This Week in WordPress #257

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 257 entitled new platform. It was recorded on Monday, the 19th of June, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined today by three guests. I'm joined by Michelle Fettchette, Bob Dunn and Maja Loncar. We are a WordPress podcast, so that's mainly what we're gonna talk about.

First up, we talk about the changes in Gutenberg 16.0. There's a few things which are certainly worth taking note of. The next piece is all about whether or not we should change the q and a section at Word Camp events. Certain people seem to think an adaptation wouldn't go amiss. WordPress Accessibility Day has become charitable.

I can never remember the American term for this, but it's become a charity. How will that affect what they can do and how they can do it? wordpress.org has some new flags. Commercial and community can now be filtered. What are they for and why might they be used? We also talk about North Commerce briefly, and the fact that Jet Pack has added their AI capabilities into the product.

We also get into the. Podcast that I did about Maxi Blocks, and then finally a conversation about social networks and Reddit specifically. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

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

Hello?

Hello. Brand new platform broken by all accounts. Rob Cairns. Thank you very much for your comment.

I have no idea why. What? I'll tell you the story, Rob, just before we introduce the guests, I figured out I was gonna, I like to tinker and play with new platforms and all that kinda stuff. So here we are, we're trying a new platform. Previously, I previously, I've been using Restream with a WordPress plugin to figure out when the episode went live.

I I tested it and it worked perfectly, but it's not gone onto the WP Builds.com live page, but there you go. That's life. It's still going out on YouTube and so on. We'll see if we can manage, but thank you for joining us. This is this week in WordPress episode rather a lot. I'm not sure exactly how many, 257 I think it might be, but we're joined by some fabulous WordPresses.

We're gonna drone on about the WordPress news for this week. Let's go round the houses and introduce all the participants. First stop just down there somewhere. Is Michelle Fette. How you doing, Michelle?

[00:03:08] Michelle Frechette: I am much better than this time last week.

[00:03:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, what happened?

[00:03:13] Michelle Frechette: I got covid from Word Camp Europe.

Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. This is my first day out of bed, so

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Were you able to travel today? Day goes well. Were you able to travel and all of that? Did you hit, you'd hit the tarmac at home before you knew, did you? I hit

[00:03:27] Michelle Frechette: the time. I, yeah, I started coughing on the plane and started feeling pretty badly, and then I got home and woke up the next morning and thought, oh, this is not good.

Took the test and realized that yes, indeed, I did have Covid

[00:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: oh, I'm so sorry. I know that it can be, that's okay. Absolutely de debilitating. But anyway, Michelle Cher is the Director of Community Engagement for Stella WP at Liquid Web. In addition to work at Stella WP Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk.

She's the co-founder of underrepresented in tech.com, creator of WP Career pages, the president of the board at Big Orange Chart, director of Community Relations yada. Yeah. No, it's not. I enjoy doing [email protected]. She's an author, business coach, frequent organizer, and speaker at work workout events.

She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she's an. And you can find her website, which just explores her more generally at Meet Michelle online. And it was lovely to spend some time with you in Athens. How fabulous. Yes. It was so interesting. In fact, we were all there, weren't we? All four of us, we were there.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. So let's move around the houses. Let's go. Yes. Still got the right way. It's Maya Lanka. How you doing? Maya, Christine, just

[00:04:37] Maja Loncar: like Michelle explained, we are recovering from work Camp Europe and my feet have this, have had deserved vacation.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the feet got it. Actually the heat was pretty amazing and I'm like, you, if it's hot something goes slightly awry with my feet.

So yeah. Anyway, let's not go into the details too much of that. Maya is a happy word, camp Traveler. She's the ma she's into managing events for GoDaddy in the E M E A region. She likes promoting websites, especially those that are accessible for blind people. And just a nice pithy phrase at the end.

She's trying to do the right thing. It's lovely to have you with us, Maya. I really appreciate it. And then, We have Bob, can I get the Yes. Bob's in that left corner and then there's Bob. And then there's Bob. How are you, Bob?

[00:05:28] Bob Dunn: Hey, I'm doing good.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, doing good. Yep. Lovely to have Bob with us. I'd spent rather a lot of time with Bob actually over, as we always seem to do.

These days we're more or less stapled together, which is really nice. Bob is the connector and producer at Do the Woo a community network for WooCommerce Builders. They have a simple goal, which is to create a platform for the community by the community to help elevate and connect builders of WooCommerce and WordPress through their journey story and WINS is unique in this, sorry, and special ecosystem of ours, and he does it all from Porto, Portugal.

You are settled in over there now? Oh

[00:06:03] Bob Dunn: yeah. I think so. Yeah. Settled in. We have our residency appointment in Lisbon this Friday, so that's the big next step. So this weekend is crazy mean.

[00:06:15] Nathan Wrigley: I have to ask, right? What if I know, I'm touching wood and all sorts of things, but what if they say, No.

Do you have to just up sticks and go back home or, what goes,

[00:06:27] Bob Dunn: that's a good question. I don't, oh, sorry. If anybody, I don't know if anybody really has been turned down on this air, a psychopath or something, but, okay. Yeah. There's a chance there then, but no I don't know.

I never really thought of preparing for that. I guess I'll just wander away. And live on the beach till they kick me out

[00:06:46] Nathan Wrigley: or something. Loving it in Porto. I'm gonna stay on the beach. I do apologize if you've just joined us. Usually the, this episode goes live on the WP Builds.com/live page. It doesn't seem to have done, but then again, it doesn't really seem to have stopped you finding it somehow or other maybe who cares?

But thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it. I'm, again, because it's new, I might click the buttons, I might click the wrong buttons. I'm gonna try. So here we go. We've got Elliot Sby who's saying hi there. We've got Rob Cann saying good morning, but it's not showing on the page. Thank you for pointing that out.

That's really useful to know. I'll get it fixed up. We've got Cameron Jones saying hi as well. Cameron was I spent the last night in In Athens with Cameron. That was really nice. And yeah, I'll, there's a story after I stop tell you about we've got Maya who's joining. Oh no, she's there. We've got Burgett joining us.

Hello, Peter Ingersol has joined us and he's given us his weather report, as he always does. Good morning on this lovely sunny morning here in to get 19 degrees centigrade, 67 degrees Fahrenheit. Peter, for once in my life, for this time only, I am gonna win the temperature war. It's 26 degrees centigrade, 250 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

That's what it feels like. I've been. Hot, let's put it that way. Hello from Israel says Roman. Har there Roman. Nice for you to join us. Thank you so much. And then there's a bunch of other comments, but maybe we'll get to Oh, nice comment about Porto there. Look, Tom Volts, Porto. Lovely. Lots of good wine along the duo.

Yeah. Nice. Thank you for anybody who's making a comment, really appreciate it. We are of course, a WordPress podcast and so let's get stuck into some sort of word pressy news. First thing just to say is, this is our website, VP builds.com. You can see look this nice big yellow banner just here. Look, it says We're sponsored by Goad ePRO.

So great big hand claps and thanks to them for making this all possible. Really appreciate it. I've been doing this for, Absolutely ages now and and it's really made a really big difference. Thank you to everybody there, including you, Maya. Really appreciate it. If you want to sign up, you can do that by clicking this button here and then just, click on random things in the menu and see if anything useful shows up.

Possibly it will, maybe not. Here's our first piece of news. It is Nick Diego writing in Make WordPress Core, sorry, make wordpress.org. It's all about core. He's telling us what's new in Gutenberg 16.0, and there's actually quite a lot of nice stuff in here, which I like. I'll just quickly go through it and then we'll talk about it in general.

Gutenberg 16.0 has been released, so hopefully if you are sh messing around with the Gutenberg in the plugin, or you could certainly expect this stuff in the near future. But the highlight items really are that you're gonna be able to manage pages in the site editor. Prior to this, it was a discombobulating experience.

If you wanted to build a page, you had to go to the page section and add a new page. And you were in the old WordPress admin and that was fine. It, it's what we're all used to. But then in site editing, if you wanted to edit a template or something like that, which governed how a page was laid out.

That all look really different. So what they're trying to achieve is one UI to get everybody to see things in exactly the same way. And so that's basically what you can do. This piece is called What's New in Guttenberg 16.0. I'll link to it in the show notes. And essentially, now the interface is exactly the same as you can see on the screen.

Sorry if you're listening to this on audio. But basically you've got the big black sidebar on the left, which now replaces the WP admin bar on the left. And and it enables you to edit pages, but it also enables you to edit templates. I've gotta say, I'm s I'm a bit confused about whether I'm editing a page or whether I'm editing a template because the experience is so similar.

