This Week in WordPress #249

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It is time for this week in WordPress, episode number 249. This episode entitled Ai Fingers. It was recorded on Monday the 24th of April, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined by three. Oh. Is it four guests this week? First up, we've got Bob Dunn. We've also got Marcus Burnett and Andrew Palmer, and a very sneaky, cheeky little interlude from veto peg as well.

We are a WordPress podcast, and there's lots of WordPress news this week. First stop WordPress Accessibility Day. Then we talk about the evolution of WordPress, which is a book covering the last 10 years, rims. Fourth Summit Web Agency Summit is starting tomorrow. Marika Vander Act is stepping down from Yost, but not the WordPress community.

Woo Commerce are launching their own managed Woo commerce enterprise. It's called Woo Express. That'll be interesting to see how that goes. Guttenberg 15.6 has got some lovely updates, including something called Command Center. Google Routing has been added to WS form and we have a little bit of fun about that, and the plugin creator, Mark West Guard as well.

Block Diffusion allows us to create some ridiculous images on this podcast, including some with koalas and bananas and eating of things, and also Google is planning a new search engine. Cookies are going to be protected in Mozilla's Firefox browser. And we finish off with a little bit of a chat about being a digital nomad. 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 manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain ssl, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/WPBuilds.

Hello? Hello. Episode number 249 of this week in WordPress. Good, welcome. That's not a phrase is it but it'll do good. Welcome to you all. It's Monday. It's 2:00 PM therefore, it's time for this week in WordPress. It what, just on reflection, what a stupid time this was to organize this show, like this is the first thing on Monday morning for most people in North America, but I appreciate everybody who shows up.

Really appreciate it. We've got Marcus joining us from that part of the world, but we've got Bob and Andrew joining us. From Europe. Bob from Europe. Yay. Let's go around one at a time and introduce him. Let's start with Bob. How Bob, how you doing?

[00:02:59] Bob Dunn: I'm doing good.

Good.

[00:03:00] Nathan Wrigley: Sound good? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Bob is the connector over at Do the w If you haven't heard his podcast over there, Marcus is part of that as well.

But he's do thew as a community for Woo Commerce builders. We got quite a bit to talk about in the Woo Commerce space this week. He's also working with some Brit podcast. I didn't read your intro, and now I just suddenly realized he's working with some Brit podcast and a new, on a new podcast coming this year called WP Office Hours.

Let's see if that happens. Bob, shall we? If you see him wandering around aimlessly at Word Camp Asia, you see this is old Word Camp Europe. Please guide him to the Lost and Found. Anyway, it's lovely to have you and I did

[00:03:40] Bob Dunn: change that, but it must have not got changed. Oh,

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I'm so sorry. That's all right.

That's okay. I've probably overwritten it. Yeah. But how's it in Porto? You're enjoying the move? Oh yeah. Great. No regrets.

[00:03:52] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Doing good? No, good. Great. Glad to be on this side of the pond. Naturally. Yay. I had added that on my intro, that I am happy to be in a zone that doesn't have me waking up at the crack of dawn to be on this thing.

You know that is an

[00:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: advantage. If there was one thing which you moved for. Yeah. Clearly it was that. We're also joined by Andrew Palmer. Hello, Andrew. Hello. Hello, how are you? Yeah, I'm good. Thanks. You can see from Andrew's little logo underneath his, next to his name. He's from Beha ai.

Andrew is the c e o and co-founder of Bertha ai. I understand how difficult is for business owners to build a successful website. That's why I'm dedicated. This is all in the first person. Is it as if it's Bertha speaking? Yeah. That's why I'm dedicated to helping people. Oh, no, it isn't. It isn't in that.

It's just you say, right? Yeah. That's why I'm dedicated to helping people get their businesses online quickly and cost effectively with the use of WordPress templates, layout, and pre-design themes, as well as AI technology. By doing this, you can focus more on running your business in order to create a life that you deserve, one that will provide peace and security for yourself and your family.

My. Goodness, Andrew. The AI news never stops. The avalanche began sometime late last year, and honestly, that's 50% of everything I consume at the moment. So I'd, we'll get into the meat and the bones

[00:05:14] Andrew Palmer: of that. That's big. But do you wanna tell people what you wrote in my profile before I put a new profile?

No, I've forgotten. What did I write? You wrote Can't stand Mark. I

[00:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: did not. Please. Did I say that or did you say that? Listen, just so that we are, just so that we're very clear if that's what I said. Then that is approved by Mark West Guard. Let's be, I hope he's watching. We'll just put a silly thing on the screen.

Mark West, he's

[00:05:39] Andrew Palmer: just a caveat there. He is literally one of my best one. Oh, I've got three and he's

[00:05:44] Nathan Wrigley: literally one. And he's two of two of them. Anyway, lovely to have you on, Andrew. We will get thick into the conversation about AI later, I'm sure. But also joined by Marcus Bennet. Hello, Marcus.

Hello. How are you? Yeah, good. Thanks, Marcus. As you can see by, his name is from GoDaddy. Marcus is a field marketer. For GoDaddy. He's an amateur photographer and team co rep for the WordPress photo directory. He is also, as we mentioned already a do the Woo podcast co-host. He loves long walks in the woods.

As part of the GoDaddy Pro events and community team, Mar Marcus is passionate about connecting agencies and freelancers with the tools they need to build successful sites for their clients. Can I go back to the walking in the woods thing? Sure. I love that. I do that probably four times a week. We have a forest just.

There basically through that window, go, I don't know, 600 yards and there's a forest there. And it is my way to kind of rebalance when things are stressing me out. It's great, isn't it?

You have

[00:06:48] Marcus Burnette: to get outside. We're cooped up in the cell. It almost looks like a cell.

It's a nicely decorated cell behind me, but it's like a cell. You've gotta get out.

[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, and that's the end of this week in WordPress for this week. We're time for walk. All gonna go? Yeah, we're all gonna go on. Have war. But yeah, thank you for joining us. I really appreciate anybody who makes the effort to come here.

If you are watching this and you feel like sharing it, please do. WP Builds.com/live is the best URL to send people to. Once more WP Builds.com/live. If you go there, you've gotta have the old Facebook, no it's not, it's YouTube, so you need a Google account to comment there, but that's where most people seem to end up.

If by some chance you are in our Facebook group or something like that, you might need to go to this u r url. chat.restream.io/fb. Otherwise we don't know who you are. But yeah, please share the podcast. It's very nice to have more comment. All crikey. It's very nice to have commentary. And there's quite a few comments here.

We've got comments saying basically, hello from Maya, from GoDaddy as well, and from Courtney from Godi. Yeah, go daddy in the house. Check him out. We've also got Mike Johnston. Hello Mike. He says hello from Lisbon. Not far from you, Bob. We've got Rob Cairns who always joins us. I appreciate your.

Participation. Rob, that's really nice. And Courtney's making nice commentary about your hat. I've not seen you in Hat Bob. I've seen

[00:08:14] Bob Dunn: It's a European way I guess. I dunno. It just felt like something to wear

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: today. Got a tri be. Yeah. Is that what it is? It's a tri be, I didn't wanna say the word. Yeah. And as always, Pete Ingers, Peter Ingersol drops in and gives us a weather report from Connecticut.

It's nine degrees 48 degrees Fahrenheit. The garden is getting planted this week. Nice. Keep us updated. Okay. Let's get on with the word pressy stuff. Thank you for joining us. Keep the comments coming. It makes for an interesting show. First things first, this is us WP Builds.com. This is our website.

You can see that in the near future. I've got a ui, UI and UX show. With Peach Jane e that's gonna be happening on the 9th of May. If you're fancy dropping us a line about a website that you're building, peach will go over it with a fine tooth comb from a u I X standpoint and give you some helpful tips and tricks.

You can do that by clicking this button, fill out the form and then we will know what your website is. I also would like to mention GoDaddy Pro for their support of the WP Builds podcast. They've been doing it for a very long time, and I appreciate it very much. Keeps the lights on over here.

Let's get into the WordPress news. So this week, first up, WordPress accessibility Day 2023. Essentially, this is me saying stick it in the diary. September the 27th to the 28th. I think I'm right in saying that it's, it looks like it spans two days there, but it says here at the underneath it says it's a 24 hour global event.

So maybe it crosses the time zone there. But it's dedicated to promoting and learning website accessibility with best practices from WordPress for WordPress websites. This is all about getting your name on the email list so that they can give you updates as the time comes. So it is 2023 dot WP accessibility.day, that's a nice r url 2023 WP accessibility.day.

Go and get yourself on the list and you know the important cause of accessibility. You will probably learn a great deal in that one event. Dunno if any of you three have got anything to add to that. If not, we will move on. I think it's good.

[00:10:30] Andrew Palmer: It's good. Sorry to but in straight away. But I think, we need to talk about this more but more.

More than that, we need to do something about it because it's, if you go through even, websites we build, we try and build them, accessibility in mind and all that kind of stuff. But actually we've gotta start thinking about accessibility first because it's becoming very important to do all the things in WordPress.

