This Week in WordPress #247

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 247 entitled, you Gotta Take Those Moonshots. It was recorded on Monday, the 3rd of April, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by three wonderful guests. I'm joined by Jess Frick, by Robbie Adair, and also by James Giroux. We talk a lot about WordPress this week, and some of it is to do with the latest version of WordPress because yes, WordPress 6.2 has landed.

What's in it? What features do we like and what are we looking forward to In the next phase of the Block editor, which is all about collaboration, we also talk about the fact that I'm trying to get Michelle Frache to Word Camp Europe. I have a donation page. If you're interested in helping this fabulous community member attend Word Camp Europe in Athens this year, solid, WP is the new name for all of the Ithe properties.

In the past, you had various things, backup, body sync, and so on. They're now gonna be rebranded under the. Monica Solid. Wp, what do you think? We had an interesting chat about that. The Block visibility plugin by Nick Diego. It's now gone. Open source. The pro version is no more, and the mighty Nick has decided he's gonna give it all away for free.

How lovely is that? WP Engine have a new patent manager. There's a new block plugin form builder called Form Block, and also somewhat tragically on April the first. All of WordPress's source code was released online. Patch Stack tells us more. 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? Hey. Hey. Hello. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Good. Whatever. Wherever you are, depending on which part of the globe you're in, we're all in different parts of the globe today.

I am at least. Anyway, the rest of you are over on that big piece of continent called America. We have joined. There's three of us joining today. We've got Jess, Rick. Hello. How you doing Jess? I am

[00:02:46] Jess Frick: doing good. Nathan

[00:02:47] Nathan Wrigley: Wrigley Na, I was rolling the R there for effect. Yeah. Yes, you started it.

Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Jess is the director of operations for Pressable a make WordPress hosting team rep. She's also an iced tea conno. So do we say iced or ice? Iced

[00:03:05] Robbie Adair: because iced

it has

[00:03:06] Nathan Wrigley: been iced tea connoisseur. And a Proud, unless You're a rapper. Oh yes. We won't get into that.

She's also a proud member of the post status community. Thank you for joining us again for this episode number 2, 4 3 of the WP Builds This week in WordPress, we've also got first time Robbie Adaire, a Adaire. We don't know how to say her surname. She tells me it can be said multiple ways. What's the best.

[00:03:34] Robbie Adair: Like I said, if you're in Texas or Louisiana, they normally say Adair, but if you're anywhere else in the world, they say Adair. So I just answer to whatever people say normally, it's, Hey, you.

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Hopefully you'll enjoy it in combat. Robbie is the c e o of os training.com, an online web development training company, and one of the co-hosts on Do the Woo podcast.

Have you managed to keep up with Bob? Have you figured out exactly where he is these days? I hear he is, he's got to Portugal, he's safe and sound bags have arrived. Exactly.

[00:04:10] Robbie Adair: He's sipping coffee by a lighthouse view. I was just like, I'm so jealous right now. I'm like, quit posting those,

[00:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: Bob. I confess I did see some of those and it was exactly the same.

It was one of those, why did he get to do that? And I didn't think to do that moment. Yeah. I'm so happy

[00:04:26] Robbie Adair: for him though. That's what a cool adventure, right?

[00:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about OS training before we get to James. Sure.

[00:04:35] Robbie Adair: So OS training has been around for over a decade actually.

I bought it about three years ago from Steve Burge. He started it years ago. It actually started as jula training because they wanted to do in classroom training for jula because there was no any kind of open source training out there. And so he wanted to do in classroom. I actually did some of his in classroom in Houston.

For him it was great. And it was so like we had students come in and go, I didn't even know this college training existed. It's so great. This is a long time ago though, right? And so then he, it just grew and so he rebranded to OS for open source. Now we just use the OS as.

Just because it's been there for so long, right? That we've actually started adding in a few tools that we think would help web developers that aren't necessarily open source, but we still primarily focus on the three big open source WordPress, Jula, and dru. Those are our core trainings that we have in the website.

And then we we also do some online live training for people, companies. We do some white label training as well for people who they just want something very specific or want something for their product.

[00:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: Built. Very cool. I'd forgotten the Steve Berg connection. Steve's been on the show Yeah. A couple of times and yeah, I'd forgotten that's how he, Steve and I go way better.

Yeah, he's got an interesting story, hasn't he? Yeah, he was a teacher and got fed up with that and then did our training cuz it, it hit the nail on the head with the teaching aspect and then he sold it to you and now he's got publish press, which actually curiously we'll overlap some of the stuff we're gonna talk about today, cuz it looks like the next iteration of WordPress is gonna touch on a lot of what Steve's plugin does.

But anyway, we'll come to that. Yeah. Lastly, but by no means least best background of the Weak award. I have to say, sorry, the re the other two of you, but my background's always rubbish so I'm out of the count. But I just think that fan, whatever that fan bulb thing is pretty cool.

It's James Giro, how you. I am doing well. How are you? I think I butchered your name. I'm so sorry.

[00:06:35] James Giroux: No, you actually didn't do too bad this time. Like this time if Adaire is one that people struggle with, you can imagine what J is like.

[00:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yes. I, yeah. See

[00:06:48] Robbie Adair: now, if you were in Louisiana, it'd be Jiro.

[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: I will definitely try to do better, but yeah. Splendid. Camera set up, you've got there. James is contributing to the future of work in WordPress as the founder of Team wp, the team and culture platform designed specifically for WordPress teams. I've asked about OS training, so I can't pass this one up really.

Can I what's team wp? Yeah. A little bit

[00:07:14] James Giroux: of a of a side project. Thing that I kicked off. I started writing a little bit last year about, psychological safety and culture stuff around WordPress teams and just the WordPress community in general. And as that. Started to get a little bit of traction and people started to respond to it.

It really got me thinking that maybe there's an opportunity here for us to bring some of these practices that happen in the larger companies within WordPress to some of the smaller. Teams in WordPress and give them access to the resourcing and thinking in, running great teams and building a great workplace culture to yeah, the masses basically.

My hypothesis, the one that I've been working through is that if we can help WordPress teams develop great ways of working in their internal team structure and develop the kind of internal culture that really is forward looking, is supportive of people's growth plans and like just happy and healthy cultures, that we can actually see that trickle into the way we interact in the global WordPress community because those ways of working those expectations of psychological safety of, like great rituals and trust in communication will filter into the way we develop.

WordPress as a core product. So that's the working hypothesis. And I'm getting ready to launch. Jess, you're on my private beta list so you'll get an email later today, but it's opening up for private beta. The survey's launching today. So that's really,

[00:08:59] Nathan Wrigley: oh my gosh, that's so exciting.

Yeah. That genuinely is exciting, isn't it, when you've been working on something for so long and then finally you get to let the cat out though. Oh, James, this is exciting. Definitely a new direction. I'm gonna definitely get you on the email at some point and try to drag you on the podcast so you can explain Absolutely.

In greater detail. That would be lovely. And Jess, I've totally realized I'm asking all of them what they do and and I forgot to let you have things. I've only been on the press clock like a hundred times. I know. And I'm very sorry. How did the how did the word press 6.2 rollout go for you guys at Pressable?

[00:09:33] Jess Frick: Oh man. Why do you guys start there?

Is that a low,

[00:09:40] Jess Frick: There were some little tricky parts. Oh. Here's the thing. If I got to have, unlimited wishes, one of my wishes would be that people really do try using the beta version. I feel like everybody is so reactive and I think that when, people just assume that they can automatically update WordPress and everything will always be perfect.

And that's not always the case. A lot of times it is. I think it's a bigger issue with the more major releases from five to six. Obviously six two is a major release. Yeah. But I think I think people would go a long way with. Testing it, especially if you are with a managed WordPress host that offers free staging sites like Pressable, you can very easily do it in a no risk way.

[00:10:34] Nathan Wrigley: You just click the button, it's, yeah, trivially easy. Click the button, wait two minutes and play over there.

[00:10:40] Jess Frick: But honestly the update was, it was good. Oh, nice. Here's the thing. I, we are in a a really blessed position and that we are working with people that, run wordpress.com, so they know what they're doing. Yeah, for sure. And we've got an incredible team. The Pressable staff is truly a group of experts and so everything was handled every step of the way, but, we always have to do it with with.

[00:11:15] Nathan Wrigley: Touch. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting cuz just because of the nature of the fact that most of the plug-ins that I use, I have real faith in them.

I don't really have that trepidation of pressing update and hoping but I imagine the wealth of different sites that you must have over there with, I don't know, probably hundreds of thousands of plugins, all a different mismatch of everything. It's a bit of a lottery, isn't it? And no doubt your support team, Have to suddenly bear the broun when, yeah.

Yeah.

[00:11:47] Jess Frick: My, my frequent quote is never underestimate someone's ability to do bad things to their website. It's, ah,

[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: Now you need, you just need to push 'em over to Rob Robbie and, she can train 'em up with the best of intention. The

[00:12:01] James Giroux: ones I'm

[00:12:02] Jess Frick: thinking of, I would not send to her cause I like her like,

[00:12:07] Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, funny.