I find that a little bit discombobulating. They've also added dimension controls and post templates to get nicer block spacing. Previously you had to do that with css, so let's say you've, I dunno, you've created a post page and you've got little cards on there. Previously you had to separate those cards with a bit of custom css.

Now you've got just a nice simple toggle. You slide left and right for margin, top, bottom padding, top, bottom, and then left and right. You can do with a different toggle. That's quite nice. And then this is really cool, especially maybe Maya or Michelle can speak to this. I'm not entirely sure.

We've got the details block and this is a block which has been in development. It's been introduced in Gutenberg 15.6, but it's no longer an experiment. It's available. You drop this block in and it's got two parts. It's got a title and then the text or whatever you want it to be. And I've been using this for transcripts.

So if you're looking at the screen, you've got this little toggle, which is like a left, an arrow. And you can either, you toggle it and it goes down, you toggle it and it goes back up. You can see the title. I write transcript in that little section, and then I put the transcript in the section underneath.

It just enables you to collapse something and uncollapse it and collapse it and uncollapse it. And I was told by a bunch of accessibility people when I did it, that it was. Okay. Wasn't super perfect, but it was actually, it was reasonable. Then there's a bunch of other highlights as well. I've talked too long.

I'm gonna hand it over to you and I'm hoping that you are gonna all interrupt each other and who's gonna go first? Whoever you want. Oh, we're too

[00:12:13] Michelle Frechette: polite

[00:12:13] Nathan Wrigley: to interrupt each other. Do I need to name you one at a time?

[00:12:17] Michelle Frechette: I'll interrupt you anytime, Nathan, but the rest of these fine folks less I'm excited about some of the changes.

I think that some of the blocks that give us more options and different ways to outlay information allows us not to have people say, oh, I could tell it's a WordPress website. You hear that a lot, right? Oh, I could tell it's a WordPress that's first of all, it's untrue because we could make our websites anything we want, but the more of malleability we have and more flexibility we have with how we build our pages makes it even less likely for somebody to say, oh, that's just a cookie cutter site.

So having additional options like this makes me happy.

[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you very much. Michelle, anything to add or contribute to that Maya or the Bob?

[00:13:01] Maja Loncar: Maybe I can say just maybe a couple of weeks back, we tried to evaluate whether Gutenberg is accessible to blind people, but we couldn't, there were some positive results, but

[00:13:15] Nathan Wrigley: Gutenberg is not accessible to

[00:13:18] Maja Loncar: blind people.

So there has to be a lot of things done before even people with disabilities are able to

[00:13:25] Nathan Wrigley: use it. That's interesting. Can you, do you recall off the top of your head what some of the key findings were? Some of the bits and pieces, which made it largely, I wasn't

[00:13:33] Maja Loncar: present when they were doing the checking, but I know that Lazar even mentioned it in his talk at Port Camp Europe this year that there was a question whether.

Hosting or I think that Kovic asked was a C panel accessible to blind people and stuff like that. But then LADA made the remark that Guttenberg is not something that he

[00:13:55] Nathan Wrigley: would be able to use. Interesting. That's not good, is it? That's really quite bad yeah. Okay. Yeah, there's certainly a lot of, I do remember right when Gutenberg was released, there was a lot of work done straight after it's released.

When it came into WordPress 5.0, there was a lot of talk about, it's in it's inaccessible nature. And then I do remember in the news there was lots and lots of things prior after that where people were working on making it more accessible. But ever since then, there's been an avalanche of new things added.

Seemingly a week or two doesn't go by when something new is piled on top. So we've got this new this new block and this new way of creating paddings and margin and so on and so forth. And I guess keeping up with that from an accessibility point of view, Maya, what you're saying is it hasn't really.

It hasn't really managed to do that. Not at this point anyway.

[00:14:47] Maja Loncar: I know for sure that he wouldn't be able to finalize a page but I wouldn't be able to tell you at this moment. We can invite him and do the with we can

check if yes, let's do it,

maybe we can do a test. But he wasn't able to use it by himself.

[00:15:04] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's so disappointing, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. That is disappointing. Okay, I'll chalk that one down at the end of this show. Mayer, I'll be contacting you and we'll see if we can see if we can get another show made about exactly that. Any thoughts on this, Bob?

[00:15:19] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I was gonna do the Happy Gutenberg feature dance, and then Maya just nailed me, so the dance went away outta my mind.

So I'm gonna just sit here and we can move on.

[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I, broadly, so you're gonna have to forgive me cuz I'm not gonna speak to the accessibility things. I am as month goes after month from the point of view of somebody who is able to click a mouse and see a screen and all of that kind of stuff I just, it just makes me happier and happier as each month goes by and things like this ac sorry.

This. Tell summary block is just perfect for my needs and it just that, it just seems that there's loads of stuff coming out, which exactly hits the sweet spot of what I need, but may I've written it down. I'll speak to you after the show and we'll see if we can see if we can get something highlighted.

Cuz that would be a nice thing to do, wouldn't it? Okay. Let's move on to the next piece in that case, right? I dunno what you make of this. Whenever I go to a WordCamp, pretty much after every session, a little bit of time is allocated for a q and a. So let's say it's an hour there's typically, I don't know, 40 minutes of presentation, something like that.

And then 20 minutes is allocated for the person doing that presentation to receive questions. So far, every single time I've been to a WordCamp, those questions are just on the fly. The person rocks up to the mic or the mic is brought to them. And they begin whatever it is that they wish to say, typically that's a question.

And then, it's on message and the person answer it answers it, and we move on. And after 20 minutes, that's the end of that. But this this article came out in the tavern in response to a tweet from the performance teams, Felix aunts, and I'll just paraphrase. Basically what he's saying is it is a bit of a waste of everybody's time.

If in that hour where there's 20 minutes available for questions, somebody gets up and is obviously a self-promoting. So they just give this big spiel, which in the end is about something that I'm building. I'm building this thing, and and then you obviously, you're waiting, okay, now drop the name.

Okay, you drop the name. Great. Now we all know, or the person is just, Making some kind of commentary. They're not asking a question, they're just saying something that they wish to say. And what Felix is saying is, wouldn't it be better to waste everybody's time less and less to essentially have a system of pre-vetted questions.

I don't think anybody's worked out what that is, but Okay. Let's all submit questions beforehand that are pertinent to the subject in hand, or perhaps they could even be submitted during the presentation. And then there's some kind of online system where they get upvoted or downvoted, and I think this is all born out of.

Probably Felix's frustration. He obviously attended a bunch of talks at WordCamp EU and experienced frustration when this happened repeatedly. I don't know what I, not entirely sure what I think. I've been in that situation where I've thought to myself, it's been in my head and I haven't uttered a word, but I've thought, okay, you've had three minutes now.

Where's the question? So that thought has definitely crossed my mind, but also I do the fact that people sometimes wanna stand up and just, they're making something up as they go because I. They've just heard something during this, during the presentation, they wouldn't have had the capacity to pre-submit it.

They wanted to wait till the person delivered what they delivered, and then we go, Felix or somebody in the, in this piece has suggested, wouldn't it be nice to give the speakers the option to not have questions at all and just talk for the entire hour? Because it may be that some people are terrified of that moment.

The worst thing is the the worst thing apart from doing the presentation itself, which racks them with nerves, is the fact that they then gotta answer questions and they might feel I don't know that I'll have the answers to everything. So again, The floor is open. Michelle, I'm gonna ask you first, actually being a frequent question answerer at Word Camps.

Do you like the freedom to just make up what you're gonna say at that moment, or do you think it should be more prescribed or, I don't know.

[00:19:30] Michelle Frechette: You go I think there's a lot more than just a like it one way or the other to this. This is very multi-layered. I think that when it comes to the q and a following, anything Matt's involved with, there's, it's a different ballgame than if it's in work Camp talks.

[00:19:46] Nathan Wrigley: What do you mean by that? Why is that?

[00:19:49] Michelle Frechette: Okay, sure. So when Matt's on the stage, this is everybody's opportunity to have an audience with Matt. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to ask you a question that's self-serving. So that, not me a lot of, but and not most people, I will say that too, but there are people who wanna make sure that they have an opportunity to ask a question that gets back to whatever they've just released or whatever their business is doing or whatever they're doing.

And so it's very self-serving. Then there are people who have a lot to say about the matter. It's not necessarily getting back to what something that they're doing or something they're promoting, but they want their opinion heard on it. So there's a lot of, this is what I think, this is what I think this is what I think and maybe there's a question at the end which basically revolves around that.

