This Week in WordPress #253

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 253 entitled Mushrooms and Trees. It was recorded on Monday, the 22nd of May, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined this week by Jess Frick and Adam Warner. We're a WordPress podcast, so guess what we're gonna talk about? Yes, WordPress, and there's lots to say this week.

First up, a giant amount about the 6.3 roadmap, what's coming up in the next major release of WordPress. Then we also talk about the command center. Thoughts on something, a bit like Spotlight for the Mac. Way to easily find your way around a WordPress website, WordPress 6.2 0.1. That didn't go so well.

We talk about why that update had to be updated. There's a new proposal to not support certain older default themes. What do we make of that? We also get into some bits and pieces that I've recorded. It was a podcast episode on the Tavern with Alex Standford and also the webinar series I'm doing with Mark West Guard from WS Form, stackable.

I've got a new. UI generate press are on offer, and then there's the usual bits and pieces about AI as well. 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 there. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Good. Other things as well. Happy Christmas. It's it's the 22nd I think. Yay. You're the 22nd of May, 2023 and it's number 253 of this week in WordPress. We're gonna talk about WordPress a lot actually, and then a few other bits and pieces usually related to AI and various other social media platforms towards the end. But before we get into that, I should probably say hello to our fine guest today.

We were supposed to have four, but here we are. There's three and three is just great. Let's go with it. First up, we got Jess Sprick. How are you doing, Jess?

[00:02:37] Jess Frick: Wonderful.

[00:02:38] Nathan Wrigley: How are you, Nathan? Yes. Yeah very well indeed. Jess is the director of Operations at Pressable, which is a WordPress managed hosting company.

She's also a team rep for the make WordPress hosting team. She likes ice tea and considers herself to be a connoisseur and a proud member. She is also of the post status community. Do you know, I always say post status, which is a betrayal of my Englishness because actually in England we would say post status, but there you go.

I've adopted the American version. It seems to be the way to do it. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. And also by there he is. See if I can point in the right there. Oh, vaguely. Somewhere. Yay you. You're way better at that than I. It's Adam Warner. How you doing Adam?

[00:03:26] Adam Warner: Good, Nathan. Hi Jess.

Happy to be here. Hi

[00:03:29] Nathan Wrigley: everybody. Yeah, great. We had some technical gremlins there and Adam managed to, as a good tech person, would, he managed to go and ferret around in a box somewhere and come up with a solution. Yeah. We barely had three people. Yeah, we got there. Honestly, audio is the killer. Audio and browsers.

Do not go well together. It is the single point of failure for so many things that I do. Anyway Adam Warner is the director of For Field of, sorry, the director of Field Marketing at GoDaddy. In his role, Adam raises brand awareness through events and community discussions. He also manages activations with GoDaddy's Pro marketing team, focusing on web designers, content creators in WordPress and website developers.

Thank you. That sums it up. Are you both in Florida? Have I got that? Yeah.

[00:04:18] Jess Frick: Yeah. Adam lives like bicycling

[00:04:22] Adam Warner: distance. Really? Yeah. It's the Orlando show today or the Florida show.

[00:04:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's nice to know. That's really nice. Thank you. I appreciate you both joining us today. Like I said, at the top, it's a WordPress show.

If you like WordPress, please join the word plus. If you like WordPress. Please join us. The best way to do that, there's a variety of ways really, if you're in our Facebook group, that's one thing. If you're on just the web on our website, there's another thing probably the best place to send people is this u r url.

If you happen to be listening, I don't know, Twitter or something, easiest one is WP build.com/live. If you go over there, you have to be logged into a Google account because the comments are just it's a comment block from YouTube, so you need a Google account. However, if you're in our Facebook group, then you've got a little additional step.

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It's really nice. Speaking of which, we've got a few people coming in. Good afternoon, says Cameron. Yeah, it's not the evening. Cameron formally of Australia has now moved as far as I can tell to play cricket. In the uk. Cameron, seriously, tell me, is it to play cricket that you've come here, or is it for a job as it looks like genuinely like you're here for the cricket?

We've also got Courtney joining us from GoDaddy as well. Looks like Nathan is doing another edition of W Yeah, that's right. It is. It's the WP Orlando meetup. Every week can be guaranteed. And Peter Ingersol joins us from, oh formally the US state called Connecticut now called TTI Oak. And it's 60 for you to say.

That's right. Easy for me to say. It's 16 degrees centigrade, 61 degrees Ferena. He always gives us a weather report and look, bless his cotton socks. He's re he's repaired it, he's sent the comment through. Again. It's gonna be beautiful this week. To right Peter, for the first time in 29 years, there is Sunshine in the UK and it's about 16 degrees cent.

Great. It's about the same temperature as Peter's. Got it. But I'm in a t-shirt. I've got shorts on. The sandals have come out, Bravo Sun and Marcus Burnett Jrs also GoDaddy. He's missing out on the All Orlando No show this week. I'm not in Orlando. You don't need to worry about that. Okay. Here's the answer, the definitive answer.

Cameron came to the UK to play watch cricket. Ah, that's quite the move, Cameron. That's very brave. And he's here until mid September. Okay. Thanks for your comments. I'll try to drop them in if there's any that, I'll try to do that as quite a juggling. Sometimes I'll miss them, but I'll give it a go.

Let's share what we're gonna do today. Word pressy stuff first off. Here's our website, WP Builds.com. If you're fancy, keeping up to date on the bits and pieces that we do, then just go and put yourself your name rather your email in here, and we'll send you two emails once a week on, sorry, two emails once a week.

How does that work? We'll send you two emails once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday to update you of the new content that we got. That's all there is to it. And look, There we go. Look at that. This podcast, this very episode, and about 800 before it was sponsored by GoDaddy Pro. So thank you to GoDaddy Pro for keeping the lights on and the sun shining in the uk.

Thank you. First up, this is interesting. Honestly, there is so much cool stuff about WordPress this week. Genuinely, there's a lot of nice stuff. This is the first one. If you are a Mac user, I don't know if there's an equivalent on Windows, I apologize Windows users, but on Mac we have this thing called Spotlight, and you can invoke it by a keyboard shortcut, and basically it brings up what looks like a field.

It's just one field with a magnifying glass in it, and you just start typing and it goes and finds anything that relates to that on your Mac. And it's. Really useful. When I was a Droople user, which is honestly like 10 years or more ago, there was a module that you could get for droople, which did exactly this.

But now it looks like the good folk over at WordPress are thinking about having what they're gonna call command center. So think quick search, find anything you want. In your WordPress website, a command center for navigation and so on. And honestly, I just thought to myself, this is such a great idea.

I'm really pleased that this is being considered the implementation of it. I guess we've got, just gotta see where it lands. But the idea would be that, I dunno, you might type in ad and it gives you the option immediately to click a link, which would be ad post, ad page, add, whatever custom post type you got, you might be able to click.

Write templates and it gives you the option to go into there. There is a lovely little 32 second video on the page I'm linking to. It's Sarah Goodings piece called WordPress is developing a command center for quick search and navigation inside the admin bar. But it, I was quite curious down in the comments, there were only four comments and they didn't seem to have the same enthusiasm for this as I did.

But maybe I'm wrong, somebody here saying, finding it difficult to figure out how clients would make use of this and so on, because really you're asking people to memorize short shortcuts and words that maybe are out of their, vocabulary that they're just used to clicking on the interface.

Yeah, sure enough, the interface still works. It's not going anywhere. But I just think this is a really nice idea. I've talked for too long. Jess, Adam, it's over to you. What do you make of this? I think it's cool.

[00:10:10] Adam Warner: I have a few thoughts. First of all just Cameron just chimed in Windows has the same kind of command center or spotlight search in the start menu.

And I am for one really looking forward to this. I use Spotlight on my Mac all the time to find stuff. And. As the navigation stands now in the admin panel this seems like a step in the right direction, but I do agree with the comments that the admin panel overall the admin dashboard needs some attention.

So for experienced users, like all of us and probably everyone listening here I think it's going to help us be more efficient within site builds and site maintenance. But I do see the hiccup there with clients. There'll need to be some some education there and they won't be as well versed like you said.

So I'm looking forward to it. I think it's long overdue.

[00:11:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Thank you. Jess.

[00:11:15] Jess Frick: I agree with John in the article. I'm not exactly sure what problem this is solving in the video. They've typed in post meta and the average user doesn't know what post meta is or does. You type footer and I would think that you could just scroll and go there, but I think maybe it's just the video wasn't giving me the right mindset is to where this could go, right?