Really, thank you for joining us. Yeah, go check it out. pressable.com. Full on managed WordPress hosting company where Jess works. We got a few comments coming in. I should I should probably get to those. Kitchen sink. What's the kitchen sink? WordPress I can never remember who is this, and so I've put in a little comment.

It's Brian. No, it's Dave. Or is it Jeff? It's one of those, it's not even one of those. But thank you for joining us. Good afternoon. Somebody's joining us. Who's this? This is Atif. He's joining us. He says he'll be listening in the background. That's really nice. Thank you very much, Elliot, from down the road for me at least.

Anyway, he lives about, I don't know, 10 miles in that direction. It's really nice to have you joining us. Thank you. And Porto, why have you said Porto? Dunno. Peter Ingals joined us to give us a weather update. It's Kinetica, it's this, it's every week we have this two degrees centigrade, 36 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's sunny, it's 9:00 AM in the morning. And look it repost. Is WP Kitchen sink? 11 degrees. He's got nine degrees on ya. From Carrie. Is that Carrie Carey? I don't know. In. And I wanna say North Carolina. Is that what NC is? Carrie is

[00:13:20] Jess Frick: just outside of Raleigh. You've probably heard of that.

[00:13:23] Nathan Wrigley: I've heard of it, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. 45 degrees and, yeah. Anyway, morning, we've also got somebody joining us from Buen Aires. Thank you very much. Demystifying Dev. Victor Kane, it looks is the real name there, but thank you for putting those comments in. I really appreciate it. If you wanna make this conversation a bit more lively we would appreciate that.

The best thing to do is to direct people to that url, WP Builds.com/live. Stop what you're doing. Unless you're a fireman. And then just carry on. Please let the, get the fire put out first. Then go over to WP Builds.com, copy that url, paste it somewhere social, and let the world know that we're doing this and it would be really nice to have more people along.

What we doing, WordPress is what we're doing. But before we do that, little bit of self-promotion, hope you don't mind. WP Builds.com. That is our website. We are sponsored down here by GoDaddy Pro. Really appreciate everything that they've done for us. If you wanna subscribe, state your email address in there and we'll send you two emails a week when we produce new content.

That's it. But the first piece of news that I want to highlight is this little beauty on the right hand side here. This is, I was chatting to Michelle Frette last week and she said to me, I've quite fancy going to Word Camp Europe. And I said let's see if we can make that happen. So forgive this, but I'm gonna do it cuz I think it'd be nice to get Michelle there.

Currently we, we've put a target together of how much we think it's gonna take to get Michelle there. We're not saying what that is. We're just, we've just got this number in our head. And so far over a per period of about four or five days, we've managed to get 51% of that total with very little in the way of, a few tweets and things like that.

If you want to go back to our website homepage, you could link, you could click on this button here and link to it. Michelle does. It is monstrously massive amounts that Michelle does when she comes on this podcast episode. We always make a bit of a joke cuz her biography is a full a four page of things project.

She's working on things that she's done. I genuinely don't know how she manages to get any of it finished, but she does, she's a force of nature and I would agree. I think she's a robot and she doesn't sleep. That's right. She is ai. There's three of her. Yes. And she would, yeah, she made in a test tube somewhere.

And no, and and we want her to go, so what this form is on this page, you just supplies your name, your email address, and an amount that you would donate. This is not a payment form, this is just you saying, look, if Michelle gets the amount that we want, I will give $50, $200 whatever you wanna put in that box.

And then if it's successful and we get over the threshold, I'm gonna put Michelle directly in touch with you so that you can honor that commitment and she can give you how it is that she wants that to happen. But, okay, so there you go. If you wanna do that, if you wanna help Michelle out, that's the page to go to.

It's WP Builds.com/michelle wc eeu. Or like I said, you can find it on the homepage. Now, I know that's not really a piece of news as such, but I am gonna open it up to any EU three if you want to comment. Love

[00:16:43] Jess Frick: Michelle. I agree everybody needs to do this, but can you go back a second?

[00:16:48] Nathan Wrigley: To the page here.

Yeah. What are you using for this? This is just WS form, is it? Yep. So's beautiful. This is just a form. Yep. And then I

[00:16:58] Jess Frick: Love the pledged percentage. It's

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: just very clear. Oh, okay. So this is a block. This is a it's like a, I don't know, what do they call it? Progress bar kind of block.

But they offer it as a circle option as well. And it's, yeah, it's just blocks, basically. Just a ton.

[00:17:15] Jess Frick: Beautiful form. Clean. I love it.

[00:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Ws form. See, look how I made

[00:17:19] Jess Frick: it about WordPress.

[00:17:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Dynamite. Thank you. I don't know if James or Robbie have anything that I wanna add to this. If not, we'll just crack.

[00:17:30] Robbie Adair: Hey, like I said, Michelle is amazing. She is everywhere. Every time I'm anywhere related to WordPress, there's Michelle smiling and, and she just, she is a great connector. That's, she really connects people and hey, I hope she's there. I expect to see her every time I go to a word camp.

[00:17:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, indeed. That would be really nice, wouldn't it? So if you wanna do that, go fill that form out and we'll crack on with the rest of the WordPress news. Okay. So this is a truly massive week for WordPress. How often do we do this? Probably three times a year, something like that. We go from 6.1 to 6.2 or 5.9, eight to 5.9.

This one's called Dolphy, I think I'm pronouncing that as is always the case. It's the name there is assigned to a jazz musician, in this case, Eric Allen Dolphy. I never quite get the connection, but there you go. I guess it's Matt's proclivity that he likes jazz music. And so that's the tradition that we've got.

And there is an Absolut. Boat load in this release. Some nice polish has been added, and some things, which I think it's fair to say in the site editor were more difficult to use previously than they are now. I've had a bit of a play and some unexpected things came my way. In the ui, I was thinking, Ooh, that's interesting.

Mostly around inserting things like images and open verse and things like that. But I'm just gonna go through it with you in case you haven't updated or you've updated, but you haven't actually had a play. But essentially, we now have a way to the navigation block has been expanded and it's a little bit more easy to use in the sidebar now.

If you're looking at it on the screen, you'll be able to see that's now how you're gonna be building your menus in non. Themes, it's re really straightforward and easy to use. It's a ton easier to discover things that you wanna put in. So it's that bit is called the block inserter. You press plus and you can insert all different things.

Previously you just got a great gigantic list of blocks and sometimes they were quite hard to find. Now they've been set out into different layers. We've got this tab interface, we've got blocks, patterns, and media. And then, for example, if you go into patterns, you get a further interface and then things pop out on the right.

This is really nice for the media section of things. You can just click and it shows you your most recent images, which is typically what you're after. The thing that you uploaded 10 minutes ago. So that's a nice improvement. We've also got this tabbed interface where they're splitting up settings from styling.

So settings is a cogwheel, styling is like a circle split in half, but all of the, text collars and font colors and all of that kind of stuff lives in there now. So that's nice and easy. I think they've taken that the that's come from third parties, like cadence and things have been doing this for a little while.

The headers and footers. I don't really know why that's particularly different, but this is super cool. Now, 700 million pieces of media, which includes images and audio and things like that, are now available to insert right inside the editor. So if you're looking at the screen, somebody's just simply typed in the word birds, and there they are.

There's just a little panel of images. It will go down and you can scroll through it and get lots of them, and all of the things that you're gonna click on there, you are free to use and do what you like with them so you can stop worrying about Mr. Getty and his great big team of lawyers coming after you because you accidentally inserted a two by two pixel image of something and they got you for it.

This distraction free writing mode is truly distraction free. There is a little video of it on the WP Tavern article about this, but you click the button. All the UI goes away. You are left with a pure white screen and the writing that you've been doing. And I tried that out this week and I have to say I do get distracted.

I do find that the stuff kinda, I don't know, I don't know what it is, but I do get, I start clicking on things for no good reason. That's all gone. I'll be using that a lot. The style book is here so that you can see how all of the different parts of a site will look on your website. So it'll show you the H one s through to the H six s.

It'll show you buttons with their rounded corners and you can just see all of it in one big go. Copying pasting styles. If you like the style of a block, you copy it, go to another block, paste it, all the styles come along. That's a super cool time saver. And you can add tons of custom CSS all over the place if that's your thing.

I dunno why this didn't get more attention. Sticky positioning is now available on like a top level group block. So if you've got a load of groups of things, you just say, okay, make the top one sticky. And obviously when you scroll it out, it now long, no longer goes out. The view port, you can import widgets and also local fonts are available in themes.

If you've got a classic theme, you can import your font so that you don't get in trouble with G D P R, and it's significantly more performant if you're using a classic theme. Less so if you're using a block theme, it's gone up by 15, 18% in terms of speed. And I need a drink of water because I've spoken for too long.