Don't you agree with me? And then there are the questions that are honestly seeking answers to what's going on in the community, what's going on with the software. I like to think that my questions are like that. For example, you know that I'm asking a question about what, how are we meeting in the community's needs?

This way, X, Y, or Z? And others may not think that's what I'm doing. Completely open to your judgment when you're and I think that's what happens a lot when we see Josepha or we see Mattias or we see especially Matt Mullenweg on the stage at flagship events like Word Camps, Europe Asia and us.

We also often see bigger name speakers on the stage, people who have big projects, people who have a lot of sway in the community. And so you'll see some of that happening there as well. Where you don't see that happening or where I haven't seen that happening is at the smaller, more regional camps.

So Word Camp Buffalo happened a couple of months ago. I gave a talk on podcasting. People might have questions that they came with about podcasting, but then they also had questions based on the things that I said in, in the talk. Nobody asked a question there that was self-serving. Nobody asked a question there that was, but what about this and what about what I'm doing?

And look at me. It was all like, oh really? What about this and what do you think about this? And how would I do that? And really seeking to better understand podcasting. And so I. You have all of these different, various levels of how big a camp is the speaker on the stage having more or less a sway within the community and within the open source project.

And then you have the ultimate, which is the people who are very much at the top of making decisions regarding the community and the open source project. And so I think people come to the podium or they come to the or they just sit and ask their questions where they are. Based on who's on the stage and whatever self agenda they may or may not have.

Whether that just be wanting to know more about what you're talking about or wanting to get something in front of you so that you will either endorse it or learn more about what they're doing.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: So do you feel like, so as an example, word Camp Europe is, it's being every session, my understanding is every session was live streamed.

I dunno what the attendance figures for those live things are, but let's imagine it was a couple of hundred or perhaps even more watching live. But, and then especially for the mat one, where that auditorium was basically full, I came in just as it was kicking off and I really struggled to find a seat.

I really had to walk from the top, like halfway down and it, there were. That, that auditorium was massive and it was basically full. So you there's gonna be a small proportion of people. It's not everybody. There's gonna be a small proportion of people who will use that opportunity as free advertising.

It's just I'm gonna, yes, I'm gonna go up there, say a question, which is tangential, but I get my product name and I drop it in and then ask the sort of slightly tangential question if that's the case. Yeah. And I definitely think I picked up on that on a couple of questions. Then I think maybe we do need to restrict, but I don't, I dunno how you do that, because I don't really like the idea of sitting through a presentation with some kind of polling software open on my phone, thinking, okay.

Who's asking questions? Oh, that's a good question. I wanna listen to who's in front of me. I don't wanna be worrying about who's asked a good question, whether it should be upvoted or I don't really have a an answer to this, but I get your point. The bigger the event, the more likely it is that somebody's going to usurp that.

Yeah, maybe we need some sort of little card that we can hold up. Just some, and as more of these cards go up, like it's okay, we're all tricking this as spam. Get 'em off the stage quickly. I dunno. Bob or Maya, anything on this?

[00:24:08] Bob Dunn: I have a, there is a few things. I agree with Felix.

I'm on the side of Michelle. There's too many layers here, but I remember back even before WordPress when I would speak at other conferences, blog conferences and stuff way back. And one of the things I always discovered with. Q and As and I found us at workshops too, and I did workshops and other people did workshops.

Is if I look around the room, you can't do it with maths because there's too many people to look at. But how much, how many of the people that are sitting there are really interested in that answer? I see a lot of people zoning out because it's, it can be very a different self-serving because it's not so much you're, just talking about yourself, but you're talking about a particular thing that you're concerned about or interested in.

And there could be 80% of the people that are like hoping for the next question cuz they don't find it that interesting. And that's a tough thing about q and as to begin with way back, I mean that, this isn't just word camps. Yeah I don't know the other thing somebody else mentioned, and I thought it was intriguing in a way, in another thread they said that, Why don't we do a a little networking, 15 minute networking with the speaker and you can hang and talk with them, which also puts a weird situation on that.

People go up to speaker talk a bit too long, take up space, you're standing there waiting in line or milling around. It's, and then let me throw in the thing where I've been in sessions where there are no questions and that's very embarrassing to Oh yeah, you

[00:25:56] Nathan Wrigley: felt awkward.

[00:25:57] Bob Dunn: Yeah.

Yeah. It's very awkward. And you hope to plan a few people around, like if somebody doesn't ask anything, but, nobody really thinks to do that. So there's that awkward moment that can make somebody, especially if they're just starting to speak at Word camps, feel oh my God, dead silence.

And then maybe the first question comes up, almost feels forced because somebody wants to help you and you're thinking so there, there's a lot of things I myself I could do without him. Personally, right? I could, they could be totally eliminated and I'd be happy, I'd like to see that time almost used for more little bit of networking between the, sessions, you have time to do some stuff.

Maybe you do find the speaker and you ask a question. But those q and as, sometimes in the big groups shell said with Matt sometimes it's like they go on and on and, it's, and putting 'em in beforehand too is really awkward because it's then you're picking and choosing and it's not sporadic and it's not really as meaningful as if you asked it.

At the moment. So there's, yeah, there's a lot of things I, I personally could

[00:27:08] Nathan Wrigley: do without 'em. I think with the Matt one that just singularly the Matt one, which is obviously massively attended, there might be something in that, but there would definitely be the accusation of, you only answered the questions that you wanted to answer, whereas you didn't get the ones that maybe asked something that you didn't necessarily want to answer.

But I do like the idea of Bob of over i, the speaker. I'm gonna go down there and I'll be available for 15 minutes and the volunteers could, I don't know, get a line of people queuing up who want to ask the question because the chances of the question directly overlapping. Everybody in the audience is pretty minimal, isn't it?

You'd imagine that maybe 10, 20, 30% of the people. So I think that's quite curious. Look, Maya, sorry. We've, you've been excluded from this. Any thoughts?

[00:27:58] Maja Loncar: Not many. I agree with both Michelle and what Bob said. And when it comes to Matt questions, those are, let's say, not very often.

So maybe there was in more opportunities, maybe people would be asking, different type of questions and then get those answers, and then those could be public as well. But if you have to wait for a couple of times right, in a year to get an answer, you get a line. So maybe there should be more opportunity.

Yeah. Yeah. And mean,

[00:28:29] Bob Dunn: think about, oh, I was just gonna say real quick, somebody like Matt, people are gonna have the tendency, and I know some people might disagree with this, To wanna ask a question to put him on the spot versus a smaller group, because they wanna okay, I have the floor. I can, I can put something out here that kind of, not mean or nasty or anything, but something that just okay, there's gonna be a pause, or how's he gonna answer this one?

So that, that kind of throws into the bigger. Bigger kind of discussions. Or bigger session. But it's curious.

[00:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: There are. Oh, I apologize. You carry on Michelle.

[00:29:08] Michelle Frechette: It's okay. There are other ways to do that too. We're gonna talk about Reddit in a little while and Reddit does these AMA sessions, right?

Where sometimes it's like the head of Nike answers questions. I'm just pulling things outta the air. But where big names will come on and they'll just tell a little bit of their story and they do an ama and you can literally thread anything and ask any question. We could do that with Tumblr, we could do that with Twitter, we could do that with Mastodon.

There's lots of ways that we could say that Matt could say for the next 30 minutes. And I'll Matias and Josepha and I'll be answering questions on Tumblr about the, anything that you heard at the presentation. Would there still be got to questions? Of course.

Would there still be people who are trying to, Tout their own things, of course, but that would be very much more easily seen and other people would pile on those and say, Hey, how about asking a question that has to do with all of us instead of just you? And it would be a lot more self-governed from the whole community as well.

So there are ways to do that. I also know that a AMAs like that are often targets for the person who is sitting at the top of that so how they choose to do that or not to do that. But there are ways to do that that would be more inclusive of everybody and people who are absolutely terrified of standing up in front of a microphone could so ask the questions.

Yeah. So maybe some sort of hybrid.

[00:30:28] Nathan Wrigley: I like the idea of the speaker being able to decline doing a public q and a. Certainly, I think it would be a nice option to be able to say I'm gonna, I want to do a q and a, but I'd like to do it one-on-one. So as soon as my presentation's finished, I'm gonna, Take the applause and then walk off and I'll be over there.

And curiously, this platform does a lot of what we're talking about. If you think about it, there's just comments rolling in from all over the place and it's kind of part of my job to paraphrase them, pick the ones that I want, and nobody generally hops in here and does anything self-serving, so that part is taken care of.