Inclusion, accessibility, everything. Because there are some people out there that, that really kick us up the bun to get it right. So we just gotta do our best to get it right. And accessibility is so important. I know some people, we had a little Facebook group session with a blind person literally a few weeks ago.

It was so enlightening. I can't even begin to tell you. I don't, I. Honestly, the first thing I say to customers now is let's think about accessibility. Get rid of your sliders. Get your old text right. Get your tapping right. Get everything right, and stop being so creative because, it's the most creative websites that really suffer from accessibility.

[00:11:44] Nathan Wrigley: If you say, yeah, the brochure ones still have

[00:11:47] Andrew Palmer: creativity in it, but, get away from your images that don't have descriptions. Get away from your pastel colors where you can hardly see the text, make sure you everything is right, it's a tough one. But yeah, it, I really believe in it.

It's really got to be right. So it's the first thing I talk about. Thank you Andrew, Bob, and also pitch bashing

[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: my head with a sledgehammer. Yes. That's

[00:12:11] Andrew Palmer: didn't really help me

[00:12:12] Nathan Wrigley: always. And I got always gonna work that. Yeah, the sledgehammer approach. Very good. Keep it up. Peach. Bob Marcus, anything?

[00:12:22] Bob Dunn: No, pretty much echo what Andrew said, okay. It's, I don't know how many sites I go to that, I can't read very well, or, the, or they put the actual text in such small, those days are over. I remember those days in print, but, that's yeah, something's gotta be done.

[00:12:49] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, la last year's was really good. It feels like a lot of information coming at you at once over the course of a 24 hour period, but if you can soak even a little bit of it up you'll benefit for it. Your customers, site visitors will all benefit from it. So hop in, hop out as you can and pick up as much as you can and just, do what you can to make everything that you do a bit more accessible.

[00:13:14] Nathan Wrigley: I I'd like to just point out that there's a couple of bits towards the bottom of the page that I just mentioned where obviously to make these events run, there is a need for investment at some point that could be investment in terms of time. So if you would like to volunteer, if you head to the bottom of that page, there is there is something about that and you can click the learn more link and presumably get yourself on the team that are organizing that event.

The, it don't underestimate how difficult these things are to put on, typically they, they look easy when you join these kind of events. There's a lot of touring and throwing in the background, making those kind of things happen. But also if you feel that you could contribute to make the event happen from a financial point of view, there is a sponsor option as well.

Both sides of that coin, volunteering and sponsorship are very important. Go check that out at the bottom of the page 2023 dot WP accessibility.day. I'd just like to point out that I now consider myself in some respects, in need of accessibility because e even with these things on, so I'm holding up my glasses.

I am really struggling over the last six months to see things on my phone, on my on my desktop. I've got, on, on a lot of websites I'm just clicking enlarge, so I'm doing that in the browser. I'm just clicking the, make it bigger so the whole UI grows. But on my phone, it's comedy. My children relentlessly take the mickey out of me when they see what I'm reading and I can fit about eight lines of text.

From the top to the bottom of my mobile phone. It is properly massive. They can see what you're reading too, across the room? Yeah. Oh, from a hundred yards away. Yeah. It's one of those tests that you get at the opticians. Can you read your dad's phone? Yeah. It's easy. But I really do appreciate it when I've got the option to toggle the tech size up, tech size down, but also that whole pinch to zoom thing when you pinch a site and all that you do is zoom in on a bit rather than pinching it.

And then the text expands to fill the, what was the previous view port? So yeah. That's my take on it. It was quite a lot of nodding there from,

[00:15:28] Bob Dunn: yeah. I've had people grab my phone and say the same thing. Yeah. People grab my phone and say, what is this? What are you blind? And I'm like, yeah.

[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm just trying to see if there's any sort of app that I can demonstrate where there probably isn't, to be honest.

There

[00:15:44] Andrew Palmer: are things, I was reading, I had to read my driving license today cuz I've got done, I've been done for speeding, which is really annoying cause I don't speak and I just did this one particular day and I had to read this tiny, it's literally five point text on the bottom of my license that gives the a, a particular reference.

I have to get it magnified. Yeah. Yeah. I've got an, I've got

[00:16:07] Bob Dunn: an app that actually magnifies things on my iPhone. Yeah. Because I've been reading, not only are they small, the. Stuff like directions on cooking packages here. Then I'm trying to use Google Translate at the same time. Yes. So I'm just having a great time.

I'm just like banging my head against the wall, walking in circles. I'm lost,

[00:16:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's there. There's the sort of level that I'm at. So that's a fair, fairly short message probably about fif 12 words and it occupies almost half the screen. That's my reply, which says hi. And then there's another four word reply and that's all I can fit on the screen.

It's about 25 words, something like that. And you are right Bob. I know it's in the real word. And it's got nothing to do with WordPress. I literally cannot read the packaging on anything anymore. I dunno if there's a new fad here, but. But the font sizes that what they've tried to do is reduce it so that they can have more picture of the product, let's say, I don't know, you bought something that needs to be heated up in a certain way.

They've got more picture of what the product looks like, and then this tiny little box, which I have to, this is so sad, I have to photograph it. And then zoom in on the photo on my photo, Andrew,

[00:17:19] Andrew Palmer: he's having

[00:17:20] Bob Dunn: to write loud and you'd think they would like, I have a debit card. The number on the front, the half of them, because of the different colors of their logo, half of the letters disappear.

So I have to get out my thing, enlarge it, light it up so I can actually read my credit card numbers. Oh, this, we've

[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: gotta rename this episode. It's gonna be called the Old Fogies or something like that. But yeah okay. The, this is the tiniest bit of the iceberg, isn't it? Not being able to see things very clearly, but what if you can't see things because of the color contrast?

Or you can't see things because you cannot see things. And as Andrew was saying, you've gotta use some sort of assistive technology. The web is like the most crucial thing. It's replaced everything for information finding. You can't literally,

[00:18:10] Andrew Palmer: you cannot, you can't, you can't do your electricity bills.

Nope. Your gas bills, your phone bills, your council tax, your poll, tax, whatever you care to call it, or local taxes everything is online, so I don't know how people are. Are coping, we've got a lovely man, David Brown, who has got, and he won't mind me talking about this, he's got cerebral palsy.

So like he's not yet at the stage of, bashing a keyboard randomly cuz he can't control his arms. He's, he, he's not far away from that, but he's a web developer and he currently, he's not using any tools, but he's telling us that, soon he will start needing tools like being able to speak directly into ai, for instance, for instructions, being able to speak directly into WordPress to be able to write the content in WordPress or, speak into AI and then say, okay, insert into this, or whatever.

So there's some, so there's some accessibility things for people with physical disabilities as well. If you're looking at quadriplegics or paraplegics or Tetraplegics or whatever they still have. 100% active brains. They just can't move their body in the way that we can or an able body person can.

So they need accessibility tools as well, and that's mainly in their own home. But if we can make websites work better with the Accessibility tools that are there and coming out as well, which are, there's some fantastic ones coming out then, we've done our job.

[00:19:44] Nathan Wrigley: It's as simple as that. I think you make a really good point about the fact that almost everything has gone online. So the bare necessities of life, like banking paying your taxes, shopping all these things are now largely done on the internet. I actually walked in our local town center for the first time in a long time recently.

I was quite surprised by how much had shot down boarded up and given up trade. And I'm imagining that the internet has taken over a large proportion of that. But if the, if those basic things that need to be achieved are now being done online and there's a proportion of people who can't access those.

Yeah. That just seems. Criminal essentially. So you can learn this stuff yourself the hard way, or you can attend events like WP Accessibility Day, where in one day you can probably get a whole boatload of knowledge. So once again, hat tip to them, 27th to the 28th. Of September this year. And a shout out to the board, I know there'll be more people involved, but Amber Heinz, Bethan and Joe Olson Maya in the comment says, try reading any medicine.

Oh, just forget it, Maya. I'm not even gonna try that one's being handed to my children, who then just take whatever you want. Yeah. Then they quadruple the the dosage. Yeah. Yeah. QR code on the back of that. Look at that. And

[00:21:10] Andrew Palmer: those are my pain meds for my back. And I just don't, I know what they do, but I don't know what they've got.

If you open up the contraindications thing, it's this long. Yeah. And it's in four or five point

[00:21:21] Nathan Wrigley: and you're going Yeah, it's literally font size one, isn't it? It's crazy. Crazy. Maya's like me though. Photo zoom. Regular procedure. Yeah, that's what I have to do now to read. Almost sad, isn't it? Font size matters.

As we get older, it surely does. Yeah. Thank you, Maya. That's absolutely fine. She says real problems you are tackling. Love the conversation so far. You're welcome. We're not gonna stay on accessibility though. We're gonna move forward. Mentioned last week that there is a book, this is such a curious little project.

I really like this. There's a book which came out more than a decade ago, I think it's more than a decade ago, called Milestones. And it charted the first th sorry, the first decade of WordPress. And I don't know who wrote it, whether it was an individual or a collective of people, but it very much sounded like it had come out of the pen of one individual.