And what this is going to become a building block to do. So admittedly, like right now, I'm just stuck in what I've seen. But again, I also had questions about Gutenberg and full site editing in the future, and we're starting to see where that's going and it's extremely cool.

[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah. So maybe a, maybe an interesting conversation to have about that would be guardrails, wouldn't it?

If you are the admin of the site, is there, would there be settings involved in this thing whereby, I dunno the editor role can only type or will only surface these results. So you can add, if you start to type in ad you'll get post pages and this custom post item, that custom post. So that kind of implementation, making it straight, straightforward.

I'll tell you, I'll tell you why though. Okay. First, Jess, do you use Spotlight on your Mac?

[00:12:36] Jess Frick: Sometimes It doesn't usually work the way that I want it to.

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So I think maybe because Adam and I do, and we've figured out that it's such a crucial part of our workflow, I just use it to short circuit.

And honestly in every time I use it, I'm probably saving about three seconds. It's not a big thing, but it's now become my muscle memory. So it's now the quickest way for me to do it. And doing it by finding the finder window and then navigating to the right bit of the finder window and then moving the mouse and then clicking and clicking to get to the nested folder and so on.

That's now become part of my keyboard muscle memory. And Ross Winkel, I dunno if you've heard of him. He's a UK based developer. He has a Chrome extension called Turbo Admin. It is ever so good and it basically does this, but because it's a Chrome extension and it sits outside of a WordPress install, it figures out every site that you are on.

It figures out, okay, we're now in the WP admin now start to do stuff. So obviously, if you're on TechCrunch or the B BBC or C B C N or whatever it may be, it does nothing. But as soon as it figures out you're in the admin of a WordPress website it allows popups, it allows you to just navigate to all these, and it does all of that stuff, and it does it admirably plus it it hides adverts in the WP admin, which is quite nice as well.

And I just think my personal thoughts are, this would be welcome. I totally get it. I think it should be disable. I think there should be a toggle for that. But it strikes me as a user of this stuff, it really strikes me as a really nice idea. It's called Command Center. Who knows whether it's gonna come?

Anytime soon or not. I dunno if it's me. Can somebody hear like a phone? Bingy D bong. Sorry. No. It's okay. It's fine. It's totally fine. But I have a mic and it would isolate that. And I'm guessing, Adam, your regular mic might do the same, but yeah. One you your blame it on. That's, I do wanna

[00:14:42] Adam Warner: say one more.

There's Yeah. Blame madam for the late start. Blame madam for the noise. I'm, I'll take it. I do wanna just comment on what you said, Jess. The example is post meta. That's not helpful to anyone except, developer re people. But it, the main benefit for me is just less clicks.

That's the benefit. And I'm not a keyboard shortcut person in general, but I've, like Nathan said, spotlight has been a big time saver for me and a pain saver for, clicking. So I'm really looking forward to command center. We'll see how it goes.

[00:15:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And the nice thing is it certainly with Ross's interface, this turbo admin, if you start typing, let's say you put in the letter A and you intend to type ad it, you can imagine what's happening.

Anything with an A at the beginning of it is starting to appear. So you don't really need to type in the whole thing. You just begin typing and as you get more letters, the things that you really want surfaced to the top. So typically you can get away with two, two letters and all of a sudden you've created a new post.

You click ad and it's got new posts and you click return and you're done. And it's really great. So anyway, yeah, we'll have to see whether that comes. The article, like I said, was Sarah Gooding on WP Tavern. As always, I will link in the show notes tomorrow morning when we push this out as an audio episode.

I do not even know how we're gonna get through this next piece. So because man alive there is a lot here. So this is the. The heavenly Anne McCarthy is all I can say. Anne, who never sleeps McCarthy she's put together a piece called Roadmap to 6.3. It's on make.wordpress.org. It was released on the 18th of May.

Really would recommend if you're listening to this on the audio or watching this on replay or whatever, just pause now. Go read it because you'll be able to make more sense of it. But you can imagine what this is. This is Ideas for 6.3. It barely feels like 6.2 0.12, I should say came out over the last few days and here we are pontificating about what WordPress 6.3 might have.

There are some lovely little short videos, a minute, 30 seconds, and they show admirably what's going on. The site editor. It's gonna get by the looks of it, a lot more a lot more interesting. I know that everybody has their own little complaint about the site editor. There's a bit of it, which is wonky and doesn't behave in the way that they want.

This really does seem to address a lot of those. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play this video and I'm gonna enlarge it and you can have a little look, have a look at the polish. What do you think of this? So at the minute we're in the styles panel. And there's a ton of interesting little JavaScript going on here.

The interactions as you click around on the stars are interesting. So now you're go into pages and you're now into the blog template, but then they go and they actually start to create a new page in the same interface. So that's nice. So you're in the same interface to create a page.

In this example, they're creating a page called About us, and there's some loam in there and an image and so on. And then that gets modified. But then what you'll notice in a moment is that they then click into the template governing this page. And again, it's watch, here we go. So there's the page.

Click onto the template. Now they're editing the template for that page. So any other template? Sorry? Any other page that you wanted to follow that template? Would adopt the same thing. So now, I dunno if you're keeping track now, the About Us has got a wide image because that's what the template said.

Even though the post itself didn't have that, it's just all coming together. Oh, there it is. There's the command center look. That was it just starting to be used. I just thought that was really nice. For the first time, I've got a glimpse of how you can do everything in this one interface. And I thought, yes that's where I want it to go.

There's gonna be a load of polish added to all of that. We've talked about the command bar. There's a load of new stuff about blocks. The pattern interface is getting a big update, full screen model. A list of curated patterns. So WordPress is hopefully gonna ship with a ton of patterns, which are created presumably by people unlike me, who have the design skills of a potato.

And so just seems to be loads and loads of polished. There's just absolutely loads going into this. So yeah, I feel like I'm waffling here and I can't remember what it was that I wanted to say, but that first video summed up my, my, my greatest piece of excitement, I think. Adam, Jess, anything?

[00:19:37] Adam Warner: Jess, I talked first, last time, please.

[00:19:41] Jess Frick: This might be a spicy take. But watching this video makes me feel like. The way I felt thinking about theme developers when 5.0 was coming out. I would be worried if I was a page builder like Elementor because this is just gorgeous and easy.

[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: It's getting there,

[00:20:09] Jess Frick: right? It's a beautiful experience. One thing I did wanna call out though, is actually in the comments, and it's something that we've talked about on this show before somebody was saying, what am I supposed to do when you continue doing all of this stuff in the, database?

How am I supposed to run that through, C I C D and, typical environment sinking. And that's been a longstanding problem. Everybody's trying to figure out how to sync stuff and the traditional method was to just exclude the database and you can't do that anymore. And, others have come in to say I think you're just gonna have to adjust your workflow.

But it's gonna be interesting to watch innovation in that area too. Cuz it's gonna have to develop alongside this. But all in I just I'm blown away. Thinking about what WordPress looked like 10 years ago versus now. It's

[00:21:06] Adam Warner: incredible. Yeah. I'm also really looking forward to this.

I think the overarching theme of enhance, or excuse me, Polish and refining is, The time is right. A lot of people have been asking for that over the course of the last several years with the advent of Gutenberg. And I do agree. I feel like it's finally coming together into a more cohesive let's design and get to all the things we need to get to in as few clicks as possible.

I'm then, I, you'll hear me mention that a lot fewer clicks. Yeah, that's right. Because of the pain in my hand. Yeah. But that still, I don't think it, it doesn't re still doesn't address the WP admin dashboard yet. But I think parts of it, obviously several parts of it it's addressing.

So I'm really looking forward to it too. As I've explored full site editing in Gutenberg as limited as I've been able to I've run into confusion and hurdles with template and template parts and pages and my only concern with that, with the video you just showed is someone going from a single post to the template and then back again.

And the average user being able to understand that or having that communicated to the user for the educational part again, of what a template and the template part does in relation to how it makes your content layout differently. But yeah, really looking forward to it.

[00:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a really good point.

There were parts of the interface, which looked so similar. Editing the page template was basically the same as editing the page, except the navigation at the top had a one extra. It was highlighted in a different place. You got about us and then page template next to it, and you had to figure that out.

Yeah, so I think there's polish around there. It's difficult to describe what these little incremental changes are doing, but let's just put it this way. I think like a year ago, six months ago when full site editing came around, I was massively confused. I didn't feel it was in any way, shape, or form usable.