But I would be able to pre-screen them and just say, just read the bit that made sense. So it was obvious, I'm such and such, and here's a list of all the great things that my company does. I could just screen that out and just say what your name is and what your company name is, and then just get to the number of the question.

But there's loads of comments, particularly from Courtney. Thank you Courtney. She says at smaller camps there is often more questions in the hallway after the session. Yeah. And I guess the, I guess what we were saying earlier, apologies Bob and Michelle, it would appear this platform completely obliterates your faces.

I didn't realize that would happen. There you go. I'm sorry about that. But that does seem only I was taller. Yeah. Oh no. The other platform used to squish the images up, but anyway, there we go. So yeah, that's a good point. There's less of an audience, so less opportunities to show off. And then Cameron says on top of that, on top of what was said, ha having vetted questions might also help people remember what the questions are instead of to, instead of having to hold onto them for half an

hour.

[00:32:09] Michelle Frechette: Cameron, you time, I actually type my questions into my iPhone notes or I text it to myself so that I don't forget exactly how I wanted to word it and what I wanted to say. So I'm one of those people that wants to be very clear about what I wanna ask. Yeah. And so I, I make sure it's written down and I read it off my phone to make sure I've covered all

[00:32:26] Nathan Wrigley: my bases.

Yeah. So that's a tip. And there's his Courtney again saying that she's asked Matt a question at each international Word camp, state of the word, and so on, and she keeps it relevant to the make teams, but she is trying to wear, she's great at that. Raise awareness of them. So she does mention them.

But yeah, it's not I don't feel that it's not self-serving. No, it doesn't feel like that. You get a pass. It's fine. Those questions have really supported the teams and the folks that have joined the teams as a result to work on some of the initiatives. Yeah. Thank you.

Absolutely. I wonder if we could have had, she says a segmented q and a with Matt things about software. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So segment the questions so they know what's coming up. And then Paul, half Penny, thank you for joining us, Paul. I was considering asking a short on topic question for Mattias about what the release window for phase three was likely to be.

But there was such a cue at the mics and the delay in answering questions that I decided not to bother. So in that scenario, you got put off, which is interesting. I think I've, yeah, I've just read that one out, haven't I? I'm struggling with this. Can I tell you a new platform? How do I know which one's on the screen?

Oh, that one, okay.

[00:33:35] Michelle Frechette: Can I tell you a little bit of a funny story about the q and a? This time is, yeah. I was struggling to find a place to get in with my scooter because the handicapped accessible way didn't accommodate the scooter, so I had to go all the way up to the top balcony. Oh, I saw that second balcony.

You were right up there. And I scooted in at the back. Yeah. So all of a sudden, Somebody shows up right next to me holding a microphone and I heard somebody else say, we need to know where Michelle is. And I'm like, I have reputation for

[00:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: asking questions. Yeah. You're gonna ask a question, make sure they made sure that I, it's coming.

It's coming. I think you and Courtney would be in this same boat. And then big it, thank you for joining us. I'm thinking about whether it would be useful, especially during the q and a to place one and two volunteers right. By the mics and remind the question. Oh, good idea. Remind the question is about good etiquette.

I love that. The question limited. So I could be the mic bouncer. That's right. You're the dude. You could that very well. Two minutes. If you don't get off in two minutes, we're just gonna take the microwave. Yeah. We, no, but it would just be nice, wouldn't it? Okay. It's a question. Ask a question, but also if you've got a business, please don't stand here and self-promote it.

That's not what this is for. Yeah. Great. Good suggestions. And yeah. Okay. That was interesting. Thank you very much. I think for me the whole round of that was, You should have the choice to not speak, and you should have the choice to walk off the stage and say, I'll answer questions on a one-to-one basis.

That feels to me like a fairly decent way of doing it, and I could. Could not speak at those events anyway. But honestly, if I could summon up the courage to speak at one of those events, the most terrifying bit would be the q and a for me. Cuz I would just hope thing, I dunno. The other thing, as a

[00:35:17] Michelle Frechette: speaker, it's hard to know what the time limit is.

So you start taking questions and you still have to clear the room for the next speaker to come in and set up. So oftentimes I'll keep an eye on my watch and I'll say, if you have more questions, I'm go, I'll go to the Happiness bar and I'd be happy to talk to you one-on-one there. And I make that announcement from the stage and then I take my exit.

So the next speaker is starting to get anxious about setting up their tech.

[00:35:40] Bob Dunn: And one more thing about the, just another little thing to add is that uncomfortable zone is a lot of people tend to leave during the q and a because they're like, for whatever reason, they need to go do something. It's last a little bit too long, whatever.

So then you start having people standing up and it's oh, It's did my question offend you? So anyway, there's, it's just a lot

[00:36:02] Nathan Wrigley: of weird things. Things, yeah. Lot of weird things. And then Paul makes the point that if there was more q and a, sorry, less q and a, there would be more speakers.

You could get 'em in more quickly cuz you'd have that little extra slice for time. Yeah. Interesting. That was a fascinating subject. A little tiny piece of the WordPress community, but obviously, really important. And thank you for Felix for raising that and also for Sarah Gooding for picking up on it.

That piece is on WP Tavern. It's called Word Campers. Demand changes to Q and A format. Okay. We always do AI news. It's important to do AI news because basically that's all the world will be in the next 10 years. So let's. Quickly squeeze some in turns out WordPress, via jet pack are jumping on the AI assistant bandwagon.

Now, honestly, I don't know how this differs from other things that we've seen in this space. We've had product founders like Andrew Palmer from oh my goodness. Bertha ai. Thank you. And we've also had Mania Kamal on the podcast talking about his Gutenberg Hobb products and so on.

And ostensibly they all seem to do similar things. So I don't really know where this differs, but for the figure of $10 a month, you can get Jetpack AI assistant in your WordPress website. It comes in the form of a block. So you add a block type in ai, and the AI Jetpack assistant block will come in and it's basically a blank text field.

I dunno if we can actually see it. Yeah, there's a little video showing on the screen. Apologies if you're watching this. You can see somebody dropping in the block, little blank text box, and you start writing like you would. Chat, g p t it will answer it as best as it can. It can do things like list, it can do things like tables.

I dunno how you instruct it to create a table. Presumably at some point in the prompt you have to say, make me a table of the following data. So it'll do all of the usual content creation stuff, but it will also do, and again, I'm sure this is in available in other products, but I don't really know if when you've read something through, you feel actually, that feels a little bit too jovial.

Let's make it more professional. It will do that. It does things like empathic happy, what have you get the idea. There's 12 or so different type of voice. It can have. You can also get it to generate a title based upon any other text that you or it have written. I guess that would be in terms of SEO and optimization, you can also get it to translate things.

So you can go from English to Spanish to Greek, whatever, that kind of thing. And it will fix your grammar up for you. I don't know if this is different, if this is, just the same as all the other products, but I did think that $10 a month, cuz it says there's a get started at the bottom and it says basically you'll get 20 free requests and after that it's $10 a month.

Now, I dunno if that scales. In other words, if you're using millions and millions of tokens on your giant WordPress website, whether that will, you'll be charged more. But that did seem like a fairly decent price point. I guess Jetpack at some point, or wordpress.com had to get into this game.

So again, the floor is open. More ai. Yay.

[00:39:16] Bob Dunn: Just a convenience to me. Whether it's got more added features than others, it's probably you have jet pack in, give it a try if it works for you, or look at the other options.

[00:39:29] Michelle Frechette: I wanna know if this new platform that we're using today would support a an avatar so that I wouldn't have to actually brush my hair and all of that.

So you could just see little cartoon Michelle talking. Yeah. And I didn't

[00:39:45] Bob Dunn: see, I didn't see snarky in the the different ways you could have the

[00:39:52] Michelle Frechette: Are you suggesting that I'm snarky, Bob?

[00:39:55] Bob Dunn: No, I'm just saying every once in a while I feel like getting snarky, and they need to have that in there so I'm questioning

[00:40:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. They need a little snarky sar. Yeah. Or British sarcasm, you might say. Oh, yeah. That's that's edited version,

[00:40:08] Maja Loncar: the stuff that the

[00:40:08] Nathan Wrigley: rest of us don't understand.

Yeah. The I don't know. I dunno what I think about it, I guess the mantra at the minute is if you don't, if you've got a product and it's got anything to do with text and you don't have AI in it, you are basically failing. Whether or not that's true or not, I don't really know. But here we are, this is the offering that they've got and it does seem like a fairly attractive price.

