through that on a daily basis.

Anyway, there you go. Well done. Automatic bravo. I think that's cool. There we go. Now . Here we go. Hey. Hi . Every week the conversation about ai, I am so sorry Rob. I know you wanted to get into this, but time is running. You'll have to come back and talk to us. , but gp, there will

[01:20:05] Rob Howard: be many more AI's that's coming down.

I'm

[01:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: slightly suspicious. Suspicious that Rob's real. You just seems to be . chat G. Sorry, not chat. G P t four has come out and taken the world by storm. I had quite a few bits and pieces that I wanted to say, but I'm just gonna mention this one. Chat, G p T has made coding easier and there is this Twitter, which I will link in the show notes for today where this chap on the screen now, you really can't see it, but he writes down in a book like it's a piece of paper.

Basically he writes down what he wants his website to be and he photographs it, uploads his photograph to Discord. And don't get me wrong, it's not like a complicated thing. It's dead straightforward. It's a few buttons and a bit of text, but it pauses his drawing. Creates buttons with links with the text that he said wanted, that he wanted to be on the buttons.

And I'm just like, oh my Lord. If this is what Chap or G P T four can do, what can five and six do? And I, Rob, I've seen the slew of content that you are putting out over on Master WP AI related stuff. I'm troubled, but I think you are more sanguine.

[01:21:27] Rob Howard: I guess the first question I would ask is, are you troubled because you think that it's gonna take over the world and destroy humanity or is there other trouble?

I'm trouble That's I'm

[01:21:40] Nathan Wrigley: troubled because I don't think we've got the incentives. . And what I mean by that is I don't think it's a good outcome if an AI is able to eliminate a whole host of jobs, unless we've prepared society for that disruption, it's all very well saying other jobs will come along.

Yeah. But imagine the pain and anguish of tens of thousands of people whose job in accountants you say, which can now by all accounts, be done by G P T four. Yeah. What? So it's the incentive piece. I don't worry about the use of it. I'm sure that it's not gonna take over the world. I'm gonna go and live on Mars anyway.

,

[01:22:19] Rob Howard: pretty sure. Yeah. . So I think I agree with you in a somewhat narrow sense that like you don't want an individual person to experience getting their job eliminated because of a computer doing it. I think what I would. Add to that is that if you look at, even like the la, even like our lifetimes, right?

There was a time when spreadsheet software didn't exist, so there was a lot more need for manual like accounting. There were elaborate card systems that were used for these things that are now used that, that are just in software, right? Microsoft Excel essentially eliminated not only certain jobs and tasks, but also.

the need for tons of paper storage and card storage and elaborate systems like that. Even if you think about when you were a kid at your school library and you had to learn the Dewey Decimal system and go through like the card drawers and stuff like that, like the kids don't have to do that now because they use databases on computers to do that instead.

So it might still be like interesting to learn like that the 900 s are biographies or whatever that, systems, but like that is no longer really relevant. And if you look at it that way, like yes, like there, there used to be jobs where people would hand copy books, right? And the printing press eliminated the need for most of those jobs.

So I think one other example I would give that I actually, have thought a lot about over the last 10 years is that in 2005 when I started doing like full-time professional web development after college Building an e-commerce site was really hard. It would probably cost, 10 or $15,000 just to get a basic store up that would process credit cards securely and, send you some products.

Now that can be done with Stripe and Shopify by pretty much anyone. Yeah. In a matter of days, so that did eliminate a source of income for me as a web developer. There's a lot of times now where I would've charged you, $10,000 to do something that you could just do yourself on Shopify today.

I don't feel like that has been like a huge that hasn't been a. A traumatic negative change for me. Like obviously there could be bigger changes and bigger issues around that, but software getting better to me seems like a net positive. Provided, it doesn't like turn into Skynet in and take over the world in some people way.

We'll

[01:24:58] Nathan Wrigley: come back in three years, we'll be talking about Sky . Yeah. Honestly, I just find this whole thing really interesting and it's the, in, it's the logarithmic curve of how quickly it's getting better. That is, is a bit scary for me and I do worry about our own industry. And whether or not this will be able to code to a proficient standard such that, there'll be lots of people looking around.

If you could get your web app built for a hundred dollars through Microsoft's open AI and or spend $20,000 getting it done by a person, that's the incentive. That bothers me. Yeah. A little bit. Okay.

[01:25:38] Rob Howard: Michelle. It's deflationary though. Yeah. Yeah that's a good thing. Great.

[01:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no I'm so conflicted about this whole thing. Kristen, Michelle, anything?

[01:25:47] Michelle Frechette: I'm, I've said a lot over the last few weeks about it, . Got it. So I'm,

[01:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: let's leave it to Kristen, if you've got anything. Yeah. I

[01:25:55] Kristen Wrigley: think I'm one of the few riders that have been like super excited by this technology. I think it's really amazing and it's been fun to learn how to ask it questions and figure out like what it's gonna say back.