So anybody, any of you, three, want to jump in and tell us any of your favorite bits of WordPress? 6.2. We'll make sure there's time for all three.

[00:22:46] James Giroux: I just think as somebody who's been a big fan of rich Tabor for a while, when I look at this, I just see his fingerprints, his design style all over it.

And it's really great because he is been such a good contributor of aesthetic, I think, to the WordPress ecosystem that now that he's like fully integrated into the whole ecosystem now we're all benefiting from that. And it's just really cool to see his, you can just see his little bits thrown in everywhere.

So every time I look at it I go,

[00:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: ah, rich. Yeah, that's that. Nice. Oh, I hope he's listening to this though. I'll give him a real no. Nice pat on the back moment. That's lovely. Thank you. James. Anything from Robbie or Jess?

[00:23:28] Robbie Adair: I think they're all exciting features that we're seeing. All I can say is every time that though we, we come up with these, I'm like, ah.

Cause we're working on our new WordPress book and WordPress class, and I'm just like, okay, all right, step back. Now we've got to go back cuz we've gotta go add some things and change some screens and blah, blah, blah. I'm happy Yay. But it means more work.

[00:23:54] Nathan Wrigley: That is a forget really unique perspective, right?

Because everybody normally is, gimme the features, throw in new features, you're like, stop with the features already.

[00:24:06] Robbie Adair: No, we want the new features because it means we have new content to write about. But at the same time, we were in the midst of getting our WordPress six and it's, boy, I tell you, it's been a lot.

There's like from five nine, like basically once you go five to six two. My goodness. So as as we're working on this, it's okay, now let's go back and let's go tweak that. Cuz now we wanna show, focus, distraction, free writing, things like that. You want to show those features that are there, but they weren't there.

And so now it's oh, okay, let's go do it. And we don't like to work with betas on our training just because you, things might change. As much as you hope they don't, between beta and release, there are some changes and so it's bit us sometimes to work with a beta. So we do wait till it's actually a real publish.

Feature, so that we know we're not going

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: backwards. Yeah. And the there is so much in this actually, and a lot of it is gonna be your daily driver. The distraction. Exactly. Free mode and the menu, like the menu mode. You can't not write about that menu block really.

It's just a no total no-brainer. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. You are the first person who's I think, ever expressed that thing to me. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:20] Robbie Adair: It's a lot. It's a lot to it. Yeah. But it's, like I said, it's always a good thing. And we see this by the. This is not unique to WordPress world.

This is the same when Jumela comes out with a brand new big feature set, whenever PLE does, it's like we have to look back at all our classes and go, wow, okay, now we gotta go back and we gotta go fix this. And you've gotta replace all of these screenshots because you're showing we're we in our classes, we like to actually truly build.

And so that the person who's watching it, they can just watch the class if they want to, or they can literally participate and go along. And at the end they have built something from beginning to end. And so that means we're showing it, like we're showing that screen the entire time. So when there's major releases, we've had to go in and do some inserts, when the block editor did come in, that was an insert into our WordPress class.

Things like that. But it's more cohesive if we have it all in from the very beginning before we release the

[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: class. Yeah. Ah, that's cool. That's a really interesting insight. Yeah. We touched on this a bit, didn't we, Jess, but have you got any more that you wanna reflect upon?

[00:26:19] Jess Frick: Yeah that's a great point is site editor came out of beta in this release.

We got open verse, which is awesome. Okay, two confessions. Number one, I suck at css. I've never just, there's, I've got like a brain block. I have to look it up every single time I have to do something.

[00:26:40] Nathan Wrigley: Do you not have the cheat sheet on the wall, like big? You

[00:26:42] Jess Frick: know what, man? I'm gonna show my age here.

I remember when Flash came out and I was like, this is the future of the internet. And I learned flash and I'm like, CSS is gonna go away. Oh

[00:26:54] Nathan Wrigley: no. And

[00:26:55] Jess Frick: I don't know, I don't know if I, like my brain needs to be right, but I just, I've got this weird brain block with c s, so the copy paste c s is so amazing for me.

Yeah. I can't even begin to tell you. That's just one of those like little things that's gonna be great. And they made it easier to do custom CSS too, which is great because like I said, I can look it up and go borrow from other places. Sometimes. Now Jesse.

[00:27:22] Robbie Adair: Now you can just go chat g p t and say, Hey, how do I do this in CSS?

And it'll write it for you. Not in. I have

[00:27:28] James Giroux: a story about that. I did that this weekend. Oh my goodness. Mind

[00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: blowing. Can we reserve the chat g p t conversation for later? Cuz Jess has dropped something in, which is really, yeah.

[00:27:39] Jess Frick: And there's one other thing that I wanted to bring up.

The other confession. So I've done some websites for organizations who I love, obviously. I just help them but they don't pay me and they're doing their own thing and they're perfectly happy with their old school website that has not been updated to block themes. And the reason that they haven't been updated is because I don't have time to deal with the fact that they're all built with widgets, because that's how you used to do things.

And 6.2 is giving you the ability to import classic. Into your block theme, which is something that we haven't had before. And so now it might be time to go revisit these older websites and Nice. And bring 'em into the future. Yeah,

[00:28:23] Nathan Wrigley: that is, genuinely, I think this is a really nice release.

There's a whole ton of stuff. I confess, I'm still not on board with the block theme thing. I don't mean by that, but I don't think it's a good idea. I just haven't yet got myself to the point where I've, I'm entirely satisfied that my workflow works with them yet. So I'm keen to explore what the new navigation block and what the options are in terms of styling it.

And all of the CSS patterns are cool, man. Yep. Yep. The patterns the way that patterns are now presented is so much better. So in the past, you would click on the patterns button and then you would get one dropdown, which would show you all the categories. And you'd click into the categories from the dropdown and, but now all the categories immediately are displayed as sub as men sub menus.

You then click on those and then you get a visual representation of them all. And it's just so much cleaner. It looks more like, there, I say it, a Sass app, it looks like something that like Notion or something like that. I just think it's really well done. There's absolutely tons in there.

It was delayed, the last beta was delayed for a day or so. I don't, can't really remember why that was now, but it came out on time as far as I know. And I've heard no problems. I've heard of no problems so far with it blocking anybody's sight, but Yeah. Interesting. So that was WordPress 6.2.

Big piece of news for us in this community at least Sarah Gooding did an article. She obviously explains it in a different way. And if you like that the style that Sarah has, which I do, then you can go and read. She brings out a lot of the different things that we just mentioned, and in some cases she also brings a video to bear.

Let's just quickly watch this one. You'll get an idea. There you go. There is the distraction free mode, not a thing in sight apart from text, which I think is great. Let's hope you don't get trapped in. Stresses me out. Yeah. What the, where's all my stuff? Oh, really. I'm totally the opposite.

That's just ideal for me and with the keyboard shortcuts that I'm now getting to be part of my muscle. I'm very happy with the way this, yeah. This is perfect

[00:30:35] James Giroux: for me. Oh, those keyboard shortcuts are, like when you come from a page builder sort of methodology and way of working.

Yep. The, you're used to just using your mouse for everything and when you make the mental leap from mouse to keyboard, My, it's going backwards really, but the mental leap of doing that is so convenient. Yeah, I've started doing it all the time

[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: now. It's great. Jess, next time you come on the show, not only do we want you to have memorized the lexicon of css, but also we need you to have memorized all the keyboard shortcuts inside.

Okay. Okay. It's a small ass, come

[00:31:12] Jess Frick: on. Yeah, no, I For you, Nathan.

[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I guess so. You're so kind. I will do it. Yeah. Thank you. Date and time issue with the plugins. Oh, is that what it was? Something like that date and time issue with plug-ins, like Woo Commerce. It was delayed for one day, but that was the final bt yeah.

BTA four I think it was. But thank you. I appreciate that. That's great. There's a little bit of a conversation going on maybe if there's time at the. Jess, you'll be able to answer that. Somebody's asking why Pressable and and maybe Jess can be given a better choice. Why indeed? Answer, yes, that's right.

I'll tell you. We'll give you, you'll ponder that answer cuz I'm sure you've never thought that question before. And we'll go onto the fact that the classic classic themes are obviously now not being pushed so much. We're into an era of site editing that has had its beta label dropped. And because that beta labels been dropped, we're out of phase two now.

Phase one was blocks, phase two was site editing. Other things as well. But broadly it was that, and now we're into phase three. Phase three is honestly, if this gets pulled off, not only will I be staggered, actually Robbie, Steve Burge has a lot to say about this because he's really keen to see how this all goes.

Phase three is all about collaboration. And when I think about it, I think concurrent editing, I'm thinking Google Docs, I'm thinking I'm in a page. You are in a page. We're both interacting in the page at the same time. I like the way Google Docs does it with the little lines, with the name attached to it, but I'm not wedded to it.

There's an exploration process that's gonna start happening, and that's essentially what this post by Mattias Ventura is about is outlining what phase three collaboration looks like. And of course, it's not just text on pages, like on Google Docs. It could. I don't know, sharing patterns or it could be collaborating on the site's editing experience.