I don't know if it's just using in the backend. Obviously you are paying jet pack, so the most of the solutions that I've come across now offer you the option to just put your chats gp sorry. Your open ai a p i key in and for me, boy, is that cheap. I've tried a few things out on there and it's nor point not one.

You, us cent for that answer. So I would, I think really, although it sounds like a deal, $10 a month you might get better mileage if you connect it with a different api. I don't really know. Maya, what's your thoughts?

[00:41:06] Maja Loncar: I still don't know what to think about ai.

[00:41:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that's the sensible position to have, frankly.

Somehow,

[00:41:14] Maja Loncar: I was raised to work hard and whatever comes easy way, it's not really good and so for me, something that comes just by pressing enter where I don't have to think, and then the text is there, you have no idea if that's true or not, and you just copying and pasting it and, I feel in a way I'm happy, but I'm scared

[00:41:36] Nathan Wrigley: at the same time.

Yeah. I feel exactly the same way. And it's interesting if I put that, if I put the the shot back up, this video, the jet pack promotional video, I think it's about it's about a minute and 10 long, something like that. I won't play it because I don't think the audio will come through, but it makes exactly that point.

The whole u s p of this is, You don't have to try. I very much came out of watching that video thinking, okay, so that's the angle that they're taking, effortless, easy. And for me that is the opposite of the enterprise of writing text. I think good text comes out of working hard and thinking hard.

Certainly something that I want to read. I wanna think, okay, whoever wrote that, they put some effort into it. So I'm like, you, Maya, I'm really unsettled. The technology's cool. I love it. It seems to be amazing. But I do have this slight fear that in the background somewhere, we're just gonna create this.

We're just gonna flood the landscape with mediocre content that we then don't know how to.

[00:42:37] Michelle Frechette: How to deal with it. I still enjoy using it for idea generation. So if I'm gonna write an article, like 10 ideas, 10 Ways to X, Y, Z, and it gives me 10 ways I can look and think, oh, I hadn't thought of those three.

Okay, I'll incorporate those three without using, AI actually write articles for me. I did do that once for post status and I put at the very top this entire article was generated by AI just to see what kinds of feedback it would get and literally nobody said anything about it. So interest.

It was very interesting. I think that's, yes, I would

[00:43:07] Maja Loncar: really if anything that's being written by AI is actually stated, Because, I would then know whether I need to check the data described there or somebody actually went and manually did it. Why? Because what I think that the biggest advantage of AI is that our brains will just stop operating because the machines will do everything for us.

So are we trying to develop as a civilization or we just wanna stagnate and gen degenerate? And then you have a machine

[00:43:35] Nathan Wrigley: who thinks about for you,

[00:43:36] Bob Dunn: right? Yeah and I found it very useful to use the next morning after you've gone out a night with Nathan, the AI comes in really handy. It's like you wake up and you're just like, and you go, oh, I'm just gonna, oh, wow.

Look at all that content

[00:43:50] Nathan Wrigley: I'm putting out.

[00:43:51] Bob Dunn: So don't, I don't disagree. Found a very good thing for, so

[00:43:55] Nathan Wrigley: I think I'll agree that Maya has hit the nail on the head, though. I think the content warning who on earths, on Earth knows how you would police that, but I do like the idea of the content warning.

I did mention it a couple of weeks ago, actually. It turns out that Google for images in Google image search they haven't. They haven't shipped this yet, but they've got this proposal out there, which is to say, because Google basically knows when any image on the internet first appeared. Let's say that for example, you've got a picture of a politician or a video of a politician or something like that, and they're doing something which seems like slightly out of character for them.

Google are gonna be able to say, okay this video or this image first appeared online on this date at this time. And so from that you'll be able to read backwards and say hang on a minute. That was hours after the initial video. So something a bit quirky is going on there, and if you see a picture from the 19 I don't know, the 1990s or something like that and it only appeared in 2023 you're fairly confident that somebody.

Doctored that because Google knows it appeared in the last millennium. So I think that's quite a decent initiative. But it's a bit of an honors system, isn't it? I go to my, my, I pay for an online subscription for a newspaper in the uk and the reason I pay for that is because I want humans to edit it. I want an actual human being to say, okay, this is our opinion on it.

We've sent journalists out into the field. What I don't want them to do is employ AI and fact check it afterwards. I want to be able to pay them so that they get a blank page. And everything that's written on that page is done by a human being. That's just my proclivity and my concern is that at some point, how do you know that newspaper that I'm paying for will stop doing that and a little bit will creep in and or maybe we generated the headline a bit more clickbait for this reason, or, and a bit of the text, we didn't quite research that.

And it's the erosion of trust, which bothers me. Anyway, that's my weekly run about ai. Do that every single week. I can't help myself. Tom, thank you very much. He says, thank you, Maya. Being able to write and express yourself is an essential skill. Yeah, that's certainly true. Oh, I think I can move these.

Look. Oh, that's great. Says I can double click. And move these things around. So how do I do that? No, apparently not. Oh nevermind. I thought I was gonna be able to move the comments around, but apparently not. I was gonna cover up my face and Maya's face for a little while. But you we're stuck with, we're stuck with, yeah, that's right.

We're stuck with the way it is. Okay, let's move on. Long as on, long as you can still hear me, I don't mind if you cover my face. Yeah, that's right. I might write to the developers of this software and suggest that as a possible upgrade, cuz I'm liking the rest of it. Okay. This is a very minor piece, but I thought it was worth mentioning wordpress.org.

Especially gonna be interesting I guess if you're a plugin or theme creator. A little while ago, Matt, in the state of the word 2022, which I think maybe some of you guys were at he announced that there was a plan to label community. And commercial plugins and themes. In other words, you would, there's this binary choice.

You either label yourself as community or you labeled yourself as commercial. Now, obviously, if you're in the WordPress repository, that bit is not commercial. So the question is what's that about then? And the enterprise here is that if your product has an upsell, if there is a premium version, you would label it as commercial.

And if you have no skin in the game financially, you're just doing a plugin for the benefit of the community, and there's no upsell model, anything like that, you would label it as community. Those tags are now enabled. They're visible, but it would appear that there's no kind of hard and fast rule about when it needs to be applied.

I'm getting all of this from a tavern article that's entitled wordpress.org enables commercial and community filters on plugins and theme directories. And because it's not being enforced at the moment, it does somewhat seem a little bit. Pointless to have out there. I can see it if I'm getting a plugin and I know that there's absolutely no upsell.

In other words, I'm getting the, and I, lemme get the word right, I'm getting the community version. There is something in that, for me, I, there is a little bit, I dunno, my head goes in a sort of slightly more positive direction because I only want that thing. I know I'm gonna not gonna be upsell. That sounds cool.

I'll try that. And if it's a commercial one, I know what I'm getting myself in for. Maybe there'll be ads maybe there'll be an upsell, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I don't know what you guys think about this. To me, it strikes me as really, it doesn't need to be binary. You only need one. The tag is commercial.

Everything else doesn't need to be labeled community. It just, Is community. So we just need, yeah, and I think

[00:48:48] Bob Dunn: you've made a good point, Nathan, earlier when you were chatting before on this is that I think it's this maybe happened because so many of the plugins that are coming out that do have premium versions are coming in more and more bare bone compared to how it used to be with plugins.

Free plugins would come in, they would have a premium, but there was still a lot with the free plugin and not saying that doesn't happen as much, but I do see more and more coming in really bare bone and you almost, What can you do, but pay something to connect this to something to make it happen.

So I, I don't know if it's nice. Yeah. It would be like, here's commercial, everything else is,

[00:49:31] Nathan Wrigley: whatever. Especially if you are, especially if really you are building a website and money is tight. If you could toggle on a community or, in this case toggle, I guess toggle off the commercial toggle to see that, okay, all of these are utterly free.

They're unencumbered by any kind of upsell. It's free now, presumably it will be free forever. There's just, there they are. That's a nice feature to be able to see, isn't it? And I think you are right. I, I know of that. I feel that the free version is not really all that free. You are saddled with a ton of ads, possibly.

The free version really doesn't do. As much as perhaps you would imagine it did do. And really, it's all about the upsell. So maybe this is combating that. Yeah. Thank you, Bob. Michelle, Maya.

[00:50:23] Michelle Frechette: I never think, yeah, I don't think it's a problem to have it labeled one or the other, versus one or nothing.