Different approach. Perhaps this time the book is being written on GitHub and if you want to contribute information about the last 10 years of WordPress, which kind of more or less overlaps with my time in the WordPress community. They want your help. Obviously they want the whole thing to be cohesive.

And so there are some sort of style guide. For example, there's a, an article on the page that I'm looking at now I will link to this in the show notes for tomorrow, but it's on make.wordpress.org. The piece is called Building Blocks, the Evolution of WordPress 2013 to 2023 by Jonathan Pantani. And and there's guidance about the voice and the tone that you should use if you want to contribute to it.

You can link to the repo on GitHub where all of the chapters are laid out already. Most of what's been written is there and you can log any issues or what have you. So if you are feeling like a WordPress historian and you want to get stuck into that project, unlike anything else, I think really different project then yeah, I'll link to that in the show notes tomorrow, but you can see it there.

wordpress.org. The article was produced on the 13th of April. Anybody wanna contribute on that one? I've just sent you a

[00:23:25] Andrew Palmer: private note. Oh yeah, thank you. Cause I asked Bertha and How you

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: doing? So your AI there says that it wa it was not written by a single individual, but rather by collective effort in the WordPress community, these milestones represent.

Okay. Yeah. I won't read the rest of it, but yeah. Okay. So it was written by collective. What a lovely idea though. So if you're into writing and you wanna help chart the history of the last 10 years of WordPress, I've got my WordPress swag on what, I've got my 20th anniversary t-shirt, and you can see that they're really nice.

It's just that little same little logo that you've got there. Got a nice black one. Very cool. Marcus, Bob, anything on that? Or shall we move on? Sounds

[00:24:07] Bob Dunn: like some light

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: reading for poolside. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. What are you reading there, dad? History of WordPress over the last 10 years. Oh, moving on. Yeah. Okay. All righty. This is sad news. I say sad. I think it's sad, but at the same time, I think it's, for the individual involved, it's probably just the tonic they needed. Marika Vander Act, who's been the really instrumental in the growth of Yost, the company, Yotta product, the community, the learning materials they've put out.

She has decided finally that she's gonna step away from Yost on a permanent basis. And I'll just quote the first paragraph here, or a bit of it. It says, this is with mixed feelings that we say goodbye to Marika Vander Act. Who has decided to leave Yost? Everyone at New Fold Digital, which. Bought Yost in 2021, I believe, and Yost will miss her dearly.

We want to say thank you to her for all the wonderful things she has done over the years. She played a pivotal role in shaping the company's vision, growth, and success. Yost is truly one of those m that there aren't many, I maybe Elementor and a couple of others who really can claim to have the numbers that Yost do.

And Marika, obviously, Yost himself have been pivotal in that. They've got a fantastic team. They've grown an academy. They've championed all sorts of initiatives in terms of equal pay and representation for underrepresented initiatives. They've sent people to all sorts of events. Their brand is. I would say second to none in the WordPress space.

I can't see that purple without thinking of Yost. And if there's a little bit of green in there, then I know it's Yost. When they show up to Word Camp events they're just somehow stand out. They've got an amazing history. And so she's moving on. And in a moment we'll talk about what her and her husband Yos are gonna do, which is also equally interesting.

But yeah, with a tear in my eye. I guess thank you to Marika for her contributions at yo so open floor. Anybody wanna hop in?

[00:26:22] Andrew Palmer: I do. But I want other people to hop in as well. But I wanted to say a special thanks to Marika and Yost himself and the Yost team. I know them all really well, and we worked together with Bertha. They rebranded Bertha. For nothing. We did a joint venture for them. They helped us with some marketing stuff.

We did a marketing venture with them. They could not be the, they are just the nicest people in the world. They, there's, I spent a lot of time with yos at at cloud fests, drinking coffee, having a few beers. Bob knows what the situation was. Just friendly people. A lot of Yost representation at cloudfest and Word Camp Asia as well.

They pay when people need to do something, they need to go to a Word camp, or they need to go to Yost Con, which is actually in May. They pay their flights and their hotels. It's just, They're just amazing people. So when I saw that, I literally had tears in my eyes that Marika's not no longer gonna be, Yost and Marika are no longer gonna be there.

But also I'm aware of the people that are there, the C O and also we have the news that TES left as well. Yeah. It's a tough job being a CEO of a company with 13 million users, customers in 120 or 130 staff. And also, going into the corporate world of new fold, which are billion dollars.

Whatever company. It's tough. So I think the transition has been good for them. They're still kind and loving people, and they still give you can't believe like GoDaddy, produ, GoDaddy gives a lot to the community, which is probably unseen, with the or unnoticed unfairly unnoticed by the sponsorships of all the word camps.

They do by sponsorships of people that are actually working in WordPress. And I think, the fact that Yost have made money from the WordPress community and they throw it back in spades is what WordPress is all about. So congratulations to them. I wish them so much. Good luck with the investment company, Amelia.

They've invested in a couple of companies. We all know X Extendi In, and a lot more than that. I can't remember them off the top of my head, but they invest quickly as well. And what they're gonna be doing at word counts in the future is amazing. Yeah, congratulations to them for what they've done and really good wishes for them for what they're gonna do with the media.

It's

[00:29:04] Nathan Wrigley: gonna be great. We'll talk about Amelia in a moment, but Bob or Marcus, I dunno if either of you wanted to put a personal comment

[00:29:11] Bob Dunn: in there. Yeah, I think Andrew, yeah, pretty much the same I've known. I think they're probably some of the people I met first in this space, around 2009, 2010.

And they supported me with a lot of different things over the years and stuff. I remember way back, I did a workshop on Yoon, Seattle. They sponsored that and yeah, they've just been like one of those mainstays, and yeah, there's, there's. The whole team is amazing, but it's exciting to see what they'll do too, because I think we all saw what they've done so far, and it's gonna be, it's gonna be really really cool to see.

And you're gonna be talking about some of that, and I know they've already, talked about that they'll be staying in the WordPress space or not leaving the space or just looking for new ventures and stuff and Yeah. I, yeah, and they, their hearts in, into helping people and into diversity and stuff, and there's a lot of opportunity out there.

And I think they're gonna do some really

[00:30:17] Nathan Wrigley: amazing stuff. Marcus, anything for me?

[00:30:21] Marcus Burnette: Yeah I agree. I only. I guess unfortunately no Marika or anyone else at Yost secondhand. But from everything that I've heard about the things that they've done and things that I've read, I don't think that the word press space would be the same now without them.

And although I don't know them personally, I've been around a number of, CEOs leaving and going on to do other things. And I think it's a while. It is sad in the moment. And probably for those that work with them day to day, Yost, it opens up opportunity for them to do some really great stuff and not necessarily be limited in the direction that they want to go with the things that they've done at Yost so far.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: Every year when WordPress dot org put out their contributor graph, there's always this like bubble diagram which comes out and there's always the giant automatic bubble that what they're showing is the number of hours or people that have contributed to core. And there's always the massive automatic bubble that I don't expose.

That demographic will ever change. They'll always come in number one, I'm sure. But basically since records began as far as I can work out, number two by a long way is always Yost. I think over the years they've had their heart in the right place. They don't just show up to the flagship events either, do they on some of the smaller ones.

They still show up and send some of their key staff into all parts of the globe. So they've contributed in all sorts of ways. I've managed to find out the companies that they have recently worked with. I'll say I've managed to find it out. Ari Equalized Digital X Extendi, Casto. And Stratec, they've also helped all of those fine people.

And that leads us perfectly onto the next thing, which is what they're gonna be doing next. You may not have heard of this before, because although it's word pressy, it's not, it's not a plugin, it's not a theme, it's not really even a product. Their thing is called Amelia. It's not Amelia, it's e m i l i a.

And the name of the domain will give the game away. It's called amelia.capital. And what they're essentially doing I think this is so interesting they're gonna become like a venture capital firm to try and get products, in the WordPress space primarily. But I, I don't know if that's the boundary of what they're gonna do.

Maybe it's tech in general just to give people a helping hand. So in order to do that, what they've done, and again, I've not heard of this happening before. They've got themselves a sponsorship booth at Word Camp Europe. And in that sponsorship booth, they're not promoting a product, they're using it as a place where you can go and pitch them.

So what you need to do, if you want to do that, you have to apply for a 20 minute slot in which 10 minutes you can give them your elevator pitch of why you would like to receive some help, financial help. And maybe it's more than financial help. Maybe they'll give you some tips and advice and maybe they'll get stuck into the thing as well.

I don't really know. But they'll give you 10 minutes in which you can pitch. After that immediately follows a 10 minute q and a where they will quiz you about whatever it is that they want to quiz you about. And at the end of that, they'll give you a yes. Let's take this conversation. Beyond Word Camp Europe.

Let's keep talking or a simple no. So in 20 minutes you'll have your answer, which is pretty remarkable. It's all happening at Word Camp Europe. You need to be going to this website if this catches your attention. It's called amelia.capital/sponsor Word Camp Europe 2023. All hyphenated links will be in the show notes tomorrow, but the post is called Pitch Os.