I haven't used this cuz obviously we're looking at videos of what we, I guess will imagine it will be like, Presumably based upon code, not just, some concoction in a video editing piece of software, but that looks so much better to me. If I can edit a page and then immediately say, oh, that page, now I want to be a template.

I'm really happy with that, and I can do that in the same interface, save it away somewhere and use it. I'm showing on the screen all of the different pieces that 6.3 is intending to bring around. These are the sort of high priority items, and there's a lot. So introduce content editing including clarifying the relationship between templates and content.

We just saw that in the video, adding a navigation section to the site editor with nuanced options, depending on the number of menus and the complexity of each. My feeling is the navigation piece is the big. Is the bit that's really not right yet. I feel that there's a lot of improvement there.

Add a page section to the site editor. Add style section to the site editor. Expose revisions. That'd be nice. Obviously if you've made an error and you wanna just roll back to something you did half an hour ago, that'll be nice. Improve the loading state. Okay. Stabilize the title bar. I don't even know what that means because it never seems to be unstable to me.

I don't really know what that's about. Obviously it's a link. I could click on it and find out what I haven't done. And then add the command center tool. Consider a distraction free mode for the site editor. Keep custom templates and template parts across themes. This, there's another little video.

I think it's that one. I just wanna make sure I'm getting the right one. Yeah, I think it is that one, which is probably worth seeing. It just ties together a whole bunch of things. So was it this one? Let me just try and fast forward. It's where they throw the playbook in. No, it probably wasn't that one.

There was another video on this post somewhere and I can't find it at the minute. Which shows the style options and the playbook all in use. The playbook is now hidden behind this little eye icon on the left and yeah it's just nice. So 6.3 rolling out soon go. Honestly, go and read that article.

If you are into WordPressing, you are using it for client websites. You've gotta know this stuff and there's a lot coming down the pike. Jess, it sounded like you were ready to say something there. No. No. All.

[00:25:44] Adam Warner: Oh no wait, I was can we, what I'd like to see is when you save a draft or I think publish a page, why do I have to go from the top right all the way down to the bottom left to click the view page link, the little mobile that comes up?

Yeah.

[00:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, there is a sort of shortcut for that if next to the publish button, which will then be, become, update. I guess next to that, on the left is a preview and if you click on that, you get an option to preview it in different, for like mobile, what have you. And if you click on new window, it'll open it up in a new window.

And every time you save it, that will then be refreshed. So that's, there is a solution there. But yeah, again, you gotta go to a menu. Select a menu. Yeah. Click. Yeah. Yeah. Click three. One, two. Yes. Yeah, sorry. Two at least. Yeah. You wanna add less clicks? Yeah, that's right. Okay. Let's see. See if anybody has any solutions for that.

Marcus helpfully tells us that potatoes can be cooked in a number of ways, and so they're pretty creative. Okay. All right. I'll think of any something else. A, I'm about as creative as a. Cushion. There we go. Oh no. That's quite creative. You can get all creative with cushions. Oh, no. Something that's really not creative.

I'm as about as creative as me. There you go. It's not very creative and moron message. The site editor says Atif is getting better, but I would stop using a builder like bricks or Elementor over it. It is not there yet. I guess you meant to say, but I wouldn't stop. But would I, sorry, would I stop using?

Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I made that decision a little while ago that for me it was ready with a few custom block solutions. Things like generate blocks and cadence and all those kind of things. I think for me at least, anyway, I've made that leap and happy with it. Give it a go for a week at it and see how you feel.

And then report back with the exact same information that you told us just then. No, not ready. Okay. I don't even know where to begin on this one. This didn't affect me thankfully, but WordPress 6.2 0.1 rolled out a little while ago, few days ago. And if you had, okay, so the big problem here is that there's a, quite a long time ago now, I'm guessing about three years ago, something like that, you were able to To automatically receive and implement and update your WordPress files automatically.

If it was a minor release, if it goes from six to seven or 6.2 to 6.3 it won't do that for you. But if it's a 6.2 0.1 to 6.2 0.2, that's fine. It'll do it. And it did, and lots of people had problems. Looking at a piece by Sarah again on the tavern, it's called WordPress, 6.2 0.1, update breaks.

You don't want that word in a title. Short code support in block templates and exactly that. If you had blocks sorry, short codes in block templates, which is fairly nuanced, it's not everybody that's gonna be doing that. But if you did have that implemented, and a lot of people, it's you don't often get 37.

Comments on the tavern. That's a really a lot. There's a lot of people venting quite a bit. Then it broke, they removed support for short codes in block templates because I di wasn't following this prior, seemingly, that information was not communicated. So a lot of people, agencies, there's, there was one person in the article who seemed to have much work to do, essentially either fixing what was broken or going, rolling everything back to 6.2.

So yeah, a bit of a problem, bit of a snafu there almost immediately off the back of this. And I think basically relying on quite a lot of people to work over the weekend which is, that's a stretch for some people. I imagine they couldn't do that or had to just surrender bits of their life to do that.

6.2 0.2 came about and this problem is now gone. So if you're on the latest version of WordPress, you're all good. If you've got any problems, go to this article. And yeah, so really the story here is automatic updates, good, bad. Was this a misuse of the automatic updating feature? Should it just be for security?

Should we have, I don't even know what to say about this. Jess, in you go it was a security release, but it was, you're right. I apologize. Yeah,

[00:30:40] Jess Frick: that's the whole thing. Yeah. It was a security release and yeah they did work over the weekend. Sarah actually published another one on Saturday talking about the 6.2 0.2 update.

And I think I think it speaks to the dedication of our contributors. I don't think anybody was expecting it. But it does bring up, Concerns about that automatic update. And I think that stuff like this is just gonna make people turn it off, and that's really a bad idea.

[00:31:13] Nathan Wrigley: So Courtney's in the comments saying that the short code removal was a security issue.

Okay. I totally missed that part of the story. I've misunderstood it in that case, and my apologies. I probably should have paraphrased that whole article differently. I thought it was a security update about something else, but it was this, that was the problem. Okay. Sorry for that. Everybody and then Courtney goes on to say short codes restored with a new, more secure way to process it.

So the problem was here was that there was a problem with the implementation, but by switching it off, there were unexpected things that would break on certain implementations of certain people's websites if they'd got short code buried in template. Okay. So it's very nuanced. This isn't it. Wow. Yeah.

[00:32:01] Adam Warner: Just [email protected] article regarding six point regarding 6.2 0.2 It says that the, it was a security is issue.

Black themes were parsing short codes and user generated data. And thank you for responsibly reporting to Liam Gladi of WP Engine. And also like Jess said, a huge shout out to everyone who, all the contributors who jumped on this, and I know they worked there was a tweet about John de Giros working from Friday afternoon into late night Saturday nonstop to, to make sure that this was corrected and pushed out quick.

Huge thanks. Without the contributors to the WordPress code and project, we wouldn't be here, so thank you.

[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: Do either of you two, or maybe Courtney, she seems to be on the money here. Do you know how critical this was? In other words, was this a push it now an issue? And if so, I guess yeah, something had to be done.

But I guess also it brings into question, whether or not every eventuality. Was taken into account. Clearly not, there's only so much you can do. I guess I do wonder, I wonder how many people suffered as a consequence of this and equally had to give up their own weekends because their, let's say client websites broke and they had to either restore to an older version of WordPress or something.

It's inevitable, right? Software breaks, updates, break updates to updates, sometimes break the update. So we go let's have a look. Marcus giving us another comment. Hi Paul. By the way, Paul, half Penns joined us. Hello. If there was a secure fix for this, why wasn't that implementation there in the first place rather than removing them?

Yeah, so there's, I guess with the benefit of hindsight, there's the question. If after a weekend it could have been implemented not to do this, then why wasn't it? But I suppose it's one of those cases of it's, there was a lot of complexity and it just got. Got missed. So another WP drama in this case from Core, which is you don't often get those.

Yeah, there we go. That one's been put to bed. And as Adam said, or Jess said, I can't remember, Sarah wrote her another piece explaining about how it all got fixed. Okay. Thank you Courtney. Brilliant. She says, sorry, Jess. The the folks working on it deemed it significant enough to push it through.

Got it. Good to know. They needed to get the fix out even before they had a solution to protect 43% of them. Okay. So there was like a risk. So benefits decision made and they decided to push it out. Okay. Interesting. I'm sure this will develop. Let's find out in the days and weeks to come, Cameron says, I can't help but feel It indicates that core contributors aren't really in touch with how regular users actually build sites.