Especially with a toggle, right? With a toggle, it lets you know that there's more than one option, and it also leads the opportunity for a third option someday. I don't know what that would look like, but it gives you opportunities for that, right? But also when you're looking at something and you know that it's a community plugin, then perhaps you have lower expectations about how quickly you, your questions might be answered as well, right?

I have a plugin and the repository, nobody's ever asked for support because it's basically a version of Hello Dolly, and I understand that. Very low maintenance, very low, everything, but. If somebody sees that it's a plugin that I've created for the community, maybe it hasn't been updated to the latest version of WordPress, there's a better understanding of why that's so Then if I'm trying to also sell something and this is my business and I might be, have people who are dedicated to answering those questions as opposed to I have a different job, but I also threw this in there for other people to take benefit of,

[00:51:25] Nathan Wrigley: I dunno.

Thank you. Yeah, that makes sense. Agree. I really thought about it from that angle. Yeah. Sorry, may I agree to

[00:51:31] Maja Loncar: what Michelle said? It depends what is the usage. If you're making a commercial website and you're trying to fix it with community plugins, that's not gonna work. You have to understand the purpose of it, right?

It's great to promote it and perhaps use it, but you have to understand the weight of what you are building and what you need it for. Because if the last update was, I don't know, two years ago, how are you gonna use it? So there's I mean it's very, how to say, critical. For me, to be honest with you, I, I don't know why that it's important, whether it's paid or co community made.

Because in general, if something becomes successful, you need huge support. You need, you will need to become commercial, I didn't really understand

[00:52:20] Nathan Wrigley: the point of this. Yeah I think that the, I think the point of this is lost unless it becomes a mandatory thing really, isn't it?

If this is a tag that you have to honor, I'm either one or the other, cuz everybody is one or the other of those in the plugin or theme directory. Maybe it needs to be enforced and there's some commentary in the piece about exactly that. Maybe this should become a flag that everybody's got to honor in some way, seemingly at the moment, despite the fact that it's there, a very tiny number.

I think from memory, reading this article a few days ago, I think it was several hundred had actually implemented this. So there's no compulsion at the moment. And also there is talk about the fact that it will be not just on wordpress.org, but it will be entering the ecosystem that you will find in your WordPress website.

So this filter will be available at the point at which you install, not just download. Plugins. So there you go. All right, thank you. This is just a little bit of a hat tip to a friend of mine who has released North Commerce. I dunno if you've come across this before, but north Commerce is intending to be a WooCommerce rival.

They've been in beta for a long time and it's interesting that they've now come out with the slogan, the real beta. I think really they've acknowledged that the beta has gone on for long enough, but not quite there yet. But if you, if the idea of using a different product than Woo WooCommerce or you wanna explore a different e-commerce solution built inside a WordPress they are offering it at the moment on a three domain license.

And I believe this is a lifetime deal, although I could be wrong. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is at the moment. I'm looking at this. It looks like they've got 288 licenses at nearly $500, $475 for three, says three domains there. You can still get it. It seems pretty credible. There's a lot of, they've got a nice big, I think it's Discord channel where people are contributing.

So I think they're serious about this, but Google North Commerce and and you'll see that there. Just a hat tip. Really, I dunno if anybody wants to comment on that, but I maybe Bob's Bob's thinking let's hope these guys don't have too much success. Otherwise I'm gonna have to rename my podcast.

Yeah. Do the North

[00:54:33] Bob Dunn: Commerce. No, I've watched them. They've been around for, he, like you said, he's been building it for a while. Couple of years at least. I know a couple people that have been directly involved with the building it too. And yeah I say, Hey, there's room for a stop.

If it's, and I actually heard somewhere that. I think he's, it looks like directly competitive with WooCommerce, but also I think he's looking at big commerce too, because of their tie into Woo, tie into WordPress. So yeah, I think it's great.

[00:55:06] Nathan Wrigley: Check it out. Yeah, I think that's probably the most that we can say is go and check it out.

They're still looking for some advice about the roadmap and things like that. So you've got a limited time, 288 units available if you're selling stuff online. Okay. Michelle, Maya, shall we move on? Okay. All righty. The next one is all about accessibility. I don't really understand US law around this, but hopefully Michelle in particular and Bob can assist me cuz both being US citizens again, back on the WP Tavern.

Michelle Good. Sorry. Michelle Gooding. Who is that? Sarah. Good. And Sarah Now,

[00:55:45] Michelle Frechette: Sarah and I are one the things Sarah

[00:55:47] Nathan Wrigley: for. Yeah. Yeah. Michelle Michelle did not write this. It was Sarah Gooding that wrote this WordPress Accessibility Day secures nonprofit status. For an annual, for the annual event calls for speakers and sponsors.

So the WordPress Accessibility Day is a 24 hour event. They had one I can't remember exactly when. I'm gonna say September time last year, something like that. And it was very successful. Over 1500, 1,604. It says attendees from 52 countries were able to attend with 28 sponsors and great success however.

It feels like the team behind it would like to be able to step outside of the confines of a normal WordPress event. No expert in this, but it feels like you've got to go through the usual channels. I don't think you can pay the speakers necessarily, and maybe the sponsorship you have to deal with in a different way.

So in the same way that I, I do this summit, this page builder summit thing, it's entirely, we organize it, we run it, and so we can do what we like. It looks like that's the avenue that they're going. They're gonna be paying speakers $300 per session. So if that I intrigues you it's, I dunno if they're still looking for speakers, in all honesty for this one, but it's coming up 27th of September to the 28th of September, and the hoop that they had to jump through in US law is something called 5 0 1 c three.

Now that creates a nonprofit. Organization, which we would call a charity. And charities have, there's a lot of paperwork to do to become a charity, but also, yeah. You don't get to be that status unless you can prove that you are legit. So I guess it adds some kind of legitimacy in there as well.

But also certain sets of financial responsibilities, I guess you've got to be open with your accounts Sure. And things like that. So anyway, what do you make of this, you guys?

[00:57:40] Michelle Frechette: I think it's great. The 5 0 1 c three status here in the United States is an IRS determination. So it's taxation issue so that anybody, what it does is it allows anybody who.

Makes a donation to that organization, that donation is tax deductible. It does not necessarily account for sponsorships. Sponsorships are something separate because you are buying something that then is you're being given something in return. So sponsorships is separate then donation status, but 5 0 1 3 C status also allows them to operate without taxation as well.

So if they're making purchases if the organization has to purchase microphones, for example, they can do that without having to pay tax on those microphones. So tax exemption status is what that basically gives us. It, it does legitimize it for sure because there are so many hope hoops that you do have to jump through.

So many things you have to prove in or in order to be able to say that you are five one C three and have that distinction. And it also is expensive and it takes a lot of time. You usually have to engage a 5 0 1 c three, a nonprofit lawyer to do the paperwork for you because it's, it is so intense.

So it can run anywhere from 1500 to $15,000 to establish a nonprofit status here in the United States.

[00:58:46] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it's it's my wife and I, Judy, we. Helped a lot of nonprofits. That was another thing in our lives before we got into WordPress. So we, she was a grant writer. And that's the other thing is instead of sponsorships, you can get into grants and there's government grants, there's corporate grants, right?

There's all these other grants. So there's different funding you can tap into as a nonprofit, and that is specifically earmarked for nonprofits. Competitive, it's not like it flying around and free to grab, but it's my Judy spent many years as a grant writer and she was a grant writer for World Vision International Company nonprofit organization.

And we've, yeah it's. It's a, it is a lot of work. Yeah, it is. But it's there's advantages to it and that's

[00:59:35] Nathan Wrigley: why people do, so you get this status and then you can apply for pots of money, which are set aside for charitable, we would say initiatives. Yes. And you can apply for those and you can compete with everybody else, but you at least can apply for them.

It's open to you. Whereas prior to the five, oh, sorry, I'm gonna just have to read it again. 5 0 1 3 c3. Prior to that, you couldn't even apply for those pots? No. Okay. So that's interest. Correct. You have to have that status. Okay. Peter Ingersol helpfully says don't, basically don't try to apply because the the application closed just yesterday, so we were 24 hours.

[01:00:12] Michelle Frechette: Yeah, it's still open on their website. Oh, okay. So they haven't closed it on their website as of just now, but, yep.

[01:00:17] Maja Loncar: I don't know.

[01:00:18] Nathan Wrigley: And do you know if the, cuz I think I'm right in saying this, if you apply to speak at WordCamp you will not be paid. There is no scenario in which payment can happen.