I really don't know what the boundaries are gonna be and where that would all start to get a bit clumsy. But this is workflow as well. Yeah, workflows as well. Yeah. So this is the third phase. Realtime collaboration. Asynchronous collaboration publishing flows. And this is the piece that I thought would be of interest to Steve Bird, who used to own OS training and now has published press.

Just this idea of building into core WordPress, setting up some constraints about what can be published and what can't. If there's no, oh I don't know, featured image of a certain size, the publish it, it's impossible. If you haven't filled out your tags or categories or whatever it may be. Those flows are coming.

Post revisions interface is gonna get a bit of an update. And also this one, admin redesign, boy. Wow. Yes, please. Let's have that. We've had the admin for forever as far as I can work, since I've been using WordPress, the admin has changed very little. A section which is just being labeled here is library, which is where you're gonna manage your patterns and blocks and styles and fonts.

And then development of a global search and command component so that you can get to a part of your WordPress website, specifically to a part of your WordPress website by typing in a search. So it feels a bit like on the Mac we've got that thing, what's it called? Spotlight or something? Where you invoke it, you type something in and it just takes you right to the thing that you need.

Cuz typically, if you want to, I don't know, get to a particular screen or a sub menu or a set, you have to go click on a thing, wait for it to load, click on another thing, go to the, all of that's gonna be looked at as well. So this is tremendously exciting. It's exciting when a post on WordPress gets Look at all the comments, so many people chipping in and giving their opinions on all this.

So phase three, what are your thoughts? I can already see Robbie's oh, I've got a thousand pages to write in the next six months. Yeah, exactly. You, whoever wants to take it first. Robbie, maybe.

[00:35:16] Robbie Adair: Yeah, I was gonna say, and you're right. Actually Steve he did a great interview. I can't remember what, what podcast it was on, but

[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: they, it was mine.

It was mine podcast. Yes. It was

[00:35:26] Robbie Adair: great. I listened to it on my walk. It was fantastic. And I was like, yes. Because he was really and it's something that's in the back of my mind. He goes, how are they going to do this? And mainly because when you're talking collaborative, the server. I've gotta have some power behind them.

Yeah. And so what about the people who are on little dinky starters and things like that? Alex is gonna work for them. Is it gonna be restrictive to certain? You have to have this set up to be able to actually even use collaborative tools? I dunno. It's gonna, it's fascinating and I do think this is a big thing.

The other thing that I think is interesting, just gonna say from, because we work with all the different open source, big platforms, we see trends, right? So this is a trend that we've seen also happening in Jula and also happening in Duple. That we want the workflows, that we want the collaboration, we wanna redo the admins.

It's literally it's like little replicas in the world, of this is the thing to do now. So I do think that's quite interesting. I do think the That was a big order in that collaborative list though, that you just went over. I was like, that is huge. That's years of work, in my opinion.

Yeah. This is not, so we're not gonna have this out, this time next year. That is huge. That's a big change. And it's a lot. I feel like they will pair that down a little bit before they start releasing things. Just cause that's big. It's real big.

[00:36:47] Nathan Wrigley: In the podcast interview that you alluded to there, Robbie.

Steve. Yeah. He drilled down on how he really couldn't conceive of how you would achieve. Full site editor, sorry. Collaborative editing on cheap infrastructure. So let's say you're on a $4 a month hosting plan and you are hoping to get 12 people collaborate collaboratively, editing something.

It's all right with Google, isn't it? They throw a billion dollars at their infrastructure and it's their cloud, and they can probably leverage that and, they just make it work. But if you've got. Affordable hosting and you are trying to make this stuff work. I do wonder if we're getting ourselves into a little bit of an issue where the expectation's gonna be I'm gonna be using WordPress.

It's gonna be completely compatible. Steve's notion was that maybe it'll be on a block by block basis, so two people can collaborate in the same document, but not on the same block. So if I'm in this paragraph you can't be in that one, but you can be in the one below it or adding your own new one underneath it.

So that was an interesting one. But, so Jess, we just talked about cheap hosting and all of that. I'm guessing that this kind of stuff is the stuff that your team is thinking about, getting ready for what is gonna happen. The expectations of what hosting is gonna have to cope with presumably are gonna start to go up.

There was even talk somewhere about whether this was gonna be some sort of SaaS service, like you buy into a wordpress.com. Collaborative editing account, $10 a month or something, and it enables the infrastructure on that end. I don't know, I just wondered what your thoughts were.

[00:38:30] Jess Frick: Okay. This is where I do my once an episode caveat.

My views do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. Thank you. I think if this is going to become a SaaS thing, they're gonna have a hard time finding people to devote their time for the open source project coding it to make.com money. I think if that were the case, they would need to use dot com's people and, they're paid developers.

But, admittedly when I first read. Again, not really thinking through it. My first thought was I literally never want somebody editing the page at the same time as me.

Yep. Get it. Get it. But I often have a colleague who leaves the page open and then I gotta kick 'em out when I don't even think they're doing anything.

And how nice would it be to see if they're actually working instead of

[00:39:23] Nathan Wrigley: You keep an eye on them. Yes.

[00:39:25] Jess Frick: No, not like that. But before I kick him so I could work on the page cuz it'll say, like Wayne is in the website I don't wanna boot him out if he's doing something right.

Then I thought about this from a product perspective and yes. This latest WordPress release had over 600 contributors, which is amazing.

[00:39:48] Nathan Wrigley: I forgot to say that. Thank you.

[00:39:50] Jess Frick: But we have so many other things that need to be done. Is this really the top priority? That's a question a lot of people are asking right now, and I don't know the answer.

I think it is the top priority cuz we've said it is, but there are a lot of people who say there's a lot of UX stuff that needs to be addressed too. And I don't know that this real-time collaboration is going to do it. I think there's a lot of really smart stuff in here and I'm so excited for what it's gonna bring.

But I do have reservations for those reasons.

[00:40:22] James Giroux: That's interesting. The one I was having a conversation with somebody last week and one of the challenges we have with WordPress is, so much of our creative process is driven by developers and what do developers want to do? They wanna create features.

And one of the challenges I think we see is we don't have a lot of product people leading the charge, like product first, product discipline, product management, discipline, people leading a lot of these conversations, which means you often have solutions without problems and we devote a lot of attention and energy into solutions without problems, and we pat ourselves on the back because we delivered something.

Meanwhile, you have challenges. Like we still have the debate in some circles around classic versus block editor. Why is that a debate? It's because we didn't do a good job in the early days of clearly articulating the user story of why we need locks to be the thing. I think most people are on that wagon now, and most people understand why.

But had we done a better job, maybe at the beginning of articulating the user story and the problem we're trying to solve, that would've gone a long way in, in helping. To mitigate some of that challenge. So I think collaboration is good, but who is the target audience for that? Is this an 80 20 split where we're serving the 20% rather than the 80%?

When I think of most WordPress websites, there's only one person ever actively working on the site, right? And that's probably the 80 20 split. And so where is the need for this? And when I look I'm gonna put on a bit of a different lens here and look at it from some of our hosting companies perspective, who are dealing with scaled WordPress, right?

And they're dealing with enterprise, and they have multiple stakeholders. They have multiple people editing, they have multiple people designing and developing, and they're working in groups and teams on various parts of the website at the same time. That's where collaboration becomes important, and that's where revenue is tied up as well, right?

Because while the 80 20 split is 80% of one person companies or one person editors, the revenue split is probably the opposite 80 20. So finding that balance, that commercial approach to it, I don't think is a bad thing to do. I think we have to consider that. And if we can say, like this is part of that balance by creating collaboration tools, we're actually making it easier for us to create the capacity for us to work on these other things.

So yes, we have a whole laundry list of UX things we need to work on, and we're gonna balance that with some of these commercial and maybe higher end enterprise things in order to make sure that WordPress remains the number one choice of revenue generating websites, or revenue generating or ecosystem supporting activities that we can have for WordPress.

[00:43:35] Nathan Wrigley: This is a really interesting conversation. There's so many different angles here and I appreciate all of them. It's also interesting you, James, especially with your team hat on. It'd be interesting to see if, does anybody even need this be, for me, I would really like to have document.

Document editing collaboratively. That would work wonders for me. But would I want, would I personally want to be editing a site with other people at the same time? I'm not sure that I would. I just can't even imagine that work for, it looks like, Robbie, you've got something you wanna say there?

I was gonna say,

[00:44:15] Robbie Adair: I wanna add to what James was saying too. Cause I wanna put, I wanna do two different hats here. One, my training hat. Collaborative for training. This is fantastic, yeah. For us because it's like we can actually be training and showing them directly in the same document while you're showing them something.

And so this is a great training tool in my opinion. We can use it for that. Now, I also have an agency that I've had for 20 years. And so when I put on my agency hat and think about this, I think about consulting with my clients and supporting my clients. And again, this kind of is a cool little tool for me to use.