This should have been for foresee. And a fix without breaking things initially. Yeah. Thank you for your comment there, Cameron. Okay, let's move on. Ah, anybody here using a default theme from the 1990s? Cuz it's about to go away. 1990s is a little bit too old even for WordPress. This piece, again, Sarah Gooding doing due diligence as she always does.

It's called new proposal, looks to retire older WordPress default Themes. So we all know what happens when you get a new version of WordPress. You get a new default theme. We're currently on 2023, but they stretch right back, really a long way. And for the longest time they are maintained. They are patched, they are made to work so that nothing hopefully breaks that however, is a lot of work for a very tiny return.

So you can imagine the. For example, the 20 20 10 theme sorry, the 2010 theme. 20 20 10. That's a, that's an interesting year. Look into the future. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Really far into the future, the 2010 theme. There's bound to be people out there who are still using it, very happy with it, and it's being maintained and updated.

But this proposal is basically saying, shall we just put the brakes on after a certain period of time? At the minute? Sounds like there's 13 themes, which are being constantly maintained for security fixes and making sure that everything works. And the idea is, I think if memory serves, if usage drops below 1% of all WordPress sites, that could be a determining factor for switching off the updates.

Essentially, it just goes into a. A sort of holding state where it is maintained from a security point of view. So vulnerabilities don't come into it, but no more updates to make it function and be beautiful into the future. To me, this makes perfect sense. I have no objection to this. Especially when you get down to the sort of wands and half percent that makes sense.

But what do you think over to you guys?

[00:37:01] Adam Warner: Yeah, I think it makes sense to clean things up, streamline reduce clutter. And, but I do think that removing them based on a percentage also makes a lot of sense. That's the user-centric view that we all should have. So it could be that someone built their business site in 2010 using the 2010 theme.

Theme and their business is still dependent on that site. If we, if it's removed from new installs, that's one thing. If it stops getting critical security updates, that's another. But what also comes into play is are we eventually going to just, we don't need themes that aren't full site editing compatible as we move forward in my opinion.

So I, I see this as a good thing.

[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, Jess.

[00:37:54] Adam Warner: Yeah,

[00:37:54] Jess Frick: I agree. And then, as it was mentioned in the comments, they'll still get security updates. It's not like they're gonna be open to a whole bunch of terrifying things if they're retired, but I just don't, we only have so many resources for all of the things that we want to do, and I guess it's just a matter of whether we wanna continue investing in the old or in the new.

[00:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There is almost nothing in life where they keep going, for decades. And honestly I feel that. WordPress in a sense, has painted itself into a bit of a corner where this is even news. I imagine in most every other software development cycle. It's what? It's 10 years old. No, we're not.

What are you even talking about? Whereas what the community around WordPress have honored that commitment and kept it going. And so it's not, it just doesn't seem like much of a story, although it is, it makes the point here that we'd go from 13 active, actively maintained themes down to six. And the consequence of that at the moment, at least, if this were implemented tomorrow, that would mean 730,000 users, say users.

I don't know if they mean sites there, but the word they've, we've got from Sarah's users would no longer receive maintenance on their theme. Reception seems to be on the whole positive, but we'll have to see how this goes. I have

[00:39:19] Adam Warner: a proposal. How about when these themes are removed? Someone, not me, because I don't have the proper skills, builds a full site editing Gutenberg theme called Kubrick 3.3 0.0.

Yeah. And so we have the classic throwback to, the, some of the beginnings of WordPress, but

[00:39:44] Nathan Wrigley: modernize it. There's a talk at Word Camp Europe this year, and I forget who's doing it, but there's a talk where somebody's gonna show. It might even be a no, probably not a workshop. It's a talk.

Somebody's, because it's 20 years of WordPress, somebody's just gonna show all of the things that have happened in WordPress over the last 20 years. And so I bet Kubrick gets a bit of a mention. That was everywhere I remember. I didn't even know that CMSs like WordPress really even existed.

And I remember seeing that Kubrick is with the sort of like blue rectangle with rounded corners on the top. I'm seeing that all over the place and thinking, what's going on? Why hasn't nobody got any creativity in their website? Finger pointing at myself there. Yeah, just curious. But yeah, this makes sense to me.

Let's get rid of stuff that really doesn't need to be maintained and trim it down. Cameron, thanks for your commentary. Says you're not even sure that these old teams would need. Out what they would need outside of security updates. Yes. I guess that's the point. It's just tradition, hasn't it? Like I said, we've painted ourselves into a bit of a corner there.

Okay. Forgive me, I'm gonna do a little bit of a self-promotion. It's self-promotion. It's not entirely self-promotion. I want to I want to mention this, oh, let me just remove Cameron's comments. I have a webinar series that I'm doing with mark, west Guard. I always think his surname sounds like it belongs in Game of Thrones.

Guardian of the west or something. Mark West Guard from WS form where we've done three so far. We've done form building basics, we've done building interactive forms, and the third one was preventing interactive forms getting spam and also tackling how to improve deliverability.

And then this coming Wednesday at 3:00 PM UK time. So basically, and more or less now in 48 hours time, we're gonna be going live on the same URLs. Me and Mark, only this time he's gonna be showing us how to integrate custom field. Plugins such as a c f tool set, meta what's it called? Meta box. And I think there's a jet engine I think might be in there as well.

In into WS form. It's been a really fun series so far. If you are unsure about whether to try out WS form, this is a great primer. Just shows you what's possible in there. Dunno if either of you two have ever seen Mark's plugin, but boy

[00:42:09] Adam Warner: yeah I'll second that. I forget where it was at. It might have been Word Camp Europe last year in Porto.

Where Mark and I sat down in the lobby of a hotel and he showed me Ws form and I was blown away. Yeah. It's, the last previous to seeing this, the last thing we, that I thought we needed was yet another form plugin. But I'm a big fan of a lot of different form plugins that you just pick the right one for the right the right tool for the right, for the job.

But Ws form it's so simple, but yet, Capable of such complex things. I was blown away. It's a, I would recommend everybody check out these series and on, and what Mark and his team has have built.

[00:43:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That is the point. I did a podcast, I did a webinar with him about, I. A couple of years ago during the pandemic and an hour, and he raced through a whole bunch of things that you could do in an hour.

And I remember thinking, boy, that's complicated. There's a lot in there. And then we did another one about six months ago, and at the end of it, I just got this strong impression that wouldn't it be good if we just slowed this right down? And spent a long time doing it. So we split it over six episodes.

Like I said, three of them are live, oh, by the way, if you want to get to them, I'll just show you on the website. You go to archives and then click Demo Archives. And that's just where we keep a load of stuff that we've done in the past with things like Newsletter Glue and what have you. And the, they're here, they're at the top, so they're in reverse order.

1, 2, 3, and then four will be going there in the next day or so. But it's just breaking down and giving, really giving market opportunity to just show off what it can do because it is, it's supply. It almost could build you a little app. You could build like a CRM or something like that with WS four.

I know that sounds like what? Don't want my form solution to do that. It just does so much heavy lifting and it's really worth a look. So come join us just like this. Make some comments, Jess. Probably nothing. Oh look. And it's sponsored by show, show up there in the corner again. Sorry, who's that? Yeah.

[00:44:31] Jess Frick: Show up for the education. Stay for the fabulous accents. Oh

[00:44:35] Nathan Wrigley: yes. Oh yes indeed. Actually it's quite funny cuz there's a few words that he's, that has somehow he's been subverted over the last however long, decade or more that he's been the US There's a couple of words, which I I pick him up on. Yeah.

But anyway nice plugin, nice person. And well worth a look because I think if you in the round just watched a couple of these episodes, you'd get a real impression of what it's like. So forgive the self-promotion there. I do apologize. There's one more bit of self-promotion kind of, and that is to say that I released a podcast episode on the WP Tavern this week with Alex Standford.

And we talked about the fed averse. Now I would actually like to get into this, if you don't mind. The Fed averse is the sort of generic name for all things activity pub. So Masteron is an example of that and other things like Pixel Fed. And Alex in the podcast talks about how he has made his WordPress website, it's a little bit technical.

He uses a concoction of different plugins, posses plus his unique coding abilities, but he basically has made his WordPress website the fulcrum, the centerpiece. Of his social networking. So he posts something on his website, comments, then it goes out to these other social networks like Masteron, mainly Masteron in his case, but it could be anything that's connected with the Activity pub protocol.