And I've used it a ton. I use it every day. So I think it's just, Not really something that I've felt threatened by necessarily. I think it's something that's a tool that I'm able to like, leverage to get better at

what I do. Yeah.

[01:26:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, that's good. Need the voice of reason, the pair of you have done a great job in in calming me down a little bit.

You've cathartic feel to this whole episode towards the end. Okay. We're gonna move on because I definitely want to touch on a couple of things. Firstly Jamie, I have mentioned your Twitter thread, so don't unsubscribe to all the things. I'm not gonna say much more about it, but I am gonna say that this is what chat g p t gave me when I asked it about Cat Gate.

Just be somewhat alarmed. Let's put those away quickly and say nothing else . But Jamie Marsland, you have been mentioned. The next thing I want to mention is this little beauty day one. I have it on my phone. It is an app which you use to journal. It's it's such a great idea. I love these kind of apps.

But we did mention the other week that it's now gone all web-based. Previously you either had to, download the app on your phone or you had to download the app onto your computer, but now it is on the web. Being an automatic owned company I think that was. 24 months ago or something like that, it was acquired.

But look at this little interface. Does that remind you of anything , that there be Gutenberg, I'm guessing. Kristen can tell us more. Is that right? Is this a gut implementation of Gutenberg?

[01:27:43] Kristen Wrigley: Yeah, I, it's been really amazing to watch those coming from a WordPress, background, seeing how Gutenberg is being used as an independent framework within the web app for day one.

And so it's just been a really interesting and exciting implementation of it because, we really believe that the more Gutenberg is used, even outside of WordPress, like the better it gets. And so it's been cool to see even, Tumblr using it for its editor and even an quadruple integration with Gutenberg, which I think is kinda interesting too.

Yeah.

[01:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: But. . It's really, it's like they've stripped out all the crop that you don't need. Yep. And it's, just here's some headings, here's some ization and bolding and all of that kind of stuff. . But it's a really nice app if you are searching around for this kind of stuff.

Or indeed, if you're looking for an excuse to do journaling. Kristen's actually got a poster here. Just highlight the main points of this post. You've got this gratitude journal. A hundred ideas Yeah. Tips and techniques. Yeah.

[01:28:40] Rob Howard: So

[01:28:41] Kristen Wrigley: gratitude journaling is just a really great way to get started journaling if you're new to the practice or maybe feeling like really overwhelmed by, I don't want to write about my emotions or thoughts or feelings, but gratitude journaling is just like a really easy way every day to just think about what you're grateful for and jot down a few things.

And so this post is really, designed to help you get started, get your feet wet with gratitude journaling and maybe even inspired to, to start it.

[01:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: It is a really genuinely nice app. I feel if you're on the iOS Mac. Ecosystem, particularly the implementation over there is really good.

I'm still waiting for the sort of Android equivalent to catch up. You're working on it. Yeah, I was gonna say there was I got it from the horse's mouth can hold you to that. It's a really nice app. But now, importantly to me, I don't need an app anywhere. , it's just available on the web and in that lovely, familiar interface actually it, it looks Gutenberg, but it's been tweaked just that little bit so that you maybe wouldn't necessarily know.

It's not like Gutenberg's following around the internet. Just, yeah.

[01:29:47] Rob Howard: And we just pushed out

[01:29:48] Kristen Wrigley: some exciting updates even last week calendar view where you're able to view entries in Oh, nice. And then missed that really. Yeah. Like people were asking for that. And then tagging, there's some really cool tagging functionality for your journal entries.

And so we're working on it. It's actually, it's in beta right now, but it's still ready, you can use it out.

[01:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: And also, if you can persuade people to get on the web version, you just do one thing. Just the one thing. Don't have to update the Mac app and all of that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Everybody's using the web, use the web. Okay. And very finally, tacos. I'm afraid we're gonna have to miss them out. Michelle, we're not gonna talk about Samsung's moon or how tag, that's okay. So sorry. I, so sorry. But we will end with this one. This is something that Rob dropped in, he wanted to mention it's a plugin which their team have been developing.

We were talking earlier about getting things right in terms of accessibility, ALT tags on your images. Bit of a chore, aren't they, from time to time. But what, we've got AI mixed with WordPress here. It's the perfect way to end. What does this do? .

[01:30:51] Rob Howard: So what we did was we built basically a new, and we think better image recognition AI specifically for this purpose of populating your alt text, right?

So you can see some of the example images here. If you upload your image to every alt either via the website here or the plugin you might get an example like two people sit on a bench or the stars twinkle in the night sky above a field of trees, right? So the idea is that the vast majority of the time it's gonna give you.

Accurate Tex that you can just basically take to the bank and use right away. The way we see people using it is twofold. Number one, they don't have to stare at a blank space, right? That's one of the biggest challenges is like, it doesn't seem hey, add a little tex to your image is a big deal, but when you're composing something and you're staring at that blank field and that blank field is also often even hidden in the interface in some situations.