Whereas in this, the 5 0 1 C three frees them up to pay. In this case, they've nominated, they've decided on a fee of 300. But if you were at WordCamp, that could not have to, it gives them that flexibility to remunerate their speakers, which seems like quite a nice thing to do, yeah. Okay. Maya, anything on that? You are good. Okay. I think your mic might be muted. I, sorry. No, it's okay. It's fine. You shook your head. That's absolutely fine. Okay. So yeah, congratulations to the WordPress Accessibility Day. It sounds like over the last year, in order to get over a few of those hurdles, Amber Hinz, who we've had on the show took the responsibility on her company's shoulders, equalized, digital, and acted.

Made her company the fulcrum for the whole thing. But now they've, they managed to sidestep that, excellent. Bravo. Well done. Yeah. All righty. Okay, let's move on. Just a quick one. I did a podcast episode, if you like, blocks. We were talking a little bit about blocks earlier, if you're curious about blocks and block packs and suites and things like that.

There was a, an interesting podcast that I did, I won't label this too much, but I did it with Christian Peter, say from maxi Blocks. And Maxi Blocks. It's worth checking out because they've got a whole load of blocks. They do a whole load of things. But talking about the free commercial, this is an interesting one because their whole product is completely free.

Accept the templates. So normally you pay for I don't know, you, you'd get a block and some features of that block will be missing. Certain settings will be unavailable to you. They've opened the floodgates to all the settings, all the features, but they've excluded their templates. So if you want to use their pre-designed stuff, click a button and a whole page of about us content drops in, or a row of the, I don't know, hero section drops in.

That's the bit that they've hidden behind the table. So though in theory they would be commercial, but if you're just gonna build things from the ground up yourself completely free so you can go and listen to that podcast all about that. Now, I'm no longer 17, sadly I used to be several years ago. I'm not even gonna try the math.

Somebody over here is 17 though. This is a new product. Called Kaka. Maya's just gone and she was the one that was gonna talk about it. Let's hope she pops back into the stream. She put this on the agenda for this week. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to sum up what this product is and hopefully Maya will drop back in, talk about timing.

This is a new product. It's called Collab Cart. You can find [email protected]. And we had a brief chat before the podcast began, and so I'll try not to butcher what she said. Essentially, this is if you and a bunch of people want to buy and she used an example of a t-shirt, imagine that you and a ton of your mates want to buy this particular t-shirt.

The way that e-commerce works largely at the moment, is either you give all of the money to one person, they buy them all and saddle the problem of making sure that everybody gets the right one and all this. Or you can use this new thing, which is a woo prop WooCommerce plugin built on top of WooCommerce.

And the idea is that individual people can come to the platform, but buy the thing as one big order. Ah, she's back. Here we go. Welcome back, mayor. I'm just explaining how this works and I'm just saying I've just got to the point where 50 people are buying a t-shirt and instead of buying it once and distributing it to 50 different people, those 50 people can collaborate, buy it 50 different times, but it all ships as one order.

So Maya, forgive me, is the principle here that you just save money on shipping because everybody's buying the stuff at the same time? You're on mute. You're, I if you're on mute or if you're not on mute. Have I got you on mute? No, I've got you off mute. I've try again, just make sure the mic that you've selected is right.

Just at the bottom of the screen. Below where we are recording is a little mute button, and next to that is a little arrow. And if you click on the little arrow, it will give you the option to select the correct mic. And if the mic that you want isn't there, we're doomed. Captain Mannering.

No. Should we give her, should we give her 20 seconds? Let, yeah. She's,

[01:05:04] Maja Loncar: lemme jump in

[01:05:05] Michelle Frechette: And let me give I know a little bit about this from what she said before, is that definitely it helps a lot as far as coordinating payment and things like that and shipping, because all the shipping will be sent, to, to the one place.

But also if you are somebody who, let's say that you are you're running a sports team and everybody has a different size T-shirt. You don't have to keep a spreadsheet now of all those different t-shirts. You just tell people, jump in place add to the order your size, the color, and the whatever else that needs to go with that.

And now one person has all of that information in one place without having to coordinate it separately.

[01:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: It's really clever. I think it's a really smart take on a WooCommerce checkout. And I've not seen this before. May are you joining us again? Is the mic working? I wonder. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we got you loud and clear. Did I get that

[01:05:55] Michelle Frechette: right? Maya?

[01:05:57] Maja Loncar: I have no idea what you guys were testing cause I was rejoining.

[01:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: I'll explain very quickly for Maya's benefit, what we were saying is that this new plugin, this collab card is that you get, let's say it's 50 t-shirts rather than one person buying all 50 and then having to distribute them, right?

Or 50 people buying one individually. You can all collaborate, but you pay one time and therefore everybody can just log in, get their order, and then it ships once, right? Correct. And you

[01:06:26] Maja Loncar: can also choose different colors and different sizes and you can tailor make your part of the shipment. This guy, his name is Loro, he's just turned 18.

And I'm very proud of the, that generation because we are wanting to bring them into our world because we are all old and we constantly meet the same people at the conferences and we really require some flash blood. So here is the fresh blood coming. Nice. So he came to speak at Port Camp Europe this year and he's, what he's trying, the reason why he came up with this solution is to try to solve the problem of Z generation.

For instance, we might not be meeting such things, right? But then there are new requirements from the third generation. So basically the call card offers a unique approach to acquiring new customers by enabling the sharing card links resulting in highly effective advertisement and social proof. So the gen, the, so the Z generation, they're all about social proof.

So this is why I think

[01:07:30] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. This is, yeah. Yeah. I hadn't made that connection before, but I'm, when I buy from E-commerce, I still see it as quite a novel thing, if but kids on kids nowadays, my kids really shops and bricks and mortar stores are just not really a feature of their life.

When I was younger, a typical thing to do on a Saturday was go around the shops. You would just wander around the shops with your friends and browse things. My kids are not doing that. They're looking at stuff online at, late in the night and deciding, oh, I'll try that and we'll get it shipped, and if it doesn't fit, I'll send it back.

But the idea of being able to buy things on mass, Truly, I think this is really clever. I hope that I hope that it's successful. I imagine that if it is successful, there'll be like three dozen copycat plugins coming along. But Bob, you are the WooCommerce, the WooCommerce expert I suppose, amongst us.

What do you make of this?

[01:08:26] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I think it's great. I, yeah, didn't yeah, I'm trying to think. I think I've seen the name, but I hadn't quite dove into it. So this is good because yeah I'm impressed. I'm impressed that he's 18 years old too, cuz I wasn't doing this kind of stuff when I was 18 years old.

But and anyway, and he was, yeah, I don't, I may have met him at Word Camp Europe. I can't say for sure, but I met a lot of people. But yeah I think it's really cool. It's yeah, I'll have to give him a little plug because I think it's a much needed piece of the

[01:09:03] Nathan Wrigley: puzzle for sure. I really, I do genuinely like the idea.

I can imagine. Like for example, somebody's birthday or wedding or something like that, that you throw together this one link and it all just gets delivered. Everybody that's attending the wedding that wants to buy gifts buys it all gets shipped to the one place at the right time to the right person who lives like two minutes drive away from the venue, but everybody's paying for their own individual things.

Yeah. It just seems like a really smart idea. I have to say, and it's the one thing, just to

[01:09:32] Bob Dunn: add real quick, is that, I, I've, I, for a long time, everybody's, pulling out these plugins, all these features, I am a big fan of plugins that do one thing and do 'em good. And this is exactly it.

He's got it nailed down to this one thing. He's not trying to add a bunch of bells and whistles to it, but. Solving one problem, which is which is huge these days. And I think that's, if you can find that, and he found this, like you said, maybe there'll be some more to follow up. I'm sure there will be, if he took the time to actually do this it's great.

Yeah. And I see that Prier was he's actually on the podcast. He's quite the has a huge agency and he gave a testimonial there, okay.

[01:10:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Social good stuff. I love it. Social proof indeed. I will link to this as show notes, but for the purposes of people listening, it's at CoLab car, c o l a, car, c a RT dot.

Net and you can find it there. I don't know. Let me click on the buy now link. Let's see if it'll give us a price. So it's monthly pricing. $49 per annum, or you can pay $4 and yeah. Okay. That's actual honest pricing. Look at that. $4 and nine. Cents exactly a month, which equates to $49. None of this rounding up and rounding down depending on what you do.

It was updated a little while ago, so 2022, ninth of the 10th. But nevertheless, go and check it out. I'll link to that in the show notes. Okay. We're gonna make this our final piece for today, unless you guys have got something else you wanna drop in. But oh dear. First of all, Elon Musk buys Twitter and then charges an awful lot for the API access, which seems to have annoyed a lot of developers.