Your idea at Word Camp Europe 2023. It was posted by Yost on the 17th. So yeah really interesting. And I'm guessing that I, in particular Andrew, I know that as a sort of serial plugin entrepreneur, does this kind of idea, is this of interest to you? Is it, would've this been something you'd have been interested in?

[00:34:35] Andrew Palmer: No I had a really long conversation with Yotta. It took two hours. We sat and had coffee and drinks and whatever. Just me and him, it was awesome. In cloudfest. And he said, are you looking for investment? I said I dunno. I dunno what I'd do with it, and also I'm horrible to work with because I'm, I'm just horrible because I like to do what I like to do.

But having said that the point is with Eosin and Marika involved, they only ever give advice, right? So they, and they give the great advice and they, 10 years building up a plugin that they did, which was free. There's a great podcast with him on, with a guy that I can't remember, but he is a VC guy where Yos takes you through the basic growth of it.

And he basically built Yost SEO or WP seo. As a free plugin. And he didn't know how to and Marika said, listen, this is taking up too much of your time. You've got a million users. You've gotta monetize it. So he added the YouTube. SEO bit as a premium, launched it. And he said, if I make a hundred grand a year from this, I can stop doing what I'm doing, which is more than that, but I can still justify it.

And he made a hundred grand in the first week. Oh, this works. So that's so somebody to advise you on that. And, we've had some we've had some major success, with Bertha. We made quite a lot of money in the first weekend with a few l t d deals and other plugins that I've done, one plugin guy, it took me 18 months to get him onto elegant marketplace.

He's told a $7 plugin. He made 30 grand in a weekend. So there's possibilities that you can make a lot of money very quickly for a very low price. And the great thing about having Yost involved and Marika involved is that Marika is a phenomenal marketer, right? So she's a great copywriter.

She's a great, yeah. And also with Yost, he can literally look at your code and go. Nah, I don't wanna buy you or yeah, I wanna buy you, or I want to invest in you. I don't think they're looking to completely acquire. I think they're looking to give money, which is great because that gives you stability as a company.

But they, the best thing is that they're there are, they are the dragons of WordPress. If they've had this massive success with what they're doing, they can advise you on how to market. And also, not only, but also they have that, they're two of the largest influencers in the WordPress space.

So if they say that they've invested in your plugin, that's going to, that's gonna. Be the little hook on the end of the line with no worm. People will be hooked in. They'll go, if yo Haveve or Emilia invested in this, I gotta have a look at it. And there'll be growth opportunities there. So I love the idea, but I've never looked for investment.

So I don't know, I don't know how I would even pitch, so it's just, I've got a

[00:37:38] Nathan Wrigley: couple of quid line about Andrew,

[00:37:39] Andrew Palmer: if you, I'll give you some money then I'm, I might talk about it, but I wouldn't even know how to pitch because

[00:37:45] Bob Dunn: he just show up with a couple beers and say, let's, that's right.

[00:37:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:37:48] Andrew Palmer: exactly.

[00:37:50] Nathan Wrigley: Would you like to run back coffee with

me?

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: But what they've said is that essentially if you want to get one of those 20 minutes slots, you've got to fill out a form on the website that will, then they will notify you by the 17th of May. That form closes on the 11th of May. So you've got.

You've got a couple of weeks if you wanna receive some of this money. So yeah, I just think it's a cool idea. Never seen anybody doing that before and spinning the whole sponsorship booth notion around is quite interesting. Normally bringing some commercial

[00:38:21] Andrew Palmer: ability to WordPress, it's well

[00:38:23] Nathan Wrigley: done.

Kind of interesting that normally at the sponsor booth they're trying to drag people towards them. This one it's like note two at a time. Just get in the queue. It's not your turn to be at the sponsor booth. You come back in 20 minutes. That'd be interesting. Marcus, anything on that?

[00:38:39] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, I mean it reminds me a little bit of a far less intense shark tank, right?

And with the same benefits. Cuz there's the two, it's the two pieces to it. Of course there's the money part and I think if you're maybe newly in the space or trying to figure out what to do, you wanna become a WordPress plugin entrepreneur. You start to build something you don't know really where to turn after that, okay, I built this thing, now what?

This gives them an opportunity to say, Hey, come here, come talk to us and we'll figure this out together. If you need money, we've got some money to give you. But also, like I said, the two parts the advice part, I don't know if there're many others that are as well equipped to give advice about how to grow a WordPress plugin or a WordPress business in this space.

And so I think there's, the multiple benefits there and the fact that, they're, when they invest like anything on Shark Tank they then put their name behind it, like Andrew said, that, that will hold some weight as well and get your plugin off the ground all the faster.

[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: I bet Bob can nod at this one. I'm I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I'm fairly sure Bob, how many times have you been app approached by people who've got a plugin? And want to come on your podcast, but they can't market it. They're just out of the bandwidth for that. Oh yeah. And a lot, right? Yeah.

And it's interesting

[00:40:05] Bob Dunn: because, you know how many people go to Word Camps hoping to make that connection, yeah. And they're just taking to the forefront and saying, Hey, that's what we're here for. That's what we're doing. We're creating a booth. And I think it, it adds a little bit of, I don't know, real world flavor to Word camps.

It's they're doing this thing over there that maybe other conferences have done in other ways where I'm, we don't want a whole bunch of people pitching in a whole bunch of booths are doing that. But on the other hand, it just adds a different level to Word camps. And it's yeah.

You don't have to sit there and stand way back and think, oh, I'd like to talk to them about this. They're giving you the opportunity to actually. Pre-pitch them and then, set up a time and

[00:40:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And seriously talk. So from one, sad bit of news that Marika's leaving to nice bit of news that she's not, she's, it's a bit of a pivot really.

So they'll be there links in the show notes tomorrow. All right. And you can see what's going on. Okay. This is probably the biggest piece for this week. This will probably consume the most amount of time. That is and this is right up Bob Street. Probably Marcus has got something to say about this as well.

I sourced this on the WP Tavern. Sarah Gooding wrote a piece about Woo Commerce launches. Woo Express. I'm gonna summarize Evera quickly. You can now get a, a, a. A pre hosted WordPress install with Woo Commerce attached to it. Not only that, you can access a whole bunch of the many hundreds of plugins.

They come in bundles and the price point is pretty cheap at the moment. Now I know that GoDaddy have got their managed Woo Commerce stores, and I believe other rivals like blue hosts and things like that have also got these kind of things. But now, woo, commerce via, I guess this is being funded through automatic, are now stepping into this space.

The obvious things that people are gonna talk about are. Number one, is it a good product? What kind of things do you get for your money? How much does it cost? And so on and so forth. But then there's also gonna be that isn't this treading on the toes of people who've already been into this space and kind of launched these products?

Indeed. Is it cannibalizing their own offerings? Does cuz Pressable does things like this? Is it gonna be doing all of that kind of stuff? So to me this is a significant development. It's available for, I'm trusting that these screenshots are correct. It says $40 a month or $25 a month if you build bill it annually.

That's for the what they're calling the essential plan. And then if you go for the performance plan and I stress, I dunno what the difference is, it's $70 a month or 45 if you bill it annually. We could get into the bundles and all of that as well. But first impressions, Bob, your commerce person.

[00:43:09] Bob Dunn: Yeah. I think before anybody really Whether agree or disagree with it or however you feel. I'm gonna give a plug. I would say go and listen to Bo Leks. He's the head of engineer at Wu and he did a podcast with us and Jonathan w was the host and Jonathan really, I don't wanna say he nailed him, but he asked them about the hosting.

Is this stepping on? Are you feel like you're intruding? And I can't encapsulate the entire thing. So that's why, and there's a transcript if you wanna read it, but I feel like they are one thing is, I think this shouldn't come as any surprise, really. I think it was, coming has probably been worked on for a long time.

And I know that he talked about other hosting and I think they're looking as an open book hosting. First of all, I don't think everybody's gonna rush to WooCommerce or wordpress.com and get WooCommerce hosting because, other. Hosts offer it. It's competitive. It's, if you're a GoDaddy customer, you're not probably gonna move over there.

You're gonna look at the GoDaddy Blue Commerce hosting. So he, they're putting it as an open book. They're hoping also it will help other hosting companies and help themselves to make that onboarding experience better. It's like they said they wanna be totally transparent on what they're doing, what they're working towards.

And then other hosting companies can say, maybe we can do it even better. And that's what they're hoping to encourage other hosting companies to look at it and learn from. Cuz they're probably gonna not do everything right the first time. And that it'll how do I want to say. It'll build on each other.

Hosting companies can look at this and they can say, okay, do, WooCommerce is doing this, but I bet you we could make it one notch better by doing this. So it's I don't know. I just think, he really had a lot to say to the podcast is really, yeah. It made me think a bit more about not only why they're doing, of course they're doing it.

Yeah. Everybody wants to make money and, it's inevitable because look how many hosting companies Marcus knows have put in a Woo commerce piece. I'm getting they're coming to me left and right all the time telling me. So it's not unusual for them to actually do it, or is I think it's going to be squashing them, but, that's time will tell and I'm just guessing and I'm, I'm not a hosting expert either, so I don't know everything that goes behind.