And then if you interact with him over on Masteron, the comments get consumed back into his website. So all of it is on his website. So he just had this real strong feeling that I'm giving everything, all the best stuff I'm giving to Facebook, and in his case, Twitter. And he was thinking time to slow that down.

I've just surrendered all my best stuff to Twitter over the years. Why not just do it myself? So part of the problem there was that he felt on his blog, he needed to write long form, curated content, whereas he thought Twitter was a bit more disposable. Now he's just got out of that cycle.

Everything goes on his website. Beautiful website, by the way, some cool interactions in the top writing corner with the men. Really crazy interactions with his menu. It's cool to look at. But I just thought this was really interesting. I've constantly been telling clients, you wanna own your own content.

Don't go to some company where they can shut you down or don't post your best content on Facebook. That message seems as hard as ever to get in. But Alex is a living example of how you can do it. The enterprise is that very soon. The now automatic owned activity pub plugin will enable you to do this one.

The lead developer of that plugin has been hired to work on it full-time, but sponsored by Automatic. And so at some point soon you'll be able to do everything I've just described by putting a plugin on your website and click in Activate. This is cool. I love all this stuff.

[00:47:37] Adam Warner: I can't wait. I think it's, we've all preached for years to, to own your content, like you said.

The way I describe a website to anyone is that it is the hub of your wheel and every other channel or the spokes. So everything should be centered. Every piece of content should be centered on your site. And this is one more step in the right direction. So I

[00:48:03] Nathan Wrigley: I can't wait an interesting sort of con, just by pure coincidence that over the last couple of weeks, the jet pack.

Plugin, which I know comes bundled in the Pressable offering. The, that they've switched off, haven't they? Cuz the Twitter API has been automatic and Twitter couldn't work out what the finances of that would look like, so that's been turned off Quite a few of the platforms that I use, which are similar to, for example, buffer, they're beginning to start turning their access off to Twitter.

I was saying the couple of weeks ago, one of the small SASS app SaaS platforms that I use which just literally consume content and put it out to other platforms. Their bill was gonna be $42,000 a month. To push to the Twitter api, and they just said that's like significantly more money than the platform makes a month.

So they've just turned it off. They've just turned Twitter off and said go and post it directly on Twitter. And so this feels like a perfect time. If you're not on Masteron, check it out. We've got a, an instance WP Builds.com. It's not.com, it's WP Builds.social. I can never think that's a url, but it's free, it's open.

You can come and join us, and then if you click the local tab, the conversation is basically just about WordPress. It's not a lot of people, it's about 180, something like that, but it's quite nice. Yeah.

[00:49:28] Adam Warner: That just one of the cons of this is and we've seen this right? When Twitter changes happened, before even API changes happened, everybody was exploring experimenting with Mastodon and Fed Averse and other platforms too.

W. What I hope doesn't happen, which I think is just inevitable, is our audiences, I guess our communications. Unless we can have that single source and push it out to multiple places we're gonna be stuck in this, these choices that we have to make of where we're going to be active.

We have to make that choice now. So I'm not very active on Facebook. I post every now and then. I'm a Twitter person now. I have Mastodon and I was in this space where I was checking this one and checking this one and having multiple conversations. Plus you add things like Slack and multiple Slack instances Yeah.

And channels. Yeah. I hope that at some point we can converge for the most part. And we can choose one platform to fan out everything. But I don't know if that's gonna happen. I think we still have to make these choices onto where our individual groups of people that we want to interact with,

[00:50:50] Nathan Wrigley: where they decide, yeah.

Yeah. Masteron doesn't really solve the problem of legacy, because if you move away from one instance, let's say mine, let's say I decide to close my instance down. What you can do is you can take a list of all your followers and you can take that to another account. So your followers and all of that doesn't get lost, which I suppose is the crucial part, but you can't take the things that you wrote.

They don't come along for the ride. But I'm, I've got a feeling that might be being addressed. The problem is the way the URLs are structured and all of that. So it, nobody saw that one coming. But also interestingly blue Sky, which is another decentralized platform based upon an entirely different protocol, somebody I've spotted on GitHub this month has figured out how to cross post from Master Dawn to Blue Sky and back again.

So because they're both decentralized, there isn't one website for Blue Sky in the same way that there isn't for Masteron. And the idea would be wouldn't, that would be nice if there was some op open source middleware that sat in between them both and you could cross post between Masteron and all of that.

Anyway, I just thought this was interesting. Alex really taken it to the next level. I would just really like what he does. Sorry, Jess we haven't given you a chance to get in there. You're all

[00:52:09] Jess Frick: good. You're all good. I'm just listening in. I was also gonna say you did release another podcast on Tavern this week.

[00:52:17] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yes I did. Did that, did I not put that in the show note? No, I don't think I did. Shall I quickly go there and show you? I can't imagine why you wouldn't. Do you know why I didn't? I didn't mention this. It's cuz this is the first one that I never click publish on. I let Sarah click publish on this one.

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. So yeah, here's the list on the tavern of some podcast episodes. That was 76 and then this one is the first of two. Oh, the screen's not shared. I do apologize. I'm talking nonsense. I'm not showing you things correctly. So if you go to wp tavern.com/podcast, you can see a bunch of episodes that I've done in the past.

But yeah, an out of cycle release so it doesn't have the normal numbering is this one. 20th anniversary edition. David Beset actually made this, I take no credit for it. All I did was top and tail it with a little bit of my audio. And he had on the podcast this time he had Sarah Gooding, Aruba Armored, Maestro Stevens, and somebody else.

[00:53:19] Adam Warner: I'm so glad you brought this up, Jess. This looks

[00:53:23] Nathan Wrigley: like an excellent episode. Those for, oh, and Jess. Sorry, I didn't need to say it out loud. And Jess talking to David about the, about basically the last 20 years of WordPress, their thoughts. All about it. It's about an hour and a half long. It's really nice.

It's a lovely episode. And I, Jess, I am so sorry that never made any No, it's

[00:53:42] Jess Frick: okay. I just, I only brought it up because it was, you're in cool that it came out on the tavern. Yeah. And also because I left so much on the, so the format, David actually gave us some things up front, some questions up front, and we were to come prepared with answers, but then he picked the order with a randomizer.

Oh yeah, I remember that. In the, so most of the episode is just me getting sniped, like all of that, like my first and second choice went in the first round. It was like, it was very funny.

[00:54:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's quite a good format actually. I was thinking that as I was listening to it. I've not really heard that. So he gave you all the questions then If the question got used up, it was no longer available for you to answer you.

Yeah. That's

[00:54:27] Jess Frick: Fun. Which is great when you're, being asked like, what was your favorite WordPress release?

[00:54:33] Nathan Wrigley: I've got another one lined up this week, but it's not with these four, it's with four different people. But again, I don't know when that one's gonna go out, but yes, please go and check that out.

That's wp tavern.com/podcast.

[00:54:49] Adam Warner: And anytime with David Beset, there's always a good time. There's always, it's always laughs. That's

right.

[00:54:53] Nathan Wrigley: She's so great. When you, do you ever get this, when you look at something that you did previously and you suddenly spot a mistake that you made? I've just spotted it.

Look, every one of these episodes has got a number. 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, and then 74. For some reason I've missed it. 75, I've missed it. And now I'm all angry. I've just, oh man.

[00:55:15] Adam Warner: We know what you'll be doing

[00:55:16] Nathan Wrigley: later today, Nathan. It's just not right. You're gonna have to go and fix it. Yeah. Thank you Jess, for mentioning that.

I appreciate it. Getting back to some, circling back on some comments, Marcus is saying, Back about WS form amazing series of webinars. But yeah. Marcus, thank you for ch turning up to that. If you are like me, somebody that likes using it but really doesn't know what it's capable of, it's been really helpful to do that.

And he mentions also that they, that you had him on GoDaddy Pro, a virtual meetup. Yeah. And he just kept showing magical feature after magical feature. That's the bit you think you've seen it. And then he just goes, oh, and it can do this. And he's so self-deprecating. He doesn't go, oh, and it can do this.

It's yeah, and it can do that. And then he just moves wait, slow down. What did you just show us? There's a lot of that, right? Word Camp US 2023. If you're fancy going there is a scholarship available. I've mentioned this in the past. There are certain constraints around it, but essentially this is for people who want to go to Word Camp US 2023 but maybe feel that they would need some support with that.