Normally we build a site and then we go and we show the client, right? You do, I'll call it custom training. You're showing them how to work in their site, in particular, the way it's set up. But imagine if you could also literally go drill down to, okay, let's go build this post and I'm gonna show you how to put blocks up here, show you how to apply your styles, like collaboratively real, you could see what they're building.

You can see 'em mess up, things like that. And so I think that. Yes. I think James is right about the 80, 20, 80% of the time you're just, you're doing your own site probably, or there's one person from the organization who's working on it and all that. But I think if we try to broaden the idea of how we can use collaborative tools, then we might could use it for more than just pure, this is a team of people collaborating on an article.

Absolutely. So you see what I'm saying? Yeah.

[00:45:39] James Giroux: That's the product lens, right? Of being able to say, here's the user story, right? Of we want agencies to be able to work with their clients. We want support engineers to be able to jump in, right? And be able to quickly solve a problem. We wanna be able to do training, right?

Like to me, those three things create the business case that says collaboration is more than just multiple. It's more than the enterprise, right? That enterprise is just one of those user stories, but all four of those create the business case where we can go and say to people, this is why this matters, and this is why it's a priority now.

[00:46:12] Robbie Adair: The other thing I think is we are future looking towards bringing more people into the ecosystem, which are gonna be younger people, right? That's right. Younger people expect collaborative tools. They've grown up Absolutely. Now with the Zoom, with the Google Docs they are used to working together.

Actually, they're better at working together in collaborative teams that we are, because we've done it all ourselves. They've had this digital ecosystem that had collaborative tools out there. So I think they will be, they will adapt to it better than we do.

[00:46:43] Nathan Wrigley: That's, that is a really interesting point because you are completely right.

My kids have no conception that a document cannot be edited by a gazillion people at the same time you remember like the whole tennis of getting a Word document around a team of people and how tortuous that was. Then this generation have no concept that was a thing and yet, Stick 'em in a WordPress site, suddenly they're back there.

It's what do you mean locked? What? And I think that is just that reason alone is compelling enough for me to say, yeah, we should, because we've gotta shore up the next generation who are fully gonna expect that. I just don't know where I sit. For me, I'd like to see the post editor.

Just that bit fixed first and don't really know too much about the other bits just yet. But I just wanna make a just wanna draw attention to something Courtney said, she said Leslie had put a really nice comment into the article and whilst you were speaking, I was trying to read it, but it's a it's fairly near the bottom.

If you go to the page in question that mattia crafted and then go and search for Leslie, l e s l e y it's leslie.pizza. She's got this really long comment where she does, she gets into this whole workflow thing. What are the, what are sort of concrete examples of how this might be used?

And she's written quite a lot with some final thoughts. And as Courtney's mentioned it, I thought we'd raise that. So go and have a look.

[00:48:19] James Giroux: That wasn't gonna name names, but Leslie's the one who I had the conversation with about it.

[00:48:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, really? Excellent.

[00:48:25] James Giroux: Yeah. Yeah, it's good. No, it's good. That's awesome because it's exact, she's exactly right.

It's that product hat we've got to. Invite more product people into the conversation around what's going on with the development of WordPress and create these stories. It's just a if you've, if you work in larger companies, like I've had the benefit of working in places like Invato and, liquid web and gravity forms.

Just name a couple of name drop a couple of examples. Yeah. No, but the thing that you see in these larger teams is that when you have a product discipline actually informing and supporting the work that you're doing, it creates better outcomes for everyone. Not everyone is happy all the time because you have to necessarily say, But the thing that's been amazing is to see the articulated end, right?

The ar articulated outcome be something that people can rally around and at least understand, right? And can see the business case that's being made. I say business case, that's a term I've borrowed from Invato days, but you couldn't do anything without a lean canvas that talked about the problem you were trying to solve, who the target audience was, what the benefit was going to be. And just having that discipline built into our workflow and WordPress would be phenomenal, I think, in helping to get people to rally behind the work that's being.

[00:50:00] Nathan Wrigley: Figure out the user journey. Yeah. Peter OL's made a good point. It feel it, he says collaboration may be a disservice.

Made the same point that several of you have. What percentage of WordPress users really need collaborative editing compared to everything else? And he's saying the UI and the UIUX of the admin area seems like it might be somewhere that needs more attention. And Courtney seems to reflect that.

She says. I also do think that the UI overhaul fi, we do think, I do think we need an UI overhaul. Finally. It's been stagnant for since 3.9. Gosh, is that really it? Wow. However, we must maintain at least the same level of accessibility. Yeah. It does start to look a bit old, the WordPress UI a bit now.

I'm in it every day, so I'm it's like a comfortable old pair of shoes. It doesn't really trouble me that much. But when I go to a new. SaaS app, built on some crazy JavaScript technology, you do look at it and think it would be nice to have something a little bit more modern.

So props to Leslie there, go and read her little comment. So yeah, and I apologize, I'm not getting through all of the comments. I can see that there's quite a lot of you dropping things in, but I can't get them all on the screen, otherwise, we'd never get to our articles. Speaking of which I'm gonna miss out the Interactive Interactivity api, but I will alert you to the fact that this piece exists proposal, the Interactivity API, a better for better developing developer experience in building interactive blocks.

It's quite interesting. If you watch the video, there's a little video here where they explain how this is gonna work, but it's very much a research project at the moment. But I'll link it in the show notes and you can go and have a look at it. However, this is fairly big news you have all heard of I themes.

You. Definitely heard of. I think. Not anymore. Not anymore. Ya haven't. It's changing. All of it's changing. They've taken on a new brand and they're doing this thing called branding in public, so they're gonna do it in the public eye. This is the first step in that process.

Rebranding, I should say, in public. They're shifting their branding up. Everything's now gonna be solid. WP is gonna be the main thing. So it's gonna be solid security. I think I team security. Solid backups. Think backup body, solid, central. I think that was called sync. S y n. C. And then Solid Academy was the work that Nathan Ingram was doing over at Ithe training.

So this is just that they just decided we want a bit of a rebrand, I guess in the, if you look at what they're doing now, security backups syncing. And Academy there's not really a lot of theming in there anymore, is there? And so the nu the moniker I themes does seem to be a little bit astray of what their new mission is.

So it's all gonna happen soon. You've got the usual things at the bottom where you know the FAQs, what will this mean to me? And essentially, if you are using their brands and you're using their products long, and the short of it seems to be from everything that I read, just the brand. If you're on a plan, the plan will stay.

If you do, if you've got a lifetime subscription for something, you've still got it. All of that kind of stuff applies. But I like it. I love the dark and the black and the purple. I think it's quite cool. And yeah, solid. It, I don't know, it is just we use that word in the UK quite a lot actually. I dunno if it's a word, which typically in America gets used, but when we use the word solid, it just means reliable.

It's, I don't know. You might buy a new machine or something, like a new dishwasher or something, and you describe it as being solid. It's good. It's gonna be around for years and years. So for me this kind of sounds really cool over to you guys.

[00:53:58] James Giroux: Speaking as the former brand and product marketing director at Stellar wp, did you know this insider was happening?

Known this was coming for a while? Yeah. And Yeah, no, it's it's exciting to see it released. It's exciting to see it happening. Yeah, just to give you all a little insider on this, as marketing teams, and one of the challenges you have is how do you communicate your product to prospective customers, right?

How do you explain in an elevator pitch what it is that you do? And Ithe was becoming more challenging to tell that story because you've got the word themes in the name. So the automatic assumption is your theme company. Yeah. When we, at the, the group hasn't been doing themes for a while, and how do you elevate those parts of your business that are actually, what you wanna focus on.

So security and syncing and backups and those other pieces those foundational. Elements that you really should have to have a really solid WordPress experience. Sorry, you just

[00:55:12] Nathan Wrigley: did it. You just did it. Yeah.

[00:55:14] James Giroux: Like you need that. So I'm excited about the brand.

I'm excited, like a lot of work that's gone into it. The team behind it is great for those of you who may not know modern Tribe the agency was acquired a couple years ago by LiquidWeb as well. So you've got this incredible team of designers and developers in the backend who are doing all this brand work, and they're just really cool people as well.

So to see the fruit of their labor come through, and you can see it in Nexus as well. I don't know, nexus went through a rebrand as well. And and that looks really great as well.

[00:55:52] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask you, James, I know that this is no longer, you're not wearing this hat, but more about it than I do.

Who in the pyramid here? Liquid Web is at the top of that pyramid, or Stellar is at the top of that pyramid. Is it LiquidWeb owns Stellar, and then Stellar is the owner of lots of these other WordPress brands. Ownership's

[00:56:13] James Giroux: the wrong word. Oh, okay. What Stellar WP is it's a brand umbrella for all of the software products.

So if you imagine you've got infrastructure, which is LiquidWeb and Nexus and you've got software, which is all of the things that they've acquired. Got it. In the WordPress space.

[00:56:33] Nathan Wrigley: So solid will, so solid WP that we're looking at now, that will fall under the umbrella of Stellar.