What it takes in the marketing

[00:46:04] Nathan Wrigley: stuff. Bob, will you, in the private messaging, will you put me the link to the Oh, yeah, sure. The episode, undo the woo and I'll mention it. I'll just share my screen very quickly because I think this comes to the knob of maybe the, is this I don't wanna use the words anti-competitive, but nothing else is coming into my head, so I'll say that.

And Sarah writes, although Woo Commerce may be late to the gaming offering, managed hosting solutions, the makers of e-commerce, the, of the e-commerce software, have a clear advantage with their positioning in the woo commerce ecosystem and marketplace of more than 800 products. That is quite a thing.

Woo Expresses launched with a compelling set of commercial extensions bundled into the hosting plans. That's a link. You can go and you can see what these bundles are like. There's a whole different, there's a whole array of different ones including product add-ons product bundles, gift cards, minimum maximum quantities, stock notifications, and a whole load more Over to Marcus to say I'm not suggesting that you are gonna give us the official GoDaddy position, but what's Marcus's position?

[00:47:09] Marcus Burnette: Sure. First off, a little surprised that it, they waited this long to launch that sort of an offering, but it completely makes sense that they would I think when I look at. Woo Express and GoDaddies managed WooCommerce stores and Blue hosts, woo Commerce offering. They're really all kind of different flavors of Woo commerce hosting.

And that's largely gonna be dependent on the plugin, the extensions that are bundled, right? So woo commerce.com has the marketplace of, like you said, what, 800 plus the marketplace is available to anyone, right? Anyone can go to w.com, purchase one of those extensions and put it in their site.

So it really comes down to which extensions are bundled, and what else is built in. And like for GoDaddy in our case, right? We have all of the SkyBridge extensions because of the SkyBridge acquisition. And Blue Host has the Y extensions because they new fold acquired y whatever last year, the year before.

And so those are all just different. Sets of things that you can do with your WooCommerce site, and it's really gonna come down to what you're trying to do and how much money you can save on not having to buy those extensions because the skyr extensions are all still available in the marketplace.

ES extensions are all still available to purchase as well, so the access is still there. It's what are you trying to do with your WooCommerce store and which is the more financially wise direction, depending on how much you can save by having those already included in your. Flavor of WooCommerce, yeah, I guess we'll have to see how competitive these bundles are and whether or not you can save a boatload of money and whether the configuration of the bundles works for different scenarios. But yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, the one

thing that I think that they're still missing that I assume will be added at some point that I think the Blue Host offering has as well to to some degree is the omnichannel selling.

And I think that was, that's really one of the strongest pieces for managed WooCommerce stores at GoDaddy is being able to have WooCommerce be your product and inventory source of truth and sell on places like Amazon and Walmart and Etsy and all of that. And so that seems to still be missing. And that's definitely.

Gonna be that next step in selling. Once you have your store running, you're gonna have to expand where you sell and really draw on the traffic that places like Amazon and Etsy already have. And like I said, I think a couple of these flavors of WooCommerce have that as well. That one seems to still be absent here.

That will have to be added at some point, I imagine.

[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you Bob and Marcus. Anything on that Andrew? The cynic,

[00:50:11] Andrew Palmer: the devil's advocate. Yeah. One of, one of the reasons they don't have the omnichannel is because they have WooCommerce payments, which they make money, they get a kickback on commerce payments.

So that might be a long way in coming because they run a, they would learn. I wouldn't, if I was the commercial director of WooCommerce, which I'm not, I would wait a little bit on the omnichannel because I wanna make WooCommerce payments my default it's basically Shopify for WordPress because, It's everything that you need to get started and to continue.

You've got your abandoned funnels all already built in. You've got your delivery already built in, you've got coupons already built in, et cetera, et cetera. So it's effectively WooCommerce Plan Catchup on Shopify and Squarespace and the Wix e-commerce solution. So because I'm web diagnostic, generally I build web, I've got an agency which builds websites in all platforms.

Doesn't matter to me which platform you're on, I really don't care. But the W Commerce, the W Express offering is effectively to monetize the w payments situation. And also, if you own the majority of the plugins required to run an effective e-commerce store from a delivery. And a download and a licensing perspective, then you're gonna be a winner all the way along.

And there's no way that a hosting company can keep up. But also the other devil's advocate bit is that because the hosting companies can't keep up with W Express or won't be able to keep up with W Express with their offering, woo Commerce will also be going to the hosting companies and saying, Hey, here's a deal for our bundled stuff.

So they'll be using Woo Express as almost an anti sales thing for the hosting companies to go into larger licensing agreements with W Commerce so that they get all the plugins that their customers would need. That's my C perspective.

[00:52:12] Marcus Burnette: They do have quite a bit, but a lot of that 800 extension marketplace is third party, and they can't cannibalize the third party extensions.

They can only include their own. So they still be limited somewhat to the extensions that. That they've created or acquired.

[00:52:29] Nathan Wrigley: Just on a slight pivot towards the bottom of the article, it talks about the, how this offering is gonna be really leveraging blocks and the block editor full site editing, navigation and all that.

And it ships with a theme, which is called Suki. And everything by the looks of it, is gonna be done with blocks. I dunno if that paradigm is gonna fit with absolutely everybody, especially if you're not familiar with doing it that way. But anyway, there's that. So yeah I'll link to the show notes tomorrow.

There are articles about the bundles, what's included in the woo express. I'm gonna really struggle to get that word out my head. It's always gonna come out as Woo Commerce Express. And, but it's not, it's woo express. And then also there's a link here where you can actually see what's included in all the bundles and they've all got some sort of rock.

Band type theme attached to them, which Bob tells me is pretty normal. I didn't know that. All ready? Let us move on. Oh, by the way, there's Bob's episode April 13th, so hot off the press building a better Woo Commerce hosting ecosystem with Bo Lemons. Is that how you say that? And I will link to that in the show notes tomorrow.

Okay. Okay. Let's move on to this one. This is, Andrew is very much involved with this, as is a surprise fifth guest to our podcast today. Let's see if we can catch him on a, wheres He's in the, he's in the little booth. Let's see. Come on. Let's see if we can grab him. Is he there? Is he there? Is he with it?

No, he's not. He's looking the other way. Look, he's there.

[00:54:13] Vito Peleg: Hello

[00:54:14] Nathan Wrigley: there. Yeah. We're joined by Veto veto and Andrew together. I think on this one we're gonna be talking very quickly about the a WordPress event coming up. Tomorrow, right? It all kicks off tomorrow. I guess that's where you were looking.

Veto on a different screen. Trying to organize your event. I'm just gonna quickly link to the rim post on WP Tavern. That obviously takes you to the Web Agency Summit. It's happening tomorrow from the 25th to the 28th. Who am I gonna go to first? Andrew Veto. You can fight with each other.

[00:54:49] Andrew Palmer: He's got more to say about it than me. I'm just, I'm a Mia co-host, which I'm really enjoying it. And I also sponsor Bertha a, a sponsor. Amazing sponsor. The world. Just

[00:55:00] Nathan Wrigley: amazing. Who is a Mia. Very good. So yeah, veto. Nice. Thanks for dropping in. Really appreciate it. Tell us about this. It's round four, right

[00:55:11] Vito Peleg: round four, fourth year in a row.

And this is a huge one. There's this year we tried to take things. Even further. Yeah, of course you can't have the top air, the hero section without Andrew's photo. I think we lost about 3000 attendees.

Oh, nice.

[00:55:34] Vito Peleg: But it was bad. It's because of Christina. Christina? Yeah.

[00:55:38] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. She gained 3000. Yeah.

[00:55:41] Vito Peleg: Good. Right this year we have 40 sessions four days in a row. But there's a few new and loads of attendees. We just passed the eight and a half thousand a attendee count.

And we're hoping to even hit the 10,000 attendees count by by tomorrow. 23 hours from right now. Looks like we're on track for this. Now what we did this year, which was a little different, is we added speakers that are, while there's the standard kind of like agencies from the space or web agency owners that come and share their knowledge.

These guys are literally in the trenches. So there's a lot to learn from people that are experiencing things just now and maybe figured out a problem that some of the attendees have just like a couple of months ago now coming to share some insights in what they learn. So that's one thing. That's what we've done always.

And I love that. That aspect of it. But then we also added panels this year that are that allow us to bring really high caliber folks from all kinds of different companies. So if you stop on this one, for example, there, you see we have Josepha. She's the director of WordPress, and we have folks from HubSpot Web Pros, which is C Panel and Plesk cloudfest, GoDaddy.

We have Rakus who is representing word camps cuz he created the first word camp in U World Camp Europe or co-created. Then we have Elaine from x, WP, and Andre from Google. We have folks from on another one. We have for example, the guy from Microsoft that is in CH was in charge of implementing AI into Bing.