It's a scholarship and there are four criteria listed on here. The criteria are identifies as a woman is a WordPress contributor, has never attended Word Camp US before, and requires financial assistance to attend the deadline for submitting. This is Monday the 12th of June. You can find this. The u r l is too long for me to say out loud, but I'll just say it'll be in the show notes tomorrow.

But if you just google that title. Kim Parel, P A R S E Double L, Memorial Scholarship for Word Camp US 2023. Then, yeah. So I don't know if anybody's got anything to say about that. Probably not. I was just raising the awareness there. Nothing much

[00:57:10] Adam Warner: to say other than I had I've never met Kim. I know what what an impact she made to the project and the community back in the day.

So I'm so happy to see that this is continuing on. And then what's become more common in the last year or so are different initiatives, getting people out to these Word camp events. And I think it's great to see. I won't name them cuz I'll probably miss one and then but this cuz we're involved in a couple of those and then, and other people are as well.

And I really. It's really it really fills my heart to see that the community and the companies surrounding and involved in the community are supporting people to get them out to events, whether they're new users, experience users, whatever. They're yeah, it's

[00:58:12] Nathan Wrigley: good stuff. I agree.

I'm glad to see this. Yeah. But you're right, there are quite a few similar initiatives without the same or just with a different set of constraints, but obviously that one, as I read out, they are the constraints on that one. And yeah. Go and apply for that if you fancy it. Couple of promotional pieces, not for me, just for some things around the internet that I thought were worth mentioning this week.

If you are a block user and you like the suites of blocks, there's one called stackable. Really nice suite of blocks. They're basically imagine like something like Elementor back in the day, three or four years ago. All of the different things that you had in the menu down the left, stackable brings that.

It's a bit like cadence or something like that. They've got all the blocks. They've decided to upend their ui. They obviously maybe were looking around at their competitors or what have you, and decided to update it. And I just wanted to give them a bit of a hat tip really. I thought this was done really well.

Not only is it a gigantic update to everything that they've done, but also they're just one of these companies where, Just make the effort. They make the videos to show what they're, what they've updated and they display everything. So clearly I read every single word of this and I now fully understand what all of the different pieces do.

Obviously, if you're doing something like this, you are gonna upset, that's the wrong word. You're gonna cause a bit of dissonance for your current users. So going out of your way to make it clear is really cool, really nice product. We have Ben Intel, who is the lead developer. We had him on the Page Builder Summit several times and really nice.

So anyway, go and check that out. But also if you are a generate press fan or at least have been eyeing it, then to today might be a good day to jump for a limited period of time. I dunno how long they are celebrating being nine years old. Boy, that's pretty good going. And they're offering 25% off. So generate press.com.

You can see 25% off. There's no coupon code as far as I know. You just, the pricing is just automatically reduced. And they do a lifetime license, which is becoming increasingly rare. $219 down from 2 49 at the minute. A solid theme. And they've got a block suite as well. It doesn't do all the wizbang, but it will lay out more or less anything that you want.

It's called generate blocks, but I don't think that one's on offer cuz it's definitely not nine years old. Anything to add? That was just me telling people about stuff. No. Okay.

[01:00:40] Adam Warner: No, nothing from me other than to agree with you that the lifetime licenses are exceedingly rare these days. Like cussin.

It

[01:00:47] Nathan Wrigley: is a good one, is a good one. 500 websites. So gonna suit more or less everybody. Okay, the next one, this is just ah, makes you feel nice. If you're going into Word Camp Europe, which is in about, I don't know, three weeks time, something like that. This just seems to reflect the nice warm and fuzzy side of WordPress, which I think is really nice.

There is a wellness track which has which has caught my attention this week. You've got three options. You've got the yoga option you, I, you all know what that is. Tai Chi. You can do that each of the two days. But also, this isn't, I've not seen this one before. They're gonna do a fairly mild hike to somewhere.

Where are they going? They're going to somewhere. It's up here called like Abes. And you can join o, other members of the WordPress community and go on a bit of a hike from the atrium of the venue. And I just think stuff like, that's really nice. The yoga starts at eight 15 in the morning. The Tai Chi is at three o'clock, and you can still manage to go on the hike each day, stuff like this.

Not really part of WordPress, but nice to shove into a conference, I think. Yeah. I think it

[01:01:57] Adam Warner: should be part of WordPress, right? Yeah. We talk about mental and physical health and how important that is to make sure that we can do what we do digitally. I am so looking forward to this.

The only thing I need to figure out is as a sponsor and Jess, I don't I assume you're gonna be there as well, or maybe not. Sorry. But I didn't mean to bring up a negative. I'm sorry. But it's okay. It, you're, you need to be there earlier than when registration starts.

You need to be there when people start coming in. I'm not sure about the timing, but I did make a couple of accountability commitments to some people to attend the yoga sessions. So hopefully we'll be able to work that out. Nice. I think this is super important. That hike looks awesome too.

[01:02:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I am go, I think I'm gonna make the effort to do that. I'm hopefully gonna be carrying out some interviews and I might b block that time out so that I can actually attend it. To, to me at least anyway I think an hour and a half walking is well within my reach. Maybe that's gonna be on the upper limits of some people.

I dunno. It looks from the map at least, anyway. Fairly flat. I know

[01:03:12] Adam Warner: I'll be winded, but that's the point, right?

[01:03:16] Nathan Wrigley: Meet in the atrium. Six o'clock if you go in there. Lovely. Jess, anything to add? Shall I move on? Just, it

[01:03:23] Jess Frick: sounds like an absolute nightmare hiking around Athens, Greece. Yeah. In the spring time. It just, yeah.

I feel awful for y'all.

[01:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: 40. Mind you, the temperature will be stifling 40 degrees or something. Maybe not quite as hot as that. I was gonna, you're talking to

[01:03:38] Jess Frick: Adam and I

[01:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: like

[01:03:39] Adam Warner: that's, yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, I had this conversation the other day is so I'm actually leaving in three days for, to, for Europe, for a, a vacation.

Pre more Camp Europe. So I've been checking the temperatures and then I checked the temperatures, the forecast for Athens and it looks like it's going to be pretty mild com compared to what Jess and I normally experience. Oh, I'm to actually bring pants. I'm looking forward to to it.

[01:04:10] Nathan Wrigley: There

is a word which is very different depending on which side of the pond you're on. Speaking at Mass West, Mark West Guard earlier. Pants is, so you use that. We use the word trousers for that trouser, right? Tr so that's pants for us. Pants is the things that you wear under your trousers if oh,

[01:04:27] Adam Warner: I, I'm bringing those too.

Okay.

[01:04:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But I doubt you'll be doing the hike in them. There's another title right there. Adam West

[01:04:38] Adam Warner: brings our trousers. Adam West. God, I just

[01:04:40] Nathan Wrigley: said Short trousers. Adam Warner's pants, let's call it that. Anyway, really nice. I'm looking forward to some of those bits and pieces. Thank you, Marcus.

Lots of comments here. I plan on doubling the hike into a photo walk. If you do the same, come share the photos to WP Photo. Richie Marcus, let's hook up on, I'm not a photo, I'm not a photographer, but I do enjoy. Standing places and using my phone camera, if I enjoy just getting what I can get with the phone camera, but I would be well up for taking in some of the sites with you and let's see what we can do.

Yeah, that'd be lovely. Okeydoke. So there's word cam, you're up for you, right? You, Americans here are gonna have to guide me through this one because I saw this and I thought it sounded important. But equally on the same note, I don't really understand it because this is a piece of legislation which matters to you over there, but not so much to me.

Have you heard of this thing, net neutrality? Is that a, that's a thing over in the us We definitely don't use that term, but I remember years and years ago listening to podcasts when net neutrality was being talked about, and I guess it's the principle that every packet is equal. If I summed that up correctly, that yes, traffic flowing over the internet should all be weighted equally.

So a tr a piece of a packet, searching out WP Builds.com should be equal to a packet showing a bit of a Netflix movie. Now we know that in the real world, Netflix has got a mighty strong financial clout that I simply don't have. So the principle being maybe Netflix could start paying. To receive a premium service on the internet.

In other words, their packets get boosted. If you go to Netflix, everything just happens quickly. WP Builds.com, might be, it might be a different thing. Shouldn't really use that example, but there's just some, there's a lack of equality there and I don't really know how that vote went.