That's correct. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That would, honestly, that was such a cool insight. I appreciate that. That was very insightful. Thanks. I'm gonna hand it over to Jess or Robbie if they want to comment. If not, we'll move on.

[00:56:54] Jess Frick: James and I were both employed there for about a month.

And then I left. I left a year and a month ago. Yeah. I remember when Stellar was set up and I'm excited to see what all they're doing. I don't love this. I think it's bullish to name it after something that already exists. Ah, tell me. There's already Stellar wp or excuse me, solid wp.

It's a WordPress theme. If you Google it, they already have the Facebook, the Twitter and it looks like Stellar went and bought the name. But also solid can mean other things here. And I just, yeah, I don't love the choice. I feel like not your favorite could have done better. No, I think they could have done better, but again, also like I'm an iThemes chick.

Like I love everything that they've done. I agree that changing the name was probably a good move because iThemes is a beloved brand. But like James said, they haven't done themes for a very long time. I think getting away from known names like sync could be problematic long term strictly because there are so many people that have used it.

It's a known name and nobody's gonna know what solid central is. It sounds like something you'd see a doctor about.

[00:58:17] Nathan Wrigley: So I just did the Google, and you're right. The first result that came up for me was something called bootstrap wp.com. Yep. And they are a, it looks like they're a theme shop because then there's a forward slash themes slash solid wp, so it's a, it appears to be a theme that you can purchase.

It's a bootstrap theme that you can purchase. Yeah. That's interesting. I wonder what way, in what way this story will resurface in the future if they've done their due diligence to check if the name. Available. Also curious, and I don't want you to say it out loud if it's something you don't if you're not comfortable saying it Jess you highlighted there that solid could mean something else in the us I, I genuinely don't know what you are referring to there, but I'm guessing it's not a good thing.

No,

[00:59:09] Jess Frick: Like solid can mean all the things that you said. Okay. Solid can mean all the things that you said. It's just, I don't know the association, when I heard that they were doing this a couple weeks ago, the first thing I thought is, oh my God, it reminds me of poop. Okay. But

[00:59:24] Nathan Wrigley: I was not expecting

[00:59:25] Jess Frick: that.

But I love the brand and I love like under understand. I'm not like pooping on the people that did it at all. I just, I really, I feel like there were so many other names they could have chosen.

[00:59:38] Nathan Wrigley: Well interesting to get your points out there. Thank you, Jess. But Robbie, have you got anything I was gonna say.

[00:59:44] Robbie Adair: I did not work for Ithe at any point in time. So too, so I have no association on that side. My thought about the whole thing was just, it's very interesting that they chose to do a public rebranding because it takes way longer. We've seen other companies do public rebranding. Oh my gosh. It takes forever as well as it may change it.

By the way, because they could get so much negative feedback in a rebranding publicly that it makes, then you've gotta go back and reinvent the wheel. It's almost better, in my opinion, to do one of those, like you've got your whole brand ready to go, your rebrand, and it's like this is the date and you just drop everything.

Like everything is done. Here's our new site, here's our new logo, here's our new social media accounts, here's everything. And you try to do it all at one time. That's what, when we've done Rebrandings with our clients, that's typically what we like to do because if you start doing this, like we're gonna put out our logo ideas for everybody to give their opinion on, oh my gosh, you know how many opinions there are out there.

And so now all of a sudden it starts making you start questioning are we right? Maybe we need to rethink this. And so it's interesting that they're gonna do a public rebrand. Those are hard those are really hard.

[01:00:47] James Giroux: Yeah. It'll be interesting to see.

[01:00:48] Jess Frick: And I just say one quick thing. Yeah. I feel really bad about saying what I said, and I want it to be perfectly clear that I want them to win and I'm, I want them to win.

[01:00:58] James Giroux: Yeah we'll take it with the intent, right? And we'll assume positive intent in, in that comment. Cuz you know that's right. And you do have history and we all have history and we get it. But we also have to be willing to call out things that maybe we don't like or maybe that, that we don't see it as work.

And that is part of the interesting side. Robbie, as you mentioned about this public rebrand, I clearly have not been involved in decisions around all of this for a while, since I no longer work there. But it's it is interesting. I think, like the public side of it, who will win?

It'll be the loudest voice rather than the most right voice. So that'll be interesting to see how they're influenced by that. And then also if there are not so loud voices that are all articulating the same thing, What do you do with that? What if you don't like, if you don't respond to that, then was this really a public branding launch or was it just a marketing ploy?

If that's the case, then what does that say about Yeah, about the way you feel about humans, right? And your customer base. Yeah.

[01:02:18] Nathan Wrigley: This is interesting. I genuinely didn't see the conversation going this way. So this is very surprising and quite engaging and fun. So I've got a few people, chi chipping in here.

So seemingly is a podcast episode somewhere about solid WP and it's, or in existence, maybe somebody's already put out an episode about that conflict there. There's also, apparently, so Dennis says Dennis from Maine, WP says there's a something called solid affiliate. Yeah. For commerce, I guess the word solid is maybe being used quite a bit.

So yeah, the differentiation that could be interesting and also slightly outside of the, by the way they're a great. Oh, okay. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Not really in the WordPress space, but there's a JavaScript framework, front end framework called solid as well. So yeah, there's quite a lot of there's quite a lot of solid opposition around here, isn't there?

Oh, we'll see,

[01:03:13] James Giroux: I will say, like you're, no matter what name you pick, you're gonna find somebody that's probably similar or something, right? Having just gone through the process of doing this with Team wp, right? It's team wp, there's probably another team WP out there, and there is in fact, if you Google it, you'll find other things show up first, but does that mean you don't do it right?

[01:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know.

That's, yeah, that's interesting. The short of it for me was always if the Twitter handles available, go for it because, it's highly unlikely that whoever they were seriously domain was available. That was when you said about team wp, I did think. Four letters before t before the word wp, you've done really well to capture something so short.

And I thought that about solid as well. I thought five letters, and we were just talking about Dennis from Main, WP four le. There's just something, there's just something cool about that. I dunno what it is, but if you get a short word and then slap WP on the end of it, for some reason, that works with me and team wp.

Well done. Yeah, that's good. I like that we're gonna move on. I'm sure that story's gonna come back. Let's see how that develops. But for now, we'll just move on. Oh, Nick Diego. We love Nick Diego. He has this in incre solid. He has a solid plugin called Block Visibility. And this is just the best news when something, which is already really great, the then, which has a pro versions, which then gets made all open source.

So Nick has decided, and I believe it might be to do with. The commitments that he's got in his time. I think I read somewhere this week that he was moving. Forgive me Nick, if this is wrong. I think Nick might be moving over to automatic. Is there any, has anybody heard that rumor? Is it Yeah, Jess is nodding.

Okay, so maybe there's something about that. He's got a different reset responsibilities, but he had block visibility, which is like a conditional plugin. You chuck it into your WordPress website and you say things like, if the person is using Chrome that's visiting this page, show this block.

If it's the 28th of December, show this block. So it's like the perfect little lightweight membership. He kind of plugin thing he had a pro version and and he's decided, ah, let's just make it all free. Let's just stick it all in. The repo. The free version currently is called 3.0 0.0 and he hasn't managed to port every single feature as of yet.

There's a couple of the pro versions which still need to be. Port it over, I guess to the free version. But Bravo is all I can say. He could have done something quite different. Couldn't he kept on going with it? It could have suffered from his lack of time, perhaps if that was indeed the case.

It could have sold it on to somebody and all of that, but no. Give it away. Give it away. Give it away now. And I just got into the chili feathers. Check it out. Yeah. How did that happen? I needed to roll my eyes, Jess, didn't I? I forgot about that. The, so anyway, I just think this is all good news and Bravo to Nick for doing this.

It's a cracking plugin if you haven't used it. So thoughts, we're gonna have to rush a bit through this, I think. What a . Yeah. Awesome. I think

[01:06:43] Robbie Adair: to me that's like what open source is all about, right? I mean that there are times that you just say, Hey, I'm gonna make this. I'm gonna give this away.

And then there's times where you monetize it because you need to pay your bills. And and I think that it's cool to see, we see this happen sometimes where somebody just says, you know what, I'm not gonna sell it. Like you said, Nathan I'm not gonna try and continue this.

I'm gonna give this away. And I think that's awesome. And did I see that they are going to pull this into core, or is that

[01:07:10] Nathan Wrigley: just people wanting it? No, I, I don't, I think everybody wants this to be in core. In fact, I did a plugin, I did a podcast episode and I can't remember who I did it with, but they were saying that the SAS platforms, the rival platforms, conditional stuff is just baked in.

There's, there is that stuff. And in, in an industry where we're going head to head with Squarespace and Wick and Cycore and all of those kind of things, this does to me feel like an 80%, 20%. I think most people could make use of this, even if it's just once a year to inject a bit of. Snowfall at Christmas in your c s style sheet?