And he's coming in to talk about how that is going to affect search how this is gonna affect SEO so that agencies can adjust accordingly. And even from, from that Google side. And here we, I heard you guys talking about Mak the stuff that she's doing there. So she's gonna come and talk about this here as well.

Yeah, so these panels really expanded our ability to bring people that usually wouldn't sit and create like a full on presentation. If but but they do have a lot of knowledge to share with the community and that allowed us to expand a little bit beyond just the small WordPress community, or at least the people that usually you see in speaking at events and go outside to bring to bring experts from outside of our space, but that still interact with websites, with agencies, with WordPress and talk about their involvement in that thing.

So you see, we have Fabrice there for Microsoft Duda as well. One of the major sponsors this year also Ben Pines. Oh, and Ben. Yeah, Ben is coming back with

[00:58:44] Nathan Wrigley: a different hat. Yeah. That's interesting. So he is working now for. Word tune. Yes. She's an AI 21 lab. Interesting. Oh, that's good to have him back.

It all kicks off tomorrow. Veto, do we need to, do we need to pay anything? Do we just show up on the gate and be let in? How does it all work? So come on in

[00:59:05] Vito Peleg: here and sign up. It's completely for free. If you wanna get access to all the content after the event you can get the backstage pass that gives you this that gives you access to watch everything after.

If you can't, if you're gonna miss something. And yeah, but generally, Free. Come on in, join. And what have we learned? Also, and I think you might have seen that in your event Nathan as well, at that early on in Covid days, we were expecting that these online events would be people just are like fully interacting with the feed.

Very much like we are now all in this conversation and we're except for me from before now I'm not doing anything else. But but what usually happens is that people do exactly what I did before. They listen with one ear and they gather a few of these gold nuggets. And it's one of those.

Kind of a podcast that runs for an entire week. Yeah, come in, join it in that way. Keep doing your work. Do some creative work on your computer, but let that run in the background. If you need a break, you come hang out at the lounge. Yeah, all kinds

[01:00:22] Nathan Wrigley: of awesome stuff there.

C can I just say to Marcus is James Rou. Your brother. There is a remarkable similarity there. Isn't he really? He does. Look, I can see it. Yeah, I can see that. Clearly he's not yeah, I get it. Veto. I totally get it. I think during the covid times when these events began, I think that was what happened.

People were just so desperate for that kind of connection that, that they they did watch it. They gave it their full attention. Yeah. But now there are so many of these kind of events. It's apropo to just have it over there, have it on as a, as another thing. And then when you tune in to that moment that you think then you can drop the pen and Yes, tune in and give it your full of te Yeah I totally get that.

But if you click that button on the website, if you click the sign in, if you put your first name, email and click sign in. Do you then get into a sequence of being updated about what's going on when and all of that kind of stuff?

[01:01:22] Vito Peleg: Yeah, of course there's also the agenda that that is being published or was published just earlier today.

But yeah, but then you get access to the platform just by adding those details, eh, where you can interact and on top of the sessions. One thing that is pretty cool this year also is we collaborate with post status and they are running the networking lounge. So there are about 27 se 27 meetups or mini parties that are scheduled for the upcoming week run by folks from the community.

Bob, I think you're also doing one, right?

[01:02:02] Bob Dunn: Yeah. I think we'll probably do a podcast like we did Yes. Last

year.

And.

[01:02:08] Andrew Palmer: I'm doing one as well in between my hosting duties, but I've gotta schedule that in with Michelle yet cause we've only just done the schedule, so I didn't know when I was free.

But yeah, the networking is a really cool bit. And Bob tends to, I dunno, he just doesn't sleep for the week and just stay,

[01:02:24] Marcus Burnette: he just stay there all week. Yeah,

You

[01:02:26] Andrew Palmer: hear the bob, the woo, I'm,

[01:02:33] Nathan Wrigley: you

[01:02:34] Andrew Palmer: hear that for four seven, for the next 4, 4 4. Basically I've got, it's Tuesday through Friday. So it's gonna be a, it's a long day for the co-presenters, which is veto me and Stephanie Hudson as well. We've got a we're hosting the the panels and we're also just, in the background to help out the presenters if they've got any techie issues.

The nice thing we're doing this year for the presenters is that somebody's gonna meet them in the green room and just make sure their presentations are there because, with all online things, this yourself, Nathan, running this every week. Sometimes there's glitches or an internet connection will go down or.

Something will happen. We've got some nice tech support in the background to previous

[01:03:18] Vito Peleg: season was like wrapping up a session. Jumping to the other stream. Yeah. Finding the person. There's like where are you? It's okay, we're going live in one second. One second.

Okay. Ready? Check the screen. Checking this out. Okay,

[01:03:28] Nathan Wrigley: we're going live. You've got way more slick with it. And can I just say nothing ever goes wrong on my show? Not echo. Really? Yeah. Veto, thank you very much. Let me just say the URL for that is atri.io/summit io slash summit. Oh. Web

[01:03:48] Vito Peleg: agency summit.com.

[01:03:50] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Okay. Web agency summit.com. Which would you prefer? I'll link to it tomorrow. Yeah.

[01:03:55] Vito Peleg: Who? Whoever, whichever. Whichever.

[01:03:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And can I just say that it looks like you're growing your hair back, but

[01:04:03] Vito Peleg: it's because of

[01:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: the, it's the summit.

[01:04:08] Andrew Palmer: It's better to, it's better to link to IO slash That

[01:04:16] Nathan Wrigley: would be fine. Okay. Okay. Veto, appreciate it. Get some sleep tonight. I know you're gonna be busy, but thanks for hopping on the show today. Really appreciate it. We're gonna get back. Thanks for having regular stuff. Cheers, veto. Take it easy.

Bye. All righty. That was nice. Little surprise. Oh, thank God we got rid of

[01:04:32] Andrew Palmer: him all week with him.

[01:04:34] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not saying a word. Let's get back to normal business. So we're onto WP ta again, Gutenberg 15.6. If you get the Gutenberg plugin, you get all of the kind of beater updates if you like. There's a couple of nice ones in this one.

There is an experimental details block. There is actually already a block that you can download for free called the Details Summary Block, which does an identical job to this. It's good for things like transcripts and things. Essentially you get a little arrow, you can give you can give the thing a title and it's like an accordion.

You click the button and whatever's beneath it, it could be a whole stack of different blocks will be revealed. That's quite cool. There's also a, now inside the spacer module, it's now gonna be fluid before you set it to one pixel value. So 50 pixels, and it didn't matter what device you looked at it on, it was always 50 pixels, which would, on generally speaking, on desktop, maybe that'll look great, but on mobile that would be a gigantic chunk of your screen.

It now accepts that fluid as an option, so it collapses appropriately over different over different view ports. But probably the most interesting thing to me. What's that?

[01:05:41] Andrew Palmer: Just

[01:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: seems like common sense. Yeah. Yeah. It's the way it's all going, isn't it? We're getting rid of few ports and media, sorry, media queries and all of that, and moving towards that.

But this is the most interesting thing, I think, and I wonder if Ross Wintel is in the comments, probably not. I haven't seen him, but this is akin to spotlight on your Mac. I dunno if Windows has an equivalent thing, but on the Mac you can, with a keyboard shortcut, you can invoke. On top of every app, this kind of search bar, and you type it in and it looks everywhere on your Mac for something that matches that query.

The idea here is that there'll be something similar in WordPress, and the idea is that it would be available everywhere. So whether you're in the admin, whether you're writing a post, whether you are viewing a post, but are logged in, you can click a button, invoke it, and then start searching for any part of your WordPress website, including the ability to add new posts and go to, custom posts and all that kind of stuff.

It does look very similar to what Ross Wintel has done with his Chrome extension, which is also a plugin, I believe which is called Turbo Admin. Anyway, this is what, this is Gutenberg 15.6. There's, I think that feature alone looks pretty cool. Any, just interrupt me now. I'm done. I'm finished.

[01:07:02] Andrew Palmer: No. That's, it's, again, it's WordPress catching up with with other systems, with Ross, this system for, ju Dr. Paul Jula. Another a Shopify allows you to cert, when you put in a, when you wanna put in back links to your products in a blog post or in a page, that allows you to search for your posts and pages.

So yeah, it's Again, common sense.

[01:07:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there you go. This one really is common sense in a way, you wonder how it's not been done before. You mentioned as a previous, cause it's a big project. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's a big project. Yeah.

[01:07:44] Andrew Palmer: You can't, I don't agree with people saying, oh, it should be in there.

It should be, why didn't they think of that? Because, There's a lot to think about.

[01:07:55] Nathan Wrigley: This strikes me as one of those what they're gonna be called feature plugins or something. What is it? The ones where they're basically being treated as if they're core, but they're not in core, but they're gonna receive the same plugins updates and all of that kind of stuff.

This kind of seems like ital canonical plugin, canonical this kind of feels like it's a good thing to go in there. Nomad skateboarding, he says he likes the fluid spacer, but he would like the, to see spacers not used. Yeah. Padding margins, maybe you're right. Especially on the default temp default templates and patterns.