But this is interesting because apparently three digital firms out of the US have been fined a total of $615,000, which apparently they were very keen to do, just to make this story go away because they were fabricating. 2.4 million fake comments in the run up to this. Now, I dunno which way their comments were going, but it just struck me that if three firms can pollute the political waters to upset how the internet works, that seems like a really broken system.

I don't know how net neutrality went, did it maintain its neutrality? Where did all that go? It did, but I just thought this is, it did, and they were trying to fight it. So these were on the side of the inverted commas. Netflix, I've no idea. Please if you're listening to this and you're on the net Netflix board, I'm not using you as a real example, it's just, there, there's a paid service that's Spotify, Netflix, whatever.

So they won out the sort of libertarians, if you like, won that argument.

[01:07:47] Jess Frick: Libertarian means something different here. Oh, okay.

[01:07:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, we does it. We're back to Mark Westco. It's another political person. Oh, okay. So the people who were pro net neutrality, every packet is equal. That won the day. Yes.

For now. For now. And but what are your thoughts on this then? The idea that a firm can three firms in combination, can get in and steamroller a public discourse in a way that really, that should have been three comments, not 2.4 million comments. That just seems so bizarre.

[01:08:21] Jess Frick: We this is a powder keg of a conversation.

Is it? Okay? It is. And that, they will, there are people that will say, people will have used social media to turn the previous presidential election. This is not the first instance where we've seen people using data, true and not true. And user accounts being created for the sole purpose of swaying political decisions and, trying to influence the political climate.

[01:08:58] Adam Warner: Oh, go ahead,

[01:08:59] Jess Frick: Jess. Yeah, I just, I think this is the latest example of them trying to make a show that they don't want you to

[01:09:05] Adam Warner: do that. Yeah. And this was in 2015, if I'm not mistaken. Do according to the article, so this, in, in reality, this is probably, I don't know if it's one of the first, but before that kind of data manipulation on the internet was as well known as it is now after after what we've seen in the last five years or more.

So I'm very happy that they were held accountable. I hope that at this point there's more guardrails everywhere put in to recognize and block this. This kind of data manip manipulation, but at the end of the day, it's the world we live in. It's the digital world we live in. And and especially with the advent of ai, I'm sure, yeah.

The near do wells are doing everything they can to I implement ai to help with their

[01:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: dirty beads. I don't want to get into a politically toxic conversation, but because I didn't know that net neutrality was. Quite so much of a push button topic, but we don't, as far as I'm aware, we don't have a similar debate on this side of the pond.

That is to say, I think net neutrality is the default and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has even questioned it. Certainly I've seen nothing and I keep, keep my ear close to the ground on this kind of thing. So it just struck me as a curious thing that people would want to promote that because it always felt to me on a, some kind of principle that each packet being equal was a fairly good position to take on the internet.

Now maybe there are strong opinions as to why it shouldn't work that way, and, the Netflix, Spotify, whatever, et al they should allow their, their packet should be promoted or what have you. But I just thought it was an interesting debate. I. Yeah, net neutrality seems to be the default over here, at least.

Anyway, so yeah. There you go. All right, let's move on. We're gonna talk about some non no, we'll quickly do this one. Jess, you wanted to mention this. This was thrown into the show notes. I apologize I haven't had a chance to re prepare for this, so I hope you're able to run with this one, Jess. This is the WordPress contributor Mentorship Pilot program proposal. So over to you, Jess, if that's all right. Long story

[01:11:36] Jess Frick: short, it's a cool proposal to get more people involved to contribute to the WordPress project. I can't really synopsize everything all in a minute, but I would strongly recommend that anybody who is interested in contributing for the first time go to wordpress.org, make.wordpress.org and check out this post.

And it's, they're making it easier than ever to get started. And that's honestly the biggest stumbling block is that first real step. And so I think this is great. I'm excited.

[01:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: So is the principle here that you would, if you like, be shadowing somebody who's done something already, you didn't effect be just watching what they do?

They would carry on doing it and give you guidance. So if you are I'll use the word afraid, that's probably the wrong word. But, if you are concerned about getting your feet wet in WordPress, there's just some barrier or other, you can learn off somebody else for a period of time rather than just, there you go, run with that.

[01:12:40] Jess Frick: Exactly. So you will learn from an existing contributor you go through the paces and then when you're done, you are no longer in the mentorship program and you can continue contributing, hopefully becoming a mentor yourself.

[01:12:53] Adam Warner: I love this much.

[01:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: And the beat

[01:12:55] Adam Warner: goes on. Yeah.

I love this so much. The OnRamp, the on onboard to contributing does have some hurdles, right? And I don't know if this, I haven't read this article, so forgive me if I'm speaking out of return, but in order to get a.org account, then sign up for Slack with this email that you've been given that you don't know you have.

Hopefully I I know there's some work being done there, but the idea of someone. Mentoring you for me when I first started contributing. And just a side note, this does not for anyone new or who doesn't know. Okay. This doesn't mean contributing code necessarily, right? It could be. It's 21 different teams that you can contribute to anywhere from the photos directory to marketing to the training team to each people WordPress and Yes.

Courtney you just pulled up her comment there, but I think this is really great and I think having someone guide you is going to go a long

[01:14:01] Nathan Wrigley: way. Just one of the things, so firstly, Courtney making the point that her and Mike Schroeder. Are participating in the Contribute contributor mentorship program as part of their GoDaddy sponsored time.

But also I'm showing on the screen, apologies if you're listening to this on audio, there's this flow diagram which shows you how you will get through it and ultimately graduate. And quite interestingly, there's lots of off-ramps, which is so they're giving you ways out. If you might get into it and think, you know what, this really isn't for me.

And they're demonstrating okay off, that's fine. You can drop out of the mentorship program, maybe go back to the top of the diagram, start again in something that actually works out for you. And the idea is that you go through it, graduate the program, and hopefully then, Begin the cycle the other way around being a mentor instead of a mentee.

Yeah. Thank you Jess. Appreciate that cuz fully missed that piece. Okay. So from WordPress to chimps, monkeys, cuz you do, oh, what turns out they can talk and the boffins, the scientists who primatologists I guess is the right word, who have been studying them, have actually managed to figure out for the first time by studying the noises that they make, that they have a vocabulary.

They're not talking about master dawn and the nuances of social media and whether they should, get off Twitter. It's more kind of oh, there's danger over there kind of thing. But I just thought this was absolutely fascinating. Those like me who believe in evolution, this is just okay.

This is how it all began. Here we are talking about master dawn. It started like

[01:15:49] Adam Warner: This is the fact that I hope it's not the fact that we know that they're communicating. I hope it's the fact that we've figured out some of the communication because from my standpoint, my opinion, we know so little about how animals communicate.

Yeah. All over the globe. And not just chimpanzees, but any and I think this is exciting in that what are we gonna discover next? Will we be able to talk to our dogs eventually? Like the collar that Doug had on the movie up? Yeah. Squirrel and I hope so. When you really get into, I get into a lot of YouTube late at night and and as an AI especially, and there was a TED Talk where someone was showing how ai Views video and imagery.

But the view was because, or the view was that they were seeing the people based on the wifi signals that they had access to. So it was this weird digital version of Yeah yeah. Of people. And it's the same thing with sounds and event. And he went on to say, I, AI literally could eventually read our minds because it's all electrical signals.

And so that gives me hope that maybe the animals including humans of the world will form a deeper

[01:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: connection. It's, it's interesting you should say that, Adam, cuz just a couple of weeks ago there was some research which done, where they would give people stimulus. So this was in an M R MRI scan?

They would give Yes, that's the one I was, you know the one, this is the same. They would give human beings an M R I scan, and whilst they were undergoing the scan, they would give them, A prompt, they would speak to them and they would analyze what was going on in their brain, and then at a later time, they would ask them to think about one of the things that they had been prompted for.

So they've got five or six different things. Imagine yourself in a meadow, stood next to a tree or whatever, and they could predict what you were actually thinking based upon the inputs they get. Obviously it's fairly bizarre, but I guess to my mind, it was obvious, it was always obvious that the chimps were probably communicating, but it's just the fact that now somebody seems to have figured out what they're communicating about, and it turns out it is Elon Musk on Twitter.

It's, what a, what else is there? What else is there to talk about? Adam wants to have to communicate with his cats.

[01:18:33] Adam Warner: Yeah. I wanna tell one of 'em to stop me yelling at me at

[01:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: five. Sorry. Yeah. I, if I could communicate with my cats, it would simply be just leave the furniture alone. That furniture is not for your claw.