Even if you need to tweak a couple words, it's a really nice prompt and start to remember that all text and then. The other thing that the plugin can do is if you have a site, like we're literally doing an ADA remediation this week for a client, and we're gonna go through and add all texts to every single image that doesn't have it.

Oh, with this tool in two seconds, right? So it goes back through, and then you'll see a history, like a board of all the things that it did, and you can just tweak 'em, page a word or two at a time. It auto saves the changes that you make. So basically it's your assistant in the sense that you don't have to type all that stuff.

It's gonna get it, 80 or 90% of the way there for you. Maybe it's gonna do 300 images in three seconds, and then you can go through and edit that, but you're not the, you're not racking your brain to do all that, all text work. It's free. You can create an. Get a bunch of image credits for free.

If you wanna do a bigger batch, you can buy additional image credits. And we have version 0.1 of the plugin here. We actually have two coming out today, later today. We added a couple new features. We move some stuff around and we're gonna get it submitted to the directory probably later this week.

It also has its own api, so you don't have to use the plugin. You can hook up to the API and put it in and build it into your own app wherever you want. We have a Zapier integration and all sorts of other cool stuff, so check it out. We basically took like a bunch of image recognition tools and a bunch of language tools and baked them together with kind of our own recipe to get this specific use case of I really want to know what this photo is and I wanna describe it.

succinctly in one sentence, in a way that somebody using a screen reader could truly get value

[01:33:42] Nathan Wrigley: from it. If you are doing the ADA backport, if where you've got the 10,000 image website and you need to do that work quickly. Yeah. How presumably, I say presumably, how do you interact with those 10,000?

Is there like a list view of all of those or do I have to individually go into the media library and click on each one at a time?

[01:34:01] Rob Howard: So you can individually click on them. And then the other thing you can do is run a bulk optimization, a bulk generation, right? So if you've ever used one of the image optimization tools, it'ss, kinda like that, where you go back through and pricing is $10 per thousand images max.

I see that in the chat. So you, the first a hundred are free if you sign up today and then basically it's 1 cent per image going forward. So if you wanted to use it for clients, like it makes a lot of sense. Like doing a client site with a thousand images for 10 bucks instantly is a pretty easy yeah.

It does thing for an agency to afford and it's not a subscription, you just buy what you need. And you get an API key, you could plug that into unlimited WordPress sites. You've only

[01:34:48] Nathan Wrigley: gone on proven That AI's quite useful, haven't you? I don't,

[01:34:52] Rob Howard: See, that's the thing. I wanna move it away from toys

That's what I like about the accessibility approaches. I'm like, okay AI is weird and creepy , right? Yeah. If you're using it to generate photos of like cats and gates and whatever you guys were doing earlier, but that is, if you think about okay What is a problem that I can solve with the fact that this, these tools can see objects and images and then they can create really interesting like language output from it.

So what we've done is we've said, okay, let's use this image recognition technology that's mostly used for boring stuff, like caps and stuff like that, and let's actually apply it to something we want to change to make the future better, right? So this is not necessarily creating absolutely perfect content, but it's making this accessibility work a lot.

Faster and easier. So it's a way to leverage these tools for something that's actually,

[01:35:54] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. You've got a few nice comments. Obviously people dropping off this, I'm just going to check out the plugin.

[01:36:00] Rob Howard: Yeah, and I'll address Max's last question real quick in, in that yes, the data that we generate is stored in your WordPress database if you use the plugin.

So what's gonna happen is you do it once it's gonna there, it's gonna store it in the alt text, field for that media library, right? You'd expect it. Yep. And you can also set it up so that anytime I upload a new image, it's gonna, as it's uploading that image, it's gonna ping the every ALT api.

It's gonna populate the alt text. So even if you just drag and drop an image into the block editor, it's gonna automatically have your starter alt text built

[01:36:35] Nathan Wrigley: in there. As you might expect, it's called every alt they managed to get every alt.com, which is rather handy. Every alt.com. Nice and easy to remember.

No weird spaces just. Every alt. Yep. Oh, that's cool. That's cool. And I, yeah, I'm somewhat annoyed that AI is actually useful. , I want it to be relentlessly bad , then I could justify my sort of reluctance to adopt it all. Okay. I'm so sorry. We've overrun. We've gone for one hour 40 instead of one hour 30.

I'm really sorry about that. I do apologize, but I would like to sincerely thank anybody who made a comment. They were really valuable. They keep the show going. That's great. Also, to thank Kristen for joining us. I really hope you come back, Michelle. I'm. I'm trusting that you'll come back and Rob.

Yeah, maybe we'll have Rob on again as well. And by that point I shall be a robot. And we'll see how it goes just before we end. The slightly humiliating thing that we always do at the end of show, this is how the album art is made, and we all put our hands up. And I Yes. Look, everybody's so willing straight away.

That's so good. Thank you for joining us. We'll be back next week. Take care. Thanks a lot. Take it easy.