I guess for any non-technical users, they need something like that, don't they? Because non-technical users just don't know about. C s margins and padding, but they do know that they want some kind of space. So the ability to drop it in with a block is probably semantically not the best, but at least it's some kind of,

[01:08:45] Andrew Palmer: it's also page builder land as well.

That's where, that's kinda over from page all the, divvy Elementor beaver Builder, all of them

[01:08:54] Nathan Wrigley: had spaces. Yeah, they did.

Yeah.

[01:08:56] Andrew Palmer: Allow, because you generically or you went into the customizer and set all your spacing so that sometimes the spacing was a bit out of kil. Yeah. You needed to put space in there.

Yep. So that's where that comes from. So it is good, it's a mix of best of both walls, but we are, I think, again, the cynic in me says gunboats gonna be the page builder. The default page builder. It is, it already is. Even when you have a page builder in, in WordPress and you go to write a post, it comes up with a little popup to say.

[01:09:28] Nathan Wrigley: Use Gutenberg. It's the way, yeah. You have to decide at that point to use arrival, don't you? You have to launch Beaver Builder or click the Elementor option. Yeah. Looks interesting to me. I dunno if Marcus or Bob have got anything to add to that. We are running out of time, so if you do go for it.

[01:09:47] Marcus Burnette: Yeah, I was gonna just say as long as this seem, it seems like something that maybe could use some resources on your site. If you end up not using it, maybe it'd be nice to be able to turn it off. It's gotta continuously index your site and make sure it has access to doing any and everything that you might want to do on it.

Great for other developers to hook into, to add their own things to the menu. But if you're never gonna use it, maybe it's something that you could shut off. Like you said, maybe it's a canonical plugin. It's something you can decide to leave on or turn off if you don't want it using up server resources.

Yeah,

[01:10:23] Nathan Wrigley: I hadn't really thought about that, but yeah, obviously if you've written a new post or you've got an editorial team that doing 20 things a day on it, that is gonna somehow have to go spidering around in the background, isn't it? Bob, anything?

[01:10:34] Bob Dunn: Not really. I've been not doing as much with.

Anything inside my site that I don't need to do every time I do, I swear anymore. It's just kinda what it is.

[01:10:47] Nathan Wrigley: This is more opportunity for swear. Yeah.

[01:10:49] Bob Dunn: I was playing with spacers the other day on something and it was like, oh man. Anyway. Yeah.

[01:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: Good stuff. Yeah, the, I can imagine the opportunity to invoke that, that search thing, occasionally you'll just get it.

What the, where did that come from? I definitely didn't click command, whatever it is. The only

[01:11:07] Andrew Palmer: swear word I've heard Bob say. It's Holy mo. Holy, moley moly.

[01:11:13] Nathan Wrigley: Holy mo. I've definitely heard him say some more fruity things. Fruity on a rival show that we have. Yeah. By the way, we figured out that show's acronym the other day.

It is the word Ass, which lovely. We hadn't actually figured that out. I wrote it, actually typed it out saying, should we do another? One of those and then looked at one, he was like,

[01:11:39] Marcus Burnette: what the heck? How did

[01:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: that happen? Okay. Moving swiftly along. Let's we've been talking about ASS and now we're going onto WS form Mark West Guard.

Oh, I'm never gonna get away with that. I'm in such trouble, but it's okay. Don't you worry, because Mark West Guard is approving this message. Okay. Mark has done something pretty cool here, actually. And joking aside, right? Ws form. What a great product. We all know him. Yeah, he's a really genuinely nice guy, which is why I can poke fun at him, and I know that he's gonna take it in good.

Good form, but he seems to be on a bit of a clip at the moment. Lots and lots of new things coming out. I have it installed on various sites and the amount of times I have to click update on that plugin because he's got a new version, is remarkable. And he's got this new feature called Google Rooting.

So you can enable this in the backend, but there's a really great display of it. If you go to ws formm.com/knowledgebase/google-route, it's exactly what you'd imagine. You type in two things a start point and a destination point. So for example, this week I went with my son. I went from Scarborough in the UK to a place called Canfor.

Let's see if we can find that in Lancashire. And that's it. I'm done. I don't even have to click return. I've typed in where I begin, where I end, and it will figure out a route. You can see the route it's been calculated via a Google map. There it is. That's the optimal route. But it also gives you a boatload of other data right out the bat.

So gives you the latitude and longitude settings of the start. On the end. The distance in kilometers, maybe that's tolerable to miles. I don't know how long it would take to go in a car distance. Oh yeah, there you go. Distance in miles, yards, kilometers, meters. Do the, do check this out. How long it takes in seconds to do that journey.

Whoa. How long it takes in weeks, months, years. Calculation example, how long, an e-commerce example is in there as well. You could figure out the cost of, I don't know, use this for your delivery service or something. How much does it cost to do that journey to get that product delivered to that destination?

Bearing in mind that our depot is over here 50. Yeah. So

[01:14:00] Andrew Palmer: see how much it costs at one pound. 50. Do that. What's that? Sorry. Cabs run out about one

[01:14:05] Nathan Wrigley: pound 50 per month. So if I put in, let's put in it's working in dollars. So if I put in $1 50, whoops. That journey would cost me in a cab, assuming that's correct, $245.

But you could see how something like this for your little cab service, even on the back end, your staff just

[01:14:24] Andrew Palmer: it on my Brother's Cab service website. Yeah. Straight away. Yeah. That's what I'm, it's amazing. Yeah.

[01:14:28] Nathan Wrigley: It's really cool. I don't know if it's bundled into a particular package of Mark's offering pro.

No. Pro. Pro. Pro. Okay. Thank you. So you need a pro account. But there it is another cool feature. And I know for a fact that he's got a load of other cool things, which I'm not gonna mention, but he's got a lot of other nice ideas up his sleeve. So do you see why I can't stand him? Yeah. But standing that it's okay because he approves this message.

I'm gonna just keep doing that. It's never not funny. Look, every time I do it, It's funny. Look. That's funny. Now it's not funny. Now it's funny again. Now it's not funny. And look, it's just funny every time Marcus, sorry I interrupted. No, it's

[01:15:11] Marcus Burnette: fine. I feel like I saw someone ask him for this in a Facebook group, maybe his in the WS form Facebook group and within 24 hours it was a full

[01:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: fledged feature.

Yeah. This is how it works, right? So anybody listening to this podcast come up with some wacky zany and preferably that's word in Facebook group. Really difficult thing for Mark to implement and go to his contact form and ask him, really challenge him this time. Yeah. Yeah. Really challenge him. Maybe something to do with launching rockets or something like that.

Something a little bit tricky. Go to his form and and say that I sent you. And he'll forever be happy. But anyway, great little product update. Just awesome, brilliant. I'm gonna skip over a couple cuz we really are running out of time. I was gonna mention this plugin called Block diffusion, which enables you to generate images from text prompts.

Oh, come on. Let's put in a text prompt between us. This is the plugin at work, right? It's just for, just show you again, it's on the WordPress repo. I presume. You've gotta connect and open ai a p i key or something like that. But it's called block diffusion. Let's come up with diffusion. Stable, diff let's do a man called Mark West Guard.

Eating, what should we have him eating? Eating fruit. Okay. Eating fruit. What else?

Near a gar

[01:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: p garbage, near a garbage trashcan is probably more appropriate, isn't it? Over there? Yeah. Near a trashcan. Okay, let's see how long it takes to come. A man called Mark West Guard, that's not a very good prompt, is it?

But let's see what happens. A man called Mark West Guard eating. Okay, here we go. It's done it.

[01:17:00] Bob Dunn: There.

[01:17:02] Marcus Burnette: I think it's his new profile photo. There it is.

[01:17:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, screenshot that and send it to him. That's brilliant. We have a man doing exactly what we are. So he's eating fruit, which apparently is square and white. I dunno what kind of parking ticket. Yeah, he's eating a parking ticket close to a trashcan.

There's no trashcan in sight, but there's definitely a man. It's right

[01:17:25] Marcus Burnette: outta frame.

[01:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: That's, he's so huge. He's hiding it. I, this is always the giveaway, isn't it? With with stable diffusion. How many fingers? The fingers,

[01:17:35] Andrew Palmer: he's reaching in his journey of yeah. Complete. If you go and have a little play with me journey.

Okay. Yeah. Fixed as the lever. We're, and they don't have an api, which is frustrating cuz I'd love to throw Mid journey into into ber Yeah, they're the best one at the moment. Images in Bertha as well. But you've just gotta write the it's all in the prompt. And that was a crack prompt.

Yeah, it was.

[01:18:00] Nathan Wrigley: Once we were live on error, couldn't really think. Give me a better prompt. Let's just do one quickly. Gi gimme the sort of breadth and depth that we need. No, hi desk. Oh, hang on. Wait a sec. Let me just open a new tab cuz I wanna keep that one and send it to Mark. Okay. So what, I have to literally write the word Hi def.

Yeah. Hi Def. Hi Def. Yeah.

[01:18:20] Andrew Palmer: Oh, hang on. Let me just clear all over. Hi deaf handsome man. Yep. In coffee shop. Yep.