I don't know, but it does seem that you do wanna hide things in certain situations. I vote for this to go into core. I think that would be great, but yeah.

[01:08:02] James Giroux: Oh, it's just great for lead gen, right? So you think about all those Yes. Those sites out there that are looking for ways to grab email addresses or, provide extra access or things, and even sales, right?

Imagine a sale banner that's only visible to people that have logged in, or whatever like that. There's some really cool things you could do that would continue to add value to the case you make for using WordPress instead of something else.

[01:08:31] Nathan Wrigley: I actually downloaded it and had a play, and I I remember thinking, boy, that the set of conditions which are available.

Is basically everything you need, typic, sure there's gonna be some edge case stuff, but I think it's, it, it combines with things like a c, f you can do query. Okay, so here we go, right at the top of the article. User roles, status logged in, logged out specific users, user IDs, screen sizes, interesting query strings, ACF fields, and more.

Like I said, there's a couple of the bits that haven't yet come across, but bravo. It says on this page, 9,000 active installs. I think as of today it's hovering around 10,000 plus, so it's prob just, this has probably made it much more of interest to people. Yeah. Great. Okay. From one extreme to the.

What can you say? If you have an Elementor website, sorry, I'm just gonna make this site look like it's supposed to. If you have an Elementor website and you have Woo Commerce on there, and that is the conditional, you have to have Elementor Pro, I think, and you have to have Woo Commerce. Then there is a, an exploit going around in the wild, which is being targeted and I believe it allows completely trivially to create administrator users with almost no interaction from there.

Of course, your site's not yours or, so that's it. You can read this article. It's on Hack and News. It's probably all over the other word. New sites by now, I would've thought. Yeah, if you've got that combination element or pro and WooCommerce, just stop what you're doing. Go and fix that right now, immediately, like yesterday and get that fixed.

I won't go into the details, but do you wanna comment on that or should we just crack on? There's not really any to say there is them now. Okay. WP Engine have got a patent manager, which has come out into the repo. I confess, I'm not quite sure what this is for. Did any of you guys have a chance to look extensively at this?

Okay. Jess is, you are nodding right, Jess? I

[01:10:46] Jess Frick: did. Okay. And, once again it just, it annoys me how beautiful this is.

[01:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh really? It's so good. Hey. Oh, that's, I know.

[01:10:57] Jess Frick: WP Engine just has some brilliant developers on their team and this is so smart. I really love the way that they've extended the pattern functionality and have made it just easier to manage your patterns.

It's worth trying for sure.

[01:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: My memory of reading this is that this is for development environments, right? Nobody's advocating this is some sort of cloud solution. This is the kind of thing which you're attached to a local website and it just allows you to iterate on your patterns. Finally settle on the series of patterns that this particular site is gonna use, and then you can corral them, organize them, and ship them with the live site.

Have I got that right, Jess? You are correct. Okay, perfect.

[01:11:41] Jess Frick: But I also wanna say you could use

[01:11:43] Nathan Wrigley: it anywhere. Just so it, it's not like a cloud-based thing though, is it? It's not like you can back them up to WP Engines cloud and then just take 'em everywhere and none of that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Okay. None of that? No. Okay. Okay. Anyway, it's there for the taking if you want to go and check it out. It says, when you design beautiful block patterns for your theme pattern, manage WP by WP Engine will automatically push them into PHP files for you. Every time you save the dedicated studio to design and build block patterns, you can 10 x your ability to work effectively with patterns.

I should probably have more of a play with that as I will do. James, anything on that or Robbie or should we just crack on? We've got a few more to get through.

[01:12:20] Robbie Adair: I'm like you, I need to play around with this one and check it out. I have not yet

[01:12:25] Nathan Wrigley: and I do make extensive use of local I, I crack local open more or less every single day.

So this does look. This was a smart one

[01:12:34] Jess Frick: for sure.

[01:12:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So somebody helping us out here. Who's this? Demystifying dev, the patent manager is basically a great in capital letters help for dev workflow because you save patterns in code to the think. Got it. Right now it's making more sense.

Screenshot, this is Nomad Skateboarding screenshot showing frost theme, which was taken by the in-house WP Engine. Again from Brian Gardner. Okay. There was a screenshot somewhere. Was that I didn't notice last. There we go. Okay. That's quite nice to look at, isn't it? Yeah, I get it. It's okay. All right, Jess, I get what you mean.

Why does it do that on the repo? When you click on an image, why does it open in a new window and you can't get, you can't click backwards. I don't know what you have to click back to get anyway, the little gripe there. I

dunno. I'm a tab click

[01:13:26] Nathan Wrigley: chick, oh, really? Okay. Interesting. Another thing in the repo form block we mentioned earlier that I've, I was using WS form for the Michelle Frette thing.

This is quite a nice new thing. Really new. They've just come out, they're on version 1.01. And essentially you build a form inside the block editor. You can imagine how this works. You just drag the fields in from the side, stick 'em in. I don't know how comprehensive this is. I dunno if there's like a pro version or anything like that.

But I just thought actually building four there is, there's a pro is there? Yeah. Do you know, do you remember what you get with that?

[01:14:08] Robbie Adair: Yeah, like you could do like multiple emails with the Pro, see if you wanted to send to multiple people and things like that. I can't remember what else is in the pro.

There's a few, there's not many extra features in the Pro, but there are a few that probably would be the one you'd want. Of course, but there, so there is a Pro versions.

[01:14:25] Nathan Wrigley: A few weeks ago we featured Man Mania Kamal's. He's got a, like an overlay over contact form seven, which you can build in the block editor as well.

So rather than doing it in that sort of fairly clumsy short code interface, which we've all used in the past, I'm sure now you can build with with the block editor. And this feels similar. So if you like the experience, if your clients are into it and they wanna build forms in this way yeah, there you go.

That's a another thing. And we'll talk about security Breach, nightmares, patch Stack have got a biggie. Boy, it really doesn't get much worse than this the entire, and I you can't even make it up, can you? The entire WordPress source code on April the first was found to be exposed online, all of it, every single line, not just the most current version, every other version as well.

It's negligence personified, isn't it? I just, I woke up

[01:15:27] James Giroux: Saturday morning my day off to see this news and was blown away.

[01:15:33] Nathan Wrigley: I know. It's who would do such a thing? I know. I just thought, how have I never seen that story before? That was just genius. So hats off to Robert Rollie Kota Clear key there was the April the first mention.

But it's just for me, the way he goes through it as if it's the real thing. Sorry, I'm, I love cross talking discussion with Chad. Yeah. Yeah, just brilliant. I, you can imagine some actual news out there getting hold of this and thinking, oh, we've got a scoop on, got

[01:16:09] James Giroux: automated press release feeders that I just shoot out.

That's

[01:16:14] Nathan Wrigley: great. And then they asked and the discussion with chat G P

[01:16:16] Robbie Adair: T. Yeah, that

[01:16:18] Nathan Wrigley: was hysterical. They asked chat gt g p T about what it thought about the leak and you can imagine the way that went. Yeah, it was really good. I just thought that was, I just thought that was brilliant. So hat tip to Robert Rollie for making me laugh cuz I actually, honestly there were about 10 seconds where I was thinking at what, oh this is bad.

Oh wait, hold on. Oh, brilliant. Thank you so much for that. Let's move on quickly. We've got some non-word pressy stuff. I wanna introduce you to this page, right? Very quickly. It's called tri. Alright. This is for the nerds. Get your tinfoil hats out. The trigonometric functions in c s s. Jess, this is for you.

I just thought this was so sublimely cool. This is all done in c s s. How do I get this actually working out? Maybe I have to refresh the page cuz it worked for me before. Look at this, you can drag things. Oh you use this. That's right. You can drag things around and look at all the complicated, fun stuff that's going on.

It doesn't end there. They give you examples of how to use it and it, if you turn this on whereas it show the de bog lines, it gives you all of the the trigonometry that's going on to drive these circles in a circle. Cuz you just think it's a circle. Of course, it's not a circle it's actually a bunch of horizontal Ls and y Co and it's constantly being updated.

But that's very cool, isn't it? And then this is my personal f actually, th I quite, I dunno what to make of that. That just seems confusing as all hell. But there it is. I'm moving on. Look at. Isn't that beautiful? Sorry, I know I'm getting carried away. It's beautiful. It's this Mobius strip just constantly turning around in the background.

Anyway, so Jess, earlier we said you've gotta re memorize all of c s plus all of the keystrokes for Guttenberg. I think we should add this into your your workload as well. If you could figure out how to do these fairly basic trigger. Trigger.

[01:18:20] Jess Frick: Yeah, I think because of the reschedule I'm on here in about four weeks instead of six, so

[01:18:25] Nathan Wrigley: I have plenty of

time.

[01:18:26] Jess Frick: Yeah. Four weeks is plenty of time to memorize

[01:18:29] Nathan Wrigley: all of this. Anyway, I just thought that was fun and a bit cool. I dunno if anybody's got anything to add about that, but here's the bombshell of the week dropped by Jess. I genuinely is, this is thi was this posted on the 1st of April, Jess?