Just leave it alone. I thought that would be nice. Anyway, this is that, which I think is interesting. Jess, anything to add to that?

[01:18:53] Jess Frick: No, you guys pretty

[01:18:54] Nathan Wrigley: well? No. Okay. Okay, so we got a couple of minutes left. We'll just stray into some other pieces. Oh, firstly, Adam, very quickly good book recommendation from me.

Oh, crikey. Do I have to accept the cookies? I suppose I do. This is a fascinating book. It's called The Hidden Life of Trees, and it explain, it's a, it's a solid inch and a half thick. It explains about how trees talk to each other. An example being, if there's giraffe eating the leaves of this one plant through the root system, they communicate chemically and trees like a half a kilometer away will suddenly start excreting this chemical, which giraffes don't like.

[01:19:33] Jess Frick: I just watched a video the other day of mushrooms communicating in the rain through electric. I

[01:19:38] Nathan Wrigley: would never sleep again if I saw that video. I had mushrooms not so sure. Do. You don't like mushrooms? No. It's just I've watched like slow mos of them growing and it just looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Yeah. They

[01:19:52] Nathan Wrigley: were talking. You go into your back garden, you're convinced that there was no mushroom there. You like, you sneeze or something and suddenly let's Apache mushrooms. How a de grow

[01:20:02] Adam Warner: very quickly. There is so much we don't know about the natural world. Yeah. Or yeah, it's true. And it's, that's the one of the reasons I get up every day is because I wanna see what else we're going to learn.

Yeah. It's just incredible to me and I, when I think of my kids in, 20, 30 years from now, what their daily life is going to be like. Thinking positively. Of course. Yeah. They'll be

[01:20:26] Nathan Wrigley: chatting to trees and chimpanzees, but I

[01:20:29] Adam Warner: hope so. I hope they both have gardens and, are eating from and sink with.

With the natural world. Yeah, that's my me

[01:20:41] Nathan Wrigley: too. I hope your children are doing that as well. That sounds good. And maybe we'll get '

[01:20:45] Adam Warner: em together and start it. And we should start. That's

[01:20:47] Nathan Wrigley: right, yeah. A clubber start a commune and we'll eat nuts. So in, in news somewhat titled What Could Possibly Go Wrong, Google this week decided in their wisdom to release two new top level domains.

One called zip and one called.mov. So basically you can now go to a website called archive.zip. And it will immediately rickroll you. That's hysterical that somebody has got that domain archive.zip, so you could now link that in an email, but immediately problems start to get recognized. Like anything with.zip on the end, you and I, up until this point, we've thought it to be a file, right?

We're just gonna download that, unpackage it. And already people have figured out nefarious ways to make it so that you go to that domain, it starts to download a file a, A file that you didn't expect. So just watch out. If you see a.zip or a.mov, just be a bit careful, I dunno why, what they were thinking, to be honest, given that all of these things were out there already.

[01:21:51] Adam Warner: Yeah, I don't understand why.

[01:21:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Really weird quick hat tip. If you like things like Plex or Google Photos and, but Google Photos, obviously, you give your photos to Google. There's a rival called Plex, which you can house locally. Stumbled across this one this week. It's a bit like Google Photos, but self-hosted.

It's called Image. i w wm, I c h. Go check it out. It's a free open source project. I think it lives inside a Docker container. Can't remember. But if you want a self-host and it's got a wicked cool in system, it just looks really nice. That's a nice way of doing it. Also in what can only be described as one of the most beautiful blog posts I've e or blogs I've ever seen.

I just think this looks Abso

[01:22:32] Adam Warner: oh, how I

[01:22:33] Nathan Wrigley: wish I could draw. Doesn't that look nice? This is a piece I'm gonna link to. It's called The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative ai. We don't have time to get into the K nuts and the bolts of it, but basically just this fabulous idea. That in the future there's gonna be so much AI content that proving that you are human is gonna be a thing.

And so just, there's a lot to it. But I'm just gonna quickly scroll down to something that I just really hadn't even thought about. Here's a fake Google page, which might be something that we need to have in the future. You'll notice that this top result here has this little badge and it says, certified human, and the same for this one here.

Whereas all these other ones are not human. And in a world where AI can produce thousands of pieces of content in the time it takes me to click my fingers, maybe we will need something like this. And in the post she's literally saying, you're gonna walk into an office just like with your driving license.

You're gonna need to prove that you exist in order to get this certification. So I thought that was interesting. And then from the sublime to the ridiculous. Turns out I'm no longer needed. I've managed to eek out a little bit of a thing for myself in the WordPress podcasting space, but it's all over.

I'm afraid because we now have recast, which Jess is set in my direction. What does this do, Jess? I'm afraid,

[01:24:06] Jess Frick: just so everybody knows, I brought this up just to make Nathan Squirm a little. So basically what recast does is it will turn your content into a conversational style audio recording. It almost sounds like a podcast.

So Linked here is actually a blog post on pressable.com and what it's done is it's taken the content and. Shockingly, if you listen to it, there are two voices and they are having a conversation about the content. They're not just reading what's there. They're like, oh, so what's the big deal about that?

Oh, let me tell you, la. It's my goodness, it's computer voices, but it's shocking how well it's done. And what recast has already said is they're going to make it possible to create RSS feeds out of your podcast style recordings so that you can play them on say PocketCasts, you can subscribe to your favorite blog and just listen to the content.

It's

[01:25:08] Adam Warner: bananas.

[01:25:09] Nathan Wrigley: So much is changing. Yeah. So quickly and it does bring me to, back to the article we were just looking at a moment ago. The whole piece of. I wonder what the desire for consuming this content will be like. But also imagine that on this blog post, Jess, that you mentioned you had five options.

Do you, I don't know, do you want to hear do you want to hear the two North American guys chatting about it? Or do you want to hear two European children talking about do you know what I mean? Or do you want it to be in a sort of light, airy tone? Do you want it to be quick and to the point, or would you like to hear the sound?

Samuel L. Jackson. Samuel l Jack. Oh, that's the one. Every, just forget it. The other options are off the table. That's the other, yeah. There's no other voices needed.

[01:25:54] Adam Warner: That's right.

[01:25:55] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, it's over. No, what's the guy called who was in the Shawshank Redemption? The guy who was the he's in lots of films. Morgan Freeman him, I'd listen to him all day as well.

Yeah, I dunno what to make of this. I just probably climb into a small hole and. Pull the earth over me and got mid defeat. Yeah. It's gonna be

[01:26:15] Adam Warner: interesting. And when you think of I know we're just over time here, but just one word on this. When you think of people that are new to consuming content, the younger generation are they gonna care that it's AI generated, like we're discussing? I don't think so.

[01:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: It's interestingly right, because, we were, I showed you that thing a moment ago, which had the goo, the fake Google page, and it said, this is human. This is human. So one of the things that I got from reading that article was that there will be a certain benefit to being a human.

I think there'll be a certain proportion of people who will want to seek that out just because they know that they're a human. So that will matter. And I was thinking, okay, in the case of this podcast that I've been clearly been going before ai. So everybody knows that I'm real, and maybe that'll be something in the future, which will help because people will say, okay, that's a fake, that's a fake, that's a fake.

Nathan's rubbish. But at least he's real. Adam's nodding. Thank you, Adam. Yeah, no,

[01:27:21] Adam Warner: I think you're right. I think people are going to seek out those

[01:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: connections. Exactly. I'm saying it's like Etsy, but for but for content. And then Jess said, no, ets mushrooms is fake now as well.

[01:27:31] Adam Warner: Just like mushrooms and trees.

[01:27:34] Jess Frick: Exactly, but Etsy added that handmade tag now because you can sell things that aren't handmade on Etsy. So I think in a similar vein, they're just gonna have to call it out. What is art without pain? Exactly. Exactly. And that's what separates us from

[01:27:50] Nathan Wrigley: the bots. Oh, and on that bombshell, we're gonna wind it up.

The episodes I'd gonna be called Blame Adam, or mushrooms and trees. I've just decided one of those two time has come for the humiliating wave of the hands, if that's all right. Yay. Looked everybody's so good at this now. I think I've managed to train you all and yeah, look, even a little wiggle there.

Thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. If you left us a comment, that is even better. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you to Jess from Pressable and thanks to Adam from GoDaddy. We'll be back next week. Will we? Yes, we will, hopefully, and we'll see you then. Thanks for joining us. Take it easy.