[01:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: With a laptop. With a laptop. I presume that writing the words Hi deaf at the beginning is gonna take a little bit of. Time to compute it. Oh no, look, that was still pretty quick.

Yeah. That he's very handsome. He's very

[01:18:51] Bob Dunn: handsome in an sort way. Obviously

[01:18:53] Andrew Palmer: handsome men

[01:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: we're both That's right. Yeah. Nothing prejudice in here. Anyway, we got down a bit of a rabbit hole there, didn't we? It is cold. It's called block diffusion, but you can use Andrew's birther AI to do all of this.

Goodness as well. If you

[01:19:08] Andrew Palmer: no, actually just one, one point is that I love the fact that there are over in the last two, three weeks, over a thousand ai. Things that have been developed, and one we've gotta, we've gotta give a shout out to Aaron, who's from u Ugly Robot, and he's done some great things with Docs, Bott and WordPress and all that kind of stuff.

And codebase dot code, which is great. And, there's some fantastic stuff going out there from ai, but just segueing back to W Commerce or W Express, invading our spaces as web developers almost not giving our customers a choice of going to, you go to W Commerce and, or you come to us and we build you a W Commerce thing.

We've got a situation where open AI have literally opened up a whole new market, but also by giving out GBTs. Four for free and chat for free and stuff like that. It has affected, including Bertha Die, it has affected our revenue. I've seen, I know a couple of guys in the space, they've just given up because G P T chat is out there and it's free.

And they've they've just suffered immensely from having a, couple of grand a month coming in. They're now literally down to $200 a month. Yeah. And it's just unsustainable. So we've gotta be careful about these companies that have their products and us building layers on them. So what be AI are doing is we're actually, yes, we're using open ai.

But we're also giving you a choice to use somebody else, which is maybe an open source one, to keep our costs down and to keep our offering live. Because what I've noticed over the last eight weeks is that open AI literally go down every day. It just goes down. Oh, the API goes down. Interesting. Really, I, cause I get notifications cause I've got an API and so to get over that, we use, we're starting to have a little toggle.

If this hasn't worked, toggle to this, we'll use a different AI engine for you. So that'll be out in the next Oh, nice. Yeah. Keep your eye. We've gotta watch our who we build our layer applications on. And, we're all vulnerable to that.

[01:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: Whoever these guys are using this is this is clearly exactly what I asked for.

I asked for hi def, a man shopping online with a banana in his hand and a koala in the other. And I got this, which yeah, shows no bananas, no men. I really wanted to see that too. No, anything. Actually I'm gonna do it again. I'm gonna submit that one more time and let's see if we can get something.

No, which, what even is that's nothing. What?

[01:21:41] Andrew Palmer: Copy that into the private and I'll put it into birther and see

[01:21:44] Nathan Wrigley: what I can, okay. Let see what we can, okay. See if you can show us, there's the prompt. And let's move away from this AI madness just for a brief moment and get onto a plugin vulnerability.

If you have an old, and one might say abandoned plugin called eval wp, please do get it updated. It is being exploited in the wild. There's more to say about that, but that's all we've got time for. It's called eval. W p sorry. Eval. P h p. So get that checked out. Speaking of ai, if you have any concerns about AI and, the sort of perhaps the Pandora's closed box in it, where is all the training data coming from?

Are the artists getting recognition and so on and so forth. Mozilla, the people behind the Firefox browser have decided to take a different approach. They're announcing Mozilla ai. And putting 30 million up front. I'm sure that to me sounds like a lot of money, but I guess in the AI space, that's probably a drop in the ocean in the hope of building in the open.

So whatever they're doing will be open source and you'll be able to see exactly what it is they're doing. So that's an interesting little thing. What else have we got? We talked about that a little bit last week so I won't mention it. Quick hat tip to Tim Brugmann. He reached out to me on Twitter, completely unrelated to this, and I went to his website and I found a really cool page called the Cheapest Domain name Registrars.

And it just lists in a big table the costs of buying your domains from different companies. I dunno how often he updates it, but if you are in the market for dot coms and all of these other different ones this will show you how much you're typically gonna pay so you can make a choice about which one to get it from.

And the last one, this one's directed at Bob, is there's a page on Forbes called Digital Amount Nomads Increased 131% from 2019. But before we get onto that, I just wanna show you what I think is probably the worst cookie banner that I've ever encountered in my life. Forbes, shame on you as if I'm not gonna get sued for that.

So you know how it works. You go to the page, you get the little pop up, and it says, choose options or accept all. I always click choose options and always regret the experience that happens. Watch this one though. Okay. So here's my options. I'm gonna scroll fairly quickly, right? I'm gonna just do quite a lot of scrolling.

These are all my choices for the different things that I could opt into or opt out of. And I'm still scrolling. I'm still scrolling. I'm still scrolling. I'm still, that's nuts. That is properly not, I don't even know where to begin with this. How do I decline them all? I think they've probably already been all declined, but I don't know.

Anyway, let me just make that go away and click accept all because that's what everybody does, right? Because it's just you into it That's Yeah. Too much Faff, which is such a deceptive design. Digital nomads increase 131% from 2019. Bob, you represent probably 1% of that. I

[01:24:51] Bob Dunn: consider myself a digital immigrant.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not very nomadic these days. It's, but no it's true. But they're, yeah. I, yeah it's interesting because I was, small world. I was walking back to the complex we live in and a guy in front me was wearing a Codeable shirt, and I. Didn't know if he was from Koul.

He turned around and said, Hey, I know you. So it's like Marcel. Yeah. It's, so that is no, that wasn't, it wasn't Marcel actually. It was somebody else there from

[01:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: So wait. Hang on a minute. You moved to a completely different part of the world and you totally got spotted on the street by somebody you didn't know.

Yeah. And they knew who you were. Yeah. That was like, cool.

[01:25:40] Bob Dunn: A celebrity. And they live in the same complexes we do, which was really interesting. But no, they're, they, I think it'll, it's happening, but it's, they're starting to I've been reading or we've been seeing that, visa approvals and stuff are stretching out to 6, 7, 8, 9 months now.

And oh, things are slowing down. There's getting. Backlogged, I'm sure it varies from country to country, some of them are starting to restrict it more and more so it's good, it's, there's gonna be a point. Where yeah, I don't know really what will happen, but it's true.

More and more are doing it. Several people have threatened to follow me

[01:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: here and one of them was the guy from Codeable who is currently looking through your window with a magnify, microscope, whatever telescope is it. Yeah, I would fully do it if I had the capacity and there are certain reasons, children, all of that kind of stuff.

I, I've, I think that really appeals to me. I would definitely give it a year and then see how that goes. I'd love to live out the back of a van or something. I know Alex Sta Stanford, I dunno if you know him. He he. Does it is Alex, isn't it? I'm getting the right person. Yes. Yeah. He lives out the back of what we would call a, like a big campervan, but in the US I think you got a different word for it.

And and I did a yeah. And I did a podcast episode with him and Man Alive. Was I jealous at the end of that? I was. I want to be you. But yeah, I think I've got several more years. That's it. I've got nothing else to say. Anybody want to add anything before we finish? I created that image

[01:27:26] Andrew Palmer: in Bertha.

[01:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, great. How do I get to, I created that image

[01:27:29] Andrew Palmer: in Bertha. I just, I have to

[01:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: you have to share your screen. Yeah, you have to share your screen. Put it on your screen. And then there's a little icon, which looks like a, underneath OS four, there's a little li icon, which looks like a monitor with an arrow pointing up.

And then you have to authorize a tab or something like that, wherever it may be. And and we'll wait here, we'll grab a coffee. You have to put in your bank account number. Yeah, that's your right. Your bank account number. And here it comes So much better. Much better. It's actually a man with a banana with, oh, look at that

[01:28:07] Marcus Burnette: arm.

You're shopping online.

[01:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: Look at that arm of the

[01:28:11] Marcus Burnette: koala. Oh, that is that koalas? I'm, yeah.

[01:28:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's a bit freaky. I want send that to though, because Yeah.

[01:28:18] Bob Dunn: My, my life is complete now that, it just,

[01:28:24] Andrew Palmer: but it wasn't a landscape, it wasn't a, it wasn't a spatial landscape, was it? Let's be

[01:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: honest to you.

I feel a new podcast episode coming on video. Just typing in random nonsense into into something like that and seeing what happens. That's, we gotta go. We gotta go. I've got a, I've got a few commitments that I've gotta sort out in a few minutes, so thank you for joining us. Thank you. For anybody who put a comment in, really appreciate it.

Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Marcus. We'll put it out tomorrow. It'll come out as a podcast episode. I'll include any extra links in the show notes. But now the, you know how it goes. The humiliating hand wave. Oh look, nobody's embarrassed these days. It used to be that this was awful and everybody was like, do I care?

No, exactly. We're done. It's all over. Just one last thing before we go. This episode has been approved by Somar West Card. Thank goodness, sir. It wouldn't go out. Thank, wouldn't go anywhere else. Take it easy. Have a nice week. We'll be back next week.