And it's always fun to annoy the general population. So Reddit this week of decided to do exactly that. Reddit a popular site where you can basically go and get the answer to more or less any question. It's divided into, I'm gonna say millions, it probably isn't, but thousands and thousands of sub-communities.

So if you're into, I don't know, skateboarding, there's probably a Reddit channel for that. If you're into painting or whatever, there's gonna be a channel for that. But this this last week or so, the c e o of Reddit has basically decided that any app or anything that is using the API to suck out content from Reddit is gonna have to start paying previously to this.

It was completely free. Now the sort of wrinkle here is that the API being completely free means that a lot of successful apps, and there's one called Apollo for example, were able to just consume an infinite amount of data out of Reddit's api. But what the API doesn't do, and maybe they should have thought this through, but the API doesn't allow their adverts to show on the content that is sock out via the api.

So Apollo builds the app and you get this perfectly. Great ad free Reddit experience or you can go to reddit.com, look at the exact same content and it's full of ads. I dunno about you, but I know which one I'm gonna frequent cuz I'm not that fond of ads polluting the stuff. So Reddit have basically said, you've been free riding for a long time.

You've done very well out of us, but we're now gonna start charging. But the charges are, Astronomically high. Millions and millions a month if you have a popular app. So I don't know what you guys think. I, this stuff really does seem like we're going through something at the moment. A lot of these apps that we've thrown our content into, I can imagine that there's Redditors who've probably given up hours and hours of their lives moderating off and being a good citizen on Reddit.

I think they feel it's a bit like a kick in the teeth. I'm sure that a lot of people on Twitter felt the same if they had a Twitter app that was using the api. I don't know. I feel like we're at a bit of a turning point in the minute where a lot of us are waking up and thinking these platforms that are taking our content and trying to churn a profit off the back of it I dunno what to make of it, which puts us in the WordPress space in a good position because you own your own content.

But anyway, there's the story. What do you make of it? Over to you?

[01:13:54] Michelle Frechette: A quick Google turns up that there are over 2.8 million subreddits. So popular. That's

[01:14:00] Maja Loncar: a lot.

[01:14:00] Michelle Frechette: It's popular. Yeah. And at any particular point in time there's over 140,000 active users. So that's a lot of of activity. I think Reddit has done a lot of things differently than a lot of places have specifically.

You can be as anonymous as you'd like on Reddit, which is really nice, but also a double-edged sword. There are a lot of WordPress subreddits. There are a lot of pornography subreddits. Not that I frequent those. I actually frequent the WordPress once for the record. But but Reddit has a lot of capabilities and it does everything other than advertising is free.

So it's free to use, it's free to do whatever you like, just WordPress and Twitterer and all of those things. And like I see a comment from Cameron that says that most of the app developers are happy to use to pay for the use of the api, but that those, that pricing is extortion.

I agree with that 100%. You are either going to kill it by charging those kinds of fees or you're going to make it very, you're gonna survive on a few users a few people that are gonna pay that and not the others. And perhaps that's the way to go. It's like when I was teaching people how to build web WordPress websites, you could build 10 websites at $300, or you could build one website at $3,000.

Which would you rather do? And there's lots of different ways to look at monetization and there's lots of different models that you can look at for that. And remembering that the cheaper that you charge something, the more people there are that you have to support for it. So there's just a lot to probably went into that.

I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall when they came up with that valuation.

[01:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the, one of the things is they're gonna do an I P O, so the, one of the thoughts is they're trying to make themselves as profitable as possible before the ipo, but it really just boils down to the eye watering amount of money.

That they were charging. But I can see it from their point of view, if they've got this free service, which is free to use and a lot of the right, the apps which consume the a p I can show the exact same content, but without the ads that they need to make it profitable.

I get the point, but also I'm slightly worried that we're getting to the point where lots of these apps, which over the last decade or so we've been pouring our free labor into, so you imagine, I dunno, the WordPress subreddit where there's probably thousands and thousands of hours been poured into that for free and lots of moderators, making sure that it's cleaned up and is curated and it looks nice and there's no, no incendiary comments in there or something off message.

A lot of that stuff you've gotta feel, you're on slightly shaky ground now because if these tremors turn into earthquakes and Reddit. Starts to sufferer and becomes less profitable. And ultimately it probably won't happen, but it does go out of business. Just kinda make you think, heck, what have all those people achieved over the years that they've been pouring their hard work into Reddit anyway?

[01:16:55] Michelle Frechette: Let's also not forget that Reddit has a lot of sway. Remember the, what happens, what's happened in the stock market in the past based on Reddit users and how they have chosen to attack or promote different stocks in the past. So the power behind the Reddit user base is enormous.

[01:17:13] Bob Dunn: The powers.

But what amazes me about all of this is, and it's, I know it's a cop out, but it's can we not see this gonna happen sooner or later? We get on all these platforms, we're on their platforms. It's, I'm that way. I'm still on Twitter, whether, how that ever plays out, if I'm there forever.

We, we pour our heart and soul out on it. But I don't feel like I poured a lot of my heart and soul on a lot of that stuff. If it's disposable. If it happens. I move on. But it's, yeah, it's like there's, if we see all this stuff happening and it's costing us nothing and we're able to do all this, hey, it could happen.

It's gonna happen. Maybe it won't happen on certain platforms, but, Yeah. And I think it sucks is the, yeah. They come up with these incredible amounts of money, they suddenly, it's bam, here, you need to pay us. It's like your landlord coming to you and saying, oh, now I'm going to increase your rent by 45%.

[01:18:19] Nathan Wrigley: So there's, yeah. It's just, yeah it's interesting cuz in the article, if you I'll link to it in the show notes if you read it. So the Apollo app, I think is 20 million that they've gotta find, which is just an extraordinary amount. Who has. Anybody got 20 million just lying around to keep their app.

Yeah. Maya, that's it. Yourself? Yeah. So who, so basically what you are saying is we are gonna put you out of business. We priced it at an amount of money, which we know you, it's very unlikely you are gonna be able to afford. But also it just feels a little bit like a bit of a shakedown, yes it is. Yeah. But we, in the WordPress, I dunno, I feel a little bit smog, and I don't mean to sound smog, but haven't we all, as WordPress has been telling everybody forever, own your own content. Have a web WordPress website. It's yours. The worst that can happen is your hosting company goes out of business, in which case you just download a backup and you're off to the races.

I, I do wish that message, how many more Twitters and Reddits do we need to go through before people start to think, okay. Yeah. The problem is, Bob, you said that Twitter, you're still on Twitter. I'm still on Twitter. It's there. It's blooming effective. But I would love for there to be an more open system.

It's interesting that there are a couple of activity Pub Reed Mastodon rivals to Reddit, and they've had a real upswing in the last couple of weeks. Now, whether or not that, Peter's out and becomes more of a thing, or the people go back to Reddit, because a lot of these a lot of these Reddit communities in protests have just basically said, we're shutting down.

We're just gonna post weird content or no content at all. Do you know what they're posting? Do you know what the, do you know what the consensus now is? You've got to post content only in all, in a lot of these Reddit communities that have decided to stop. You can only post content that's about Oliver Martin.

Is that is either TV guy, doesn't he do a chat show or something like that? Is that him? What's his name? Hold on. I haven't got it in this article, but a lot of these people have decided on this one TV personality, if you post about him, you're fine. Anything else? No. It's just kinda hysterical.

Is that funny way of saying get lost, Reddits? I don't wish Reddit bad. I just wish that these kind of things didn't happen. Get a website. Everybody get a WordPress website, you'll own it all. Good for you. Yeah, that's it. I'm done. I am done with the rant. I think. I think we're finished. Yeah, that's it.

That's all I've got for this week. We're finishing a couple of minutes early, which is great cause I know Bob's got a dead hard stop. Sorry if the platform failed on you, Maya. I dunno what went wrong there. The audio definitely was a bit quirky at times, wasn't it? Oh it was you was it? She's pointing herself.

Okay, fine. Thank you. I'll see if I can make it work. See if there's any tweaks that we can do for next year. Thank you to all of you who made comments. I really appreciate it. We will be back next week. I have no idea how I'm gonna stop this show, but before we do go, I have one request and that is that everybody do the slightly humiliating arm way.

Look at Bob's Got one behind the mic. One in front of the Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There you go. That's great. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. We will be back next week. Take it easy. Thanks Maya. Thanks Michelle. Thank you, Bob. Take it easy. Bye now. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye. Let's see if this will work.