This.

No,

[01:18:44] Nathan Wrigley: it was not. Okay. Here it is. I, whoa.

[01:18:49] Jess Frick: Actually no, it was, but it's

[01:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: real. Okay. So it just happened to coincide with April the first. Yeah. So the headline reads, and I'll hand it over to Jess Chachi, PT Bann in Italy. It over privacy concern. So what Alan Kit ban Tell

[01:19:06] Jess Frick: us more. So they're, they've banned it and they're investigating, but the T L D R is, you guys probably all saw that a whole bunch of tech leaders came together and, put a pause on, we're calling to put a pause on AI training for six months to try to figure out what to do to make things ethical and safe.

But this is specifically about privacy. They're saying that it's improperly stored information. And it's basically ordered open AI to prove that they're not violating privacy or they're done

[01:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: for now. So do you mean that in the scraping, cuz I'm guessing that's probably the wrong word, but the large language model scrapes the internet up to a specific data.

But I think now that's changing. I think with these new plugins, they're actually doing it all in real time, but so they're scraping things like what email addresses and things like that and that's getting stored in the language model and it's that kind of thing that they've been gotten on it's

[01:20:15] Jess Frick: collection and storage specifically.

I don't know what the data points are, but I would imagine it includes that and more.

[01:20:22] Robbie Adair: Good. I read somewhere that it also had, it had to do with the storing of the user's content too, meaning my profile information, my credit card, if I've got chat, G P T pro. Also the prompts that I've put in my conversations I've had with it, that those are possibly being exposed.

And so that's, that was part of what I saw in their privacy concerns too. I don't know if that's all.

[01:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: So I'll just quickly read the first few paragraphs. Italy has become the first Western country to block Advanced Chat Chatbots Chat, G p T. The Italian Data Protection Authority said that there were privacy concerns relating to the model, which was created by US startup, open ai and is backed by Microsoft.

Blah, blah, blah. What else have we got? There have been concerns over the potential risks of artificial intelligence, including its threat to jobs. We've talked about a lot in the, a lot on this show. GDPR is mentioned here. The watchdog said that on the 20th of March that the AppD experienced the data breach involving user conversations and payment information.

Ah, maybe that was the the trigger for it, cuz I do remember that story. Some people were seeing. Payment information, albeit only the last four digits of the card number, but they were creeping into, oh man, it never occurred

[01:21:43] Jess Frick: to me to

[01:21:43] Nathan Wrigley: ask for that. Yeah. Can I chat g p t please? May I have Elon Musk's credit card number?

See what you got. Okay. This is really interesting and honestly, the first volley of this kind that I've seen, I know loads of people have got the concern, tinfoil hat and I'm, I've got a lot of concerns I have to say, but I haven't, I didn't honestly imagine that any nation would come out and say that's it.

Stop using it. Dunno how you actually ban this

[01:22:14] Jess Frick: though. It's already blocked in China and Russia and North Korea, the usual. But yeah I'm really interested to see where this goes, that they said they've got 20 days to comply with the investigations.

[01:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: Questions. Yeah. Courtney, by the way, is she's already on the case.

Look, she wants the last four numbers of your social security number, and then shortly after that, can you give her the first five? Absolutely. I'm guessing there's nine numbers in the US Social security number. Oh, yay. Yay. I don't know. I don't know. I dunno. But fascinating. I'm gonna, I guess I'm gonna put on

[01:22:54] James Giroux: a different hat here and I'm gonna say this is a big click baby.

Interesting because I don't think this is necessarily about ai. This is about a software company having a data breach. And so if we were to replace chat g p t with any other name, it's just another software company with a significant data breach that has 20 days to comply. Fine. Got it. The AI side of it to me is does the model have access to information?

It's not supposed to. Is that what we're actually investigating here? I don't know if that's the case. I from the, what the article said I got out of it, that it was related to the data breach of, information being improperly stored. And that's an issue, everyone faces.

[01:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: I've just accidentally clicked something.

Here we go. So there, there's an organization called the B E U C, and I can't actually find what that stands for, if anybody can help me out and tell me what the B E U C, but it's, I think it's obviously some body in Italy. I don't know. It says there are serious concerns about how chat GTI and similar chatbots might deceive and manipulate people.

That's got nothing to do with data protection. Now, maybe it has these AI models. These AI systems need greater public scrutiny and public authorities must reassert control over them. So that's coming from the more traditional. Moral panic mode, isn't it? Whereas James, what you are saying is this just is basically a data breach and institute, like you say the word, I don't know.

[01:24:34] Jess Frick: The quote that I saw was the mass collection and storage of personal information for the purpose of training the algorithms underlying operation in the platform. So I think that's what makes it different. That's fair. Interesting. It's not like they're storing it in a database and then, they shouldn't have had it.

It's that it's being used to teach the

[01:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: computer. Yeah. I think my my concern, my moral panic mode is just, I just, it is just seems to be going at such breakneck speed that it concerns me that I don't know. We are really aware of what kind of consequences are going to be. But yeah.

Interesting. So if you're in Italy you can no longer write those 10,000 word articles about anything that you chose. That's all out off the table now. Write couple of minutes. Let's see if we can do this one. I what I mean what the ti the title is the Moon is Getting a 4G Network thanks to Nokia.

Jess, this was you again. I didn't even, I know I'm coming and hot. I just thought that are that's what it is, right? It's that really?

[01:25:44] Jess Frick: Yeah. They're gonna get to play with rovers and they're gonna be able to talk with each other. It's very cool.

[01:25:50] Nathan Wrigley: But afford, so they've got a telephone, they're gonna put a telephone network.

Up on the moon, or I guess it's just one little station. And if you're not that close, you've you've had it interesting. Fascinating.

[01:26:03] Robbie Adair: It's all part of the Artemis program. The Artemis program is amazing and if you guys haven't looked at it, you really need to look at it cuz it's I'm a real space nut.

I love it. I love nasa. And so I, and if you're in Houston, should go down to Space Center because there's a fantastic exhibit explaining how they're gonna do Artemis. But because they're gonna have a space station revolving around the moon and you're gonna have transports going back and forth between it.

They need to have cellular reception there. It's gonna be important.

[01:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: It's mental. A friend of mine, like when I was a child, so 87 years ago or something, a friend of mine signed a record contract, and in the contract, one of the sub clauses was that the record label. Had the rights to distribute.

Bearing in mind, this was when I was a kid the rights to distribute that music on Earth and its solar system. Wow. So even back then, they were thinking, we're gonna, we're gonna colonize the whole thing and we need to be able to flog your record. It turned out the record never sold anything, so it didn't really matter.

But the point's the same. If you can sell the Beatles on Mar. Yeah, the big, the mask becomes the Napster of the solar system. Sorry, James, I crosstalk to you. So what were you gonna say? No, it's

my fault. I said

[01:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: Spotify on the moon. Yeah. Yeah. This is fascinating. So if you if you're getting.

Problematic reception down here on Earth. You know where to go. Get yourself on a SpaceX rocket. Oh, sadly.

[01:27:38] James Giroux: From 5G

[01:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: to 4g. Yes. Yeah, that's right. It's not top quality, is it? Their wifi will be like one megabit per second or something. The the British

[01:27:47] Robbie Adair: There won't be a dark side to the moon anymore.

Oh, that's

[01:27:51] Nathan Wrigley: the the British endeavor led by Richard Branson from Virgin. Looks like it to get into space. They've got this, they had this system of flying a rocket on a jump, the bottom of a jumbo jet, and then it would decouple and go. In other words, you don't have to, you'd have to overcome much of earth's gravity.

You're, you are already in the low earth, whatever it is. That seems to have all collapsed this week. It's gone into, they've said they're not gonna do any more research. They've laid off, I think it was 90% of their staff. Yay. British Engineering. Woo-hoo.

[01:28:21] James Giroux: You've gotta take those moonshots. You've got,

[01:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: oh, that was good.

That is the title of this episode. Yeah, I'm gonna write that down. You gotta take those moonshots, right? Okay. That's it. We will be back. That's it. We've done it. We will be back next week. I've just remains for me to say. Super duper. Thank you. That was a really interesting conversation. Went off in all sorts of different directions.

Big thank you to Jess Frick, from principal. Thank you also to Robbie Robi. Robbie adea or ADI from OS training and also James ah, SRU. From now Team wp. I really appreciate it. One last thing before. Before I let you go, you have to do the quite humiliating hand wave. The double hand.

Oh, look straight away. Everybody's hang on. And again, James. Yeah. That's the way to do it. Okay. We gotcha. Thank you very much. Really appreciate all your comments. I can see that in the comments. It went off in all sorts of directions. I j honestly just couldn't keep up. So if if you wrote something which needed our attention, forgive me.

I apologize. We'll be back next week for episode 248 and yeah. Thanks for your attendance. Take it easy. Bye.